Transcript: PropTech: The Data Dilemma

what we have in store for today, you are going to get so much out of it. As someone who's been a fan of tech trends, but also a spirit of collaboration and love for meaningful relationships, you're gonna enjoy this discussion just as much as I am. We will be talking about the data dilemma. We're gonna explore what we need. As far as data today, how the pandemic has kind of changed and shifted our ways of thinking and how we can manage more efficiently, more effectively and securely.

So we have some powerhouse people that's gonna be joining us today. I'm so excited to bring each and every one of them onto the panel today. And we're gonna have Anthony Day join us in a couple minutes. He's not joined with us yet here in the back room, but in about a couple minutes, he'll be joining us here. But he is a partner in IBM's UK and Ireland blockchain team.

He leads blockchain transformations and creation of new business networks for IBM. But he's become a friend across the pond and is really probably drinking a few Guinnesses right now here wrapping up St. Patty's Day week. But I admire his approach to education in the blockchain space over the years. Not only is he a partner at IBM, but he is a podcast host of a podcast called blockchain won't save the world podcast.

So looking forward to having his perspective on new business, the changes that are happening in the blockchain space, but integration with all other technologies. Next up, I wanna share a little bit about Paul Doherty. Oh my goodness, Paul has been such a mentor, such a friend over these past couple of years. We've been running into each other in so many endeavors, blockchain related, AEC built environment related, and most recently working on a smart cities endeavor with Naom. So yeah, Paul is the chairman and CEO of the Digit group seen on Bloomberg TV CNBC as one of America's business titans and reported by Forbes as changing the world and that he's doing.

He is an award winning architect. He is a IFMA fellow and he is always looking for ways to push the limit on how we're using technology and data in the AEC industry. Looking at the little guys and seeing how we can change the world. Last but not least, Lindsey Nguyen, technical program manager at Google, founder and chief executive officer at Empire Equal. And she is spearheading some diversity inclusion work at Hyperledger as well.

There's so much I could talk about from Lindsey's perspective, but she's really pushing the conversation as it relates to women in color and blockchain. She hosts a group, a community that's focused on uplifting diversity in that space. She also comes from a perspective of security in data. And I think she's gonna have a ton to add to this conversation. So last but not least, I'm going to pull up, I'm gonna pull up here, Paul, here to the stage.

I'd like to ask Paul here. Good afternoon, Brittany. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you.

Oh, there you are. What's your biggest focus right now? Okay, so the data dilemma, our biggest problem that we have both internally and as we're communicating to our partners around the world with our large scale urban planning and then implementation of what people are calling smart cities, healthy cities, resilient cities. Is that an issue? So the problem with smart cities, healthy cities, resilient cities is that I think we need to have an intervention with ourselves and between ourselves about the description of data.

Data has been looked upon as part of the plumbing. Part of it can be very sexy on the output, but just the struggles that we're having of nomenclature, of taxonomy, of ontology and how data is now getting to a point where the data lakes becoming an issue. But the actual idea of what do we do when we're metastasizing this data to a point that we almost get overwhelmed by it, which is why I'm saying we almost have to have a different relationship with data. And the way that we're going about it is actually making the analogy that data is now becoming more of an element, especially with the newer tools of how to manage, how to analyze and then what are the outputs of that data such as blockchain, such as the idea of looking at those pattern behaviors and allowing the machines to learn,

which is getting to this idea of artificial intelligence in some way. So by treating or starting to communicate how we can take the data and look at it like water as an element, we now take a different type of perspective or different prism as to what that means for us and our discussions then about the plumbing of how do we categorize, how do we start to control the data or manage it better becomes a little bit more real. And what I mean by that is you have water, water is just an element, but it can be frozen, it can be liquid or it can be steam.

It's still that same piece of data. So as data is going through a life cycle, because when you create the data, that's what we do in the built environment, we create the digital DNA of the built environment. And that's a very noble cause, because in life on the spaceship earth, this whole idea of making sure that the environment that we live in as a human species remains, we're one of only four major things that allow us to survive on this planet. And that is fresh air, fresh water, safe food and shelter.

Shelter is a very noble cause. And if we inside of the built environment can understand that if we're dealing with data as elements, I think we have a higher calling that when we wake up in the morning, that goes from the urban designers right to the local plumbers that we should be waking up every day inspired because we're doing the work of the human race. And I think that's something that COVID is really pointing to us. That's not about going to Home Depot and fixing up your home, that's great.

But it's about taking a reassessment of what's your relationship and what are the trust factors that data can have about knowing that you're coming into the reopening of economies. Am I gonna be able to trust that other person that's standing across from me in the elevator? Is there someone else there that can help me feel safe as I walk into an open office? What happens when I go onto that factory floor? And that's where that relationship now through data starts to make sense.

There was a book by John Sealy Brown. He's the former director of the Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, where many of our tools today, like the mouse and user interface and stuff came from. Steve Jobs actually took a look and went, aha, that could be Lisa. And what John Sealy Brown said, and it was years ago, he wrote a book called The Social Life of Data that inherently data wants to be free. It's its own element.

It's a living, breathing organism. And that when we try and put it into a spreadsheet or a data, it constantly wants to try to get out. It's what cybersecurity is all about today, which is it used to be you get Norton Antivirus and that type of thing, because you don't want bad data to get into your good data. But everything has shifted because data is no longer being attacked from the outside. Sometimes it's let loose from the inside.

Think Snowden, right? So data wants to be free. And we'll always find a way for you. And it's also very social. It likes to look for other data.

And when you start to now have that relationship and that intervention, I think we can have a richer conversation of what data can do for us, what it can do against us and how we can start to manage this process, not as trying to put it into categories because it's gonna break free. It's gonna wanna get out of that PowerPoint. It wants to be in an Excel spreadsheet. And when we start to take a look at it as a living organism, again, those richer conversations can happen where I think we're gonna get to solutions faster and understand that we have to have a respect for the elements.

I love that perspective, especially a practitioner who has kind of gone through the years of working with data from a design perspective. And you had a huge hand in creating Revit and getting us to kind of think about how do you use not only 3D technology, but all the other components of metadata and put that into a whole universe that can be perceived visually. You've worked with software over the years. You understand what it looks like to think through. How do we not only keep the data in order for it to communicate something clearly, but in addition to that, how do we think about that long-term goal about how it can be used in an ideal way and perhaps manipulate it in a way where it can kind of go above and beyond the here and now.

So I love that perspective because to your point, and the story you told about, yeah, data wants to be free. Yeah, I put that here in all the socials because that's such a poignant point. We do have to think about that fluidity and nebulousness here. And I think there's a responsibility factor. Doing save as and getting on with work, whatever your definition of that would be.

We always put productivity as one of those goals when productivity has nothing to do with the quality of the data. It's all about efficiency and effectiveness because I can be very productive doing a captured data and I'm showing a graphic image of how this particular connection with this particular material in a building happens. What happens if I did that wrong? I could be very productive and go save as, save as, save as, and I'm just showing I can be very productive with the wrong information, right?

Which is where this idea of enabling the visual quality to have people either make a better informed decision or just be better informed. Brittany, we've been privileged to surround ourselves with ethics and morals and the idea of tolerance and inclusiveness. And one of the great lines that came out from our friend Montresa and also with Valerie Ross through our process at NEON was this phrase that was not as triggering to the masses such as systemic bias, but how about the word, the phrase inherited conversation. And I think we have the same dilemma with data.

We have our inherited conversations of how we've dealt with it in the past and how it is a double-edged sword. But this is where the trust factor starts to come in, the authentication of that data and being able to have tools and management tools like the child parent way of looking at relationships between data with people, places and things. Which means that when we're designing the built environment now, we do not do it as a standalone machine. That age of building as machine has now closed.

If you're still considering that, I mean, you're not gonna go out of business, but there's a place in the world for the Amish too. We're now at that next level where when you have the data not captured in a abstract and that abstract could be from the perspective of a CAD drawing or a building information model, but you actually take that data and have it flow through the walls, floors and ceilings of every single shelter on earth. You're now providing the actual blood that is now running through a living object.

And the fact that we're putting artificial communication apparatus, things like Siri, things like Alexa into our homes, we're no longer creating homes, we're creating massive echo dots. And we're living in the speaker because now we have a different interface of trusting an AI that's learning your pattern behaviors that over time becomes your genius platform that anticipates your needs. Now things get interesting because as we look at creating the fourth utility in every single building on planet earth, you have mechanical, you have electrical, you have plumbing.

We're now talking IT and we're not talking to structure cabling. We're talking about creating an inanimate object relationship that you trust. One example is that we are involved with the world's tallest building under construction in Jeddah called the Jeddah Economic Tower. It's one kilometer tall. At its top, it sways at a certain velocity upwards of four meters, four meters, right?

I'm gonna wanna trust that on a windy day that I can talk to my building, go, is everything okay? Yes, Paul, this is the way this was designed. Everything's cool. Or if there's a fire or if I get injured, how the hell do I get down from 289 floors in a way that makes it good? Which then comes into this idea of heterarchy of data of the different layers of need, such as, well, I'm a kilometer up in the air and I just fell and broke my ankle.

We have to think about healthcare now in a totally different way. That it's not about bringing the person down to a hospital, but how do we bring the world of medical services to the real hub? The hub is not the general hospital, it's the individual. Now all of a sudden we have a different hierarchy of how we create those ontology tools that allow that data to make a quick decision so it anticipates our needs and it knows that it's there for safety and security. So thanks.

Yeah, you're getting into some good stuff, Paul. And what I don't want to do is not give Anthony an opportunity to hop into the conversation. He may have some perspective on the healthcare conversation that you're generating here simply because of his work with the digital health path. I'm gonna let him come onto the stage. Welcome, Anthony.

Hey, Brittany, how are you doing? Happy Friday. I'm so good. Happy Friday. Just to kind of reset a little bit, I have some excellent participants here today and we're talking the data dilemma.

I have been talking with these individuals over the years and let me tell you, they know their stuff. They understand what it takes to think about data, think about how it might be manipulated for a very specific purpose and make sure that it is gonna be effective and it's gonna be effective long-term. So that being said, Paul said some really interesting stuff about how we need to really be thinking about healthcare and how it might tie to your personal identity. And Anthony, I wanted to just kind of ask you, I did a quick intro for you earlier before you hopped on, but just what are you up to and share a little bit about some of the healthcare work that you've been focused on as much as you can?

Awesome. Thank you so much, Brittany, and thank you for the kind introduction in absentia. My name is Anthony Day. I'm a partner in IBM and I focus on blockchain technology, multi-party systems, business networks, basically solving complex challenges by bringing a number of different companies together, which is, in my view, some of the most fun places to work because you get a really big team, you get lots and lots of creativity, you've got lots and lots of challenge as well. But for the last 12 months, I've been focused, the large majority of my time on a proposition called IBM Digital Health Pass, which to many people at this point should be familiar, the kind of concept of owning and managing your own health credentials relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and being able to verify those credentials in a digital way.

And I think there's an important crossover here with the built environment for sure. We've had a number of different clients worldwide who are building owners, building operators, facilities management organizations who are looking at saying, well, when I get back the one, two, three, 10,000 staff that were gonna be previously in this large city center building, how do we help our clients or our tenants to ensure that there's a low risk environment? Not everybody out there is gonna be vaccinated. Not everybody out there is going to be from this location.

You've got people coming in from abroad. How as facilities management organizations, how as building owners, how as companies, do we need to think about the credentials and the safety of our workforce? And there's an angle of this at a national level. So saying what is the national system solution for issuing you health credentials that are already yours. It's already data that exists about you.

It's already data that you've consented to give to a hospital. But how do we give that data back to you? How do we put that on your phone, in your hand, on the web? For those, we've got to think about accessibility for those who are less digitally capable. But how do we put that credential in your hand such that you can share it with a third party in a privacy preserving way?

Let them validate that you're low risk in whatever that means to them, whether that's you've been vaccinated, whether you've had a test, whether it's any of those things. And not share too much of your private information with that person. When you're going into a building, I don't want somebody to know my date of birth. I don't want somebody to know whether I've been vaccinated potentially, if I choose to. The vaccination is a very sensitive topic for a number of individuals.

How do we preserve the privacy of citizens and employees? How do we provide services to people coming into our offices and places of work? Whether that's proactive testing or rapid testing near to the office or on location or in the car park. There's a number of different configurations for this. But these are things that we need to think about and are going to be challenging to us for probably the next 12 to 24 months.

Hopefully, in the course of time, the requirement for this technology goes away. Hopefully also we can deploy it in as unintrusive a way as possible. So that it's actually very easy to use, or it's as streamlined as a boarding pass or a train ticket for using your access badge to get into the building. But there's not too much challenge or too much difference in that. These are the sorts of things that we're trying to deal with right now.

Yeah, very, very good. Nice kind of continuation of what Paul was talking about. But considering PropTech, right? And the tie to personal identity. One big concern that has come up, and I've actually heard an industry colleague talk about this concern.

If you're pulling in any biometric data about individuals into a facility, there's a security concern. And so I think, you know, having had lots of conversations about blockchain and how secure these opportunities are under blockchain technology, I really think it's something for us to address in this conversation, because I think there's some people who still don't have an understanding about, one, how secure can this personal data be? But in addition to that, how can you kind of manage the release when it's necessary for particular situations in order for it to, in order for us to be effective in communication and transacting whatever information that's necessary.

So I'm gonna pass that to Antony, but I'm also gonna pull Lindsay into the conversation because she has a perspective on security around data like none other. And so I'm gonna pull her up on stage, but Antony, I'll pass it to you. And then Lindsay, if you can quick introduce yourself and give your perspective on that. Thanks, Brittany. And this is a super important question too, is when you're talking about data privacy, and there's another consideration on top of what you said, which is how do we ensure that people are querying information about us without actually capturing or storing that data?

And a number of different methodologies are possible with blockchain where you can query the platform, you can query whether a credential or a piece of information exists without actually surfacing that to the other system on the other side. There are certain domains called zero knowledge proofs. There are other methods you can use without zero knowledge proofs, but ultimately you can query information about an individual without actually passing that information. And that's a really important privacy preserving technology in and amongst some of the other options we have.

Really what we're looking to do is to have data exist at rest where it's appropriately managed, where it has consent to stay. Take the example of health credentials. That data is perfectly okay to sit in a hospital lab system or into a hospital database or CRM system. It shouldn't ever leave there. But what we're looking to do is to create credentials that I can pass to you.

If you wanna scan me, if I wanna come on the show, if we wanna do an interview face to face, you wanna say, look, Anthony, I wanna make sure that you're low risk to me, show me a QR code of your credential. I will have my digital health pass verify app on the other side. I'll scan your phone. I know it's you. I can see it's a picture of you, or I can see the name turn up on the credential.

I already know it's you. And that will return a result of green based on what I asked of you. You're not downloading personally identifiable information to your phone. You're not copying over any person identifiable information onto your server. You're really just querying, yes or no, is this person safe?

And so what blockchain has underneath is it's very good at orchestrating. It's very good at encrypting. It's very good at managing credentials or the concept of assets and the ownership of assets. In this case, it's a token for a health pass that's a second stage vaccine that was conducted in February, 2021. And the ability to query that that exists, that it's accurate, is something that blockchain technology does well.

There are other ways we can do it. There are other ways that you can concoct a similar architecture, but that's one of the encryption, automation, privacy and obfuscation are some of the digital capabilities that we have to do very well. Excellent. Thank you for that response there, Anthony. Lindsay, welcome to the conversation.

We're so excited to have you. Please do a quick intro and share your thoughts. Absolutely. So my name is Lindsay Nguyen. As Brittany said, I am a technical program manager for Google, but I sit in a very unique role within security, privacy, mergers and acquisitions as the lead security person for Waymo.

Our group basically recognizes that each of the investments that Google is lucky enough to partner with come to us with a very different security posture, very, very different and unique set of security goals and risks. And so each of us are embedded to make sure that we bring the security maturity up to appropriate standard without necessarily having to force a one size fits all security bar on all of our investments. Now that's something that I'm sure a lot of individuals definitely can relate to, right? Because what might work for me in my security will not necessarily work for my grandmother or my aunt and their needs as a user.

And before that, I'll just take a step back. I've worked in the government. So with the Federal Bureau of Investigations, with NCIS, so across the Intel and lucky enough to work in HHS as well. So love to talk shot, Tony, when we get off of this in the secretary's operations center. So really looking across my career at very different types of data, very different levels of security where securing that data is concerned and understanding the unique needs that present itself when you're trying to share information to protect a different asset or a different individual when that data and the nature of it is highly sensitive.

I was lucky enough to also be a professional in the industry when the shift from holding everything very, very close to the chest and sort of closed walls in cybersecurity shifted to having more of a collaborative and collective Intel community that allowed different sectors and different organizations and companies to share information with each other to keep their assets secure. But that in of itself is a very unique challenge. Anthony spoke a little bit about it, right? Being able to get more granular in the types of access control that we're able to grant to what entities and at what time, right, just because you're supposed to have this particular record of mine today doesn't mean you can have it into perpetuity, right?

And knowing that the time to live, we can set those things in a manner that is appropriate. We can configure shared trust models in a way that says, okay, if Brittany trusts you, then should I trust you? And being able to now program and automate these things in a way that has never been able to be achieved before. So that's why where I sit in both the blockchain and security worlds and how they start to intersect and play together is a really exciting thing for me.

So excited to join the conversation, very, very excited to share my perspective as well and open to any questions that you have outside of what I did for the Intel community. Thank you. Oh my goodness. Thank you so much, Lindsay. When I started planning this event, I said, all I know is I want these individuals to get on a stage together.

I don't really care what we talk about, but this data dilemma is real today, right? And just to kind of reset the conversation, we heard from Paul Doherty. He is really coming from the AEC, Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Built Environment perspective. He's the chairman CEO of the Digit Group. He's a developer for property, but also has over the years developed software and sold it to many to Autodesk.

And at this point, he understands from a practitioner's perspective, data and what makes it effective and has that long-term view. Antony, you've been helping companies think about strategy on how we should even be thinking about data, right? Just from A to Z and what makes the data a strategy about data successful. And then Lindsay, you have the security perspective like none other. So just to kind of reset the conversation, we've been talking about the shifts simply because we've been thinking about the pandemic.

We've been thinking about how people are really manipulating data a little bit differently because we want to know so much more. We want to analyze so much more. We want to trust that much more. And how do we get from where we are, which is still a very crazy hodgepodge kind of like understanding of, we have data sets in all these kind of disparate locations, but how do we pull it together and have this long-term trajectory of how we might use it and get more out of it?

So, go tossing it out there. I think the fun part of this, Brittany, is also it's not gonna get any simpler, right? It's actually the opportunities with data only getting broader, deeper. And I think that's why it's a very interesting space and time to be working in data. And also shout out to you, I have never felt so under-qualified in my entire life to be on anything.

I'm an absolute awe, not least of which you've been on two of my favorite TV shows in the X-Files and NCIS, but dual joking side, I feel unbelievably overqualified. I don't think anything that I can possibly say about data could be relevant next to anything that you have to contribute to this conversation. But the one observation I will make is I think there's a new or relatively interesting domain in the space of data that's not just about what do you do with it once you get it.

And I think in defense and a number of other sectors, it's been critically important for a long, long time, but it's increasingly interesting in the private sector now as well as the provenance or the authenticity of that data before it then gets recorded and verified. And one of the areas that I'm most passionate to work in is around sustainability. So if you look around carbon specific data, carbon output or carbon capture, and if you look at what's happened over at Volkswagen in terms of their ability to manipulate sensors for diesel emissions, if you look at organizations starting to increasingly look at their net carbon neutral strategies for 2020, 2025, 2030, et cetera, et cetera, the ability for us to verify that certain activities have happened, that certain data relating to their climate performance has been recorded as tamper-proof and has not been manipulated on the way to a regulator

looking at it or a financier assessing their green credentials before issuing green finance, or when we get into the business of carbon capture and trading, right? What activity actually took place? You're starting to get into the space of use of IoT devices, of industrial sensors, of data capture, and making sure that at the exact point it's captured from machinery or from sensors, it hasn't been tampered with, it's trusted that that sensor was calibrated appropriately. That to me is one of the most interesting spaces, not just what do we do with what we have, it's how do we create additional trust in what we need next?

So just building upon that, so I have parallel dilemmas, maybe the experts on this stage, and again, I feel like you, Antoine, I'm just like, what the hell am I doing up here? But at the end of the day, I have two parallel ethical problems that feed off of the authenticity issue of data. And it's actually a moral issue as well, because I'm right now faced with the world's largest project in Saudi Arabia that is dealing specifically with healthcare systems where we're re-imagining everything about it, where hub and spoke is no longer a general hospital with a lot of clinics, it's bounded, which means that we're capturing people's past history, what their perceptions and medicines are now, their wellness through Fitbit capture, what happens when they die?

We're right now looking at the digital twin as not just being this wonderful thing of creating Oasis from Ready Player One, which we are doing, but the moral dilemma is, do we create digital immortality for people or how do we gracefully use that information to help better the human race by giving it to, anonymously, a person's lifestyle with this demographic and how they can be then put into research and real understanding of people's lifestyles about how come they got type two diabetes? Real data, authenticated data that comes from sensors, that comes from their daily lives, and as they pass away, what is their legacy?

Or in the case of what we're doing in China right now, we're working with some pretty amazing folks. My chief software architect is Remy Arnaud, the creator of Keyhole, which you know is Google Earth. Remy was part of that team and he joined us because he was not happy with how, when Keyhole was first acquired, and it's still going this way today, you create imagery of that data, but you have to attach data to the imagery, be it streetscape or anything like that. He wanted to make sure that geometries and visualization were driven by data, rather than saying, here it is, let's attach data.

So it's a different philosophy that way. When we did that, we then created a photorealistic environment that is geospatially perfect because we're the architects. We know exactly where that building is somewhere on planet Earth. Using gaming engines like Unreal with our partnership with Epic Games has been an unreal experience because we're now able to test a lot of these ideas of creating photorealism with our team that just finished up the Avatar movie for James Cameron. That's the level of quality we're getting at.

So we are doing Oasis. We are creating that digital world that people can play games in. They can actually have healthcare educational sessions. They can actually have a real life that what we're learning through Zoom and through Restream and Teams, that the virtualization, I can see you, but I haven't shaken your hand. But with the idea of having this genius platform learn from that, it can enhance this so that we can have the Jedi Council in the next year or two, right?

But here's my dilemma. What do we do ethically with people's data that actually pass away? In China, we're being tasked right now with creating the virtual reality theme park. It's the first of its kind in Qingdao. And how I sold it was that I used VR and data that its main purpose is death.

Because at the end of the day, I can keep my grandma alive in a holographic image, photorealistic to be my council. And the way I sold it actually to the Chinese authorities was that I asked him a very simple question. Wouldn't it be nice to have Chairman Mao as your council through AI in this digital twin and in perpetuity, they become your companion, your conciliary. That's how I sold it. Now I gotta deliver this.

So my dilemma is from a security aspect, from a data acquisition, what is the responsibility? Whose responsibility is it? That there is no real law out there or policy about what happens when you have medical information about an individual. Does it go to Pfizer to the highest bidder with real names so that they can make another billion dollars? Or do we actually turn that around ethically and say, no, this needs to be stripped of the actual person, but keep the actual data so that we can learn from it and better the human race.

So that's my dilemma right now. It's moral, ethical, and they didn't teach me this stuff in school. I wish they would have. And societal. Paul, to build on one of the points that you were saying and just sort of answer your question, even if it's only scratching the surface, is now I am elated that we're starting to think about the ethics of tech and how integrating this technology and this data that is live and constantly morphing into larger data sets and more complex sort of systems is used both during our life and posthumously.

I think that one of the things that you mentioned, what do we do hinges on educating those around us about what our wishes are. In the same way that you would leave a will and your family carries out your last wishes, there are now mechanisms for things as simple as Facebook, to carry out, execute those wishes in the way that you saw fit. Now, maybe my brothers could follow the directions that I laid out. For Facebook and my social media platforms, but could I expect them to do that same thing for my keys for all of my wallets?

Could I expect for them to really know how to gently turn down a lot of the systems that I have in my home, hardware and software, right? Will they even know where to look, right? To track down each of the digital footprints that I've left across the web. And that's a double-sided coin because if they would know how to do it, really depends on their technical acumen, but it also depends on my ability to actually document each of these things. And our data is kept so many places that we don't even know ourselves, right?

So now you're starting to delve into the wonderful world of regulatory advocacy and how we start to educate our congressmen and women on our privacy preserving technology, on things being written into the foundation of how modern technology companies are run so that people are not one, getting taken advantage of, right? On the far end of things, but also can benefit from the data that they leave behind. Because in the same way that you would want to make your sons and daughters the benefactor of a legacy that you leave financially, you also want to make them the benefactor of the value of the data that you've amassed, right?

So there are so many layers to the legacy of your data and what to do both during life and after death, but what you hit on beautifully that excited me, right? I'm not a gamer, but when you started talking about mixed media and gaming and movies, I think that there is such a opportunity that we have at our fingertips to incorporate tools that we never have been able to before to educate people. Because doing PowerPoints and sitting in classrooms is no longer going to be a viable option for helping professionals or individuals keep pace with the unique and complex issues that we're facing as a society.

And how we think about it in the US is gonna be completely different, Paul, than how you think about it in Saudi Arabia or even Asia. And do you have the mind share, the collectives to start to tease out, right? Those ethical issues in a real way, quickly, right? At the speed of technology, we've got to start. Yeah, you have just taken about that.

Yeah, I mean, I have so many triggers. I feel like a hockey goalie without a defense. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, wow. So yeah, the biggest piece of this that I'm struggling with, quite frankly, and it is a data dilemma, is about those responsibility, who are gonna be the custodians?

And an idea just came to me, like there's a multi-billion dollar business just in managing the data after the physical person goes away. That data's still alive, right? And I'm seeing some spooky stuff like myheritage.com, where you can stick photographs of people that have passed away, yet they do the Harry Potter thing, where they become alive. I'm like, whoa, talk about emotional triggers. Amazing technology, but I'm like, oh, that's creepy, right?

But at the same time, it could help people, also with their mental health and their grieving, and how that can be used or not used. But given the options, it hit me that if funeral parlors would like to have a funeral, it's probably bigger than burying people. It would be, what do you do with the digital footprints? And by the way, we have a term, and we use it for our real estate developments, is that with every footstep, there is a cloud print, footprint cloud print, and that type of way of poetically trying to introduce people to a very complex thing that is there to help them become something that becomes a storytelling exercise.

And I think that's something that we've definitely just put that into play, just reminded me of that we still have to communicate such highly complex things in simple ways so that people feel like they're not being talked above their head, but give them enough to go, ah, so that makes sense, and there's a value to that. And that also gets back to this idea of crypto what makes Bitcoin, what makes GameStop a hot stock, all of a sudden, and it's that perception, and it's that need, even with the NFT craziness going on right now, I feel like I'm in the middle of trying to find Tickle Me Elmo before Christmas.

It's like, wow, all this stuff gets emotional, and there's gonna be some things that I think that we are still gonna discover, and I'd love to have this team and others come back periodically just to benchmark how we're wading through the gray waters right now, because, Lindsay, you're raising such pieces that you're right, some things need to be regulated, except that when you can't touch it and feel it, that old adage, if it's not high tech, if it's not high touch, it's not high tech. Still, we're getting used to the idea of a virtual representation of everything, yet the idea of deep fakes now, and the idea that you can fool people, how do you even trust an environment like this?

It's that whole, that New Yorker cartoon when the internet first burst on the scene, I think through like, copy server AOL, and there's this dog at a computer station, and he's on Tinder or something, it's like, there's dogs up online, all these types of things. So yeah, I'm really excited about where the future's going. I just don't have a clear picture today. How do we solve issues of the legacy issue? And one thing that you also raised was the value of that information.

If it is willed, is there a monetary value behind that for research, for medical, for the acumen that you've collected? What is your digital legacy? What's your portfolio at the end of the day? Yeah, Anthony, jump in. Yeah, I think there's a few clear ways to think about this, because ultimately a lot of the problems that we're trying to deal with, whether they be digital or regulatory, have analogies in the real world already.

What you're describing, I think, with data is the digital donor card, right? Any number of us have been carrying around a piece of cardboard in our wallets for years and years and years, saying on the sad and unfortunate event of my death, you may take my organs. What's the digital representation of that, what are the legal or regulatory parameters that need to sit around it? How do we enable Facebook and Google and Twitter and YouTube and all of these other different properties to recognize my digital donor card?

What's required for that consortium to recognize that? What are the access privileges required to prove that somebody can access my data upon my death? Because chances are, it's not in a time capsule ready to go. I will have been outside and I will not have been prepared for this moment in most cases. So how do we allow that donation to happen in a way that's also enabling trust?

I think the other analogy here that's interesting is around intellectual property. If we assume that my data is my IP, how do we protect IP in other modes? How does an artist protect its IP when it comes to licensing and music rights? How does an artist monetize its IP? If we start talking about NFTs and Paul, I've got to dip in about four minutes, but I would love to do the 10 minute version of this on IP and NFTs.

But if we can tokenize or if we can identify a digital replicant and monetize that for a piece of artwork or for a song or whatever it might be, and that can be tradable, are we actually infringing on people's IP right now and getting away with it? And how do we catch up with the organizations who are doing that today when actually there's monetary value in what I already am giving? And then what more could I give with my consent that could be of value? When you start talking about information that comes from your smartwatches or comes from your devices or from your EchoDots or whatever it might be, there's a lot in that.

Not all of that data is useful. Some of it's unstructured, some of it's unuseful, some of it's uninteresting. But on one of my previous podcasts, I talked about data cooperatives. So where data doesn't exist, and the example specifically was around fish stock in the Philippines, they went and created a database of that or they went to crowdsource information that was particularly important. If we're trying to solve medical research or we're trying to look at sustainability, how can we use data cooperatives to create that data and how do we monetize it in a way that represents fairly the IP and values fairly the IP of the Filipino fishermen who are creating that data or whoever it might be?

The nice thing is that none of this is unique. None of these problems are unique or without analogy. It's just breaking them down to their component parts and then building them up with the digital capabilities we might want. That's the fun bit. So one of our partners is a group called Digital Domain out of Hollywood.

And they are responsible for a lot of special effects, but they're also the people that brought Tupac Shakur back to life on stage, right? With his moves, his voice, his representations, his corkiness. I was there. Oh, no kidding. Yeah.

Well, Digital Domain now, we're working with them with WME based upon the intellectual property that is unique to that performer, and their ability to bring back to life be it an actor, actress, musician. And in perpetuity that becomes part of their legacy that they can bring them back to life after they're gone. Like Harry Fisher reprising her role as Princess Leia when she wasn't even there. She was dead, right? So I mean, again, walls and ethics.

Oh my God. Where do we go from here? You mentioned data collectives. A colleague of mine at MIT with was the concept of a data custodian, right? In the same way that you take your money to the bank because you don't have a vault to adequately protect it, right?

You could check your data in with a group of security professionals, right? Who could adequately protect that and be able to communicate your sort of wishes to your family in the event something happened to you. However, it gets us a little bit further away from that ethos of truly decentralized systems, right? Because now you're centralizing things again. So you're back to that philosophical dilemma of what we do then and the tone.

And I always say to this, and I would love to hear both of your perspectives is, there is no one size fits all method here that is appropriate. There will be some systems that are custom, sort of built for being highly decentralized and distributed and that makes sense. And others that for a myriad of reasons need to be more centralized. And we have to make room for both in that. Lindsay, I'm gonna stop you there.

That's gonna be the topic for our next show, hasn't it? Oh, goodness. I mean, you hit it on the head, Antony. First of all, you gotta continue to celebrate your St. Paddy's Day festivities, right?

He's already kicking it off. He's based in Ireland. He has his Guinness going. I mean, Paul, you should be proud. We got, not someone who's Irish, but someone who's celebrating St.

Paddy's. But Paul's Irish, so he's probably gonna get started later this afternoon. We're all Irish for the day. We're all Irish for the day. Jesus, absolutely.

That's what they say, we're all Irish for the day. Exactly, exactly. Exactly, Lindsay. So I'm happy to continue the conversation, but I know Antony has to go. We need to plan a follow-up.

That's what this is sounding like. We have to continue this conversation about the data dilemma and keep finding people who can keep having these conversations about how we might address it and how to get some solutions. There is too much greatness here to stop this now. And Lindsay, I thought that you raised up the level where, and Antony, thank you for not diving into the plumbing because that would be like on a Friday, right? And it is about that inspiring idea.

And Lindsay, I think you hit it right on the head. Talking about the ethics is this next generation. So again, I would love to follow up at the appropriate time. Absolutely. I look forward to talking with you, brainstorming with you, working with you all.

And we can't do it alone, can we? We take the village, man. It certainly does. Yeah. Well, thank you, Brittany, as always.

Yeah, thank you guys so much for joining. Yeah, I appreciate it. I hope you guys enjoyed the show. Hope you guys have really enjoyed the conversation here. We're gonna continue this.

It's fixed. We're gonna do a phase show to continue this collaboration now discussion and really make sure we understand this dilemma and get to the crux of what we need to do in the future. So thank you all again. Type your comments in the chat. If you're on a platform where you can respond and let us know how you enjoy the conversation, we are looking forward to your interests.

Any further queries that you have, we can bring them to the next discussion. So that being said, bye all and enjoy the rest of your Friday.