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The Trade Secrets Tech Summit (season six of the podcast) is taking a quick summer break. In the meantime, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada are sharing some of their favorite past episodes. Join them this week for an update on the Tech Summit — which will return toward the end of June — then a look back at last season’s episode all about destination management companies (DMCs). Enjoy! This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. – What’s the difference between a tour operator and a DMC? How can advisors find DMCs to work with, and what are the top dos and don’ts of working with them? What if a contact at a DMC ghosts a travel advisor? Hear the answers to these questions and more in this week’s episode of Trade Secrets, featuring Andrea Grisdale, CEO and founder of I.C. Bellagio in Italy. Further resources IC Bellagio on the web Andrea Grisdale’s email Mentioned in this episode: Death of a Travel Advisor by Dori Saltzman From TravelAge West: The ultimate travel advisor guide to destination management companies Conde Nast’s travel specialists Travel + Leisure’s A List Wendy Perrin’s WOW List Need advice? Call our hotline and leave a message: 201-902-2098 Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Bloomberg Daybreak Weekend with Tom Busby takes a look at some of the stories we'll be tracking in the coming week. In the US – a look ahead to U.S CPI and PPI data and Tesla’s Robotaxi launch. In the UK – a look ahead to London’s Tech Summit. In Asia – a look ahead to readings on Chinese exports, as well industrial production and retail sales. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Bloomberg Daybreak Weekend with Tom Busby takes a look at some of the stories we'll be tracking in the coming week. In the US – a look ahead to U.S CPI and PPI data and Tesla’s Robotaxi launch. In the UK – a look ahead to London’s Tech Summit. In Asia – a look ahead to readings on Chinese exports, as well industrial production and retail sales. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Bloomberg Daybreak Weekend with Tom Busby takes a look at some of the stories we'll be tracking in the coming week. In the US – a look ahead to U.S CPI and PPI data and Tesla’s Robotaxi launch. In the UK – a look ahead to London’s Tech Summit. In Asia – a look ahead to readings on Chinese exports, as well industrial production and retail sales. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
I spoke at Latinas in Tech Summit! This was such an exciting opportunity for me. Tune in to hear how it happened and how it went. After that, I explain three steps you can take to ensure that you can get more professional development opportunities paid for by your job. Remember, your professional development is part of your compensation! If you're not getting it, you may be leaving money on the table. Plus: How I've gotten every job I've ever had since college to pay for me to attend conferences or receive training and you can too!Resources and LinksPrivate 1:1 Coaching: https://calendly.com/thefirstgencoach/discovery-call Download your FREE Resume Guide and Template Follow @CarlaTheFirstGenCoach on Instagram
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Travel Pro Theory, represented by founder Kate Thomas. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. Further resources Travel Pro Theory on the web and Instagram (feel free to DM) Kate Thomas’ previous appearance on Trade Secrets talking about advisor-supplier relationships From TravelAge West: 10 ChatGPT prompts every travel advisor should use Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Neste episódio, recebemos Leonardo Vieira, Co-Founder da Tractian, e Julia de Luca, VP de Tecnologia no Investment Banking do Itaú BBA, para uma conversa sobre como a inteligência artificial já está transformando negócios, os destaques do Tech Summit 2025 e as perspectivas para investimentos no setor de Tech.Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/itauviews/Telegram: https://t.me/itauviewsYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/itauviews
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a five-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Tique, represented by COO and co-founder, Jennifer Jacob. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. Further resources Email Tique Follow Tique on Instagram Listen to Tique’s podcast, Tique Talks Jennifer Jacob’s previous appearance on Trade Secrets Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is TripSuite, represented by cofounder and CEO Jacey Jones. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. Further resources TripSuite on the web Email TripSuite Request a demo of TripSuite with Jacey Jones Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
El evento tecnológico reunió a expertos en ciberseguridad, inteligencia artificial y datacenter para mostrar las soluciones que el mayorista ofrece a través de sus partners.
If you had to choose today, would you shrink to fit or rise to lead?In this empowering episode, Jackie sits down with tech powerhouse Nikki Barua to explore the game-changing impact of AI, the immigrant hustle, and the power of representation. Nikkie is a Serial Entrepreneur, Author, Keynote Speaker, and the interim CEO of Latinas in Tech. From growing up in India with a collage of powerful women (with her face at the center!) to becoming a Tech and Innovation Global Leader, Nikki shares how belief, vision, and relentless drive helped her break glass ceilings—and how she's now helping others do the same.Tune in to Episode 230 of Amiga, Handle Your Shit, and learn why Latinas must have a seat at the table in AI's revolution. Nikki demystifies AI, offers a blueprint for getting started, and explains why now is the time to lead, not to retreat.Episode Takeaways:How a homemade collage of powerful women shaped Nikki's belief in herself (3:10)Making elephants run. What does that mean in business and innovation (8:50)How AI is transforming every industry, and why Latinas must get involved now (9:40)The #1 mindset shift to stop fearing AI and start using it to magnify your brilliance (12:00)Why dreaming bigger is the first radical act of empowerment (21:00)What AI can never replace—and how to tap into your superpowers (23:20)The ultimate key to handling your shit: Live life on your terms (25:40)You don't need to be an engineer to thrive in tech (28:00)Connect with Nikki Barua:XInstagramLinkedInLatinas in Tech Summit 2025: InstagramXLinkedInFacebookYoutubeTikTokClick here to get 50% off using the code: AHYS-AA-10** Click the link. Select “All access tickets.” And enter the codeLet's Connect!WebsiteFacebookInstagramLinkedInJackie Tapia Arbonne websiteBuy The Amiga Way's Book Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Safari Portal, represented by founder and CEO Rachel West. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. Further resources Safari Portal on the web Email Rachel West Safari Portal on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this special episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nikki Barua, Interim CEO of Latinas in Tech and serial entrepreneur. We talked about AI, leadership, legacy, and the upcoming Latinas in Tech Summit, happening May 28–30 in San Francisco, CA. If you're in the Bay Area (or need a reason to visit), this is one to show up for.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is AtlasGuru, represented by CEO Kim Bennett. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by Globus family of brands. Further resources AtlasGuru on the web, Instagram, Facebook and email Kim Bennett’s email and LinkedIn Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
AI is an extremely powerful tool that is currently accessible to anyone with an internet connection. We, in the Latino community, can use to give ourselves the leg up we may not have had access to before. Say, for example, you couldn't get a Master's in Marketing Data Analytics when you were in college, but now you need to make a marketing plan for your business. AI can help you create a personalized marketing plan that appeals to any and every algorithm out there. That being said, not everyone knows how to use AI or use it well. A lot of people are afraid that AI is going to steal their jobs and leave them destitute. But AI is a tool - it's as much a tool for you as a hammer is to a carpenter. And in this week's episode, we're talking to an expert in tech to teach you how to take your business to the next level. This week's guest is Nikki Barua, the Interim CEO of Latinas in Tech. Nikki is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and leading expert in helping people and organizations accelerate success. In her 25-year career in innovation, she has helped global brands transform their culture and capabilities. Now she is on a mission to help business leaders reinvent the way they lead, live, and succeed in the age of AI. Nikki has won numerous awards, including Entrepreneur of the Year by ACE, named as an EY North America Entrepreneurial Winning Woman, honored as one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, recognized as Entrepreneur Magazine's 100 Most Influential Women, LA Woman of Influence by The Business Journals and Women of Entrepreneurship by LA Lakers. Nikki holds three Master's degrees and is a lifelong learner with insatiable curiosity. She believes that we are all limitless and leads her life committed to inspiring people to live up to their highest potential. In this week's episode, Nikki tells us how we can level up as business leaders and use AI to take our businesses to the next level. We are entering a new age of leadership, and I don't want any of you to get left behind just because you didn't know how to use the most powerful tool of our generation. Tune in to hear how you can leverage AI to improve your business and hear all the leadership lessons Nikki has learned to become the powerhouse she is today. Follow Nikki on: Instagram: @thenikkibarua Instagram: @latinasintechorg LinkedIn: Nikki Barua Website: https://latinasintechsummit.org Get your tickets for the Latinas at Tech Summit here! Follow Erika on: Instagram @theerikacruzTikTok @theerikacruzLinkedIn Website: http://www.theerikacruz.com How to work with Erika: Join the waitlist for the Courage Driven Latina program here. Join the waitlist for the Magnetic Mastermind here. Podcast production for this episode was provided by CCST.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Travefy, represented by senior education manager Stephanie Gries. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Travefy links: On the web New Travel Advisor Program Travefy Premium On YouTube Facebook Group Facebook Page On Instagram Support page Travefy on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Lucia, represented by founder and CEO Grace Van Hollebeke. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Lucia on the web Follow Grace Van Hollebeke on Instagram Grace on Humans of Travel Lucia on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is WeTravel, represented by CEO Ted Clements. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources WeTravel on the web Ted Clements on LinkedIn WeTravel on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today's episode of The Destination Marketing Podcast is a full-length look at Adam's keynote presentation at the One West Tourism Alliance's Tech Summit. In this key note, Adam explores the value of taking risks and how to navigate risk taking as a DMO. He also brings up a few examples of creators Brand Revolt looks to for inspiration as well as a few examples of Brand Revolt clients and how they take risks. If you're enjoying the show, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe to our newsletter! The Destination Marketing Podcast is a part of the Destination Marketing Podcast Network. It is hosted by Adam Stoker and produced by Brand Revolt. If you are interested in any of Brand Revolt's services, please email adam@thebrandrevolt.com or visit www.thebrandrevolt.com. To learn more about the Destination Marketing Podcast network and to listen to our other shows, please visit www.thedmpn.com. If you are interested in joining the network, please email adam@thebrandrevolt.com.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Axus, represented by Gregory Wilshire. Axus, Travel Weekly and TravelAge West have the same parent company, Northstar Travel Group. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Reach out to Axus via email Axus on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Sabre, represented by senior vice president of product management and distribution experience Kathy Morgan. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Learn more about Sabre on the web Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is VAX VacationAccess, owned by Trisept Solutions and represented by Josef Shomperlen. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources VAX VacationAccess on the web, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn The Compass on Instagram VAX VacationAccess on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Sion, represented by founder and CEO Irving Betesh. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Get in touch with Sion on the web or via email Sion on Host Agency Reviews Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Con frecuencia vemos máquinas expendedoras de café, que tienen una alta tecnología incorporada para el consumo en el hogar o en el sector comercial. Lo que no sabíamos es que una empresa de Medellín fue la primera en crear sus propias máquinas, el periodista Juan Carlos Yepes nos hace su informe desde Aroma Cafetero; además el panorama de la formación en tecnología, también Una de las inversiones más importantes en materia de ciberseguridad para Colombia, se anunció desde Cartagena en el marco del Claro Tech SUMMIT 2025 y mucho más.
Se inicia la versión 2025 del Claro Tech Summit y Javier Jules habló con una vocera de la multinacional para conocer más detalles del evento que tendrá como sede la ciudad de Cartagena; además llegó el Hot Sale 2025; también la misión planetaria que revisará la tecnología para proteger a la tierra de asteroides, el cumpleaños de Fito Páez y mucho más.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a five-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is the Hive, represented by founder and CEO Whitney Shindelar. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources The Hive online and on Instagram The Hive on Host Agency Reviews Whitney Shindelar’s previous appearance on Trade Secrets, talking about mentorship in the industry Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This season, Trade Secrets is hosting the Trade Secrets Tech Summit. Every Monday, co-hosts Emma Weissmann and Jamie Biesiada will feature a different travel technology company that works with travel advisors. A representative from the featured company will begin with a 5-minute elevator pitch to tell advisors about their product, followed by a 15-minute Q-and-A with the hosts. This week’s featured company is Tern, represented by co-founder and CEO David Shull. Trade Secrets is using Host Agency Reviews’ list of technology providers as a basis for this season. If a technology company doesn’t have a profile, advisors are encouraged to send a link to the hosts to be added to the list. This episode was sponsored by the Travel Corporation. Further resources Tern’s website David’s email Tern’s Facebook group for users Get in touch! Email us: tradesecrets@travelweekly.com Theme song: Sock Hop by Kevin MacLeod Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4387-sock-hop License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
361Firm Zietgiest Panel at the...Tech Summit (Feb. 25, 2025) SUMMARY KEYWORDSAI innovation, venture capital, early-stage companies, technology revolution, market uncertainty, geopolitical shifts, consumer spending, debt management, leadership challenges, educational access, technological race, global alliances, investment strategies, productivity increases, existential risks.SPEAKERSZoe Cruz, Mark Sanor, Barbara Doran, Christopher Birne, Stephen Burke, Joe Mancini Mark Sanor 00:00I'm going to make a prediction if Eddy will give me his attention. Eddie and Maisy are doing a deal right now. That's the whole point, yeah. My prediction is that this might be one of the most educational five to six hours of your life. There are so many interesting things happening in the world. Again, we were talking this morning. It really is like a new world order. And what gives us hope is always technology, productivity and all those things, those great things. So we're going to talk about these aspects, and hopefully these are the things that we in this room can control, but we all don't know how to navigate, so we have specialists who that's what they focus on, you know, whether it's health tech or dual use. So let's all learn together. So I asked the panels a classic question, what scares and excites you, and share some insights. And I like to to do the following, and sometimes the what scares and excites you, of course, can be insightful. But by way of very quick introduction, introduce yourself, and then you'll be you about clean up. David, you'd like to clean up. Share it, you know, introduce yourself and share. Share an insight with the view of, we're in this, this very, you know, rapidly transforming world, and the rapidity is only increasing. So with that, I'm gonna, you know, I always like fund the funds, so I raise money. So a lot of people don't want to raise money for fund the funds, because you're like, you know, you don't get paid much. You have to long term journey, but the intelligence that you get from fund to fund. So I let Joe kick off, Barbara, we all, you all know from pickle ball or or CNBC, or the like. Zoe is new to us, maybe not to some of you, but she was the president of Morgan Stanley. Who else has been president of Morgan Stanley here? Not too many of us have been your perch, right? Your view, your vantage point. So and you're on to new frontiers, you'll share some of that. And everyone should know Stephen. Who does not know? Stephen Burke, has anyone has not been to our Tuesday briefing? It okay if you haven't, Olga, you haven't made it. Have you a Tuesday briefing of 361 firm? Has anyone not made it to one of them? You probably made it to 100 but it's 256 next Tuesday, our anchor man. So you'll anchor the panel. So I'm going to pass it off to you, Joe, and truly be inside tell us something we don't know.Joe Mancini 03:22Well, I'll start by just telling you what you don't know, which is who I am. My name is Joe Mancini. I'm one of the founding partners of a hybrid venture fund called front porch Venture Partners. About half our capital goes into early stage venture capital on the fund side, via kind of a classic Fund of Funds approach, and about half directly into companies at the early stage. Companies at the early stage. Super excited to be here this community as I've started to engage with it more and more. It's just a really authentic and interesting group of people. So I think it's going to be an amazing day. Is this the scares and excites? Part? Mark, or no? Mark Sanor 03:54Well, insights and or scares Excite? Yeah. I like an insightful perspective. Joe Mancini 04:01Yeah, insightful. I would say, you know, I mean, it's, obviously, it's a more dynamic world, I think, right now, than we've lived in in a very long time. It feels like every other day there's some new piece of news that's throwing us all for a loop. I focus on early stage venture. I would say I when we get to the scared and excited part, I both worry as well as I'm excited about the state of venture as an asset class and the state of early stage innovation. It's been a primary driver of the US economy for a very long period of time, and American ingenuity and innovation has put us, you know, at the top of the heap globally for a long period of time. And there's an interesting where, an interesting intersection in the asset class right now, where, you know, LPs are frustrated about liquidity, assets are being concentrated among some of the biggest managers. And meanwhile, innovation is happening globally. That's starting to put, I think, American innovation on its on its heels a little bit. So I can talk about. A more inspiring version of where I think we go from here, but that's where I sit today. Barbara Doran 05:11Hello, yeah, hi. Besides playing pickleball, and there were two women who won, by the way, will be defending next year. Anyway, I'm Barb Duran. I wear two hats. I'm here, really, on the investment Council of Penn State. I'm not staff member, volunteer. I've been on the board of Penn State for nine years, the Board of Trustees just after the Sandusky scandal was elected by the alumni, and have been on the Finance Committee ever since. So on the investment Council. And so I want to talk a little bit about the things that we do there. But also, excuse me, my other hat is I have my own firm, wealth advisory, asset management, and so I invest in public traded equities, and that's really my specialty as an independent professional, the things that excite me most really goes along with what Dan was saying are Bill Joe. Oh, jeez. Anyway, David. David anyway is really about technology. I don't think that should come as any surprise. There's lots of talk all the time about AI and what that means. We had a market sell off about three weeks ago because of deep seek. You know this Chinese competitor, potential competitor, to Nvidia and lots of other semiconductor players, but there's so much going on, and we're already starting to see the productivity increases that will come from businesses adopted it. And so far, in terms of businesses adopted, probably, you know, not even you know, only maybe 10% have really adopted, and we're not talking about the service now. So the salesforce.com but the businesses will actually implement to make their businesses run more efficiently, their sales, all that sort of thing. So that's just beginning, because everybody's looking at, how do we use it, working with consultants, etc. But there's going to be a lot more to come, and more new companies that we don't even know about yet, and that's why, like, for instance, at Penn State, we're doing we don't invest directly and anything, we're just not big enough. Our end down is maybe six to 7 billion, if you include our operating cash. So we have a great staff, but we invest in funds, you know. So that's the fund of funds who really have the expertise to dive deep. And we've been investing in in different venture capital funds that have different areas of expertise in technology. Some of them are AI. Others are other areas of technology, but AI has been a big one recently, and we're continuing to look in that space. And the publicly traded side at Penn State, we just do index is which I'm always the one speaking up like, why we should do some active managers. But for my own clients, I do a lot in technology. Like, for instance, I've own Nvidia since 2019 which had no idea it would happen as it has. But I looked up at that time, like, why did I buy it then? And it was really because they were one of the first actually using AI to help their clients run their business. And so that was, this was the beginning of and this is just the beginning, still, even despite everything that's happening on So, and I know I'm getting the look, but the things that I worry about really have to do with the current administration and the uncertainty being created by not knowing what's happening with tariffs. Is it more bark than bite? We don't know. We just had a pronouncement today about Canada and Mexico, or maybe it was late yesterday. Who knows? And also about the deportations. We don't know. Even company managements are worried about what that could mean in terms of labor shortage and the inflationary pressures there. So there's a lot we don't know. And right now, what's happened? Sure you've noticed, the last three days, we've had a market sell off, including today, in the equity market. 10 year yield has come down, and I think it's we're now having a growth scare, which we haven't seen for a while, and we'll see how that plays out. My view it's probably a buying opportunity somewhere in there, because the economy is still strong. It's consumer driven, and it's the mid to high income consumer that's driving it. And people have made trillions in the stock market. Their home prices are high, and they're employed. So despite all the noise in the frights of the last few days, I'm still, you know, optimistic on the market. Thank you. Zoe Cruz 09:09Thank you. My name is Zoe Cruz. It's actually Zoe Papa vimitrio Cruz. I was born and raised in Greece. I am what you call the American dream. Three years before I went to Harvard on a full scholarship, I didn't speak a word of English, and if it weren't a public school teacher that took an interest as to why I wasn't applying to Harvard, I probably wouldn't be here. And I joined Morgan Stanley right out of business school. It was a small investment banking boutique with 1800 people in three offices, Tokyo, London, New York. When I left in 07 it was 65,000 people. They had offices everywhere. That's a revolution. Finance was globalizing. Overnight, rates were 21% on their way to zero 30. Interest rates, the risk free rate of return for treasuries were 15% on their way to 1% as I say to people, a monkey could do what we did at Morgan Stanley, and we were not monkeys. So you have to recognize paradigm shifts. And I actually think right now we're in a massive paradigm shift. There is way too much in being spilled. Whether the Fed is going to use 25 basis points. Who cares? The world is de globalizing, fragmenting. The biggest assumption the markets are making is that we beat inflation. It's going to go back down to 2% I could be wrong, but I believe we're not going to save 2% in my lifetime. We should worry more about hyper inflation than deflation. The US government has $36 trillion worth of debt, and so for me, what I worry about is there is not enough talk about, how do you hedge your portfolio if it is a paradigm shift, and interest rates actually, the cost of capital keeps on going up, and availability of it keeps on going down. If I'm right about that assumption. A lot of your portfolio is in deep trouble, because that's the assumption most people are making. So what scares me at the moment, I'm an optimist by nature. I love you know, we are the lucky sperm club here, actually, most of us. What scares me is we are in the middle of an amazing technological revolution. But unlike what so it is amazing in the sense that when I look at the power of that thing, I downloaded all four perplexity, Gemini, grok, chat, GPT, all four of them, and I asked them the same question, all four. And by the way, they have their own biases. Just excellent. I don't need 12 research people. It's just in a second, I get the most complex answers to a question that's exciting. I mean, I can get a PhD basically, just, you know, asking that's exciting. Unlike other revolutions, you don't get the extreme risk of Elon, a brilliant man, whatever you want to think about his character. This is a brilliant man who has changed the world. Now everybody's talking the game, but he, I remember, if you look at his interviews only a few years back, he said there's a non zero possibility humanity ceases to exist. Well, that's kind of a big risk. So, so the mirror image of that exciting, exciting revolution is more of us should think about humanity is a wonderful thing, and how do you preserve us being masters of this revolution, as opposed to the other way around? Stephen Burke 13:14I'm done. First of all, I agree with most of what you said, and the stuff I don't agree with, I don't understand. So thank you, Zoe for that crash course. I worry about debt too, and I worry about debt being the current consumption of our future earnings, and we've gone way over our skis on that all over the world, and how we get that back is going to be a real problem. And the other thing I worry about is the lack of leadership that will make the hard decisions that we have to make to put the pain on the system that we have to go through to get the excesses out that we built up over the years. I also share the view that the move down in rates is going to be much more challenging the market is hoping for as investors, if we don't get our mind around that change that the last 15 years are done and we're back to a normal interest rate level on the low end of what we've historically seen, you're going to have problems valuing all your assets if we don't get that right. So I think we have to change the mindset there. I do think there's elements of this administration that are not getting credit for the positive outcomes because of the delivery on it, but if we can get digitize a lot of our government expenses, you only raise the level of trust in how our taxes are being spent, they can give you a whole different mindset towards government and deliver much better outcomes for our country, but I think it will be the same for other countries. Europe has a massive fiscal problem where their needs are far greater than their ability to spend to meet those needs, and that's not just on defense, it's on their regular day to day living. So I think the transformations that are going. On. I do think this is one of those periods where we've slowly walked into, over the last decade, big, secular, mega trends, whether it's demographics, whether it's the tech boom. You can go through the list. There's several other areas where we're seeing these mega trends. I think the anti immigration bias that we're starting to say is another worry, we're going to have a brain drain problem. We've already seen it in a lot of countries. The US cannot afford to lose the opportunity the edge that we've had in immigration, and we're on our way to doing that. So I think we're going too far in the pendulum all the time. I think we have to get back to a more moderate way of seeing how we deal with all the problems that we have. So I'll stop there more. Mark Sanor 15:42What do you think about the risk of of humanity? So arm and Sir keys on. He did this conference. He how long wasn the question of existence? Do we can, you know, sort of existential, the ultimate existential question. I'm surprised Stephen Burke 15:58they made it this far, so that's not a priority for me, but I do have four kids that it is a priority for. And I would say that I worry about our kids. I worry about the we called sending the bill to the kids table with the debt and the strains on the system, but I also worry what we've done to their future. I think their their ability to have hope is not the same that we had when we were growing up. And I think that's a real problem, because without hope and hope in our leaders, it's very hard to get out of the problems and deal with the problems Mark Sanor 16:32that we have fair enough. Well, I want to open up because I asked insights and scares and excitements, you sort of answered those questions, but did you hold back a scares and excites? Answer? I held back and excites. Okay, let's Yeah, and that Joe Mancini 16:46was really interesting. I appreciate this is a really smart crew up here. You know, like I said, I play in the early stage venture world, primarily in the US. I spend all day, every day, with fund managers and founders. I would say something that excites me with as concerned as I am about certain things, is how many founders are starting businesses right now in an AI native way. And what I mean by that is, you know that they're building these businesses now with AI tools in their pocket that are going to dramatically, I think, decrease the amount of capital needed to build a great company, right? Which means that, as an investor, there's an opportunity for great returns. Peter Walker, at carta has a great stat around the average series A employee count. Two years ago was 18. Last year was 13. It's ready to be under 10 within the next 12 months. So in terms of productivity, kind of carrying us out of this, I think there's a huge opportunity with this next set of tools, not just as a system layer for a lot of things that we do, but for founders and people who are creating and building things, and for our kids as they're creating and building things. So Mark, that's the more optimistic. So Mark Sanor 17:51do you know Esther Dyson? Does anyone know Mr. So she was we had this discussion about this time last year about companies that are the founders being an AI and the board members potentially being a is you guys have thought through that scenario, but it's they would Love to replace you too. So so it goes both ways. Joe Mancini 18:23I mean, some might as well be AI in certain cases, right? I mean, particularly at the board level, we work with a lot of boards as well, and, you know, there's some sleepy boards that might be better served being AI, right? We try to avoid those types of situations. Mark Sanor 18:39So, let's, let's open it up. Will Speaker 4 18:46First off, this was awesome. So far, I really enjoyed what you guys all said, a lot of brain power up there. We've talked a lot about, you know, uncertainty of geo politics, Global War, where interest rates are going. I'm curious, you know, from an investment perspective, it's sometimes easier to think about, what are the things that are not going to change amidst all this, and what will continue to just make sense. And I'd love to hear what you guys think about, what's not going to change, and how we could invest in slow, boring things that aren't going to change. Mark Sanor 19:18Who wants it? Zoe Cruz 19:22Great question. Sorry, yeah, it's a Mark Sanor 19:27girl he was being coached by the Pender, right? Zoe Cruz 19:30It's a great question. I'm not sure I have the answer that to the question you're asking. One thing will never change is basically, if you have short term clarity on what's going to produce cash, you know, even if inflation takes 5% of it, who cares? That's never I mean arithmetic, simple arithmetic is so good businesses, but I. Say what's also not going to change. Some of the best money I've made is after the crash, one of the best trades I've made, because I know how to read bank balance sheets in oh eight after the war fell apart, you could have bought if you had enough cash saved aside and not prematurely invested all of your portfolio and things you could have bought bill based stock at 50 cents of its book value. This is a company that was still making billions with an S every quarter. So what's not going to change is we know after major and I think we are in a paradigm shift. You don't need to be a great investor. You're going to pick up great companies. You're going to make me investments that give you a symmetry of risk reward. Most Great Investors basically have, so yes, you can lose half of your money, or you can make 100x that's a symmetry of risk reward. You should do the trade every day. I think right now, the asymmetry of risk reward is against the traditional portfolio, stocks and bonds. You know, when you can actually save there is inflation, the huge debt that the market, sovereign in particular, the US of A everyone is actually printing money, including even Germany. Basically, when there is huge debt, as I say many times, people forget there is only two ways of big debt, repudiation or inflation, we're choosing the latter, so that should guide your portfolio. Now the Argentinians don't have a reserve currency. So if you choose inflation, your currency goes down 98% Turkey 60% we are in a wonderful world of America with the reserve currency. The question is, we better be careful. I Barbara Doran 22:06just want to make a quick comment on that. We better be careful about the reserve currency, because when 22 when we used we froze central bank in Russia. You know, it suddenly woke up a lot of other central bankers to say, hey, maybe the treasuries aren't so safe after all. So it will be a long term process, but we can't take for granted. I mean, the near term, yes, will be the world's reserve currency, but over many years, and depending how it accelerated or not, by various administrative policies, current or future presidents, that is something to watch. And I share the concern over the deficit, which looks like it's going to be even higher, but what will not change? I mean, there's so many ways to answer that. One is about consumer spending. You know that Americans love to spend through thick and thin and and also market psychology, which we addressed in which Zoe said, back in it was oh nine in February, I remember looking at those bank stocks because a friend said, bar, what can I invest in, and I don't give friends ideas. But I said, if you really want to invest, because she knew nothing. I said it with Hank was bank America and city, which were like $2 stocks. I said, I don't know. The only thing I know is they're not going out of business when will return. It wasn't one, whatever it was. It was crazy. But the only thing I knew they weren't going out of business. So, Mark Sanor 23:23all right, yeah, what's Joe Mancini 23:24playing in my head, as you all are describing these situations, which I think are really good examples, is just, I mean, supply and demand, as far as I can tell, is always going to, you know, rule quite you know, rule every market and just about every transaction. So knowing where you sit in terms of, you know, where is demand, where is supply, and ultimately, where is price, right, can help you make really good decisions. Simple, but I think we go back to it all the time, Mark Sanor 23:52by the way, I'm gonna is amazing here. Of course, you stepped up. But we'll talk about pricing perfect timing, because we're gonna talk about talk about large pricing models. That's the next open AI that we've been looking at. Lots of hands were going up because you guys have asked lots of questions. I'm going to let Speaker 5 24:16Dave Thanks. So regarding rare and critical minerals, we're sort of hearing now that if you haven't already got any, gone into them, you're late, that they're not going to be very rare in a very short period of time. Do you guys have views on that? Mark Sanor 24:31I mean, Greenland and Ukraine? No views from the panel on that Speaker 2 24:40one? No, I don't know enough either. Don't forget the ocean too. Oh, Mark Sanor 24:44the ocean. We have two people in Alyssa. Where's Alyssa and Lisa on ocean research. We know so much. We spend so much more in space, not in the ocean. Chris, Christopher Birne 24:58thank you guys for your time. I guess. First, I would say, both my dad and I went to Penn State for our undergrad. So we are and I'm Greek. So CI do elada Go Blue? Yeah, oh, wow. So, I guess a lot of discussions I've had with other family offices, and I think Stephen You had mentioned this idea of, you know, a lack of leadership and its effect on making crucial decisions. You know, I think that the Obama administration was the last two year term we had for a president. And, you know, I guess you could argue that Trump is a two term president one time, separately, this political climate that we're in now and this shit, this paradigm shift politically, I think, where, you know, every four years to different president with a completely different outlook. What effect does that have? Like, kind of, some of the things you guys are discussing about the deficit and being able to make crucial decisions, Mark Sanor 25:48we do have elections every two years too, that impact Stephen Burke 25:52this. I'll start I think the I think the ping pong match of the party's policies is a terrible waste of money for the US, consumer and taxpayer. And I think we need to separate the budget out to a maintenance budget and investment budget the same way you would in a corporation, and then you would evaluate the return on your investment for like the infrastructure plan that was absolutely necessary. But you do that in a way that you actually look for an ROI the way you would in the business, and I think if we did that, the people would have a lot better response to the government spending and new government projects. So I think that's the kind of leadership that you need. You also need people to step up and say, I'm going to be a one term. Er, because what we need to do is the stuff that is the hard stuff, we're going to have to have to raise taxes and we're going to have to cut spending. You can't avoid the deficit problem that we have. You can't grow out of it. We tried that for the last 15 years, and all we did was make the debt worse. We avoided a financial crisis, but we just might have prolonged it instead of completely avoid it. Zoe Cruz 26:56I would say that we're focusing on the wrong the politics, the Democrats, Republicans. I think the Democrats pretend they care. The Republicans say they're going to do the right thing for the economy, but neither one, neither of the major parties, really focus on the one thing, the economy is no longer working for large swaths of the population. And if you read history, they pick up the pitch forks at some point. That's what's happening to me. Donald is the pitch fork saying he's a disrupter. We're going to throw a bomb. Tabula rasa. Let's start all over again. So the again, the amount of ink that's being spilled on Obama versus Donald versus at the end of the day, the reason Donald won is he had a great story line. I care. I listen to you. We've globalization eviscerated your town, your middle class America, your poor. I'm listening to you. That resonated now. What's going to happen if two years from now, he's not listening? Is what I worry society is fraying, not because Republicans did the wrong thing, or Democrats did the wrong thing. We're not focusing on fundamentally, when you have I think I read a statistic that's, again, I believe in capitalism, but we're not practicing it any longer. When you have three guys, bez, I think Zuckerberg and Elon, the three are worth more than the bottom 50% of us of a think of that statistic that's crazy. Yeah. So I think, you know, I talked to a couple of you, I think the caucuses we should have is, What is the purpose of leadership, but to actually get to our children, leave our children. I have three amazing children. I'm ashamed of the future I'm leaving them. My generation is the most self est generation of them all my dad fought in World War Two. They were starving, and here we are, my generation. I need, I want, I have to have. So I think that's what has to change, not Obama versus whatever. Barbara Doran 29:24Well, all very interesting. But I think your question was, was, really, how does it affect your investing, and how to think about it? So in a more granular, granular level, it does affect, I mean, you had leading up the election, you had the Kamala plays in the stock market. You had the Trump plays, you know, and after Trump won, then you had, you know, all his the areas, whether it was financials, materials, everything running. And so you do have to be cognizant. And of course, now, as I mentioned earlier, there's all this policy uncertainty, which certainly is, you know, impactful, because the Fed is on hold, and probably may hold a little longer to there more clarity, because they are. Worried, you know, if you deport too many people, you know could hurt labor, inflationary and tariffs and so we don't know yet. So there is uncertainty that you have to build in. Now, interestingly, there just was out yesterday, the second Consumer Confidence Report from the Conference Board, and last week with senior University of Michigan, a big drops in consumer confidence in terms of inflation expectations. But interestingly, there was quite a disparity, as we've seen in other surveys, between the Republicans and the Democrats. Democrats were much more pessimistic about it all, and Republicans, even though that number went up, they were not so very interesting. How either they're hearing separate facts or they're interpreting or focusing on different things. So this politicization that Zoe is talking about, you know, is real and is is harmful, you know, in terms of making informed decisions. Mark Sanor 30:47Question Tony, hold on one second, Speaker 7 30:55Zoe, I want to go back to something you said. I think you touched on concentration, concentration of wealth. Most people are focused on chasing the return based on what's happening in the market, and a lot of that has to do with technology. How do you, how do you properly address that concentration? Speaker 3 31:14You know, I hope this time around, it will be different. When you look at the history, when you look at, you know, this time, it's different. When you look at the history of capitalism again, the best system, on a relative basis, you have huge growth plateau, collapse, start all over again. That's how it so you look at, you know, the 1920s I'm rereading the great crash in 1929 you look at the parallels of what we constant, robber barons, concentration of wealth, gold, Gilded Age. I mean, so you look at the pattern. And my hope again is that we don't have this collapse, if people say, if you put your money in equities, you'll make money, yes, over the long decades, if you put your money in equities, right before the crash in 1929 it took you 40 years to make your money back. Let's pick or 30. So to me, I would say, right now, there's not enough, really, risk management these. How do you change the concentration of wealth? I hope it's not by, you know, I hope that those guys that there are worth trillions, don't figure out how they go to Miami to save taxes. They figure out how you actually use technology, you know. And again, Elon, to be fair, even though I think he's a deeply flawed human being, but I have enormous respect for his IQ, he started talking about again, years ago, when you listen to what he was saying, is, and that's why, by the way, they had this, you should have open AI, why he supported it. He said we should have the minimum income. I don't know if that's the right answer. But he thought about if 65% of the US economy is consumption, which means people have a job, they make money, and then they consume. That's America. So when you have all of them now say productivity, you are going to need to fire millions of people. We don't need them, and this time, it's not the machinists. It's actually the lawyers, the accountants. How does so? Again, we're not thinking about the paradigm shift. I am hugely positive about what will happen if we survive at the other the land of plenty, but I hope the transition, which was World War One, World War Two, is what transitions were this time. Hopefully it's different. Stephen Burke 34:13I would just add mark. I think the thing that's going to help the inequality is, can we use technology to make the access to education better than it is right now for the low end, because 49% of the spending in the US is done by the top 10% of earners, so they the others don't have a shot. They just don't have a shot right now. And the way our educational system works in many states, it's driven by tax revenues, particularly real estate revenues, and that is the definition of inequality. So I think we have to fix the educational access to allow them to have a shot to compete, because we're not giving them the shot to they're not starting on an even playing field to begin with. Mark Sanor 34:59So. What we haven't talked about is the global, the geopolitical Democrats and Republicans. But we're in a world, a shifting world. You talked about the dollar and in our debt loads. But how do you see, I guess, what scares and excites you on the geopolitical fronts? I I'll Stephen Burke 35:20start just the same thing inequality. You have a couple countries that are dominating all the discussions and all the influence right now, and it's the US and China, primarily, that are sucking the wind out of the air, out of the room, and they're not leaving much for the rest. And as we're carving up the world, we're creating a real problem with that. I think you have inequality on three levels. I think you have it on a country level, you have it on a corporate level, and you have it on the individual level, and we have to deal with all three of them to for this, to get it right. Zoe Cruz 35:59What I'm excited about is that it's possible to have the Chinese leadership and the US leadership meet to say, if actually humanity is what we're trying to save, maybe we work together, as opposed to because the nuclear arms race is now the technology race that the Chinese and the Americans are actually fighting so they don't lose on a technological revolution that they recognize they can lose control of. So my hope is those two guys meet and then we get to the land of plenty fast. Do Mark Sanor 36:35we have like this new, enlightened, mutual, assured technological destruction? Yeah, and that we should be enlightened, Zoe Cruz 36:43yeah? Because, I mean, I'm sure there are, there are people that are telling both Donald and she that there is a scenario we all die. I mean, there is, we all know that. And so right now, externally, at least what we are hearing and reading is what they want us to hear and read. Those two are the super powers, the unilateral whatever you call it, the world where America was the only one. Yeah, so those two guys, I think there must be at least initiating discussions Russia and all that. It's a human, horrible toll. The two leaders that need to get together, the two that count, that can change the trajectory of the world, is the Chinese and the Americans. Speaker 2 37:41Okay? And I worry long term about shifting alliances. You know, the US, it may not be seen as a reliable partner. And certainly Europe, basic leaders in the last week or so have said we've got to go it alone. And that will shift alliances all over the world. You've got Canada, Mexico, and we'll see where that shakes out. And, you know, I think longer term, it could weaken us and our ability, you know, to withstand all sorts of global pressures, the fact that we've done so well the last few years, economically, all these things, again, this is longer term. This will take time to shift, but that's what I'm concerned about. What's being set in motion now. So what? What that may lead to, and it may not be good for us. Joe Mancini 38:24I'll tell you a thing that I probably shouldn't say, that I actually wish had been a little less certain for a period of time, which is, I don't know if folks noticed the news story about a week ago that there was a 3% chance in 2032 that a meteor was gonna strike the Earth, right? And then we got a better look at the media, and we're like, Ah, it's one and a half percent. And then we started look back in history, and we're like, Oh, something hit, you know, the northern part of Russia in 1908, it wasn't that big of a deal. And now we're saying, yeah, it's probably not gonna hit. No big deal. I wish that that had stuck at three to 5% for a little while longer, right? And just tried to bring the world a little bit together around, okay, this is madness, but we have an existential threat. We can see it through a big, giant telescope. Let's get the best minds together to try to figure out what to do. Unfortunately, now it's like point 1% and we'll probably be fine. Mark Sanor 39:17All right with that. Thank you to our kick off panel. Zoe Can I ask you to stick around? Can you stick around? We're going to talk about AI and two of my panelists are not here, and I thought you might keep sharing some. There you go. It's a half an hour panel. All right. So if Thank you. Thank you so Ben and Maisie Jack is on on an airplane. Watch her. Please come up. We're going to talk about AI, and if you, if you, and maybe. Be Ben, you'll go first, introduce yourself again. Sheri, come join our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. Ben. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. 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FinTech and Digital Assets Panel - at 361Firm's NY Tech Summit Feb. 25, 2025SUMMARY KEYWORDSFinTech, digital assets, blockchain, stable coins, tokenization, payments, regulatory policy, venture capital, AI, decentralized finance, financial infrastructure, crypto winter, institutional investors, innovation, emerging markets.SPEAKERSMark Sanor, Brian Neirby, Speaker 6, Bill Deuchler, Ben Narasin, Rich Sobel, Speaker 4, Margaret Butler of BakerHostetler, Stephen Burke, Speaker 2, Will Wolf Mark Sanor 00:00But we're very I'll come see in a second. We're very lucky to be here. Baker, host, teller, I once practiced law in Cleveland, Ohio. Baker, we love Cleveland, and that's Baker's head quarters, and we are here at their home. And I'd like Margaret to say a few words. Margaret Butler of BakerHostetler 00:21Mark, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's really a very few words, because all I want to say is thank you to Olga. I hope she's here for connecting me with Mark. And thank you, Mark, for bringing all these amazing people here. I have had such an amazing day listening to all of you, and I Well, thank you. I love all of you. I'm Margaret Butler. I am the head of the financial services industry team here at Baker, Hostetler. And so I want to thank my team, definitely. Joe Matteo, who's been putting everything together, Cynthia, Kevin e who is here, my Managing Partner, George Sam bollitus, who was also around for making this possible for all of us and for me. Because, like I said, I really just enjoy this so much. Thank you all for being here and get to the good stuff. I don't know if you need this one. I 01:18don't know how he has it set up, probably. So 01:22thank you for having us, Bill Deuchler 01:27I guess so. So this is Mark style. He just leaves the room and lets the panelists take over. Okay, so we can go ahead and do introductions when you talking about digital assets and fin tech and well, no, hey, I'm buying you time. Mark Sanor 01:47Get mark out of the way. 01:51Go ahead. Okay, Mark Sanor 01:55that was your 2024, go ahead. Sorry. Go right. Bill Deuchler 01:59So I'll introduce myself, and then hand the mic over to my colleagues up here. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Bill D clear. Currently, I serve as trustee for our municipal police pension fund. I've been on the board there for eight years. We have more of a traditional portfolio, but more recently, we've we have an active conversation, and actually an allocation for private equity that we've yet to fund, private credit, which has been funded and specialty real estate, which is another asset class. Previously, I was CIO for two two family offices, and have been around the institutional world quite a bit, and also currently advise a venture capital fund in the fin tech and AI space that has some very interesting characteristics, and I'll talk a little bit about that generally, as far as what an allocator looks for. But I will hand the mic over to my esteemed friend and colleague, Rich Sobel, Rich Sobel 02:55thanks. It's nice to be here. Nice to see everybody I am kind of wearing multiple hats. The hat that brings me up here is I'm a founder partner in a $50 million early stage fund that invests in blockchain and web three fin tech fund was set up three years ago, four years ago, I knew relatively little about this, and it's been a tough couple of years in the digital asset space. We went through what some people would call crypto winter. That's over, and I think we're coming into a period that could arguably be called a tipping point, kind of a renaissance, in the penetration of these technologies and tools and business models that are going to disrupt major markets, and we'll talk a little bit more about that catalyst. One of the catalysts is the change in regulatory policy. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit about that. So I'm quite excited about the changes that come but it's clearly a risky area. So it's not some place you put the majority of your of your assets, but it's something that I'm quite excited about, and I'm happy to share my perspectives. Will Wolf 04:18Yeah, thanks. Thanks everyone for being here and for having me. I This is me and my partner, Vanessa's first time here. My name is Will. I'm a managing partner and co founder of arc capital, which is an early stage Digital Asset Fund we just got off the ground last year, and I met Mark, I think, last week or two weeks ago, and we joined and so this is our first time here. So Thanks for welcoming us. We we are basically inter I am also a fin tech co founder. Back in 2012 I co founded a company in the fin tech space. We went through Y Combinator and ended up getting acquired into Airbnb, and I manage some of their back end payments infrastructure. So I know a bit about the the payment rails, Rails, at least in the West, and sort of the fin tech ecosystem. Them, but we're very excited at arch capital to be investing in what we think is the future of financial infrastructure globally, which is web three, and what's being built there, all Mark Sanor 05:11right, this is what happens when I don't lead off. So this is good. It's good. But what I want are insights. What are you seeing that we don't know? Or what scares or excites, hopefully both. Rich Sobel 05:25I know in some of the areas that we're focused, there's tremendous change going on under the surface that's starting to come out of the ground. And one of those areas is payments, and payments using Blockchain and stable coins, is a 1,000% improvement on the old, incumbent way of making payments. It's particularly impactful when payments are going across border to emerging markets, which is reducing, or, in fact, sometimes eliminating, the volatility and risk in emerging markets currencies, which is making the world closer, so incumbents are being disrupted, and we're invested in a company I spoke about, I think, back in December, that is making remittances to Africa, and they're using the data on the chain to help those people who are making payments improve their credit scores, which opens up all kinds of new financial products to the UN banked folks right here in America. And so there are growing number of companies that are doing that. Some of the incumbents, like Visa and others, are coming around and looking to partner in this space. And the second area I'll mention, and then I'll leave, there's many areas, so I'm clearly leaving some out of respect for my esteemed colleagues. Here is tokenization of assets. So there is a better model for holding and trading securities, funds and real assets, and the tokenization model now works, and so it's been held up by the US SEC and the litigation and impediments that they had established. But those litigations, last week, they dropped the litigation against coin base, which is really like the red light, and they're also changing policy. So there's an executive order going on that Trump signed in his first week. Within 180 days, he expects a whole new set of policies to be proposed, and that's going to make major financial institutions see a green light to move more actively into this space, on bringing assets on chain, democratizing access, improving liquidity. I mean, it's like the frog in the frying pan that if you know people don't see it on a day to day, week to week, basis, but I assure you that within five years, there's going to be dramatic changes. And this year, 2024 there was one and a half billion, one and a half trillion, of tokenized assets. Conservative estimates put it at 16 trillion by 2030 so it's really going to change the way we deal with financial assets, and eventually all assets. I Mark Sanor 08:10like everything. Just didn't quite understand the frog and the frying plan. You don't see it 08:15on a day to day basis, the frog in the well, you're not from Will Wolf 08:17Ohio, the boiling pot of water. Yeah, there you go. No, I agree with that completely. I think, I definitely do think that stable coins in this ecosystem, people sort of outside the ecosystem, don't appreciate maybe what's going on there. You know, we're very close with the teams at both Master Card and visa that have very intelligent blockchain web, three teams building very interesting things. A lot of people don't know. Visa has been settling actual, real payments on both Ethereum and Solana for almost two years, and they're growing that volume, and they, you know, that gets you to on Solana, 400 millisecond settlement times on global payments for visa. So that's pretty powerful for them, and that this is stuff that's really happening. And I also think in terms of the new administration in the US, I think they may not fully understand this yet, but I think the stable coin market right now, the is a couple 100 billion dollars, but the rate that it's been growing is, I mean, I think a couple years ago it was 10s of billions or less. And this is a new source of global demand for dollars, which is important with what's going on in sort of our treasury markets right now. You know, circle whole, which is one of the stable coin providers, holds 100 $50 billion of treasuries. And if that gets to a trillion or 2 trillion, that makes them pretty important. And people all over the world want dollar stable coins instead of their African currency or their South East Asian currency, and they can get it because it's just, you just need an internet connection. And so I think this is very powerful for the dollar, for the US system. I think the administration is going to realize that. And I think even broader, what the technology means is, over time, getting rid of middle men everywhere, globally in the financial system. I. Them because we don't need them anymore, and so this is going to take multiple decades, but I think that's the inevitable end game. Bill Deuchler 10:10One of the central themes, from an allocator standpoint, is investing in innovation. And you know, both ourselves and some of my colleagues from a much larger pension system were quite interested. You know, back actually around 18 or so in the blockchain space. Back then, it was much more nascent. Not much was going on, except people knew that Bitcoin was used by drug dealers and other nefarious schemes. But none the less, the idea of investing in innovation and seeing the kind of radical transformation to fundamental systems, to our economy was, was the attraction. And I think that things somewhat got put on pause with the FTX debacle and the crypto winter, but now things have matured considerably. And so you see, you know, the tremendous growth of the stable coin market and the ability to transact much more efficiently there, it's a great opportunity to participate in something that it's truly going to change the fundamental systems of how we interact. And I think also from an investor standpoint, both on the fin tech side, as well as the blockchain side, you can see various companies that have good ideas and who can master the go to market exercise. Well, all of a sudden, at very, very early stages of their growth, they are actually revenue positive. And if you can find companies that are revenue positive, and you can still get in at the seed and pre seed stage, that is a tremendous advantage, because then you can track them in a way that you can't track companies that are still pre revenue and and that's the whole venture capital exercise is either an exercise in the law of large numbers or just spray and pray, which is how it turns out. And there are very few who do it, but I think that this space facilitates a much more disciplined way to attack venture capital. And again, as an allocator, I've seen just two firms who have been able to master that. One is a master at understanding the law of large numbers and how to put the statistics in your favor. The other one goes after these types of companies, as I say, that are revenue producing and being able to act more like incubators or not. So I think that that again, you know, for an allocator perspective, the idea to be able to participate in significant innovation and then also seeing unique circumstances of the individual companies that you can then use to your advantage and build out your portfolios in a more robust way. There's two really great opportunities associated with this space, Rich Sobel 13:02I think it's probably clear to everybody here, but you know, what we do is not pure and simple crypto, and what we're doing is not trading currencies and trading staking or tokens on the secondary market. That's a different business. There are people who are good at it. We don't think that that's nearly as compelling as investing in companies and protocols that are building applications and tools that leverage the infrastructure that's been built. And so those are what we're looking at. Are more application, asset, light businesses that don't require a lot of money until until you figure out if it's going to work. So the risk return on those types of venture early stage investments is much more interesting. Again, I'm not speaking just for us, but I'm speaking for a class of investors. There are relatively few early stage GPS doing this, and most of them don't have a three fund track record. So it's an emerging market. I spent 20 plus years of my life working in another emerging market. That's how I ended up here. I have kind of an appetite for risk and comfort working in new environments where the model is you really have to underwrite the people and understand their business model. If they can't succinctly tell you what their business model they probably haven't figured it out yet, and they might, but it's a much higher risk. So we're investing in what I call my partners. Don't really like this, but because I'm kind of an older guy in this team, I call it the App Store for web three. So you're basically thinking about the phone comes out, the infrastructure is in place. Now you want the tools that solve real problems, and those are coming. And just to put a little icing on the cake, if you look at the NVCA data in 2021 a lot of money was raised. It was a. Hyped market, and in the last couple of years, relatively little capital has been raised for what they broadly call crypto and digital asset venture. So on top of all the other things that have been putting pressure on companies and funds, the lack of new capital flowing in creates a very interesting dynamic for capital that becomes available. So I fundamentally think there's a combination of reasons going to make it quite interesting. But as Tim Draper said to a group here, when people say, How's it going with your early stage deals? He said it's like raising kids. It's going to take a long time till you really know. But we're proud about the way things are going. We like talking about the portfolio. That's the way of giving people a tangible idea about the kinds of things that are coming out of the ground that will change our lives and our kids lives before you really know it. Will Wolf 15:54Yeah, I like that last part you talked about. One of the things we think about is, or a phrase I like to use is, every fin tech startup today is a crypto company. Some of them just don't know it yet, because I think that is what the new features that we'll be able to push the envelope and provide new functionality are going to be built on, like we've already got the stripes, and these guys that have, like, milked everything out of the current like legacy financial system with t plus one settlement and stuff like that. And so to push the envelope, I think they're going to have to offer crypto services underneath. And that's what I'm excited about, is to see, you know, PayPal now is another example. They have their own stable coin, and they're trying to integrate more utility into their consumer app, which I think is a little more interesting than, like the visa Master Card stuff, because they're not really targeting consumers, but we're seeing it with PayPal. Stripe, you know, I mentioned earlier, just did a billion dollar cash acquisition of a stable Coin Company, and stripe is arguably the, you know, the expert of the traditional credit card and payment rails, and they understood the value of this new ecosystem that they were willing to pay up for it. So I think that speaks a lot. But I think we're going to see a lot of even just traditional fin techs offering new products that wouldn't be possible without crypto rails, and I don't think a lot of their users are going to need to know or care that they're using stable coins or blockchains underneath. It will just be transparent, and we'll be able to do much more than we can today. Mark Sanor 17:13So questions to this group as we talked about fin tech 2019 we were in Detroit, and the guy runs a swimming school, and he said, even swimming school, everybody's a fin tech company, because, yeah, you interact with a customer. So I guess there's so by definition, every company is a crypto company. Potentially. Vince got a question. It's Ben Narasin 17:41going to push back a little, I think, stable coins and powering and amazing things. Basically, it's an alternative rail with no real cost associated, compared to the existing stuff and remittances. But I've always bridled at the term web three. The web changed everything for everybody. I'd love any of you didn't tell me anything that web three has changed in a material way. There's speculative currencies, there's meme coins, also speculative. There's an enormous amount of speculative products. Stable coin, though, to me, feels like a totally separate thing, and fractionalized ownership of assets is interesting, but I could just as easily do that in Oracle server. You have to trust me, if you're going to buy a 16 of the Mona Lisa from me. So I'm still questing for I did one blockchain related investment in 2014 I've never done any sense. I just can't find the the there. There other than stable coin transfers. Mark Sanor 18:36I love it when we don't all agree. Rich Sobel 18:39First of all, since 2017 the kind of power of the technology of blockchain has improved about 1,000% so the things that you could do in 2014 is kind of very, very insignificant compared to what the technology can do today. Second of all is, everybody talks about this boom on AI and how great AI is, and how much capital is flowing in, how many new businesses are having an AI component to them. But for AI to really work, you need to have smart contracts and blockchain based tools to help these agents interact with each other, for agents to make payments to each other for these automatic things to work. Software driven by blockchain is a key determinant to a big part of its pulling it along. And actually, interestingly, William and Vanessa and my partners and I are invested in a company together, nap the AI, that sort of services that space social is another one of the spaces that is allowing decentralized use of content and information to give users more control and allow users to essentially retain more of the economic value. So in. Say 10 years models like Facebook will not be monopolizing, that those tools will be decentralized. So it's 20:09been 1,000% better since 2017 we're 10 years past that. Again, eight. Only where? Rich Sobel 20:17Okay, okay, listen, in the United States. I'm sorry, in the United States, the regulatory policy has been so hostile that they have essentially litigated and driven money and entrepreneurship away from this. So I think we're when you build a building, first you go down, and then it comes out of the ground. When you have a plant, first it goes down, you build the infrastructure, and then it comes out of the ground. So if we meet in a year or three, I think you'll be buying me lunch. Will Wolf 20:47So first off, I think it's a very good, good criticism. Oh, can I answer this one? Yeah, I think, I think it's a good criticism that that we get a lot, I think from a Western centric view, I think it's, it's fairly valid. Because I think, you know, for all the bad things I said earlier. Our financial systems work, you know, but I think there are those in, say, Venezuela or almost any African country, where they are just devouring stable coins us, dollar denominated stable coins, because their currencies are devaluing by 15% to the dollar, they can hold a stable coin just on their phone with internet connection, the government can't stop them from doing it, and they can get 8% yield in US dollar terms, while their currency goes down 15% a year. And that's literally saving people's lives. For a more anecdotal example, you know, there have been people. There was one, one girl, specifically that I know, did an interview, and she was able to escape Afghanistan with her family's wealth because she put it into Bitcoin and wrote down her 12 seed words where, you know, they couldn't find it when she left. So she could actually bring her wealth and, like, have a family somewhere else. So I think these things are happening, and it's, it's not Western centric, mainly the stable coin, which is that one was Bitcoin with the Afghanistan girl, but, yeah, sort Ben Narasin 21:59of like Charlie Munger argument the dollar is freely available all over the world, and there are many ways to hold it, but this is a pH I do like stable coin, as I led with, yeah, I think that's rational. I don't I think the dollar is not available 22:13to Speaker 6 22:16Zimbabwe. And my thing is, I'm with him to where I'm going to push back as well, especially on the decentralization aspect of it, because you have large institutional players who are who see it as a threat to their to existing business models, right, and are innovating in that space in order to maintain some type of central control over what happens in this area. So I'm kind of also hesitant on saying, oh, that's going to decentralize everything, and you're going to completely eliminate middle men. I think they're just going to transform into something where they have some some grasp over the transactions. Will Wolf 23:01I also think it's a valid point. I don't know specifically, if you're talking about banks, Mark Sanor 23:05can you disagree with somebody not joking? Will Wolf 23:07Well, that doesn't that doesn't mean that I agree with it. I think it's a valid point. It's true. That's true. But I think, you know, part of me, I like that, maybe the Trojan horse analogy. But if you've been following, like with the new administration, a bunch has come out. I don't know if you've heard the term operation choke point 2.0 you know, we had silver gate bank go under, and it's become clear, and basically factual, that it didn't really fail. The Fed forced them to shut down by stopping them from doing crypto business. And I think we've seen now that there are over 47 banks in the last two years in the US that wanted to offer crypto products proactively, but the FDIC, and the FDIC shut them down and didn't let them do that. So I think to say that they don't want these things, you know, I think maybe some of them don't understand that it may ultimately destroy their businesses very far down the road. And maybe I'm wrong and they won't. So that's where I get the Trojan horse example. But I think a lot of these businesses want to offer these, whether it's a Bitcoin product or a stable coin product, to their customers getting involved, because there is Speaker 6 24:06a risk to the existing Speaker 4 24:10business model, right? So they're hedging Exactly. So that kind of makes my Brian Neirby 24:13point slightly different, pivot on the conversation. So we have what the state of Utah, Wisconsin, I know there's another one in there that's Louisiana, or this their treasury secretaries, you know, backing a crypto reserve, right? So those are three. We know that Don Junior loves crypto. We know that senior loves crypto. We know that Bobby loves crypto. So we have some tail winds coming out of this new administration. You. So I'm a nerd. I love the blockchain from a tech standpoint, I love the utilization and elasticity of Bitcoin. In particular, I believe all roads lead to Bitcoin. You walk around Istanbul, you see i. Are tickers everywhere of what's happening within all the coins. What's it going to take for the US to get to that point? Bill Deuchler 25:12You raise an excellent point, because since, since we are the world reserve currency, and because our economy, arguably, is the most robust in the world. A lot of the advantages of digital don't aren't readily apparent to us, but I think it's, as will has pointed out, if you're at all outside the US, if you are definitely in in a third world country, the advantage of the decentralized currency is huge. It is the litter, literally, night and day. And so I, I hate to say that it would be a crisis that would cause that, you know, to all of a sudden the light bulb go on. But it could very well be, but we're in a very enviable situation. I think the opportunity for the US is to be able to take advantage of all the features that digital offers and be able to build it into the system. The one thing that I'll say, that I've been saying for a real long time, is that one does have to be careful about Central Bank digital currencies, because digital currencies are programmable money, and if a central bank issues it, number one, it's tied to the monetary policy of that central bank and the state authority that oversees it. The other thing is that they can, for better or for worse, direct or Yeah, or imp, thank you. How the currency is used, and it is so easy. You know, everybody says, oh, micro monetary policy. Wouldn't that be just terrific, because then we can target like certain areas of the economy where it needs to be spent, things like that. Think about your bank account. All of a sudden you have digital currency in there. The next morning, you wake up and you don't so digital central bank digital currencies, will compromise freedom. They will compromise privacy in ways that we have no idea other than that. So I think kind of that's great. It's the decentralization aspect of it that is so critical for a real successful Mark Sanor 27:21so look, before you know, it's 330 just Stephen Burke 27:23on that bill. Isn't the bank financial settlements pushing for such beneficial currencies? Yeah, Speaker 2 27:33yeah. Certainly the the operational characteristics you know, are good, but one Mark Sanor 27:38so every, every quarter we revisit this subject. So it's time to revisit it. I Will Wolf 27:44think, I think they are and I think they will happen elsewhere. I think they're very unlikely to happen in the United States, at the Federal Reserve. Because what people usually mean, I think, by a central bank digital currency is the retail, the end user, you and I would have accounts directly at the Fed on this system. It would get rid of the banks entirely, like JP Morgan Chase would be gone, right? Like, we don't need them anymore. You would just have accounts directly with the Fed, because, because, other than that, the dollar is a central bank digital currency already. I mean, 98% of the dollars are digital. They just have to flow through the retail bank. But only the only the banks can have accounts with the Fed, not you or I, and so the banks own the Fed, so they're not going to let the Fed do a central bank digital currency, because they don't want to kill themselves. So that's that's my take. Mark Sanor 28:28Okay, so there will be a break out soon, and you can hammer this these questions, and we'll come back and have a de brief, and we'll have a I'll be here again, but let's thank this panel for kicking off the fin tech, digital. Now I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. 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Consumer, Media, Travel Tech - 361Firm NY Tech Summit Feb. 25, 2025SUMMARY KEYWORDSimmersive entertainment, community building, AI potential, mental health, social isolation, technology impact, addiction treatment, digital media, fintech innovations, therapeutic applications, virtual reality, oxytocin release, social cohesion, AI-powered platforms, community healingSPEAKERS Chris Lawes, Peter Rafelson, Mark Sanor, Marcos Isaac, MJ Gottlieb, Speaker 1, Jeff ZawadskyMark Sanor 00:00We're going to have a little more fun. We're going to talk about media as it enters the tech world travel. We're going to talk about immersive entertainment, growing communities with MJ community. That's enough. That's I mean, to kick us off. I just do want to show that 361 is actually finally getting with the times. You don't, you won't, you will soon, at some point, access this of how you hopefully you still need me as a human at some point or my teams. But we're going to get mark out of the way in 2025, with that. That's the That's the theme. So you'll see, actually, this is a good example. This is the domes. You can see. You can when you come on here, you will see what it is we're talking about, or you can see what kind of deal it is, what they're solving for here we pitched in Miami. You can ask questions of it. You can provide insights and all these things. So I say that to that's where we're heading our own. We're trying to move with the zeitgeist. But let's is there you got it. So since you've got it, why don't you share an insight as technology? That's a great picture, right there? Really exciting, how technology is scaring and exciting your worlds? MJ Gottlieb 01:43Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the things that scares the hell out of me is the ability for technology. So technology has the ability to make the world a better place, or it has the ability to destroy and so it depends upon, you know, whose hands you put it in, you know, and what you're doing, you know, I have a community of about 300,000 members in sobriety and addiction, and with the whole goal of bringing people together and healing, right? And we had some amazing conversations on AI and how AI is making the world a better place. And my first question is, okay, in the wrong hands, how can AI hurt? So it's the same conversation here. So that's what scares me. What excites me is text ability to bring communities together. I don't know if you guys remember, there's this great documentary, I think it's called Blue Zones, and they talked about how people could live Centurions past 100 years old. And what is it about, you know, and you looked and in a lot of the they're eating worse and all this. And it's community. And so what excites me is that, the fact that when you bring affinity groups together and can create community, people live longer. And so if the community is the answer to so many problems, from health to healing, then we need to start leaning in to more community and affinity based tech. So that's what scares me. That's what excites me. Chris Lawes 03:17Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm definitely on the double edge sword side of this. So my world is very much immersive technology and media and the domes, but also holograms and, you know, these different kind of virtual reality experiences. And the end result of all that is basically making making content experiences and gaming experiences that trick the brain more and more effectively into being realistic and into being real, which is very powerful and very positive for teaching and training or for social cohesion and building, you know, trust and intimacy relationships and can be very powerful for for therapeutic applications, but also obviously it could be used to, you know, we joke around in the immersive industry about like horror films that you know you really don't want to make, like the ring or these kinds of, like classic, you know, mall horror movies for like VR headsets and domes, because it the technology is to the point where you can actually, like, Scar someone You know, and truly traumatize them, which, you know, shows the power of the medium, but obviously shows how, you know, dangerous it is. And same thing with AI, you can make, you know, all these new technologies can make it so realistic and so convincing and so engaging that you know, you have to really keep track of your mind, and, you know, pay attention to what you're doing. So unfortunately, I think that that's going to happen for better or for worse. And so companies that come in need to be good stewards of that technology, and we make sure we use it for good purpose. Mark Sanor 04:53So we have a Zoomer and Peter, do you want to introduce yourself? Peter Rafelson 05:05Thanks, guys, yeah, so I spent my entire career at the cross roads of media and tech and finance. I come from three generations of Hollywood entertainment, but I got deeply into copyright and production. I've written 30 number one songs, including open your heart from Madonna. But what happened was I started managing all of my own copyrights and rights, and eventually I had to learn how to administrate and my sense and do all the legal work. Well, technology really helped me to create a platform which allows the more stringent corporations to accept the proof of title, all of the regulations and restrictions that large companies have, and really fin tech innovations that have driven so much advancement. What does this matter to investors? It's crucial to understand that for the first time, the scaling of digital media is is everywhere, right? Whether it's just on a brand or raising money, it offers an opportunity to invest in ways that never existed before. I'll give you a great example in in creating large scale projects like films and television IP, it was hard for people to invest in in smaller participation. Now with tokens and NFT and funding and group funding and crowd sourcing of crypto, those fractionalized ownerships of these of these titles can really include many more cross border, international, global investments and the early adopters, the ones who get in earliest, are going to really benefit them. I'm Mark Sanor 07:17going to call another audible. I'm going to bring music community together. This is to this was the you can see the screen. This was our mental health. Oh, I MJ Gottlieb 07:34don't think there's anybody that I've met who hasn't had a friend a family member Mark Sanor 07:39who just we have shape. I'll just show this real quick. I believe it. I'm not as adept at this. Need to be. But this was the lead singer of corn, right? The guitarist, yeah, who basically went into places. People that were that were just drugs couldn't help. Therapists couldn't help. You know what helped music, use Speaker 1 08:04and treatment has grown and changed, as you can imagine the early days of a a you might see in them. So Mark Sanor 08:10immersive entertainment, community and what you do this is these are just some common themes. Now, if we could just all this, do this on an airplane. Now, tell us what you're doing with technology. Marcos Isaac 08:24Well, if you want to get that technical on the health side, I would say that there are two things that are great for you that make your life better. One is having more serotonin in your body and more oxytocin. If you want to get a little bit technical, as opposed to dopamine, Mark Sanor 08:43play more bracket sports, ping pong? Yeah, Marcos Isaac 08:46absolutely. That's why I decided to do more tennis than golf, because it's great for your brains and for your body. But the reason I'm trying what I'm trying to say when I relate this to travel, for example, people are spending a lot of time having these experiences. Instead of traveling on social media and learning everything about everything, my son was traveling with me. He wanted to go to Rome once last year, and I took him, and he was I've seen it all. I knew it all. There was no excitement anymore, because he had seen everything in with the social media. However, that's on one side, and what the way I look at is that you're getting a lot of dopamine, if you want to call it that way, from the social media looking at it, you're getting a kick out of out of that he enjoyed, for example, talking to kids about what he was experiencing. But at the same time, the thing that worries me is that we lose the passion for travel, to get curious and to get to experience things, and that is what helps mental health. Among other things, it's really positive to for you to have that curiosity on that side. That's what scares me the most. What Mark Sanor 09:53that was pretty elegant. Well done there. Marcos Isaac 09:58What? What I be Well, I think it could be great if we have aI with us in every day. We will have less time to work, but hopefully we will have more time to travel. So that could be a positive. So that's my hope. MJ Gottlieb 10:14Yeah, I was gonna say, and that Wes was talking about oxytocin and the release of the chemicals and one of the brands we're working with, because we partner with a number of sobriety and wellness brands. We were talking at this company called Brain tap, which is the top brain fitness app in the world. And I was talking to the founder, guess what we're trying to do, and what people are trying to do is, how do we how do we actually trigger the very chemicals that were that we needed when we were addicted to drugs, right? And just to be clear, 300 million people suffering from alcohol use disorder and 38% of adult Americans, so we're not talking about a small amount of people, and it's getting much worse. And so if we could figure out ways to trigger those same chemicals that oxytocin or trigger the parasympathetic nervous system, Mark Sanor 11:07then we could literally on what's that? How's that going? Unbelievable. So MJ Gottlieb 11:10this, this company brain tap, and these anxiety wearables and all these companies that we're bringing into the lucid marketplace is showing how we can literally hack and get in to fire those same com think about when you go and exercise and you don't want to exercise, and you're you're crawling into the gym, and you feel horrible, and then after you're out of there, you feel like a million dollars. Peter, Mark Sanor 11:33I just saw Peter's hand up, Peter, you want to make a comment. Peter Rafelson 11:36You know? I agree with what everybody is saying. I think that the other aspect to art, entertainment, technology, music, is the fact that this is a great and very common way to build bridges and community. And God knows that the mental health isolation is is, you know, the enemy. So I found that I build the platform Digi ramp, which is the digital rights and asset management platform. However, the greatest benefit that it offers to so many people that are being more and more isolated through technology is the ability to connect, communicate and collaborate, and that too, I think, also really supports the health and the benefits of what you speak. Mark Sanor 12:30Well, maybe I'm going to bring it back to you, Chris. Now we're going to have 100 cities with your domes right the way. We can connect in ways. You one of your first investors who just wired you money on Friday or Thursday, part of his vision of what you're doing, right? Can you speak to that aspect? Chris Lawes 12:48Yeah, I'm just distracted thinking about a company I met when I was at abundance 360 called Apollo, where they make Sano acoustic frequency transmitters. You can either wear them or even put them into the floor panels of a room, and they create a subtle frequency that is almost like a drug or alcohol, like on a very subtle level, but it puts you into a more social kind of a state. And obviously, with the dome, we want to do a similar thing, get everyone out of their houses where they're addicted to their socially isolating devices, and get them into a communal, physical environment with their fellow man, and have a good time and use music and visuals and other kinds of vibrations to, you know, support the brain and support the body, to have therapeutic positive experiences, but also to have, just on a heart level, on a you know, greater than frequency level, social level, human intimacy and connections. Mark Sanor 13:42Do you need an Do you need an airline to take you to all those dumps? I MJ Gottlieb 13:45was gonna say, what this gentleman said is 100% correct. Peter. Peter, the opposite of addiction is connection. And so when you you know that in my space, someone comes in and they're like, You don't understand, you don't understand how I'm feeling. And then you come into a community and understands, and you're like, Wow, you get it. And that's everything. And so if we can bring communities together, like everybody here on this panel is doing, that's it said that there's this saying those amongs us, no explanation is necessary. Those not amongst us, no explanation is possible. And so when you bring these affinity groups together and people who share this common bond, magic happens well, and Mark Sanor 14:27I think, and by the way, that's the magic that happens in the round tables at the end of this conference. Sorry, Chris Lawes 14:36yes, I love this event, and I've had some wonderful times meeting more of this community. And you know, there's, like, the pickle ball stuff and the networking and dinners and things, but not everyone actually has those experiences in their life. And you know, fortunately and unfortunately, COVID created, like a huge global experiment on the effect of social isolation and. But a lot of people hypothesize that we would be able to, you know, stop driving our cars and commuting so much and just work from our homes. And, you know, go to virtual concerts from our homes, and like a virtual, you know, concert venue, wearing headsets and all these things. And this would all be sort of the way of the future. And we, you know, we gave that the college try, so to speak, during during COVID, and the results were quite demonstrably bad. And I think a lot of interesting data came out of that, actually, that especially certain types of people really require community and social interaction for their mental health. And I'm glad to see that on all levels, that's being really embraced as like, not just a sort of fun bonus part of life, but really an essential part. Mark Sanor 15:44Yeah, I don't know if that brings me back. I don't know if Jeff reson, because during COVID, I experience Jeff. Can you? Can you speak to this? Because my, my pre teen sons, and I don't know if you like, we were moving around 10, like, an hour ago, so important for boys to move around. You know what they did during COVID? To all these boys? They were stuck in front of a computer, and it really just destroyed kids at that age. But that's what Jeff you want to speak to, what you you you do? Jeff zawatsky, that you that's you do 16:24you want to do the little Yeah? Comment Mark Sanor 16:26quickly, yep, please. Jeff Zawadsky 16:30I mean, we were Hello to everyone, so I can't be there. I've been Bay area, but we basically, we're building the AI power platform for families with struggling young people, teen and, you know, as the panel was talking about, I mean, how our community, he will tremendous. And to your point, I mean, since COVID, you've had a 6% increase in mental health issues for young people. Get a lot of feedback. Yeah, of Mark Sanor 17:03feedback. We hear you. It's probably my, my fault. I was had my mic on. Keep going. Jeff Zawadsky 17:09I mean, it's kind of the point where 37 kids see they're not sure if they have a single friend, right? And that isolation is tremendously costly. And right now. You know our mental health system is basically broken. I mean, you know, we haven't really added any modalities. Tele therapy has been helpful in some cases, but you really haven't added any scope. We've got a tremendous provider yet, depending on whose numbers you believe, you know, we need a million to 5 million more therapists. Our approach actually, to doing this, having those experience of having child has gone through this part of the fall, done that clinical partners to work in the field is really about community, and we're using AI to power that community so that we actually have, we partner with section AI founder of LinkedIn, three hop and AI company, it was designed specifically for EQ, not just IQ, so it was trained by therapists and psychiatrists, and we had one of the first API is more than 12,000 organizations waiting on the list, But the CEO is one of my advisor board members, so we've got first access to them. And what we're doing is the basic finding, and the premise of what we found is the way we can attack and fix the mental health crisis in this country is really through the lived experience of other families, not through and we just soft launched last summer, and we were doing it through really going communities. But what we've done in partnering with inflection is we can actually use the AI agent to capture and leverage all the experiences and all of all the families that are out there to really create the sort of career health agent, particularly we're starting with family systems. There's other loads of other applications, from care giving to, you know, we have relationships with the VA and everything else and addiction, but that's where we're starting. That's power with experience. So we're really creating something that sort of, you know, turn the problem on the head, and you get, you know, at any given time, 25 million American families struggling with a young person. So, and the big hidden asset that went out there, because all the parents who are silent dealing with this, you know, reinventing the wheel of care, as I like to say all the time. So using our AI platform, AI power platform, I'll say, we can capture that information and create better treatments, earlier identifications, fewer Eli cost, kind of the whole thing. So in a nutshell, I absolutely agree with what's being said here. In fact, the folks talk about music got some friends who are doing music therapy at that actually is incredibly impactful, but to that point where, so we're sort of building the community. For nobody wants to talk about the team struggling stigma, no, no Mark Sanor 20:03one wants, no one wants to talk about addictions either, right? MJ Gottlieb 20:07I mean, if you look at So, if you look at the cost of addiction, it's $1.45 trillion it actually surpassed it, right? And that's in lost productivity and societal harm. And so what can we do on the preventative side? And so like we created technology called Sam inside of lucid, which stands for sobriety addiction mentor, which gives a little daily check in each day, and walks that person with 365 assignments throughout the year, which we're now laying heavily AI on top of it, because it's one thing to get sober and it's another thing to stay sober. And so there's these sickness of addiction. Yeah, well, Mark Sanor 20:48but maybe this is what I love about our global community. You guys need to connect your communities. Because as my son, who went to a wilderness you know, lot of those kids, the older ones, all facing had that addictions. This was their part of their detox, MJ Gottlieb 21:06absolutely, absolutely and like equine therapy and all the so if you think about everybody that's talked about here, from music and community and all different types of communities, right, and how we're able to get together. I mean, I think that the only answer is to be inclusive and combine, as you say, because in this case, we're a strength of numbers, because we're being outnumbered now. Mark Sanor 21:33So I think, I think that's Jeff Zawadsky 21:35exactly right. I mean, you know, we, we've partnered with, you know, some of the telethermal Health System Georgetown. And because you need to get those numbers, the cold start issues with any community, and it gives you impactful and powerful answers, right? Mark Sanor 21:57So what I like, what I like is this was the first of our is having, you know, fall out community. This was the first event. This is the first event that's okay. This is the first it Peter Rafelson 22:14was the Hollywood ambassador to Korea. I went over and visited them in the early hours to influence the innovation of k pop, if we follow the best Example of congregation and community, which is church. Mark Sanor 22:39Hello, you and I, you want to Peter Rafelson 22:47mute churches that were were created early on, pull together millions and millions of members, cross border, cross country, real time they were they honest technology and to see the power of creating that audience and that community. I mean, that's why I'm thinking exactly what you said, Mark, which is even the super the dome technology, the AI technology, the mental health, creating communities, creates congregation, creates commerce. Mark Sanor 23:25You know what we need, Peter. Peter. Can you hear me? Yeah, I need a song. I need you to write a song that unites this initiative. Can you do that? You can get okay. We may not get Gaga or Madonna to sing it, but we'll, we will sing it all together. MJ Gottlieb 23:53There you go. Good. Well, I will say something. So addiction doesn't discriminate, but access to care does. So what's happening in this conversation with regard to community is, you take these 300 million people that I'm talking about, and the other 38 you know, percent, you know, in aggregate, over 500 million people struggling. You get them to you build a platform, you get them together in one place to heal. It doesn't cost any money, right? And so if you can really see the power of community and our ability to join those communities and get people to heal. You flip that whole model of waiting for people to blow up and get sick and then try to treat them, and that's where that 1.4 5 trillion comes in. And so this is why the importance of this conversation with everyone on this panel, you know how communities heal. Mark Sanor 24:39So we're going to transition. That's so Jeff Zawadsky 24:42correct. I mean, more than 50% of all US counties don't have a single therapist. Only 3% of therapists in our country are African American. Less than 5% of American therapists speak Spanish, right? And with our you know, health care system, whole community. Things are shut out from camp, so being able to leverage community, get to families after that knowledge, share, that knowledge can have an impact identified situations earlier is really the only way we have fixed this, given the structural problems going Mark Sanor 25:16forward. So we have to leave it at that for this panel. And thank you everyone. We'll be doing a break out soon with all of you, I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. 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Health, Ag and Ed Tech Panel -...ech Summit (Feb. 25, 2025) (1)Sat, Mar 01, 2025 10:54PM • 19:43SUMMARY KEYWORDSHealthcare innovation, AI solutions, value-based care, healthcare institutions, national emergency, AI convenience, agriculture technology, carbon credits, nutritional content, small-scale farming, food security, vertical farming, healthcare incentives, virtual drug trials, surgical bots.SPEAKERSRich Sobel, Speaker 5, Mark Sanor, Speaker 3, Robin Blackstone, Rashmi Joshi, Alex Zhuk, Kris Wood Mark Sanor 00:00Roshni, Chris, come up quickly, introductions and insights, and then we go to what scares it excites you. Thank you guys. So why don't you start? Actually, Chris hasn't spoken yet. Surprisingly. Kris Wood 00:20Okay, Hi, I'm Chris Wood. Very quickly, I am with a company called Three BP partners. We are investors, technologists and operators that effectively now in health care, rather than sell products and services, rather than sell solutions, we're selling what we think the health care system really needs, which are outcomes and cash so we can you're selling cash. We're selling cash. Okay, we're selling cash. How you doing that? We are we are basically partnering with the health care institutions, taking risks with them, operating the business, businesses we're creating with them and sharing the financial and outcome rewards with them. So we're not a traditional vendor saying, Let us sell you something. It's let us invest in something. You give us your data, you give us your brand, you give us your distribution. We will create products that are incremental to you, to bridge you to value based care and outcome based care. What scares me is, look, I don't need to go into how messed up our health care system is, right? We all know that this country is investing twice as much as anyone else per person in health care, and we're getting the least value for our money. That that is also trend or coming down to our health care institutions. McKinsey has published reports saying our health care institutions are two to 300 basis points under water in terms of the difference between what returns they're getting from payers, the growth in that versus the growth in inflation and and they're $500 million behind in the last three years in terms of the discrepancy in payments, right? So their margins are single digits. They're getting lower. Our health care systems are in trouble. And, you know, we're still fatter and less healthy than everyone else. I think this is a national emergency. I think we can wind up, or we don't, certainly don't want to end up as a nation of wall es, right? If you remember the movie where, you know, we're just a bunch of puffy, non thinking individuals who, you know we're living on machines, basically because we can't take care of ourselves. I think this is a national emergency. What excites me is that always within massive problems becomes massive opportunities, right? The technology is here. AI is here. Solutions exist. Solutions themselves are not the answer. They're part of the solution. Technology is not the answer, they're part of the solution. But how the entire business model of health care really needs to be rethought. The incentives need to be rethought. But if you can help figure that out, I think that's a massive opportunity. Who wants to go? I think she should. Ladies. Ladies second, Rashmi Joshi 03:16thank you. First of all, Mark, nice to be here with all of you. My name is rash me, Joshi. I'm the founder and CEO of Asha AI, and I'm a serial entrepreneur. So I've been building businesses since I was 16 years old, working currently on company five. My third is founder, CEO. Been very fortunate to have had a couple of exits along the way, and I also advise a small number of family offices and funds on specifically health care, AI and impact investments, which I personally believe should be every investment that we make, especially in this room. Mark Sanor 03:49What was the 16 year old business when you were 16? It Rashmi Joshi 03:52was a dance company. So I grew up singing, dancing, acting and modeling. So I performed all over the place, and had a great time doing it. What scares me most is that a lot of the innovation that's happening now, thanks to AI, is all based on making our lives more comfortable and more convenient, and there hasn't been a tremendous, tremendous amount of thought going into figuring out what happens when we make our lives too convenient. What do we actually do when we're not forced to innovate? And that scares me, because it could mean the breakdown of our innovation fabric as a society. I think most of us as innovators on this panel too. We build things out of necessity, and so when we don't have that neces necessity driving us to ask questions, then how do we actually create new innovations that are leaps and bounds ahead of the way that we live now? And what inspires us? Because very easily we could say, you know, most people who are. Are retired, experience a huge decline in terms of their health, in terms of their well being, in terms of their mental health, they're less likely to reach out to their communities and connect with people. So we could go in that direction if we're not careful about how we decide to respond to this influx of AI tech, but we could also go in the opposite direction and say, Hey, we're going to take this as an opportunity to focus our energies, our efforts, our time, on building something that's truly leaps and bounds forward. So that scares me, but I'm also optimistic, as we probably all are in this room, and I hope that it inspires more of us to build more community, to have more conversations like this, and to start building more innovative solutions to bigger problems than the ones we're experiencing now. Mark Sanor 05:56So I guess you've already answered that question, Alex in a different way, or unless you have any additional thoughts. I mean, do Alex Zhuk 06:03you want me to give instruction of the company and how it relates to agriculture? Yeah, sure, yeah. I mean, very quickly. Once again, Alex, great to be here, founder of a company that use satellites and AI models to map the footprint that farmers are having on the environment. Fundamentally, it has two purposes. One is to measure the agriculture sector's contribution to climate change and how we can solve it. But two and where we see the world heading is actually being able to measure the carbon the farmers are sequestering by adopting climate positive practices in the form of carbon credits, and that is important, especially when you zoom out and consider all farmers. Mark Sanor 06:49So in doing this, what surprised you the most in your journey? Sure, Speaker 3 06:54agriculture specifically, but I imagine there are other sectors, and Mark Sanor 06:59by the way, you raise like $18 million yeah, so Bloomberg and Alex Zhuk 07:04Bloomberg Microsoft, and then the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore for various teach reasons, and the world operation on multiple continents. What surprised me about agriculture is one the tradition inherent in the industry. You know, these farmers have been doing things their own way for generations. It's family business. You know, you need to come in humble and not just, you know, be with typical Silicon Valley, you know, shaker and disrupt her, because this is, you know, not just their livelihood, but their land and their legacy. And that has consequences, both in terms of how you work with the farmer community, but also fundamentally speed of scale, you can just come in and expect to grow like a hockey stick, because cycles are quite literally annual. You plant, you try, you come back in Europe, you reassess. So I would say not to bore anybody else more, I would say the biggest surprise was the Jux disposition between the Silicon Valley philosophy of building a start up and the reality of how the agriculture sector operates. Mark Sanor 08:14Makes sense. So anyone else have any questions in the health, AG, education sectors for our panel, can Robin Blackstone 08:30you use your tech? Thanks. Hi, Rob and Blackstone. Can you use your technology to determine nutritional value in the foods that you're evaluating? Because, you know, right now, there's a big discussion around Ultra process, foods and and the actual value, to your point that we're getting out of it, if you could somehow pair that, that might be actually extremely valuable to people. So Alex Zhuk 08:52you mentioned that because we actually started out doing that. So the you know, when you look at satellites all around us, the data can be used for whatever purpose you want, because ultimately, we're doing is we're understanding the chemical composition of the soil and the plants that cover it. So we originally started out by with the idea of understanding the nutritional complexity the soil and the plants, and then using that to understand where exactly do you want to spare your nitrogen, or exactly do you want to apply your other fertilizer? The challenge came in terms in terms of commercialization, when, because we weren't bringing new money to farmers, whereas of carbon credits, you're laying a new income stream on top of what they're already getting, which is yield. And unfortunately, the system today pays farmers only for the yield, nothing into account the health aspect of the food or the soil, and they operate on very similar margins, so they're very risk averse to try and compute new things. But to answer your question In short, you know, as we see the trends in terms. Us becoming much more interested in what goes into our bodies. Yes, technology can support us being able to provide more nutritionally Whole Foods. I actually Speaker 5 10:09have a question about that as well. You always have the hard questions. Rashmi Joshi 10:15So I actually agree with you that we're living in one of the biggest genocides of our time right now, and we don't really even know it. Most of us in this room are consuming on a daily basis 1000s of ingredients that are illegal in most European countries, and there's no way to avoid them. So to follow up on what you just said is it, are you actually able to determine the nutritional content of the actual produce that's being grown, not the soil, but the produce. And the question to follow up on that is, when you have companies like Monsanto that have IP on specific seeds, and you have neighboring farms that are not using those seeds, but as we all know, seeds disperse naturally. So if you are a farmer that's not using that specific type of crop and Monsanto seeds gets into your lot, they can actually sue you for using their products without explicitly paying for them, which is how they've squashed millions of small scale farmers to date. So what are you doing to protect small scale farming, and are you actually able to detect nutritional content of produce? IAlex Zhuk 11:22produce. Great questions. Great questions. I'll start with the first one, which is, can we quantify and measure the nutritional content produce? We measure the application and the growth of the plants, so not just oil, but also the leaf canopy, but a lot of the nutritional content actually is downstream. How you process it? What do you mix it with, etc, etc. So we can help with that, but we're not going to be the entire answer in terms of helping small hoard farmers, this is something that I'm particularly passionate about, but it is a harder technical challenge, and what I mean by that is, using satellites. One of the magical things about it is that if you can measure carbon in a big farm in Iowa or Australia, you can measure carbon on a farm in Ethiopia, for example. And given that a lot of the countries in the Global South as we term it, have skipped over the land lines and are all digitized with cell phones. There's a digital path to where you can measure the amount of footprint of somebody's small quarter farm and then pay them for that impact, if the proper system is to centralize that. Do we see that a skill today? No, but my hope is that we're going to get there soon, around the winter. Rich Sobel 12:43Okay, I have a question. So we're looking at this today, and maybe just over the hill, maybe looking back a little bit. But you know, there's so much technology that's going on, and there's so many problems in food security, we're familiar Eddie and I with vertical farming and indoor farming, and now we're going to have a problem with people coming in and being seasonal workers. Just one small example of what might be resolved if you could figure out other models using technology to feed the planet and to do it with less microbes and plastics, if you can do it in a controlled environment. This maybe applies to health tech as well. Where do you think we are in the percentage utilization of technology compared to the technology that's reasonably available? And how long do you think it's going to take before we see that sort of tipping point where these problems are really being solved, not just on the margin, but in a material way. Kris Wood 13:50Well, look, I'll speak to at least the health tech side of that, and I think a lot of things you were saying about food and, AG, it's very similar, which is, there's a misalignment right now between incentives and outcomes, right? Whether, whether it's are you incentive for the amount of food you make or for the nutritional quality of the food you make? Are you incented for keeping people healthy or you incented by the amount of procedures that you do on sick people? We all say we want one thing, right, but people are paid by the other, right? And I had a mentor decades ago who used to tell me, lead, lead somebody by their w2 and their hearts and minds follow, right? So, and that's that's fair. So until you align those incentives, it is going to be difficult. I look, I can speak to health, I can't speak to AG, there is a lot of technology there. I think one of the challenges, at least in health care, is you have entrenched institutions who are motivated economic ly by certain. Regulatory frameworks and and they're slow to act. And so getting those things done at scale right now, until you change the business model, is very difficult, right? That's why we said we're trying to change the business model. We're selling outcomes and we're selling cash. We're not we're not trying to just sell you technology, because guess what? Mr. Hospital, you don the money to pay for it anyway, right? So I think you really have to look fundamentally at the incentive structure and the business structure to really make until that change becomes really prevalent. I Rashmi Joshi 15:34think it's going to take too fucking long to change our policy. So I've given up on that. And as an innovator, I focus on, what can I change, and how can I actually spearhead innovation in such a fashion that it forces the health care system to change, and we're experiencing that as we speak. So with ASHA, my company not to go on too much and give you guys a pitch, but I built Asha after my grandma went through cancer as a tool that would help elderly folks, those with disabilities, people who are bed ridden or going through cognitive decline, to have a tool that they can just chat with that's going to help them to stay on top of care. And since then, it's evolved into a platform where now different kinds of health care organizations are approaching us, asking to leverage our technology in ways that we had never conceived of. One example of that is the head of clinical innovation at memorial stone Kettering approached me and said, rash me, have you thought about using Asha to help us run virtual drug trials? Because we've been looking for a tool like this for the last 10 to 15 years. We've tried building it ourselves, and it hasn't worked. And imagine if you are, you know, stage four pancreatic cancer. You're sitting at home and you're thinking yourself, well, I've just been through this intense treatment. There's no way I can participate in this amazing research study that I found on the opposite side of the world, in New York, when I'm based in India and afford flying there, in and out and staying there every few weeks, every few months, to report my outcomes. Well now actually, you can do that through Asha without getting off your couch, so having the ability to participate in potentially life saving clinical research from any part of the world, no matter who you are, what kind of state you have in terms of your health, is such a massive leap forward, and it's something that is actually very aligned with incentives across the board, with the clinicians who are responsible for managing your care with the pharma company, who is looking for greater insights on how patients are responding to their medications, and it's also much easier for family care givers and patients. So I think if you're driving any kind of a systemic change, you have to be bullish about it, and you have to find ways to align incentives, rather than waiting for the policy to catch up to you. And I also think that no one's asked this question yet, but I think it's an important and valid one, which is, how is AI going to change health care? I think eventually we'll start seeing care being delivered at home again, we'll start having things like even routine surgeries being done at home, because you'll have surgical bots that could easily come to your home. You have a greater chance of recovery. Because I think it's crazy that we send all sick people into this great little place called a hospital or clinic where you're already immunocompromised and you're spending time with other sick people, your likelihood of getting sick from just going to the hospital is actually much higher, right? OrMark Sanor 18:49sometimes you're like my father, you don't even want the care that he needs because he doesn't want to go there exactly, exactly speaking of cared self care. I'm going to make an audible. You may not like sure that we're going to take a break right now. I put the raw I put, I stack this up with lots of panels and didn't put a break in. So I'm going to take some time from this panel and the next one, a little bit. Just get some movement and have continue this discussion and your break and come back at 305, movement is good. All right, take a break. I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest
Energy and Industrials Tech Pa...s NY Tech Summit Feb25, 2025Sat, Mar 01, 2025 10:53PM • 26:59SUMMARY KEYWORDSAutomotive industry, automation, manufacturing jobs, human error, North American trade, energy transition, clean tech, renewable energy, low carbon gasoline, sustainable aviation fuel, methanol, nuclear power, electrical grid, AI in education, family offices.SPEAKERSAlex Zhuk, Eddy van der Paardt, Carl Pro, Matthew Friedman, Brian Neirby, Mark Sanor, Greg Licciardi Mark Sanor 00:00Now we're gonna second to last. Matthew's already on. He's transforming in the automotive industry. I've asked Eddie someone find Eddie Carl, so Industrial Tech, energy tech, Eddie ready. Always, always. I love that. We're gonna play ping pong. We're gonna put on a demo right now. Eddie was amazing. And I have to, like, say i We've yet to lose a match, and last night was just but like in life us, most important thing you can do is choose your partner. And I got Eddie. So why? Since you're on Zoom, Matthew, tell us how technology is transforming the automotive industry, if you could. And then we'll go on to the others, Matthew Friedman 01:02yeah, so, I mean, I'm a living, breathing example. With the work force becoming increasingly transient and particularly easy in manufacturing jobs, it's becoming very difficult to offer a very reasonable hourly wage and good benefit to get people that come in and want to establish a career in manufacturing. So automation is becoming all that much more important, not just from the you know, operational side, but from a quality and in Section side of things. So the visual in session component is critical. We are being not just asked, but effectively mandated, to invest more and more in capital so that there's as little human interaction with our process as possible, because as much individual human interaction as there is that still needs whatever minuscule percent of human error in place. And all you're doing is putting in 100% 200% 300% inspection to assure that bad parts are not getting out. It really doesn't make a difference, because especially with the important and huge critical parts that we're manufacturing, if there's one part that gets out, even if it's one part in a million, it creates a heck of a stir. So what I would say technology for us is finding a way to not just better design and engineer parts up front, but it's more derived at the process themselves. How can we eliminate as much of the human element out of the process? Mark Sanor 02:39So that begs lots of questions, but one of which, what about your competitors? What are you seeing on the competitive landscape and Matthew Friedman 02:45technology? So it's pretty much all the same. I mean, every time we go to a company to help provide us with a potential automation solution, we find out that our competitors on the same programs have already contacted us. So it's all the same. I mean, you know, the other thing that bears mentioning is that with what's going on, kind of, within the North American trade supply chain, is that other companies had gone down to Mexico to try and rely a little bit more upon the labor side of things, both from a pricing and you know, your standard hourly worker in Mexico tended to have a much better work ethic, tended to care a lot more about their job and take pride in their job and be more careful with with the, you know, the actions that are being contemplated by the current administration that bringing a big pressure in a lot of those companies that have moved down to next door are now looking to be short back Mark Sanor 03:44to the US. So who's providing the technology for you? You're talking about? Matthew Friedman 03:49We've got probably, you know, 10 to 15 different vendors in the Midwest. We're based here in Cleveland, Ohio. There's a number of companies here in Ohio. They're doing that. We have a number of companies in Michigan that are critical for that. The big impact on us we feel in very sophisticated, you know, heavy gage, very highly engineered products. When you see the Super Bowl commercial GM pick up that's pulling a space shut all up a rocky cliff, those are our parts that are very carefully designed to do that. But really, right now, the only company that's capable of doing that is a Canadian coup bill, and as a result of the contemplated tariffs that are going on right now, we're looking for alternative sources in the US to be able to provide that capability. We get to find it even, by the way, for this company's US based and Ohio based operations, just that are not equipped to do the same level of process. Mark Sanor 04:48Gotcha, maybe I'll turn it over to you. Ed, bigger picture, because you've been looking at this whole landscape. So yeah, Eddy van der Paardt 04:57maybe the own button. First of all, congratulations to Matt So, so just full circle, we visited his plant, I think, four years ago, and at the time, it was half the size and double the trouble. So, so you've come a long way, my friend and I wish you all the best. Is really interesting to see the company at the time, and it's really amazing to see how you've grown, how you've managed to escape all the problems and come out much better at agile and now on the way to become a massive success. Mark Sanor 05:31But unlike you, Eddie, he was my partner in pick up ball, and we couldn't beat Barbara, right? She's our champion over there, pickleball, silent Eddy van der Paardt 05:39kill her. Mark Sanor 05:41She did not cheat. She picked a better partner, apparently, better athlete. Eddy van der Paardt 05:45I think, I think she's a life long athlete, and we just pretend to Mark Sanor 05:49be one. That's over to you. Eddie, Eddy van der Paardt 05:54so what do you want me to talk about? Mark, Mark Sanor 05:58this is energy and Industrial Tech. This is what you live for, yeah. So I want an instance, an insight, or what scares it excites you, or both? Yeah. Eddy van der Paardt 06:07So, so here there's a couple what scares me in terms of, and let me first do, to do a two second background thing. So I'm sort of aware two hats with one hat I'm investing across the across the value chain, across the asset classes for a family office. And we're sort of agnostic the other hat, which is more relevant hat, is the the hat where we invest in, essentially clean tech, agri tech, and energy transition. And so in that space, we invest, typically in early stage break through technologies that could meaningfully contribute to the decarbonization of the world. And that's a super exciting arena for a number of reasons. One this will, this is not a one and done problem. This, unfortunately will for the next several decades at a minimum, before the so called AI solves all our problems, we we will have to sort of cope with the consequences of climate change, whether we believe it or not, and and have to mitigate and adapt. And in terms of energy, we have to create significantly more energy rather than less, because the way we set up, our world increasingly demands more energy and and that more energy, hopefully can be drawn from mostly renewable resources. We've come a long way, and that's the part where stuff excites me. There's a very significant percentage of that energy already in wind and solar who are now mature, respected, sort of EBITDA positive technologies. But as a venture investor, I'm not investing in these because they deliver sort of, you know, mid, low digit return. So that's not very interesting to me. So we, we are particularly interested in investing in sort of local carbon alternatives for technologies that are up and coming. So for example, low carbon gasoline, we know EVs are eventually, hopefully, what's, what saves our transport needs. But only 3% of the world is, is EV and over the next 25 years, it's a massive curve to climb, and therefore, there always be need for, you know, internal combustible engine cars. Luckily, otherwise, Matt will be out of a business park. Mark Sanor 08:39He he can, he can build Eddy van der Paardt 08:43for so, so low Mark Sanor 08:46carb fuel company going, Eddy van der Paardt 08:50yeah, so So with 361 or as a result of an introduction from 361 we invested in a company called Naro, which had two massive pivots, one, from low carbon gasoline to soft sustainable aviation fuel, and then from soft to methanol. Methanol is going to be preferred fuel for shipping. Going forward, there's massive amounts of CO two emissions by shippers, and they need particularly driven by European regulations, look for new alternatives that are lower emissions. And those are, you know, either LNG or methanol. Methanol is very big up and coming sort of fuel, transport fuel, and they're going to be the first large one point M, 1.9 M ton ethanol plant in the states that deliver sort of the CI score that you want. Mark Sanor 09:53When does it come online? Eddy van der Paardt 09:57There's, there's so. So what I'm excited about this if. Investing in those technologies. And the interesting thing in that space is that there's very few sort of, let's say, you know, Silicon Valley type venture firms investing in this, because it's all real assets, cap, ex, intensive stuff. And people, a lot of people, a lot of venture has to shy away from that Mark Sanor 10:20well, that segue to Carl. And I know you've also looked at paralysis, Eddy van der Paardt 10:24we have an investment in a paralysis company as well. Over to Carl Pro 10:30you, yeah, I'm probably the only non financial person around here. I'm a nuclear engineer, so I'm familiar with everything from new plants, from the Navy side, the small, what I call the Corvette plants, to the big, 1200 megawatt plants that we built. Also did the combustion turbines, wind mills, solar panels, and did a little stint as a power broker bought and sold electricity in California. And what scares me is the fact that everybody looks at power generation, and if you're looking at data centers, there's they're looking for a place to find some power, and now you're seeing they're starting up Three Mile Island. They're starting up another nuclear plant that was in Michigan, that was called that was closed down, and those are 600 mega watt plants. I mean, you're pulling a lot of power, and they're locating them there because they can't move it. When I was in California, I couldn't move power from the north of California to the south of California, because when you look at those transmission lines, you got to go through switch charts, and you got to buy space in that switch chart, and there is no space. So California can't move power from up north, where it's real cheap, down south, where it's real expensive. So that's the other thing is, you know, and then solar and wind. I didn't buy any solar wind power, because the risk mitigation of that is you have to back that up. If you have a sunny day and it's real hot and your windmill doesn't turn and you're supposed to put 100 megawatts on the grid, you got to go buy it on the spot market. You'll probably go bankrupt unless you've bought a contract. So everything that you buy in renewable energies, you have another back up power contract, a tape contract to cover that. So nobody is looking at the US transmission system really hard. The voltages are all different. Some interconnects don't work. Cross state lines. There are breakers that never have Mark Sanor 12:49all right. Carl, I'm giving you as much money as you want. You're, you're the equivalent of Doge, you can, you can, you can make this change. What will you do? Carl Pro 12:58I think there needs to be a national effort similar to the Federal Highway plans, where they did the interstates, that they go out and do that same thing with electrical distribution grid, standardize it around the country and upgrade it. So the one, it's EMP design, so you know, you don't get shut down by somebody putting off a small, inexpensive EMP weapon in the back of a van. The other thing I worry about is the gene pool, and I use this because we built a plant in Mississippi. In Mississippi, the smart kids go to the oil field who you have left are not the sharpest tools in the shed. So I always said this, this gene pool is very shallow. Our schools really suck, and we've got to lift those all up by their bootstraps and get them all better. Don't know how you do it. Yep. My wife was a school teacher. She retired, and she worked in a school where it was the school of last resort. Those kids had been thrown out of every public school in the Pittsburgh area and every private school, and they had, they were taking them on there. Brian Neirby 14:14Brian, so I appreciate the background on this. I been doing quite a bit of research in this space, and just recently invested in a direct to chip water cooled, containerized data, you know, mobile data center unit out of Vienna, Austria, and bringing it to North America and other parts of the world. I'm curious, in this research, you mentioned nuclear power, and in doing that work, I read a study that you're 19 years out before that really becomes life. I don't know if that's fact or fiction. You mentioned 600 megawatts, and from what I've understand, it takes 20 million in capital stand up one megawatt, and then two years of dealing with cities and. Land and blah, blah, blah, then you got hydro power. So you've got these huge demands on AI, got huge demands on the grid, like, how do we how do we account for all this with all these different delivery models to provide data center capacity to these technologies? Carl Pro 15:19I can tell you, the strategy that I looking at, because I'm trying to protect what we're doing, is that I'm looking at every coal mine and every steel mill that is shut down, and every coal fired power plant, because when they demolish them, they leave the switch yards there. Those properties are worth 10s of millions of dollars, and they're just sitting there, and I'm looking to pick up a couple of them just to hold on to. Alex Zhuk 15:47I have a lot of questions. So Ed, you have a question for you, but you just be so I'm gonna ask you first, with regards to the brown fields, which I'm assuming we refer to, I totally agree. I think that's the relatively low hanging fruit. Do you, from your experience, think that's already sat shrewd, meaning that's a strategy already. Of the big ones have gone out and bought up all the steel mills, coal plants, factories, etc. Carl Pro 16:14No, there's still a lot available. If you focus in on on the coal mine areas. That's why there's so many battery plants being built in the southern Panhandle of Ohio, in West Virginia, because the power is there. But in my neighborhood of Pittsburgh, there's four really sweet sites that had power plants on them that Alex Zhuk 16:37yeah, so completely. Thank you. And then Adi, so to give you just two minute context, the company I may have introduced previously as an a tech company, but we raise capital from Microsoft because we are turning agricultural soils into a carbon sink. And I completely agree with you, actually everything you said, including the capital stack and what many term as the value of death, which, for those who aren't aware, is essentially when a company has raised venture for equity, has de risk completely the technology, but needs to build a factory, or, first of a kind, physical facility, and it's very expensive to do so, and the two options they're left with is either raise so much venture capital that there's nothing left of the company or go to a bank, but not bankable yet, because it's the first of the client facility. And so what you seeing is many companies dying, even though they are building solutions that are needed for the world and also have been de risked. I've been also advising family offices on the climate side, because I believe families can play a very pivot role in this, because they're structurally more flexible. I'm just curious how you're thinking about this, and if you you know generally, what are your thoughts Eddy van der Paardt 17:53on this? Well, it's interesting you te this up, and we didn't, we didn't play ping pong yesterday, or did we compare notes? So we're actually looking at probably raising some type of platform or fund to from family office to provide that capital, because it's not coming from a venture world, and for the right reasons, it's not coming from the infrastructure world yet either, because it's, it's, it is bankable, but only if you have enough equity. And the equity is not coming from that piece of equity is not coming from the infrastructure guys, although Mark Sanor 18:23they they could cross over a little bit, they are. They Eddy van der Paardt 18:25can cross over a little bit for fid capital Right, right before you make the decision to put a billion dollars of steel into the into the ground. And we're looking at a number of investments where we invested in that are looking for either hundreds of millions of a bill or a billion plus more, and it's not coming from the IRA anymore, because that's not killed as well. So where do you go? Well, well, that little piece of capital, which is, no, it's not a little maybe 10 million, 40 million, something like that, right? Is a perfect sort of play for family officers who like to have the risk. Sort of risk sort of risk reward structure is very significant that can come in the form from of a convertible which we did, which we did number of times, where you basically, as a downside protection, have the ownership of the technology and the assets that are there as a collateral, and that can be a digital twin of the plant, etc, etc, etc. And a technology as down side protection, as upside you have, sort of a convertible into the equity round the moment infrastructure partner will invest, which comes with a significant upscaling of the value, plus a, you know, I would say market is now mid teen to high teen return on your on your money, and it's also short term duration, so it's typically 12 to 18 months time in between. Sort of a you have the value of death starting, and your fid starting, and there. And there are a number of of companies to your point, that are stuck in this position. Great technology. Good team raised a bunch of capital from well known investors and cannot move forward, which is obviously also from, like, an A from like, you know, a global perspective, a shame, right? Because these technologies are working, and they've been proven to work yet they just, you need capital to scale up. And so, so I think there's, a lot of work to be done. There's a lot of work to be done by by sort of somehow syndicating, even 361 can play a significant role there. Syndicating this with family offices. Number of them take the lead, fed it out, write the memo, and others join. And I think family office type capital, which is relatively more flexible always, than institutional capital, in many ways, can play a lead role there. Greg Licciardi 20:53I would just add that the your comments on education and the need for improving. I think AI will actually help that and is helping that greatly. I teach at Fordham and Seton Hall, and we're taking all types of master classes on how to elevate our teaching using AI, and it's pretty cool stuff, and it's making education more accessible and tutoring more accessible to more students. And Mike, my kids have tutors, but a lot of families can afford tutors. But now with AI, they can. It's it's pretty cool. Mark Sanor 21:31And we have another company blueprint for kids, which is doing this very Carl Pro 21:34interesting project years ago, and in this kind of dates myself, but it's probably 20 years ago. We did a AI training platform for the Air Force, and you basically put this little ball cap on your head, and it presented material to you, and when you understood it, your brain waves did a shift. And if you didn't understand it, it kept presenting it in a different manner. So it was, Mark Sanor 21:58why don't we bring that to our children? That's pretty cool. Seriously, why? I mean, I know that in war time and in defense, which is going to be the next panel, we come up with lots of innovations. But why is that not trickling down? Carl Pro 22:14It just cuts that on the shelf, and the Air Force now uses it. Well, why Mark Sanor 22:19don't you and I go find that? Let's get that too. Yeah, no, let's, let's buy it first, and then we'll figure out to do Matthew TED talk on that. Matthew Friedman, do any, any, any wrap up thoughts on your, your, your part of the world? Matthew Friedman 22:39Yeah? So sure. I mean, like, what I was saying is, there's great opportunity, there's great unknown. The opportunity excited. There's a lot of people that are going to, not going to make it through this shake out. I would say, you know, a testament to my staff and I that, as any graciously mentioned, we've, we've made it through the very interesting roller coaster ride over the last six, seven years of, you know, strikes and COVID and tariffs and whatever, and so it's going to remain to be seen with the shake of it, but I think companies like myself that are nibble and are able to adapt to the changing environment is going to be critical. I think automation, as we discussed earlier, is also going to be critical, the more we can do to rely less upon Mark Sanor 23:34the ele Brian Neirby 23:36no drink it over Mark Sanor 23:41there you can get now. Matthew Friedman 23:43Point, but you know that's gonna cook you a lot of jobs, but it was necessary in the current automation environment for auto mode. Mark Sanor 23:54Excellent. Any last comments from the crowd or panel? You know it's not about technology, but I know you've got plants in Canada, Mexico. We got tariffs going in, going out, turn on, turn off. How you managing that? Matthew Friedman 24:18Well, I mean, the answer is, we were looking at it both as a whole additional because we're looking can move production from one place to the other, we're doing it. The key is, you know, we're only in Canada. We're only in Mexico, not because we're bringing in parts from other places. Alex Zhuk 24:40I Hi, Don. So that's so what 24:49happens in between on the slide then Austin morning? Mark Sanor 25:14Go, Yeah, how's it been going? Matthew Friedman 25:22All as definitely, line production, contact the US. It will adapt accordingly. Well, position new things on the tariff side of things. Again, what we're seeing is with the delays, right? Originally was supposed to be, you know, February, then it was going to be March, and now sometime in April that they're going to take effect. And it's definitely caused the leaders of both Canada and Mexico to respond and do things accordingly, mostly in the fight against alleged drug trafficking and importation in the US. So if those companies, I think rice occasion like that, while they shined them and done in particular Mexico, then I think they will see a little bit less of aggression on the terror front. Mark Sanor 26:10Fair enough. All right. Well, for a moment I didn't think we'd have our panelists for the last panel, but they suddenly appeared. Gator has invested in Dan's company, so it's a good they didn't even know that each other would be here today. So that's great. Sara, I don't think is going to make it, but I know the ELA has a a dual use fund as well. So let's just first. Thank Eddie, thank Carl. Thank Matthew, I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Panel - 361Firm's NY Tech Summit Feb. 25, 2025SUMMARY KEYWORDSArtificial Intelligence, generative AI, venture capital, seed funding, Hippocratic, LLM, job displacement, AI revolution, energy solutions, food security, humanoid robots, quantum computing, stakeholder model, economic impact, technological advancement.SPEAKERSSpeaker 1, Alex Zhuk, Rashmi Joshi, Ben Narasin, Speaker 2, Maisy Ng, Mark Sanor, Zoe Cruz Mark Sanor 00:00Um, introduce yourself again, share an insight and what scares and excites you about AI, there you Ben Narasin 00:06go. What is this the one? All right, Hi, I'm Ben Naris, and I run tenacity venture capital. I spent of any a large venture firm about three years ago. I focus on seed. I've been doing that for about 18 years. Last year, I saw 2000 companies. I funded three. They were all generative. Ai related. It it is not because I have an explicit focus on AI. By the way, focused funds of under perform generalist funds for 40 years, find that data out there and think about how you invest. It's that the best and brightest always go to the shiniest, most exciting thing, and that is certainly generative AI right now, I even have I paid them personally, the most I've ever paid for company, $500 million for a company called Hippocratic, which is creating LLM based nurses. And what's fascinating about AI, I guess there's so many things, but one, we don't know how it works and how it thinks. These machines are thinking. And people that are in the business will acknowledge they don't actually understand how, two, it totally changes the value and reality of time. So let's use the example of Hippocratic they have an LLM that is trained on the nursing notes from major medical facilities. It calls in audio every person that leaves a hospital or doctor's office and checks in on them to make sure they are staying in tune with the things they need to do to get better. When in the past, would that ever have been possible? You know, 1000 people leaves a hospital in a day, there is zero chance you can afford to get the people to do it. But AI can spend infinite amounts of time and spin up infinite instances, and it will totally change things that we are able to do. I make one more example of that. I was listening on calls that the AI made to different patients. And it called a woman that had diabetes, and it, you know, did its check in. And then she said, Hey, can I eat, you know, beans? Yeah, beans are fine. Can I eat bread? Well, bread is bad at spikes. And then she listed off one by 156, foods to see if they were okay to eat. And the AI, very patiently, said, yes, no, yes, no, that would never happen. But not only can the AI allow infinite time to be utilized to do things in parallel, but the people on the other side can take advantage of it in ways they never would have with a traditional nurse in this instance. So I think there are going to be so many things that happen that we are not expecting. I am not worried about I am a little worried about the single purpose tool labor, the person that is not able to be retrained well, because that's not the culture they grew up in. They didn't value education there, you know? But hey, I walk down New York City streets today, a lot of people swing and sledge hammers and dig in dirt. There'll be plenty of things to be done. It's just if you have a single if you're that high or gal in the call center in Bangladesh. Woo. I hope you can find someone else. Mark Sanor 02:45Okay, so Maisie, also introduce yourself. And again, what scares, excites, insights. Maisy Ng 02:53Hi. My name is May Z. I'm founder, managing partner of the light capital. We're VC head quarter in Singapore. We're now doing our second fund, the first invest in Southeast Asia tech companies that celebrate the UN SDGs. The second fund will invest in AI companies across the AI tech stack. We're really excited about this opportunity because, I mean, AI is like a tech East dream, right? So, because it's so revolutionary, the same O, same o doesn't work anymore. We need a whole new class of semi conductors, data center technologies, new software that will empower new applications. So this is, we think it's like, I think the aircraft guy, this is once in 100 years as well. So, and what excites me, I think, well, the sort of paradigm shift that AI brings, it enables us humans to do things we never thought was possible. And initially, for example, when deep mine was started, it started by trying to play chess. And initially it basically took all the grand master strategies and train the software to play like a grand master. And so it played against grand masters, and they win some and they lose some, and then they decide, okay, fine, we just tell the computer, these are the rules, and you just go play. And because computers can basically, you know, like, work really fast, they could play, like, a million games overnight, and very soon they learn how to play. And then they did this go, which is a far more complex game than chess, and just by playing against itself, they found new strategies that Grand Masters would not think of like in the chess game. They be sacrificing pieces, left, right and Sanor, and then they win. And people just can't understand how they did that. And a couple of days ago, I read this article about scientists using AI to design basically micro wave circuits, and they said that the design that comes out looks really weird. It's not something that an engineer would design, because it's not something you've been taught in school. But so it looks really weird. Doesn't look like a circuit board, but apparently it worked better than any other circuit. So I think that is opportunity that we can have with AI. What? What scares me a bit to what Zoe said. I mean, someone once said that basically, software would eat the world. So guess what? Ai. Eat the software. And to Ben's point, people will lose jobs, and this is a major program shift. Some of the jobs aren't ever coming back, and so you gonna have, like, massive layoffs, and what people are gonna do so the consumption will drop, because people just don't have jobs they can spend. So I think the governments and the companies need to know and try to plan ahead, because the core, I guess, social compound we have capitalism is that if you make money as a capitalist, you are supposed to invest the money to create more jobs, build factories. But what we saw in the past decades is that people who made money from outsourcing globalization, they didn't build more factories. They did hire more workers. What did they do? They bought Yach, they bought art. And so all this rent seeking behavior didn't help the economy, and that is a problem. So if you take AI, that's going to be like compounded a train in times exponentially. So I think companies need to be aware of that. Governments need to be aware of that. It may be that we have to do either tax on robots or UBI just to what people picking up. Pitch Fox, Mark Sanor 06:00okay, let Alex go next. Alex Zhuk 06:05Thank you, Mark. Thank you for having me. Great to see all of you. I'm going to give you a very short introduction by myself, because I haven't met many of you. I'm a founder of an AI company that uses satellites to map the environmental footprint of every farm on the planet to help ensure food security through resilience, but also decarbonize agriculture, which is the second largest emitting sector in the world. I'm also on the side involved in critical mission asset development, primarily energy solutions and data centers, starting with building a digital twin of the electrical grid, because it's becoming very hard to connect to it, as many of now, in terms of an insight that I think hasn't been shared by these experts near me, I think we are under appreciating, or at least I did for a very long time, the way in which industries that have been established as part of humanity's operation for 1000s of years will be disrupted. So I work in agriculture. We've been farming in a mechanized, or at least structured manner for centuries, but you could argue 1000s of years we are actually for writing of climate reasons, but also just the way we've been farming since the 19th century, are on track to erode the size of arable land. It's about the size of Latin America, which puts in tricky position, especially with a growing global population, right? What do you mean by a road? So the way we farm, we've been farming for past 100 years is we've been blank to chemicals non stop on the soil, mechanically turning it over same crops. And what we found recently is that process over time kills us well. Now the question is, how do you deal with that? One way is to improve how we've been farming before. So precision agriculture, but you know, there's a completely different paradigm on hand, right? So, much like a century ago, in order to get a diamond, you would go down a mine shaft, you would dig it up, you would clean it, you process it, you ship it over. Now you can start with a kernel of carbon and grow it, right? Similarly, for example, with meat, we're getting to a point where we can grow real patties that are juicy, feel more or less the same taste and a real meat in a lab, what the consumption and the water and the energy needed to raise through animals at scale. So I think it's an opportunity in that AI can provide real resource abundance and a quality of life for each and one of us in terms of volume, that is fundamentally different from how we've been approaching it as humanity for hundreds of years. The question comes back to actually something you mentioned and several other panelists, which is, how do we tackle the social question, and how do we deal with the tension if the haves, if the gap between the haves and the have nots increases far greater than we've seen before. Mark Sanor 09:17So thank you, Alex, somewhat hopeful, maybe, maybe. Zoe, you're now on an AI panel. If you stick around, you could be on a health tech panel. What are your thoughts on on AI specifically scary and exciting. I Zoe Cruz 09:35mean, to me, this young man is Exhibit A why it all is going to be very good again. My concern is the transition. And right now, the way we allocate capital to wonderful things like AI is in at the traditional paradigm, which is, you know, stocks and bonds go up if x. Why, you see, there's a paradigm. I went and re read actually, and that's where AI is helpful. There is a book that was written in 1955 and it's basically the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And it was the first time they talked about paradigm shifts. And in that they said scientists do a lot of work in a particular paradigm, and then Copernicus says, no, no, no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth. It's the other way around. That's a paradigm shift. So you do something different. So for me right now, as my 29 year old son says, technology exists to take the carbon out of the air to even get these meteorites to go off. The technology exists. How do you deal with the existing capitalist model, where you have existing capital allocated to things that will go to zero? So I do believe this is something spectacular and exciting, but I can't put the two and two together. That comes up with four in terms of regular transition. And you know, one of the things I said to my son, because the world is now run by HEPA gene octogenarians, never mind heptogenarians, why don't you guys get more involved? I mean, he's a brilliant young man. He started evolutionary biology. He plays the classical piano. He should get involved. And you know what he said? Talk about socio economic issues. What's the point? We have to wait until you guys die off. Now he didn't mean me, but hopefully, but Mark Sanor 11:42so we were in Germany at a round table, and apparently there's, there's legislation afoot to reduce or incentivize you to reduce voting at later ages. So you've sort of heard the panel, if you guys want to make some comments. But otherwise, I started opening Ben Narasin 12:04it up to comment on something I very much disagree with. Maisie. I don't think the evidence is that people are greedy, venal yacht buyers. I think it's quite the opposite look at so I look spend a lot of time in trucking space. Trucking is the number one job in the world by head count, although nobody wants to do it anymore, and there's an issue with aging out, etc, etc. But I was very concerned for a long time, because I was also looking at autonomous trucks and the massive displacement number one job in the world by head count, it should be done by machines. Okay, these people are out of work over time. So I started looking backwards. And one of the great example. See what the very one of the very first commercialized robots was the card scanner at the gas station. Now, if you're unfortunate enough to live in New Jersey and drive a car, you are in one of two states that unions which, by the way, I could not despise an entity more than I despise union. So please, no union leaders here have insisted that a human being pump your gas, an incredibly inefficient experience that drives me insane whenever I'm forced to deal with it. By the way, yesterday I was in a apartment. We were looking at buying an apartment here, and they have a man who pushes the button in the elevator like talk about it doesn't matter how much we do, the unions will make sure people have ridiculously stupid jobs and get paid. So anyway, what happened with all that great wealth that was created because now they didn't have to employ people to pump the gas in 48 states the United States, did people just stick with what they were doing? Absolutely not. They created what is now known as the convenience store when you go to a gas station, instead of just having gas pumps, which back then was all there was, maybe a counter with gum and candy, full fledged stores with all kinds of food and drinks and slushies, those stores ended up employing more people than the gas station attendant jobs represented same thing with the ATM everybody said, Oh my God, all these banks, the tellers ought to work more banks today than there Were with ATMs. I Mark Sanor 13:59think maisie's Point was different, because and Esther again, Esther Dyson asked, What billionaires, you know, have become better people in the last 1020, years, some have, but we, of Ben Narasin 14:13course, remind me, exaggerates you. It doesn't change you. Rashmi Joshi 14:18Hi. Thanks for that. I have actually three questions, so you might have to come back to me in a bit, but I'm curious, as an AI founder myself, what industries or new verticals Do you feel like are going to be established as a by factor or a consequence of us getting rid of all of these mundane tasks and grunt work type of jobs? Alex Zhuk 14:42Sure, happy to so the near term industry that has gone from, I would say, sort of in the shadows, a little bit boring, to very exciting. That was obviously energy. So we're realizing that if we're in a race at international level, we. Can't afford to lose, to concentrate now, as to how do we power these machines, both to train the models, but also humanoids, once automation is commercialized, which we're seeing happening very rapidly, that's exciting. How that will be solved, whether it's nuclear, whether it's other source of energy, is a guessing game, but that's a very exciting space. We haven't seen this growth infrastructure in decades. Personally. You know, I mentioned example of how we can similar to how we can synthesize proteins for medicine, create new foods, right? So, there is a company that was able to create cow free milk, and they tasked an AI to come up with ingredients that would when combined, taste, smell and feel like milk. And when you know, you might wonder what those ingredients were. Those were pineapple and strawberries, right? So ingredients are completely unintuitive to the human mind, that when combined, we're able to synthesize something that we want to consume. And I think we'll see that across food, I think we'll see that across health care. Mark Sanor 16:03But those are interesting vectors. But I think your question was the people, sort of your earlier point about job, you know, people who are going to be out of out of jobs, was your question like, Where will they be going? Where should they be where's the puck going for people? Is that it Alex Zhuk 16:20very difficult question for me to ask Mark, I would say the best bet would be for the verticals that are growing the fastest, Mark Sanor 16:29or maybe this goes back to Steven SPI about education. Anyone else want to answer that skill set Speaker 1 16:38would be, oh, I will cycle into something different, maybe more productive, just like, Well, Ben Narasin 16:41that was a great example. One of my one of my founders, made the point we brought a YPO group in, and he said, you know, you were talking about farming before the Civil War, 90% of the US population farmed. So we have seen a massive wipe out of an entire population of workers before it was all of America, but then they moved to cities. And guess what? When you're on a farm, you don't cut you cut your own hair. So all kinds of jobs were created that didn't exist when we had a mono culture of farming as the primary job, hair cutter, barber being one, and there were infinitely more. I think, by the way, if we could answer your question, we wouldn't tell you, because we'd be investing in at least two of us would be investing in it right now to get ahead of it. Yeah, well, yeah, I'm you must not have met many VCs, because we're very greedy in the first round to get all the ownership we can. That's the only chance we get. But it's, I think it's unpredictable, but I'm not worried that it won't happen. I think that, look, we have been through this before. The difference is that this is the first time software ever attacked the labor force instead of just process. But the labor force has been attacked many, many times. I mean, the Luddites are obviously the most commonly quoted example. But you know, it's like labor is lake water. It flows to the place it's needed. I do have material concern about, I'll just say, because I'm not gonna go too deep and dark here certain populations that might not have the historic advantage of or desire to reinvest in their own education. And I think that sometimes it's unrealistic for highly educated people to believe that everybody can be re educated, and that they'll even want to be and so where does that end up going? But here you want hope there's 100,000 unfilled jobs the United States right now in construction that are paying over $100,000 it's a good place to start. There's many places where jobs are unfilled. And lastly, a lot of the AI will augment people's ability and take over jobs that aren't filled, that are wanted and needed. As someone once said, You're not at threat of a of being your job being taken by AI. You're at threat of somebody that's better of using AI, taking your job. Maisy Ng 19:01I think I might have mis understood your question. So if you allow me, I'll give you a misunderstood answer. So I think there's, I mean, AI could be used also for, like robotics. So for example, I think, you know, we have really seen from Boston Dynamics that like dancing robots, but that isn't too useful for most of us. You don't buy a dancing robot. But a couple days ago, I saw this really interesting video. I think it's a US company that has basically built robots that can be used for domestic work. So can you imagine a robot that cleans your house? And this one was cool. So there's like two humanoid robots and standing side by side, and basically the owner comes in and gives them a bag of groceries, and the robot just look at them, and they sort it out. And if they took up a ketchup and they know its ketchup, they put at the top shelf of the fridge, they open it and they see there's eggs. And one robot picks up the eggs very gently, hands it to the other robot, who then puts it in the fridge. I mean, that's pretty cool, because you need computer vision. You also need an LL. Am, and you know, you can train a domestic robot for all scenarios, right? So the robot has to know that if it's an egg, you handle carefully, and this may be a quills egg, so he would know to the LLM that is a quills egg, it's an egg, so I handle it gently as well, so that, I think would bring tremendous, I mean, advantage for us, because nobody wants, you know, to do housework these days. Can I Rashmi Joshi 20:20just piggyback off that for a Mark Sanor 20:24second? One second, piggyback on the mic. Rashmi Joshi 20:27So as humanoid robots become more and more similar to us, let's say I can build you a robot that would be your perfect husband or partner, right? And it's indistinguishable from the real thing. Maisy Ng 20:44I think I can distinguish that Rashmi Joshi 20:47today, sure, but maybe five years from now, maybe not, right? So my question is, then, what is the value in being human? Maisy Ng 20:57I think we still have a soul, which I don't think that. I mean, we could probably train the robots at some point, but I don't know, it's a tough question to answer. So I think, I mean, that's something that we had discussed internally as well. I mean, so do we teach robots about, you know, like life after life and so forth? I mean, do do when you Mark Sanor 21:17say So internally? I mean, your fund internally discuss this friends Maisy Ng 21:20and within the partners and so what it means to be human, and basically, what do we need to teach, you know, the robots and so forth. So I don't know. I mean, it's an honest answer. I really don't know good to see how it goes, Zoe Cruz 21:33because I'm gonna leave after this. Are you gonna drop the mic and just go? What an amazing question, in the sense that, first of all, the idea that I'm going to have this made in my home, this robot that I can't control, that somebody else actually can control, I don't know that I'm going to get to that dysfunction. To me, we're not again, we don't need we can take off the table. How amazing AI is going to be. Let's take it. It's not. You don't need to argue it. It's going to be amazing. Okay, the land of plenty. This thing about human beings, my experience at Morgan Stanley was, if you in the ability of human beings to do amazing things if you inspired them, is mind boggling. If you inspired them, that's what humanity is. And so this idea that we're going to replace human beings, you're going to build me the perfect partner. No, thank you. What I want to ask again, of all of us, why is it that we talk in terms of the stakeholder? We're talking about is the shareholder of a company that's going to make a lot of money because they're going to fire employees, and therefore productivity is going to go up, and therefore you're going to be rich. That's basically the discussion. Yes. Now the old capitalist system that I started growing up in as a young, you know, graduate of a business school was you had three stakeholders as a company, shareholders at the head of the que, clearly, your employees and your community, those were the stakeholders. And I think how we got to the only stakeholder in any kind of for profit organization is your equity holders. Is what stops us from doing inspiring things. I'm not inspired to be rich or they say the shroud has no pockets, so when you're six feet under, it doesn't matter whether you are multi billionaire or sent a millionaire. Did your life make a difference? So with that, sorry. 23:53Thank you. Ben Narasin 23:54Just one comment on humanoid robots. I mean, Japan has been trying to do humanoid robots for decades. It is not clear that human beings want them, and I'm looking think about your eggs, example. So what's better a humanoid with two hands and two feet, or an octopod, pod like creature that has eight you know, building for functionality will ultimately so you'll go back to one thing. You wanna know, it really scares me. So I was a writer for 10 years. I got a lot of freelance of freelance writing. I want to write a science fiction book on the following. Jump forward 10 years. Quantum works. Okay? I don't know how many of you spent time looking at Quantum. We have no flipping clue what it can do, right? It changes everything. And the only thing we worry about is end point, security. Well, how about literally everything else? It's things differently than human beings find ways to do things that we would never consider okay. So now we're 10 years forward. We're at chat GPT 10. Now someone express some optimism that China and the United States would get together for some positive Oh, hallelujah moment, which, yeah, good luck with. That I'll take 10 to one odds against it happening. China wants to replace us, not to be our buddy. So now you take chi and you take Putin. They, you know, probably two of the richest people on the planet, considering certainly how Putin has raped this country of its capital. And they each put a half a trillion dollars in a bucket, and they build out the largest data farm in the world that runs entirely quantum computing. And they bring in all the best people who, by the way, if they don't perform, get a bullet in their head and get buried in the back yard. And they get them to run the newest issues of chat, GPT, and they ask that system, that trillion dollar system, do just one thing, figure out how to destroy the United States. That's what I worry about. I hope we can stay strong enough that we have a really good chance. And while I'm not a political person and we, you know, the pendulum is a nightmare, we will spend well on defense. We will allow AI to flourish. And if we're not a leader, we have a very good chance of being a distant 12th 10 years from Mark Sanor 25:57now. And what's your last thought, Alex, actually, you're going to stick around because you do AG, so the panel you originally on, you'll stay, you'll stay for and rash me is going to come up along with Chris, and we're at two. This is why there's an AI for that. There's not an AI for my glasses. 229, so last, any last questions or thoughts for AI? Yes, sorry, David, Speaker 2 26:27so Alex, love what you doing. The thought is, you know, 50 years ago, there's probably people in a room, and they were talking about how spectacular we'd gotten at crop farming and the use of these fertilizers and this mechanization, all the stuff that's now proven problematic at that point seen ground breaking. What are your views on how we've grown in terms of thinking about the how of technology and being able to mitigate for all of because everything has trade off, so everything has unforeseen circumstances. Are we just plowing ahead, same as we did 6070, years ago, expecting perfect results, when actually we've seen that. That doesn't often happen. That's Alex Zhuk 27:06a fantastic point. And to give context to that comment, you know that process, which is the HP process, which allowed us to manufacture these chemicals for farm and very cheap and scalable, did prevent famines, and, you know, solved a lot of issues at the time were post World War Two, especially, really pressing. I think today, there's a component of that, which is, there are problems we can see in the near term, and it's extremely appealing to solve those at the expense of, you know, something we will have to figure out later down the line. And I will also compound on the comment I've heard earlier I can remember who mentioned it, which is that both great powers Today, China and America, realize that in particular, the AI race is the new nuclear race, and it's a race neither one of them can totally afford to lose, and the importance of which supersedes profits. So you combine that dynamic with where we today, and I don't see not only any one of us stopping, but how we could, even in the in national interest, slow down our progress given the dynamic internationally. Hope that answers your question, do you Mark Sanor 28:22want to hit that or you good. There's one other thing that I think you all should know. You all know open ai, llms, just give, give 3060, seconds on, on pricing model, Maisy Ng 28:34right? Yeah, we are investing in a new company that does the world's first large pricing model. So basically, there's lot of content in the world, but there's no price on it. So this company has figured out a way how to price different content. So just like you train an LLM with text input, I mean, with lots of text, so that you can figure out, using transformer model, what's the probability of the next word, and therefore, in doing so, be a performance sentence and reply to a query. So basically, LM has been trained on copious amounts of text to give you an answer when you input a tax query. So what these guys have done is, again, they've trained the large pricing model on a huge amount of content. And instead of figuring out a tax output, what it does is, when then confronted with a content input, it can then spit out the monetary value of that content. And so the use is immense. Because right now, if imagine, if I go to farmers market that was sharing this angle, we don't have time for the farmers market, but they can price any content. Mark Sanor 29:31But the point is this, this is, yeah, this is another new frontier that I think, is talk to talk. We'll be having round tables very soon. So thank you to this panel. We appreciate it. Alex, stay I'm joined our 361 firm community of investors and thought leaders. We have a lot of events created by the community as we collaborate on investments and philanthropic interests. Join us. You. You can subscribe to various 361 events and content at https://361firm.com/subs. For reference: Web: www.361firm.com/homeOnboard as Investor: https://361.pub/shortdiagOnboard Deals 361: www.361firm.com/onbOnboard as Banker: www.361firm.com/bankersEvents: www.361firm.com/eventsContent: www.youtube.com/361firmWeekly Digests: www.361firm.com/digest
Sports Geek - A look into the world of Sports Marketing, Sports Business and Digital Marketing
Sean Callanan shares his experience at the NBA All-Star Tech Summit. The episode highlights technological advancements in broadcast, AI and the future of sports tech. Perfect for sports business professionals and tech enthusiasts interested in the NBA's innovation initiatives. Show notes - https://sportsgeekhq.com/inside-nba-all-star-tech-summit/
In this week's episode of China Insider, Miles Yu unpacks the name changes made across the US State Department's website and why these designations carrying significant implications for US foreign policy toward China. Next, Miles peels back the curtain on Xi Jinping's latest meeting with high-profile leaders in China's technology sector, and whether this will truly infuse confidence in the Chinese economy. Lastly, Miles analyzes China's evolving legal warfare campaign against Taiwan across the Global South, and how this impacts the status quo in cross-strait relations. China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world's future.
In this episode of the Bringing the Human back to Human Resources podcast, Traci speaks with Kristen Brun Sharkey about building a culture of innovation and effective leadership strategies. Guest: Kristen Brun Sharkey Kristen Brun Sharkey is the Founder and CEO of Emboldify, an executive coach, facilitator, and speaker with 15 years of experience leading teams in advertising, tech, and marketing at companies from early-stage startups to Fortune 100s. She helps leaders advance their careers, make better decisions, execute change effectively, develop innovative solutions, and successfully engage their teams. Her unique approach combines evidence-based business and leadership frameworks with principles from improv theater. She holds a master's degree in management strategy and leadership from Michigan State University and has spoken at notable conferences including the California Conference for Women and the Chief in Tech Summit. Key Topics Discussed: 1. (00:00) Introduction and welcome 2. (02:09) Defining innovation and its importance in business 3. (02:35) Model for building a culture of innovation 4. (05:36) Incorporating improv principles into leadership 5. (10:18) Separating idea generation from evaluation 6. (14:50) Case studies in innovation failure (Blockbuster example) 7. (15:22) The role of humility in leadership 8. (22:31) Strategies for influencing resistant leaders 9. (26:55) Behaviors that support innovative culture Highlights: * Innovation requires both high commitment and openness to new ideas * Psychological safety and destigmatizing failure are crucial for fostering innovation * The "Yes, and" principle from improv theater can transform team dynamics and idea generation * Great leaders create more leaders by elevating others' ideas and solutions * Separating divergent thinking (idea generation) from convergent thinking (evaluation) is essential * Feedback, especially through third parties like coaches, can help leaders develop self-awareness * Successful innovative cultures celebrate failure and embrace play * Leaders must balance humility with the ability to guide their teams effectively Connect with Kristen Brun Sharkey: *LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristenbsharkey/ *Company Website: https://www.emboldify.com/ *Podcast: https://www.loveandleadershippod.com/ Connect with Traci: * https://linktr.ee/HRTraci * Visit our website: https://HRTraci.com If you found our conversation valuable, please take a moment to rate our podcast. Your feedback helps us grow and reach more listeners who are passionate about human resources and leadership. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment, and give this episode a
In this podcast, Walt Zerbe, Sr. Director of Technology and Standards at CEDIA and host of the CEDIA podcast, talks with Jake Fuller, owner of Automated Audio Visual, Brendon Reid, Managing Director of Automation Associates, and Christian Lambros, General Manager of Len Wallis Audio Video about their experience at the 2024 CEDIA Tech Summit in Newcastle Australia. Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:00) The speakers introduce themselves and the podcast as "CDS." Event Overview (00:00:54) Walter Zerbe welcomes listeners and discusses the successful Tech Summit in Newcastle, Australia. Networking Experiences (00:02:32) Speakers share insights on the value of networking and in-person conversations at the event. Educational Sessions Highlights (00:04:15) Jake discusses the educational sessions and their importance for industry learning and collaboration. Ethics and Technology Discussion (00:05:15) Walter highlights a session on ethics, technology design, and the industry's visibility. Education Pathways Development (00:06:10) Kristian shares insights from a meeting on establishing educational pathways in home automation. Volunteering Recognition (00:08:17) Speakers commend the efforts of volunteers and recognize award winners from Australia. Personal Experiences and Insights (00:09:28) Speakers discuss the personal connections and professional development gained through volunteering. Find of the Show (00:11:01) Brendan shares his transformative experience from a session on leveraging major tech companies in the industry. Future of Home Automation (00:12:40) Speakers discuss the transition in home automation and the role of community-driven software solutions. Understanding Smart Home Technology (00:13:33) Discussion on the term "smart home" and its implications for awareness and product integration. The Evolution of Product Integration (00:13:51) Exploring how product integration has evolved, allowing for diverse choices and budget-friendly solutions. Challenges with DIY Products (00:14:56) Addressing the difficulties users face with DIY products and the need for professional guidance. Liability Concerns in Networking (00:16:37) Revelation about liability for network breaches and the importance of proactive client communication. Ethical Design and Client Education (00:17:41) Discussing ethical design and the concept of "positive duty" in client relationships. Privacy Issues with Smart Devices (00:18:46) Concerns regarding the data collection practices of smart TVs and potential breaches of privacy. Awareness of Online Risks (00:19:30) Highlighting the growing public understanding of online risks and identity theft. Learning About CEDIA Standards (00:20:18) Experience in learning about RP23 standards and the importance of industry knowledge. Need for Performance Data (00:21:12) Discussion on the necessity of comprehensive performance data for informed engineering decisions. Standardization in Product Specifications (00:22:26) Emphasis on the need for standardized testing and data reporting among manufacturers. The Importance of Networking Events (00:23:38) Benefits of attending networking events for inspiration and new ideas in business. Reinvigorating Business Focus (00:24:53) The importance of stepping back from daily operations to focus on business growth and strategy. Strategic Location of Tech Summits (00:25:05) Discussion on the strategic choice of smaller towns for tech summits to enhance participation. Commitment to Business Development (00:26:09) The value of commitment to learning and collaboration among peers in the industry. Networking Insights (00:26:10) Discussion on the value of networking and relaxed conversations at the awards event. Closing Remarks (00:26:39) Thanks to participants for sharing experiences and supporting the organization. Acknowledgments (00:26:59) Speaker expresses gratitude towards Paul and the Australian CEDIA team. Final Thoughts (00:27:12) Encouragement to continue learning, volunteering, and networking in the industry. CEDIA Information (00:27:33) Invitation to visit the CEDIA website for more information.
In remarks on the new AI national security memo delivered Thursday at National Defense University, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan highlighted the potential AI has for the country's national security advantage but spoke in dire terms about taking action. Sullivan said simply: “The stakes are high” and if the nation doesn't act more intentionally to seize advantages and to deploy AI more quickly and more comprehensively for national security, the U.S. risks “squandering our hard-earned lead” with the technology. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is bracing for what's ahead in the shift to focus on post-quantum encryption and the arrival of quantum computers. Among all of the cybersecurity modernization efforts underway at the Defense Department, cryptography has recently moved to the top of Deputy CIO for Cybersecurity David McKeown's list of priorities. Speaking at AFCEA DC's annual Tech Summit on Thursday, McKeown said the effort will likely be a big lift for the department given its timeline and scale. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast on on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.
When Donald Trump was first elected to the White House, he tapped a young and relatively unknown guy named Michael Kratsios to be the nation's chief technology officer. Today, Kratsios is back outside politics, working as the managing director at the company Scale AI. At Politico's AI and Tech Summit last week, he spoke with POLITCO's global tech editor Steve Heuser. They talked about what Trump's tech policy might look like in a second term, and why he thinks Vance will be a champion for “little tech.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
POLITICO held its AI and Tech Summit earlier this week, where host Steven Overly sat down with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar. On today's episode, we air that conversation. Klobuchar is one of the Senate's leading Democratic voices warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence this election cycle; and as Senate Rules Committee chair, she introduced legislation that would ban AI deepfakes of candidates and require disclaimers for political ads made with AI. But with the election now weeks away, those rules still aren't on the books — and it's not likely there will be any movement before election day.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) is helping set the House's artificial intelligence agenda as co-chair of a bipartisan task force in the House. That includes more than a dozen AI-related bills he thinks the lower chamber can pass this year. On POLITICO Tech, host Steven Overly sat down with Obernolte at POLITICO's AI & Tech Summit this week for a live taping of the podcast.
Gilad Berenstein, head of the Brook Bay Capital tech investment firm and on the board of Virtuoso, the luxury travel network, talks with James Shillinglaw of Insider Travel Report about the Virtuoso Tech Summit, which took place at the very beginning of Virtuoso Travel Week in Las Vegas last week. Berenstein tells us about the speakers, the topics and the new travel technology firms that were showcased during the Summit. He also reveals the top trends in travel technology today. For more information, visit www.virtuoso.com. If interested, the original video of this podcast can be found on the Insider Travel Report Youtube channel or by searching for the podcast's title on Youtube.
Join hosts Cathy Hackl and Lee Kebler on the latest episode of the TechMagic podcast as they explore what's hot and happening in tech, innovation, AI, and spatial computing. Cathy shares her experience of attending the Christie's Art and Tech Summit, where she was one of the keynote speakers on spatial computing. Cathy and Lee discuss the recent news about Dr. Fei Fei Li raising significant money for her startup focused on spatial intelligence. They discuss how Apple was allegedly found to have used YouTube content without consent in their AI models and the need for a legal reckoning in data usage and fair use standards. Cathy and Lee discuss the formation of a union by employees at Bethesda Game Studios and the potential implications for the gaming industry. The episode also includes a sneak preview of an exclusive interview with Matthew Ball. The full interview will be featured in the next episode.Come for the Tech, stay for the Magic!Cathy Hackl BioCathy Hackl is a globally recognized tech & gaming executive, futurist, and speaker focused on spatial computing, virtual worlds, augmented reality, AI, strategic foresight, and gaming platforms strategy. She's one of the top tech voices on LinkedIn and is the CEO of Spatial Dynamics, a spatial computing and AI solutions company, including gaming. Cathy has worked at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Magic Leap, and HTC VIVE and has advised companies like Nike, Ralph Lauren, Walmart, Louis Vuitton, and Clinique on their emerging tech and gaming journeys. She has spoken at Harvard Business School, MIT, SXSW, Comic-Con, WEF Annual Meeting in Davos 2023, CES, MWC, Vogue's Forces of Fashion, and more. Cathy Hackl on LinkedInSpatial Dynamics on LinkedInLee Kebler BioLee has been at the forefront of blending technology and entertainment since 2003, creating advanced studios for icons like will.i.am and producing music for Britney Spears and Big & Rich. Pioneering in VR since 2016, he has managed enterprise data at Nike, led VR broadcasting for Intel at the Japan 2020 Olympics, and driven large-scale marketing campaigns for Walmart, Levi's, and Nasdaq. A TEDx speaker on enterprise VR, Lee is currently authoring a book on generative AI and delving into splinternet theory and data privacy as new tech laws unfold across the US.Lee Kebler on LinkedIn Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On this week's episode of the Jefa Mode Live podcast we revisit the Latinas in Tech Summit for an empowering live podcast session titled "Jefas en Tecnología: Empowering Latinas in Tech." Moderated by our Senior Programs Manager, Cecilia Fisher-Benitez, this insightful discussion features inspiring stories from chapter leaders across New York, Denver, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and can amplify your influence within the community. Listen in as Tatiana Carret shares her incredible journey from physical therapy to digital health, Aimara Rodriguez talks about her transition from supporting startups to becoming an entrepreneur, Patricia Flores from Chicago reflects on her move from healthcare to tech, and Lourdes Murillo recounts her 12-year journey in video infrastructure and digital assets. Their stories underscore the importance of resilience, leadership, and personal empowerment in navigating the complexities of the tech industry. We address the real challenges faced by Latinas in tech, offering strategies to overcome setbacks and imposter syndrome. Learn how to recognize your own achievements, view failures as growth opportunities, and understand the necessity for Latina representation in leadership roles.-Join the Latinas in Tech Summit 2025 Waiting List: https://latinasintechsummit.org/waiting-list-2025/We have 25 chapters across the globe, find one near you: https://latinasintech.org/chapterLatinas in Tech Mentorship Program: https://latinasintech.org/career-growthBecome a LiT Mentor: https://latinasintech.dreami.io/main/mentor -About Latinas in Tech Latinas in Tech is a non-profit organization with the mission to connect, support and empower Latina women working in technology through professional development, mentorship, and recruiting. Learn more about our organization at https://latinasintech.org/.
We conclude our 2024 Tech Summit coverage with an interview featuring DARPA Director Stefanie Tompkins. Guest: Stefanie Tompkins, Director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You can see all of our interviews from the 2024 Tech Summit at Defense One's YouTube page, here.
Our 2024 Tech Summit coverage continues with a discussion about the future of hypersonic missile research and development. Guest: Frank Peterkin, Principal Director of Directed Energy at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies; And Jarret Lafleur, Senior Advisor to the Principal Director for Hypersonics for Strike Systems Strategy and Policy Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. You can see all of our interviews from the 2024 Tech Summit at Defense One's YouTube page, here.
We're sharing some of our notable exchanges from the 2024 Defense One Technology Summit, beginning with the Pentagon's Maynard Holliday. Guest: Maynard Holliday, Performing the Duties of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Critical Technologies at the Defense Department. You can see all of our interviews from the 2024 Tech Summit at Defense One's YouTube page, here.
Last week, Elon, Inc. held a live taping at Bloomberg's Tech Summit. Like many of the conversations that day, it focused on artificial intelligence. Host David Papadopoulos was joined by Bloomberg Businessweek senior writer Max Chafkin, Bloomberg Musk reporter Dana Hull and a special guest, Bloomberg Businessweek editor Brad Stone. Together, we broke down how Elon Musk has (and hasn't) innovated in this crucial industry. Also, the crew tested Brad on whether he could differentiate between Grok and other chatbots in a game called “School of Grok.” See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Watch Carol and Tim LIVE every day on YouTube: http://bit.ly/3vTiACF. Reid Hoffman, Co-Founder of LinkedIn and Partner at Greylock, discusses going all-in on AI. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Brad Stone shares the sights and sounds of the Bloomberg Tech Summit. Aileen Lee, Founder & Managing Partner at Cowboy Ventures, talks about the pulse of venture capital investing. Monique Woodward, Founding Partner at Cake Ventures, looks at work shifting in the age of AI. Anthony Aguirre, Executive Director of the Future of Life Institute, addresses the AI risks that businesses are facing. Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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