The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – David Yakobovitch, Host of the HumAIn Podcast & Principal Data Scientist at Galvanize

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

David Yakobovitch, Host of the HumAIn Podcast & Principal Data Scientist at Galvanize Humainpodcast.com/

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com, thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Oh my gosh, we just had a plethora of awesome guests and interesting material, things that are going to expand your mind. You may have to get bigger skulls if you listen to Chris Voss Show. You may need to surgically go to your doctor and say, I've been listening to Chris Voss Show on the nine podcasts on thecbmpn.com, the chrisvosspodcastnetwork.com. And I've learned so much. My brain has outgrown its

skull. So if you have that problem, I'm sorry, it's not our problem. It's your problem. Anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in and being with us. And of course, we have all the best guests. You can go to youtube.com for us. That's Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. If you're listening on the audio podcast, you can go there. You can see the video of a lot of these interviews we've been doing lately, as well as this gentleman we have here today. Today, we have a super interesting gentleman who comes from a lot of different backgrounds and a variety of knowledge and information that will expand your brain to a point that you may not be able to hold in your cranium.

David Yakubovich is with us today. David previously served as a lead data scientist for Enterprise with the General Assembly in 2017 and 2018 for the Fortune 500 portfolio. General Assembly was acquired by Atico, I think I pronounced that right, for $413 million in 2018. Prior to that, David served as Chief of Staff for the Big Three Basketball League from 2016 to 2017. Prior to Big Three, David served in a variety of roles in banks and insurance providers from 2010-2015, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, ADP, and Aflac. Hey, welcome to the show, David. How are you doing, man? Chris, thanks so much for having me. I'm here, you know, ground zero in New York City, and it is definitely every day is a new day. And we should plug your websites. Give us a plug your website because you actually have a cool podcast as well.

Let's get those plugs in. Yeah, thanks so much. Beyond being involved in tech and many things that we'll talk about on the show, I have a podcast called Humane. Humane means to be human from French. So the website is humanepodcast.com. That's H-U-M-A-I-N podcast.com. And you guys cover a lot of AI stuff on that podcast?

That's right. We've been out for a couple years focused on AI, data science, future work, and developer education. And so you guys will get the chance to pick this up on our Spatial Computing podcast as well for those of you. So, like I said, subscribe to all nine of those podcasts. You'll be able to catch it. So you've got this great podcast. You've got a lot of experience and a lot of, you're like a renaissance man, all different trades we talked about before the show.

You're very well equated with startups, VC investing, et cetera, et cetera. But let's get into the core of you and your origin story. Tell us, you know, kind of how you became you, if you will. Yeah, I mean, I love data. And I've been doing data ever since middle school in math competition. You know, I've been seeing in the early 2000s, how everything's been moving to computers and quantifiable systems. And that led me to study and focus on data, not only in college, but with all these big organizations you just mentioned in their back offices to successfully implement data. But I was doing that in Florida and Georgia and the Southeast, and I was missing the roots of my parents in the Northeast. So I decided to move

up to New York City in 2015. Ever since then, I've been focused on scaling training efforts at large Fortune 500 companies like Bloomberg, Booz Allen Hamilton, and other companies like BP and Citigroup. It's been a wild ride since then. I've been involved with a lot of tech training in the data science and AI space, and also angel investing. Awesome sauce. So, I mean, you've, you've seen it done at all. And of course we're moving into, yeah, I've heard these things about computers,

like they're going to be the next big thing. But no, I mean, data technological stuff. And I think more and more as we go through this coronavirus sort of experience, we're going to be moving more to, you know, technical online. Everyone's using zoom now. I mean, there's people that had no idea zoom existed now that are using it, learning to either broadcast or school schools or having to learn to do that. Like I know my, I think my sister-in-law is a school teacher and you know,

she used to do the tactile school teacher stuff. Now she's doing it over zoom and you know, all the models are starting to upend it and technology should be the thing that brings us through it. What's so fascinating, Chris, is that everything is on the cloud today. And we've seen with software like Zoom that prior to COVID, there were only about 10 million users on the platform. And suddenly in March, they have 200 million people running daily meetings on Zoom, whether these are classes simultaneously being cast, or these are Zoom dance parties in the evening where we're celebrating with our friends in California, Vegas, and New York. Zoom has become the new life. We've been coining here

at Galvanize that we're living a digital first renaissance, this new experience where everything is live online. And I don't think it's just for the short term. I think there's a fundamental shift that's occurring in society. For me and you, I mean, I've lived online and, and, and once,

once I got rid of my partners and, and I've pretty much been able to work from home since 2004, I've been able to work anywhere in the world as long as I have wifi, uh, good wifi. Um, and, uh, and yeah, the freedom of it to be able to do whatever is great. And I kind of felt like I was, uh, recently with zoom, you know, we've used zoom for years now about zoom and always double platforms. I kind of felt like, you know, like Metallica before the Black album or like, you know, any given rock band that you like before they hit the big time, you know, and you're like that old fan who's like,

hey, man, this is my band, not everyone's band. Get away from it. That's kind of how I feel about Zoom right now. I'm like, hey, man, this used to be my thing. I don't want to share that, but it all works out. That's right. Before it became mainstream. And it's so interesting now because we run classes at Galvanize on software like Zoom and WebEx and even Microsoft Teams.

And by far, I think Zoom is the best software from the experience for the user. We have these breakout rooms. We're able to engage in dialogue. Even the angel investing communities I'm in, we have some happy hours where we dive into one-on-ones with companies. It's just seamless, you know? And I think Zoom had its own growing pains, particularly around security with their servers in China and Zoom bombing and all these issues.

But fortunately, their developers have been on par to get the software up to speed. And now it seems like it's smooth sailing from there. They were, I mean, that's, talk about a business dream. You're like, holy shit, everyone wants to join us right now. And whoa. But this is kind of the new dynamic. I've been talking about this a lot on the Chris Voss show

where a lot of business models are going to change. Office structure, office rentals and structure i'm not even sure what the folks that we work are going to do with the uh what you would call it the bank soft bank is going to do with all that that mess but uh um you know we're going to see more telecommunity uh you know and like i started earlier you know i've been telecommuting technically since 2004. Uh, you know, now we're seeing Facebook has recently come out and said, uh, we're gonna let more people work from home. Um, uh, same thing with Jack at, at Twitter. Um, in fact, there's now rumblings that people who live in Silicon Valley are, you know, tired of paying those crazy prices. And if they can telecommute, they're like, well, why not move to Utah? Why not move to Vegas? Why not move to the middle of America? Which I think would be great.

I think it would be good to kind of start spreading technology around and really making us a technological nation instead of having flyover states that are still, you know, that need to get retooled and come up to, you know, the 21st century, et cetera, et cetera. I think a lot of the conversations we've been seeing in the last decade in the U.S., Chris, is not just about Silicon Valley, but Silicon Alley, Silicon Coast, Silicon everywhere. And we've seen that predominantly around college towns. My alma mater was University of Florida, the Gators, go Gators, and Gainesville. And everyone's building up their own tech hubs.

But the challenge is aggregation effects are so strong. So when you co-locate in Palo Alto and Foster City and San Francisco and San Jose, there's nothing like it when there's so much talent and smart minds mending together to great innovative companies. That's what we've seen in New York City as well. We've seen all these industries from fashion and finance and consumer services that have been able to disrupt a lot of industries. The challenge is we are having the fundamental shift, not just from in-person to remote, but also from remote to distributed. That means not only can your team be at different locations in the same city, but they can be different locations in the

same country or world and be running synchronously at the same time. Now distributed is powerful, right? You can have individuals with talent who are anywhere, which increases access and equitability in building startups and scaling ventures. But it brings up another point, as we've heard from Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, is, look, if you want to work from home forever, I want to empower you to give you that capability to live peak performance in what is your life. But if you're not in our core cities, these big metropolitans like SF or New York, you're going to take a pay cut. So I think

it's a really interesting angle that companies are taking now. And it's weird to me because I see commercial real estate taking a hit from what's going on. I mean, not only from the financial aspect of it, you're going to have bankruptcies. We're already seeing a ton of retailing hitting the wall. Those are going to be more empty office spaces. You know, I had a lot of retailing hitting the wall. Those, those are going to be more empty office spaces. Uh, I, you know, I had a lot of friends who were like, I've been bugging my boss for years to let me work from home. And I've been telling him, Hey, I can work from home. You don't have to have me in the office. And, uh, and now they're doing it. And I think a lot of companies are going to get used to this new way. And that when, you know you know, we beat this virus or there's some sort of more testing or more inoculation that could take place,

I think companies are going to be so used to it, so are workers and employees. And I know for me, I remember going from brick and mortar because I started a lot of companies back in the day, brick and mortar, and you'd have to go in hard. You'd have to buy the phone system, buy the furniture, buy the secretaries, you know, to the three-year lease on, brick and mortar, and you'd have to go in hard. You'd have to buy the phone system, buy the furniture, buy the secretaries, you know, to the three-year lease on the brick and mortar, you know, and you'd have to buy something that you could expand into, even if you didn't even know if you're going to make it, you know, and you'd have to get the phone company to come out

and put a bank of a hundred lines in. It's a freaking nightmare. And I remember when I finally was able to go with technology from brick and mortar to, um, to, uh, you know, telecommuting basically, and in doing stuff, you and I have both seen startups, uh, app startups, things of that nature, where they have teams all over the world. You know, you've got a guy in Russia, you've got a Venezuela and a guy in Japan and, and they're able to run and build things and do well. And, um, and the cost of being able to get away from brick and mortar is, you know, it probably won't help the economy very much for those, but this is some of the bloodletting we're gonna have to go through

as we go through these model changes. But, uh, it's going to change our world. And I, and, and I would think if I was like Zuckeruckerberg i'd be like i mean he did pay for that big complex but uh you know i'd be like hey man isn't it cheaper if we can have people work from home and there's probably gonna have to be like you're talking about software and different things that can make sure there's accountability like are you really working when you're at home eight hours a day or what's going on over there you know human interaction is so important and fundamental. And I think you've said it spot on, Chris. We've seen companies just like Stripe who have offices

in Europe and Russia and America and are able to successfully deliver the products. But I have a big bet and it's very contrarian. A lot of people today are like saying, well, we're going to leave Silicon Valley. We're going to leave New York City. Get us out of here. I think just the opposite is going to happen. Once we recover and reimagine society, cities like New York and SF are going to be more important than ever before. This is where the big deals and the mega deals are going to happen. And these are where the next big companies are going to occur.

Because as you've said, some of these bankruptcies are going to occur with restructuring and private equity deals. And this will pave the way for very affordable real estate that we haven't seen since 9-11. The deals for commercial costs and consumer costs are going to plummet. And that's going to provide accessibility for people who wanted to come to New York and SF, but just couldn't afford to do so before. Well, there you go. That's one of the things that definitely need to get reset in San Francisco. And I remember the reset back in 2008 when that took and happened. And, you know, at that point, prior to 2008, you know, people couldn't live in that city either. The cost of living was going through the roof and that's,

that's what a lot of people are looking at now, quality of life and stuff. So I'm all for it. Um, and I, and, and I know that there's a lot of rumblings in the startup industry for tech is, you know, in 2008, there were so many great ideas and so many, so many great startups and hunger and, and people that were, you know, uh, lost their jobs and they came up with great ideas and concepts. There was the new youth, of course, that were coming out of college. I was watching these young kids that were graduating. They held these special online ceremonies for, and I feel for them because you're just like, I just came out in the arm again, you know.

But hopefully they're going to bring a lot of ideas, a lot of, um, new models and, uh, and all of this hopefully will flow together and we'll come out the other side with, uh, a new greatness. Maybe there'll be some new, some new Steve jobs types, some new, uh, incredible renovations or revolutionary things. Yeah. I mean, like you mentioned in 2008, Chris, we saw that's where Uber was founded, right? That's where Travis was in Paris at Loeb and just like drinking with friends and saying, why can I not get a taxi?

And that idea formed. I think we're going to see the same thing today with millennials. I mean, Elon Musk has contributed to hack in high school for these hack days for kids to be able to code while they're stuck at home. I think there's going to be a lot of exciting new models happening. And most of it's going to be around the cloud enabled by data. The data has been what we've been talking about for the last few years, both for good and for well privacy with GDPR.

But I think it's coming of age now. We've seen a lot of new applications with computer vision we have uh just in the past few weeks the samsung galaxy s20 ultra has been announced in korea the iphone 12 was leaked with its new camera as well and we look at this and these cameras are jam-packed with ai everywhere yeah uh in fact my good friend robert scoble we mentioned earlier in the pre-show, he was actually in the taxi with the Uber folks pitching their idea at LeWeb. And Marissa Mayer, I think at that time, was sitting on his lap in the taxi.

Marissa Mayer? Did I get that right? The Yahoo? Marissa Mayer. Marissa Mayer. That's right. She was sitting on his lap and he was listening to the Zuber idea going, whatever.

And of course he's good friends with he used to run LeWeb. I forget his name. Great Frenchman. Really nice guy. He started C-SPIC back in the day and a bunch of other companies, CSPIC web. Um, so, uh, so what else do you do?

Tell us more about, uh, maybe stuff that you cover on the podcast and some of the other aspects of what you guys, uh, go and do over there. Yeah. So at the humane podcast, our topics are split between artificial intelligence, data science, future work, K-12. So we're now part of the largest network of online charter school education in the world. And we've had opportunity to talk about transformation in the space for business. Beyond that, I've had a lot of AI leaders like Nicholas Badminton that's coming on shortly talking about the future of AI for society. So it's making sure that whether you're a product manager, a software engineer, a data

scientist, or an executive, you can translate these results practically to your business. Awesome, Sauce. And so technology probably is a big aspect of that education platform, correct? Yeah. probably is a big aspect of that education platform, correct? Yeah, so at Galvanize, we have our own internal learning experience platform with APIs, with different integrations that run on cloud services like AWS, Heroku, with our own product team. And it's amazing to see that as all education has moved online, like not just for us, but for K-12 education, everyone is testing online. Assessments are online. Proctoring is online. And all the social monitoring is occurring. And although it can seem

very crazy for parents and kids, instructors love the access to these different data points. I mean, one thing that we do at Galvanize with our students is we have checkpoints daily. And the checkpoints are not really for pass or fail. It's more information for the instructors to see where are students succeeding or needing more improvement in material so we can provide those pathways for access and learning outcomes. I think that's going to be a great opportunity for all these online programs, but we are seeing schools today who are scrapping assessments. We saw the University of California system completely abandoned the SAT and ACT system.

Really? Students no longer need this for college admissions. We've seen colleges that have dropped the GRE and GMAT. So I'm not sure where that's going to be. Are we going to just the participant award generation full stop in college now? Well, I think what we're seeing is that a college degree and grading by test is no longer the only thing we need to be successful, right? You've seen big tech companies like Facebook who've said for years, you don't need a college degree. Come to our hackathon. Prove that you can code. You have earned the job. I think the same thing is going to be for college. You could be a

phenomenal mathlete or someone who is an activist in your area. But you know what? Maybe you're not right at reading comprehension. That shouldn't stop you from having access. You know, my mom's talked about this for years. She was a teacher for almost 20 years. Uh, and you look at the European model or the British model of where early on, they kind of figure out what your kind of angle is of what you're, you're good at. And they steer you towards that. And they kind of focus. I remember, uh, growing up as a kid for me, learning wasn't like a big thing. Uh, and you know, and it just seemed like I was shoved so much stuff that I had zero interest in.

Like even when I was in school, I wasn't really into math clearly. Um, and I don't know if that's clearly, and maybe you can just look at me and go, he doesn't look like a math dude. He looks like he's, uh, be drinking a beer somewhere in a, uh, that's not going to sell anywhere. Uh, I'll put a. That's not going to sell anywhere. I'll put a, that's not going to make it on my Tinder profile. But no,

I just, I mean, there are people that like you that get math. You guys have, you guys have this neat ability to, to deal with that. I like math. But you know,

when it came to algebra and trig and you know, all this sort of stuff, I'm just like, when the hell am I ever going to use this when I'm in the unemployment line um and then I didn't go to college either I started my first company 18 it was a subcontracting stucco business for contracting but it was my first company 18 and I never looked back I started over 20 different corporations over the years we had multiple ones for a long time. And my whole life has been being an entrepreneur. And some people look at me and

they'll go like, you must've really went to college. And I'm like, no. Now I did read a lot of business books. Like I, you know, one of the things I realized was I wasn't going to college and I was, I grew up poor. So we had a Pell grant for me. That was the setup. But, you know, I read Harvard Business Review. I did, I read a lot of stuff on modeling. I plan on being a CEO someday. And so I set my course on that, but I educated myself, read a lot of books and things and, and, and probably did probably an MBA study when I came down to it. I just didn't pay for it. But, um, but, but that was how I learned, you know, I'm, I'm very tactile that way. And I, I seem to, I used to think I was normal like everyone else, but I've had people tell me, they're like, you kind of have a way of seeing a direct line between two points that most people don't. Um, but, uh, and I'm not

specifically brilliant, but it just learning was really hard for me because it was soul crushing you know because like well you're great suck you know even when i had my even when i had my broker's licenses for mortgage companies real estates uh i took my stockbroker license when i was like 20 to become a stockbroker um and you you know, I took the test and I'd learned all the materials. I knew the data, but they had the, you know, the double negative, triple negative trick questions. And you're like, you're not testing me on what the fuck I should know. You're just playing tricks and whether or not I can figure out your tricks. So everyone learns differently, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of assessments are setting people up to fail.

And the truth is you can be successful in the school of hard knocks, right? Like you can actually go and do vocational work. You can do apprenticeship-based work. And I think that's where we're going to start moving back towards as a society. One of the organizations, I sit on their board in New York City. They're sponsored by NYC EVC. They're called MAKE. They're the Advanced Manufacturing Industrial Council.

And prior to COVID, we were talking about that they just cannot hire people to work with CNC drilling machines and CAD systems to build products. And it was so fascinating because these are jobs that pay up to $100,000 or more, even more than like software engineers at college. So it's fascinating. But I think we're going to move back there where project-based learning or the Montessori system is essential for learning. I mean, that's what we do with our K-12 students as well. I mean, at K-12, a lot of our students come from less socially, you know, available backgrounds, right, where they don't have that access or equity. And that's why we're bringing in data science and software training, starting in kindergarten. So by the time these students are in 12th grade, they may not be a data scientist or software engineer, but they're

on that pathway to get a good job in the new tech economy and access is really what we should be focusing on. And, and I, I, I used to tell my nephew, my, my brother and for his nephew, my nephew,

his, his son, when he was turning like 10 or 11 and you know, we were going back to the big boom in 2010 of apps and stuff. And I'm like, he really needed to teach that kid coding because that's his future, his future is computers. And you know, I've tried to learn coding in my old age.

And it's a language and multiple languages in and to themselves. And it's just proven that when you're young, you just adapt to that a whole lot better. You assimilate it a whole lot better. And getting that at a young age. And the computers are going to be the the future where these kids are going. The one thing I've been talking on the Chris Voss show is different, how different models are going to change. I don't know how soon we're going to have, if we will ever have vaccine or how soon we will have one. I know the CEO of Bank of America said we may not have a rebound, a full rebound and get back to semi-normal until the end of 2022. So one of the problems that parents have right now is they're, a lot of them

are, are being teachers, you know, they're having to school. And I don't, my feeling is that the business model that, that a lot of companies have is they may have to really look at having one person at home or having some sort of support for people at home because one of those parents is going to be you know full-time daycare and full-time um full-time teacher sort of thing or you know a balance between what you guys are doing and you know we're seeing a lot of what you guys are doing and then a lot of what you know con academy and different guys are doing and, you know, we're seeing a lot of what you guys are doing and then a lot of what, you know, Khan Academy and different things are doing, where this online schooling is having to take place. The challenge with learning,

and I think you've said it best here is that you need to be in a space with a sound and focused mind. So if you are homeschooling your children and then you're making their meals and you're trying to maintain a job or you're furloughed and you're trying to learn, it's so challenging when you don't have the peace of mind to focus. So definitely online education is very different than in person where you're in an academy, in a locked room, phones silent, everything's out the door, but you're coding. So it's a different experience. And I think that's something we're going're coding. So it's a different experience. And I think that's something we're going to have to figure out as a society together. You know,

I think what's interesting is the CARES Act, you know, that passed earlier in March, apportioned about $300 million to furlough employees to helping people get re-skilled in the new economy. About $150 million of that is for these types of short-term programs, especially for companies that hold on to their employees throughout the crisis. I think the change that we're seeing that's particular to the United States is a lot of companies are not holding on to their employees, especially companies that are tight on cash. So they've been dropping somewhere from 10% to 100% of the workforce.

But that's not what we've seen in Europe. In Europe, there were several policies that went through the commission that said, look, as long as you retain your employees, we will cover up to 80% of their salary for up to $60,000 for a year during this crisis. And because that unemployment has not really changed much while it's changed here. So I know right now, depending on when you're listening to the show, the Congress has been working on the HEROES Act to help enable similar legislature that's going to not only protect employees to stay longer,

but also to offer this universal basic income security for people who are contractors who did not qualify for unemployment in the CARES Act. Yeah. I mean, I don't have employees. I've used virtual assistants when they need them for stress points or events that we do and stuff. But, you know, I mean, I don't qualify for any of that. I've lost, you know, 30, 40, $50,000 of the cancellation of shows and events that we do. Um, and I keep losing money. I think they just closed IBC or one of the other shows again. Um, but, uh, you know, it has an effect on me. It has effect on what I spend. I know, I, I know we're going to go through the bankruptcy phases and the, in the probably, you and probably foreclosures and stuff like that. I think I just saw Goldman Sachs is foreclosed on a bunch of homes that we went through in 2008. So these kids are going to be at home. They're going to be trying to learn. They're going to be dealing with the stress of their parents going through all sorts of crises of financial debilitation.

We're already seeing the other element of it, you know, domestic violence as well. You know, a lot of these kids, you know, my parents were nice people, but, you know, sometimes it was nice to get away from them, you know, as a child. Like, I'm going to school. And, you know, you go someplace different. And so, you know, there's there's going to be a lot of pressure point that's going to be in the home and in schooling daycare. I mean, you can't really, you know, put 100 kids in a daycare room anymore until something gets done about the virus. So there's that health care and healthcare and, uh, mental healthcare

is going to be huge. Um, so there's, there's a lot of pinch points that we're coming into that are going to have to be addressed on a multi-modal basis. Yeah. And I think, uh, when we look at like tech investments and startups and where the industry is moving, I think mental health tech is one of the fastest growing areas that we're going to see a lot of change. We've already seen some of the big players in the space like Headspace and Calm that have partnered with states like New York to offer for everyone the ability to meditate or have more of that peace of mind. But I think it's going to take public-private partnerships at the level where governments are saying, let's open up the roads and give access to people. We've seen de Blasio and Governor Cuomo working with New York City to say, let's open up 100 miles of roads. Let's shut down roads to cars, let people out there so that they can live a life

because you can't go to the beaches in New York State. You can't go to the racetracks today. You can't even go to restaurants. So you're in this whole different society that feels very much like the 1920s, if you will. And I've been seeing, we've been seeing cities that are closing down streets and turning them into restaurant forays so that restaurants can move out of their office or their place of business and serve on the streets. they're, and they're, they're putting huge coverings and they're locking down streets. You know, I live for a short time. Well, it was one of my places I was living in Denver.

And I remember Denver has like a street that one or two streets running down the whole thing. And it's like where you can go for lunch and it's all eateries. And this is so wonderful. And it's just a clear walk space. You don't have to get running out of cars and it's like where you can go for lunch and it's all eateries and this is so wonderful and it's just a clear walk space you don't have to get running on cars and it was a lot of fun and so um yeah our models are going to change um i can't imagine what that would do for traffic in new york but i don't know there doesn't seem to be much traffic in new york it's so weird to see your guys city you know look at times this is traffic. It's like, you know, some apocalyptic movie where you're just like, yeah. But fun is fun.

So you see that happening. How long have you guys been doing the podcast, the Humane Podcast? Humane Podcast has been out since February 2019. So we've had now over 75 episodes, including a lot of thought leaders in AI and data science, even people who are in the retail business. You know, like you just were talking about restaurants opening up. There's been the talk that New York City will be the biggest block party in the world if we can open up all the restaurants on the sidewalks.

Yeah, that would be really interesting too. And open up the streets and I don't know, where do you see self-driving cars going? They kind of got hit with the big pause button with self-driving cars. Are we going to become more of a walkable society for the short term or what do you think about that? You know, when we think of self-driving cars, of course, we can think of new shows that have been on TV that's been capturing our minds and imaginations. We have Westworld season three that just concluded. We have Upload on Amazon, and we even have Devs on Hulu and FX. All three of these shows in the past few months have been focusing on, as a society, are we in control? Can things be automated? Are the machines behind

the movement? And eventually we may be moving in that direction. But in the short term, what we're seeing is there's been a rapid consolidation in the space with massive funds being raised for the next shops of self-driving cars. We've seen companies like Kitty Hawk that were trying to do the flying taxis that have folded and all the engineers have moved into new self-flying ventures. We've seen Uber ventures

that have cut their entire AI research division to focus more on eats while Cruise has laid off a lot of their workforce. But on the same end, Waymo just raised a massive war chest of billions of dollars to go all in on self-driving. I think once we emerge from COVID and we reimagine what the economy looks like, we're going to be in a more lean space. And that's going to be how do we set environments for success. And that means initially minimizing some human interaction by augmenting it with machine-like experiences. So when we come back to going to school, maybe there is some self-driving buses.

Maybe when we come back to CES 2021, which I think will be happening, I'll say that here first, that I think conferences next year are going to occur. There will just be new policies in place because we have got to get back to our in-person relationships there is nothing like it in my opinion in fact what was funny was i saw this company uh someone forwarded to me i think it was one of my friends who writes for

forbes um and it's called the uh it's visor technologies v-y Z R technologies. And they, so they are going to sell and it's up on one of the crowdfunding sites. They're going to sell this outer layer protection dome. Like if you ever saw the, what was that? The cone of silence, like the dome comes down over your head and you have the cone of silence or something like that. It's kind of like that. And it's a, it's kind of an upper body piece that you wear that acts as like this portable clear tent that goes above your head and your arms can come out and basically you can walk around protection and talk to each other it's going to be on indigo looks like indigo go um and i thought that was kind of

weird we're going to be walking around you know like looking like we're in hazmat spacesuits going, hey, how's it going? Hey, how's the virus going? You know, like I don't think the overreaction is too much because we didn't know in the early stage how bad the virus was. And we're still discovering how to treat it. And we're still losing lives every day, which is a deep breath moment to pause and honor everyone who's

unfortunately lost their life to COVID-19. But I think that as we're moving beyond what capacity looked like at hospitals, when we come to better treatment, we can realize that we can open smarter and the disease is not as contagious as we think it is. Yes, if you're a vulnerable population who's 65 plus, someone with diabetes or a pre-existing condition, you're more at risk. But I think with certain policies in place, we can make sure that vulnerable populations are protected and we can get the economy moving. I mean, we see in New York City, up to 25% of people already have antibodies for COVID in some areas of the city, like the Bronx and in Brooklyn, but of them less than 0.2% have even been in the hospital.

So, you know, a lot of people will be asymptomatic from the condition. Yeah. And, and it's, it's going to be interesting how we get through this. And I think there's,

there seems to be a lot of things where we're still finding out about the virus. And there might be a lot of long-term things. This new thing with the kids, and I forget what it's called, the Kawasaki. It's the Kawasaki, yeah. We don't know enough yet. We know at least as of today, there's 157 kids in the New York City area that have this condition. But none of the kids have died from it yet. So we know know so it just

depends is that an inflammatory response um and what does that look like and is it long-term damage too we had a lot of mothers that got that thing and and who knows you know what got passed through the long-term damage i mean we've seen in adults of course you know the loss of the kidney and liver functions and people are going to be on dialysis for the rest of their life over, you know, what people were like, it's the flu. It's like, that's not the fucking flu. That thing's evil. And so anyway, we'll see what's going on. So you see AI being a big tie-in, tech being a big tie-in to, you know, pulling us through this recovery, getting us out sooner, helping change and reshape,

remodel our world as we get down the pipe? Yeah, I think we're moving to practical AI. And we've already started seeing some of this implemented in Singapore and China and Southeast Asia, where now we have these temperature scanners, which are run by cameras. So you can see infrared. Does someone have a body temperature that's above 98 degrees? If so, pause. I think we're going to move into a society, quite frankly, where you go to airports and you go to buildings and there will be devices or people scanning you for these checks. And if you fail it, you will not be allowed in. You might even have to go to quarantine or you might do a rapid nasal swab test just to confirm, do you have antibodies to COVID or not?

We're almost going to be moving into a society where if you have the antibodies and you're alive, then you're actually benefiting from movement in society, but you're also at risk for people who do not have the antibodies. So there will be some people penalized in the short term. It just depends how we look at social monitoring. We've seen that China's gone all in on social monitoring. It's been to reduce crime. It's been to reduce COVID even. But I think in the US, what we need to look at is how is health prioritized while we reopen the economy. I envision the workplace of the future, one where cameras are everywhere, but the data is being secured and anonymized. So we can determine if you do have COVID so we can have a contact tracer help determine who else may be impacted. I think that's one of the policies we're seeing in New

York State is that it's not just about the AI, but it's about the AI with the human. And that's why Governor Cuomo's worked on setting policy to hire over 10,000 contact tracers in the next few months so that we have at least one for every thousand people or so in the state of New York. That number may change on variance, but the goal is to make sure that if we can know everyone's endpoint, whether it's through an app like Google and Apple are working on for contact and trace or with human intervention, we can ensure that we can get back to the new normal sooner than later. How do you feel about the, you know, the, let's say, quote unquote, dangers of AI? You know, Elon Musk loves to bang on this sort of thing.

And, you know, I think he has a whole Skynet Terminator sort of vision of AI, you know, when they awaken and stuff. I mean, certainly I've watched that Boston Dynamics dog. And every time I see that fucking thing, the whole Terminator soundtrack goes through my head. It's like, welcome to your new overlords and a lot of people are kind of uh uh they're they're a little bit worried about that sort of stuff they're worried about the downsides how do you feel about all that so i mean i love the Boston Dynamics dog. I mean, now it can do parkour. It can move an 18-wheeler truck. Even Stanford came out with a mini, mini spot that now you can take an Arduino board and make your own at home for $650,

which is quite fantastic. But it does bring up some of the scary thoughts, like when will we reach Skynet or this AGI like in Westworld or upload or devs? I think we'll move into a world where quantum and AGI or artificial general intelligence is more enabled, but we're not there yet. We are going to need so much more progress in Internet of Things, in 5G rollouts with the Samsung Galaxy S20 and iPhone 12. But even then, we're looking today at narrow AI. We're looking at unique applications like, is the picture on my phone my dog or is it

a mob, right? Is the text in this paragraph actually about an incident talking coronavirus or is there a misspelling and we're talking about Crimea, right? So there's a lot of things that the AI is getting wrong today. It's misclassifying. It's being racist. It has bias. And I think we have a lot to fix in the AI first before worrying about the day of AGO. And a lot of that's our input, right?

Dirty data in, dirty data out, right? Garbage in, garbage out. Yeah. So our own biases are affecting that. What do you feel about, I know there's several different encroachments on our civil liberties. One was recently the Banjo scandal here in Utah that, you know, I remember reading about early on where the dirty deal came out with the attorney general. And then, of course, everything went haywire beyond that when someone did some digging. But it was a real dirty deal with the AG here that they set up a deal to give them access to the cameras. There's another company back east. I forget the name of it.

They got a lot of crap that did a really good job of staying under the wire. Clearview AI. Clearview AI. They scraped everything pretty much, and they built the database. I'm not even sure why Facebook and Google aren't suing them because apparently they scraped Facebook. And then I know William Barr, I believe there's something going through the Senate right now

that would give him access to whatever the hell he wants, evidently, from what I understand of it. I haven't read the letter, but I usually wait until it gets closer to a real vote and pass committee. But what do you think about all that? I'm surprised Edward, I haven't been watching Edward Snowden lately, but I imagine he's screaming at the top of his lungs. You know, I think one of the big challenges is that data is available everywhere. And when you don't pay for a service and you sign up on a website, you check a box, I agree to terms and conditions, which nobody reads. And those terms and conditions pretty much say, if you don't pay for my product, well, I have to make money somehow. And that might mean including your data. The difference with Bandro and Clearview AI is they went into it from the start with, we are going to take people's images and we do not care what

people think. We're going to make a ton of money on this and we're going to sell it to everyone we can. And that's the challenge. The challenge has been that in the European Union, GDPR passed in 2016. If a company tried to do that today, they would be out of business, sued millions and millions of euros. But in the United States, we only have CCPA in California, which only governs the state of California. Not another state in our union supports policies to say you have the right to be forgotten or erase your data. But you're right. You know, you look at Banjo or Clearview AI. I mean, if you Google David Jacobovich in Google, you'll get dozens of images. And with those, you know enough about me that you

can definitely create a deep faith and create a video saying David's on the Chris Voss show, even if he's not, you know, does he really have blonde hair? I thought he has black hair. What is going on here? Must be COVID. So I think we do need ethical AI. I think we need policies in place where all the technical stakeholders are thinking how to build the best systems. I have something called the design thinking standards for data science, where it's a hybrid solution where data scientists, software engineers, and product developers work together to see who owns the responsibility in building these systems. And to know that when you build a system, it doesn't stop there. You have to maintain it because as we know, with some of the HR scandals and the Clearview AI or Banjo scandals, AI can go haywire pretty quickly. And, you know, we're seeing the 1984 Georgia Orwellian aspect of that

in China. And I forget the province in China that that's in because I've been saying the other one with COVID for so long. But is it Zhaiping? There's a province in China, and I paying, um, there's a province in China and they're using it of course to largely repress those, uh, I believe they're Muslims. Um, and in those concentration camps they have, but then also throughout the cities, you know,

they've created a new social credit thing where, uh, you know, if you're caught, you know, buying too much alcohol or being a subversive, you know, you're not allowed to buying too much alcohol or being a subversive you know you're not allowed to travel you can't get on trains and there's a i mean this shit can go dark really bad especially with bad governments with people with bad intentions you look at places like britain where the you know they already have a cctv uh you know everywhere so it wouldn't be that hard to flip a couple switches and um you know i mean i know, it's, it's a crazy world we're going to. And hopefully, I don't know, somehow we got to get ahead of, you know, making the right guidelines and do whatever before we end up on the wrong side of something. And we go,

fuck, we unleashed the Pandora's box and it's not going back in. The challenge is it all is about government and it's different in every country. You know, you look at China and yes, the goals have been to reduce credit crime and COVID. But we see now where in the education system, if a student is asleep and not engaged, parents get reports daily about how their students were doing in school. So, I mean, it sounds like it's the admirable goal, like let's improve student retention and performance, but where are we overstepping our boundaries? And in China, it's a very state enterprise controlled system. So the people are very much in support of the government. So these policies move very quickly. Then with those ramifications later, like with the Muslims that you mentioned, or with Hong Kong and police oversight.

In the US, we've pretty much been, over time, we look at everything from women's suffrage to gay rights, right? It's very much moving from a state basis, then up to the judicial system as a government. And so if we're looking for those oversights, like we see with the California Consumer Privacy Act, CCPA, or the New York Privacy Act, which is still in the legislation, we got to push it in your states up. Because I think companies are capitalistic by nature, they're going to do what they can to make money within the realm of the law. Sometimes it's outside the law, like we saw with Luckin Coffee out of China that fabricated $310 million of sales, which is now creating additional tension of the United

States and China around should Chinese companies even be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. I mean, I feel that this year has been a year that the US-China relationship has been tested more than ever before. Yeah. It's going to be interesting how we get through these times and how we come out the other side and hopefully we elect people in government. It's just, like I remember when Mark Zuckerberg and the CEO

of Google went up to speak to the Congress and the idiot questions from these congressmen, you're just like, holy fuck, you're the last person we need to have trying to regulate this because you don't even understand how to pick up a phone. Some of the questions they threw at Mark and the CEO of Google, you're just like, wow, man. And we really need to change up our government so where we have people that, you know, are technological base that understand technology, understand the future. We keep putting up these guys who are still, I don't know, using flip phones. We're going to, we have problems and no wonder we do. So anyway, it's going to be kind of interesting. Well, anything more we need to know and cover about yourself here on the show while we have you? Yeah, I mean, high level, my call to action for those who are listening is especially if you're in a time today where, you know, you've been furloughed or unemployed as a result of COVID.

Education is going to go through a rapid transformation here in the country. And there's a lot of solutions that can give you that access today. If you haven't been thinking about them, some of the solutions we offer at Galvanize are like income share agreements where you don't pay anything until you get a job. That's a great way to say there's a promise to pay for you that's almost as good as a Pell Grant.

Beyond that, I think now there's gonna to be a lot of funding coming out for grants all across the board, which is going to further help with education. More than that, I can really say that if you're looking to learn and stay on top of AI, data science, future work, and developer education, now is the time for you to set goals. It may be challenging if you have kids at home. It may be challenging to see how do you create that work-life balance with productivity tools or time tracking as well. But this is the moment, if there has ever been a moment before, for you to reset those goals. You know, typically we look at January as our new year resolutions. Right now, we should be looking at COVID as our new decade resolutions.

It's an opportunity to really bring life back to what is your goals and what is your peak performance in life. So I know it's definitely an unprecedented time and I have many friends who are unfortunately as well experiencing unemployment from COVID. But I think if we take public-private partnerships, we can get a lot of people back at work soon

and in a lot of new tech industries that will power our economy and our manufacturing to stay the number one leader in the world. Awesome sauce. So give us the plugs again, Dave, where people can look you up and check that out. I don't know if you want to give galvanizes.com or whatever they have.

Sure, thanks so much. If you're interested in any educational offerings like boot camps, you can check out galvanize.com, G-A-L-V-A-N-I-Z-E.com. For the podcast, you can check out humanepodcast.com. I talk about these trends weekly on AI, data science, developer education. That's A-T-U-M-A-I-N podcast.com. I've really enjoyed this conversation we've had here today, Chris. Yeah, we'll have to have you on more and talking about AI and stuff.

I mean, we have the Spatial Computing Podcast. And I know our good friend, my good friend, I'll have to introduce you to him, Robert Scobie. He's got his launch of his new book. And he loves AI and VR and AR. It looks like Apple's going to be moving more into VR now. They're finally starting to head down that pathway, so that's going to be interesting to see what products they come out of as well.

Yeah, VR is such a fascinating space because, you know, Facebook acquired Oculus a few years back, and now Apple's acquired NextVR. And I think what's so interesting, but makes complete sense from an Apple perspective, is they have gone all in on entertainment. They have Apple shows, Apple news, and they're creating all this product. So they've cornered the news market, they've cornered the music market, even the movies now. It's a very emerging brand. They've never touched sports. What NextVR has done so successfully is they own all the IP and licensing for virtual reality with sports.

That's for football, basketball, all the licensing. That's why it made a complete sense. I know NextVR sold with a fireside price as a result of, well, COVID and more than that. But the IP licensing plays what Apple went after there. NextVR had it to where you could basically sit courtside and they even had cameras where you could watch the ball go in the basket, right? And you could,

you basically experienced courtside at the basketball game and see everything. I think we did an interview with them at EWE last year. So, or this year, last year. Anyway. I love the next VR team. You know, when i was at big three we worked with them a lot actually in the basketball space they're great guys awesome well thanks david for being on the show we certainly appreciate it be sure to check his

podcast out guys look them up interact with them and all that good stuff uh we appreciate you guys listening today go to the cvpn.com or chrisfosspodcastnetwork.com there's nine podcasts over there and uh yeah you might have to have a bigger uh cranium after all this stuff lots of great details you've gotten here from david uh also go to youtube.com for chest chris foss hit that bell notification ding and get the notifications of all the wonderful videos we put up there as always uh with the chris foss show you can listen to the podcast for the audio version, or you can go to YouTube for the video versions. Anyway, guys, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in.

Be safe. Wear your masks. Don't think about other people. Take care of each other, and we'll see you next time.