Chelsea Collier is obsessed with smart cities. The Austin resident recently spent several weeks in China visiting different cities to see how they are using technology to work more efficiently. There she discovered things like a smog-sucking high-rise in Beijing and government organizations dedicated to building bridges between industry and government.

“Their process is very deliberate and streamlined,” Collier told Kish Rajan during CALinnovates’ latest A Step Ahead podcast. “But that’s because it’s a single party. They all march to the beat of the same drum.”

While there may be some appeal to that simplicity, the Chinese system obviously comes with its share of problems. But Collier was happy to focus on the positive and see inspiration in the work happening in China.

Her trip was part of her research through an Eisenhower Fellowship which she won last year. She’s looking all over to see what make some cities smarter and publishing her findings at Digi.city.

“I don’t think of some cities as dumb per se,” said Collier. “They’re just not as connected as they could be.”

Collier believes that cities should be using technology to engage citizens and to make services smarter. In San Diego, for example, the city is using an app to let people instantly report problems such as potholes and downed electrical wires. In her hometown of Austin they’ve created an app to help move excess food from restaurants and stores to people who don’t have enough to eat.

“How do we invite smart people in the private sector to help create these kinds of solutions?” asked Collier. “At the end of the day, we’re all in this together.”

Listen to the full interview here:

https://soundcloud.com/user-90169041/ep-16-founder-of-digicity-chelsea-collier

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A Step Ahead: Chelsea Collier

Hey everybody. Kish Rajen, Chief Evangelist at CALinnovates and welcome to the latest episode of A Step Ahead. We’re talking to Chelsea Collier who is talking about smart cities through her initiative, Digi.City. It’s a fascinating discussion about how innovation and technology can revolutionize the way that communities function. Basic infrastructure, basic civic services, and the way citizens can use technology to get involved in the communities where they live and work. Chelsea here brings a wonderful perspective and we were glad to have her on A Step Ahead. Chelsea Collier, hey, thanks so much for joining us on A Step Ahead, we really appreciate it.

Chelsea Coller: Oh no, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

You and I had a chance to talk and you helped convene a panel in San Diego not long ago. A really great conversation that ensued there, where you brought together the public sector, private sector, people thinking about innovation policy, that was a really informative session.

Glad you enjoyed it, and my hope is to be able to put people in a room who may or may not always find themselves together in conversation. I think smart cities is a great platform to be able to do that.

Well, that certainly worked and it did, it brought very innovative leadership from the city government itself along with people on the business and economic development side. It was a rich conversation about how those public and private interests can align and how we can do important things in places like San Diego and beyond. I gather that’s what your work is, so tell us a little bit about Digi.City and what you’re up to.

Sure. Well, I’ve worked in a variety of different sectors over the course of my career. Public sector in communications, I worked for the governor’s office in Texas so had a little bit of public sector experience. I’ve worked in this tech and startup community, I’ve worked in social impact community, and all of that has felt phonetic over my career but I’m really excited that the topic of smart cities is a chance to bring all of that conversation together. I was really fortunate, I received an Eisenhower Fellowship in January of this year and I chose the topic of my research to be smart cities both across the US and also in China. Really, as a way to study best practices, see what was happening in the fields across both nations, and then use those practices to bring people together to have interesting conversations and to hopefully spur more innovation. I launched Digi.City which is a blog, it’s my personal blog, as a way to foster that conversation. I thought I can publish a Whitepaper in a year that nobody’s going to read or I can talk about it as it’s happening, which might be a little more messy but to me, messy is interesting. That’s the background of where I’ve been and what I’m working on and hopefully being of service to everybody, private sector and public sector, and the smart city spaces, we’re all trying to figure it out.

Well let’s get into that a little bit. Are most of our cities dumb in the United States? Tell us what that means.

I don’t think they’re dumb, per se, but it’s certainly not as connected as it could be. If you look at public sector and private sector, I think cities have really evolved in two different silos and that hasn’t helped anyone. People in the public sector, city staff and city leadership, they’re tasked heavily with serving their community but not always knowing how to engage citizens. Even the whole idea of a city council meeting as a place to involve citizens, most citizens and residents aren’t going to sit through a city council meeting, it doesn’t fit the way that we work and live. On the other side, in the private sector side, technology is moving so fast and it’s enabling this 24/7 connectivity in our lives to where we’re always on, we’re always connected, we’re always creating. I’m really hoping that smart cities is a way to enable technology to connect and bridge those two divided areas. I’m seeing that in some cities.

Are you talking about using technology as a means of reaching the citizenry and enabling them to be more civically engaged, or are you talking about city operations and the way the streets work and the way the water systems work? Help us understand where you see the opportunities for technology to be applied in our civic life.

That’s a perfect question and I’m really grateful that you framed it that way because it gets to the heart of the challenge and to the heart of the promise, I think. In San Diego, I was really impressed to hear about the Get It Done app. This goes to the point of civic engagement, really enabling citizens who are running around their city as a way to connect with how the city operates. The Get It Done app, as I understand it, is basically empowering every citizen and resident with their mobile phone if they see a pothole, if they see an electricity line down, if they see grounds that are unkempt, or something that’s not quite right, or something that’s really wonderful that they want to champion and cheer. They can snap a picture of it, upload it to the app, and then it fosters the conversation between that city department or that city employee and the person who’s recording the issues. That’s an example of smart technology and smart city technology in San Diego that’s doing that citizen engagement piece.

At the same time, your question about how a city operates, smart technology is absolutely critical to that piece of it. I learned a lot about what was happening with street lights and there’s a pilot program where there are sensors connected to the street light that helps them adjust the timing of the traffic lights in accordance to the traffic volumes. A dumb way to operate is somebody shimmying up the street light every two years and clicking how many people go underneath it as opposed to a sensor which communicates in real time what’s happening. If there’s congestion, it can adjust with its current reality.

Yeah, there’s so many great applications you could think of and as you may know, I served on my own city council in a small town in California for four years. I was coming out of the mobile phone industry that I had been in for 10 years and seeing this incredibly rapid evolution of new technologies that were changing everything. We were looking at how city governments function, whether it’s how citizens learn about or report potholes or how traffic flows or how street lights operate from a lighting and safety perspective, to how the trash and recycling gets collected and when and where. You could go on and on and on, all of these seemingly mundane aspects of our daily life in our cities that we take for granted, could and probably should be revolutionized by technology to make them more effective.

That’s exactly right. Yeah and it’s really fun to think about. Having been in the private sector and the public sector, I really appreciate that you have that perspective and can have compassion for both. I live in Austin, Texas, you know, we have such an engaged, super, super intelligent startup community here. Tech entrepreneurs who are priming employees to see a challenge and then fix it. They’re focused on how can we quickly escalate the solutions, and then you apply that to city government, which has been created in the citizen interest, and you can’t experiment in the same way. I think the cities that are unearthing better leaders in the smart city space are finding a way to meet in the middle and to rethink the silos that aren’t about immediate delivery of services, the trash and the potholes and the parks and recreation and those groups. But in thinking cross laterally and especially from a policy perspective, how do we become more nimble, how do we invite smart people in the private sector both in the corporate world and the startup world to help us create these solutions because at the end of the day, we’re all in it together so how does each city want to create the city that it wants to become.

Well, it’s such a great way that you phrased that, how do we invite that kind of talent and entrepreneurship and ingenuity to tackling what again, can often be these mundane but really important public problems. One of the things that we’ve worked on a lot at CALinnovates is around open data and I’m wondering if this is part of your work or the research that you’ve seen in places like San Francisco, San Diego, I’m sure in Austin and Boston and New York and other places. When the city government or the local government will make the data that they possess inside of all of their internal operations, when they’ll expose that and make it available for entrepreneurs to see that data, what often is produced are great new ideas, great applications, great tools that as you said, invite that ingenuity in creating whole new mechanisms around how we deal with important aspects of our daily lives.

Mm-hmm, and the important piece of it for the city is to really message what they’re doing with that data, how they’re managing it, and address the citizen and resident concerns that naturally pop up. It’s easy, I think in the lack of information, for fear to be produced. I think cities that are getting it right are really doing again, that citizen engagement piece where they say wow, I think we have a great opportunity here, we’re going to be capturing all this data because we’re putting sensors on street lights and cameras to make our city safer, all of these sensor, data collection points.

“By the way, here’s the department that’s managing all this data, here’s what was thought about, of course we’re worried about security and privacy and that’s our number one priority. Here’s how we clean the data and here’s how we use it.” Everyone is opting in because as private sector citizens, we exchange privacy for convenience all the time.

Yeah, we check that-

Every single, tiny-

That terms and conditions boxes all the time, right.

Exactly right, every time I try to get from here to there, I’m letting someone know where I’m going and I’m very happy to do that because it helps me live my life more efficiently. I think if the messaging is right and it’s inclusive and there’s a real conversation there, then we can do exactly the same thing on the safe front as well.

Well, it’s a great point you make and again, my experience at government at all levels is that communication is a very difficult thing to do. I think we are entering a very complicated period for government because I think for the reasons that you touched on, one, government is always going to be risk averse, I mean, it should be risk averse. These aren’t startup companies that are inviting risk because failure is part of the process. Failures in government have real consequences and so there’s a natural risk aversion to experimentation and innovation, right? We have to deal with that but the other piece that you mentioned also is that how do you get the citizenry comfortable, let alone participate in new models of engaging their government when the communication channels are old and often are not that effective. These are really vexing challenges right now.

Agreed and I think it’s the tech community that gets it on an entirely different level. In Austin, I think it’s in June, we have the ATX Hack for Change which is a civic hack-a-thon that is sponsored by the city, it’s put on by St. Edward’s University, and it brings all of the people in the tech sector and the broader community, everybody becomes a hacker whether you’re a designer or project manager, a coder, developer, teacher, whatever your role is. It’s this participatory engagement way that you can choose a project and hack the city. Not in a bad way but in a good way, creating an engaging project. That’s one small part of this solution but I think the more that we can talk about it and lovingly challenge cities to be transparent and support them, that they don’t have to have it all figured out and that they can ask for help and that the citizenry can rise up to meet that challenge.

What’s one of your favorite examples that you’ve seen or have you seen anything that really strikes you as a good example of where that kind of hack-a-thon or that engagement between the city and inviting in those entrepreneurs produced some new idea or some new approach that appears to be making a difference in that community?

Yeah, there was a project that came out of the hack-a-thon and I’m playing favorites here, which is a bit unfair. There are literally hundreds of projects that are so cool and we could talk for 10 hours about all of the great stuff but in the early years of the hack-a-thon, I think it’s in its fourth year, coming up on fifth year, there was a project that engaged folks to work with area restaurants around feeding the hungry and handling excess capacity from restaurants and grocery stores. That project was actually recognized by the White House and the leaders of that project went and presented it in front of the White House administration. I think that was two years ago but that’s the one that comes to mind as something that literally was started with a question, like why do we have all this excess capacity and hungry people at the same time? This doesn’t make sense, can technology be some part of the solution to bring people together? The program is still up and running.

Well, that’s a fantastic example. We certainly have seen that if there’s one thing the internet and good applications can do well, it’s find excess supply and demand and put them together in a more efficient way. We see through these new innovations, there’s challenges with home share and with ride share and new types of applications that are doing that really well. Consumers love it but it causes consternation. I think those battles will continue for some time but there you are raising an example of matching supply and demand, it sounds like it’s doing some pretty significant public good.

Yeah and you bring up a great point about the sharing economy policy, that was a big wake up call, I think, for a lot of people that you can’t sit back and wait for the city to unfold the way that you want it. It really requires participation from everyone. In Austin, we’ve had a lot of challenges due to a new city council that’s come on board, and ride sharing and a lot of the home sharing, Airbnb legislation was not what people wanted it to be. It was again, a huge wake up call where people said wait a minute, what do you mean I can’t rent out my home to Airbnb, this is Austin, we’re the founding city of HomeAway. What’s happening? What do you mean Lyft and Uber can’t operate here? It was a rally cry for engagement and that policy doesn’t happen by accident. Another piece that is really top of mind, at least for me right now but doesn’t get a lot of talk, it doesn’t get a lot of air time, is the whole idea around network capacity. We’re seeing all of the IOT, Internet of Things, all the sensors collecting data, that number is proliferating at a speed that none of us are truly conscious of but the numbers are staggering. The capacity for our networks to handle all of that volume is going to be a very, very big issue very soon.

Well, as I mentioned, I spent at least the first part of my career in the mobile industry and I’m old enough that I was around the first go around when we were building out the first generation of what we now take for granted as digital wireless networks. Now that was 1G where now we’re talking about 5G, which is what you’re alluding to, but when you talk to the telecom network providers, they’ll tell you about the amount of physical infrastructure, the number of the repeaters or the mini-towers if you will that need to get deployed. That number is growing dramatically because of the nature of how these more powerful networks need to function in order to accommodate all of the data that you’re talking about. Whether it’s the billions of devices being connected through the Internet of Things or it’s the intensity of video and other varied data intensive services that people really love and want. To your point, it raises a really big challenge at the local level to enable that infrastructure, doesn’t it?

That’s right and to educate the policy makers and also to educate the citizens and residents that this stuff doesn’t happen overnight. One of the things that I’m hoping and attempting to do through Digi.City is really cheerlead and champion cities who are having the right approach to that policy who are creating a streamlined permitting process that really spurs competition and encourages innovation. As opposed to what I hope doesn’t happen in many cities, which is four years down the road, people aren’t getting the connectivity that they want and then all of a sudden, everyone’s mad and not as connected as they could be. Cities will really lose out in that scenario. Trying to raise the profile of that conversation and really get people thinking about it and talking about it and looking at what policies have been successful so far.

Well, no kidding. In the few minutes we have left, you mentioned in your introduction that the work that you’ve been doing or the research is both here and in China. Obviously a very different form of government there where they can move much more deliberately at the government level with things they want to accomplish. I’m wondering, what is your experience in terms of the contract that may be happening there versus what you see in the US?

It’s pretty massive. All of my assumptions were challenged. I was there for four weeks and spent time in five different cities in China and the massive scale at which they think and deploy innovation is absolutely amazing. To your point, which is so well said, it’s very deliberate and it’s very streamlined. It’s a single party system and there’s an edict from the central government to the local government and associations and private sector and citizens, they all march to the beat of the same drum once that vision is communicated. The language that I kept hearing is, “innovation is the way that we will liberate citizens from poverty.” They’re incredibly connected and have I think 298 smart city projects active and another 300 in the works about to be deployed. They’re moving at a rapid, rapid speed and to some that causes fear. I think there’s a lot of hesitation around China but to me, I think it’s incredibly inspiring. We can learn from the advances that they’ve already created and then apply that of course to our system of government and what works here in the US.

Yeah and-

I think if we concentrate on the positive, then we can learn a lot.

Yeah, yeah, you know I mentioned to you when we met that when I worked for governor Brown, we took a ten day trip to China. It was a trade mission but also where the governor was actively working on climate policy with the Chinese government there at the national and at the provincial level. Governor Brown, of course, he’s got a very unique style as you know and he was openly talking about how much he admired at some level the speed and the determination with which big projects and big things could get accomplished in China. No California Environmental Quality act or regulations slowing them down. He of course was a bit tongue in cheek but he was honestly saying here in the United States, we could learn a little bit from them about how, as you said, they get a vision and they make it happen. Of course, they can learn quite a bit from us too in certain ways but he did acknowledge that there’s a lot to look up to in certain ways there.

That’s right and in my experience, again, I’m one person and I was there for four weeks so I’m certainly no expert on Chinese foreign policy or even their rate of technology but what I did understand is that they’re very transparent about the challenges and very determined, to borrow your word about how to leverage technology and innovation to address those challenges. I think it’s definitely something to keep a tab on.

Yeah. Well, back here at home, last question Chelsea, we’ve gone through a national election, we have a new president that’s talked a lot about infrastructure, some policy and potentially investment from the federal level. You’ve been now traveling the United States and seeing examples of what’s possible here. What is your level of optimism and enthusiasm about where we’re headed as a country towards this vision of deploying smarter cities?

In the smart cities space specifically, there has been a very decentralized approach in the US. It’s been every city for themselves, and the private sector has really led that conversation and then tried to apply that to cities. That has some success but I don’t think it’s as efficient as it could be. In June, the Department of Transportation issued a smart cities challenge and chose the winner in June through the Department of Transportation and Secretary Fox chose Columbus, Ohio as that winner. That was really the first time that there was a dialogue between the federal level and the local level of some challenge or even very light policy recommendations about how to go about implementing smart cities, smart city technology. I think we’ll see a lot more of that and that will happen relatively quickly because that conversation can’t happen in isolation.

I was at a conference and I was listening to the chief innovation officer of Chicago talk about when they’re looking at their infrastructure challenges and there are many, whether they were talking about roads or waterways or bridges or you can fill in the blank, whatever big system needs a ton of money to maintain it. They’re looking at smart cities and connected technology as sensors to gather information about what are the most vulnerable, and what’re the most efficient way to go about and deploy resources. They’re using that smart city technology to spend money wiser and more efficiently which in the big picture, means that they save money in the long term. I think that’s perhaps a subcurative answer to your question but I think we’re going to see a lot more collaboration with some vision from the federal level. It can really help to bolster the local level to make decisions smarter.

Well, I think that it’s a hopeful idea that we can find smarter ways to create collaboration at the federal and local level in ways that are also inviting more of that private investment. It certainly seems that that’s going to be the necessary combination to help us to look at all of our legacy infrastructure and the things you touched on before, how do we create a new chapter of civic engagement between the public and their government? Hopefully this vision around what the smart cities can be can stimulate the progress that we’re capable of and that we really need.

Yeah, that’s very well said, great.

Well, listen, Chelsea Collier at Digi.City, thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and we’ll be following your travels and the information that you’re sharing on your blog. We really appreciate you spending time with us here on A Step Ahead.

Thanks for the opportunity and for creating a platform. I mean, these are exactly the conversations that we should all be having and thanks for fostering it.

https://soundcloud.com/user-90169041/ep-15-editor-in-chief-at-mattermark-alex-wilhelm

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A Step Ahead: Alex Wilhelm

Hey everyone. It’s Mike Montgomery here on the A Step Ahead podcast, and today we’re joined by Alex Wilhelm from Mattermark. Hey, Alex.

Alex Wilhelm: Hey. Thanks for having me.

Really glad you’re here. Let’s start by talking about you. Is that okay with you?

I never get bored with myself, so I’ll go ahead and say, “Yes.”

All right. What is Mattermark?

Mattermark is two things. On the business side, it’s a corporation that collects and processes a bunch of data on private corporations, that people like venture capitalists buy from us on a recurring basis, to help them do deals and that sort of thing. It has a history in journalism, the company was actually founded as an add to journalism by accident. Back in the day our CEO, Danielle Morrell, wrote a long series of blog posts over a month long period, and in one of those she ranked a bunch of portfolio companies of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. She ranked them by traffic, and Twitter followers, and so forth to come up with kind of a ranking of their portfolio. That became a product, that product became a company, and Mattermark’s been around for three or four years now. That’s kind of one thing. Then my side of the company is the publishing arm. A little old journalism shop that does coverage of the intersection of finance and tech. You want to think about this model in more of the real world sense, Bloomberg is a data company and a media company. We’re like the micro micro micro version of that, if you will.

Got it, so your audience is like VC’s, investors?

About four people and my mom, so a small crowd.

No I think that’s it’s odd to see a niche topic like finance and tech, and kind of their collision point become more mainstream. There’s so much money inside of Silicon Valley in the technology industry right now, it’s quite a broad thing to talk about it. So my audience goes from people that are interested in tech, people that are into tech, to people that fund tech. Also I think a lot of people that may invest into VC portfolios and so forth. I have a relatively savvy audience, if you will. I don’t have to do a lot of re-explaining of issues and topics, which is fun, but it also means that I do write for a more narrow audience. Back when I was at TechCrunch I wrote for a much more mainstream set of people, which means that you have different goals, but over the last, I guess eleven months now, I’ve gotten to focus on kind of one evolving story, which is the state of technology in America, and that’s been a real blast. I really feel like I’ve learned a lot. I hope I’ve done a good job. I can’t really grade myself, but it’s been fun.

I have a question for you. You spend a lot of time as most journalists do, on Twitter.

Yes sir.

How do you get anything else done, because Twitter seems to have the ability to take over people’s lives. How do you balance that?

Well it’s not a subtraction from productivity if you do it correctly. Often I will get off Twitter for an hour or two when I’m working on something that’s creative and I need to focus. If I’m writing or I’m editing I’m not usually on Twitter at the same time because I need to have kind of a singular focus, but a lot of the time I’m news gathering, or I’m reading, or I’m taking part in a conversation, and a lot of the things that I share on Twitter, that I see in Twitter, that I talk about on Twitter, find their way into stuff that I write about. That’s kind of the continuing conversation that feeds and helps me kind of hone what I think. It’s where you get a lot of good ideas, you see a lot of really bad ideas, you see hot takes, cold takes, medium rare takes, whatever.

You’re no different than Donald Trump?

I don’t watch Morning Joe on MSNBC and then tweet about what I saw and tank stocks, so no, not quite Trumpian. Also, his tweets are lame. His tweets are always about him. He’s actually really bad at Twitter. Imagine if he had no followers and tweeting out that same crap. I mean how ridiculous would it be. He’s only famous because he’s famous.

You’re kind of a pot stirrer, you like to throw shit occasionally, right?

I wouldn’t self-describe that way, I just think we’re all very snarky. I think that one fun thing about Twitter, kind of a recurring basis is that it gives us-

Is that-

Go for it, sorry.

I was just going to say, is there any regrets with some of that snark, or is it all just usually in good fun?

Yeah, I think it would be unfair to say none. Not as much as you’d think. There’s a lot of people out there who, either due to their job can’t say much though they want to, a lot of people there have a bias towards positivity, which I find very interesting. They say, they default to the rule that if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything. Which is ridiculous. If you write, as you guys do, at least some, you understand that every sentence you put down is a declaration. If you’re always making judgment calls, why stop at the positive? Why not go on to the negative? I think the PR industry is so big and so powerful in a way, that you need an even more corrective dose of negativity just to get back to even. They’re paid to spin positive about everything. They’re much bigger than journalism, and they’re better funded, and they’re growing more quickly. The negative stuff is stylistic to some extent, I have to admit it’s fun, but it has a purpose too. It’s not just me, you know, I can’t say that in a podcast, what’s a polite way to phrase self-indulgent? I guess that’s a good enough.

That may be a polite way to phrase it.

Yeah I think we’ll just leave it there.

Yeah, your, all right, so you’re pretty young, are you a millennial?

I’m viscerally a millennial, yes.

Uh huh, okay, and you spent some time at The Next Web, right?

Yeah, I did.

What’s changed since your days at The Next Web? Like what, in terms of journalism, what’s different now than it used to be?

Well, I joined The Next Web probably, what, seven years ago, somewhere in there, and so back then I don’t think BuzzFeed was nearly as big as it is now, and BuzzFeed didn’t have the same high quality news team that it does now. BuzzFeed news is actually pretty good. Recode wasn’t born, BI wasn’t spun out and purchased. Washington Post had different owners. The Journal wasn’t doing as many buyouts. Newspapers sold more ads. The one thing about the journalism industry is that it continues to fall apart somehow and still exist. I don’t know how that keeps happening, but it’s strange.

What the future of newspapers?

I mean I was just at Starbucks for my 8:30 a.m., and I was reading the print copy of The Journal, and it only had two main sections to it. Made me kind of sad. It used to be a lot deeper. I don’t know man, there’s a lot of cool companies working on this. There’s a Dutch company that’s doing a lot of great work on micro payments for individual articles that I’ve covered actually for Mattermark, and that’s doing a lot of good work, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s been lost. I think as we all understand paywalls are not replacing declining ad revenues for papers. To me it’s a bad looking situation that won’t probably get better until the general public decides that it wants to invest in newspapers, or the government does. The government won’t, and people don’t seem to be willing or able to, so I don’t have any good news. Or even good hopes. Okay but same question back to you, what do you think the future of newspapers is, say in the next five years?

I think they’re a lot of smart people in the newspaper industry who are taking a second look at it. We’ve got Jeff Bezos who’s trying to revive The Post, and you’ve got some really smart people running the Times operation, and then I even heard that the Chronicle’s making money now, which is surprising given the fact that it seems like it’s not got a lot of news in it, so-

Well, I like The Chronicle, I have to protest. I have to protest big, my friend Owen Thomas is the Business Editor over at The Chronicle and I think he’s doing a very fine job. At least for in that desk.

That’s great, but it’s not a business newspaper. It’s a multipurpose newspaper. If you get past the great work of Owen, and you try to read the sports page or the front page, or the entertainment section, there’s not a lot left.

Are you a big fan of the entertainment section? Is that your go to?

No, I’m a sports fan.

Ah, okay, fair enough.

Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. But I’ll read it all. I’ve gone through a lot of years sitting on a Muni bus or whatever with some time on my hands, and something to read and I used to be able to fill that time well, and now it’s harder to fill that time because I can just blow right through it.

Yeah.

I guess there’s the beauty of this world that we live in now is that there’s a great mix, right? You can grab a newspaper, you can use your phone or whatever you want to read, anything from Mattermark to Reddit, wherever you get your news. There are more options, but this idea of micro payments per article is great. It may help everybody.

I recall the name of the company, it’s called Blendle.

Blendle.

Blendle, yeah, and they’re a big hit in Europe and they’re just I think in open beta here in the US. I’m hoping, just between us, that it does well, because if there’s a way to get more money from me to newspapers, that’s great. I’m a Post subscriber, which I’m actually pretty happy about, and I founded a company back in the day called Contenture. That was trying to do micro payments for online content, but way before it’s time, so it died. This is a space that I really care about, both intellectually and professionally.

I met somebody at a conference who was trying to do micro payments for porn. What do you think about that?

Well, given that it’s porn, why not do macro payments?

You know what? This is a topic that I find explaining working knowledge of will somehow out myself. I’ll just say that I think that’s there’s a number of online media formats that monetize at different levels, and pornography may be one of the more successful ones. Especially going back in the history of the internet, porn’s been at the forefront of technology. They were the first people to do online payments, video streaming, and so forth. It does matter, jokes aside, but given the advent of free porn, and here I am showing off my knowledge of the industry, I think that cat’s kind of already out of the bag as it were.

Right on. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about journalistic integrity and direction. When you worked at TechCrunch, TechCrunch was owned by a variety of a different companies. I guess first AOL and Time Warner, maybe now Verizon. Did that limit you in any way shape or form? Did you feel bound by positions that your parent companies had taken?

When I was there it was owned by AOL and then my last six months were the Verizon acquisition. I was there towards the very tail end of AOL’s independence and then the first bit of its non-independence. The short answer is not even slightly. I never had any pushback. I mean really the first thing I did when I got to TechCrunch was cover the implosion of Patch, which was AOL’s micro, sort of hyper local news startup. I was a jerk, because it was a horrible product, and a horrible business, and it lost tons of money.

My wife is offended that you’re saying that. Offended.

I mean Patch is a delectable, delightful, delicious thing that should have been kept going. With Patch, whether you liked it or not, it lost a bunch of money and AOL couldn’t afford it. I joined TC and that was one of the first things I worked on. I’m sure they read it, but they couldn’t do anything about it, because they didn’t control at all the newsroom at TC. This is a pattern that kept going. The only times that I ever really interacted with AOL staff in the editorial sense was when I needed legal backup. If I needed to have something read of mine that was let’s say breaking then about lawsuits, and you want to have your lawyers read it to make sure you’re not over your skis, it’s great to have institutional level resources to lean on. In terms of day-to-day, or even just month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter operations, zero pushback. Which is why TechCrunch works, and that’s why it’s stayed around. If there was any interference from above like that the brand would die, because it would lose all of its voice. TechCrunch really is just a voice. The Times has more reporters, Bloomberg has more reporters, The Journal’s bigger. TC only exists because it still has it’s own, I forget can we swear on this podcast, guys?

Feel free.

Okay, TechCrunch still has that “Fuck you” attitude, and that really does stand out in the mix of relatively milk toast reporting we see. No, it was great, and I’ve got to give them points for keeping the AOL stuff as far out of the TechCrunch world as possible. The only thing that ever really showed up that was AOL was my badge to get in the office and my AOL corporate credit card. Otherwise, there was no real AOL influence whatsoever.

Is that why you’re not there anymore? Because you ran up that bill pretty heavily?

I may have been late on my expenses once or twice. I will confess that paperwork is not my forte. No, actually that’s the thing I miss the most is having, well that’s a different story.

For another time. For another time.

Yeah, I think for the podcast it’s off recording. No I left because I had been doing that job effectively for six years, TechCrunch and I needed a new challenge. Taking over an editor role and doing things like writing style guidelines and ethics policies and hiring freelancers, and schedules and so forth was a whole set of new challenges that made me break out of my writer shell. I think TechCrunch remains the best place to write if you’re covering anything related to technology because it has the most support and the most freedom.

At Mattermark though now you’re going to start covering technology policy, right?

I don’t see a way around it. Yeah.

Is that because of the confluence of the issues you cover, they just kind of make natural sense, or is it because of the craziness that’s happening in Washington and New York right now?

I don’t see a difference between the two answers. The disaster force hurricane that is descending upon DC in the form of the crypto-fascist Donald Trump is the reason I have to write about it. I have a link pulled up right here from Recode from I think yesterday, that reads “Net neutrality faces extinction under Trump.” All right, that’s pretty interesting. That’s a political story that involves regulatory policy that directly impacts everyone here in Silicon Valley. Trump is bringing these stories essentially back into my fold. I haven’t covered tech policy much in the last year, but I don’t see a way that I can possibly talk about the industry without mentioning it and working on those issues.

If Hillary Clinton were President Elect right now you wouldn’t be touching on any tech policy?

Much less. I know Tom Wheeler a little bit, we’ve met a couple times and I interviewed him in New York, and I asked him when we were on stage, I was like “Are you going to stay in your role?” He said “She hasn’t asked me to yet.” His point was that if Hillary won the election and asked him to stay on he might have, and we would have had a continuance at the FCC which would have had a relatively stable regulatory landscape. Now with Pai probably taking over, that’s my guess, thankfully if it isn’t abolished altogether, it’s going to be a disaster. You know and a bunch of people are going to fight against it and it’s going to become again a Silicon Valley story.

Disaster, that’s going pretty far right? I mean it’s not like-

More effective in your life, man, disaster is polite terminology for what I might call it. That’s a two out of ten.

We’ve gone through a really interesting four years with Tom Wheeler. I would argue that what he did was pass a lot of highly partisan issues down three-two party lines where there was no willingness to work with the other side to get to a point where there could be compromise so that if something disastrous like this happened, some of these policies that would be in place wouldn’t be so controversial. Right now it’s very controversial. What we did at CALinnovates is we tried to look for third ways, right?

Yes.

It’s not one way or the other, but let’s find a creative path toward a solution that works for everyone.

That was the first time we spoke, right?

Yep, yep.

Yeah yeah yeah, I recall.

I would argue that Chairman Wheeler didn’t take that path. He took the path of least resistance which is “I’m going to get what I want, and fuck everybody else.” Now what we’ve got instead of taking the CALinnovates way, which was “Hey on net neutrality we need legislation that we can lock into affirmative law. What we have now is a regulation that can be overturned.”

Mm-hmm.

It’s not law anymore. It’s really hard to change a law, right?

Yeah, the term after parliament has a place in our shared language for a reason. I disagree a little bit. I don’t think there was enough political will through the means you’re describing to actually get net neutrality done in any strong capacity other than the way Chairman Wheeler did it. I agree that that would have been a much better option if possible. I just don’t think that that door was actually unlocked, at least in this last cycle. This is going to sound kind of dumb, and I’m not a fan of real politic in the morning, but if Trump’s pick trashes it, it may lead to a response from tech on a submission scale to actually drive legislation. I’m not sure if that’ll happen, tech so far has essentially, as I think we’ll get to, rolled over a bit now that’s Trump’s in charge, but I’m hoping they’ll find some back bones. On this issue, I mean it is cut and dry here, at least among all the investors, entrepreneurs and employees that I talk to. I don’t know a single person in Silicon Valley on a personal basis who’s not if favor of strong net neutrality.

To me the third option is more of a political point as opposed to a functional way to approach the issue. Again, Ajit Pai is not going to pursue a third option either, and I think he will work against that. There’s political will on the other side of the spectrum here, to drive that change forward.

In a perfect world, which we’re pretty well aware we don’t live in-

Sadly.

Yeah, the new Chairman would look for that compromise, would look for four one or five zero, votes, right?

Mm-hmm.

We’re probably looking at another four to eight years of three-two party line votes.

Why do you hold four-one five-zero votes in such high regard?

Because that means that at least the other side is getting closer to what they want, right? It’s not just steamrolling the other side. Let’s look at net neutrality or privacy or any other number of NPRM’s that happened under Wheeler. The controversial ones were all three two votes.

Yeah, sure.

What that meant was that, and again arguments that CALinnovates made, was there’s uncertainty in the future. There’s uncertainty with a new President, how’s it going to all play out? Those three-two votes that were really national stories-

Yeah.

Wouldn’t be as big of an issue today, because they would have been handled differently if they weren’t these three-two highly charged votes. A four one, a five zero, and we’re not talking about net neutrality or privacy any more because every side would have gotten closer to what they wanted. We may be moving on toward different issues. Net neutrality passed, right? All the sudden Netflix backs away from it. Cloudflare says “Whoa, whoa, whoa, be careful what you wish for, we didn’t mean what we just said.” There are groups that have come out and said, companies that have said “Wait a minute, hold on. Strong net neutrality, yeah, define strong and how that works and what that means.” I think we’re getting into a world where we’re going to stop talking about what things mean and how they apply. We’re perhaps entering a world where it doesn’t really matter.

You know I guess your call for-

According to the decision makers. I’m not going to say it doesn’t matter, because obviously all these things do matter.

For sure. I think the argument for centrism which we see a lot among the New York Times columnists, that are always calling for some sort of middle pathway, presumes that the winning group, in this case Tom Wheeler et. al., could’ve found in their opposition, I guess, to use a polite phrase, some willingness to compromise. In my experience talking to the people on the other side of this issue, there was no political will there. Or to use the old joke, there’s no there there. I don’t know.

We saw a long concerted effort by John Thune and Bill Nelson to try to craft legislation.

Inside of the GOP. When Ted Cruz called it Obamacare for the internet, that’s not a position from which you can argue a middle pathway.

That’s also Ted Cruz who didn’t have a lot of fans in congress, right?

Are you saying Ted Cruz is unpopular?

No, I would never suggest such a thing, never.

It’s amazing to me. Ted Cruz actually makes me feel better because at least when I wake up every day, I have at least one friend somewhere. Ted Cruz cannot say that and that’s one up on Ted Cruz every morning before I even have breakfast. I’m still beating Ted Cruz because I have at least one friend. So I smile. That does help on grayer minutes.

That’s true. Okay, so let’s talk about anybody who has ever made more money than everyone in America meeting up with Trump and his transition team to talk tech issues. What are your thoughts on that?

This is one of those moments in which I get to lean on my elders and betters. Kara Swisher, probably the best journalist in technology, she’s writing a column again over on Recode, and the headline, which I’m just going to read for you is “As Trump will thin skin, let’s down his hair for tech, shame on Silicon Valley for climbing the tower in silence.” It’s a great piece, everyone should read it. It’s Recode, there’s no paywall, you can just jump into it. She is taking a harder line against Trump than other people are and she is being as strident as she should be, and she’s doing it in a voice that’s much more authoritative and better spoken than I could ever muster, so I’m kind of enjoying her as my hero, as I’m her acolyte in this.

I think that there is an inherent complicity among big business, which is not a pejorative, to work with administrations. Which is great, and I think that shows a lot of maturity to work with people you disagree with. Then there are certain cases in which any sort of compromise is a form of appeasement. You have to decide is Trump an actual fascist, or is he just an idiot. If he’s an idiot go talk to him. If he’s a fascist and a threat to democracy don’t. It seems that tech is trying to have it both ways, and not discuss the moral applications of their move. For me, I think it’s sad that this is happening, but at the same time I do understand it from the shareholder perspective why they might do it.

Tell me this, what’s the difference between this meeting with these tech leaders and Trump, and the dinner that Trump had with Mitt Romney.

Well I think they’re great analogies. Mitt Romney looked horribly uncomfortable and then got shafted, so what’s the difference?

Right.

I think a better example there would be the discussion he had with media executives a couple weeks ago, that one of the media executives said was like a firing squad. He essentially brought in the media and then shot at them, the whole bunch and called them out for calling him out for lying. If that’s the tone of this meeting, and tech sits there and takes it, then they don’t have the moral fiber that we hoped they did. I think inside this industry there is some optimism that its leaders are in fact creating more than just short term profits. That they’re building technology that will improve lives and drive long-term improvements to human happiness.

That’s a big issue that I think perhaps people out on the West Coast didn’t realize bothered the rest of America. Think about the fact that tech is seen as a bunch of elites creating products and platforms for the elite.

Mm-hmm.

Do you sense that that’s something that the greater tech community is going to focus on and rethink a little bit?

I don’t think you’re ever going to get the arrogance out of tech. I don’t think you actually really want to. Which sounds counterintuitive, but to be an entrepreneur is to be arrogant, because you’re saying “Here’s the world, it’s not good enough, I’m going to make it better. Or at least try.” Which is inherently a non-conservative statement. In a small “c” conservative way, not in a political conservative way. I do very much feel the point you make about how much technology and the industry can seem very odd to outsiders. Especially because all the stories they read are like “These tech kids, they’re on hover boards drinking green juice upside down in the office pool.” Or whatever. Which is not 99.9% of tech.

The hot tub, right? Yeah.

Hot tub, that’s what I was going for, yes. Upside down hot tub with a green smoothie, yes. Which Google has five of out here. I’m kidding. There’s a lot of money here, there’s no way around that. I think that if you look at the quality of life improvement that technology can bring to humans on a short term basis, I mean in the last ten years, smart phones, okay? Ten years before that, broadband internet access. Ten years before that, the internet. These are big things that are going to change the arc of human history, and are changing how politics works around the world and so forth. Yeah, people here can be pretty full of themselves, I just don’t see it changing, or there being really any force to change it.

Right on, okay, let’s talk about a couple issues here. Fake news.

Oh.

Is this real? What should people be thinking about when they hear about fake news?

Oh man. That is a huge question. Let’s start with some facts I guess. Fake news, which I think for this we can define as news stories that are completely constructed to be sharable on social platforms that have no basis in reality and are not designed for a political point but are designed to generate clicks in ads, is an issue. It hit a, I think an apparent peak around the end of the election cycle as we’ve all seen. It’s not as big an issue outside of certain bubbles so far as I can tell, and finally there are some ethical requirements that social networks should answer to involving fake news. I’ll clarify that slightly, because it’s an odd statement.

Facebook is a media company because they filter your news feed and they decide what you see. They’re making editorial choices about the products. While they do that, they are in effect a media company and should have an editor, a public editor, an executive editor or something, to help guide that process. If they just run a straight temporal based news feed, and not make editorial choices, not name trending topics and so forth, then I think they can get away with saying “This is not our problem.” While they’re an active media company that has editorial capacity, I think they have a moral requirement to keep blatantly fake news that is sold as news off their platform. It’s a big topic, it has a lot of different sections to it, but I think that we can’t let tech companies that are also media companies shirk half their responsibility just because they right a whole lot of code.

Let’s break it down. Is fake news an epidemic or an overreaction?

It’s a bad head cold.

You didn’t answer the question. Great, great answer.

It’ll pass, like you like.

Yeah I like that, I appreciate-

That’s the third option.

Okay, I can accept that. All right, so what about the idea of zero rating, or free data, or any variety of names that this zero rating process is given? On the one hand you have the argument that it’s great for consumers because it doesn’t affect their data caps, and they can use, enjoy, listen, as much as they want. On the other hand, you have the argument about competition, and the effect that it has on perhaps startups entering a space dominated by the big players. What do you think about this issue?

I would say especially in the era of increasing mergers among both content and distribution companies, in developed markets zero rating is an abrogation of net neutrality both in spirit and print, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed. The other side of that is, in developing markets where there isn’t capital to build out the same level of access, if zero rating and other forms of bent marketplaces effectively, can help people get online I’m in favor of it. Where internet access is hard, if this is the only way we can get people online, viva. In developed markets where that’s not the same issue, I think it should be privy to the same rules as wire line connections. I want to have my cake and eat it too, but here in the US, to bring it to a local issue, I think zero rating is a bad idea.

You don’t want your Spotify zero rated?

No. No.

At all. Ever?

I do not want Verizon to decide that Spotify over other music providers is the way to go because one, they won’t choose Spotify, they’ll choose Verizon Music. Two, I don’t think I want to see that-

Wait a minute. Wait, hold on, hold on. Who chooses Verizon Music? A show of hands on this podcast. Who even knew that Verizon Music existed?

It doesn’t, I was making a point.

Exactly. Here’s the other piece of this. I think the idea behind zero rating is that it’s offered to all comers at the same price, right?

If they’re zero rating for an entire category of things, so if my mobile provider wanted to say all music services are zero rated equally, that’s slightly different to me. That’s not picking a single service or supplier, that’s taking a genre, and I would have less problem with that, but I’d still be I think intellectually opposed to it. I do think that’s an interesting way to approach the issue.

Okay, that’s fair. All right, so let’s talk a little bit more policy and let’s get into the brain of Alex Wilhelm from Mattermark here a little bit more, which could be equal parts awesome and scary, right?

Okay, yeah, fifty fifty.

Yeah, fifty-fifty, let’s roll the dice here. Do you have any policy predictions for the first hundred days of the new Trump administration?

Oh, man. Well, policy in what sense? Do you mean policy in the technology sense, or policy in-

In tech.

I think that the only thing we’ve really got a good handle on is that he has no idea what to do with the NSA. He’s going to probably appoint people that will end net neutrality. I think those are the only two things we can pretty well know looking at what’s going to happen. He’s very unpredictable. I mean, say whatever you want about him, he does things on a very random basis, so I don’t want to over prognosticate, but I do think we have given control of our national security apparatus to the wrong person. As a privacy advocate in a small way, that terrifies me. Those two things are huge. Even though there’s just two on the list, at least in my mind, I’m scared. Same question to you. Are there things that I’m missing?

I think it’s going to be interesting to see how the Trump administration deals with immigration. I don’t know if that’s a first hundred days issue, but it was a hallmark of his campaign, it talked about immigration in general. I know that most tech immigrants aren’t rapists and murderers. How does that get dealt with? I don’t know the answer, but it’ll be interesting to find out how that-

What’s your stance on H1B, and high school immigration?

My stance on H1B, from a personal perspective is the more the better.

Sure.

I think the US needs to be a magnet for pulling in the best and the brightest minds that we can, because they come here, they work at different tech companies, perhaps they fund a startup. The last thing we want to happen is for them to come over for a short while, create a platform that’s meaningful and creating jobs, and then you know what, they’re done. They’ve got to leave.

Right.

They’ve got to take that company somewhere else, they’ve got to take it to India, China, wherever. This country should be the place for the best and the brightest in tech, and we should open those walls and break down those barriers. Comprehensive immigration reform, I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen in the Trump administration, but I’m hopeful, and perhaps maybe the Peter Thiel principle comes into play. I guess we’ll see how much of a voice he has with the administration.

What is the Peter Thiel principle?

His existence.

Ah yes, it’s Peter Thiel’s corporeal, okay, all right. What’s your take on Peter Thiel by the way, that’s a good segue. What do you think about him?

What do I think of him? He’s obviously very smart.

Mm-hmm. Now who’s not answering the question?

Yeah, right? That’s my answer to the question. He’s obviously very smart, I’d like to go to the horse races with him, he’d pick the right pony. Knowing that he’s a Libertarian, knowing that he’s gay, I think there’s a sense that he’s turned his back on a lot of the people who not only rose up through the ranks with him, but people that he works with, people he invests in, I think there’s probably a lot of distrust right now.

Yeah. Also a lot of confusion, if you will.

Sure.

That’s been a notable thing. It’s also been really interesting to watch, and this is just as an observer. I’m not taking a side here. To watch how Y Combinator, the well known startup incubator and accelerator here in the valley that he is associated with, how they’ve handled this, and how they’ve tried to find a way to make their own individual political beliefs known, especially Sam Altman who’s roughly in charge of it, and also keep Peter Thiel in the fold somewhat. There’s been a lot of fire brand complaints about that, and again, and I’m not taking a side in this paragraph, but I think it’s driven a really interesting conversation among at least my peers around here, about what is an appropriate response. That comes back to what we said earlier which is “Is Trump a normal event,” in which case talking to and with his administration makes sense, or “is he a large enough threat that that will be collusion as opposed to opposition?” I don’t know I’m really excited to see how tech handles the next couple years.

Let’s say you’re walking down a dark alley on Friday night, and you walk past Peter Thiel. What would you say to him?

Can I have some money?

After that.

That would be my first thing.

How much would you ask for?

I don’t know about twenty bucks. I don’t want to owe him anything. It’s a cool question but I mean let’s rephrase it, slightly if I can, if we were having like dinner, so I had a little more time and it wasn’t creepy and rainy in the back alley, I would be really curious to get a better understanding of some of his politics. I would love to get into his mind a little bit and listen to him talk at length in a comfortable setting for him. The speech at the RNC was a bit brief. I’m really trying to get my head around what he thinks. I think that he is very much in a political mindset that I was when I was younger. I don’t say that as a slam, I haven’t been in the more hard core Libertarian head space for a while.

Let’s rephrase the question even a little bit more. If there was one thing you could ask him to do on behalf of the tech community, what would it be?

Ooh, that’s fun. I think I have an answer. This may not be my final answer, but it’s a good one.

Okay.

There’s so many things you could ask him to say. I think on behalf of me and tech in general I would say, “Take the message to the government that there is no middle option on encryption. That if they are forcing back doors and so forth into encryption, it will be inherently weakened, and we will all be under assault from foreign actors. Encryption is binary in how it works, and we must have strong encryption, or the internet as we know it does not work.” I think the internet, ecommerce and all that stuff is very important, and so I’m in favor of strong encryption, and I think that maybe given that he has the ear of Trump, he could pass along that message. That would be, at least a good answer, I don’t know if the best one, but it’s got to be top ten.

I think that’s pretty good. With that Alex, let’s wrap it up. A couple important things for our listeners. One, how do we find you on Twitter?

I’m Twitter.com/Alex. A-L-E-X.

How did you actually get Alex, where you like the first Twitter user of all time?

Nope, I bought it off a guy in Mexico in 2008.

For how much?

All the money I had at the time which was $60 in my PayPal account.

That is really impressive. What should we be looking for from Mattermark here in the coming months, anything exciting that we should be aware of?

Yeah, a couple small things. One, it’s the end of the year so we’re going to be taking a really long look back at all the venture capital cycles we’ve seen this year, where all the money went essentially. All the bets that were laid. We’re going to take a look ahead at the IPO market, and keep reading because we’re going to start doing more posts on tech policy as this all starts. This conversation is effectively preamble to the next four years. If in the first hundred days stuff goes down, as it were, we’ll be covering that too. I hope we do a good job and if we don’t, shoot me an email. It’s in my Twitter bio, and I will hear all your complaints.

Awesome, well Alex thanks for taking the time to join us on A Step Ahead and we look forward to agreeing with you, disagreeing with you and locking horns over the next forever.

It’s going to be a blast. Fries are on me.

All right sounds good. Everybody give Alex a follow on Twitter, and stay tuned for the next A Step Ahead.

https://soundcloud.com/user-90169041/ep-11-monday-meditations-where-we-are-now

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A Step Ahead: Mike Kish

Mike Montgomery, Executive Director CALinnovates. How you doing?

Mike Mongtomery: What’s up, Kish? How are you?

I’m doing great. I’m going great. I’m enjoying the conversations that we’re having on the podcast. The guests have really been enlightening, and we’re still dealing with the reaction and the fallout to the presidential election. We just talked to Steve Westly, California’s former Controller whose very involved still in the Silicon Valley. He brought great perspective. We talked to Dex Torricke-Barton, really fascinating guy who has a background in communications in technology, but also in the public sector most notably at the United Nations. He’s starting a whole movement around using technology platforms to try to constructively engage people in politics. What these gents were talking about and what we’re going to continue to talk about is the role and the responsibility of technology broadly, social media in particular, in what’s going on with our politics.

It’s a fascinating thing to continue to hash out.

Yeah. I think it’s a real opportunity for the technology community at large to try to correct a little bit. Kish, you were in the Bay Area back at the fall of the dot com-

Right.

We saw a lot of venture capital go to a lot of companies that didn’t really do much for many people. One of the biggest failures back in the day was Webvan, and that Webvan idea has now morphed into something that can help everybody everywhere in the country…

I agree with you…

wealthy elites in San Francisco and so…

Yeah, and I think … Oh, go ahead. Sorry.

I think we can be helpful that through convening these thought leaders, what we’re going to hear more about over the coming podcast is how these thought leaders view the world moving forward and view technology as a piece of that, rather than this stand alone fun grouping of tools and platforms that help some people but not all people.

It’s a great point. I think you’re dead right. I think there are a couple of different traps. Substantively, what are these new solutions, technologies, applications, and gadgets? What are they doing to contribute to broader public impact and important public outcomes? What’s the substantive value if you look at it through the public policy lens of what Silicon Valley’s producing? I think that’s obviously a really important question. Then in a near term here, we’re also asking these political questions. What I pushed on Dex about was what responsibility did social media have in contributing to arguably division and the coarseness of the political campaign? Now, he wasn’t quite willing to accept that social media was a culprit in that.

I think he was thoughtful in saying but we do have to recognize that if we’re in politically divided times, these tools can contribute to the division. Maybe they’re not driving the division, but they may be contributing to it.

Right. The contributing factor though is meaningful. We’ve grown up in an era where we thought the news was the news, and now we have this term fake news. The only fake news that I had thought about prior to this election was The Onion. Now, we have this idea of fake news being propagated on social networks.

Yeah, and to your point and you started the word there. It’s not satire, which is The Onion. It’s propaganda if it’s being used explicitly for political purposes.

Right. It’s no different than dropping flyers over a town hall from an airplane. It is propaganda and so it’s a total new era. Not to mention, one of the other components of…well, two of the components of technology that people spend a lot of time thinking about are security and privacy and so we witness hacks. That’s something that maybe you consider a Watergate hack, but when’s the last time we had a political hack of great significance?

It’s extraordinary. I don’t think we have at all really come to grips fully with what apparently was the Russian government’s involvement through technology hacking of our election systems. It’s really an extraordinary thing that we’re talking about, but we still don’t really know the full extent let alone the implications of what that really meant.

Right. Down the line we’re going to talk to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla who…

That’s going to be great-

It is, and it’s going to be great to hear his perspective on this ongoing debate about the votes. Is a recount needed in certain states across the country? Is it possible that an organization actually played a role in those certain states? We may never know. It’s going to be interesting to talk about it because technology is the thing that is not only going to help people understand and maybe regain their footing after at least many millions were displeased with the results of the election, and many millions were pleased. I do think that there’s so many people who need to feel, not just see, but feel the benefits of what Silicon Valley is bringing to the world-

You’re totally right.

So that…

You’re totally right.

Silicon Valley needs to fully embrace the fact that their worlds changed on election night.

You’re totally right. I think that not only around the sanctity of our voting process but then also, again, the role of social media and other sites that had become so prevalent in our lives, what responsibility do they have? Other conversations I’m really looking forward to are with Hemant Taneja and Ron Klain. People that at the Silicon Valley level and at the national level are thinking a lot about things. Like what Hemant talks about. Algorithmic accountability which is to say if we know the sites are designed, their intent is to be as popular as possible, to be as self-fulfilling and self-gratifying to the user as possible. That’s what makes us go back to the site and continue to use them so extensively in our lives.

Knowing how big those sites have become, how massive their influence is, I think the question is that we’ll explore with Hemant in particular is, is there a responsibility on the part of those applications to consider the impact of their individual users and society writ large? Then further, may there be some role for, wait for it, government to get involved in how these sites behave and what their impact is? Those are really big questions that I think have to be on the table.

Those are huge questions, and we’ve been fighting against the idea of government intervention for edge providers. Then you just suppose that with what, say for instance, a site like Reddit and that the power that a site like Reddit has. The mantra there is that it’s really a free-for-all. The idea of opinions, or fake news, or bluster, or whatever noun or adjective you want to plug in there, it’s hard to parse. It’s a very popular place. I’m not saying anything negative about Reddit…

Sure.

I learned a lot about Westworld on Reddit recently trying to figure out what on earth is going on there. If you’re getting your political news from Reddit, or your political news from Facebook, or Twitter, we may be doing a disservice to the American public in terms of how broad the perspectives may be.

I think that’s the question, and I’m really looking forward to our upcoming episodes of A Step Ahead. I think that we’re going to continue to dive into these issues with people that are extremely knowledgeable and thoughtful. I think they’re going to be engaging conversations as we’re wrestling with questions that I don’t even think we could have imagined a year ago. Here we are with really big important questions that have to be asked, and answered, and explored so A Step Ahead’s going to be a fun place to chop it up.

Definitely.

For Mike Montgomery, our Executive Director. This is Kish Rajan, Chief Evangelist at CALinnovates. Thanks, folks, for listening to A Step Ahead.

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A Step Ahead: Dex Torricke-Barton

Hi everyone, Kish Rajan, Chief Evangelist at CALinnovates and welcome to this edition of A Step Ahead.

This time we’re talking to Dex Torricke-Barton. Really, a fascinating guy and a fascinating story. Someone who is a communications professional that’s worked both in the United Nations early in his career, and then with major technology companies in the Silicon Valley, but then decided to move on from that and get more involved in an effort that’s about trying to bring people together in a more constructive way around politics and policy. A really fascinating conversation that we had about someone who was trying to bring his enormous talent and background to bear on innovating the way communities come together in politics. It was a great chat and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

All right, Dex Torricke-Barton. Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you being on A Step Ahead.

Dex Torricke-Barton: It’s great to be here.

Well listen, your story has gotten a lot of attention and we certainly are captivated by it and I’d love to jump right in. I saw a quote from you that said that you were motivated to take a big action in your life because, in your words, I believe you said you see the world as “under threat”. I’d love to know what you mean by that.

Yeah, absolutely. The last couple of years of just seeing communities in the United States and Europe, particularly, moving in a direction that I think is less open, less compassionate and really as someone who is an immigrant to the United States, nearly nine years ago, and as someone whose dad was a refugee, all the things that we’ve seen with the global response or lack of response, to the refugee crisis, Brexit in the UK, the rise of the far-right in Europe, and then finally the election of Donald Trump, convinces me that the world is not on a good path for somebody who cares about a common humanity and the possibilities and the challenges that we need to solve in order to serve that population. So for me, it was something that has been concerning me for a long time and the election results this month have just been one more step along this increasingly dark path.

Yeah, no kidding. You’ve had such an interesting journey, career wise, working early with the United Nations at one level but then, of course, famously going into technology. We at CALinnovates, of course, are very focused on the impact of technology.

We’re based in Northern California in the Silicon Valley, which is this melting pot of multiculturalism. It really celebrates this alchemy that’s been created. It’s produced so many wonderful things, and yet those political events that you’ve just described appear to be a rejection of that. I’m interested in your perspective. How you see that and what you see as the danger in that.

Right, well I think in many ways Silicon Valley has always sort of been a bubble. A lot of people who work in the Valley talk about the bubble with a sort of wry smile on their faces. But the fact is, Silicon Valley and California and the communities that are dedicated to innovation really do not represent most of the world. Having worked at both Facebook and the UN, two organizations that closely engage with topics around global connectivity, I’ve really seen first hand just how ignorant, in many ways, people are about communities beyond our borders. Most of the world is not online and a lot of people think, “Oh, everybody’s using my app, my service, my product.” The fact is, the vast majority of humanity has never ever used the internet, ever.

And even close to home, I think people often exaggerate the extent to which Silicon Valley attitudes or values or interests have penetrated the United States. The fact is, most people don’t feel that connected to Silicon Valley and vice versa, I would say.

Yeah, it’s a really interesting point. One thing…we certainly look at that as well and I’d love to explore this notion of a bubble for a minute.

In California and the Silicon Valley, we love to celebrate our uniqueness, our specialness, the amazing innovations and applications and gadgets that emanate from this part of the world, but it can often be quite detached. And I think when you look at political events like Brexit or perhaps the election of Donald Trump, it in some ways is being described as a backlash against attitudes that seem elitist, ivory tower, and perhaps in a way that’s unacceptably disconnected from the lives of everyday people.

Absolutely, and I’m not saying that I think that’s necessarily a fair characterization, but the fact is technology is only truly useful when it serves social ends. It’s not good enough to just build a shiny new product or an app if you’re not actually solving something fundamental in people’s lives. A lot of the time, I think the technologies and innovations coming from Silicon Valley really are serving truly transformative ends and creating economic and social value in communities all over the world, but the folks who build these things don’t always think about the right way to communicate these things. They don’t think about the right way to illustrate what that value truly looks like.

One of the first and most obvious signs of that, when I arrived in the Valley back in 2011, was how people were so fond of the word “disruption.” “Disruption” means something very specific and positive in Silicon Valley. It’s about changing old industries and building new forms of growth and new ways to communicate, new ways to collaborate. But to the world, the word “disruption” is a scary one that implies the things that you have grown up with, and cherished, and which you rely on may well be disappearing, and when disruption happens, that is both opportunity but also just a massive everyday challenge for people who are living through that. And Silicon Valley has not always been good at explaining and mitigating the affects of that disruption and especially the unintended effects of that disruption.

Well, it really is an interesting question. I think that because of the different impacts that technology had, certainly on the US election, and I’d love to take a few minutes to look at these, but on the point that you’ve just made, one worry is that the tremendous growth of the innovation and technology economy, it’s astounding, the valuation of companies and the wealth that’s being created, but the worry is how narrow the band is of people who are actually benefiting from that economic explosion. And to your point, I think the question is, not only how do we actually make those economic gains broader, how do we expand that bandwidth, but how do we communicate to people that that indeed is a laudable and important pursuit of what comes out of places like the Silicon Valley?

Absolutely. In terms of communicating that value, I think there is a huge need for us to get better sources of data and ways to measure the impact of the knowledge economy. Right now, we still think about economic progress in terms of GDP and a lot of the metrics that were developed specifically to measure an industrial model of the economy. How do you quantify the economic value of the gains in productivity and the ability to collaborate much more closely, which come from, for example, social networks? Those are things which don’t necessarily get reflected in that value. But certainly, I think there is a need, as well, for us to build tools that are serving the needs of folks who don’t live in the Bay Area, don’t live in New York, don’t live in the major urban centers, and to begin by thinking, “How can we solve challenges in those communities first?”

Products like faster grocery delivery, the ability to carry out chores in your local community, better ways to access restaurant reviews or recommendations through an app, these things often start by benefiting folks who really live in very small, urban, prosperous communities. They aren’t necessarily the kinds of things that would work in rural communities where there aren’t these surpluses of services, and Silicon Valley should be playing a part in thinking, “How do we actually begin developing the overall ecosystem for growth there?” Not just solving the needs of places which already have well built-up infrastructure and ecosystems.

It’s a great point. I want to ask one last sort of political question that I’d love to tie to the work that you are doing, that you have moved to.

We are still just in the aftermath of the election and one of the things that folks have pointed to is the rise of social media having such a huge impact on political activity now. That is to say, it seems to be a central way that people are getting information and sharing information, but the challenge is that because the nature of these applications are so self-affirming, there’s a worry that social media is just contributing to our tribalization. To getting us into our own camps and keeping us there. I’m wondering if you agree that that’s a challenge that needs to be addressed.

I think it’s something that we should pay close attention to and I have yet to see any good research that has been done in any recent time which actually tries to quantify whether the filter bubble exists and is real. I have, on the other hand, seen great research in the last few years which suggests that the filter bubble, at least on Facebook, is something that is exaggerated. And on Facebook everyday, people are really exposed to a lot more diversity of content and perspectives than they might sometimes even think themselves.

I think part of the recent backlash against Facebook after the election is driven by the fact that people right now really are just stunned by the results. They are casting around furiously, trying to find simplistic answers to what are pretty complex questions. Why did people ultimately vote for Trump and why did people, in many cases, seem to vote against their own self-interests? And it would be really great if we could blame all of our troubles on something as simple as an algorithm.

The fact is, what this election has communicated so strongly, is that there are deep-seated social and economic problems in many communities which have been overlooked by successive governments, and that unless we actually get to work on solving them and tackling the root cause of polarization, we will continue to see this drift away from a more open world. And that is not a thing that can be solved simply by tweaking an algorithm or by making changes to a product. That would be the absolute worst misinterpretation of what happened and we really would reaffirm that Silicon Valley is disconnected from the rest of the country.

Yeah. We really do have to think about cause and effect, right? And I think that it’s a good time to reflect upon that.

Well, listen, let me turn to then, you did famously leave your role in corporate America. You’ve moved on and have founded a new organization, Onwards. I would love for you to tell us, what is that and what do you hope to accomplish?

Absolutely. Onwards is a non-partisan effort to try and tackle the root social and economic causes of polarization in communities in the United States. And I want to stress that this is something that is very different than the vast and rapidly proliferating set of grassroots organizations that are working specifically to fight back against Trump-ism through the Democratic Party machinery.

This is not an effort that is tied to one party, and frankly, Onwards is something that I’m working on with both Republicans, Democrats, and folks who voted for neither party to develop. And I think, here’s the challenge, communities across the United States are increasingly polarized and we are seeing the effects of polarization in the fact that people no longer feel capable of having debates about the sensitive social, economic, and political topics that are most divisive.

This whole election, if you’ve ever had a debate during this electoral cycle with somebody who disagrees with you, that experience can be incredibly fraught. You wonder if a disagreement over politics is going to become an existential threat to your relationship. I think if we want to make progress as a country, if we want to start finding practical solutions to the problems ahead, we need to learn how to talk to each other again, and to talk to people we don’t necessarily agree with. And so the first set of programs I’m working on are designed, really, to give people the tools to have conversations in their own lives and their own communities with their friends, their families, their coworkers, through town hall meetings, however they’re engaging with the political process, and to actually begin working to find common ground with people that they may disagree with vehemently.

Are these tools … sorry-

Sure.

-really quickly, are these digital tools, are they online, are they in the context of online or social communication, or are these just plain old getting people to be able to understand and talk with one another tools?

I think that it’s a combination of both and communications and conversations are taking place both online and offline. We need to have tools and programs that can help people communicate in both ways. It will probably rely on both a combination of online training and facilitated conversations in person, in communities. Small group sessions, listening sessions, and town halls.

And really, these are based on the proven set of models that have been developed in societies everywhere from Northern Ireland to post-apartheid South Africa, where folks have developed expertise on how to bring people together around a table who may feel that they have nothing in common with each other. And I think that’s really something that hasn’t been tried, or at least done at a large-scale way in the United States and I think there’s a huge utility which will come from that.

Wow, fascinating. So you really are drawing upon your time at the United Nations.

You’re talking about the types of extremely difficult, seemingly almost intractable, cultural, political difference in places around the world where organizations, NGO organizations and others, had intervened to try to bring about dialogue and conversation. You’re really talking about that scale.

Absolutely. And you know what? For the last decade we’ve heard politicians talk about how we should try to create a less-partisan form of politics, and then they’ve gone about doing exactly the same old stuff, the same old way, and made absolutely no effort to actually try and change that. I think there are actually practical things that we can do, which will shift the conversation, and we need to do them and I think this is something that is long overdue.

It’s not the only thing though, and so the other set of activities is really around, “How can we engage with the jobs problem?” And I think unless we can get to the root cause of the economic factors leading to polarization, then it will just be a lot of talking.

The other part of the challenge will be, “How can we work with folks in Silicon Valley and beyond to equip more people with the skills to find jobs, to get the skills they need to apply for jobs which don’t require a college degree, and to get the support to create businesses as well?” And these are things that all can draw on the huge wealth of resources, but also the existing tools that are available online and through internet services to really build something new. The ability to create a business today is easier than ever, but a lot of folks still struggle with that and it really is something that’s tremendously difficult if you’re starting out down that path-

Sure.

-and having support and giving people the tools to set that up and put them on the right path of success, I think will be really really important for creating the next waves of jobs and growth in communities where traditional industries and manufacturing have declined.

Well, as we wind up, I wish we had more time and I’d love to continue this conversation perhaps down the road, but I guess my last question is, what do you think is the inclination of people in the Silicon Valley to engage in this kind of work? A lot of what you’re saying feels like it would need to be governmental or at least NGO-type of activity. It isn’t traditionally the obligation or even the inclination of private businesses to engage in the type of work you’re talking about and yet, you seem to be optimistic that people will plug into this effort.

I am optimistic and part of that is just the enormous number of folks I’ve had conversations with over the last few weeks coming from companies all over the Valley, entrepreneurs from all types of backgrounds, who are really concerned about the future.

Somebody asked me the other day, “Do you think the Trump administration will be hurtful to innovation?” And I said, “Well, look. If the world goes to war, that’s going to be bad for everyone. If the world ends, that tends to take everyone with it.” We are in a situation now where we’re far from the end of the world, but we are in a situation where the social and economic challenges are rising to the water’s edge. And if we don’t work to address those challenges now when we have been given such a loud and increasing set of warnings, then those challenges will imperil all of the progress in society which innovators depend on.

Openness is a set of conditions that is not just whether I can get access to funding or whether I have access to academics at local universities. Openness is something that absolutely depends on having a national and a global framework for peace and prosperity, and those are things which should deeply concern Silicon Valley innovators who want to serve humanity. I think the good news is that a lot of folks who come to Silicon Valley really do honestly care about serving humanity and they do see technology as something that is inherently connected to social ends. I think we will continue to see folks speaking up and standing up for communities that are imperiled and to deal with the challenges ahead.

Well, it’s an enormously inspiring message, and clearly amongst all those folks that have come to the Silicon Valley to pursue amazing ends and tremendous achievements, clearly you, Dex Torricke-Barton, are one of those people and we’re grateful you’re bringing your talents and capabilities to Onwards, something that seems incredibly worthwhile that we’ll continue to watch. We appreciate you sharing part of your day with us on A Step Ahead.

Absolutely a pleasure, thanks for having me.

You bet.