David Yakobovitch
Cyrus Radfar
Today’s guest speaker offers insights into the future of technology. Listen in as Cyrus Radfar and I discuss why the next big thing is often something, no one sees. Why today’s generation G are the “always on” generation. What is the future of being human and how privacy could be the deciding factor for data access? This is HumAIn.
Welcome to HumAIn. My name is David Yakobovitch, and I will be your host throughout this series. Together we’ll explore AI through fireside conversations with industry experts, from business executives and AI researchers, to leaders who advanced AI for all, HumAIn is the channel to release new AI products, to learn about industry trends and to bridge the gap between humans and machines in the fourth industrial revolution. If you’d like this episode, remember to subscribe and leave a review.
David Yakobovitch
Welcome back everyone to the HumAIn podcast. I’m your host, David Yakobovitch and today I’m honored to have with me, our guest speaker, coming to us from Silicon Valley.
His name is Cyrus Radfar and he’s the CEO and founding partner of V1 Worldwide. I discovered Cyrus reading a TechCrunch article on Bias and AI, and learned a lot from what his thought leadership was. Cyrus, thanks for being with us today.
Cyrus Radfar
Thank you very much, David.
David Yakobovitch
It’s super fun to always see everything going on in TechCrunch. And actually, that’s one of the ways I got started in tech. Almost 10 years ago, I was at one of the TechCrunch disrupt conferences in New York and since then I got addicted to a lot of publications. Pretty neat to see if that loose ship out there.
Cyrus Radfar
Thank you. I never think of it as thought leadership. I just love to start new conversations or hope to. That’s a good platform to start getting people to listen.
David Yakobovitch
It all starts with that. It all starts with listening, I just was finishing and starting both the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020. I’ve had a lot of trend reports coming up myself about the future of FinTech, future of education, and trends are something that’s very interesting, right? You can look at what’s trendy. What is a trend? What is a signal? All these different parts of different identities, and what’s your thoughts on the future of trends or the future of certain technologies?
Cyrus Radfar
What I’ve seen a lot of is at least historically, is we’re really bad as humans of predicting when something had outliers come in. That’s one of the things that I’m always kind of aware of when I’m writing something down. Is that the next big thing that’s going to change everything and no one sees?
It always kind of humbles everyone who tries to kind of take that guess. But for me right now, I really think what you’re talking about and what we’re talking about with the future of artificial intelligence is kind of going to drive a huge number of trends. Whether it’s the future of work, the future of transport. All of those are kind of going to obviously change in the future of what it means to be human, not to get too philosophical so quickly. But to me, I find those questions kind of always back into something very big because at this point, we define ourselves so much by what we do.
If we’re looking at work specifically and the idea that, we’re going to be building something to either replace us or replace all the things that in the positive sense that we don’t want to be doing with machine intelligence, artificial intelligence, robotics, etcetera. It’s interesting because it kind of goes back to what are we going to worry about then? Not that they won’t be worried. We know we fill it with something. I kind of always fall into that kind of existential bummer of what’s next. What’s the new thing that we’re going to complain about when everything’s taken care of, but I may have gone off the deep end a little too soon.
David Yakobovitch
I love it. We’re going to be worrying about our dogs and cats, FaceTiming each other. And that’s where it would be the future of…
Cyrus Radfar
I was actually talking to someone about not necessarily FaceTime exactly, but that’s an interesting, a very funny visual. But there are folks I was speaking to and one of my old advisors, Starner. He was the inventor of Google Glass and considered one of the first CyberWorks, it was Wired magazine that coined it. He was out of MIT Media Lab, but he was working on using machine intelligence to understand dolphin language.
It’s so fascinating that, and we’re trying to kind of reverse engineer the way we learn in a way. And obviously machine learning has gone is not necessarily a replica of the brain or an attempt to be that. But it’s very, very interesting to imagine people talking to their dogs cause that’s, that would. I don’t know. Maybe Her would be a very different movie. If you could talk to your dog, people would just be, well, people already stay at home with their animals, so who knows what’s coming
David Yakobovitch
But what’s consistent is whether we’re thinking of dogs, cats, dolphins, right? All this research. It is about reverse engineering. We see all the products coming out, whether they’re original or they’re the next generation of the products it’s thinking, how do I make all these parts fit together as a whole. And a great speaker who I saw in New York recently is a venture capitalist, Brian Cohen, one of the big angels from New York. And he said we don’t invest in ideas. We invest in teams who have the capacity to execute and scale businesses.
I find that so fascinating because as we’re looking into this new age of AI or fourth industrial revolution, the future of work is not just to throw AI and see magic happen, but that’s how you integrate AI into a business to scale that, how do you integrate AI into work? So that work is more futuristic, whatever that means, right? So, more efficiency, more automation, human, augmented. So that’s how Brian sees it. And that’s interesting, but what’s your take on the future of work with AI?
Cyrus Radfar
That’s a big question. I guess the question is first to define what is work. I’ve always loved what I do. I would do what I could do for free. I’m kind of in that beautiful position where I love building things. And then I get to do that. And I guess I hope a machine doesn’t take that away from me and what I hope and is most likely going to happen because it’s the most likely business problem people are gonna solve is taking the things we don’t want to do off our plates.
In every job and every piece of work there, those tasks, and automation, AI in general is, is going to support and augment us so we can focus more on doing what we love. That’s more true for knowledge workers. Well, I guess it’s good to split and say, what does AI do? Cause it’s very different how it’s going to impact different types of work. The more manual work that a lot of blue collar work and. It’s very possible. A lot of that we could see, it being replaced. I don’t see that happening in the next decade or two, but I definitely see again, augmenting humans with robotics, having robotic farms, which we’re already seeing a vertical farming, which is mainly all automated, is going to replace a lot of jobs.
On one side we’re going to be allowing people to do a lot more of what they want to do on the knowledge work side. We’re also going to be removing a lot of work that people don’t want to do. That always leaves the question of, so what are people who are doing those jobs going to do next?
And there’s plenty of McKinsey EITs that are trying to guess, but if you look back at major transitions, the ATM is a great example. People were so scared of the ATM, destroying the whole banking industry. It actually increased the number of banks and workers because they basically were doing more transactions and It was the complete opposite of people thought of like, there were no more banks and no more tellers and all that sort of thing. So there’s been examples where we’ve kind of taken out something and we basically improve the service.
That was basically it cut out some of the less useful tasks. So in a long winded way, I’d say I don’t have a very clear answer, but in general, for most dollars workers, life should be significantly easier and you’ll have a lot more time focusing on the big problems. We’ll need to figure out. And it’s more of a political and socio-economic question of how do you structure a society where you don’t necessarily need as many people working or quote unquote, working, doing the jobs people don’t want to do today.
David Yakobovitch
It is about knowledge workers. That’s what we’ve grown up to be knowledge workers here in the United States. And even when we’re looking today at areas in Asia, Pacific and Africa and the Middle East, a lot of these countries are supporting knowledge workers. So you have for the first time virtual assistants and social media managers and dev ops teams, which are all being outsourced and they’re all going from no digital literacy to immediately capable to drive digital insights.
And so the whole world is becoming knowledge workers. We have a billion plus people who are being lifted out of poverty from making under a dollar a day to now making living wages. We see countries that formerly were not seen as tech leaders now becoming global superpowers like China, South Korea, Estonia and the Maldives and many of these countries.
So I tend to agree with you as well. The McKinsey EITs will always say what the McKinsey EITs say, but when they say something like “60% of jobs are going away by 2030”, it’s the opportunity I’ll make a tangent too, to be one of the Leaders of the March for our lives movement in the United States. It’s just supporting advocacy on gun control. One of our big phrases was we call BS, like we call BS on movements and things in Washington. Similarly when McKinsey says, “Oh, I think 60% of jobs going up by 2030”, I’m like, I call BS like, like where is the facts? How are you building these numbers?
What actuates with data scientists are coming up with these metrics. I tend to agree that knowledge workers will be augmented by technology, which we’re seeing today. You have to think about it just about 10 years ago. It was analytics and then it was business intelligence, and now it was data science. Now it’s data science with AI, it keeps evolving.
Cyrus Radfar
I definitely think one thing to remember is that like a lot of these reports are based on, the job reports given out by the United States government. And a lot of times what they’re reporting on is the number of people with a given job title. And if you were trying to like, we don’t necessarily need, I’m forgetting the name of them even right now, we don’t need payphone repairman anymore, for example, but we do have mobile phone operator, repair people who were probably the same people, but that’s a job that’s lost. It doesn’t exist anymore.
If you look 30 years ago, like most of the jobs that we’re all sitting in, there’s no such thing as a podcaster. I don’t know if that’s in the federal list, but there’s so many different things that probably didn’t exist and it replaces it. We’re kind of forgetting that like, as we kind of social media didn’t exist 10 years ago or went well 15 years ago. So the whole term is new, the whole industry and everyone who claims to be in that industry, those are new jobs and it was created by.
A platform, similarly, Uber drivers, how many people are doing that now, now that’s a separate debate of whether there’s ethics and pricing and all that fun stuff. But that is, there are a lot of people driving cars who weren’t driving cars before. I guess the question of whether it’s creating or destroying work is it’s hard to say. what we know is pensions, as we used to know, it doesn’t exist.
It’s like that jobs are not like that anymore in the United States, but I generally tend to be pretty optimistic as much as I’m pessimistic about some pieces. I do think technologists and business in general, eventually even if the intentions of the founders may not be good. Will end up changing things a lot and constantly creating good new things like social media. Is it good or bad? I’ve had this debate with people. Do you have an opinion or where are you feeling it? You obviously have to use it.
David Yakobovitch
If we look at social media, the more connected you can be the better. I’ve met so many connections, both friends and colleagues digitally, they never would have without Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, LinkedIn, it’s brilliant.
I’ve had my fair share of not so great experiences as we all have on social media, including getting locked out of our accounts, identity stolen, all these factors. But for me, it’s been the majority positive, the only other negative would be that I spend too much time on it, but that’s my own doing of my own choice and I can work to change that behavior. What’s your take on that?
Cyrus Radfar
Again, I’m really bad at answering questions that I should say it depends on everything. The question comes back to what is it good or bad for us to be seeing over the fence of our neighbors? I came from a relatively good upbringing and I can’t imagine growing up today. I have a younger brother who’s 16 years younger than me, and I’m kind of amazed by the world that he grew up in comparatively.
He can compare himself to every kid on the planet and he could see it every day, whether it was on Instagram and Facebook as he was coming into his own. And we don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m not, again, not a good or bad of whatever it’s going to be both good and bad. People may work harder. They may be more fit than they were because of all this competition.
David Yakobovitch
All these six pack abs and this.
Cyrus Radfar
All that jive. I find it really hard to pin. Is it, is it good or bad? It’s definitely changing things a lot and to me, it’s fascinating as a society to imagine. There is no other time in human history where you could go into the King’s palace and see what their life was like and know that you were actually really poor. You should just be poor and hang out with other poor people. And that was great. But like now kids really know their station in life, comparatively, and it’s not even their station, it’s their station compared to a fake reality because that person who’s on that throne, whether they’re happy or not is projecting true happiness and abundance.
There’s not many people who are trying to be the sad billionaire online. I look at it and I try to figure out like, what’s it going to do to our brains? How are we going to be? Are we going to be more or less human? Are we giving more or less empathy? Are we going to care more or less for each other or we’re going to be more or less competitive because of that? I don’t know the answer, but the reality is we’re going to limp through seeing a generation very soon, like gen Z that has completely been immersed in this thing that we created and garages.
It’s just kind of in garages and dorm rooms, so to speak and that’s going to completely shape their brains like where their brains are different than ours. I don’t actually know how old you are, but I would assume you didn’t graduate yesterday or in college. It blows my mind. I’m just excited to see. And I’m starting to right now work with folks who did, were born in like the 2000, interns and folks of that sort. It’s so interesting seeing how different they behave and how differently they look at technology and how much more control they have over it.
Actually, I would have suspected one of the most interesting things I find is, folks who’ve grown up with technology are better at shutting it off and they have better patterns, folks who are my age in their 30s and 40s.
We’re actually more addicted than they are in a way that’s more natural to them and they use it more appropriately.
David Yakobovitch
Do you see that theme consistent with your brother as well? Like he’s just using the technology more naturally?
Cyrus Radfar
Definitely like everyone is on their phone at the wrong time sometimes, but I would say that I’ve seen a lot more. I see the behavior of like coming in, you’re in a social interaction, you flip your phone and put it on the table and things of that sort and it comes, very natural. They’ve learned it because it’s something that annoys their peers and friends. The issue with when you’re talking about me with my brother or with anyone is, is when you’re with family.
Like, you may not care about that, but when you’re with your friends and you may actually be more appropriate. It is more comfortable kicking his feet up and just kind of disregarding us. One of the things similarly, if you look at Uber and Lyft, like there’s a, I was having a conversation. This kind of goes back to the future of work. I was like, “I can’t imagine taking orders from an app”, but the fact is, we’ve raised a whole generation to respond to apps more comfortably in a closed setting than they do to other humans who manage them.
They’re much. In general, and this may be true for everyone now where people are getting more comfortable to be managed by notifications. And by timers and gamified rules then than my person there’s, if you look at Uber or Lyft, their managers and algorithm, and that to me is kind of fantastical that we did that. And nobody really, I don’t say no one thinks about it, but I definitely think most people don’t realize how big of a deal that is, that a machine is telling humans millions now what to do, where to go, how to do their jobs and how to do it better and it’s coaching them.
In the olden days, that job used to be called a manager. And talk about the job destruction, so to speak, there’s no one coordinating them anymore. So it’s really fascinating that people are more comfortable this way. Again, the question is, is that good or bad or what not? If you’re going to Mars, maybe it’s great that you’re more comfortable working with robots because that’s how you’re going to hang out with machines and like, virtual worlds. And it’s almost evolutionary that we’re almost setting ourselves up for this world where we’re more comfortable with our machines.
That’s how we engage socially. And we’re engaging through screens because we knew that this feature was coming. Without it, it’s predestined of sorts that we’re going to have nine month rides to places where we’re going to have to keep ourselves busy, but I’m not too sure, but it is fascinating what’s happening. It’s really fascinating.
David Yakobovitch
It’s as if this future of work has changed us as this new generation that I coined the “always on generation”. We’re always being connected, whether it’s through Slack or WhatsApp or Line or WeChat or Telegram the apps just go on and on. We are being connected.
We’re being driven by algorithms to make decisions that maybe we wouldn’t choose by herself, but maybe it’s more efficient and better. And backing into something big looking, as you mentioned before, looking at Mars, looking at self-driving, looking at Hyperloops, the future of transport has the possibility to change the game. No longer will we just be sending Line and WhatsApp messages here on the earth, but we’ll be sending WhatsApp voice messages between Mars and Earth. We’ll be on the flight in the morning and be in Shanghai two hours later.
Cyrus Radfar
I’m very excited. I have a two year old son and when he was born, I was looking at my wife and I said, “we’re the first parents who may have to not worry about their kid dying”. And she obviously just had a baby and told me to shut up. But the reality, that was my first thought is, I don’t have to, I may not have to worry about that if everyone does things right.
We’re in 50 years, we may be able to, if that singularity actually happens or we figure out how to download ourselves into the machine. Talk about transport, it’s teleportation, right? That’s lightspeed transport right there. That’s kind of scifi, but it’s fun to think about it. When I was growing up, we’re hitting 2020 and that that’s just such a, I remember I drew a comic book when I was probably in fourth grade and it was. Well, I can’t remember it was called Sci-Tech.
It was Sci-Tech 2000 actually. But then there was a kind of set in 2020, which was like robots and cyber arms and flying people and flying cars and not claiming to be at all. It was we, and then you look at us like, We’re not moving as fast as we thought we would, but we are accelerating. I do believe that it is possible that, the generations that are born today, like, our children, imagine that my child could be on Mars.
And that’s not a crazy thought because we’re 20 years, 30 years away from getting there. By some estimates he’s too. So he’ll be my age and people will be going to Mars. So I don’t know, on earth, the Hyperloop and other things are interesting, but they haven’t panned out in the way that I initially thought they would, mainly like, I did feel like I underestimated how they would be adopted by countries.
I actually thought the U.S. would be thought leaders in this, which I am sad that we weren’t. Through the fact that most of the Hyperloops are not being built in the U.S. all the contracts are coming elsewhere. It’s really sad. It is something that should have been a U.S. led innovation. It has been technically done in the U.S. Have you been talking a lot about self-driving on your show? What are the thoughts that you’re kind of hearing about? Like where do your panelists sort of fall on when it’s going to happen?
David Yakobovitch
I’ve had a few guests where we’ve talked about the different levels from level one to five and where we’re at. And most guests think we’re somewhere in that level two, three. I know there’s been talks about four and five, but you can see a lot of these self-driving companies that have got Aqua higher, they’re shut down because of running out of funding or the results haven’t panned through. And I thought it was so interesting. I actually discussed it with one of my professor colleagues and he studied at Berkeley and Stanford and did that actually many, many years ago, in the 70s and 80s. And he said back then there was all this hype and so much excitement.
They were actually drawing in parking lots by Stanford, these lines in the parking lots so that the cars could follow these white lines to self-drive and they thought that we’re on the cusp of the breakthrough in the 80s.
People were pouring their lives and their research into it. And here we are almost 40 years later. And we’re still not there yet. So it’s interesting. When, when you think of trends and you think of signals. How usually in the short term, we’re not that great.
It’s usually a little bit further out, but in the long term it’s usually close to them. We think so. It’s interesting that you brought up the case of, bar’s traveling some estimates, but that’s there 2040, 2050, who knows? Maybe 2025. Even then they’ll take us nine months to get there. Unless we have some, some breakthrough, like on The Expanse that, that great new Amazon, you know in the USA today show…
Cyrus Radfar
I haven’t had the chance to see that. I’ve heard great things about it. Would you recommend it?
David Yakobovitch
Absolutely recommend Expanse. The new season comes out this month or next month. So it’s really exciting. And it’s sponsored by The Expanse. No, just kidding. When we look at the future of transport, a lot more to conversations I’ve been having is about last mile solutions. Whether it’s, scooters or the car movement or the future of cities and smart cities and the design of the city for that last mile.
The challenge about the last mile and thinking about self-driving, it’s all focused on metropolitans, all focused on these big mega cities. Like New York Cityand San Francisco and Palo Alto. But what about the Midwest with all these areas with different roads and unchartered territories? I wonder how the future of transport will help everyone else who seems to be forgotten.
Cyrus Radfar
I go back and forth thinking, that either we’re going to forget, or the fact that with faster travel and transport, more people will move away from cities. When I first heard of Hyperloop, I kind of imagined a world where cities would expand hundreds of miles outside of where they started. So, the San Francisco Bay area could go 40 to a hundred miles out past, overall the way towards your SMT and the New York DC whole thing is just one giant Metro to me.
It’s already happened over there with the support of the fast trains and hosting highway system. But part of me, like I go back and forth because it’s, it’s really hard to say like, do we really need all this transport as we move more virtually? Or are we just going to say, screw it, I’m staying in my house and putting on my headset and I’ll be at work.
Like I don’t need, if you look at folks like Spatial AI, a company based out in New York, they’re kind of working with HoloLens to really kind of pioneer some new experiences. Magic Leap is doing similarly in kind of again, enterprise conferencing in VR with avatars. So there’s some really interesting stuff there.
And I do believe the future is remote for a lot of companies. So it’s really. Kind of important that we consider that it is significantly cheaper for companies, it’s better for people to be at home. Like I’ve worked remotely for the last few years and it’s changed my life in a lot of great ways. And I do think that I don’t own a car. I have an old one, nine years. So all this cool technology to like travel around and fly around and It’s questionable, whether we need it, not whether we need it, but whether it’s going to be as whether it is, is really going to connect us to these hubs basically.
And then everyone moves out to the boonies or what we consider the boonies. Like that could be a really interesting, kind of exodus from the cities actually, but that kind of reminds me of that Hunger Games movies where like, there’s this massive city in the sky and then these zones that go out further and further until you’re, that’s a bit dark.
David Yakobovitch
That’s kind of where cities in the U.S. like Detroit to be going. There is some reinvestment, some revitalization, but like you say, Cyrus, the future’s remote. whether it’s Magic Leap or Spatial or any of these other AR, VR, XR, mixed reality systems. I can see the world and that world might be 2020. Where myself and 10 of my other colleagues put on the VR glasses and we’re in front of a virtual boardroom. Having our meeting and we’re still on our computer. I’m kinda more bullish on AR and VR, because if I put on the VR, I can’t really type on my computer at the same time.
It’s an interesting dynamic, but AR, both of us were big fans of these spectacles and glasses. AR could be a phenomenal compliment. To that I do think the future is remote. We see now, even today, so many startups they’ve just formed remote companies and whether they’re successful or not, it ends up being about execution and execution doesn’t mean, do you have to be in the same office in New York City or Silicon Valley? Or can you be in 10 countries in six time zones?
Cyrus Radfar
I definitely think you’re spot on. I definitely still hear a lot of folks who are kind of who dog remote and don’t believe that it’s possible to have the same dynamics. I definitely think there’s a, especially in early stage companies in I hustle culture, that’s kind of really pervasive and that’s really pushed where you need to, into, to work a lot to make it.
And it’s like a number of hours put in is going to mean whether you make it or not. And one of the slides that I’ve heard over and over with remote is, If a person’s in a desk they’re more efficient, but every single study I’ve ever seen in every, all my experience with remote workers is they’re way more focused.
They’re not distracted. There’s not as much disruption on day-to-day goals. They can focus and do what they need and then go on with their lives. Do they functionally sit? The question is like, kind of goes back to what is work is sitting in a desk or being in the same latitude/longitude work, or is it the fact that you’re creating output of value?
And that’s something that I wholeheartedly believe that I definitely think remote and partially speaking, tooting my own horn, cause I’m much more efficient when I’m off campus. It’s really everyone to get with it.
One of the biggest reasons why folks are comfortable with it is just as effectively, almost insecurity of sorts where they would say it’s a projection of, well, if I didn’t have people looking at my shoulder, then I may not be working.
Like if I was sitting at home, I would watch Netflix. You have to think, for me, it’s kind of part of the underlying problem, which is, a lot of the people who don’t like remote control are like, I don’t like my work. Therefore, if I was at home, I would be doing something else. But for those who love what we do, wherever you are, it works out. Are you working remotely yourself?
David Yakobovitch
Sometimes I’ll work from an office, but, I work remote over half the time and for me, I can echo what you’re saying, Cyrus is that it’s about getting into flow and often in the office setting, can’t get into flow as much, but, that flexibility, that opportunity to have your space to have your area that makes you feel complete, right?
Can get you more into flow. And whether that’s a desk or that’s just being in your neighborhood, you’re part of a community, but the community is different. It’s not the community in your workspace where you go somewhere to work and then you come back home. But for me, what I’ve noticed is I’ve gotten to know my community better by working remote. I get to know not just the places I dine and work out and, and see, but I also get to, experience the different businesses that I get to partner with.
It’s more exciting and it’s what you make of it. Remote work with the internet going to fiber. Where I’m at. My internet is 1.5 gigabytes per second. That’s what I’m getting on ethernet from my laptop. That’s mind blowing, when I’m at the office, it’s like 50 megabytes. So I can’t even record a podcast. It’s incredible. So for me, it’s actually by necessity that I need to be remote and I enjoy it. So that’s possible.
Cyrus Radfar
Who’s your provider? If you don’t mind me.
David Yakobovitch
I’m a Verizon, Verizon FiOS. “This episode is brought to you by Verizon FiOS”.
Cyrus Radfar
So you got to plug your thoughts. I definitely need to try to figure out how to upgrade. I don’t think my building is actually able to upgrade right now cause I’m in a building from 1902.
David Yakobovitch
You still never know. I was in an older building in the New York area and they start putting fiber in, it might be the density of New York city that now fibers everywhere.
So it connects even to older buildings, but you could probably check, see if they have fiber, because that’s the core, right? It’s like how big are those tubes to get those wires in to get that bandwidth. Fortunately, I’m in a newer building now, so it’s all new buildings are fiber,
Cyrus Radfar
For those who can’t see, he’s in a giant castle on a throne there is gold everywhere and human evil king, huge pipes of fiber all surrounding him. And it kind of looks like star Trek designed by Donald Trump.
David Yakobovitch
You mean Game of Thrones?
Cyrus Radfar
That’s true. I was thinking of gold pipes.
David Yakobovitch
It feels like a church maybe.
Cyrus Radfar
I’ll give everyone a new image of …
David Yakobovitch
…of where you’re at Instagram photos going later on. Chevron could be more addicted to social media.
Cyrus Radfar
I definitely think to be honest in benefits, it’s a huge hindrance. And I actually think it’s as I built remote teams in different countries. I’ve had, bandwidth test throughout my interview process to verify they have the right things and, and I’ve asked people to upgrade before they take a job. Because they don’t have the right bandwidth. And so I’ve worked with folks who have to get multiple internet providers because our country doesn’t support telecoms well.
It’s very interesting cause you can see how these very macro decisions can completely impact at this point. Now, like you can hire from any country in the world if you’re effectively willing or they’re willing to work in the right time zone. And I just think it’s fantastic. I could remember. On many days where I’d wake up and be talking to someone and, Bangladesh, then India, and then, hanging out and having kind of a lunch conversation.
Well, lunch my time with someone who was having a beer in London and it just takes me every once in a while, like this moment you can, or you can sit back and kind of just be Marvel at it and be like, “wow, this is incredible”. And the fact that we get so frustrated. So frustrated when we have a problem connecting a mobile phone to a mobile phone, like a Zoom video to a person’s car and Pakistan.
I had a meeting and someone called in for a standup and he called him from Pakistan, from an Uber and I was just blown away. The story just couldn’t have existed just five, 10 years ago, like from a mobile device, I was just, and there were 10 other people in the room and we’re all kind of chatting. And then there wasn’t a person in the same city, it’s talk about teleportation.
David Yakobovitch
It’s pretty incredible. We have all these countries now that are unwire countries. Looking at what’s going on in Asia Pacific and Africa. No longer do you have fiber lay underneath the roads or even all this telephonic communication connected by wires above, but it’s all spectrum.
It’s all, all this bandwidth that’s enabling this fast communication. And some of that could even be attributed to the rise of satellite internet we’re seeing from companies like SpaceX and Virgin and others in the space that who does this going to be. What soon? Thousands of these satellites. All over the world.
Cyrus Radfar
I’m kind of baffled by how quickly everything turned. I feel like I was woken up one day and then boom, Elon Musk has launched 6,000 or so satellites into orbit and, and he’s, he’s claiming it’s going to blanket the earth with low cost internet. I can’t imagine. What every telecom in the U.S. was thinking at that point beyond, let me call my regulator and figure out how to stop them. Let me figure out how to add something. It’s really, really amazing how quickly it’s happened and to how little we understand how much it’s going to impact.
So many people who don’t actually have broadband in the U.S. alone. There’s people all over the country and in rural areas who do not have broadband, which is unfathomable to me. I went to Africa for a wedding and I had to leave the country because I was so addicted to WiFi and I couldn’t get it. So I actually had to work so I had to leave, but this is very similar to a core need now to do work, to do things as it was to, like get water.
This is the last time that we had to do a huge upgrade to the infrastructure, was the new dealwith the Tennessee Valley authority. So we have a lot of really interesting things and disruptions coming with that and then 5G, similarly coming out and Apple, I’ve heard whispers that it’s coming out next and the 2020 iPhone.
David Yakobovitch
It was super cool. I actually upgraded my phone from the iPhone 8 to the Samsung Galaxy S10+ and the internet is so much faster. And I thought for a second, I said, “Wow, could there really be that the bands? The internet spectrum is that much better at this new phone”. Cause I’m still on Sprint, which is my mobile provider, but perhaps, maybe it’s the processing unit, perhaps it’s all the cores, I’m not fully certain, but I was so surprised it was getting so much better signal.
And for me, that just goes back to our whole conversation about the unwired world, this is not, I’m not taking an ether that cord and plugging it into my phone to get on the internet. It’s an unwired world.
Cyrus Radfar
I feel really lucky. What was your first computer? What was your first computing device?
David Yakobovitch
It was some NES device.
Cyrus Radfar
Nintendo NES
David Yakobovitch
It was like an older Nintendo. And then I was playing with one of these Window NT computers.
Cyrus Radfar
I may be older than you, but my first computer was, the first one I remember was a PCjr. I had one of those really. I didn’t have one at home, but at school we had those, the Apple, the Mac, classics.
David Yakobovitch
And they always crashed.
Cyrus Radfar
It was such a beautiful computer. I still remember it. Wasn’t like I learned the program on that one.
David Yakobovitch
It was, like the translucent screens…
Cyrus Radfar
No, I’m talking before that one before the translucent screens, the original.
David Yakobovitch
The nice one that got some burns, right?
Cyrus Radfar
That’s true. But I feel very lucky that I got to see that transition. My wife’s grandmother has lived since is 95. And I can’t even imagine she now uses Instagram. The number of hops that she’s gone through, both of watching the telephone really like really take over completely. And she was very young for that. And then television, radio and television, the rise of like the internet and, whatever wired telecommunications and then unwired communications. It’s crazy the perspective that folks have, who are still living.
David Yakobovitch
Yes. So for everything we’re talking about today, it’s been great to learn about data and then all these devices. And I can’t wait to see when we’re 80 and 90 years old, whether we are going to be using and perhaps even we will live forever. that might be a far stretch, but we’ll have to see.
Of course technology goes, but more than near term, generally, better predictions. So as we’re in this new year, that’s kicking off 2020, it’s always fun to talk about themes and trends and signals and, and where you see things are going for the year. So love to hear, Cyrus your take on it. What’s some of your 2020 evictions in tech?
Cyrus Radfar
My biggest prediction is routes less of a prediction. And more of the thing I’d say to look out for is 5G. And what, and asking yourself, the question is, what does this enable that wasn’t possible before? If you look back and say, what brought Uber to the world? It is that question that, Garrett camp asked, which is. Well, now I have a map in my phone that can track that has GPS at any time.
What can I do now that I could never do before? With 5G, there’s going to be a very smart group of people somewhere who see something that we all don’t see yet. And my prediction is that we’re all going to be very surprised more in 2021, when we actually figure out what they’re building in 2020, because of this new enabling technology.
David Yakobovitch
Amazing. So I’m not saying. So we’re moving to an unwired world and it’s not just in Asia and Africa, but very quickly in the United States. We’re seeing the VR technology where printing is much soon. Maybe we’ll be living in ready player zero or ready player one will be in this, this new world. And, I’m hopeful as well for that. My big prediction is that we’re moving to 2020. Mostly comes around seamless experiences.
We’re going to be more seamless with immigrations for real time data. Perhaps, maybe that’s through the 5G, some of the applications or more seamless computer vision, perhaps with some of these applications, whether it’s getting to self-driving cars that roadmap or getting to consumer applications that can see things for you or read text for you, or do it more real time. So I’m hopeful, just as you are that 5G will get us in that direction. And let’s see where that takes us in 2020. So. Thanks so much for being with us, for being a human and for being with us on the HumAIn podcast. Cyrus,
Cyrus Radfar
Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
David Yakobovitch
Hey humans. Thanks for listening to this episode of HumAIn. My name is David Yakobovitch, and if you like HumAIn, remember to click subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify or Luminary. Thanks for tuning in. Join us for our next episode. New releases are every Tuesday.