The Fremont Podcast
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The Fremont Podcast
Episode 128: Frederick Kautz - Trust and Technology
Are we going to be able to trust AI? More importantly, are we going to design AI that is worthy of people's trust?
Going back to our roots, host Ricky B. chats with someone he met in a coffee shop. Frederick Kautz gives lectures in the tech world. He is involved with cyber security, and Open Source.
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Are they going to have negative impacts? Are they going to have errors that cause aircraft to fall out of the sky? I mean, that's what I'm saying. We shouldn't just dismiss the fears, we should understand what and where and try to find ways to make sure that, in time, we're developing these things not just to drive the technology forward, but that we're also doing so in a way that people can come to trust.
Speaker 2:Coming to you straight from Fremont, california. This is the Fremont Podcast, dedicated to telling the stories of the past and present of the people and places of the city of Fremont, one conversation at a time. Now, here's your host, ricky B.
Speaker 3:I'm going to leave the door open because for the most part it just doesn't. The sound out there doesn't transfer, but even if it does, I don't mind the ambient sound of the community around us.
Speaker 3:Honestly, I feel like this conversation, this interview, is kind of going back to the heart of what inspired me to start the Fremont podcast, and that is meeting somebody at a coffee shop and having the only connection that you have with that person in that moment to be having a cup of coffee. And you and I met at Devout Coffee. We've interacted on a number of occasions. I think one time we had a significantly longer conversation together just about life and how we grew up or whatever, and yeah, it's been fun getting to know you. So thank you for being on the podcast with me here.
Speaker 1:Thank you for the invitation.
Speaker 4:Today, we'll join Fred as he pulls back the curtain on the unsettling truth of software security and invites you to reconsider your approach to trust in the cloud. Please welcome Frederick Kautz.
Speaker 1:So before we get, before we jump into the topic, first I want to you work broadly in cybersecurity, basically, or what do you, what do you what?
Speaker 3:would you what would be a broad umbrella for work that you do?
Speaker 1:So I wear multiple hats when it comes to my profession. So one side is I participate heavily in a thing that's called open source, which is like software that is given out for free, and it's like the same thing that a bank or an airline uses. You can literally go and download and use yourself. The barriers tend to be difficulty to use some of the software, so sometimes some of them are super easy and others sometimes are just super complex, but the tools are there. You don't have to go and build up a huge team and spend lots of money on a particular thing. You can get started with one of the things and then, as you start to build out your, your company, then you can find support, or maybe you support yourself and contribute back to the community.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, that's cool. I know that one of the things that I've heard from you, um, as we've met and we've talked to devout, is that, um, you are oftentimes a speaker at large conferences or at I don't know if they call them summits or whatever, but so what is it that you do, what is it that you offer in those conferences and stuff that makes you a speaker? Tell me a little bit about what you would be speaking on in those instances in those instances.
Speaker 1:So the largest engagement I had. There's a major software project that's called Kubernetes and for a period of time I was the co-chair for the whole conference. So I co-chaired three of them To give you a sense of the size. We would work with companies from all over the world. We would see people from Google and Microsoft and other major similar size companies would contribute, but also lots of startups too. And when we would run an event, we would run one here in the United States or I should say North America, and then there would be another one in Europe somewhere and sort of alternate between them. And now they've expanded out to to China and and other similar or to other religion regions as well and part of where. So the size of the conference was roughly somewhere between 10 to 12,000 in-person people and then there was also a whole online component as well.
Speaker 1:What's interesting is that all of the talks that we did there almost all of them would be recorded. And then they're put on YouTube. There's no paywall or anything, you just go and learn.
Speaker 3:Access them.
Speaker 1:And so then the question is, why would this still attract so many people when you can literally just go to the YouTube page and see it? And it turns out that there's a real value in the community itself. Like some people, they want to expand their network If maybe they're looking to get to join in in a particular project or start a new project to join in in a particular project or start a new project, but maybe it. Maybe some of them are trying to make sure that, uh, they have better job opportunities moving forward. Of course, companies are always looking for people as well, so there's a. There's a huge advantage in terms of the community there. And, uh, often there's there's a uh, people say like, oh, there's a security track, a network track and all these things, and people say, well, what's your favorite and it's all. It's the hallway track, the one where I get to meet and talk with people. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so for me that's like the big one. That's cool. Yeah, I think that that's interesting because when you think of technology or you think of, I guess, digital platforms however you want to phrase it I think oftentimes those platforms, those venues, can be kind of an escape from the hallway, the hallway venue or the topic, but I love the fact that you enjoy connecting with people on that. So, when you would speak in some of these conferences and and help host them um, you had mentioned in just uh, in passing, a minute ago that you helped build some of the structures I guess that worked that some of these companies working on 5g were you using. Is that the kind of stuff you would talk on, or what are the kind of the things? What are some of the things that you would? You would talk about it is one of the topics.
Speaker 1:So the term, the thing that I pushed forward that changed a significant portion of that industry was there. There was a desire by service providers. So when you say service providers, think of like telecoms or back the, the groups who like route portions of the internet yeah and there was a desire for them to move towards Kubernetes that I described before, which is that distributed like how do you run things in a distributed manner?
Speaker 1:And one of the problems that they ran into is that you can't just take what you did before and then shift it into another environment and then expect everything to just work. Because if we could just do that, why would you leave the first environment? Because it already meets your, your needs, and so there's something new, there's something there that they want, but it's but it's like it's almost similar to like if you, if you move to another country, you want to learn the language, you want to learn how the the road rules work. You want to learn the language. You want to learn how the road rules work. You want to make sure that you have some level of understanding.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in some ways yeah, that's interesting In some ways, like if I were just to go to a different country there's going to be some very human elements that are going to be consistent Eating, drinking, you know, sleeping. There's going to be some things that you're going to find in various places that are not going to be any different than you would at home, but then when you? But then there's also going to be elements of that that are going to be very foreign.
Speaker 3:Yeah so in the software world, though, your job is to kind of like help figure out how to take something from one environment and make it work in a different environment, or well, in this scenario for the.
Speaker 1:Well, in this scenario for the telecom, the problem that they had was they wanted to move to this new environment because it would allow them to basically run at like a larger scale and allow them to move faster and have like a more unified way of doing things. But there was no good guidance on how to make use of the environment. So it's sort of like it's like a travel guide, you know, using the travel theme, imagine you have like a travel guide that says you'll have a, you'll have a better time if you learn these particular things. So it's sort of like that.
Speaker 1:So the, the term, the thing that we created, so there's a thing called a network function okay and please stop me if I get too no, that's great yeah a network function is like something that happens in a network, like if you're connected with a Wi-Fi, like that radio itself is considered to be like a function of that network. If you have like a firewall to protect your system, to keep bad actors out, that's another network function.
Speaker 1:So we ended up creating this thing that was called a cloud native network function. So it's like they're designed to live in this environment and to know how to interact with that.
Speaker 1:So like, if you need more, it knows how to spin them up, if you need to shut them down it knows how to like bring them down properly, and so we ended up creating this thing that was the cloud native network function the CNF is what it was called and I put together, like here's a list of like 15 rules that you need to follow um and in order to, in order to develop one effectively yeah and there were not like detailed, like super detailed worlds.
Speaker 1:There were more like heuristics or like top level, like um high level guides in terms of like how to have a good time in this, in this space, and it just caught on like wildfire like I actually would go to uh, actually help run a telecom conference in the past before I did the cube con one okay and that one I like I when I would go to. When I went there, people like almost every booth would have cnfs like written on top of it.
Speaker 1:Here's like we do cnfs. I went to mobile world congress. I found in that's in Barcelona. It's like a hundred thousand people all show up there yeah and some of the booths like literally had that same term and they're saying that we do them as well and I was just like it just like blew my mind because it's like just toss out this little piece of information to be helpful and it turns out that a lot of people in that industry had some benefit from understanding how to make that happen.
Speaker 3:That's cool, that's cool.
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Speaker 3:So did you grow up here in Fremont?
Speaker 1:No, I grew up in Texas.
Speaker 3:Okay, okay, what part of Texas?
Speaker 1:El Paso.
Speaker 3:Okay, and so what was it that brought you to the Bay Area then Texas El Paso?
Speaker 1:Okay, and so what was it that brought you to the Bay Area then? So when I finished university, or I should say when I finished my undergrad, it was middle of the housing crisis. So 2008, 2009 time period and I was looking for work took me several months to find something. It happened to be out here, and so once I got that job offer, I shoved everything into a car and drove across.
Speaker 4:Wow.
Speaker 1:Didn't even have a place, like planned, to stay.
Speaker 3:So I'm curious. You know the comment that you made earlier about liking the hallway. I think that's great. I think it's fascinating, though, too, because I feel like a lot of what makes this area so popular for people to move to reason that you came here, no doubt, was because of the centricity of technology and technological advancement.
Speaker 1:Well, I came here for the job, you came here for the job, yeah, yeah, but I stayed for the people. There you go, there you go there you go.
Speaker 3:Well, I guess what I was going to say is I feel like people come here for jobs and it has to do with a tech world, a digital world.
Speaker 3:And it has to do with a tech world, a digital world, and yet you still find obvious joy and energy from interacting with people and talking with people. So I'm curious what are your thoughts on the digital space? Even AI as it takes, as it takes in some sense takes away from human hands human fingerprints, human creativity in some sense? I mean, obviously, I think AI is built off of whatever we imagine. So there's like a sense of a residualness of humanity built into what AI does. But for someone who seems to love engaging with people, someone who seems to interact with people but also working in a digital space, that seems to be, I think, creating a lot of fear for some people, or at least curiosity as to what this is going to end up looking like. What is your thoughts about what you do and how you're involved in what you do, versus a more human, physical world, kind of like a reality?
Speaker 1:That is a great question. It's also much more open-ended than you may realize, and so just to scope it down a little bit, so when people talk about AIs, they usually are thinking of what they call generative models or large language models. Generative could include sound or something that's visual, video or photos, but there's also lots of tiny AIs, like little AIs that fit in the smallest of computers, that are also very useful and they all have their place, but I think for this particular one, I think we should talk about the larger ones.
Speaker 3:Because that's the one that everyone is focused on. I think that's a great distinction, though, too, because there's probably a lot of AI that we've become used to for a long time that allows us to do the things that we need to do, and if it were to go away entirely, we probably would lose our minds.
Speaker 1:Well, the little ones are quite interesting because they're designed to do usually one task, and those tasks could be something as small and as simple as how do I make the engine in a car slightly more efficient so that we get better, more power out of it and less wear and tear? Or they could be related towards in the self-driving car. It's like what speed should I travel at, like when you have the cruise control is a good example, they can now like monitor the front like
Speaker 1:there's a there's actually an application of ai there that you'll often find because it's. They'll have to like monitor, like what's going, what's in front of them. They have to make decisions yeah, that's great so you're like these tiny eyes and we don't even think about those ones, um, and I think over time we're going to find them everywhere, doing these tiny little tunings that we used to have to do manually and now it just doesn't.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right, that's right, but yeah, so the big ones like what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:So the big ones, I think, are, as a society, we're still trying to work it out, like there's a lot of excitement and there's also a lot of fear, but we need to be careful not to dismiss the fears of people as well. It's not just an issue of like even with the internet uh, back when it was coming around like we can educate people on how to effectively use it, how to adapt to it. Uh, help people work out which jobs are going to change. There are jobs that some of some of the roles are literally faded out of existence. Um, and something else, something else replaced them. Yeah, um, and it wasn't always a job that replaced them. Sometimes it was like, literally, a program would do some, some work, and so it's.
Speaker 1:I think it's important, as, uh, as technologists, to help people understand where we're going here, and I think it's something we could do a lot better job with is how people understand, because I think a lot of the fear comes from. It comes from that like what is, what is the future going to to look like, or are these things going to steal or are they gonna? Are they gonna steal our jobs? Are they going to? Are they going to have negative impacts. Are they gonna to? Are they going to have negative impacts? Are they going to make, are they going to have errors that cause aircraft to fly out, to fall out of the sky? I mean, like the like we that's what I'm saying like we shouldn't just dismiss the fears, like we should understand what and where and try to find ways to make sure that, in time, we're developing these things not just to, not just to drive the technology forward, but that we're also doing so in a way that people can come to trust.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and because they have reason to trust it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, that's good. So what are the things? I'm just curious from your perspective and maybe this is too personal, but what are some of the things that you're excited about when it comes to AI and what are some of the things that you might have fear knowing what you know? They say ignorance is bliss. A lot of times, people who are ignorant, they have no fear of whatever it is that they you know like I think of my one year old, or my two year old now, who you know has is learning that there is a fear of crossing the street without you know, without a parent. So for him, it's just I'm going to go get the ball, and that's what's blissful is, I can get the ball because there's nothing in my way, but as a parent, it creates fear in me. So what is it from your perspective, with the knowledge and experience that you have, that either brings you hope and excitement about the future, with AI present, and then what is it that maybe brings you fear?
Speaker 1:So I tend to think of these things both in long-term and short-term. I'll start with the short-term ones. Those are a little bit easier and a little bit more concrete Things. That I'm really excited on the short-term is we're starting to see AI applied in healthcare environments, specifically around. How do we develop or discover new drugs, as an example? So one of one of the things that they, that they, that we try to do, is we have these.
Speaker 1:Uh is a look at a certain protein and they'll try to work out that, based on this protein, uh will is. Is it, does this protein or does this uh, or does this molecule have an impact on uh, let's say, a virus or or something similar or something similar. And so the idea when they're looking for, let's say, cancer treatment, or they're looking for how to eradicate certain types of diseases, or maybe not eradicate, maybe you could just be keeping them under control so that maybe a person still gets the disease but the impact is no longer there.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think, the AIs. When you think of AIs, well, there's different kinds. The AIs. When you think of AIs, well, there's different kinds of AIs, but the one that most people are focusing on are they optimize, Like they'll have to take this huge space and then they'll try to optimize in some way in order to see how they impact, and you have to actually do the math in order to work through it. It's like those are areas where perhaps they can help out tremendously because they can look at the results.
Speaker 1:They can make a decision and say, well, what if we change this or what if we change that? And then it's like on autopilot at that moment and starts spitting out useful molecules that need to be investigated. So I think a little bit of a complex answer, but I think, like when you start looking at it from that perspective, I'm really excited to see what kind of things that can come up with that. So lower the cost of discovering some of these, because part of why it's not the only reason why there's some social reasons that exist as to why some medicines are so expensive. Okay, but newer medicines, one of the things that the companies argue about is that they have to recoup their research cost.
Speaker 1:Right, right and if that research cost is significantly reduced, then us as a society can argue that we should have more accessibility.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's interesting yeah.
Speaker 1:So which really targets the economics of it as well.
Speaker 3:That's great. Yeah, so, yeah. So there's definitely an economic upside to a lot of this. If some of this can be done that would otherwise cost the researchers a lot of money and time and therefore pass that cost along to the consumers then all of a sudden that it becomes inaccessible.
Speaker 1:That's the hope now, whether that happens or not right. Right is is much more complex, but um, but it provides the basis for it to happen sure, sure um, in terms of fears, the, the short, the short-term fear that I have the most is uh, there's, there's two of them so the first one is there is a argument that is going on right now that a lot of companies are looking at their finances and they're afraid of falling behind on ai, and so they want to spin up these huge clusters.
Speaker 1:And they want to spin up these huge clusters and they want to spin up these huge training sets, but they have to get the money somewhere.
Speaker 2:So what's?
Speaker 1:the most readily available place of funds. In some scenarios it's not like bringing a product to the market and now they have more funds, and then they put that into research and development. It sometimes becomes well, let's get rid of these 5,000 people, and then that'll free up our interesting, so yeah uh, so it's not that like ai is going to take your job by doing it better than you. It's like ai ends up affecting the jobs.
Speaker 1:At least, that's what the pattern appears to be, I'd yeah I've not done enough research into it to know whether this is actually what is happening but, just my, my initial view of of some of these layoffs. It seems to be tied towards that. Well, how do we?
Speaker 3:free up funds so that we can do this other thing. I found the irony to be a little bit hilarious, in my opinion, because I don't know what I'm talking about, but it was still hilarious. I remember seeing a sign on the peninsula a number of times. I think it was Enterprise times, I think it was Enterprise AI I think it was the company name or something like that but they said now hiring. And I just remember thinking so. I mean, it kind of seems like a doom and gloom sort of scenario, Like if you're really good and you do your job really well, you will no longer be employed when you're done.
Speaker 1:I don't want to go that far For me. I'm a very optimistic person, yeah.
Speaker 3:I am too.
Speaker 1:And just the same way, the internet was going to destroy a bunch of jobs it actually created more jobs in the long run.
Speaker 1:And my hope is that what it allows us to do is to if you look at what humans are capable in, in, in as a whole, given a given a chance, like I hope it helps us move towards, uh, move people away from certain very repetitive jobs and instead gives people the opportunity to uh, to to basically branch out and to be able to work on things as, and if you have an idea like you may not know how to perform that, on things as, and if you have an idea like you may not know how to perform that specific task, but if you have uh like I'll use a specific example uh, let's say you want to do research on a given topic, uh, it's not uncommon now for people to do an initial pass, say to open up an ai and ask, hey, what are, what is? How does a car engine work?
Speaker 3:Or how does?
Speaker 1:doesn't mean the answer is gonna be good necessarily, but at least gives you a starting point and then you can go and look up those things and have some starting place. So I think that there's a. In the same way, like as computers over time started to gain more traction, they created lots of additional jobs. My is that, uh, and my suspicion is that that'll end up happening. The question is going to be between now and when we get to that maturity, yeah, uh, what is what's going to happen in between?
Speaker 1:that is, yeah, it's really a question, yeah yeah, that's that's.
Speaker 3:It's interesting. I I like your perspective and I'm glad you're an optimist, because I think that's helpful. I remember reading a book not really on this particular subject, but it was more on culture and what it means to be a culture maker. I think that we are all sometimes the book kind of called out people who were just like we're trying to adapt to the culture, and the point that he was making in the book was that we're all culture makers. So whatever we do is not like our adaptation to whatever it is to the culture that we perceive is not an adaptation to culture. It's actually culture making, not an adaptation to culture. It's actually culture making. You're actually making culture.
Speaker 3:So he used the example like whenever there's an invention that kind of replaces or fixes problems, replaces, you know less adequate, you know devices or whatever. So like, for instance, you know you can use the iPhone as an example, or whatever. So like, for instance, you know you can use the iPhone as an example. So you go from having to have a desktop computer or a laptop even, and you can accomplish a lot of tasks on your handheld device now. Or even like a camera, like a lot of people would buy a camera and they would have a camera with them and then they'd also have a phone or whatever. Now you can do all of that on one Well.
Speaker 3:Well, that solves some problems and that eliminates, like, all of a sudden, like not as many people are out buying cameras and not as many people are out buying computers because they can get it all on their cell phone, but then all of a sudden, by the existence of the cell phone, there opens up a whole new world of things that are that are needed, like cell phone cases. There's insurance for cell phone, there's, you know, support for being able to the actual support to be able to carry the data you know from phone to phone or whatever. So in some sense, yes, you can mourn the loss of the camera on one side, but on the other side, it's like there is a whole other side of it that now creates a need for so many other things as well. So, if I hear you right, that's along the lines of what I'm understanding.
Speaker 1:It definitely is, and we have to as a society. I believe one of our best traits as humans is our ability to adapt to new situations, and this is yet another thing that we have to learn how to adapt to. So we learned how to adapt with the internet. We're actually still adapting to it, because it's not like you do it once and then it's done.
Speaker 1:So, there's a continued adaptation as we, as we learn more and build more capabilities. The internet my opinion here is the internet is what led to the creation of AI as it is today, because you needed lots of data. And how do you get lots of data without something like an internet? So it basically became a internet, became a giant content generator.
Speaker 1:That, uh, that people now feed into these huge AIs, whether it was legal or not, or that's a different story, but it is certain that the current AI and the way that it's heading a large portion of it would not very likely not have been. I don't want to say it's impossible, but it would have been much more difficult to do it without something like the internet.
Speaker 1:So I think over time we'll learn how to. We'll learn how to adapt, like we have we'll we'll. We have to learn how to cope with things like as a society. How do we cope with deep fakes? How do we know that the thing we're looking at is is real? And we don't always have good answers to that yet. But, uh, but, as a society, we will be, be, will come to be more suspicious of yeah, of things that we see on the internet. So we'll naturally develop some ourselves. In the same way that when I go into into a store and I see a tabloid there and I open up the tabloid and it's saying something that's ludicrous, I'm thinking is this real?
Speaker 1:right, right, and I think we'll do the same with with the internet.
Speaker 3:That's cool. I asked you what your fears were regarding AI. I'm curious what maybe more objective dangers, as opposed to just your fears, or you feel like generally as a society, like what are some of the dangers that may be out there in regards to AI?
Speaker 1:I mentioned, there were two fears that I had that were on the short term, and this plays into some of it, into some of it the information an AI. If you think about what an AI is today, it is something that learns statistical properties and, specifically, neural networks. There's different kinds of AIs that are not neural networks, that work in completely different ways, but again, the one that everyone's focusing on is the neural network one, and part of what they do is they learn uh, they learn some statistical property about the data set, or you can even go far enough to say, with the larger ones, that they, they compress some of the information and sort of almost develop a memory okay, for lack of a better phrase yeah um and this um, so this information, uh, on one side it's like garbage in, garbage out right so you need to make sure you have high quality information to to train it on um and some of these.
Speaker 1:Uh, some people have already done a lot of work towards trying to find uh, trying to find bias within them. Uh, sometimes it can be very difficult to find some of these bias because you think that you've covered it, but there might be other indicators that tie it in.
Speaker 1:There's a more concrete thing that is also happening, though, which is that, in order to train this again, we mentioned about needing a lot of data. There is a danger when you gather lots of data into one spot. If it's sensitive data, and you have some person with malintent who wants to compromise that information, whether it's to modify it or steal it and you've gathered all that information into one spot, that becomes a very juicy target.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So there's and I mentioned before about a lot of companies being scared that they're going to fall behind yeah, so there's a pressure now, there's an economic pressure for companies to not always protect those systems in the way they historically would have, because they're afraid of losing their competitive advantage. Losing their competitive advantage. So in the short to medium term that's one of the fears that I have is that information being manipulated or tampered with or stolen.
Speaker 1:Stolen is the worst one. But in the long term, I think part of it is. If I were to drive a fear for a long term, one would be us as a society not learning how to cope with AI taking over a lot of roles. Like you look at how our economic system is set up, like we encourage people to go find jobs, suppose that AI has become really amazingly good and they can take on most, most jobs for a moment just as like a thought experiment sure um, one of the things that I think is is healthy for us is for us to engage in tasks that challenge us.
Speaker 1:It could be a martial art, where you're challenging your, your body, and you're challenging your, your mind, to work through a problem of how do I, how do I do this in a safe way and get the outcome that I want, or you know, or other sports are similar. It could be something like art, like how do I, how do I create something that is unique and beautiful, or something that really speaks, that speaks to myself and to others, and I think part of that adaptation is how do we make sure that people can still be engaged in meaningful endeavors? And in a world where perhaps the ai is taking care of most of the of the work, that, then that means we have to find, as a society, find ways to to keep ourselves busy so that we just from a from a mental health perspective, so that's good.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, that's. That's really helpful. I like. I like your perspective and it's good to know that somebody like you isn't kind of in the mix on all of this stuff. That's great, um.
Speaker 1:I don't know what I can do about it. I, I, I try, I know, I know, but but still.
Speaker 3:I mean I'm sure there's a lot more people that have similar perspectives or at least have a conscience toward those sorts of things as well.
Speaker 1:I hope so, because if the opposite side is, we don't is the worst case scenario would be as a society, we have this happen and there's it's like well, you're not doing anything meaningful, so you're not going to get enough money to to survive and you can't out-compete the AI because it's too cheap.
Speaker 2:Sure sure.
Speaker 1:And so now you have this issue of how do you even feed yourself? Plus, how do you keep yourself engaged when you can't even get the basics down?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great.
Speaker 1:My hope is that, again, like I said, I'm an optimistic person. I don't think that'll be what happens.
Speaker 2:Right right right.
Speaker 1:But we can take steps in order to help that, and I don't think the step is necessarily stop AI from becoming a thing.
Speaker 2:I don't think that's going to work.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I think, if our best path towards this is again as a society, how do we make sure that we're in a in a spot where, as these things start to to come around, that uh, people can still provide for their families and still find ways to to find things that they really enjoy and in order to keep themselves in uh, in order to keep their minds active.
Speaker 3:That's great. That's great. I love it. Frederick, thanks for joining me. I'm going to wrap it up here, but before we go, what are some of the places that you love about Fremont? What are the things that you do here? I know that you like Devout because I see you there often and it's always good to run into you. What are some of the other things that you enjoy about Fremont?
Speaker 1:Definitely we are doing better on the coffee than we used to, Because I remember when Deval was first opening was Niles Flea Market. They did like a soft launch walked in it was like very, very front of the shop was like it and there was like a wood panel. That's right and I was so excited because it was like we did not not to say there were no good coffee shops here, but there was a lack of variety.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think I do like some of the things around nature that we do have over here I think it's something that a lot of people they don't quite realize that you have some of the, the some of the parks we have, the some of the nature preserves that are here and they're they're underutilized absolutely in many scenarios.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure, yeah I also in niles in particular. I also really enjoy the community here. I really enjoy the uh, the way people are like. When I first moved over here, I ended up going to Mr Mikey's and all my stuff was still in storage, though, and I needed like a screwdriver. So I go in to buy. It's like maybe they'll sell a screwdriver, and so I walk in hey, do you sell one? Oh, no, here, just borrow mine.
Speaker 3:Oh, my word, that's cool. It's like.
Speaker 1:I knew I was in a good spot.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's awesome, I love that.
Speaker 1:And to give juxtaposition, when I was in Palo Alto because I lived in downtown Palo Alto for a while and I had neighbors there like literally lived in the place next door that a year and half two years never said hello once. If you say hello, they like walk faster, and and I, and I think, and, and I, I don't want to give them too much of a hard time and not say that everyone follow all it's like there's some amazing people over there too, but I think when people are, they're they're worried about their future, they're worried about their career they are.
Speaker 1:They're in a position where they feel they have to work incredibly hard in order to, in order to make it Um. My guess is maybe these people didn't feel like they have space for anything else other than uh, are you useful to me from a career perspective? If not, then uh, it's actually a risk because I won't do the things I need to do in order to in order to succeed.
Speaker 3:yeah, it's just a guess like yeah for sure. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of different reasons why people do what they do, but I do love niles, I love uh fremont and love the um. I've experienced a lot of friendliness as well, and I think that's one of the things that I want to highlight through the podcast is just that there are a lot of great people here and there are a lot of people that are truly genuinely interested in getting to know you, and they've got great stories to get to know, so we should take the time to do that.
Speaker 1:I don't think there is a moment. Every time I've gone walking out in Niles and very often I end up talking with a lot of people and I don't think I've ever come across a time where I didn't learn something interesting, or or it's like people are have always been friendly over here, so I'm, I'm that's cool. It's one of the things that I really love about this, uh, about this particular place.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. Well, frederick, thank you so much and look forward to sharing uh this conversation with our community and, um, I appreciate you taking the time to be on it.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 2:This episode was hosted and produced by Ricky B. I'm Gary Williams, andrew Kvet is the editor. Scheduling and pre-interviews by Sarah S. Be sure to subscribe wherever it is that you listen, so you don't miss an episode. You can find everything we make the podcast and all of our social media links at thefremontpodcastcom, so you don't miss an episode. You can find everything we make the podcast and all of our social media links at thefremontpodcastcom.
Speaker 3:Join us next week on the Fremont Podcast. This is a Muggins Media Podcast.