 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE, here with my guest host, Justin Warren. Happy to have a returning CUBE alum, but in a different role than we had. It's been a few years. Tal Klein, who is the author of the Punch-Escrow. I'll tour, please. I'm sorry. Thanks so much for joining us. It's great for you to be able to find time to hang out with the tech geeks, rather than all the Hollywood people that you've been with recently. You guys are more interesting. Well, thank you for saying that. So last time we interviewed you, you were working for a sizable tech company, we were talking about things like, virtualization, everything like that. Your Twitter handles virtual tau. So how does a guy like that become, not only an author, but an author that's been optioned for a movie, which those of us that are geeks and everything are looking at, as a matter of fact, Pac Elsinger this morning said, we are seeing science fiction become science fact. So, you know, tell us a little of the journey. I hope you read the book. I don't know. The journey is really about marketing, right? Cause a lot of times when we talk about virtual, like in fact last time I was on the CUBE, we were talking about the idea that desktops could be virtual. Cause that back then it was still like this, you know, almost hypothetical notion like could desktops be virtual? And so today, you know, so much of our life is virtual. Like, you know, so much of the things that we do are not actually, you know, direct. I was watching this really great video about Apple's new augmented reality product where you sit in a restaurant and you look at it with your iPad and it's your plate. And you can just shift the menu items and you see the menu items on your plate in the context of the restaurant and your seat and the person you're seeing it across from. So I think the future is now. Yeah, it reminds me of, you know, the movie Wally, the animated one. We're all going to be sitting in chairs with our devices or Ready Player One, you know, very popular sci-fi book that's being done by Spielberg, I believe. Yes, yeah, very exciting. Tell us a little bit about your book. You know, we talk, you know, when I was younger and used to read a lot of sci-fi, it was like, right, what stuff had they done 50 years ago that now is reality and what stuff had they predicted? Like, you know, we're going to go away from currency and go digital currency. And it's like, we're almost there, but we still want to fly in cars. Yeah, I mean, you know, the main problem with flying cars is that we need pilots, you know, and I think that, I think actually we're very close to flying cars because once we have self-driving vehicles and we no longer need to worry about it being a person behind the joystick, then we're in really good shape. You know, that's really the issue. Flying, you know, the problem with flying cars is that we are so incompetent at driving and or flying. It's not our core competency. So let's just like put things that do understand how to make those things happen and eliminate us from the equation. Everything is a people problem. Yeah. Okay, so when I wrote the book, Francesco, Francesco, when I wrote the book, I really thought about all the things that I read growing up in science fiction, you know, things like teleportation, things like nanotechnology, things like digital currency, you know, how do we make those, how do we present those in a viable way that doesn't seem to science fiction-y? Like one of the things I really get when people read the book is it feels very near future, even though it's set like 100 plus years in the future, every, all the concepts in it feel very pragmatic or within reach, you know? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's interesting. We look at, you know, what things happen in a couple of years and what things take a long time. So, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning, it's not like these are new concepts, you know, I've read a great book by, you know, it was Isaacs and the innovators talked about. You go back to like Ada Lovelace, and you know, the idea of what a machine or a computer would be able to do. So, a hundred years from now, what's real? What's not real? We still all have jobs or something, you know? You know, in the future. We have jobs, but they're different. We're in the, I don't know if you're a historian, but like, back in the industrial age, there's a whole bunch of people screaming, doom and gloom. In fact, we go way back to the age of the Luddites, you know, who just hated machines of any kind, or you know, I think that in general, we don't like, you know, we're scared of change. So, I do think a lot of the jobs that exist today are going to be done by machines or code. That doesn't mean that jobs are going away. It means jobs are changing. A lot of the jobs that people have today, you know, didn't exist in the industrial age. You know, so I think that we have to accept that we are going to be pragmatic enough to accept the fact that humans will continue to evolve as the infrastructure powering our world evolves. You know, and we talk about living in the age of the quantified self, right? There's a whole bunch of stuff we don't understand how to do yet. For example, I can think of a whole industry that tethers my Fitbit to my nutrition. You know, like, there's so much opportunity that for us to say, like, oh, that's going to be the end of jobs, or the end of innovation, or the end of capitalism, is insane. I think this just ushers in a whole new age of opportunity, and that's me. I'm just an optimist that way. You know? The Luddites famously did try to destroy the machines, but the thing is that the Luddites weren't wrong. They did lose their jobs. So what about the people whose jobs are replaced with, as you say, net new, like, there's a net new number of jobs, but specific individuals, like people who manufacture cars, for example, lose their jobs because a robot can do that job safer and better and faster than a human can do it. So what do we do with those humans? Because how do we get people to have new jobs and retrain themselves? I address some of these notions in the book. For example, one of the weird things we're suffering from is the lack of welders in society today, because welding has become this weird thing that we don't think we need people for, so people don't get really trained up in it because machines do a lot of welding, but there's actually specialty welding that machines can't do. So I think the people who are really good at what it is, at the things that they do, will continue to have careers. I think their careers will become more niche. Therefore, they'll be able to create, to demand a higher wage for it, because almost like a carpenter, a specialist carpenter will be able to earn a much higher wage day by having fewer customers who want really custom carpentry versus things that can be carved up by machines. So I think that what we end up seeing is that it's not that those jobs go away, it's that they become more specialized. People still want Rolls Royces. People still want McLaren's. Those are not done by machines. Those are handmade. That's an interesting point. So the value of something being handmade becomes, instead of it being a worse product, it's actually a bigger product. Oh, okay, right. The concept of the book is that we place a lot of value on the uniqueness of an object. Meaning there's, and that parlays in multiple ways. So one of the examples I use in the book is the value of a Big Mac actually coming from McDonald's. Like, you can make a Big Mac. We know the recipe for a Big Mac, but there is a certain, there's a weird sort of nascent value to getting a Big Mac from McDonald's. It's something in our brain that clicks that tethers the two to originality. Diamonds, another really good example. You know, we know they're synthetic diamonds. We still want the ones that get mined in the cave. Why? We don't know, right? They're just special. Because Dubia's deal has really good marketing. So I think there's that side, yeah. So the concept of uniqueness, which again comes to scarcity and so on, is like as an author, someone who has no doubt signed a lot of his book, that means that that book is unique because it's signed by the author, unlike something which is mass produced and there's hopefully thousands and thousands of copies that you sell. I've done, going into this actually, thought about that a lot and that's why I've created like multiple editions of the book. So like the first 500 people who pre-ordered it of ink shares get like a special edition of the book that's like stamped and all this kind of stuff. And like, I even use different pens. Yeah. Like I appreciate it because I'm also a collector. I collect music, I collect books. And you know, so I see those aspects of myself. Yeah. So I know what I value about them, you know. The crossover between music and books is interesting. So as someone who has a musical background, I know that there's a lot of musicians who will come out with special editions because this is an age where we can download it. You can download the book. Do you think there is something, is there something that is intrinsic to having a physical object in a virtual world? I think to our generation, yes. I'm not so sure about millennials when they grow up. But there are like, for example, I'm going to see you too next week and very lucky to see that. But part of the YouTube buying experience to get access to the pre-sale, you need to be part of their fan club. To get part of their fan club, you need to get, you get like a whole bunch of limited edition posters and limited edition vinyl and all this kind of stuff. So there's an experience. It's no longer just about going to see you too at a concert. There's like the entire package of you being a special YouTube fan. And they surround it with uniqueness. It's not necessarily limited, but there's an enhanced experience that can't just be, it's not just about you having a ticket to a single concert. Yeah, okay, yeah. I'm curious, the genre, if you'd call it, it's hard science fiction. Yes. The challenge with that is, what is an extension of what we're doing and what is fiction? And people probably poke at that. Have you had any interesting experience and things like that? I mean, I've witnessed a lot of stuff like Andy Weir, like, let the community give feedback before he created the final of Martyn. But so yeah, what's it like? Because we can, the geeks can be really harsh, you know? I've learned from my Reddit experience that, so what's really funny about it is the first draft of this novel was hard as nails. It was crazy, and in my publisher Reddit, and it would have made all the hard science fiction guys super happy, my publisher Reddit is like, you've written a really great hard science fiction book and all five people who read it are going to love it. You know, but it became, it was totally, you know, a parcel, like, I came here with my buddy, Andy, he couldn't even get through the first three pages of it. He's like, he wanted to read it, like, so, you know, part of working through the editorial process is saying like, look, I really care a lot about the science because one of my deep goals is to write a STEM oriented book that gets people excited about technology and presents the future as not an dystopian place. And so, I wanted the science to be there and to have a sort of gravity to the narrative, but yeah, it's tough. I worked with a physicist, a biologist, geneticist, an anthropologist, and a lawyer. Just to try to figure out, like, how do we carve out what does the future look like? What is the evolution of each individual, you know, the sciences, like we talked about the mosquitoes, right? You know, we're already doing a lot of really crazy stuff with mosquitoes. We're modifying them so that, you know, the males who mate with females to carry the Zika virus, you know, don't give birth to offspring that never reach maturity. I mean, this is just crazy, it's science fiction. And now that, you know, they're working on modifying female mosquitoes into vaccine carriers instead of disease carriers. I mean, like, this is science fiction, right? Like, who believes this stuff? It's crazy. This sphere is amazing, yeah. Yeah, I've loved, there's been a bunch of movies recently that have kind of helped to educate on STEM. Some, you know, Martian got a lot of people excited. Yeah, Martian, great. You know, Hidden Figures, one that, you know, I can bring my kids that are teenagers now into it and they get excited, oh, science is great. So, the movie, how much will you be involved? You know, what can you share about that experience too, so far? It's been, it's very surreal. It's a word I used to describe it. It's the honest, God's honest truth. I mean, I've been very lucky in that my representation in Hollywood is this rock solid guy called Howie Sanders, and he's just like bigger than life, you know, Hollywood agent guy, and he's hooked me up. You know, we made a lot of business decisions that were focused less on the money and more on the team, which is nice to be, like, when you're in your 40s and you're more financially settled, you're not in the kind of situation where you might be in your 20s and you're just going to sign the first deal that people will give you. So, we really focused on hooking up like the director James Bowman is, you know, he's the guy who co-created Flight of the Concords. He did the Muppets movie. He did, you know, Alice the Looking Glass. Really professional guy, but also really understands the tone of the book, which is like humorous, you know, kind of sarcastic. It's not just about the technology, it's also about the characters. The same thing with the production team of the two producers, Mandeville Productions, I was just talking to Todd Lieberman, and we're talking about just what is augmented reality? Like, how does it look like on the screen? So, I'm not... No, it's not going to look like Blade Runner is what I'm hearing. I don't know, it's going to look real. You know, I imagine, well, again, I don't know, they're going to make whatever movie they're going to make, but like, their perspective, one of the things that we talked about is keeping the movie very grounded. Like, you know, one of the big decisions, one of the big questions they asked me first going into it is like, before we even had any sort of movie discussions, is like, is this more of like a Looper, or a Gattica, or District 9, or is it more like the fifth element? You know, I mean, is it like, you know, do you want it to be this sort of like grounded movie that feels authentic and real and near future? Or do you want this to be like completely alien and weird and like, you know, out of it? The story is more grounded. So, you know, I think a lot, hopefully what we just play on the screen will not feel that far away from reality. Okay, yeah. You do marketing in your day job. I do, yes. I'm curious as you look at this, the balance of, you know, educating, reaching a broad audience, you have passion for STEM. You know, what's your thoughts around that? Is, you know, I worry, you know, there's so much, you know, general like television or things like that when I see the science stuff, it like makes me groan. Because, you know, it's like, no, I don't understand that. Oh, I am the worst, because I'm also, I've got a security background too, so that's the one that gets trampled on me. Go war. I mean like. Wait, thank goodness I updated my firewall settings because I saved the world from terrorists. You know? Cybers, no! Hang on, we're breaking through the first firewall. Now we're through the second firewall. Now we're going through the third firewall. There's like 15 firewalls, you know, like it's like, you know, no, let me upload the virus, you know, like all that stuff, you know, so it's difficult for me. Like, I think that, you know, hopefully there's also a group in Hollywood called the Hollywood Science Entertainment Exchange, and they're a group of scientists who work with filmmakers on, you know, reigning things, and filmmakers don't usually take all their advice, i.e. interstellar, but, you know, I think. I'm the good one? Yeah. In many cases there's some really good ideas that come to play into it that hopefully bring up, you know, like, I think Jarvis, for example, in Iron Man or the Avengers, is a really cool implementation of what the future of A.I. assistance might be like, you know, and I know they use the Hollywood Science Exchange to figure out, like, how's that going to work, you know? And I think in my, the marketing aspect is, you know, the reason I came up with the idea for this book is because my CEO of a company I used to work for, he had this whole conversation about why teleportation was impossible, and he's like, it's not because the science, yes, the science is a problem right now, but we'll get over it. The main issue is that nobody would ever step foot into a device that vaporize them and then print them out somewhere else. And I said, well, that's great, because that's his marketing problem. Yeah. You know, that's what... Yeah, I'm your dad every time you do it, right? But it's the same you, I can't tell the difference, well, you say you're dead, I'm saying you're just moving. Yeah. Artificial intelligence, you know, big gap between kind of the hype to where we need to go. What's your thoughts on that space in general? I think that we have, it's a great question, because, you know, I feel like that's a term that gets thrown around a lot, and I think as a result it's becoming watered down. So, you've got this sort of artificial intelligence that comes with like, you know, Google, you know, building an app that can be the world's best go players, which is like a really, really difficult puzzle. The problem is that app, you know, that app can do one thing and that's play go. Yeah. You put it on a chess game and it's like, I don't know what you're going to do. It's a very specialized kind of intelligence, yeah. Now with OpenAI, you know, they just had some pretty interesting implementations where they actually played video games with a real live competition and won. Again, you know, but without the smack talk, which really, I think would add a lot. So yeah, now you think I teach the AI to smack talk, so I think, look, the problem is we haven't figured out a really good way of creating a general purpose AI. And it's actually, there's a lot of parallels to the evolution of computing in general because if you look at how computers were before we had general purpose operating systems like Unix, every computer was built to do a very, very specific function and that's kind of what AI is right now. So we're still waiting to have a sort of general purpose AI that can do a lot of specialized activities. Even most robots are still very single purpose today. So that's the fundamental problem. But you're seeing like, you know, the Cambridge guys are working on sort of the bipedal robot that can do lots of things, you know. And Siri's getting better, Cortana's getting better, Watson's getting better, but we're not there yet. I mean like, we still need to find a really good way of integrating deep knowledge with general purpose conversational, you know, AI. Because that's really what you need to like, Stu, what do you need? Here, let me give it to you. You know, and. Do you draw a distinction between AI that's able to simply sort of react as a fairly complex machine or something that can create new things and have the, you know, something to the normality? That's in the book as well. So the fundamental thing that I don't think we get around even in the future is giving computers the ability to actually come up with net new ideas. There's actually a career that the main, the job of the protagonist of the book, his job is a salter. And his job is to salt AI algorithms to give them, to introduce entropy so that they can come up with new ideas. Okay, interesting. They're based off of the surf chaos that he, you know. It's like chaos monkey, right? Yeah, and that's really what you're trying to do is like, okay, reactive things that are happening because you can't just come up with them on their own. There's a whole, I don't want to bore you, but there's like a whole bunch of stuff in the book about how that works. There's like hand carving ideas that have been mass produced by machines. Yeah, I don't know if you guys are going to have Simon Crosby on here. He's kind of like an expert in that. You know, he was the dean at King's College, which is like where Turing came from. So he like, he really knows a lot about that. He's got a lot of strong ideas about it, but like I learned a lot from him in that regard. There's a lot of like the snarky spirit of Simon Crosby lives on in my book somewhere. But he's just funny because, you know, coming from that field, he immediately sees a lot of BS right off the bat whenever he's presented. He's got like the ability to just cut through it because he understands what it would actually take to make that happen, you know? So I've tried to preserve some of that in the book. That is refreshing in the tech industry. Tal, I need to let you, you know, wrap us up. Give us a plug for the book. Tell us, you know, when are we going to be able to see this on the big screen? I don't know about the big screen, but the Punch Escrow is now available. You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere books are sold. It's been optioned by Lionsgate. The director's attached to it is James Bowman. Production team is mandible productions. I'm very excited about it. Go check it out. It's a pretty quick read. It reads like a techno thriller. It's not too hard. And it's fun for the whole family. I think one of the coolest things about it is that the feedback I've been getting has been that it really is appealing to everybody. I've got mother-in-laws reading it. You know, it's pretty cool. Like initially I sold it, you know, that my initial audience is like us, but it's kind of cool. Like, you know, Stu will finish the book. He'll give it to like, you know, wife, daughter. They had nothing. Like, and they're really digging it. So it's kind of fun. Excellent. All right. Well, Tal Klein, really appreciate you coming. Thanks for having me. Congratulations on the book. We look forward to the movie. Maybe, you know, we'll get the cube involved, you know, down the road. Yes. And we're giving away 75 copies of it here. Awesome. At the Lakeside booth. You guys want to come? Tal Klein, author of The Punch Us Girl, also CMO of Lakeside, who is here in the thing. But yeah, a lot of stuff. Justin and I will be back with more coverage here from VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE.