>>From London, England. It's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 brought to you by Cooper. >>Hey, welcome to the cube. At least the Martin on the ground in London, a Coupa inspire 19 and I'm really excited to be joined by my last guest of the day. Save the best for last. We have Roger Hamoud, the EVP of products from Kupo Russia. Welcome back to the program. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming here. Of course, it's been great. We've had a, we've had a great day. Lots of buzz and excitement in the expo hall. The lights are jammed. It's happy hours. Happy hour for time for the Q during happy hour. So I know your keynote is tomorrow, so we'll get to that since we won't cover that. But talk to me about some of the new product innovations that Cuba announced today. The last time we spoke at inspire Las Vegas was only a few months ago. So what's new? Wow. A lot is new. It's, it's hard to believe. >>It's only been three months since then. It's been so close. Um, we very much continue our, um, focus on our community. Powered, uh, capabilities. Uh, this has been an incredible focus for us. Uh, so most recently we've added to all of the announcements we talked about at, uh, Vegas, uh, the, um, next waves of source together the opportunity to bring our community to come and source, uh, using their collective spent power and lots of new enhancements in that area. And also we're taking our supplier insights to the next level. One of the exciting capabilities our customers loved is that being part of a community member, I can come in and I can look at insights across all of my suppliers, uh, from the entire community. What we have, we've been working with them on is constantly adding more and more information to that. So now we have diversity data. >>So you can come in and you can search for suppliers that meet your women. Exactly. Exactly. Those are increasingly becoming more and more important. And then we can help companies source with the right suppliers much more easily right off the bat. Um, other areas that we've announced today was a coupon pay for expenses in early access program. Uh, we also announced invoice thing. Um, going on GA, when we talked in Vegas, it was still in the early access program, uh, capabilities and opening up our platform, Coupa as a platform. >> Uh, tell me about that, cause I wasn't quite clear when Rob was talking about it this morning. I thought I wanna dig in that with you. Kupa as a platform. What is that? What does it look like? So what's exciting about this is, so from our inception as a company, we were always had this old in Cooper about being open as an ally for the entire ecosystem that our customers might have. >>Our vision has always been, we want to be the, ultimately the business screen for everything business spend management related for our customers. So over years we kept taking the level of openness with our partners through different, um, different levels. If you say, if you will, for example, we started with just integrations in the beginning and we certify these integrations with coupon link. Um, we've taken it most recently where we allow partners to embed their mini apps within Cooper. So, for example, um, you can see in one of our partners EcoVadis now they have the capability to embed their supplier diversity data sustainability data right on the supplier record. Okay. And what's beautiful about this is that our customers, when they look at it, it looks a one beautiful unified experience and bringing all the data in context for what they want. Um, today, this morning, uh, Rob shared one example from Amadeus for, uh, trip integrations. >>So right on the homepage, I can see right within Cooper, I can see all their bookings that I've done with the travel provider, Mike pre-approvals, expense reports, all within one unified experience. But ultimately where we want to take coop as a platform is to become this app directory that, uh, third party partners and platform developers start building applications to extend Copa to bring more choice and value to our customers. Okay. Wow. Is that one of the things I saw Rob shared this morning was integration with Slack. Yes. So business folks can review, approve, or reject, like expenses for example, right from within Slack without even having to go into the platform. Yes, yes. That you hit on a very important concept, which we call the best UI is no UI in many ways. And the idea there is um, we always put ourselves in the user's shoes and ask ourselves how do we get them what they need with the least friction? >>In some cases that might involve a user experience because you need to ask them questions and make cases. We can automate the whole thing. So we just do it. And in many cases it means we go to them to where they are such as in Slack, I'm going to ask you to leave Slack, go somewhere else right then and there you should be able to approve or reject why you have to go anywhere else. Is that what, what Cuba means by no UI is the best UI, correct. Best UI is no UI. So ultimately wherever there is effort, we, we want to involve people only when they need to add value. That's it. And as much as we're able to automate, that's great. So we take that off of their table and we also adjust to the type of experience they need. Sometimes just a text message is enough sometimes to bring the data to me into a collaboration applications that I want. >>Um, sometimes we, we help them approve right from, um, a button. You don't even go into Kupa in order to do that. So always thinking of how we drive adoption, drive adoption. And it's an important concept, not just on the employee side of companies, it's even more so on the supplier side as well. Now when you think of any or like large organizations, they have tens of thousands of thousands of suppliers, many have hundreds of thousand suppliers. And the supplier ecosystem is everything from very small contractor, mom and pop shop, maybe two people or even one person all the way to very, very large companies. Okay. So as you look at that whole spectrum, you have to really think what does every audience need? And so in many cases, these people, um, they may need to do everything very quickly straight from an email without having to remember a user ID and a password to log into something. >>So eliminates friction at every step of the process for them. Wow. So let's talk about that Vic community insights. As we look at some of the, uh, the data that KUKA has gotten from finance leaders of the UK, that was like a survey that you guys, yes, I did recently have 253 decision makers and finance and some of the numbers were glaring. Like, wow, 96% of these decision makers said we don't have complete visibility correct. Of all of our spent. And then I was talking to a customer today who said, we've got now gotten 95% of all of our business men going through Coupa and that was within less than a year. Yes. So the opportunity there to deliver that visibility and those insights back to the community is, is pumped, is incredibly exciting. It's incredibly exciting. We're starting to see more and more the sentiment that's in key, loud and clear and um, by working constantly on the AE, the accelerated and coupon, we work on getting more and more of the spend for each and every customer under management. >>Um, we, when we start to projects for customers right off the bat, uh, we use our AI classification tools before they even start with Copa, where we start helping them get visibility onto all of their existing spent so that as they start into their Coupa journey, they are always looking at it holistically. Okay. So we know them, realize all of that data and provide them insights and reports right off the bat as well. Tell me about the customer interactions that you have as the EVP of product, lot of customers on the platform, a lot of data there. How are customers influential? Yes, yes. The direction. Like for example, you know, obviously I won't give a secret sauce, but for Cooper inspire 20, 20, what are some of the things that we might see customers influencing in terms of your roadmap that direction? Partnerships? Yes. Yes. >>Um, in general, the way, um, we've always worked, uh, at Coupa with our customers and we call them like our community members really is an inc very incredibly tight partnership. Um, we have three releases a year, January, may and September. Each of them packed with roughly about anywhere 72, 19 new features and capabilities. And all of these capabilities are touched either conceived by customers, with customers or touched by customers in the form of working with them on early access validation and all of that. And for me, one of my most favorite things I get to enjoy about working in SAS and, and uh, being at Cooper is that as soon as you are rolling out these capabilities and turning them on in the cloud, customers are using them. So even though like for example right now my entire team has just finished the walkthroughs of all our may release for inspire. >>And when we come back from this trip, uh, we will start the, you know, the, these, the design and, and um, definition. Um, often we might hear of new requirements that might come up and because we are InsightSquared able to, um, here at just what it makes sense and actually be incredibly responsive to what we see. >> How do you do that? How do you look through all the different responses and correlate that data and determine what makes sense to stack? Rank in terms of priorities for new features and new capabilities. So it's definitely an art and a science for sure. Um, but there's a framework that, uh, we follow, uh, since the beginning and we continue to follow and continues to serve us really well. Uh, which is always balancing between three drivers of customers, market and innovation. So the customer one is the obvious one of course, where and many events like this and one on ones and online community. >>We're talking to customers and they're specifically coming and asking for help in areas. Now, we may not build the feature exactly as they asked, but we listened to the pain beneath it and late using the latest technologies, we think of what is the best approach to solve the real pain that they have. So that's one part of the planning for every release cycle. The other is overall market. So for example, as we grow into more regions, uh, newer areas, new spend categories, um, new adjacent powered applications that our customers are needing, um, we started expanding in that area as well. Um, for example, we, right now in London, um, a lot of, uh, when I joined Cooper back in 2012, uh, we were just starting the, uh, entry into the, uh, Mel market and a lot of the product capabilities were market driven in the sense that we were spending a lot of time on compliance and different regulations and all of that. >>And the third is innovation. And what is always one of the things as we bring people on board at Cooper and talk about the framework, um, innovation for us is what we call pragmatic innovation. And it's comes from deep understanding what are the customer problems, what are the market problems? And then we ask ourselves using everything, the latest technologies, what is the best way? So you'll never hear us talk about AI for AI sake and blockchain and all of that would always talking about do we deeply understand the problem and what is the most appropriate? Um, so we call them CMI customer innovation. Uh, within my products organization, every product managers usually has a vision for their product and they have a full release roadmap. And in each full release roadmap, they are listing things as C M I in many cases the same capability is C and M and I, so it becomes an art and a science of balancing those types of things. >>But ultimately when we look at our collective release of CMI, we're asking ourselves, how much does this release accelerate the success goals of our customers? Right. And generally that's the framework that we use. Yeah, that's fantastic. Thank you for explaining that. In terms of acceleration, some of the numbers that Rob shared this morning, we're, I think your customers are collectively approving invoices 30% faster than last year. I said medium, mid size market, customers are getting lot going live on Kupa in about four months. Correct. And mid large enterprises and about eight months. So. Right. And I've talked to a number of customers today about the speed of which they're able to get onto the platform and actually start seeing business value. So that's a free coupon for acceleration was well dissected today. Yes. Yes. It's definitely, yeah. Um, these are the vision areas that Rob talked about today. >>And in each of these vision areas, we're always asking ourselves, how do we continue to accelerate? So that's actually how one of the ideas was born around the turtle is I'm the hair, which is we want to accelerate cycle times, cycle times, and what are the different ways we can do this? What can we borrow from um, the, uh, our consumer lives to do this? And that's where the game unification came. Yes. And sure enough, it was one of those things that got people super excited and, and they're putting more attention into it. Well, the consumer side of our lives is we're so demanding because we can get anything that we want. We can buy products and services, we can pay bills with a clicker swipe. And so the B to C side from a payments perspective has innovated far more rapidly than the B2B side has. >>Correct. A lot more challenged there on the B2B side. But as consumers, we want a simple experience. One of the customers I spoke to who said when he was looking for technology, he's on what something that looks like Amazon marketplace. Yeah. Because from an adoption perspective, my teams will understand it. You so that the consumerization always interests me because we are those pretty much, you know, 12 plus hours a day and to see how software companies like KUKA are taking and meeting the needs of those customers, obviously it's not an overnight process. It gets people excited. It gets its absolutely is you right. That always fascinated me also how I've seen so many companies, um, like people almost have two personalities. Like they go into their personal life, they have a personality, they go into their professional lives and like, Oh, it's okay. It's like a backend system. >>This and this and this. Um, but increasingly the new generation is no longer tolerating and the drive is starting to just go find those shifts that happen changing, right? Yes, yes. But I can't, if I can have this in my personal life, then I need to be able to transact. Exactly. Exactly. Why does it take 45 days? Exactly. Exactly. Five days. Um, so last question for you. Since your keynote is tomorrow. Yes. What are some of the strategic visionary elements that you're going to leave the audience with? So I'm going to leave the audience with the key pillars of our strategy. Um, latest innovations we've done towards them and where we are taking them in the years ahead. One of the things I've always done over the years at inspire is we always share at preview of what, um, the community has been talking to us about and we're working with. >>And usually at the end of it, a lot of new community members might come in and ask to participate in some of the development because it means a lot to them for their own business. And then usually by the following inspire, we start showing these things actually live and, and, um, executed on. So the, um, the three strategic pillars I'll be sharing and talking about are all around the pipe that Trump talked about. Yep. How do I capture more and more spend under management? So we'll be talking about the consumerizing experiences voice using voice use Copa using facial recognition in Cooper. Uh, we'll be talking about new concepts around travel, around the group card school, applying all of it around the theme, focused on the um, end users and delight them, blow them away with consumer experiences. And then now that we do all of that, we can jump into the power users because we are increasing that spend under management. >>The theme by far is all around suite synergy suite synergy. So we seriously, this doesn't exist in the market. The market overall was all siloed applications. We're creating a new category and we've created these beautiful, elegant flows for our customers today. But there's also a wonderful long journey ahead in what we are taking up. Well maybe we'll get to talk about synergy at inspire 20 slowly. I will, we would love to have you again. Excellent. We're going to in Vegas for the afternoon. Best of luck in your keynote tomorrow and we'll see you the next inspire. Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for Raja Hamoud. I, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube from Coupa inspire 19 from London. Bye for now.

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the cube. covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Boston Seaport everybody. My name is David Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman and you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at LiveWorx PTC's big IOT conference. Jaron Lanier is here, he's the father of virtual reality and the author of Dawn of the New Everything. Papa, welcome. >> Hey there. >> What's going on? >> Hey, how's it going? >> It's going great. How's the show going for you? It's cool, it's cool. It's, it's fine. I'm actually here talking about this other book a little bit too, but, yeah, I've been having a lot of fun. It's fun to see how hollow lens applied to a engines and factories. It's been really cool to see people seeing the demos. Mixed reality. >> Well, your progeny is being invoked a lot at the show. Everybody's sort of talking about VR and applying it and it's got to feel pretty good. >> Yeah, yeah. It seems like a VR IoT blockchain are the sort of the three things. >> Wrap it all with digital transformation. >> Yeah, digital transformation, right. So what we need is a blockchain VR IoT solution to transform something somewhere. Yeah. >> So tell us about this new book, what it's called? >> Yeah. This is called the deleting all your social media accounts right now. And I, I realize most people aren't going to do it, but what I'm trying to do is raise awareness of how the a psychological manipulation algorithms behind the system we're having an effect on society and I think I love the industry but I think we can do better and so I'm kind of agitating a bit here. >> Well Jaron, I was reading up a little bit getting ready for the interview here and people often will attack the big companies, but you point at the user as, you know, we need to kind of take back and we have some onus ourselves as to what we use, how we use it and therefore can have impact on, on that. >> Well, you know, what I've been finding is that within the companies and Silicon Valley, a lot of the top engineering talent really, really wants to pursue ethical solutions to the problem, but feels like our underlying business plan, the advertising business plan keeps on pulling us back because we keep on telling advertisers we have yet new ways to kind of do something to tweak the behaviors of users and it kind of gradually pulls us into this darker and darker territory. The thing is, there's always this assumption, oh, it's what users want. They would never pay for something the way they pay for Netflix, they would never pay for social media that way or whatever it is. The thing is, we've never asked users, nobody's ever gone and really checked this out. So I'm going to, I'm kind of putting out there as a proposition and I think in the event that users turn out to really want more ethical social media and other services by paying for them, you know, I think it's going to create this enormous sigh of relief in the tech world. I think it's what we all really want. >> Well, I mean ad-based business models that there's a clear incentive to keep taking our data and doing whatever you want with it, but, but perhaps there's a better way. I mean, what if you're, you're sort of proposing, okay, maybe users would be willing to pay for various services, which is probably true, but what if you were able to give users back control of their data and let them monetize their data. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, I like a lot of different solutions, like personally, if it were just up to me, if I ran the world, which I don't, but if I ran the world, I can make every single person of the world into a micro-entrepreneur where they can package, sell and price their data the way they want. They can, they can form into associations with others to do it. And they can also purchase data from others as they want. And I think what we'd see is this flowering of this giant global marketplace that would organize itself and would actually create wonders. I really believe that however, I don't run the world and I don't think we're going to see that kind of perfect solution. I think we're going to see something that's a bit rougher. I think we might see something approximating that are getting like a few steps towards that, but I think we are going to move away from this thing where like right now if two people want to do anything on online together, the only way that's possible is if there's somebody else who's around to pay them, manipulate them sneakily and that's stupid. I mean we can be better than that and I'm sure we will. >> Yeah, I'm sure we will too. I mean we think, we think blockchain and smart contracts are a part of that solution and obviously a platform that allows people to do exactly what you just described. >> And, and you know, it's funny, a lot of things that sounded radical a few years ago are really not sounding too radical. Like you mentioned smart contracts. I remember like 10 years ago for sure, but even five years ago when you talked about this, people are saying, oh no, no, no, no, no, this, the world is too conservative. Nobody's ever going to want to do this. And the truth is people are realizing that if it makes sense, you know, it makes sense. And, and, and, and so I think, I think we're really seeing like the possibilities opening up. We're seeing a lot of minds opening, so it's kind of an exciting time. >> Well, something else that I'd love to get your thoughts on and we think a part of that equation is also reputation that if you, if you develop some kind of reputation system that is based on the value that you contribute to the community, that affects your, your reputation and you can charge more if you have a higher reputation or you get dinged if you're promoting fake news. That that reputation is a linchpin to the successful community like that. >> Well, right now the problem is because, in the free model, there's this incredible incentive to just sort of get people to do things instead of normal capitalist. And when you say buy my thing, it's like you don't have to buy anything, but I'm going to try to trick you into doing something, whatever it is. And, and, and if you ever direct commercial relationship, then the person who's paying the money starts to be a little more demanding. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that right now there's this huge incentive to create false reputation. Like in reviews, a lot of, a lot of the reviews are fake, followers a lot of them are fake instance. And so there's like this giant world of fake stuff. So the thing is right now we don't have reputation, we have fake reputation and the way to get real reputation instead of think reputation is not to hire an army of enforcing us to go around because the company is already doing that is to change the financial incentives so you're not incentivizing criminals, you know I mean, that's incentives come first and then you can do the mop up after that, but you have to get the incentives aligned with what you want. >> You're here, and I love the title of the book. We interviewed James Scott and if you know James Scott, he's one of the principals at ICIT down PTC we interviewed him last fall and we asked him, he's a security expert and we asked them what's the number one risk to our country? And he said, the weaponization of social media. Now this is, this is before fake news came out and he said 2020 is going to be a, you know, what show and so, okay. >> Yeah, you know, and I want to say there's a danger that people think this is a partisan thing. Like, you know, if you, it's not about that. It's like even if you happen to support whoever has been on, on the good side of social media manipulation, you should still oppose the manipulation. You know, like I was, I was just in the UK yesterday and they had the Brexit foot where there was manipulation by Russians and others. And you know, the point I've made over there is that it's not about whether you support Brexit or not. That's your business, I don't even have an opinion. It's not, I'm an American. That's something that's for somebody else. But the thing is, if you look at the way Brexit happened, it tore society apart. It was nasty, it was ugly, and there have been tough elections before, but now they're all like that. And there was a similar question when the, the Czechoslovakia broke apart and they didn't have all the nastiness and it's because it was before social media that was called the velvet divorce. So the thing is, it's not so much about what's being supported, whatever you think about Donald Trump or anything else, it's the nastiness. It's the way that people's worst instincts are being used to manipulate them, that's the problem. >> Yeah, manipulation denial is definitely a problem no matter what side of the aisle you're on, but I think you're right that the economic incentive if the economic incentive is there, it will change behavior. And frankly, without it, I'm not sure it will. >> Well, you know, in the past we've tried to change the way things in the world by running around in outlying things. For instance, we had prohibition, we outlawed, we outlawed alcohol, and what we did is we created this underground criminal economy and we're doing something similar now. What we're trying to do is we're saying we have incentives for everything to be fake, everything to be phony for everything to be about manipulation and we're creating this giant underground of people trying to manipulate search results or trying to manipulate social media feeds and these people are getting more and more sophisticated. And if we keep on doing this, we're going to have criminals running the world. >> Wonder if I could bring the conversation back to the virtual reality. >> Absolutely. >> I'm sorry about that. >> So, but you know, you have some concerns about whether virtual reality will be something you for good or if it could send us off the deep end. >> Oh yeah, well. Look, there's a lot to say about virtual reality. It's a whole world after all. So you can, there is a danger that if the same kinds of games are being played on smartphones these days were transferred into a virtual reality or mixed reality modalities. Like, you could really have a poisonous level of mind control and I, I do worry about that I've worried about that for years. What I'm hoping is that the smartphone era is going to force us to fix our ways and get the whole system working well enough so that by the time technologies like virtual reality are more common, we'll have a functional way to do things. And it won't, it won't all be turned into garbage, you know because I do worry about it. >> I heard, I heard a positive segment on NPR saying that one of the problems is we all stare at our phones and maybe when I have VR I'll actually be talking to actual people so we'll actually help connections and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. >> Well, you know, most of the mixed reality demos you see these days are person looking at the physical world and then there's extra stuff added to the physical world. For instance, in this event, just off camera over there, there's some people looking at automobile engines and seeing them augmented and, and that's great. But, there's this other thing you can do which is augmenting people and sometimes it can be fun. You can put horns or wings or long noses or something on people. Of course, you still see them with the headsets all that's great. But you can also do other stuff. You can, you can have people display extra information that they have in their mind. You can have more sense of what each other are thinking and feeling. And I actually think as a tool of expression between people in real life, it's going to become extremely creative and interesting. >> Well, I mean, we're seeing a lot of applications here. What are some of your favorites? >> Oh Gosh. Of the ones right here? >> Yes. >> Well, you know, the ones right here are the ones I described and I really like them, there's a really cool one of some people getting augmentation to help them maintain and repair factory equipment. And it's, it's clear, it's effective, it's sensible. And that's what you want, right? If you ask me personally what really, a lot of the stuff my students have done, really charms me like up, there was just one project, a student intern made where you can throw virtual like goop like paint and stuff around in the walls and it sticks and starts running down and this is running on the real world and you can spray paint the real world so you can be a bit of a juvenile delinquent basically without actually damaging anything. And it was great, it was really fun and you know, stuff like that. There was this other thing and other student did where you can fill a whole room with these representations of mathematical objects called tensors and I'm sorry to geek out, but you had this kid where all these people could work together, manipulating tensors and the social environment. And it was like math coming alive in this way I hadn't experienced before. That really was kind of thrilling. And I also love using virtual reality to make music that's another one of my favorite things, >> Talk more about that. >> Well, this is something I've been doing forever since the '80s, since the '80s. I've been, I've been at this for awhile, but you can make an imaginary instruments and play them with your hands and you can do all kinds of crazy things. I've done a lot of stuff with like, oh I made this thing that was halfway between the saxophone and an octopus once and I'll just >> Okay. >> all this crazy. I love that stuff I still love it. (mumbling) It hasn't gotten old for me. I still love it as much as I used to. >> So I love, you mentioned before we came on camera that you worked on minority report and you made a comment that there were things in that that just won't work and I wonder if you could explain a little bit more, you know, because I have to imagine there's a lot of things that you talked about in the eighties that, you know, we didn't think what happened that probably are happening. Well, I mean minority report was only one of a lot of examples of people who were thinking about technology in past decades. Trying to send warnings to the future saying, you know, like if you try to make a society where their algorithms predicting what'll happen, you'll have a dystopia, you know, and that's essentially what that film is about. It uses sort of biocomputer. They're the sort of bioengineered brains in these weird creatures instead of silicon computers doing the predicting. But then, so there are a lot of different things we could talk about minority report, but in the old days one of the famous VR devices which these gloves that you'd use to manipulate virtual objects. And so, I put a glove in a scene mockup idea which ended up and I didn't design the final production glove that was done by somebody in Montreal, but the idea of putting a glove a on the heroes hand there was that glove interfaces give you arm fatigue. So the truth is if you look at those scenes there physically impossible and what we were hoping to do is to convey that this is a world that has all this power, but it's actually not. It's not designed for people. It actually wouldn't work in. Of course it kind of backfired because what happened is the production designers made these very gorgeous things and so now every but every year somebody else tries to make the minority report interface and then you discover oh my God, this doesn't work, you know, but the whole point was to indicate a dystopian world with UI and that didn't quite work and there are many other examples I could give you from the movie that have that quality. >> So you just finished the book. When did this, this, this go to print the. >> Yeah, so this book is just barely out. It's fresh from the printer. In fact, I have this one because I noticed a printing flaw. I'm going to call the publisher and say, Oh, you got to talk to the printer about this, but this is brand new. What happened was last year I wrote a kind of a big book of advert triality that's for real aficionados and it's called Dawn of the new everything and then when I would go and talk to the media about it they'd say, well yeah, but what about social media? And then all this stuff, and this was before it Cambridge Analytica, but people were still interested. So I thought, okay, I'll do a little quick book that addresses what I think about all that stuff. And so I wrote this thing last year and then Cambridge Analytica happened and all of a sudden it's, it seems a little bit more, you know, well timed >> than I could have imagined >> Relevant. So, what other cool stuff are you working on? >> I have to tell you something >> Go ahead. >> This is a real cat. This is a black cat who is rescued from a parking lot in Oakland, California and belongs to my daughter. And he's a very sweet cat named Potato. >> Awesome. You, you're based in Northern California? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Awesome And he was, he was, he was an extra on the set of, of the Black Panther movie. He was a stand-in for like a little mini black panthers. >> What other cool stuff are you working on? What's next for you? >> Oh my God, there's so much going on. I hardly even know where to begin. There's. Well, one of the things I'm really interested in is there's a certain type of algorithm that's really transforming the world, which is usually called machine learning. And I'm really interested in making these things more transparent and open so it's less like a black box. >> Interesting. Because this has been something that's been bugging me you know, most kinds of programming. It might be difficult programming, but at least the general concept of how it works is obvious to anyone who's program and more and more we send our kids to coding camps and there's just a general societal, societal awareness of what conventional programming is like. But machine learning has still been this black box and I view that as a danger. Like you can't have society run by something that most people feel. It's like this black box because it'll, it'll create a sense of distrust and, and, I think could be, you know, potentially quite a problem. So what I want to try to do is open the black box and make it clear to people. So that's one thing I'm really interested in right now and I'm, oh, well, there's a bunch of other stuff. I, I hardly even know where to begin. >> The black box problem is in, in machine intelligence is a big one. I mean, I, I always use the example I can explain, I can describe to you how I know that's a dog, but I really can't tell you how I really know it's a dog. I know I look at a dog that's a dog, but. Well, but, I can't really in detail tell you how I did that but it isn't AI kind of the same way. A lot of AI. >> Well, not really. There's, it's a funny thing right now in, in, in the tech world, there are certain individuals who happen to be really good at getting machine language to work and they get very, very well paid. They're sort of like star athletes. But the thing is even so there's a degree of almost like folk art to it where we're not exactly sure why some people are good at it But even having said that, we, it's wrong to say that we have no idea how these things work or what we can certainly describe what the difference is between one that fails and that's at least pretty good, you know? And so I think any ordinary person, if we can improve the user interface and improve the way it's taught any, any normal person that can learn even a tiny bit of programming like at a coding camp, making the turtle move around or something, we should be able to get to the point where they can understand basic machine learning as well. And we have to get there. All right in the future, I don't want it to be a black box. It doesn't need to be. >> Well basic machine learning is one thing, but how the machine made that decision is increasingly complex. Right? >> Not really it's not a matter of complexity. It's a funny thing. It's not exactly complexity. It has to do with getting a bunch of data from real people and then I'm massaging it and coming up with the right transformation so that the right thing spit out on the other side. And there's like a little, it's like to me it's a little bit more, it's almost like, I know this is going to sound strange but it's, it's almost like learning to dress like you take this data and then you dress it up in different ways and all of a sudden it turns functional in a certain way. Like if you get a bunch of people to tag, that's a cat, that's a dog. Now you have this big corpus of cats and dogs and now you want to tell them apart. You start playing with these different ways of working with it. That had been worked out. Maybe in other situations, you might have to tweak it a little bit, but you can get it to where it's very good. It can even be better than any individual person, although it's always based on the discrimination that people put into the system in the first place. In a funny way, it's like Yeah, it's like, it's like a cross between a democracy and a puppet show or something. Because what's happening is you're taking this data and just kind of transforming it until you find the right transformation that lets you get the right feedback loop with the original thing, but it's always based on human discrimination in the first place so it's not. It's not really cognition from first principles, it's kind of leveraging data, gotten from people and finding out the best way to do that and I think really, really work with it. You can start to get a two to feel for it. >> We're looking forward to seeing your results of that work Jared, thanks for coming on the cube. You're great guests. >> Really appreciate it >> I really appreciate you having me here. Good. Good luck to all of you. And hello out there in the land that those who are manipulated. >> Thanks again. The book last one, one last plug if I may. >> The book is 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now and you might be watching this on one of them, so I'm about to disappear from your life if you take my advice. >> All right, thanks again. >> All right. Okay, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)