 My name is Jamie Lathan, and I'm the Dean of Distance Education and Extended Programs at NCSSM. NCSSM, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, is located in Durham, North Carolina, and is the nation's first public residential high school focused on science, technology, engineering, and math. Through a residential campus, online programs, distance education courses, and summer STEM enrichment programs, we challenge and inspire talented students. Part of our mission is to, quote, cultivate engaged citizens who will work for the betterment of the world, end quote. The Ethics and Leadership Conference aligns squarely with that mission. This year, the theme of the conference is artificial intelligence, and we are so grateful for the sponsorship of the Raideen Program for Innovation and Leadership in Artificial Intelligence and AI for Teachers. We are also thankful for the continued support of the Brewhill Family Foundation. And we also thank you for our amazing keynote speakers, Dr. Igor Jablacoff for the morning keynote, and Dr. Phaedra Bonadaris for the afternoon keynote. And thank you to all of our session leaders and presenters. Another quick thank you to the other members of the Ethics and Leadership Planning Committee, my colleagues, Ms. Candice Chambers, Ms. Kendall Higman-Maze, Ms. Charlotte Duncan, and Ms. Key Benton. As a reminder, both keynotes will be recorded and shared out after the conference. If you need anything during the conference, please email us at elcatncssm.edu. Thank you again and welcome. I will now turn it over to Dr. Jablacoff. I'm coming to you from a wicked forest because, like the Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors, this has to be Halloween themed. So, here I am. And here is our presentation. Thank you so much for, especially those of you that are night owls like me. So we're going to be a little bit more fun. Because I'm sure we're as thrilled to do this in the morning as Wednesday Adams was to go to camp Chippewa. So we're going to have some fun with this. So, most people that, you know, talk about their lives and the products that they created and their life's work and what have you, they talk about all of these perfect moments as they create these things. And I'm going to mix it up a bit. There's a Japanese art form known as Kintsugi. And it basically is showing an art form, but also showing all the cracks and all the breaks and things like that. And they actually fill it in with gold in order to make it more compelling in order to show you how difficult it was to repair or create that object. And so in that spirit, I'm going to be sharing some things that you probably never heard of about some of this work, but I'll start with a little bit of a backgrounder. So, I tell my family members, I think I was born in a cave. So, I was born in porous grease. I think it was in a hospital but then they moved me over to the cave so civilized. And so on the left is an actual photograph of a place I grew up. And on the right is is my mother's watercolor of this of this place. My parents were both artists. So from the outset I started in a very creative environment. And then if you actually look right outside the cave what do you see water. And I was always inspired seeing these dolphins, you know, swimming up to my literal home. Right. So that was, you know, pretty special some of you may have, you know, pet cats and dogs and things of that sort. You know, it's pretty cool to have a pet dolphin show up once in a while. And on the left here is is a book that one of my cousins wrote it's a science fiction book. But you know when I would see these, these creatures, I started thinking, what if I could talk to them. That would be pretty cool. You know what if I would talk to them. And so I taught that in the back of my mind as a as a five year old. And we eventually ended up moving to the US. So imagine it's like this in the morning. I'm living in this white former farmhouse in Philadelphia. The next thing you know I'm startled awake. I don't speak English I'm just startle wake it sounds like a big, a big bang a big boom. And because across the street, it there just happened to be a revolutionary war battleground, and they do a recreation once a year, and the red coats and the blue coats were firing cannons and muskets and things like that. And out of coming out of the serene environment with dolphins, you know, you know, being playful right outside my door, as you can tell this was a pretty jarring experience to come to the US and now feel like you're in the middle of a war zone here. And so I was in Philadelphia because my grandparents live there and that's where we lived for spell. And I was inspired by my grandfather as well he was a watchmaker, you know when they came over to the US from Germany. And so you would tinker and repair watches for a living. And really when you think about, you know, stem when you think about the sciences when you think about engineering. For the most part it is a lot of this tinkering and experimentation and so it's not hard for us to see these patterns when when we go into the real world. Now another thing happened. There was, you know, tiny Catholic school in Philadelphia, and once a month. The nuns would walk past my desk and they would look down at my chair, and they would see these little dimes taped to it. Once a month. And so second month they would walk past my chair plastic chair probably like you sit on, and they would see more dimes taped to the bottom of the chair, a third month, they would see more dimes. And so they would go to the bottom of the chair they finally asked me Igor, why their times taped to the bottom of your chair every month. And I said look, you know, a lot of some of us want to tinker with science and have science experiments and things like that but you don't have enough equipment around here. And so I decided to ask my fellow students to, for all of us to collect our allowances the money that we had once a month, and we would use that money in order to buy some neat little thing in order to run some equipment. Now why is this important. And why is this. Why am I telling you this story under the auspices of a lemonade stand, because a friend of mine who was an Eisenhower fellow wrote this book Steve Welch called we are all born entrepreneurs. If you did anything, Girl Scouts cookies lemonade stands, you know, you know, you know, garage sales things like that if you figured out that you can do a piece of work and sell it somehow. Or collect all of these things some, you're more likely to be fundable by venture capitalist far later in your lives because under the age of 12 you started figuring out how some of this stuff works right in in economies and stuff like that. So that's what was funny about that story. It was funny around the same time I was getting inspired by some of the first, you know, folks that were essentially bringing computing to the masses so to speak so that I could start learning how to use this type of equipment of course, you know, you know, parents, you know, made us go to dance stuff and take art lessons and violin lessons piano lessons and, you know, how to paint and things like that and then also computers were something that were part of our lives. This is actually very similar to the first computer that I had I know it looks very clunky by your standards, and that tape drive I have to say would always eat my basic programs. And that was, you know, I had a very antagonistic relationship with that tape drive because I would put it in there. I would type in my little commands to save my basic programs on it. And it literally was like a monster eating my programs, I could never get it to read back out and I don't know what I was doing, doing wrong, but that was my first computer ever. My mother ended up moving us to Montreal. So it's a similar story to Kamala Harris you may have heard that her mother moved her to Montreal as well. And until years later, my mother didn't admit that she had a choice between taking us to a French school or an ancient school, she dropped us into a French school. Now, why do you see a snowy scene in front of you. Here's why. Here's why. When my brother and I woke up. The first day that we saw snowfall, we were super excited, super excited. Oh my gosh, we're going to get a snow day. And my stepfather at the time looked at us in a very with a puzzled expression and said, What's a snow day. You have snow days in Canada you have to still go to school. And so we're like what are you talking about. And so we got, we got the clothes like Luke Skywalker on half the ice planet, and pushed out the front door, saying what is this place. And, you know, walking over snow banks I know this is typically the time when people tell you that they walked uphill both ways in the snow, but actually it was pretty true in, in my, in my case, and the kicker was, I would arrive at school and first period was PE, and we had to throw ourselves into a frigid swimming pool. So that was welcome to Canada was what that scene was now because you have very long winners there guess what we get to do more indoor events, it was like cove it all the time. Right where we're stuck indoors. And so you start reading comic books and other types of science fiction and things like that and you start getting fascinated about what if what would happen, what type of life am I going to have. You start playing all sorts of games and board games and video games and things like that and you start to met, you know, thinking of strategies for playing some of these games like diplomacy and risk and strategic and SimCity and and all sorts of different things. And they help, you know, you actually form opinions and how to deal with, with other people. And then, one summer, my parents sent me over to a monastery, why to learn how to work on a farm. So that whole summer I'm there in a monastery. So here I am by candlelight reading a book by Isaac Asimov and I know the Apple TV, plus folks are about to do a movie about this, and the book was called Foundation, and it blew my mind. It blew my mind because I'm like hold on hold on a second. You're telling me I can use math to predict the future. Fantastic. And then, and then I was reading about all of my childhood heroes like Seymour Cray who invented the first supercomputers I'm like, oh my gosh, math can predict the future. And all I have to do is pair it together with these supercomputers. And so that's just started fascinating me like crazy. And it led me to go where. Alright, so it led me to go to Penn State as a nuclear engineering candidate, because I was fascinated hey you know what I'm going to go somewhere where there's a nuclear reactor. You know how fun would that be in our backyard to play with. And so I ended up going there but then I pivoted towards computer engineering because I was really fascinated that if I learned about computers that computers would be a part of anything it didn't matter if I was interested in healthcare or if I was interested in finance if I was interested in nuclear engineering or anything else if I learned about computers. I literally could work on anything that I wanted. And so here's a couple of examples that I did while an undergraduate. So by the way, I didn't I didn't go to any football games or anything else. Instead, I was in a navy lab. You know they were building torpedoes they were building submarines there and I was working on building classified computers for them that the rest of the scientists and engineers use it was called applied AI. Research lab it was it was super fun to work there but of course I'm a dork you know I would find that fascinating. And then the next thing that we worked on that I was thrilled is with JPL NASA Lockheed Martin. They allowed college students to do what build experiments that ended up going on the space shuttle. The next experiment that I was really interested in on is how cosmic rays and radiation affects semiconductors basically all the chips in your iPhones and your play stations and things like that. You know, as, as they leave the protective barrier of the magnetosphere, things start happening and little ones and zeros, you know go chaotic and they start flipping and they cause computer crashes and it was to study. Between unprotected chips and ones that were radiation hard. That was super fun for it to go up. Years later the president of Penn State invited me and insisted that I go to a football game because I didn't do it as an undergraduate. I accepted the invitation because when you go to the president's box, they have a lot of ice cream. Penn State is where Ben and Jerry's got their start making ice cream because of their agriculture schools so even with that I can't do it exactly the correct way. All right so now what happened, you know after undergraduate I joined this company called IBM. I know for all of you, right living in this really cool world of Facebook's and Googles and and in these style companies and apples. So IBM isn't really a company that you think of a lot. But back then, they were the cool kid on the block right because all these other companies that I just mentioned most of them are internet based and that really didn't exist or was just starting out. And so you can think of it as me starting my career there where things were really clunky and still character based. But by the end of my towards the end of my career there, you know, the internet was taking off and and things were certainly a lot more approachable and there were new companies that appeared. Now the real reason though I have to say that I was really inspired to join there is because again, they had an international presence. So I can see how people in many countries use technology, not just, you know, folks in our country, and also because they had a systems view of technologies right hardware and software being put together with networking. And I thought that was important to see how the whole thing work together instead of just the software, or just the hardware. Now, while I was there, while I was there, I started really thinking about speech recognition and remember those dolphins. I'm like, Hey, how am I going to talk to those things. Right. So I got to think about this type of stuff. And so when I was looking at some of the research that we were doing, I kept sending notes over to the speech recognition team. And finally, senators for supply that said, if you stop sending us bloody emails will let you lead the group. And so I ended up leading this, this group focused on multimodal research, which is fancy talk for audio and visual together, like when you watch videos it's audio and visual together and I always thought that was, that was really cool and machine translation and things like that. And in 2005, I was quoted in this magazine, hey, a researcher what's one of those things that are going to be possible. And I'm like, well I don't want to use a remote control anymore I should be able to just to talk to my television. That's a form of AI right let's let's talk to this thing. And I was really angry when they plop this American 2025 label on on the top of the magazine, I almost flung that magazine across the room. And talking about I have this thing already in the lab I want to bring it out to everybody else. And so, then I had another idea with the team. We were working on something a secret project with Sony and Toshiba, called the cell architecture, which you now know as the PlayStation three. It seems like a like a lifetime ago right now, all of you are excited for PlayStation fives and then everybody has a four and now this is the three that I'm talking about. Well, I went to them and said hey, can I put a speech recognition engine inside of that and they all laughed. They all laughed they said you know what, nobody's going to put a microphone in their house that's creepy, that's strange. Nobody wants a microphone in their house. And then so the following year I showed up and I said hey, instead of putting the speech recognition on the device in the PlayStation. Let me put it in the cloud. Let me put it in the cloud that way. I can free up the budget on the on the on the PlayStation so that you can have better games, and I will actually give you higher accuracy. They laughed. They said nobody's going to ever use cloud based speech recognition nobody. And then finally in year three I said holy smokes. If we make this cloud based speech recognition not only can I can I understand what people are saying, I can answer any question they have any question they have why is the sky blue. A second later, it could be answered right on their PlayStation. They were laughing it was it was as if milk was shooting out of their nose is there like that's crazy talk you can't answer every question that any human whatever one. So you know what I left. I left. I did a startup. I got investors to join the startup. And then I started my secret project. So here's what it was. I set up a phone. I talked into it, and it posted on Twitter. I was the first Twitter user in North and South Carolina. And I spoke. It's alive right into Twitter. And you know what I spoke on baby Alexa. That's what we ended up building. And so maybe Alexa used to be on these little flip phones, and I would carry or carry them around testing them in different places. I would be in the back of a cocktail party with my family member. And they thought I was crazy talking to myself. And so this is in 2007 that I finally revealed that we were working on this AI assistant to the first ever tech crunch disrupt conference in in Silicon Valley. To show the world what we were working on, but everybody was still scratching their heads saying I don't get it. I'm not sure what this is, you know, how are people going to be going to be using this, but you know who did get it. We started working in secret with Apple before they acquired Siri, and they started experimenting about how this AI would start affecting people in mobile. And we were also invited behind the scenes there was a group in Hollywood of producers of directors and writers of these TV shows and movies and movies that you may know. And they started saying hey, start telling us about this AI thing in the future and how it's, it's, it's, it's going to roll out because that way we look smart and we when we write our movies and things of that sort. It can look like we predicted the future. And at the same time, we can get the world ready for the things that you're creating. And so that was, you know, really, really fun to do that with them very creative people. And really being thoughtful about both preparing an audience for these technologies, and at the same time giving feedback in terms of what the best experience would be. This thing you know, you know, was, you know, we tried getting it on blackberries remember that that's a company that nearly went out of business and pop pilots we tried putting up there. And then, like a sopranos ending we disappeared. We disappeared and nobody knew what happened. So many people started coming up to me and saying what happened. You know I was using your products I downloaded it from the app store and then you just disappeared. You know what happened, because we weren't allowed to say what happened. Why, because a new secret project started being worked on. And now you know that as the Amazon Echo. So my r&d team at the time, they went in Google tried to acquire a company as well, and they worked many years in order to deliver this thing that that now lives in in probably 100 million kitchens answering this is sports news, and, and, and triggering music and things of that sort. So the things that people were telling me that would be impossible, all ended up happening. And guess what Alexa was born in North Carolina. So that's, you know, when I look at what Charlotte is doing and what your school is doing as well it's pretty special to know that one of the biggest things in in artificial intelligence over the years on the whole planet was invented right here in North Carolina. That's not so bad. Right. You know for for a nice story here. And sure IBM eventually caught up as well and, and, and did the thing that I wanted them to do. And they won the Jeopardy match with their Watson supercomputer that some of my team members worked on as well. So, that's, that's, that's the start of my journey. Now, what, what ended up happening. So you had the proliferation of artificial intelligence and everybody's homes and all sorts of devices right you had home pods and you had Google assistance and big speed speakers and all of these types of things that you would use at home for all of the things that you use them for. Yeah, I started getting worried. Right. And I'm like, Hmm. You know, what's the privacy implications of this can people do confidential work on the on these platforms how would they start using them that work you can't really use them the way that they are today just like honestly, the first was a toy, for the most part it didn't meet in entertainment, but it didn't do a lot of the things that people needed to happen at work. And so they're a took a number of years before Apple built those things up, even things that you consider gaming, right so a lot of technologies get invented for gaming, and then they eventually come to work so the very same things that are inside of your play stations and your Xbox is known as GPUs or graphical processing units are the same same chips that we use in industry to find drugs and vaccines and things like that for the coronavirus it's a very same processors right so I started thinking about what would it look like when if these things came to work. And that's how I founded this company, Brian. Now Brian is a misspelling of the prion protein. It was the codename of the of the engine that became Alexa. And so we decided to reuse it for the new company as an in joke. Where did it come from. Well, in artificial intelligence there's the concept of reinforcement learning. And this is where the AI eats its, its own output I know it sounds like a very creepy Hollywood, a Halloween style thing, ooh, you know the creature is eating its, its own output. And so the way that mad cow disease happens is unfortunately the cows are eating bits of previous cows, right that expired already that passed away. It causes the disease. And so our R&D team that don't actually get out all that often decided to name engine prion after the protein because the with machine learning, the AI was eating its own output. It's kind of sick, I know. All right, so now I'm on the same journey again to say all right with natural language with speaking, right with with all of this stuff. Can I get access to everything, literally, the totality of content out there. For instance, you know if you had to read the book Frankenstein, you know, already I read the book Frankenstein for you in a few seconds. You know, in a minute, you know, a book that I would typically take me all weekend to read it could read in a minute. Right so that's a fantastical. But you know there's still a lot of value in terms of who we are as people and by the way Amazon finally admitted that they acquired us. It took many years for them to admit that the stuff came from you know companies like ours there's many startups that are acquired in secret. Like Google by Facebook by Amazon by Apple that they don't particularly admit to until until years later or sometimes never. And so that's the journey that we're on. So now, let's, let's think about how these things are depicted in in popular culture. So how do they intercept with ethics right which is the topic that that you all are keen on and you'll be working on, you know through the rest of the day. Alright so how is AI, you know typically viewed by the mass market by by normal people. Okay, well, Isaac Asimov wrote this book called I robot right and so it talked about, you know as we build these robots and they start having a consciousness and sentience. What are some of the laws that that these robots are going to be governed by and those laws are basically the equivalent of AI ethics, right that they can't do harm to people and they can. They can't allow harm to happen so on and so forth. Right so there was a three laws of robotics, and funny enough, I mean there. What's what's really wonderful about art in general right and especially this form of writing is the fact that many AI practitioners, you know people that are in the field scientists and engineers and things like that, are still inspired by this thing that came out of fiction. Right, they're still inspired by the rules that as a cause him off was exploring in his in his works and I robot. Then the next book that came out by by Herbert here Frank Herbert was doing right and so there's a movie coming up for for that now what's interesting about this, instead of saying hey you know we're making robots and they're doing smart things but they're governed by laws in this depiction of artificial intelligence they basically said, oops, something really bad happened in the galaxy, because of an AI, and now AI is completely banned and smart computers are completely banned from this world. So that's a negative depiction of AI, because they felt like it was absolutely uncontrollable and taboo, and nobody should should study it. Then the next book that came out with our sir C Clarks 2001 and they had this infamous character, a very cold calculating AI called how. And how, if you actually look at the letters, h a l are IBM just shifted over because IBM at that time was the dominant computer company on the other entire planet. And so this is an example of a malevolent force, you know, driving that story line as well, very mysterious. Then, then you had things like Tron, you know, which is, you know, pretty interesting this is where I think some of the directors cut digitized and added into into this surreal, you know, cityscape inside of a computer where they had to do battle with a master control program which was pretty fun. And then, after that that was in the 80s right so when that came out first by Disney. And then there was a one called war games. So war games was was pretty interesting there was a super computer called whopper that was in charge of of of America's defense network. And it, and it, I think lost its mind in some ways, and started thinking that the game that it was playing with with a teenager at home. An old style computer probably similar to the to my first computer as well as they were first network through phone lines. It started thinking that that was a serious thing and not a game and it and it started accelerating the pace of antagonizing the national security apparatus and potentially misfiring nuclear weapons so that's kind of scary to hear about while you're a kid still during the Cold War. And then of course, we have skynet right that that you know is typically depicted as just the ultimate evil it gets developed similar to the whopper computer and war games and of course it just goes haywire and starts making terminators, then you have more abstract themes like alright if these AIs are all powerful, then are we just inside of this matrix. So, are we just these little green characters inside of these screens, and then you know what it what does it mean for us to be conscious, right and so you have a lot of people thinking through that as well I would think that's, that's pretty funny, as well. And then, more recently you have, you know, two depictions of AI in in, you know, in these Marvel movies you have the friendly Jarvis that is helping Iron Man but then you have the malevolent Ultron as well that is an AI that says you know what, forget humanity. I'm not sure what the purpose of view of you is. And look, that was a lot to go through. That was a lot to go through. Why can't it just be like kit, right, a cool car that talks, helps fight crime. You know, this is similar to the Teslas that we now see driving up and down the roads and stuff like that. And I have to say ultimately, when you see the majority of those depictions of AI and ethics in in pop culture references. You know what the reality is is you control it. You know, AI doesn't control you you're actually going to control it right you're going to control the outcome of how this stuff plays out, but you have to be responsible with your use of technology right so no cyber bullying and things like that. You're not going to have to have higher expectations, you know from people like me that that build tech companies to make sure that we are developing these things. You know to be helpful, and not to harm people and not to hurt people and things of that sort so, you know, if you use social media use it for good. Right. You know, don't use it for negative purposes and really think about, you know, what happens when you share these things out. Now when I say social media you're like what does that have to do with with artificial intelligence. Well, when you're playing a tick tock. How do you think things get recommended to you to watch next, when you're on YouTube. How do things get recommended to you to watch next. When you go to Facebook right and you see these articles appearing in front of your new stream maybe things from your friends and your family members and things of that sort. There's a recommendation algorithm that's putting that in front of you when you open up the Amazon.com website, and they're saying hey based on things that you've purchased in the past. Here's some new games or some new books or some new music that you may like as well. AI has been a hidden part of a lot of these consumer experiences already. And so there's a lot of discussion about you know how those algorithms work and and how do they get leverage for, you know, for good things like Facebook a long while ago, you know, got in trouble because they were ab testing with students like you, where for half of you they would show bad news in your feed. And for the other half they would show bad news. Well what happens if you see a lot of bad news you don't feel very good. You know that particular day. And so, just because we have the power to recommend certain things or use AI for certain things. You know we have to use it for good things, like what, like helping somebody like Brooke Allison, you know Brooke Allison. When she was 11 years old, got into a car accident and became a quadriplegic, even though she was affected that way. Thankfully, she, she was growing up during the, the time that we had more access to technology she reached out to me, very a lot of people in our field that worked on things like speech recognition, because she was still able to graduate as the first handicap person to receive a diploma from the Ivy League. Now she's a, she's a professor at Stony Brook University, a fantastic evangelist for for the use of technologies to aid people that are handicapped, and look at all the fantastic things that she's been able to do. She was able to backfill and have her abilities, essentially reinforced through the use of technology in artificial intelligence. That is a fantastic use of technology for accessibility. Many of us actually, if you think about how we got started with some of these technologies. There's things we wanted to do. We actually wanted to help people that were deaf and blind, you know, to be able to still access the internet. My team at IBM was the first one that ever made a speech enabled web browser, and my chief scientist at the time that now works at Google was blind. And he said that his seeing eye dog was the only business style person that he actually liked his name was Hubble. You know, that's a good use of technology. And so a lot of the negative uses of AI that you hear nowadays and many ways are unintended consequences. So anytime there's a new technology, you know, people like me are in some ways very innocently start adopting it and create products for it. When you hit some mass market, you start seeing some, some people figuring out some bad uses of some of these technologies and that's normal for for absolutely anything that gets created. And then you need the academic environment or essentially schools to give us guidance and and the good uses of these technologies. All of you as students and as consumers of these technologies, big tech companies, startups and even government agencies that need to figure out the right way of policing some of these things to make sure that they're mostly used for good and for thoughtful things. And, and I have to say, like, like one or two slides before you're controlling this outcome. You're literally control the outcome and you know how you do it. First, figure out how it all works. Remember that picture that I had of the clockwork, right and looking at my grandfather hunched over these. These these things. It all looks complicated. Right, but look at the things that you know today versus last year versus the year before versus the year before versus year before. Can you even imagine what you're going to know 10 years from now I know it seems like, you know, looking looking into a vision of Star Trek right it's it's hard to even imagine that. But just day by day, read another book, play another game, you know, you know, you know, attend a certain lecture play, you know, invent things right right code, paint something compose music, you know this. A lot of these things are art and science blended together. I was always thrilled with speech recognition because it's the most natural way of interacting with a computer. And by the way I'll tell you another secret. It's a really good speech recognition, because I don't know how to type, I type with two fingers. If I had to write an essay like you would have to write it would, you know, take me a week, you know, to type one page. It's the most ludicrous thing that I learned. I would have wish that I learned way back when. So, the future 1020 30 years in the future is going to have these fantastical things that you're going to be creating called quantum computers that are going to be closer mimics of the way that our brains work. And so, a lot of the things, right whether it's discovering new, new types of treatments and drugs and things like that are new new styles of games or new stars of AI that can help people right. All new types of security all of these things new types of cars that can see everywhere and react to changing conditions. It's going to be amazing right now there's still just like the old mainframes of a long time ago. These things are going to be really really big and they're going to get bigger and they're going to get bigger and they're going to be so expensive so expensive so expensive. It's going to happen in your lifetime you know then what's going to happen. It's just like Bill Gates and Steve jobs of a long time ago. They'll eventually get get democratized they'll get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and you'll eventually have a quantum computer right in the palm of your hand doing all sorts of crazy things, or it'll be on your face, you know on a set of glasses or it'll be in a watch. You can carry anywhere. So you know that's that's the future in front of us and so the use cases that are that this is going to drive the skies the limit. And you know what if you're sitting there saying hey I eventually need to talk to my guidance counselor. I'm not sure the type of job that I'm going to have in the future or whether I'm going to go into academia or start a startup or, or trying to pick company. What type of job am I going to have 10 years from now 20 years from now 30 years from now. I'm going to tell you a secret that that that many grown ups won't tell you. We don't know what's coming. Not completely we have hints of it, especially some of us that work in tech. Remember, when I wanted to talk to my television 10 years before the fire TV came out. We have a pretty good grasp on what the world is going to look like in five or 10 years time. After that, things start getting hazy. This is where people like me start reading science fiction, in order to get inspired or comic books or games or the idea of a various form in order to start getting inspirations and start experimenting with certain things. The jobs that all of you will eventually end up with, or even, you know, be a midpoint of their career, your career like me, or towards the tail end. They may not even exist yet. No, I know that's true, because my job didn't exist during my parents time, my job didn't exist during my grandparents time or my great grandparents, they had no idea. What is a social media coordinator to to one of our grandparents that didn't exist until you had social media technologies right that you know that's just, you know, one, one particular example, who needs an AI person, if there's no chips for us to run experiments on. Who needs that right who needs a computer vision person without cameras. Right, so certain technologies need to be developed and put out in market before you know you can do your things. Now, I think one of the most important things you can do though, in order to start your journey is start wrapping your minds around some internships, you know there's certainly internships you can do now as high school students and I know it's a lot challenging now because of the pandemic but you can do a lot of these virtually. And then later, there are certain types of internships that are STEM orientation, you don't have to, you know, focus on government service like I have here. You know just, you know, think through, you know companies the IBM's the Facebook's the Microsoft's the Google's the apples, the Amazon's, you know, the different universities that that you be that you can be going to the different government agencies whether it's state level local or at the federal level, international organizations, NGOs, nonprofits, there's so many different places you can go with your skills. And what I would tell you is be a polymath, be a Renaissance person, try everything, try art, try science, try these things, play an electric guitar play a violin play a play a flute, you know do watercolor sculpt. You know, do all of these things volunteer, do all of these things because they actually help enriched and build your sense of intuition about where you would, you would go, and then be a voracious reader. You know beyond many of the science fiction works that I talked about that inspired me as well whether it's, you know reading foundation by candlelight, which was very surreal can you imagine, you know, being in a monastery, but you know, and them not having electricity, and I'm reading this book by candlelight yes there used to be physical books it wasn't all kindles and things like that back then some flipping through the pages, reading about this fantastical future of machines and mathematics predicting the future, which we now have. Right, so we have many of these things that can predict certain things. So, beyond the science fiction, there's a great book called T minus AI by Michael Kanan who is the chairperson of artificial intelligence at the US Air Force. It's a great book, it's like that old school connections show that the BBC had way back when it shows you the origins of literally from primarily is I kid you not, Michael starts his book talking about goo in dinosaurs and things of that sort and then connecting it to the modern day with all of this new fangled AI and chips and software and things of that sort and how it's used, you know, in medicine and many other fields. Another book is the third wave, this is by Steve case. He founded a well way way back when, which was the Google of its time. And he talks about how the next wave is going to be taking many traditional industries, whether it's agriculture, whether it's heavy industries healthcare and things like that, and bringing the technology to them in order to reinvent themselves to make it more efficient, and that people will be happier in those jobs as well. And then lastly, as I already mentioned before Steve Welch wrote this book that we're all born entrepreneurs. I don't have a monopoly on on making Alexis. Right. Nobody does. Right. And so when you actually read a book like that it basically allows you to see that there's many, many different forms of entrepreneurship. And even in the in the in the educators that you are super lucky by the way to cross path with somebody like Charlotte. For example, the fact that, you know, you're even hearing this lecture, right and it's not a lecture and hopefully it was a little bit more fun than that but the fact that you're even hearing this means they're being entrepreneurial about the types of ideas that that they're allowing you to cross paths with and the fact that they're listening to you about the things that are important to you and the things that you would want to hear, you know, for the rest of today as well. That's entrepreneurial. Just doing it, you know, you know, selling books as entrepreneur working at Chick-fil-A is entrepreneurial, you know, volunteering somewhere and helping a nonprofit figure figuring things out is entrepreneurial as well. So in any event, that's, that's my story. I'd love to open it up to any questions. If you, if you have any. I do have the question. Okay. I'm a little bit echoey. So we have a question from Linda Keys and she asks, how did you keep going after all of those rejections when people were telling you your ideas wouldn't work and that no one would like it. Okay, that that is an absolute great question. It gets to the foundation of what an entrepreneur does. I learned because I grew because I had great mentors around me because I knew my subject matter, right, and because I had a gut feeling. It's like a spidey sense right I had an intuition that even though really smart people were telling me I don't think it's going to work. I don't think it's going to work. I remember having this meeting with an executive at Verizon, and who was supposedly really really smart. You know, about how this stuff would be used on phones, and he said I don't get it, and he passed he didn't invest in us. And I remember walking away from that meeting with lead feet, practically like Frankenstein I was probably, you know, moving side to side and groaning, like like Frankenstein did, and I finally shrugged it off by the time I got to my car and said you know what, I see it. I'm sorry that he doesn't see it I'm sorry geek I was hockey when I went and gave that talk in Silicon Valley didn't see it I'm sorry many investors didn't see it some people that I tried to hire didn't see it. I just, you know, I just felt like the right thing that the world would need would need this. And so that's why a lot of times when I meet people that are thinking about doing their own startups, including the guy who did the Carolina Reaper hot pepper he crossed paths with me. And he's like I'm thinking about leaving my job at Wells Fargo what do you think I'm really passionate about hot peppers. What should I do. And I'm like, don't ask me. You know, is this something you feel like you have to do and contribute to the world terrorizing them and putting hot peppers in their mouth. Go for go for it. Nobody else can plant that that that idea inside of you. And so if you if you really are sure about what you're doing. I think you do take a lots of input and you try to get smart about asking for feedback around you, but you just keep going and you know what I remember a lot of knows. I remember many years ago I crossed paths with will I am the musician, and we were both laughing, we were both laughing about how many knows he received, right and how nobody knew who he was, you know, playing sick in the back of sleepy bars or smoky bars or things of that sort and he's like I'm a quote unquote overnight sensation wearing wearing my funny hats and doing all the things that I do. And yet, who was there and and all the naysayers when when I was, you know, doing the hard work, a lot of these things that you think are overnight successes with really successful people were exactly that. So nobody knows lots and lots and lots and lots and a countless knows hundreds, maybe thousands of them, but we were sure about the things that we were creating whether it's art or science. Thank you I think we have time for one more question, and that is, if you do have that great idea what is the process like for getting investors for your product, when no one seems to think it'll be feasible. Investors are earned right I think investors are earned it's a lot of networking. The biggest thing that I can tell you is, is to find a mentor in somebody that's already done that. You know, I was, I was very fortunate that even in the last company that I was able to cross paths with an angel investor, who was a senior executive at a company, a wireless tower company at the time and now he's the CEO of of a carrier, and the fact that he's done it before, and he said, you know do step a step B, a B and C, I didn't know those steps. Right and so the fact that I could be mentored by somebody that's already done it before. That's probably the most important thing I can tell you is find somebody that's done it before because somebody inevitably has done it before you have, you bring the subject matter expertise and your new idea, and they can help you fill in the blanks like what lawyers do I need what accountants do I need what engineers do I need what scientists do I need how do I deal with patents and trademarks and, and, and cybersecurity and how do I get customers and partners all of these things. It sounds complicated, but guess what, even when this company started I was by myself, one person, and then I hired a lawyer, and then I hired an accountant and then, and then, and then these fantastic engineers joined us on on our journey as well. And now you know it's a much bigger company with with many fantastic people working here, but it really sometimes just starts with one person. Thank you for being here today you know we've really appreciated you, I hear the virtual applause coming all around. And if someone wanted to be in touch. Is there a way that they should do that. Yeah, they can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn, happy to talk to anybody and point them in the right direction.