Billy Riggs (00:41)
Hello everybody and welcome to Rewiring the American Edge. I'm Billy Riggs. In this show, we think about how we can rewire the future of the American economy with entrepreneurship, innovation, focusing on, everything related to automation in the future.

We're spin-off of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative at the University of San Francisco. Today I'm joined not only by my co-host Vipul Vyas, but, next to me, I have a special guest, Lee Riggs, part of the future of, the economy of the United States. Lee, you want to introduce yourself.

I'm Lee rigs. is there anything else to say? I'm your son. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So thanks for introducing. Want to tell anything else about yourself? You're? Lee is? How old? I'm 12.

Yeah. All right. Thanks Lee. All right. So Lee is 12 and he, he actually really wanted to join us today. And today we're going to talk a little bit about, Outpacing the Chaos. And, something we've been chewing on for a while, about how we keep, moving forward and how we keep innovating.

And how we harness the benefits of automation, innovation in the future. And I think it's something that over the past couple of months we've seen when our politics kind of seems stuck in reversed. Vipul, hi, what's going on? Hey, what's up?

Go for it.

Vipul Vyas (02:17)
I'm not sure if I have a lot to say about chaos. I think uncertainty has always been around in different forms forever. And I think we've actually been through an bizarrely certain period of time or certain era of certainty, I guess is a better way of putting it for the last 30 plus years, maybe even more than that. And we're coming out of something that we're familiar with. And so it feels particularly precarious.

but that's normal people these cycles kind of happen and we're leaving one period and entering another and I think what is dangerous is just settling into admiring the problem going out you know it's chaotic it's uncertain versus planning and preparing for that uncertainty I think what you have to almost acknowledge is that it will be a period of uncertainty and of chaos

And all the assumptions that we've held onto and we've assumed, not to be redundant, were grounded in bedrock aren't really that way anymore. That's not the case. And so we have to revisit a lot of assumptions. It's been really easy to do business in many respects of just being able to come up with an idea of

whether it's software or physical goods, and get it produced overseas, you know, cheaply with outsourced labor or outsourced manufacturing, so we could innovate very quickly. There was a rhythm to the world's design studio was America, or at least to some extent, you we played a role in that capacity. And then the workshops were either, you know, parts of Eastern Europe, India,

Billy Riggs (03:51)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (04:06)
Southeast Asia, et cetera, for software. And then for physical goods, was China, parts of Southeast Asia again, and you got stuff made and there was this sort of ecosystem that developed. And I think all of that is being revisited and new ecosystems will have to emerge.

Billy Riggs (04:15)
Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right. just let me ask Lee something too. I how are you seeing like when you go to school and every day in school, how are you seeing technology change? Like when you're in your classroom, are you seeing AI and are you seeing

technology used more in your elementary school classroom? And actually you're in middle school now. Are you seeing technology used more than you were in elementary school? Well, obviously in COVID, know, technology became more of a normal thing in schools. So like now everybody... how do I explain this? They're kind of more...

A lot more things are done online. There are these programs that teachers will say, okay, do that. And that's kind of a big portion of your education. Now, obviously there are bad parts. And I wouldn't say bad parts, but there's AI, right? Which can be used in good ways. Like for students that don't speak your language or for just helping in general. And it also, again, in my opinion, it has a lot of bad...

parts of it too, like students could be using it to cheat But I think technology has been having a mostly positive effect on education in general as it does give teachers more time to actually focus on the students. Yeah a lot more tools in the toolbox. Yeah, and I think we'll come back to this idea of

what does, what does technology innovation automation mean for education? But I think I want to agree with both of you because I think it's a really big context setting. And I would say when we think about, you know, gridlock in Congress, regulatory uncertainty, global trends, global tensions, what we talked about with regard to "guarding the gates". You would think it's a terrible time to be building the future, to be building resiliency, to be preparing your city.

for the next boom. And I think we have to think about how are systems evolving and because they are evolving quietly and powerfully. And the question is how and what should we be doing and how can cities, whether or not you're in the US whether or not you're in Europe, whether or not you're in Asia, how do you keep that competitive edge?

How do you not be the complacent city as you've described over numerous episode, Vipul? And because I would say, and maybe our theme here is innovation ain't waiting for you. know, innovation ain't gonna wait for you. The train is moving and don't you lay on the tracks. Vipul?

Vipul Vyas (07:12)
Yeah,

Yeah, I think the key is that a lot of cities, a lot of state and local governments are viewing the world as business as usual, where you see a lot of least grappling with the uncertainties happening at the national level, because that's, you a lot of the things have national implications. I'm not saying the state and local governments are completely, you know, ignoring this, but

They are more so than they should be. At the national level, you know that foreign policy is changing, trade policy is there's national level legislation happening that's gonna impact everyone, including state and local governments. But state and local governments aren't effecting that change. They're not making that change, as is the case at the federal level. They're responding to it, and to some extent, they are being buoyed about by it. And so their initial response is to, you know,

go to court, try to stop the change from happening, essentially kind of put their head in the sand a little bit about the fact that things are changing, their funding sources may be impacted, their economies may be impacted by the industries that really contribute to their vibrancy. And so instead of going, okay, well, what's happening at the national level? I think people view it as a sort of a fluke. And it depends on how you look at the Trump administration in general. Do you look at the Trump administration as

a symptom of inevitable change, meaning maybe it's chaotic, maybe it's dramatic, maybe it's happening in ways that don't seem to be very elegant, but is it just a function of this is gonna happen and this is just the administration that is now victim of or just doing it because it was gonna happen no matter who was in power?

And if you believe that, then you should be preparing. You should be like, okay, this may not be most elegant way of this change to come about, but it's going to happen sooner or later. And might as well, you know, figure out how to live in this new world. But I think a lot of people are saying, well, the current administration is the driver and function of the change. It's not that change was inevitably needed. It's that this administration was forcing something that didn't otherwise have to happen. And the preference

there is to say, this is temporary, this is a function of who's in power, and we just have to sit tight or try to fight back and roll it back to the extent we can. And if you're in the latter camp, those may be a fair conclusion to come to, if you're in the latter camp, you're not going to probably be focused on preparing for a future, you're going to be focused on preserving what is. Just not even that you intend to, but because that's your mindset, you're going...

Billy Riggs (09:47)
Okay.

Vipul Vyas (09:51)
Chaos is a function of this person in power or this administration and therefore I have to fight that versus go, well, this administration is basically just a hallmark or a symptom of changes that are afoot. And so those changes are going to happen no matter who's there. Maybe it would have been executed better or worse, who knows, but they're going to happen and therefore I have to get ready for it and prepare for it. And I think the people that are in that camp, they'll prepare for it because it's inevitable.

maybe better served because If things go back to the way they were, you're fine. You know how to operate that world if they don't you've done nothing to prepare for a new world Where the rules are changed you haven't bothered to get ready So there's no downside in being more prepared for The perceived set of changes that are coming down the pipe then to just sort of assume that this is a temporary blip

It's a long way of saying it's better to proactively think about how to navigate what may be durable uncertainties or durable changes than presume that the status quo is what we're going to drift back to at some point anyway.

Billy Riggs (11:01)
And crisis can be a good crisis or chaos can be a good.

And, know, I think, you know, if you look back to the cold war and how the cold war perhaps generated the chaos that spurred advanced manufacturing that then drove the innovation that then sparked innovations that generated GPS, the R and D urgency that then kind of.

drove a lot of the technology that's in our cell phones, in the 2008 recession, a lot of the clean tech scaled under crisis pressure that, then scaled the, the solar industry. Of course, some of that has retracted in recent years, but I mean, I think despite the dysfunction, one of the things that I take hope in is a lot of the stuff that we've talked about in past episodes is you can have.

decentralized innovation that that happens even when you have centralized chaos. And I think you can have a lot of this, this decentralized innovation that is still focused on acute societal problems and is still acutely trying to address some of these acute issues, despite some of the noise and the narrative.

that's happening while waiting for, let's just face it, DC to get its act together.

Vipul Vyas (12:29)
Yep. Yep. I think that's what you have to spend time analyzing. And it's a worthwhile analysis to undertake, which is, as I said before, are these changes that are going to be inevitably coming along or are these temporary vacillations of the preferences of whoever's in power? An example of that is, are we going to be able to run structural deficits for

a long time. And if we, if we determine that's not possible, we've hit some sort of debt maxima, then you can start to assume the federal government will retrench the amount of money it sends back to state and local governments and you should prepare for that. If you think the federal government is retreating from its role in healthcare, especially on the side of Medicaid, for example, with very massive cuts, etc. And

The Medicaid is program that's a mixture of state and local, of state and federal contribution. Then you're gonna probably expect to have to pony up more. And so how do you get ready for that? Infrastructure. If the federal government's gonna be spending less money, giving you less money for roads, road projects, transportation in general, then what are you gonna do about that? Like how do you plan for that? So those are examples of, do you think these are gonna be?

Billy Riggs (13:43)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (13:47)
trans administration or you know above the administration's current administration's policy choices or is this are they reflecting things that are going to happen for the long term and I don't think anyone sat down and thought about that in any deep way but not

Billy Riggs (14:00)
Mm-hmm.

No, I don't think people are,

I don't think people are thinking longitudinally or over time, but I have a question about that because I think that gets it. It really the, the, bigger longitudinal, we doing long-term thinking? But I want to turn it over here to the young one, like young one, lean in so we can see your beautiful face. Young one, what do you think of all this? What do you think of all this? What do think of these, these two old men here? Shooting the breeze.

I really think it all depends on how everybody, especially these big leaders, you put it, or how I'd put it, see the word change, sort of. You could see it as this horrible, I don't know how say it, natural disaster that comes away and just takes everything you knew the way it was.

Or you could kind of lean in and accept it. And I personally don't think that it's bad in any way. Sure, AI might, as some people think, take away a lot of jobs, but I'm sure it'll also open up plenty of new ones too. Now you look, I don't know if anybody's noticed this, but a lot of the time when you drive and you see all these billboards, they're mostly AI ads.

I know. feel like that's, it's going to be, it's not all going to be bad. Yeah. And to, cite a fact from one of our, I think our last episodes with Ruth Whitaker, you didn't listen to this, but, we had a stat that every,

1000 automated vehicles deployed was estimated to create 190 new jobs, which was not just engineers. was operational jobs, diagnostic jobs, fleet management jobs. It was, as Vipul put it, it was a lot of Atoms, not just Electrons. I love that quote that Vipul: "more atoms than electrons"; physical jobs, back of house economy.

not only flashy, but stable middle class work, right Vip?

Vipul Vyas (16:12)
Yeah, I mean, the the white collar jobs that we have today are mostly about conceiving things and managing those newly conceived things. There's a lot of overhead involved with that. So it's not a design related. So ultimately, it's design related, whether people sort of grasp that or not. That's essentially what's happening. So you're creating some new idea and then you're

commercializing it and maintaining the commercialization of that thing. So if you invent new software, you're figuring out how to come up with it, how to design it, how to produce it, how to get out in the market and how to then commercialize in terms of monetizing and make money. And there's a whole lot of effort associated with that. And then the part that is physical creation design.

and bringing something to life that's physical. The design may happen here, even the commercialization, monetization may happen here, but the actual atoms part happens overseas. So the question is, does that come back? Does it go somewhere else in the world or do we find it closer to home? And I don't know, we'll see. But if we are changing parts of our economy, the physical built environment and what's in that built environment,

Billy Riggs (17:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (17:27)
That's going to mean new people doing new things to keep that built environment working. And that's where those sort of Adam oriented jobs will become more relevant.

Billy Riggs (17:35)
Well, and I think as we think about the future of education, it's important that as we think about particularly, particularly some of the jobs that are

middle income jobs. And for some of your friends that don't plan to go to college, if you and if you were to not want to go to college, you think about which, you know, you can do whatever you want. You're a very smart boy. But if you wanted to do something different, you have to think about, you know, making stuff and and you have to think about like electrical circuits and maybe

and building stuff. And I think that's one of the things that we really have to rethink is not just about, it's not just about everybody can't just be a programmer anymore, because that's going to be done by algorithms. And there's going to be a lot of unemployed computer programmers in the future, because that's going to be done by AI. And there's, there's going to be a lot of lawyers that are going to be unemployed in the future.

There's going to be a lot of people in marketing that are unemployed in the future. And, you know, we do have to think about a lot of these jobs that pivot over to people that transition to other areas. And I do think this makerspace is an important area to think about. ⁓

Vipul Vyas (18:52)
Yeah,

that's a whole subject in itself.

Billy Riggs (18:55)
Yeah, it's something we can, haven't even scratched the surface on, but I do think it hits on this, this space where, and this tension that where you were going about how innovation is just moving so fast And there's all this political tension and chaos and no resolution.

And at the end of the day, politics is not policy. And so what does that mean? Policy is not keeping up. And how do we resolve that?

Vipul Vyas (19:24)
Yeah, we'll have to see. That's question. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Billy Riggs (19:28)
Yeah.

Yeah.

And I hope we can get, you know, in the coming weeks, I hope we can get Marcy Harris on here. We've been talking with her about getting her on. There's, I think, some well-meaning, slow federal initiatives about AI. There's been some well-meaning dialogues about autonomous vehicles, but we really don't have cohesive, forward-looking governance about the future of work.

Vipul Vyas (19:58)
Yep. Yep.

Billy Riggs (20:00)
And, maybe even about the future of cities. And that's where I think that people like we've talked a little bit about, you know, people like Matt Mahan, people like, Michelle Wu from Boston we've got some strong mayors in the U S that are kind of putting stakes in the ground as being, I would think bottom up leaders.

And I think some leaders in Europe at the national level, putting some industrial strategies out there and China maybe doing some national level strategies. But I think we can't expect at the U S the market to just figure it out. We have to really, we have to have some longitudinal goals and we don't have that right now.

Vipul Vyas (20:45)
Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would agree. mean, I don't think there's a lot of there's, there's goal setting. think we talked about before that's very short-term oriented that's around.

What's the best way to put it? It's around solving the problems that most places would have assumed were already solved, the sort of self-created own goals like safety, cleanliness of streets, things of that nature, very basic civic governance functions that are being tackled and solved and they are tied up in a quagmire just getting those done. So no one has the energy, time and space to think about the future because they're trying to solve the basics.

That's really the dilemma right now.

That's the core issue.

Billy Riggs (21:28)
Okay. Well, I think that's all I got for this, this dialogue, Vipul. I mean, I think my message is I think automation, it's not a job killer. It's a growth engine. The future is being built. and it's not because of government. It's because of local resolve, private capital, and, the urgency of the technical.

And, but we gotta be, we gotta be smarter and we, gotta get policymakers engaged with clear, clear, clear national intent to keep up with the rest of the world and not just have fragmented local leadership on this issue.

Vipul Vyas (22:09)
I agree. totally agree. That makes a ton of sense.

Billy Riggs (22:12)
Do you have any final word for us, Lee, today? I actually have a question. Yes, sir. Do you think with all these new innovations, what do you call it? Innovation nation? Innovations. Okay, how do I word for it? Do you think that people like my age who are growing up and thinking, what do I want to be when I grow older? Should take this into mind and say,

Vipul Vyas (22:26)
Okay.

Billy Riggs (22:38)
Well, that might not be a thing because AI will have taken it. Like, is that something that I, as someone who is growing up and thinking about what he might want to do in the future, should think about?

Vipul?

Vipul Vyas (22:55)
Yeah, and the truth is, I don't have an answer. I think that...

The, the only answer I can kind of come to is knowing AI and being able to use AI as well as possible as best as anyone can out there is probably the key to being competitive. Number one is like just, you know, not avoiding it, getting immersed in it, being an expert in it is you can't go wrong, at least in the short term and doing that. And then second turn is like, the second thing is

I don't know how creative AI will ultimately be. We'll have to see. But that is a space that is more interesting in my mind. Is that. How do you navigate that? How do you cultivate your creativity? How do you get into the habit of producing more things and consuming things?

even if that's just cooking, that's producing something that's using your creative side, art, things of that nature, because AI can probably do, at least for now, and yeah, I can make videos and things that look like movies, but someone has to come up with the idea of what it is that you want AI to do. So I think exercising your creative capabilities so that you can get AI to do what you want, that you would want it to do is going to be the difference.

Billy Riggs (24:21)
You always have to

have the, you have to have the prompt and, and, the creativity really is giving it the command. And, it's always like giving it as giving the AI, the seed and the place to start, I think is the real power. So, I mean, I would go back to the kind of, you know, it's, it's the engine and you're giving it the key to start the engine. And once that engine gets started, it just.

Vipul Vyas (24:24)
Yeah, you have to someone that's what I want.

Yeah.

Billy Riggs (24:50)
You're giving it the fuel to really, to really power your creative enterprise. And, I think it can really enable growth at a level that we've not seen before. And we talked in a prior episode about there's a possibility that we see levels of wealth.

in our society and levels of prosperity that we've never seen before, but we have to be able to plan to unlock it. And we have to be able to plan to unlock it, not just for the most wealthy, but for people across the economic spectrum for the most wealthy, the middle-class and the most vulnerable. And that we have to make sure that we take care of everyone

in our society. And I think maybe I'll just conclude us for the day with kind of what I said before that's, you know, it's happening. Innovation is here to say automation is here to say and done right. It can be a growth engine and we just need to rewire with purpose. And the question is, are we going to

guide it at the macro level, are we just gonna just react to it? And we'll keep on talking about that over the next couple of weeks.

Vipul Vyas (26:03)
That is the question. That's the question.

Billy Riggs (26:05)
Thanks everybody for being here. Catch you later. Thanks, Vipul. Thanks, Lee.

Vipul Vyas (26:09)
Thank you. Take

care. See you guys. Bye.