Episode 13: In Conversation with Jennifer Zhu Scott

[APPLAUSE] I grew up in the late '70s in rural China, during the final years of my country's pursuit of absolute equality at the expense of liberty. At that time, everybody had a job, but everyone was struggling. In the early '80s, my dad was an electrician, and my mom worked two shifts in the local hospital. But still, we did not have enough food, and our living conditions were dismal. We were undoubtedly equal. We were equally poor. The state owned everything. We owned nothing. The story I'm going to share with you is about my struggles of overcoming adversity with my resilience, grit and sheer determination. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not going to do that to you. Instead, I am going to tell you, talk about today is about a new form of collective poverty that many of us don't recognize and urgently need to be understood.

This week, Global Impact headed back to Hong Kong, where we caught up with a friend of mine, Jen Zhu Scott. What you just heard was the opening of her widely acclaimed 2019 TED Talk on why you should get paid for your data. It has generated well over 1.3 million views, and of course, a big reason why is that it's a subject all of us need to be concerned about. So please stick around as I put the question to Jennifer on whether we can start making money from our data Now, recently I told you that with Global Impact, we take a step back and try to look at the world with a wider lens, step back a bit from breaking headlines and numbing statistics and try to make sense of what is going on around us. Well, Jennifer was one of the first people who came to mind, ideally suited for that task. She first appeared on my radar screen at the World Economic Forum 2 years ago, It was there that, well, with her in-depth knowledge of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, she debated on one side of her, a Nobel Prize winner, and on the other, a central bank governor on the topic of crypto assets. In 2018, Forbes named her as one of the world's top 50 women in tech. She's also an advisory council member of Fortune's Most Powerful Women in the World. Jennifer studied applied mathematics at Sichuan University, earned an MBA in finance at Manchester business school. She went to Yale University to complete the Public Policy and Leadership program, and also at Harvard Kennedy School. Now, one of my favorite HBO series, uh, some of you may know, is Silicon Valley, and Jennifer served as a consultant to seasons 5 and 6, and we'll be talking about that as well. Jennifer lives in Hong Kong and is the founding principal of Radiant Partners, a private direct investment firm for family owners focusing on artificial intelligence. Okay, Jennifer, well, welcome to Global Impact. Very, very excited to have you, and thank you for taking time out of your very busy schedule to do this with us.

Thank you, Michael. It's my pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much for having me.

So how are things going for you? We're several weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic and most of us have been in like very intense lockdowns and I know you've had a bit of a different situation in Hong Kong, perhaps not as intense lockdowns, but how has it been for you and how have you been coping?

So in terms of controlling the outbreak, Hong Kong actually has done a great job. As you know, we're a few weeks ahead of the the time curve in terms of where we are. So Hong Kong hasn't had a local case for more than a month, except yesterday there were— the day before yesterday, there were 2 new cases locally. But largely speaking, the local outbreak, community outbreak, has been under control for quite a long time now. So Hong Kong is in process reopening, but everybody's still wearing masks. And every building you go in, you have to have your temperature tested. And everywhere, you know, from shops to on street and taxis, hand sanitizer is available for free. So I think after SARS, similar to South Korea after MERS for South Korea and SARS in Hong Kong, people just have very different level of public awareness what every individual has to do in order to overcome, you know, pandemic or epidemic.

And as someone who embraces technology to the degree you do, it must have been an easy transition working from home and connecting with people virtually?

Yeah, I feel gutturally comfortable in this situation. You know, the reason I say gutturally, I'm very aware there are a lot of people, they cannot bring their work home. They just have to physically be at their workplace, which is, you know, I know it's a privilege for my work. But at the same time, I also think You know, for a lot of large organizations, for years we've been talking about digitalization. COVID-19 really accelerates the full digitalization. I actually personally find working from home quite efficient. You know, to start with, Zoom meeting significantly reduced my small talk when I have to meet people in person. And also, you know, all the commute, etc. So now I'm actually starting to go back to office. But only when I have physical meetings in town or in the office. Otherwise, I actually choose to work from home, spend half of time. So I think this trend is gonna persist after the pandemic. Also, if for any organization, they're spending a large amount of lump sum every month on office rental during COVID if they haven't seen productivity significantly reduced, I think it's a no-brainer for them to start to facilitate this kind of working environment. In fact, I think Twitter, Goldman Sachs, etc., already announced that if you don't want to come to office, you don't ever need to come to office. I think that's kind of healthy.

Yeah, and let's remind people Hong Kong has some of the most expensive real estate in the world too.

Yeah, I think in Hong Kong though, there's none other problem that for a lot of people, their living space is so small, so they don't necessarily have an office per se in, you know, in a home. So I was talking to a quite large property developer in Hong Kong recently, and she was saying, you know, they might have to lose some of the office rental. But when they start to develop residential now, they start to think about, okay, which space we can actually design that as a home office, or if you don't have enough space for home office, what about, you know, in the residential building, you know, should we start to build shared, you know, business office area in the residential area? So it's quite an interesting shift.

Yeah, interesting. Well, I know what you're talking about. When I lived in Hong Kong, I had pretty good remuneration, but The flat I lived in above Happy Valley, I could touch the two walls from my bedside, but the work got done nonetheless. Yeah. Now, I'm going to post a link with this podcast to your amazing TED Talk. I looked it up and it's had more than 1.3 million views, so I think in the TED world you are a rock star. And let's remind people that you spoke about the topic of why you should get paid for your data. So I know a lot of people are interested in this topic who are listening in. Can you talk a little bit about that, is how one might donate or destroy or sell your data? And I'm sure many people are wondering, are there ways we can do that now, or do we have to wait quite some time before we can manage our data in the way you described?

Thank you so much for plugging my TED Talk. My TED Talk has launched. You know, it couldn't be a worse timing when, you know, launched in February where everybody in the world just wants to focused on COVID-19, so I'm very grateful for having 1.3 million viewers by, you know, today. So I think for our generation, including myself, we went into social media without realizing what we were giving away, had no idea, you know, the impact. My first realization was really, you know, when I started to really dislike Facebook content. I feel I couldn't care less about what people have breakfast and also all the vanity posts was really mentally quite unhealthy for especially the youth. But then in 2017, when Cambridge Analytica saga started to expose, and I realized that, hang on a second, not only just this is unhealthy and occupying a lot of our time, but our privacy is being taken away for profit and being used for really dismantling the democracy. So I think, you know, I start to think about, you know, in the digital, if we call this, you know, Google, Facebook, large tech companies, our digital economy 1.0, the data obviously has been tremendously valuable, but the benefit of, you know, data and also the ability to to use data has been extremely concentrated, right? If we look at the global digital advertising market, that's a few hundred billion US dollars size of market, but that basically is shared by 4 or 5 companies in the world. And as individual, if you think about traditionally, in traditional media world where a billboard will get paid, the TV station will get paid, right? If you hosted a radio show, you will get paid for all this advertising. But today, the most valuable billboard is actually your phone. We look at our home screen a few hundred times a day. And it is our network when we share information and pictures within our friends and families. It is our content. It is our attention, and it is our data. And yet, all the economic value starts only going to one direction, right? So this is a— very problematic, you know, not only just because of the economic issue but also because of the potential danger for our society where you have over-concentration of data. And especially when the technology develops in a way based on your personal data, a lot of your behavior, many of the behavior that you yourself are not aware of, a government or, you know, tech company will be able to know and predict I don't think that's a good recipe for a good society going forward for our next generation. And I have two young girls and a couple years ago they started wanting to have a smartphone. So for me to think about, okay, do I be completely draconian and don't give them a smartphone and pretend the digital world doesn't exist, or do I just give them smartphone without helping them to understand how to be smart, responsible digital citizen? So I try to explain to them how the data is used to repurpose, and my kids and most people around me, they don't understand. But when I start to talk about your data actually worth something, there's economic value, and everybody gets that. I hope that to raise the awareness of the economic value of individual data could be a Trojan horse for people to care more about what they share. And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to be ideological. I think one part in my TED Talk, I also try to bring out the nuance because I'm not trying to say a little bit like GDPR posture that Privacy is human rights and everybody should have privacy, but especially, you know, we're going through pandemic. There are tens of millions of people out of the job, and if they can use their data to exchange a few hundred dollars a month income and that can, you know, put food on the table, I don't think anybody should make value judgments in terms of what trade-off they want to make. And everybody has different priorities. And in Europe, people can afford to care about privacy. But in China, there are a lot of SME entrepreneurs or small business owners. They have a hard time to apply $500, $1,000 loans. By using their data, they can exchange that loan very quickly. Then they can prioritize. And so I think by By recognizing that economic value actually gives people this trade-off, and the trade-off is the freedom that we should pursue in the digital future.

So you feel— that's fascinating— you feel we are actually at that point now where people can actually trade their data for money, for monetary exchange.

Yeah, it's already started, right? And I think it's a huge challenge, but I also feel that given Cambridge Analytica, given the complete collapse of public trust, especially especially towards Facebook. I think if we don't try to make some change in terms of this over-concentration of data ownership, we would never be able to, right? So there are individual projects popping out everywhere in the world. After my TED Talk, I probably received a few hundred emails, you know, from everywhere in the world, people talking about what they are trying to do in terms of make some changes in this space. I also mentioned a couple of companies in my TED Talk, how people started to recognize this economic value of individual data. Myself also, I'm building an Android app that will allow people who view and share digital ads will be able to get paid with real money. I think there are a lot of initiatives that start to pop out. If you think about 20 years ago, Google was more or less irrelevant, and now how indispensable it is to everybody's life. I think it would be a little bit defeatist or naive to say that this is the status quo, nobody can change. Somewhere, someone probably creating something that will become the norm in 10, 15, 20 years' time. So I think there's a need for digital economy 2.0 that really cares about people, right? And especially I think post-pandemic AI acceleration, you will become even more real. In the more inclusive AI, AI requires data. In a more inclusive AI, I think to recognize that individual contribution of data is crucial.

Yeah, okay, and you know, I think as you pointed out, I mean, technology in some regards and platforms have got a bad rap up until now. I know that I've been doing a lot of research for my book on smartphone addiction, and I've been studying a lot of apps that are intentionally very, very addictive, especially for children. But do you think the role technology has played during this pandemic is kind of the great connector? I mean, you and I have probably mastered Zoom during the pandemic for the first time, but that it shows people that the positive role technology can play in our lives.

Absolutely. I think, you know, nobody's saying tech is all bad, right? But like all tools, you know, depends on how you use it. You know, it could be positive and it could be negative. The problem with the digital economy 1.0, with the Let's take Facebook as an example, right? I think to me personally, what Google offers at least is quite useful for me, quite valuable for me, right? But for Facebook, it manipulates your vanity, your insecurity, social insecurity, a lot of very unhealthy stuff, and then manipulate our dopamine, right? So I'm a Twitter addict, and Twitter to me is very important because it's my news aggregator. I learn a lot, I follow and access some of the brightest minds. Yeah, with Twitter friends, right? So I think, you know, I can access to some of the brightest minds in the world. That's very, very powerful. But at the same time, I also find This is how our dopamine works, right? You know, once you see there's a notification that gives you a little bit of satisfaction, you just keep wanting for more. So during pandemic, I started to do something, just kind of personal experiment that, you know, dopamine, the fact is long-term but also short-term, right? So usually before I wake up in the morning, I will turn on my phone and straight away look on Twitter what happened in this world, right? And so during the lockdown, I stopped doing that. And every morning I don't even switch on my phone and I just get up and, you know, 5:30, 6 o'clock and read a physical book. And for the rest of the day, I found myself didn't feel as strong need as usual to go on Twitter and to check what happened. And But if I start my day checking Twitter and the rest of the day I keep wanting to go back and see what else happened. And unfortunately, everything— we're biological creatures, right? There is biological roots to this, which is much more powerful than we realize. So I do think that, to your point, that how do we leverage the positive side of technology? In the meantime, also be aware of the potential danger is very important, especially for young kids.

Yeah, you raise a good point. I think it was in my last podcast where I raised the concept of looking at your smartphone or looking at your Twitter feed in the same way we look at taking a calorie hit, that one should practice digital hygiene or news hygiene. So you're right. Don't do it the first thing in the morning. And especially at night, I'm advising people not to go online and, you know, really get that hit from the smartphone that, you know, like eating food, if you eat too many calories, it can be bad for you. So I think the same thing here too.

Yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, right now I'm going through my Twitter detox at the moment. I probably haven't been on Twitter for 10 days, I guess. Wow, impressive. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, like, Right now I can go on Twitter and just listen and watch what everybody has to say without feeling the urge of, "I have to say something as well," right? And I think it's important that you can use the technology and platform to express yourself or to observe or listen and learn, but at the same time you also should train yourself to be able to feel detached from that, right? I'm training myself to be able to kind of feel detached a little bit at the moment. Sometimes it's a struggle, but I think it's important.

Fantastic. And kind of staying on this theme of technology being beneficial for society, AI, which you're an expert in, I'm wondering, because we are in the middle of a pandemic, a global pandemic, do you think we can expect AI to play a bigger role in future pandemics, and I'm thinking vaccine development, contact tracing, even predicting future pandemics, rapid diagnosing. What's your take on that?

Yeah, I definitely think so. I think in terms of the general business, especially from traditional industry, it's very hard to ignore the economic impact after pandemic to every single country in this world. And a lot of traditional industries, after pandemic, when they start to recover, they will have to consider their efficiency, their accuracy, their business model, etc. AI is a very good tool for pretty much all businesses to start to consider and think about how to adapt that in order to make their business more efficient or even come off the new business model. But specifically, I think in health, it is very interesting to watch how China used technology— this including AI, big data, IoT, et cetera— to combat COVID-19. And also, I think post-COVID-19, how this episode will actually accelerate China's digital health transformation. So in China, in terms of in Wuhan, for example, there were a lot of patients. And for patients who already have symptoms or slightly later stage, to be able to identify how their lung infection, the level of lung infection is very crucial. So with CT scan, there are so many, it's impossible for the limited medical staff to manually look through the CT scan. So this is a company called Shukun. Shukun Technologies basically uses a CTA image-based intelligence diagnosis system designed for heart disease, but in COVID-19 also repurposed for diagnosed one lung condition for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. So that was hugely helpful for the medical staff. And also, you know, if you look in China, China is a very big country with, you know, 1.4 billion people that a lot of them don't really have access to, you know, the top hospitals in large cities. So Also during pandemic, the inpatient visits in hospital dropped, because people don't want to go to hospital, you have higher chance. So another company called Dingxiangyuan, so DXY. Dingxiangyuan is basically online consultation, and as the hospital physical visit drop, Dingxiangyuan has, from Chinese New Year onwards, going up in multiple times. And so I think in terms of using AI and using genomics, using IoT and big data, et cetera, those are the technology often they use in conjunction with supporting each other and has really become very crucial part of infrastructure, allow China to come back from COVID very quickly. If you think about— I think China is a good example to think about, because China is kind of extreme in terms of digitalization. If we think about digital health as an infrastructure, in China, there are already 800 million internet users, which is the largest population in the world in terms of access to internet. And on average, Chinese netizens spend 28 hours per week online, and also the online payment system is already there, right? So if you have reimbursement from insurance or from government or for any medical use, the infrastructure is there as well. So given those kind of infrastructure, I think the efficiency achieved using AI, IoT, big data, online payment, etc. During COVID-19 in China, out of necessity, is here to stay and to be accelerated. So I think post-COVID, we probably will see China moving towards this rapid transformation of digital health, a little bit like in 2003 when e-commerce took off, and then, or in 2013, 2014, when online payment take off. And I think digital health is the is the next big transformation in China.

Wow. Well, I know the investor Jim Rogers is a big fan of global impact. He's probably furiously taking notes right now on some of the companies you mentioned.

I know he was on your show, right?

Yes, yes. But yeah, you know what you mentioned about the hospitals in China and the role of AI, I mean, that would really be useful in Russia because there are similar problems. You have mass expanses of land. A lot of hospitals have been closed down. And the actual hospitals have become hotspots for COVID-19. So if people can stay away and be treated or diagnosed remotely, so much the better.

Yeah. And also, another thing to think about, China has a lot of problems in terms of health care, right? Traditionally, health care the investment to healthcare has been disproportionately focused on large hospitals, top hospitals in large cities. And as you know very well, that leaves out probably 90% of population to really directly benefit from that investment. So with the size of population, China does not have enough education institutions to create enough doctors and building up hospitals and clinics to take care of all the potential patients. So there is a real need for China to shorten this value chain and be able to move from the medical service product and consultation sector provider to the patients. Right. So let's say drugs and medical device and medical services, et cetera. Traditionally, it has to go through so many layers of distributors from regional level, Northeast China, West China, South China, to provincial level, to Sichuan, Guangdong, and to city level. And then you have all these different hospitals between public, private, and then different pharmacies. In China, the pharmacies, chains, are about 130,000 pharmacies change, right? So if you think about even the cost add up before reach out to the patients in between, that's already very unsustainable. But if we can use riding on this momentum, really go from directly drugs, medical service, and medical devices can directly go to the patients, and then overlay that with online insurance, online reimbursement, online diagnosing, etc., that's a very powerful transformation and that will benefit the grassroots population. And if you look at all the largest technology companies that come out of being from China in the last 20 years, every single one of them was successful because they empowered the grassroots. So I see this as a huge opportunity coming up in China.

In one of the pieces you sent me, you talked about China's currency, the renminbi, being digitalized. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, because I was fascinated by something you said, is that perhaps it could be used by the central authorities to send money, for example, to their own citizens as a form of poverty alleviation. Perhaps it could be used to send overseas aid to recipients. Maybe even, well, this is my thinking, perhaps it could also help them support their Belt and Road Initiative. But how do you feel about that digitalization of the RMB? Is it going to happen? And how do you see it beneficial?

Yeah, I actually said, I started writing about digital RMB in 2018, probably one of the first ones call it that PBOC will issue digital RMB. I think this is just a matter of time. The reason this is a priority for PBOC, there are two folds of, mainly two folds of reasons. One is domestic, one is international. Domestically, as you mentioned, that China still have 60 million people living under poverty. A lot of them spread in very rural areas in China, in the mountain area, et cetera, it's hard to reach. It's not because the central government doesn't have enough money to send aid, but over the years, if you rely on the local government execution, so a lot of those aids actually is sent by the corrupt local government official. It gets ripped off, yeah. Yeah, so with digital RMB, the central government can basically just give every family a phone and be able to directly send digital RMB to their wallet. And in this way, the government can also monitor in terms of how much is actually used to buy fertilizer or for their agricultural productions and how much they use to buy food and et cetera, be able to analyze what will be the most needed. And so this is a very real need. And President Xi Jinping really takes, you know, completely elimination of poverty in China as a very important part of his legacy. So I think this part, the motivation to achieve this is very real. Then internationally, China has China has been trying for many years to internationalize RMB, but it's very hard to reconcile the competing needs between capital control and internationalize your currency. And China has been trying to convince a lot of developing countries to use RMB as part of their reserve currency. But how could you convince people to use reserve currency if it's not float, right? With digital RMB, essentially it's programmable money and you could program which part of the money that's flowed overseas. And as you mentioned, you could— the government can send aids, replace the current aids and loans to build and grow countries and use digital RMB. And then a lot of infrastructure projects that also happened, contract the Chinese companies to do to build in those countries, so they could use the renminbi to pay. So in this way, I think, in fact, will allow this kind of bilateral trade between China and those countries to remove themselves out of the US dollar zone. Now, I think it's very important to realize that Till today, nobody can really replace US dollar yet. US dollar still is the preferred currency. And in fact, I think there's nobody can really spread US dollar apart from US government themselves. With the various sanctions, if the US government keep weaponizing sanctions, that will start to become a risk that a lot of corporates have to start to consider. And I still don't think there is one single, you know, challengers will be able to completely replace US dollar. But the more the US government weaponizes sanctions, the more international organizations will be motivated to consider alternatives. And I think digital RMB, you know, will become one of the alternatives.

Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, we all, many of us know who follow this, that how much the USD has become a major tool of U.S. foreign policy. And even WHO has, I believe, complained about the difficulty during this pandemic of getting aid, getting PPE and stuff to Iran because of sanctions. So this is something that is going to be of a lot of interest going forward.

I think so. I think, you know, it's a tremendous power. To control basically the global trade artery using your currency, but that tremendous power also comes with tremendous responsibility. Are you using your power fairly? And I think if countries start to, or companies start to feel not necessarily, and/or they feel this is the risk that they don't need to expose to, right? So they will start to think about alternative. I think, you know, Rio Tinto, I might be wrong, I remember it's Rio Tinto issued their bond in RMB, and it's one of the first, you know, foreign organizations, large companies issue bond in RMB. And, you know, we will start to see a similar situation in Europe using euro, etc., right? So I do think this is a I hope the US government will be able to see, you know, it is very big temptation to weaponize sanctions. But at the same time, you know, when you weaponize sanctions, there will be, you know, consequence that other people see these kind of gestures as kind of risk, right? And whenever there's a risk, it's every executive, every board responsibly to mitigate that risk.

Okay. Look, I could probably talk to you for hours, but I'm going to ask you one more kind of technical question, then a couple of fun questions to wrap up, if I can.

Sure.

In your very well-received World Economic Forum appearance, you talked a lot about cryptocurrencies and I believe if my numbers are right, there are about 1,000 different types of so-called crypto assets worth about 400— sorry, $540 billion combined. Bitcoin, of course, is one of the ones most familiar to our listeners, and I've noticed looking at charts that it's rebounded quite a bit in value after going down. Do you think Bitcoin could become a leading currency or asset? Taking into account what you said 2 years ago?

Right. I think it will be hard for Bitcoin alone to become a currency per se, because the scalability is not there. It's too slow. But Bitcoin is already an asset, a digital asset that— I treat Bitcoin as a digital asset in my own portfolio. And I think Bitcoin itself without additional support in terms of scalability, for example, Lightning is a company that's specifically working on scaling, increasing the efficiency and speed of Bitcoin as kind of supplement applications that could help Bitcoin to become currency. But essentially, I think I see Bitcoin as a kind of alternative asset that could take a small percentage of your portfolio because it is quite unique. And I don't really think the rest of the cryptocurrencies necessarily have a very promising future. I think majority of them probably going to die or it's just difficult. And I think also Libra is another good example. I think Libra probably will have a hard time to really launch in any country, any sovereign country with their original design. The way Libra probably will be able to launch is perhaps similar to WeChat Pay, you basically still associate with existing financial infrastructure instead of your own so-called digital currency. I see the most impactful application coming out of this movement is ironically digital RMB, coming from very decentralized ideology actually being adapted by a highly, highly centralized institution.

Okay, fascinating stuff. Jennifer, part of your coolness factor, I think, other than your great TED Talk, is that you got to work as a consultant for one of my favorite HBO series, Silicon Valley. I was going to play a clip Silicon Valley, but it was frankly difficult to find a clip where the F-bomb wasn't used. But anyway, it's a very funny program. If you haven't seen it, anybody, go watch it. But tell us about your role in this series, and do you have any special memories or anecdotes, maybe interacting with the cast?

Oh, I love this gig. You know, it's the most fun, and in many ways is, you know, very challenging as well. It really started with I don't have time to watch TV shows, and my husband told me one day, "You have to watch Silicon Valley." When the first season came out, he said, "This show was basically written for you. You will love the show." And I watched the show, and I felt quite cocky about it because I was like, you know, Hollywood never got technology right. This show is so, you know, completely accurate in terms of the technical part, who's behind this. And I happen to be a friend of the president of Motion Picture Association in Asia at that time. So he knew the producer and introduced me to the producer. So I've been kind of unofficially giving them a lot of feedback and advice and just out of same as you, just love the show. And when in season 5, the show started to discuss Bitcoin and they basically reached out to me and asked me to come aboard officially to help them. And then season 6, of course, it's all about decentralization, data ownership, internet for the people, by the people, of the people. And that's kind of similar to what I was talking about in in the TED Talk as well. The process is really fascinating. The writing team will send me some kind of— not even a plot, basically just questions like, "Okay, with this technology, what would be— what type of applications, and what kind of applications will be most hilarious?" It's one thing that you understand technology and it's Another thing you will think about, okay, it's technologically possible and it also makes sense and it's kind of plausible scenario given the characters, but you have to come up with some kind of funny applications. And then I will send a package back and say, okay, here are some thoughts. And then they will come back and say, okay, what if this character did this? 'What do you think?' And I would sometimes listen back and say, 'No, that doesn't make sense because if Pied Piper is focused on this, then you should do that.' And then I don't hear from them until I see the show. So often I don't even know what's the actual plot. So it's very rewarding when I actually finally watch the show and I would scream, 'Oh, that's from me!' And also it goes to show just how much effort going behind the show. Sometimes I feel like I spend hours to just come up with one scenario and they show up in the show for like 30 seconds, right? So there's a lot of people, they hire a lot of people like me. If you go, if you slow motion, play the credits, the end credits, and you can see the number of consultants like myself that the show hired to just make sure all sorts of aspects of the tech is accurate. It's really a very amazing process. I really miss the show and it's very sad it's finished. But perhaps I think your audience will like this. So every actor in the show, the main actor in the show are all stand-up comedians except Zach Woods who played Jared, you know, kind of Richard's very loyal COO. And so Zach is— Zach improvised, you know, the difference between comedian, stand-up comedian and improviser, stand-up comedians, they write the jokes before before they go on the stage, and then they would basically just deliver what they've already written, right? So for Zach, improvise, just whatever, you know, come to his head. And so sometimes the writers will spend a lot of time and they think they've written something very smart, and then Zach will come to the set and it would just go on 5 paragraphs. That's better than anybody have written. And He's a— the guy's a genius. And somewhere, I hope sometime the producers will release the raw footages of Zach's. That would be amazing. So his method is basically his understanding of Gerald's role is that he thinks Gerald's very maternal to Richard. So whenever he's on the set, Zach would channel how his mother talking to him. And using that kind of tone and voice to talk to Richard. So he works, he works very well.

Yeah, he was a very believable character too.

Yeah.

There was one of my favorite scenes is, actually I think he was born in mainland China. Jin Yang is his character name. Is that name?

Yeah.

When he's interviewed by a Bloomberg anchor and spoke in a not very flattering way about one of his colleagues.

I'm Emily Chang. This is Bloomberg Technology from San Francisco. In a moment, we'll be talking to Techonomy CEO David Kirkpatrick about the social media phenomenon sweeping the vegan meat industry. But first, we have Seafood founder and CEO Jin Yang. Sorry, Mr. Jin? Mr. Yang? It's Mr. Jin Yang.

Okay.

Mr. Jin Yang, you just sold your company company Seafood to Periscope, and we're hearing the deal closed at over $15 million. Can you confirm? I am a very rich. My sources at Periscope tell me the tech is quite impressive, and your app uses the same machine learning to recognize if a food is a hot dog? And a not hot dog. It's very important. It's a hot dog, not hot dog. It's technology. Excited to see when you see it in the App Store? I'm told it's releasing today. For free? Because I'm rich. Speaking of, I understand investor Erlich Bachmann left the company just before the Periscope sale. Care to comment on this? Ah, yes. Eric is a stupid investor. He has no money now. He's poor. Okay, thanks so much for stopping by. Yeah, Eric is a poor, sad man, and he's very fat. You know, Eric— do you speak Mandarin? Idiandian. Idiandian. Eric is a pt. That means a fat ass in Chinese. And he's a liar. He's just a con man, and he lies to everyone. Eric Bachmann is a lying person. We appreciate your candor. Jin Yang, founder of Sifu. Thanks for stopping by. I'm Emily Chang. This is Bloomberg.

So, yeah, there's another story. I will be very quick on this story. But basically, before I joined the show as officially as a consultant, I was complaining to Jonathan Doughtan, who's the tech producer of the show. I say, you know, you have to include China. China is such an important part of the tech story today. And then there came Jing Yang. I'm like, no, that's not what I meant. You have to have China in the story. They're like, this is a comic show. What do you expect? So if you remember, I think from season 3 or season 4, Alibaba appeared in the opening credit as well. So I was actually in Beijing at the MPA event. And so the the tech producer Jonathan Dotan and I were chatting. And my friend who's quite senior in Alibaba also came to the dinner and he walked towards me and said, "Hi, Qian, how's it going?" And then he's American Chinese and of course working for Alibaba, of course he's seen the show. So this was before, this was right after Jing Yan became part of the show. I said, "Hey, what do you think?" 'What do you think of the representation of China's tech industry on the show Silicon Valley?' And my friend just went off like, 'This is not how China tech is.' And after he went off for 10 minutes, I said, 'Brian, please meet the tech producer of Silicon Valley.' So he still hates me today. So that ended up becoming a collaboration between Alibaba and the show. So it was, it's really quite fun. I will forever miss this.

I bet, I bet. Well done, well done.

Thank you.

Jennifer, to kind of end off, I'm wondering if you have a message for women in technology. In other words, for women contemplating going into the tech sector. As you know, they've been historically very underrepresented. Things are improving. I think often they're not encouraged to go into technology, but what would your message be for young women considering a career in technology?

I think this is a great question. Thank you so much for asking. It's a very important question. I think for women and girls, first of all, you know, there's no question about women and girls, can they do STEM, can they do math, can they do technology. This has been proven over and over again. If you read history, we know the very word computer was actually first meaning of computer was basically an occupation often held by women who were good at numbers and calculating train schedules. Even in NASA, most of those mathematicians are women. So there's no question about if women can do STEM or math, etc. That's an That's a myth to say women cannot do this. But I think the most important thing is that for women and girls, everybody in this world needs to use some sort of leverage to get where you are. And if gender is one of the ways to get where you are, use it. But then once you get there, you need to forget about your gender. I think girls and women need to just be really good at what you do, not become, "Oh, she's a really amazing woman in certain area." So when I go to conferences and if they ask me to be on the panel of women in AI, women in blockchain, women in X, I would always ask them, "Do you have a panel for men as well? Do you want to ask a man?" Right, so I think, you know, you need to really just treat yourself as an individual who can do X really well and happen to be a female, right? And instead of, you know, kind of define yourself with your gender because men never need to do that, right? So to get yourself out of that frame, step one is to perhaps forget about your gender first, just focus on your merit.

Yeah, and I know a lot of advice I give out to people, well, not even going into technology, but in any career choices, to build your network and very importantly have good mentors around you as well. Could really—

Yeah, for sure.

Get a lot of roadblocks out of the way.

Yeah, for sure. And often, I hate to say this, but it's true that women are not very kind to each other. I think, you know, one— yeah, totally. And I've experienced that. I have seen that, and it's not pretty. And I think, you know, that perhaps— I don't know exactly why, but that perhaps coming from, you know, before, you know, the possible position for women so scarce, right? So everybody have to kind of compete, you know, for that limited space, but now there are a lot of organizations make deliberate effort to increase the number of female in their board, in their leadership position, in their conferences and speakers, etc. So I think when it's not scarce anymore, I think apart from what I just said in terms of forget about your gender, I think another thing women have to do is to make deliberate effort to support each other and then ask nothing in return, but to ask people who receive your favor to pay that favor forward to women who have talent and integrity. And I think that's, that's collectively, that's the way, you know, women as a group will be able to advance.

Yeah, well, Jennifer, thank you so much for all those positive messages. It was one of the reasons why I was so excited to have you on the program, because I knew you would give a lot of positive messaging to young people, to women, to a lot of people who don't know what to do career-wise right now. So I really, really thank you for your time, and also stay safe and continue what you're doing.

Thank you, Michael, and I want to thank you as well. I think, you know, you're based in Singapore, I mean, Hong Kong, you're Canadian and Chinese, and I think we don't need to describe it. We all know this world is falling apart a little bit, and there are many wars around the world, and get to the point that people, families and friends can't talk to each other, can't disagree with each other thoughtfully. So I want to commend you for your effort to, you know, build bridges with such diverse voices as well. I think it's very important to help and support this kind of very divided society we're all facing right now. So thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for those very kind words. They mean a lot to me. Take care.

Thank you. You too.

Well, our heartfelt thanks to Jennifer for that amazing discussion. On the podcast website, we'll be posting the link to her full TED Talk. Now remember, there are several ways you can support Global Impact, which after all is a listener-supported podcast. You can give it a 5-star rating on Apple or any other quality platform where you receive your podcasts. You can subscribe, and you can help support the program financially by clicking on the Donate tab. We also wanted to thank Squarespace, the website building people, for their indirect support of Global Impact. And to Rosewood Estates Winery in Beamsville, Ontario. Honest wine, Innovative mead, local honey. You can find them at rosewoodwine.com. Now remember, out there, there are a lot of people who are in pain, isolated. There's a lot of grieving going on and loneliness. In the discussion today, we talked a lot about the benefits of technology. Well, Use that device, those platforms in front of you right now, to reach out to someone who may just need to hear a friendly, supportive voice. Remember, you can make their day. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Michael Bossacue. Until we meet again, bye-bye.