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Kirill Eremenko: This is episode number 191 with founder of the
Machine Learning Society, Tristen Blake.
Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. My name
is Kirill Eremenko, data science coach and lifestyle
entrepreneur. And each week we bring you inspiring
people and ideas to help you build your successful
career in data science. Thanks for being here today
and now let's make the complex simple.
Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast, ladies
and gentlemans. Super excited to have you on this
show today. And today I bring to you a friend of mine.
Somebody who I met just recently, but we instantly
connected, Tristen Blake. Tristen is the founder of
Machine Learning Society and the creator of the CO
Network. And this podcast is full of adventure. You will
hear courageous stories of going from finance into data
science. Going from not knowing anything about
analytics to founding the Machine Learning Society
and creating social networks for data scientists and
many, many more.
Tristen is a great example of a person who doesn't
have the background in the field of machine learning
or statistics or data science, but can see the value of
this field and how it is growing and is fearless about
jumping straight into it and doing things about it.
We'll even talk in this podcast about how Tristen is
working with San Diego to create a smart city in San
Diego to make it one of the most progressive cities in
the world. So this podcast is full of various
courageous, exciting stories about machine learning,
data science, technology, smart cities, social networks
and much, much more. So buckle up for an exciting
ride. We're going to jump straight into it.
But before, I wanted to let you know that this podcast
is also available in video version. So if you want to see
the video of our conversation and might feel a bit more
personal to you, if that's your preference, you can find
on YouTube. We don't often record video podcast but
in this case we did. So if you have the opportunity to
do so maybe head on over to youtube and you'll finally
the link there or you can go just straight to
www.SuperDataScience.com/191 and the video will be
available there. If not, it's totally cool to listen to the
podcast on audio. So let's dive straight into it. I bring
to you founder of Machine Learning Society, Tristen
Blake.
Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast, ladies
and gentlemen. Very excited to have you on the show
today. On the show I've got a very interesting, a
fascinating guest I'd say, a good friend of mine, Tristen
Blake. Tristen, welcome to the podcast. How are you
doing today?
Tristen Blake: Doing good. Doing good. Thank you for having me.
Kirill Eremenko: It's so, so exciting man. For our listeners, I wanted to
say that when we actually met, and this was in San
Diego a couple months ago. And it was, if you
remember, it was the Fourth of July. So there was
supposed to be fireworks.
Tristen Blake: Yeah. That's right. That's right.
Kirill Eremenko: And I was so looking forward to seeing those fireworks.
I've never seen Fourth of July fireworks. But Tristen
and I, we caught up, and also Paulo was with us, our
event manager at DataScienceGO. We caught up and
we were at this bar just chatting and we chatted all
through the night. We finished, I think it was almost at
midnight so I missed all the fireworks, man. You owe
me some fireworks, right?
Tristen Blake: All right. It's fair. I'll give them to you on this podcast.
Kirill Eremenko: Sounds good. Well, just maybe like as a bit of a
background. I read article that was written or like an
interview with you. And it was fascinating. I didn't
actually know this part of your story so I'll just quickly
mention it, if you don't mind, and then maybe you can
take [inaudible 00:04:08]
Tristen Blake: Sure. Sure.
Kirill Eremenko: As I understand, you don't have a background in
machine learning or data science. You studied
international finance-
Tristen Blake: International relations and diplomacy.
Kirill Eremenko: International relations and diplomacy. And then you
decided all of a sudden to get into machine learning.
You came to San Diego. You had severe stage fright
and you didn't know anything about machine learning
and yet, you organized a meetup about machine
learning and got 50 people in the room, got a panel of
machine learning experts. And from there it went. Now
you're in the head of the Machine Learning Society,
which has thousands of members in over four different
cities and has had over a hundred different meetups
and all these crazy things. So take us from there. How
did this all happen? Why machine learning?
Tristen Blake: So the story, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where it
starts. And I think actually it often changes, where the
origin point is. But I remember getting this feeling in
New York. I was working in finance, in a family office
world. And I was managing a lot of money for a very
wealthy Chinese family. And I would go to these really
interesting meetings where there would be billionaires
from some of the biggest and most well-known families
in the world and they would talk about investing.
But when I'm talking about investing they would
invest in 100 million in this project. They would buy a
building for 200 million. And I'm the only guy in this
room that didn't come from Oxford or any one of these
schools. I'm not from a rich family. Quite the contrary.
So I was basically working with these family offices,
helping them invest. And anyway, I watched a story on
the TED talk from a gentleman who did some really
interesting drone work. And he would navigate his
hand and the drone would move and I just got this
impression that there was almost an unlimited source
of power hidden in this technology.
But power to change the world in profound and in
really positive ways, to make all of the things that
people struggle to do seem ... Just technology would
disappear into the fabric of your life. It wouldn't be
something that you struggle to pull out and charge
your phone. It would always be charged. So anyway I
went to this meeting and I wanted to see what were
they investing in and were they really holding a secret
on some really interesting companies in artificial
intelligence or genomics for example. And I asked
these family offices, there's a little semicircle of people
around me, "What are you investing in?" And they
looked at me and they said, "Just core real estate. We
just bought a hospital and we're converting it to a
condo."
And they were so proud of this investment portfolio,
product. And I just thought, "Oh my God, the
wealthiest people on earth are missing the biggest
opportunity in history to invest in human quality of life
and also make a lot of money." There's a lot of wealth
to be generated. And a lot of good to be done. And
that's the power of this revolution, I think, that it
allows us to do good and benefit as a result of that,
whereas in history you had to make compromises.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah, yeah. I know. I totally agree. That inspired you,
if I'm not mistaken, for the fourth time to start your
life again, get a ticket to San Diego and start into
machine learning. Where do you get the courage to do
something like that?
Tristen Blake: So yeah, leadership and courage. That's two of the
things that I've been working on and thinking about
for quite some time. Those are learnable skills. I think,
one of the benefits of going from a good family or
coming from a family that has a lot of success is
actually they teach you how to be a good leader and
they teach you when to have urge. I think that is the
most important discipline to teach your kids, quite
frankly. Because everything stems from there. All
right. Your confidence. Your aggression when
necessary. Your creativity directly applied. So getting
back to it, I came to San Diego because I felt some
kind of energy here.
Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. So tell us about the Machine Learning Society.
You started off. First meetup. 50 people attended.
Fantastic result. And how did you grow from there to
thousands of people nationwide, more than four
different cities, hundreds of meetup?
Tristen Blake: So the reason that I started the Machine Learning
Society in the first place was actually because I didn't
have the necessary grades to get into UCSD. I mean, it
was bad. My GPA. I'm not a traditional student. I'm
not very good at mathematics actually. But I am very
good at networks and human behavior. The social
thing. The invisible threads that bind human
relationship. So that's a different type of math or
abstraction. And I practiced that my entire life, hence
diplomacy, international relations.
But I wanted to contribute to science. And I wanted to
get a degree and a potentially a PhD in data science so
that I could start contributing to the whole data
science world. I know the power of this. But I wouldn't
be able to do it through a mathematical approach
because I'm simply too weak in that. I don't think I
have a strength, a natural one. But I am an artist
essentially and I am a community organizer
historically. So I decided to create community so that I
could learn data Science from the people that practice
it by putting on the events. I mean, think about it, you
create an event and you marvel at the knowledge that
is exchanged to you directly and to the entire
audience. So it's almost crowdsourcing your own
education. If that makes sense?
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. No, fantastic. It's learning on steroids.
Tristen Blake: Exactly.
Kirill Eremenko: And you network at the same time. You hit two birds
with one stone. Fantastic idea, man. That's very cool.
That's kind of like nicely brings us to your new project,
which you are wearing a logo of right now, the CO
Network. Super excited man. Congratulations. We just
launched the Kickstarter. By the time this podcast is
out, it's going to be about like two weeks into the
Kickstarter. Really, really excited for you. I highly
encourage everybody watching to go and check it out.
It's going to be revolutionary and Tristen, tell us why.
What is the CO Network and why is it going to change
the world?
Tristen Blake: The answer is in the Machine Learning Society. When I
was hosting events in New York and Boston and the
Bay Area in San Diego. People would reach out to me
from Florida, from Israel, Japan on occasion. And they
would say, "Hey, I would love to participate in this
event. How do I get a link? How do I just meet the
people that are there? How do I participate?" And it
was sad that this person from Africa, I believe there
was a gentleman from Tanzania who reached out. He's
using mobile networks to predict the crop, yields.
Fascinating stuff.
And this person is reaching out to me, trying to
connect to this community. And I didn't really have a
way to plug them into this ecosystem unless I opened
up the Lagos chapter or the Beijing chapter. And that's
a lot of work on my part, to organize and to essentially
make it like a franchise. So I decided that instead of
focusing only on physical events, I would create a
digital experience or connect them digitally so that we
could have a physical digital and one of the early
names that I thought of the project was Physidigital
because it has to blend seamlessly between meeting
people in the physical world and then digitally
exchanging information with them and then meeting
back in the physical world again. It has to be
seamless. It has to be done in the right way.
So I don't know. It was one night. I was laying there
and I just realized that I wasn't building a community
anymore. I was actually building a social network. And
that realization, it stunned me because just the
change of words from community to social network
truly changed the entire scale of the project. And I
realized I'm not only focusing on data scientists. I'm
focusing on data plus scientists. That's anybody who
works with data or science. And that's lot of people.
And that's a lot of subjects, which are currently
entirely uncoordinated. Not enough communication
going on between those. We can break down those
silos with modern tools like a colloquium as a
chatroom for example on a [inaudible 00:13:52] flow.
Or a variety of other tags.
Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. We were just talking about this before the
podcast, that even though they are existing social
networks. Facebook, there is LinkedIn. There's a
couple others. LinkedIn, for instance, is great. You'd
think it's a good opportunity for scientists to connect
through, but scientists, from my experience, don't
really use LinkedIn. They don't. There's an active
professional network. People go there to get jobs, to
make connections or talk about like developing skills.
But in terms of science and data science as well, it's
not really a place where people go to hang out and do
projects together. Like for instance maybe they even do
a project [inaudible 00:14:34] there. I think you guys
found a very interesting niche to really connect science
together. So tell us a bit about that. How is it going to
be different to the existing social?
Tristen Blake: Sure. So LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, all those guys.
Just like humans ... I think you're a millennial. Is that
correct?
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah.
Tristen Blake: Okay.
Kirill Eremenko: Definitions vary.
Tristen Blake: Yeah. I think we're late millennials. We're late
millennials. Companies are just like people in that
they're born to a certain cohort. So the IBMs, Microsoft
and Oracle's. They're part of this cohort of companies
that live and operate on a similar premise, from a
similar age. GE, it's very different in age and approach
and culture. The Tesla. I find that these companies,
especially the new ones that are being born, they have
a totally different set of values. We're building
platforms that are appealing to a person not only from
a use case and quality perspective and price, but also
on whether we share their values and share their
ambition.
So you wouldn't go on my network if you didn't believe
in open data exchange and hiring people not based on
a resume, which is a very old and frankly a broken
system. You can't really put too much information on
a page and most of the stuff isn't relevant anyway. It's
been so formalized for an ancient industry that it
doesn't really matter anymore today. Today you want
to see somebody's projects and their code review, not
necessarily how much time they've spent at Google.
That doesn't really matter. And I think we're going to,
not to be [inaudible 00:16:39] but to kill the resume,
particularly in the sciences and the technology world.
So one of the things that LinkedIn for example fails to
take into consideration or do is create a specific type of
profile for scientist, that appeals to them and asks
them science type of questions. And that's because it's
a professional network and it has a professional
culture to it. You put on your suit and tie when you're
on LinkedIn. On our network you bring your mother
board and a few soldering wires. You don't need to
have a suit and tie on. And I think that culture
difference is very important to consider when building
this out.
I want to ask people the questions that they are
looking to exchange with others and how they evaluate
each other. We still haven't figured out what rules or
methods do scientists use besides peer review or their
academic credentials, to recognize whether another
person is a good fit or a project or for their team. And
that's really some of the territory that we want to go
into in terms of behavioral research and studies on
high performance technical teamwork. We really want
to write some new literature through our social
network and that'll be actually by giving access to
many behavioral psychologist to our network so that
scientist can study a scientific network.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. That's so cool, man. I'm just changing [inaudible
00:18:22] just walking through this real fast, I think.
But man, that is a really interesting idea. So I can
definitely see how scientists can benefit. When we met
up, you talked about co-researching things and
working on research papers together and sharing
research papers together. That's definitely a massive
need right now. But what about data scientists. Tell us
a bit more about that. If I'm a data scientist, I'm
listening to this podcast. What's benefit would I get
from joining the CO Network? And who are the people I
can meet there? Maybe I can work on projects, get
jobs, attend conferences. What are the things that are
going to be available?
Tristen Blake: This is going to be ready in about three weeks or so.
So you're going to open the home page and you're just
going to see a map with people's kind of ... Almost like
a conscious map. There are some of the dots on the
map that are going to represent people that just made
an action or created something, created an event or a
job or posted a data story on their profile. You're going
to see an organic community of people that are
creators, particularly in the computational science,
let's say. This is a computational science focus
network. We accept social science, but we will lean
towards computational behavioral sciences.
If it's psychology, then it's behavioral. Psychology with
a computational component. So you would be able to
log in and see all the upcoming events around the
industry. Are you going to be in New York between the
February 7th and February 14th? Perfect. When you
search February 7th through 14th for New York you'll
see all of the upcoming events, all the available jobs
that many of the companies have posted there. We
have many partners actually can't wait to post some of
their open positions. They're, quite frankly, desperate
to find CTOs and technical talent like data scientists
and deep learning engineers.
Big and small companies. We're talking about some of
the big boys. And we're also talking about some really
novel and exciting new competitive platforms that are
going to solve problems and compete with Google for
solving maps. Or a new company that we're
collaborating with, it's actually doing events. And it's
quite a powerful platform. So distributed computing.
So using your GPU on your computer and using your
browser extension to funnel GPU power, you earn
credits and then share them with a network. It's just
type of companies that are going to be joining the CO
Network. And you could talk to them right there.
You'll be able to look at the innovator directory and
find not only all kinds of data scientists, but also
engineers of all kinds. So when you have a
bioinformatics question, you can ask it in the
bioinformatics colloquium, which is our version of a
forum. So it's really cool. Yeah, jobs. Data stories. Data
stories are kind of like medium. You post your own
articles and people can read them, review them, rank
them. And soon the academy as well, where we're
going to post popular books, movies and lectures that
are technical in nature. So that people can rank them
and you can have an organic sort of ranking system
for this academic literature papers that people post.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. Wow. Very cool. First question, is this going to
be free? And second, can you share the website where
people can find this, once it is live.
Tristen Blake: So average accounts will cost about a million dollars a
piece. No. Look, the reality is, for me, and this is very
important. It's not only marketing. It's actually just
values and the purpose of why this is all happening.
We want to increase the speed of scientific innovation.
The law that governs ... The rate at which your battery
in your phone changes or the rate at which we're able
to dissect the DNA and discover new treatments, new
cancer drugs. We want to change that speed. And I
think my hypothesis is the speed of innovation is
dependent upon how people meet and coordinate and
collaborate and what kind of incentive structures are
in place to bring them together.
And today, well, it's not very much different from
4,000 years ago where you had to bump into a former
classmate or a roommate to potentially launch of
project due to that trust being already built. What if
our network could append a layer of trust, as being the
third party, for a trusted marketplace for the exchange
of ideas. Think of it that way. We're essentially a
marketplace for the exchange of powerful new ideas
and community. And it's architected around
community as a service.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. Cool. Very cool. And the website?
Tristen Blake: So this is interesting. I've been toying around with a
few different ideas. There's one website. It's
Innovation-Labs.co And that's that's our CO
Innovation Labs website. I call it the cortex because
that's where our ideas live. That's kind of an
explanation of what the whole purpose behind this
website is and most importantly, all of our projects, all
of our initiatives. So that lives on that website. But the
website that we're talking about, the CO Network.
You'll be able to visit it in the near future, but I don't
want to give out the link right now because I have a-
Kirill Eremenko: You want it to be a surprise.
Tristen Blake: Exactly. Yeah. Kirill, I'm telling you, it's not going to be
kind of like a software that you just launch and you're
like, "Oh, this is cool. A few things here and some
things work, some things don't." This is going to be
almost like a fully fledged product. It's just going to
allow people to do things that they've been trying to do
for decades and it's going to open up an entirely new
just ... Brain space for people to say, "Oh my god, I can
use this to do anything I want." And that's how it's
been architected. So free for members.
And if you want to start organization on there, it's also
free. But we charge about 6% or any ticket sales that
we do for your events. So let's say you have $1,000
conference that you're hosting. We take 6% of every
ticket. And 3% of that is actually for payments
processing for like Visa and stuff and the other three is
in order to continue building the site. While recruiting,
and I call that technical recruiting. Actually precision
recruiting. That costs $100 a month for five jobs
posted. 100 bucks a month, five jobs. And anything
more than that, and we kind of go to our internal
database and have our team help you get the right
talent through our internal network.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. For our listeners, I've actually had the
privilege of seeing this in beta when I was in San
Diego, Tristen pulled out his laptop. And I was so
impressed by the speed and just eloquence of
execution. It was just so natural. It was nothing like
what I've seen. Most social networks, they have kind of
like the standard website layout. In the middle you've
got what's been happening, type of homepage and so
on. On the left, you got a bar on the right. This is
completely different. The colors. I don't know if you've
changed it, but the whole black and white was
amazing and apps, really, really impressive.
How swiftly you got it off the ground. You said
development can take that long, just shows how
organized everything is. So very, very excited about
that. And it sounds like, as well, you mentioned
recruiting, events, careers and people getting together
to get a project. It's like win-win for everybody in the
sense that you got the recruiters recruiting data
scientists who want jobs. That's kind of what we're
trying to do at Super Data, bridging that whole data
science gap where recruiters often don't even know the
correct requirements that they have to post. They post
data scientists with eight years of experience when
data science hasn't even been around for that long.
Those types of things. So really, really excited about it.
Tristen Blake: Actually one of the cool things is I've just started
recording the first few episodes of our software
development reality show.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow.
Tristen Blake: And basically, really just think about it as just some
regular guy who is from the finance and has done a lot
of traveling. But just some dude, me, with no scientific
background whatsoever, with no development
background, basically decided that he's going to build
a platform that he sees in his dreams. I see something.
I know it's going to work. And I want to release it to
the world. And I just basically started building it on
WordPress, the initial ML society. A couple of people
came to me and said Tristen, "How many users do you
have?" And I'm like, "800." And they're like, "How did
you do that? Because it's so hard to sign up on your
page, on your WordPress." And I'm like, "Oh yeah,
they're hacking again. Oh yeah, that plugin must have
broken."
I literally had broken plugins that were solving a
problem in another plugin because they would break
the right part. It was really unstable system initially.
And then they said, "Tristen, we should build this
professionally and do it the right way." And I'm like,
"I've been waiting for you for a year and a half now.
Thank you." And that's what we did. We started
building it and actually our team is out of Cuba, which
is really cool. Fascinating. They see it. When you have
a kind of an imagination, you show it to them they get
it and it snaps with them. And that's really hard.
That's the difference between living in that project,
whether your development team actually understands
why you're doing this.
Kirill Eremenko: Very cool. Okay. That's a very interesting and exciting
description of the platform and totally appreciate like
what you don't want to spoil the fun right now. You
want to wait until everything is ready and release then.
I wanted to say to our listeners, very excited Tristen. Is
it right you're joining us for DataScienceGO this year
at-
Tristen Blake: That's correct. Yes. And I'm sharing it with my
community.
Kirill Eremenko: There we go. So if anybody wants to meet Tristen in
person and torture him a bit more about the details of
this, then you can catch up with him at
DataScienceGO. By the way, I'd love for you to share
your thoughts on our events, with the audience.
Because Paulo and I give you quite a lot of details on
this as goes about when we met up in San Diego. What
did you think? What was your first impression? And
you haven't been to the event yet. What are you
expecting?
Tristen Blake: I went to that one event that you guys hosted. And I
really just saw passion in people's eyes. The moment I
walked upstairs I saw people focused and learning and
really paying attention, which means something that
you're doing is working because the room was full. I
think there was like 160 people or something. And
everybody was really intent on learning. So I saw a lot
of familiar faces and a lot of friends were there. I
thought that was done splendidly. I really enjoyed it. I
think you guys had extraordinary poise. And for this
conference I'm really excited because I host
conferences too.
So I kind of like to see my "competition". Let's talk
about competition in a second because I think that's
the relevant point. But when I look at other
conferences, the ones that are not created out of
[inaudible 00:31:39] I always look at how are they
doing it? What culture do they have? Are the people
connecting after the event? Are they actually building
relationships post event or is this just a one time thing
and do they go back home and almost as if it never
happened. I think that's the organizers responsibility,
to be person that connects all the people there and
makes them feel comfortable enough to exchange
information and go to the next day and take that idea
and start transforming it into a reality.
Kirill Eremenko: Awesome.
Tristen Blake: I want to see that. I want to see you guys do that and
I'm happy to help in any way. Because I think in San
Diego, you guys are doing it in the right place.
Everybody here knows my thoughts about that. But
San Diego is the next capital or a science and
technology, almost like a classical Athens in the
making. One of the cool things that we just launched
and you could actually go and register to be a
volunteer or just to learn more about it. And actually,
you've never heard about this. We didn't have it the
ready at that time. So you know how there's the Nobel
prize in Sweden and Norway every year. Right?
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah.
Tristen Blake: I mean, number one, it's been around for 130 plus
years or something. And it also takes place very far
north, in a place where science and technology, it
really isn't the center of discovery or scientific
revelation. But San Diego, Orange County, LA, San
Francisco, Seattle, China, Asia, Japan. All these
places. This almost like a ring of fire or this circle of
the specific nations are creating most of the science
that's coming out right now in almost every field. So I
think what we need is a new award ceremony called
ReCOGNITION. The COGNITION is capitalized. So it's
actually ReCOGNITION or ReCOGNITION.
And it's an awards ceremony that's going to be focused
on awarding not only discoveries of this technology or
branches of science, particularly emerging tech. We're
talking neurotechnology, brain computer interfaces,
new battery systems, new energy paradigm, robotics,
AI, blockchain, cyber security. These are all categories
that we could award in and what we want to give the
prizes every year to not only the discover, but also the
entrepreneur. So in order to get a prize, you must
apply this invention or innovation to something
practical. And that really pushes entrepreneurship as
well as academic creativity.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. I never failed to marvel at so many things that
you are in. From Machine Learning Society to CO
Network to prizes. Very exciting.
Tristen Blake: The CO Network. The people on the CO Network are
going to nominate the winners and vote on it using
their weight. So if you're an expert in let's say
quantum physics, your vote would be much higher
weighted for the quantum physics prize than the
blockchain prize.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. Very, very cool. I wanted to touch on San Diego.
You mentioned, and I totally agree. And actually you
put me onto this kind of mindset of San Diego being ...
What's that?
Tristen Blake: That's my cup. From the things I don't understand
very well, but love still.
Kirill Eremenko: Nice. So San Diego, you mentioned like it's a new tech
hub. It's kind of like the new Silicon Valley. And you
are personally involved in building a smart city in San
Diego with the government of San Diego. Tell us a little
bit about your vision for San Diego. Why is it the next
Silicon Valley?
Tristen Blake: Number one, it's just location. As the center of power,
political, social, economic, artistic I think, as well,
creative. Leads into the West and goes far West. You
always go West in order to discover uncharted
territory. And I think this time we jumped from the
West Coast of the US and go all the way across that
huge Pacific Ocean into Asia. The science from there
will dominate the next 30 to 50 years.
But I think San Diego can be this incredible conduit of
ideas into the North American sphere of influence. And
essentially, if we build a fantastic relationship with the
Asian giants today, we can position ourselves to not
only absorb ideas, but also technology, investment.
And share with them to have an economic partner in
Asia. Potentially one of the biggest empires in the
world. And when I say empires, I don't mean in the
classical sense, I mean in a technology sense.
Somebody that creates a lot of innovation just from the
sheer size of their population. And their focus on
education and mathematics. I think the Chinese are
doing that right and there's lessons to learn for all the
nations of the world.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. I just have some quick stats to support it. Peter
Diamandis from Abunda ... We all know Peter, but
from his Abundance Insider, he sent one recently
which was titled China Spotlight: Next AI Superpower.
And he's actually saying China is, between 2017 and
'19, it's predicted to nearly to account for over 35% of
global economic growth, which is double of what the
US is predicted, at 18%. And also, China, in 2017, so
last year, China accounted for 48% of the world's total
AI startup funding, compared to America's 38%. So
just some of those-
Tristen Blake: Yeah. They're investing.
Kirill Eremenko: ... stats put it into perspective. You're absolutely right.
That is [inaudible 00:38:43]
Tristen Blake: I worked for a Chinese family often. So I was aware of
this phenomena as it was happening. We had 1.5
billion in assets under management and much of it
was for investment into cloud computing technologies
and some distributed computing software that we were
acquiring. I kind of saw that the Chinese were not
afraid of this technology and they were quite
aggressive towards acquiring these companies. Good
for them. I think they're doing a great job and I want to
say that publicly. And I think we should learn from
them in that particular scenario.
One of the other things that ... What makes San Diego
special is number one, it's culture first of all. It has
this fascinating culture where essentially we compete
in order to discover collaboration. So the competition
is who collaborates the most. And that is a reality you
can only find in tech cities. Like New York or San
Francisco, where you compete on a zero sum game
theory because there are limited finances, there are
limited funds, limited resources in general and you
must crush your opponent to get their market share.
Here, if you build a technology or some sort of
scientific process, there's always room to build on top
of that and improve. And every new company can
effectively be two new companies born to satisfy that
scientific demand or that product demand. So I think
science is fundamentally different than finance. And
that will become omnipresent in the coming decade.
And another thing is, right now there's a lot of
intelligence arms race going on. I'd like to talk about
this because the world right now is changing and
people are finding where they belong. And they are
moving to cities for example where the culture is
scientific so they're moving there.
And essentially, if you've already won the intelligence
arms race, you're only going to get more scientists and
technologists and data scientists. And then are going
to start building local companies and your economy
will flourish. The cities that lose the data scientists
that don't appeal to them, they are unfortunately
destined to buy our technology in perpetuity or an
interest, if you want to put it that way. So right now is
a very important time for city administrators and
government people to develop the proper incentives
that attract data scientists particularly, but scientists
in general, to attract them to come. Or else, they won't
be able to keep up in the coming years.
Kirill Eremenko: I hope everybody on the podcast is listening to this.
Data science is our, not just in a business sense, but
in a global economic and government/cities and
regions. And that's very, very exciting to be in.
Tristen Blake: I'm in international relations and diplomacy. I wanted
to be a diplomat for a long time. There is a reason why
I believe being a representative of a data science
industry or sector or set of values is far more powerful
than being any potential president of any government.
I think you wield the power to create anything
imaginable. And that goes far further than money or
military power. Intelligence, ownership of intelligence
and ideas and data is a type of power that has only
recently become available. And it's important to use
this power to create good and to establish fair and
equitable environments that promote not academic
hierarchy.
Universities, I'm looking at you. Just because
somebody is smarter than somebody else doesn't make
them better necessarily. Tenured professors, they're no
more special than non-tenured. They simply have a
designation. What I believe is there is a caught up
point for intelligence or activity. If you're intelligent
enough I only care about what you do, not how much
more intelligent you are than me or you or any other
physicists. I don't care about intelligence. I care about
how you've done. And that's what our social network,
the CO Network, is going to promote. Yeah, that's what
we're focusing on. That's the culture. Culture tech.
Kirill Eremenko: In a way culture of results?
Tristen Blake: Yes. Paradigm shift there.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. And that's, for instance, what we're building
at our own company at Super Data Science. At the end
of the day, results are what matter. Yes, efficiency.
Yes, knowledge. And those are tools in your toolkit.
But at the end of day, results is what you bring to this
world and that's ... Okay. Tell us a bit about, while
we're on the topic of cities. This podcast has been all
over the place. I like how we about machine learning,
networking and events and stuff like that. Well, while
we're on the topic of cities, tell us a bit more about
what is a smart city and if you can disclose anything
about San Diego. Why do you see that is becoming a
smart city and what does that mean?
Tristen Blake: I have this intuition that the future of our economy,
particularly in San Diego, is a city that sells city
services to other cities. So imagine the entire grid
infrastructure, electric or water grid. Imagine an entire
almost ... I call it a synthetic infrastructure that
communicates and an intelligence that lives inside the
wires is able to coordinate civil activity, traffic and
parking, pollution. It's able to manipulate all this in
real time and ingest this data. Emergency services.
Some cities are going to figure out how this works very
well and they're going to start growing quite rapidly.
And then they're going to realize, and this is something
that I've been talking to the San Diego Government
about, is they'll actually be able to sell this service to
other cities. Cities that need a better way to manage
their sewage system or water resources, crop yields.
You can literally give them an entire framework on
which they can build and they could rent that from
you. So the project that I'm involved in is called a
Silicon Road and the Smart Border. And that's a
project that I launched in tandem with a lot of these
other things. It's a long-term project. And the effective
goal of that is to make San Diego the first fully
autonomous city on the planet.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow.
Tristen Blake: Yeah, Now, many of the listeners might be thinking,
"This guy, where is he getting his money or time or is
this even possible?" I would just say the following. This
technology today allows you to leverage at an
unimaginable ways to coordinate literally millions of
people online. You create a viral video, it can touch a
billion people and you could change the world by being
in front of a billion people. So I think that powerful
media is going to be able to make San Diego appreciate
its true economic value as the capital of artificial
intelligence and biotech and some other fields like
robotics, actually, I would say.
And it's already been successful. It's just a matter of
helping San Diego appreciate its incredible scientific
diversity. And once you give the data scientist
competence, I think they start to explore this new
territory and build on top of it and truly start to
appreciate the benefits that come from being a data
scientist in the 21st century.
Kirill Eremenko: Wow. Thank you. Very cool description, and it will be
interesting to see how quickly that takes on form
because I totally agree that it's all possible. It's just a
matter of time how-
Tristen Blake: Kirill, it's inevitable. It's inevitable.
Kirill Eremenko: When do you think it will happen? For instance for
San Diego.
Tristen Blake: It doesn't matter. And that's an important point. When
will this recognition prize happen? As soon as possible.
And that is actually dependent upon how much the
community wants it. So I launch a project and I leave
it to our community to decide whether that is
something that they want to support. We have, I think,
over 250 volunteers that have signed up to support
this vision and to support what we're doing. And it's
only a matter of time before you reach a tipping point.
And as a network's guy, as a person who explores
human, social networks, very kind of different types of
scientific networks, financial networks, I think that
once you align enough people and make them feel like
it's inevitable, it becomes inevitable. It's kind of a law
of the universe. It's something that you learn by
creating smaller things and then you just see how the
bigger things can be done. It's just scaling a very small
project. Launching this podcast is the same thing of
launching that award ceremony. It's just a matter of
scale.
Kirill Eremenko: Okay. I gotcha. But then like, I would like to argue
that what happens to technology? You're in the space
of technology and when you say, "I leave this project
for the community to decide if they want it or not." By
the time they decide, the technology might be
outdated. So inevitably you still have to update it
yourself. Don't you think?
Tristen Blake: I'm more interested in pushing and motivating people
to think bigger, dream bigger, imagine larger. That's
the goal of our software development project, the one
that we're recording right now, is basically to show you
that if you have a dream, you can create it. You need a
little bit of capital, you need to be creative about that,
but otherwise a dream can become a reality through
very specific steps. If you want to achieve a goal,
whether it's lose weight or get a job at Google or build
a global social network, it's important to outline a
vision of what exactly you want, arrange your values.
What is the basis of how this is all going to work when
it's done? And then create a plan. And once you have
that. Again, there's a tipping point towards inevitability
that you reach once you've actually committed yourself
entirely to making this happen, which I personally
have. So it's only a matter of time. Hell or high water.
Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. Okay. Cool. I usually ask this question at the
very end, but I'll ask it now because I have something
else in my mind that I want to ask you. Is there a book
that you can recommend to our listeners? I know you
read a ton of books. And just even right now, you
mentioned two really good ones that you recommended
to me. What's a book that you would want to
recommend to those that are [inaudible 00:51:07]
Tristen Blake: Sure. So a couple of days ago I came up with a list of
books that guide our values at the CO Network. I
actually posted them into our team page on our
website. So Innovation-Labs.co. If you go to the team.
So it's press kit and then team. You'll actually scroll
down. After you read about the team, you'll see all the
books that we put together. I think there's about 40 of
them actually. Each one is linked to our Amazon
account. So if you buy a book, I think we get a dollar
or something. It's just a way for people to support us
and also to find some really cool books and podcasts,
which I'll add yours there, by the way, after this
conversation. They could find really valuable content
all in one place. The book that I want to recommend is
The Square and the Tower by Niall Ferguson.
Kirill Eremenko: That's exactly the one I was thinking about man.
That's why I asked this question because I was like, "I
got to ask him about The Square and the Tower." Tell
us about it. When we were catching up you told me
about Square and Tower. It's about the value of
networks and how they grow. I think it's essential
knowledge because it will give people more like a push
to build their own networks, their own, not social, but
build a network of connections and grow their career
that way. What's a summary of this book? What's the
most valuable stuff that you learned?
Tristen Blake: He starts it off, Niall Ferguson, he's this famous
Harvard Don, this historian. He just has incredible
books. The West and the Rest, The Rise of China. He
has a lot of work on China. I think he wrote a book
about Henry Kissinger, an entire account of his life.
Truly this political historian. A beautiful historian.
One of the people that, when you read the Dan Brown
novels, you're reading about this guy's character. So
the main character. He's like this explorer, a modern
day explorer and he takes you to a journey of how
networks have existed for a millennia and they're the
ones that drive human phenomena.
So for example this is on personal account, but I
would imagine the World War II was not a war between
two people. It was a war between living and dying
network. the Thucydides's Trap, which is a famous
situation in political theory where arising power
threatens a current power. It's a Thucydides's Trap,
that it's inevitable that they war. That's part of this
network analysis, his network theory. And if you really
get into studying this stuff, there's a lot of fabulous
methods. There's mathematics behind it and the
visuals are spectacular and you really get to see how
ideas spread from place to place, how culture
manifests.
It's the study of population-wide behavior that we are
quite literally ... We know about it just as much as we
know about DNA, which is less than a percent, I think.
And in the next coming years, and what he outlines is
that we're going to start seeing the world in a much
more networked fashion. And I totally agree with that
because the moment my community became a social
network I understood its true power and potential. And
by treating it like a network, you give it essentially
these new capabilities. You start to provide it with the
ability to connect to itself. You can architect the nodes
in the communication systems in it. And you could
even layer it over other networks.
I'll tell you this much. He also talks about networks
collaborating with each other and attacking each
other. And I find that today is a great example of in the
morning my network essentially attacked 23 [inaudible
00:55:32] network for turning off their API, for
scientific research. A really, a move that was based on
revenue and not on responsibility. And our network
tonight, it's collaborating and blending together and
creating value for this intersection. So if you look at
the world through networks. you start to see that
they're alive. They're conscious. They exist and they
govern governments, they govern small towns, they
govern corporations. A corporation is almost a living
entity. It's kind of consciousness. It has its own
consciousness behind it. And that's what a network is
to me.
Kirill Eremenko: Fantastic. And even in legal terms, corporation is
mistreated just like as a human.
Tristen Blake: Exactly. Exactly.
Kirill Eremenko: So why is the book called The Square and the Tower?
Tristen Blake: I think he was talking about a particular city in
Florence or Tuscany, where the Square is where
commerce is done, it's where the market takes place.
It's where people come from all over and share and
exchange goods. The wine seller sells to the bread
maker. The bread maker bakes bread, which is used to
do this and then the sword maker sells it to this
person to protect the bread maker. So it's just a
marketplace. The tower is this hierarchical structure.
So that's a network of kind of like interactions that are
almost a marketplace of exchange. Well, hierarchical-
Kirill Eremenko: That's a square?
Tristen Blake: Yeah, that's a square. The tower is a hierarchical
structure. We're talking about the military, the
government, we're talking about universities. We're
talking about systems that have a distinct leadership
infrastructure and cannot bend or breed or create as
fast as networks, but they're safer. And in different
parts of history and it's time, it's better to be a square
than a tower and I think the ... Or a tower than a
square. I think today it's obvious that it's better to
build digital communities or digital networks in the
square. Because the tower is simply, it's unable to
leverage this opportunity, this width, this eight billion
person and soon 10 billion person intellectual
capability that's trapped in there. The tower can't
leverage that. It doesn't have enough hierarchical
layers to layer all of that. While the square can invite
billions digitally or millions.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. Wow, very-
Tristen Blake: It's scalable. The square is scalable.
Kirill Eremenko: Tower, at some point is going to start falling over.
Tristen Blake: That's it. Right. How high can you build a tower? And
there's also a little bit of the tower can see the square
and dominate it. And it was very high up and far away
from the action. The king lives in the tower so he's
unable to speak with the commoners or the people
that are exchanging. He or she doesn't really know
what's going on there and they make decisions based
on a higher view that affect the square. And the square
affects the tower in return. So that's kind of the
fascinating thing. But the reading is absolutely
necessary. I would truly encourage you to pick that up
and explore the hidden world of these invisible
networks. They walk around. They're among us if you
really look.
Kirill Eremenko: I just looked up Metcalfe's law.
Tristen Blake: Metcalfe's law
Kirill Eremenko: ... which is value of a network. And I just had a
thought. Maybe the word square comes from the fact
that the value of a network is proportional to the
square number of the nodes, the number of nodes
square. That's kind of like an interesting, fun word.
Tristen Blake: That's interesting, yeah.
Kirill Eremenko: But basically, I guess, for me and for our listeners the
takeaway is that first of all, great [inaudible 01:00:05].
I looked it up. either. I did get it as an audio book, but
it's huge man. It's like a really big book. It's not one of
those quick reads.
Tristen Blake: Yeah. It talks about illuminati. It talks about secret
societies. It talks about financial networks and modern
social networks. It talks about how to design them and
how to architect them as different types. It's scientific
treaty [inaudible 01:00:33] on this type of new
technology. Networks are technologies by all means.
Kirill Eremenko: Gotcha. So basically the takeaway is, get the book if
you're interested to learn more, but in general,
networks have a lot of power. And if you're not as
passionate as Tristen about building your own social
network, build a network of professionals around you
or scientists, data scientists, who will give you that
power to leverage your career. A good example that
70% of jobs are filled, job places are filled behind the
scenes. They're never advertised. They always happen
through referrals, connections, people who each other,
internal hiring and so on.
Tristen Blake: Personal network.
Kirill Eremenko: The job listings are like 30%. Well Tristen, this has
been an hour. A very, very exciting hour. I know we've
got like a ton of other stuff that we can be talking
about and so many things. I think we should do a
follow-up podcast and maybe a bit after your CO
Network launches. You have some initial user
feedback and some stories, some success stories to
share. Would love to get you onboard. Want to say a
huge thank you for coming today.
Tristen Blake: Thank you.
Kirill Eremenko: What are the best ways for our listeners to get in touch
and follow you or maybe join the CO Network and
other ways that they can get more info about your
project?
Tristen Blake: Sure. So visit our website Innovation-Labs.co. And the
reason we use .co, we want to have a little play on
words and basically communities, they're born out of
conversation and collaboration. While corporations,
they're born out of competition and conquest. These
are two types of co's. We want to hybridize operations
and essentially make them like communities. So
imagine a corporation that lives and breathes off of
collaboration and conversation. And if you want to
support that visit our Kickstarter campaign. It's up for
another 30 days. Support us there. Share it. Send 25
bucks or something. You'll get this T-shirt right over
here with a hoodie.
And also just tell your friends about it. We plan to
release it in about three weeks from now. And it's
going to be fully fledged. I mean, it's going to work in a
way that you're actually going to be able to use it to
search for jobs. And in the next six months or so we
actually plan to add artificial intelligence to do it.
Because we are a data science community. So we're
actually going to host on a hackathon on the user data
that we generate. We're gonna host a hackathon to see
if we can improve compatibility, that's name of our
engine for discovering opportunities between people
and talent and companies. So join us for that
hackathon. I'll be sharing information. Check us out
on that website and follow us and follow our articles.
That will be lovely.
Kirill Eremenko: Perfect. Make sure to follow Tristen on LinkedIn as
well to grow your network through his.
Tristen Blake: Exactly, yes.
Kirill Eremenko: We'll sharing all of links on the show notes. Tristen,
thanks so much, again, for coming on this show.
Really appreciate your time and all the comments and
all the ideas you shared today and I can't wait to meet
you again in person in San Diego in October.
Tristen Blake: Yeah, I look forward to it. I'm going to share an update
on our social about the event. I'm really excited about
what you guys are doing. I saw you have Pablos
Holman coming. I've heard some really great things
about that guy. So congratulations on getting him.
That's actually a pretty interesting talk. I think it's
worth it to go see just him. So look him up. I think
he's like Microsoft's lead ... Public stuff. But there's
private stuff that's really cool, which you can just ask
him.
Kirill Eremenko: Yeah. He's worked with Bill Gates and Microsoft on ...
He's behind like the laser that shoots down
mosquitoes or something.
Tristen Blake: Precisely. Yeah.
Kirill Eremenko: Really cool.
Tristen Blake: Very cool.
Kirill Eremenko: And then he's talking about data science, so it'll be
fun.
Tristen Blake: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much and I
appreciate it. We got to do this more often, man. It's
going to be a lot of fun.
Kirill Eremenko: Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Tristen Blake: All right. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Kirill Eremenko: So there you have it ladies and gentlemen. Hope you
enjoyed this podcast. Once again, it's available on
video so if you listen just the audio version you can
always come and refresh later on and watch the video
at www.SuperDataScience.com/191. I don't know
about you, but personally my favorite part of this
podcast was just the general fearlessness of the way
how Tristen approaches things. Without a background
in machine learning or data science or even
technology, he sees the value in this and he jumps
straight into it. And that is a huge testament that
anybody can do it, with any kind of background of any
kind or whatever you were doing before. If you see the
value in this field you can jump and you can replicate
Tristen's success.
You can create your own meetups. If you have a vision,
you can create really cool things in this space because
you have technology and the data on your side. That
was my favorite part. I'm sure there are lots and lots of
things, lots of valuable things that you got out of this
podcast. As Tristen mentioned, he will be coming to
DataScienceGO 2018, which is in October this year.
It's precisely on 12th, 13th, 14th October. So if you're
coming, you will get to meet him there and network
with him and he's a really cool guys to chat to. When
we met for the first time we met on the Fourth of July
in the US. I really wanted to see the fireworks, but we
got so carried away. We were chatting for four hours
nonstop.
So I am really excited for you if you're coming to,
because you're gonna get to meet him along with lots
of other influencers. We've got 25 talks and that
means over 20 speakers that are coming from all over
the world to DataScienceGO. If you haven't picked up
your ticket yet, this might be one of your last chances
to do so. Head on over to www.DataScienceGO.com.
That's DataScienceGO, all one word, and .com. And
pick up your ticket there today. Secure your
opportunity to network with some of the most forward
thinking, influential data thought leaders in this
space.
And as always, you can get the show notes for this
episode at www.SuperDataScience.com/191. Make
sure to connect with Tristen and check out some of the
exciting projects that he's working on, including the
CO Network. And on that note, thanks so much for
being here today. Can't wait to see you back here next
time. And until then, happy analyzing.
