TLDR;
Join us for Episode 5 as we talk with tech founder and award-winning AI engineer Micah Brown on how Artificial Intelligence actually levels the playing field for aspiring entrepreneurs (if we know how to use it to our advantage).
Micah Brown 00:05
Artificial Intelligence is affecting us financially and emotionally. And those are two very big things.
00:14
Hey guys, welcome back to scaling side hustles.
Valery 00:17
I’m Val min Hill.
Hillary 00:19
And we will eventually be joined by Joshua and a very special guest today, Michael Brown and brown. Like we mentioned last episode, we’re going to be taking breaks here and there to do what we’re calling alt alt episodes, where we have the opportunity to invite on special guests answer your questions. So this time, our first all episode is with a very special guest,
Valery 00:42
Michael Brown, so he’s like a tech guy tech mogul. He’s an investor and an inventor of an awesome product that he’s gonna get into the details of
Hillary 00:50
basically, we’re really interested in talking with him because AI is affecting, it’s affecting everything, the future of work, and he has so many amazing insights. He’s created products that are really revolutionising tech world, AI world. And so so he
Valery 01:03
has a really cool accent.
Hillary 01:06
I love accent. He’s from London, Utah. Makes him sound smarter, instantly, but he is really smart. So
Valery 01:13
give me give me an accent. Nope. So he’s done a really awesome TED Talks and been guests at prestigious universities, which is really exciting. So we really hope you liked this episode. It’s Michael Brown. Enjoy it. Michael Brown here today, which is really fun. A little bit about Mica. Let’s see. So this is we googled.
01:44
Not hard to find, though. No, not at all. But
Valery 01:47
actually, you are all going through it. So I see you’re a neuroscience entrepreneur, investor, founder of a tech startup. Yes. Financial and data engineer.
Hillary 01:57
Yes. No. What are we missing? What are you identify? I
Micah Brown 02:00
don’t put it on their bio was a professional musician who was Grammy nominated once.
Valery 02:06
Writing that explains
Hillary 02:07
things that you’ve created.
Valery 02:11
position. Okay. Very cool. We do have like a question if you want to just drop some questions. Yeah. Because looking you up, you do a lot with AI tech. So how have you seen firsthand how advances in AI tech are changing this job industry?
Micah Brown 02:29
Yeah, I think that I think two things come to mind. I think when we think about chat, everybody’s wanting to buy taxi taxi service. Let’s make it real. Right. We’re all sitting in here. There’s a microphone. There are cameras, right? Imagine if no one had to operate the microphone towers? Right? Well, what, Antonio? That’s a great question.
Hillary 02:49
I, you know, I’m a copywriter, and I’m freaked out by these things
Micah Brown 02:54
that everyone just because people always make a 10,000 foot, right. So I’m gonna get ridiculously granular today. But you always needs to make these changes possible, right? Because we always talk about truckers who was the right restaurant staff, he was about all these industries. Oh, yeah, it’s just gonna go away. No, those are like humans. So I think let’s make it let’s make it finance specific. So if we take equity trading, for instance, you got a back end trade execution officer, you’ve got the handsome trader on the trading floor. And then you’ve got somebody in between who also does order execution, the order execution person and the back end trading execution officer are going to disappear. Right? Why are they gonna go? Because if you think about let’s think oversight, right? So Morgan Stanley has a trade off. And in that trading arm, most of what needs to be done as client communication. If the trades are being executed automatically, at scale, if they’re being annotated, identified, commented on in a regulatory compliant way at scale, but in a way that makes sense for the SEC and the FSA in the UK, then those jobs just disappear. Those are middle class tropes. So what does that mean? What are we I’m going through something
04:01
I’m gonna consistently bring you back down to Orlando. It’s great.
Micah Brown 04:05
That’s great. No, I absolutely. So what does that mean? What does that mean about college? Right? American education, especially higher education is a $2 trillion a year industry? Right? Why are people paying $2 trillion a year because they think they’re gonna make three, they think for generations and generations and generations, if you go to Duke or if you go to UNC. If you go to Cambridge or Oxford, you’re gonna always have a job, no technical operators. A technical operator is someone who specializes in something right. So that might be in the copywriting world, someone who specializes in exact emotional copyright that appeals to a very particular audience which chat TV TV is never going to be able to see this as a human. This is someone who writes for The New York Times to clarify that somebody who writes for The New York Times it’s a very specific job. It’s the creme de la creme of copywriting and journalism because why because you have to evoke emotion.
Valery 05:00
In your articles, and robots can’t do that
Micah Brown 05:03
robots can’t do that. In fact, that’s the holy grail of my fun is called singularity. We’ll see, it’s a play on words, because, hey, we’re heading towards this thing called the singularity. What is the singularity? The Singularity is when you can’t tell the difference between a person and a robot. And the robot is so convincing the human that the human, right, so it’s a combative question. To be changes, right? Artificial Intelligence is affecting us financially and emotionally. And those are two very big things.
Joshua Aguirre 05:36
So one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on this podcast is because within five minutes of speaking to you, I realized that you could shed a lot of insight into the the areas that we’re trying to impact and the people that we’re trying to reach. They don’t have as much knowledge as me, let alone you. So how do we communicate change to them? How do we educate them on the direction they should be taking their small businesses, to not be replaced by new types of machines in the future?
Micah Brown 06:09
Yeah, I think if you’re gonna get hyper practical, right, you’re talking about the shopfront owner in Hudson Valley or in Charlestown, or in Matthews, right. You have to be able people with us with digital signage, okay, digital signage and digital services. What does that really mean? What does that really mean? If you’re gonna go and learn how to use Facebook and great groups? And how to get on Shopify? That’s great. But that’s kind of useless to be honest with you. Frankly,
06:38
what was it at one point relevant now it’s useless, you got
Micah Brown 06:40
to remember what’s happened to those things. Alright. So there’s a company called clear coat. There’s also a company called pipe, let these companies operate. What these companies do is they finance over the top of actual real business activities, right. So for a Shopify storefront owner, that Shopify storefront owner is making $50,000 a year, right. And it’s great. Now they can make 16. And they can make 100. The only issue is they’ve got to edge someone else out, to be able to make that growth, right. So what that essentially means for every storefront owner is there’s much more increased competition. So every storefront owner needs to learn to grow. That’s really what it comes down to, I need to learn they need to go, it kind of doesn’t matter what language ideally PyCon. Everyone should learn Python, right? Because once a storefront owner learns the code, there are definitely irreplaceable community staple level things that every storefront owner does. Which in the 60s, in the 50s, that’s what made the economic boom, that happened back in the 80s. It kind of collapsed a little bit in 2000 collapse a little bit because there was so much economic activity, right. But every storefront especially let’s take a meat market. Right? The meat market, Elena knows, you know, what families need, what meat what times of the year, they need that meat, they proactively buy for that mean, they know that maybe there’s some misbehaved kids that come into the shop that needs to be able to sit down and draw for an hour, right? Like these are like community based items that make people special. Now the issue is what’s happened is there’s been so much money going around in the startup ecosystem for so many years, that competition became business, which you know, business, right. But competition isn’t the case for every single business, hyper competitiveness is not for the meat stuff. Right. But these big financing companies and the banks behind them, but I kept wanting more and more and more and more and more of the pie. They have made it that way. Which is why every storefront
Hillary 08:41
now when you say again, here we go bringing bringing it low. And what do you say storefront owner? Yeah. All right. Is that just a term? Does that mean every entrepreneur, every small business owner, or just brick and mortar or just brick and violence? Specifically about brick and mortar? Yeah, needs to learn to code?
Micah Brown 09:01
Yeah, well, that’s, that’s, that’s a 60 year old grandma, who’s had that nice go in her family for 150 years. And she has the lungs coat. And that gap is really clear. Right? Yeah. But that is what is going to allow people to participate in the digital.
Hillary 09:19
So if they don’t, they’re just gonna die.
Micah Brown 09:24
I mean, I’m exaggerating. But I’m just actually I’m kind of exaggerating. Yeah, if we look at the pandemic, what happened?
09:34
It accelerated accelerated all
Micah Brown 09:37
of that. Yeah, literally. I can’t remember what the exact percentages us why the UK why I think it was like 10% of brick and mortar retail shops that were doing below like a million dollars a year cuts. Yeah, they just didn’t fit.
Hillary 09:50
Right. So okay, so the solution is if people want to keep up this little term, learn to code. How can someone how can we People who are not immersed in the tech world AI world like you are, and has to focus on their business, how can they balance the two? Like, how do you keep up with AI thing on and like integrate it into your Sony
Micah Brown 10:13
free resources? It’s called Sierra, there is general assembly, there are these resources. But beyond that, right, I think that when I think about like the New Deal, for instance, right, when you say that we’re the New Deal, it connotates evokes a very specific emotion in America, a very specific time, a very specific way that society itself, which is everybody got something and they had jobs, right. Well, the GI Bill, which is linked to houses, right, I think that there hasn’t been a thing that everybody can hold on to, because the resources are out there. They’re already on its general assembly, this all these different things. I’ve talked about this grants as community grants, as community funds, this government initiatives, right, there was literally COVID loans that were being handed like 100,000, each to people. But I think what America really means is someone’s like, sit there and say, Hey, this is the new New Deal. This is the new gold rush. This is the new exodus of opportunity, right? Because the opportunity is already there. But the gulf between what people desire to be seen as and what needs to happen in the economy for it to advance. It’s huge. Yeah. So you know, just to reel off a few resources, there are sorry, there’s there’s era there’s TechStars, if you’ve got a high tech business, there is a comment with the name of the program that President Biden just signed a current inflation reduction, the IRA put together community centers for coding and engineering, I think like a billion dollars of that was just dedicated to that. Right? It’s things like Coursera, there’s general assembly, there’s all these things, you know, they’re very good, billable, but I think it’s more about seeing asked yourself what you want to do? Do you want to participate in the modern economy or not? And if not, that’s okay. Because you remember, these are people who’ve seen the Great Depression come and go. There are there are 50 year old six year old individuals that kind of don’t want to participate in the economy. So it’s really a matter of decision.
Hillary 12:09
If I’m a copywriter or CNN, those are selfish, too, because I’m like asking for advice. Someone else out there? Like how do I? How do I use those tools? To my advantage? Like what how would How is especially
Micah Brown 12:23
the gold rush right now for copywriters? Look, if you had five clients, right, you had magazine, law magazine, see magazine three, and like publishing house wine and publishing house, too, right? You had to spend 10 hours in the day, thinking about what the branding alignment was, you’re going about who your internal client is the person who hired you at one of those companies, thinking about what they want, think about what their bosses want, sit down, write all of that down, translate that to stage one of the coffee, you’re probably perfectionist. So he does 15 different versions of the right. And he did 50 Different versions for all five of these people like Sydney, two different versions of the copy, and then he delivered one each. The entire process is Oh, man.
Hillary 13:04
The losing my creative, like the human
Micah Brown 13:07
is the most important thing. You just need to learn how to interact with the tools. And now it’s so easy to chat GPG three that you say hey, CNN, an office bizarre and like barrels, right? What do they want? Chevy T GPT? Three that get back the copy? No, that’s not right. No, that’s not right. No, that’s not right. No, that’s perfect. I’m looking for myself, I’m gonna give the context I’m gonna give him a Y. I’m gonna give the how I’m gonna get the meaning. And that takes me 10 minutes. So now I’ve done five days of work in 10 minutes. But people just don’t think about it that way. It’s not.
Hillary 13:37
It’s threatening. Yeah, if you don’t understand.
Daryle Serrant 13:41
I got a question. I was gonna type it in. But I thought I’d Yeah. So I’m, I’m a I’m a consultant. I work with several startups in the Bay Area.
Joshua Aguirre 13:49
That’s Darryl, surround one of our team members. He’s a former Tesla employee and freelance data scientist.
Daryle Serrant 13:56
I remember not too long ago, I was involved in a project where I was developing a website and we were using a lot of no code, no code tools. And we turned out the and this was before I actually, I jumped in on the project that point where they already
Micah Brown 14:13
found out Squarespace like prototyping that kind of
Daryle Serrant 14:16
Yeah, and we were found out that the tool that the project that they were working on wasn’t really wasn’t a fit for no call tutor or using and just kind of going on to the point where you talked about with everybody has to learn how to code I was just curious. From your your standpoint, what role do you think no code tools would play in? Kind of like or any any storefronts are looking to really tap into the digital economy? And do you think it would be enough for because I know from my experience, I know no code tools would be good for certain applications. But for others, you’re you you need more of a custom development, and I was kind of, I was kind of curious what you What’s your take on? It was?
Micah Brown 15:02
Yeah, I think it goes back to kind of what you were talking about, right? When you think about the people in the economy, who currently do what they do, so let’s get like hyper realistic, let’s say a cop into, let’s say, a meat store owner, let’s say a farmer, a bean farm, right? If you ask the bean farmer, what time of the year to go and collect his beans from his farm? And what kind of tractor to use you were looking like, you’re absolutely crazy. Because he knows exactly what time of the year to grow. And it’s been attracted to us, right? I think, from from the perspective of whether no code tools are indispensable for real world businesses. Yes and no, right. It’s more about the business. Yeah. I think we really need to change our perspectives. as technologists change our perspective. Sometimes it’s journalists change our perspective. Sometimes it’s storytellers, and go from what can people do for the technology? What can like every storefront owner, every farmer, every meat processor in the meatpacking district in New York, DuPont, local tools like figma, right? Versus, as these technologists as these influences? How do we go to figma? And say, Hey, can we have a farmer’s group. And in that farmers group, we have one dedicated CSR customer service representative, who they noticed the business model the farms, and by the time, you know, they have gone through 10 Different farming companies and the farmers that are attached to them. There’s a figma specific application for bugs, which is a real thing that a lot of farmers are very high skilled individuals in terms of what they do, but they’re not describing that to the world. So it’s less, it’s less like, How can everyone else work with no code tools? Right, which is kind of a question. How can everyone else work with SQL Server? Can everyone else work?
Daryle Serrant 16:45
Yeah, yeah.
Micah Brown 16:46
Natalie, right. It’s like, it’s a very obscure square peg, round hole thing we’ve always, we’ve always got a reverse our thinking about technology is how do especially as people have some remote understanding of the tools and know of their existence. Because you know, there’s 300 people, million people in America, and at least half of them literally don’t understand where technology is today. And the tools and the fact that they even exist, like charging people to be on local tools like figma. Right? How do as individual technologists, journalist professionals, how do we empower every single person we talked to who doesn’t have the expertise with understanding those things and flexing them?
Daryle Serrant 17:26
Yeah, that’s a really good point. Yeah. Cuz it’s, I think the common, especially for people in the startup, you know, Silicon Valley worlds, they tend to build we build technology to solve kind of people’s problems. And that’s what we do. But we don’t think about the other way. Well, how can we empower people to actually use these tools that are already out there?
Micah Brown 17:44
Yes. Yeah. Oh, Lizabeth. What’s the name is company? Yeah. Right. That’s right.
Daryle Serrant 17:50
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
Joshua Aguirre 17:52
So part of like, our objective, our mission at our company is to empower marginalized communities, through education through giving them like ambition to start their own companies trying to unlock that in them, giving them the confidence to say, this is how you do it, and you’re capable of doing it, you don’t need to go get a degree to start, you can you can do them simultaneously. And so I think, like, you know, helping us to better educate them in the direction that they should go, would be really beneficial. So like, if you were talking to those marginalized communities, and you said, Okay, this is square one, what is square one for people that are just getting started?
Micah Brown 18:37
I think for anybody who’s getting started with technology, but especially marginalized communities is an awareness of what you’re trying to do. Right? Because I think if you think about a college like CCNY, or Howard, or even a lot of HBCUs, there are a lot of high school people in those colleges, but then they go into convention environments, right? Like I see a lot of HBCU individuals go work at like conventional finance companies that are not their community focused, right. It’s all about what you’re trying to do. You can literally have someone who’s like, not about high school education, who isn’t trying to get high school education was trying to go to college and trying to do those things. But they might be someone in their community has a very specific understanding of one specific issue. And maybe the case isn’t that they need to go and do 150, you know, coding courses, maybe they need to understand policy, and how to do grant writing, and how to actually get grants and having a bank account where to put them. Or if they don’t have the bank account, have someone in the community he does have my first company, it’s good film for them. Right. So this was when the Oscars or y thing was happening. And I remember coming straight out of NBC, and like 10 years with corporate Korea, right, the first thing I’m gonna do is like, make everybody do with your money for that $100 million dollar budget films, which is like a very small minority of people. They even have a script or the education or the access to be creating $100 million budget film. So then I expanded it to independent filmmakers. And when I expanded it to independent filmmakers, what I found is, although there’s a lot of people at NYU, at all of these different schools, these film schools across the country that have the skills, that’s not usually what their problem is, their problem isn’t the skills that they’re learning. Their problem is the rest of the ecosystem. So I ended up selling that company to a film production company. And now it’s being rebuilt again by the company that bought since we capital. But my next thing was okay, it’s really the advertising world, right? Because you can raise $100 billion for the film, you can raise 500k. For the film, you can do a GoFundMe or Indiegogo for 1000 bucks, right? But now how do you get that message out. And now you’re dealing with Facebook ads, and how to customize them and how much that costs, or you’re dealing with put a banner up or, at the time, this is even 10 years ago, a paper ad like, oh, that’s the next problem I’m gonna solve. So I started tangling with the advertising world, which was like a very tiny drop in a massive, massive, massive Bucky, right, we did have some success, we had a really big advertising company by the company, we helped like, you know, 15 20,000 individuals of color and different types of minorities in the advertising business, but it was like a very small drop. So that’s why I’ve kind of gone to the venture capital world. So with the selling of sentiment, capital and raising of singularity, now I’m getting to broaden my kind of throughput, if you will. But that’s, again, after a lot of kind of mission orientated decisions. And going, I’m trying to solve this specific problem, which is mostly about media and representation in the media and the money that comes from that. And that helps you get there. I think I’ve definitely seen other founders like me who didn’t have that direction. And then they they got tons of skills, some of them reads a lot of money. You know, I think, obviously, SBF was, well, he’s actually technically something. Somebody who’s the CEO of FTX. And obviously, there’s, you know, some fraud there and whatever. But I think he’s your classic example of he didn’t really decide on what he was doing. But he was able to tell a very good public story.
Hillary 22:01
So you’re saying your focus started out very broad, and you were able to, you’ve been able to, like narrow it, like you’ve kind of known your purpose and what you want to do, but the way you’re doing that has shifted over the years. Wow. So what are some of the direction? Yeah, so you’re saying people that are maybe struggling? To find that ambition and confidence to get started is to find a clear direction
Micah Brown 22:26
and find a clear direction? And have it be your direction? That is so so so so so, so, so, so important? It’s really not 1986? It’s not 2008? It’s not 2009? Like, especially in America, although there is definitely poverty, although there’s definitely abuse of minorities, financially with ecosystem with the economy. Well, that Israel, right. But at the same time, you know, you can be in New York State with like state sponsored health care, and a bunch of resources. And if you just get access to a computer for an hour, and you decide what you’re doing, right, there’s a bunch of grant programs there are, you know, it’s one of the only states with you either way is right, where you can just claim unemployment insurance, right? Like, I know, North Carolina’s a lot. So that is the age we’re living in. And I think what’s really sad is like, there’s so much noise that comes from the political world that comes from the news. It distracts people so much from all the resources that exist in the 21st century, right.
Hillary 23:32
So actually, kind of technology is kind of leveling the playing field. So we’re just you just need to let people know, don’t feel intimidated by that you have a role here. And you can. Yeah, that’s, that’s encouraging.
Joshua Aguirre 23:43
So how did you learn about all of the programs that are available in the United States being that you grew up in London?
Micah Brown 23:51
That’s a great question. That’s a very good question. Well, you know, I’m thinking it’s really funny. I actually watched Chinese documentary The other day, I was completely bringing in lots of wine. And I’m not comparing myself to Kanye don’t make that comparison. Like, his story that This is footage that wasn’t released. And it fills in a lot of the gaps in this story, right. I remember hearing late registration in the UK. And it was like such a first down and even the issues he was talking about, even though they were mostly American, they affected us right. As I start to think about my story, that I do have a lack of running set of footage. That is a very exciting story, right? So to come back to the story. And this ambition, people talk about this word, right? Ambition, ambition. Ambition requires you to say that you’re going to do something and define that you’re going to do it and almost kind of not ignore but like, resist every force that says the universe. And it rolls off the tongue very easily, but like, especially in minority communities, ambition is a very hard thing to have Because you gotta remember why. If you already have ambition as a child, and then you’re going into the school ecosystem, which is why a lot of kids drop out of the school ecosystem, who are minorities, right? You’re in the school ecosystem, you have this ambition, and every kind of force that’s communicating with you is telling you not to have it, right, which is kind of what happened to me. I was, you know, I was in school. Fortunately, I’m intelligent enough to have kept my grades up, right. But my thing at the time was, I went when I was very young, it’s I wanted to be a pilot, right? And class in the UK is like a whole different set of stuff than it is in America. Like, the cool thing about the US is, you get kind of like some very surface level encouragement, you don’t get any food, or you don’t get any real assistance for like, at least people tell you, that’s a dream. That’s great. That’s the American dream, right? England is not like that. It’s like, don’t dream about anything. But I continue to dream. And as I went through my life, I continue to have ambition. But I channeled into the corporate world, where I became a credit risk analyst at 17, Barclays commercial, I was dead during the recession, I ended up being one of the few people left on my team, and everyone else got fired. And I saw the recession from a frontline seat. And I also saw that, like, especially in the case of Lehman Brothers, there was this world where you could get 800 times 900 times leverage on what you were making on EBIT, da. And that was really big for me. You know, a lot of people don’t get that experience that 17, especially minorities, but what that showed me I was like, there’s a whole world out there where if I want to do something, there are people that will give me a lot of money to do it. Sure. And I have seen this for a fact, because I’m looking through the mortgage statements for Lehman Brothers that just collapsed. And these guys had 5060 or 100 200% leverage, right. And so that was really interesting, because that happened about a year before my parents came to me one day, and they were like, Hey, we applied for green cards 10 years ago, and here they are. And so you can understand, like, that’s in anybody’s story. That’s very rare, but it’s like, in my story, where I’ve kind of gotten into English consciousness. Yeah, so I haven’t even I’m always gonna live there. It’s kind of fucking depressing. It was depressing a little bit. English culture is to be quiet, and naturally loud and boisterous person. I’m starting to accept that. And then it’s like, Hey, here’s a chance to I’d be a completely different person. And I just came to the US. And I just hit the ground, literally, running at Usain Bolt speeds, nowhere. I was I was 1818. Yeah. And I remember coming to my family, we literally, our property was being repossessed at the time. And we all go on the plane. And my dad spent the last of his retirement money to get these plane tickets to Florida. And we all went to Florida. And I remember just feeling like the Florida sun hit me like, wherever I need to do to stay. I’m gonna friggin do it. And I remember I must have done about 15 different interviews in Florida without a car. So I walked in most of the interviews. And which is pretty crazy. Because we lived we lived in Westwood and my uncle lived in West Palm Beach. And somebody that he was like, I didn’t just walk to Florida, I took the train and I bought from the train station to Florida, Dale,
Hillary 28:19
stamp stomping ground there. You got to Floridians hear
Valery 28:24
about him that he I can imagine walking like you don’t see anyone on the street to see anyone
Micah Brown 28:27
walking. Yeah, gosh, but you gotta understand grown up. All I did is walk in the UK. So I’m just gonna walk. To cut a long story short, you know, we ended up bouncing back between the UK and the US. I ended up getting a job alien. But to go back to your original question, right, culturally, how did I find out this information? A lot of it came from the fact that I didn’t have a choice. A lot of you know, I also kind of became financially independent, a very young age. Well, when I came here, which was he and my family, they didn’t have a lot. They live in Long Island. So I ended up taking care of them. But it was like, looking at my situation, which was good. I had a job, you don’t have a place to live. I was in New York, I was like, I need to find things that are gonna allow me to advance Yeah. But I still had my ambition. And even though it had been chalked up a little bit and moved around, it was still there. And why I’m telling you that is like, that is really the key to all of these questions. That’s the key to a lot of big political questions that we have. You know, that’s the key to a lot of employment questions that we have. That’s the key to a lot of societal questions that we have. There’s a lot of big things happening on the Supreme Court right now. Right? And people are upset about them and whatever, right. But a big thing is there’s no enough representation to really fix them. But at the same time, we have this amazing opportunity technology wise, right now from a voting perspective, from an economic perspective, right? So it’s really about nurturing people’s ambition.
29:51
That’s the key. That’s the key, nurturing people’s emphasis.
Joshua Aguirre 29:55
I like that look. So without disrespecting your your beautiful testimony for me. I see I see like, initially you you saw opportunity for this job at Lehman’s. Yes, you are able to see through the numbers, see. Okay, yes. So you were able to see potential there see opportunity there. And then planning and chance, led you guys to get the green card, right? Yeah. And then you saw your parents take risks like huge, like, I think that’s huge for me, because I saw my dad come here as an immigrant from Argentina. And he took huge risks in that. And I saw the dichotomy between my mom’s way of living as an American born American, and my dad is an Argentinian American, I came here and spent 20 years trying to get citizenship. And like the just the two different frames of like, I have white privilege. But like, I also can understand the perspective of the Latino immigrants. And then I see like that risk led you into persistence of like walking to and from and like, making sure that no matter what you’re going to take the opportunity that you saw originally, yes. How do we nurture people’s ambition without them seeing that opportunity?
Micah Brown 31:16
I’m really into policy. I’m also really into practicality. Right? So I want to answer your question practically. So there’s about 30 million people in the US between the ages of about 15 to 25. Right? About half of them are in poverty in some shape or form. By that I mean, the the New York median poverty index income is around $5,000 per family of four. Now, why adds up to a family of four is what happens frequently in the US, especially immigrant families is everybody pulls into one household. Right? So what sometimes you might see an immigrant family with a house. But there’s 20 or 30 people rotating through that place. Right? So that’s dimension one, to your question, how do we get people to reach for these opportunities when they might not have knowledge, there might not be people around them that have the knowledge and they’ve never seen done as damaged one, it isn’t just that they’ve never seen it done. And they don’t have knowledge. There’s an architecture of people who’ve never seen it done. I think that from a policy perspective, we look at programs like, you know, the SNAP program, and the school assistance program in New York, North Carolina has one as well, this is where the state pays for people to have childcare. And I think, I think that they’re framed almost as burdened. Politically, I won’t go into the reasons. It’s a very big long Overton Window yet I get it, but they’re framed as buttons. And I think that framing programs, which are a very small percentage of state budgets, that help people who contribute to the economy disproportionately, which are the people in these households, because their economic mobility is 80%, more than the millionaires and billionaires of our society. What I mean by that is, if you look at the Vanderbilts, you know, their wealth has massively decreased over time. What that means is, there’s 100 200 people in the family, and they’re running private equity firms, and then doing whatever, but they’re not really creating true economic opportunity, mobility. I want to say anything useful because people do things, but like, they’re not doing as much. So I’m breaking all this down for a reason, right? So. So if we’re saying that we’re framing that 80% of people in the economy, and it’s 80%, which is why you have this top 1% dichotomy. That’s literally what America is, right? Sometimes they get it wrong, because the top 1% are actually a distortion, it’s actually more than the top point 5% Because 2.5% of people in the US make $100,000 or more, which is like most of the people in big rich metropolitan areas were told anyway, the reason I’m saying this, right, is we need to change that narrative. And those three statistics are way, right? If all of these people create all of this economic opportunity, which doesn’t just apply to metro areas, it also applies to farmland to the North Dakota as the South because to the Iowa’s right, where that same stigma, makes people who have farmland, and are theoretically more wealthy, not want to reach out to try and get help for them that needs to stop. And that’s how, number one, we solve that problem. Number two is I think that I think that more attention, more opportunity, more promise needs to be given to generational breakers. What do I mean by that? I mean, the Argentinian immigrant at Harvard, or the Latino immigrant at Cambridge or whatever, right? They need to be supported more, because that one person in that person index of that family who’ve never seen it done Is that person is that impactful? And what I kind of what I think is strange is like, when you think about media representation, that story is always that person gets mobile, and then it gets out. Yeah, that’s literally in Hollywood stories. That’s in popularized stories, that’s in news stories. Why isn’t it that person gets a bunch of support, and then they can help their community? Right? Those are literally just two real data points, right. One is a policy point, there should literally be something passed state level, that one increases the budgets and things like snap, right, and the child Assistance Program. And number two, there needs to be something particularly in web require and say Democratic or Republican, particularly democratic, right, where there’s a banding together on that messaging, and almost kind of a hardline stance that’s taken on that message. Anytime we hear anybody demonizing these programs, go after them. Because there’s some real things that happened. Whatever political kind of swing you are, where the Republicans particularly they choose a stance, and they’re like, we’re not crossing the lens. And they get with it, right. I know the Democratic Party. But I think the Democratic Party is driven by emotion. So let’s use that. Let’s take emotional hotlines because there’s, for some reason, low policy guidelines, right. So let’s take some emotional hotlines. Let’s say, anytime anybody demonizes snap, demonizes these programs that are helping people, we are going to make them pay the political price for that. Right. Because look what happened with Obamacare. The Democratic Party didn’t even need to do that. They just wasn’t there. It was really Barack Obama, he created something that even for poor white people in South and North Dakota, was so important, they didn’t want to talk about how important it was. But when it came to the votes, it showed up, that’s why the programs to the route, right. So I think that needs to be done for economic mobility. And that’s how we show people that it can be done, and we give them the circumstances to do it. So you guys are familiar with Buddhism, right? So you’ve got like, eight chakras. Now, I think people simplify two things. I think people simplify neuroscience, because a lot of people don’t know this. Right. So that are in here. Science is just how people are disposed to certain things. Some people thought this was everything, which is an extension of what old medicine was like no, neuroscience is, it’s like, mechanics, right? Just because a car has a certain bolt doesn’t mean that that bolt stays on that car, right? You got a wrench bolt on a BMW, right? And you take the wrench bolt off, and you replace it with like a screw bolt, then it’s gonna scribble it out, right? That’s what people are like. But we’re just discovering how powerful our brains actually are. So that there’s all these both educational and medical things, right, which I’ll get to spirituality and education. All right, you got a Barbie, you guys, right? That system is so dumb system is so unintelligent, because somebody in this scoring system you’ve got to see might go in front of a piano and spend an hour on it and become Mozart. But the person who goes out he goes in front of the piano and spends an hour in and has no idea what’s going on. Because we have what creative differences. We have intelligence differences and creative differences, right? So so that’s the first thing, how do we get to one, what ambition means and what it means to spirits running? Right? Ambition, first of all needs a new communication system. We need a new communication system about who’s worthwhile. And you know, there’s a whole bunch of other ways and rabbit holes I could go into, but I’ll just say that we need to start talking about people and their worth differently, not based on the conventional school system, or let’s get a new one, right? We got it for math, right? There was there was, you know, there was Indian math, which by the way, has a bunch of zeros and ones completely differently. And then it was simplified to the decimal system in the Roman Empire. And then it took from the decimal system, the hexadecimal system, and now we have a filing system. Right. And then that was the binary system was mostly created in the early 19th century, right. So we changed something. So yes, sir. Very passionate. Yeah. So let’s change how we talk about our natural powers, literally that come from the computational supercomputers that sit at the top of our Scott’s right. And then how it relates to spirituality. So I think that everybody energy is real. I mean, you can call it pheromones. You can call it hormones. You can call it dopamine. You can call it new reprimand thing you can call it you know, by the way, so basic, very, very basic simplifying a lot, if any neuroscientists Yes, I noticed more complicated than this right. So, so you got dopamine, you got serotonin, and you got neutral neuroscience chemicals like plus minus negative, right? Well, zero sorry, zero plus minus. And so those states alter so if you You take a bunch of sugar, you’re gonna, your dopamine is gonna decrease and you’re gonna go into the negative, right? If you exercise a lot, your dopamine is going to increase right? What also happens is your dopamine can be manipulated. So pornography is a big thing that manipulates people’s dopamine. Exercise is a big thing that manipulates people’s dopamine. But most importantly, that achievement is a huge thing that manipulates people’s dopamine. So how do we produce dopamine produce dopamine from glucose? How do we produce glucose we eat? Right? So that’s the real scientific hard stuff. So to
Hillary 40:32
achieve, I need to eat Yes.
Micah Brown 40:35
I’m making it so everybody can agree. I’m gonna go to the more ethereal stuff now. Right? So everyone, I started head. We don’t disagree about that. You can look that up. Now, I think that people process those things differently. There are people who don’t eat for a week, and you send them into an exam, and they ace it. Now we get to chat, Chris. So there are ways to hold on to things that usually happens in your base chakra, right? There’s literally an energetic thing that happens to you, if you say, Hey, that guy pushed me 10 years ago, and I’m still thinking about it, right. And that applies all the way from your heart chakra all the way up to the chakra at the top of your head. So now we’ve got these two systems, we’ve got chemical systems, and we’ve got spiritual systems. And when they align, and someone is aware of them, they can push themselves to do amazing things. There’s a lot of rumors that Albert Einstein used to sit there and not eat for long periods of time, but then write his equations was connected to something. So now we talk about ambition, right? I think that, again, it comes down to differences in people, right? I could go into the energetic reasons why I’m right. But I’d be talking for a long time. But I think I’ll go into what I think are the basic buckets of people instead, I think there are people who are contented. I think there are genuinely people, maybe it’s to do with how they were born, maybe it’s to do with who they are, they start saying well, but at the end of the day, that content. Now the sad thing is that goes all the way up and down the economic spectrum, there are people who are content, not having anything, and we mischaracterize this really quick, in America, that is somebody, there are people on farms in Iowa, and that farm has been in their family for 100 150 years, and someone fought in the Great War. And the GI Bill got in the house, and they’re happy. someone in their family is opioid addicted, but they’re okay. You know, they have to find their food, but they’re okay. Right. What I think is really interesting is people who will not content gravitate into cities. There are a lot of people in cities who want to change their lives. Right. But now we get to talk about the economic system, and how energy changes in cities, right. Most extremely wealthy people. I don’t know it’s about the millionaires, the billionaires, right? If you go and talk to them, they are aware of energy at some level. I genuinely believe that people get together at that level. And they say there’s this much energy to go around. And we’re going to have this and the evidence in a lot of political discussions. The political discussions wouldn’t be the way they are publicly, if that was not going on somewhere else. Right. So what I think is there’s an additional layer now for people who are in the seas, the millions of people who are in New York, the millions of people in San Francisco, the millions of people in Miami the following year, wherever there’s an additional energy layer to traverse. Because you’re literally trying to overcome systems and very small groups of people who run those systems to be able to better yourself. So I think that’s the first thing anybody with ambition needs to understand. I understood that very early in my life in my teenage years, and everyone else was in the park, and swimming and going to Ibiza. I was on a trading floor, looking at the fact that there are some people who have there’s the numbers and they have that many numbers, and everyone has that. Yeah. And I think that I had a very unique experience. But you don’t have to have the experience. Literally, when I was at Barclays. I had to find a deep for a lot of that information. I think there are influences out there that talk about it. There is enough space on Wikipedia, that gives you information about it right? But again, it comes back to desire, but desire. Once you have energy desire multiplied by energy equals results. That’s the way I think about it. That’s the equation you might have failed. By every measure there is in the normal world. You might have gotten a terrible grades. You might literally be in a homeless shelter. You might literally have no food, right? But if you just decide that you want to do something different, you get out of the hunger show you find something. All these things change. And then I think it multiplies the more results You get Yeah, I know, there’s things I can do in my life in very short periods of time, huge things I’ve done before, and numbers that I’m able to generate, because I’ve done it. Right. And I think that is where there is some responsibility for people because we’ve got to give people the environment to see those results. That is a policy question that as an education question, as an educational systems question, that is a political sciences humanities question, right? Because that’s the bit that usually determines whether people continue to do something or not.
Hillary 45:31
Well, I’m really glad that you brought up your personal story, because we definitely wanted to, you know, learn more about you. And you mentioned, creating brain wrap. Yeah. Fascinating, and it kind of is like the future. I love that it will I want to let you like kind of give a explanation. Other people? Oh, here we go.
Valery 45:55
No, don’t allow us to do that.
Hillary 45:57
Well, no, let because it’s for musicians to, like, combine data with like their expression. It’s basically, I don’t know, you’re gonna have to explain it. But yeah. It’s like, as someone is rapping and like flowing, it’s not predicting what you can say no, it’s like, but is it assists? I don’t know. Can you explain? I mean, I know that was,
Micah Brown 46:25
that was my like that because fear PR, I always like hearing it from other people. And I always like that. People always say it’s about musicians. So there’s so much technology behind bringing it up there. There is something like chat TPTB, which is called LMS, which is a computational semantic system that we built, that specifically takes a neuro scan a timestamp and relates it to a word, and then uses a floating variable, somebody called a recurrent neural network to build that up around that. Right. Well, but that could be chat TPT. Three, but it’s not your description was about the musician. And I love that. And that’s, that’s why I love hearing the explanations because people don’t understand that technology they never supposed to. It’s like, but there’s something in there that helps musician. Right? Because, you know, I didn’t mention the artistic thing. There’s a TED Talk by office. But yeah, so I, I am a musician, I do play the guitar, I play a couple different instruments. And I was a professional sign rapper, or label a really big label. And I just I saw it firsthand, you know, I saw some greats, some big names that I listened to growing up. And they get in a room with, you know, the label manager, and they’re like five years old. And they’d been told how to manage their money, or what they kind of gone do and ended up ending. Then I saw that in meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting. And these are the people that made it right. And then I saw like other musicians who are aspiring to be signed, I want to be signed, I want to be signed. So I’m going to make myself homeless, I’m going to do all these things to get signed, right. And then I saw a third party musician who are doing it. But even for them, things like the change in the Spotify algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, they’re at the mercy of social media companies. So your record label social media companies. And then in the middle of Spotfire, right, which was supposed to be this incredible, new thing that no one could explain, which I loved. And it just isn’t, it’s like, an extension of both of those things. Right. And I was like, so we, we hit this attitude of time, we had, you know, the fat cats and the starving dogs, and we had the 1%. And then I was like, I have created enough products to make myself. I’m in a personal position where I can think financially, right, which is nice. And it’s like, okay, in 2019, when when that happens, I was like, How do I do that for other people really do it for other people? Because I thought I’d done in my first three companies I hadn’t do one exactly. Help people advance economically easily. And I realized I can’t do it. Right. But I can do it for musicians. Why can I do it for musicians? Because they’re undervalued. They are one of the most undervalued classes of people. I want to see, well, why because they’re not undervalued worldwide, by America, and Europe. They are undervalued. You understand musicians have been sages, since time immemorial, in Israeli culture, to be a musician and to sing in Hebrew. And it’s a privilege, right? So yeah,
Hillary 49:40
just because of our consuming like we just consume, consume, consume,
Micah Brown 49:42
consume, consume, consume, yeah. Powerful. You being on this is, do you know, do you know? If you take how long people spend on Instagram and Facebook, and the CPM, which is the cost per mouse score of how people pay to get your time. If you spend 10 hours a day on Facebook, you should be making 100 grand a year. Because that’s what you are literally, like, if you break down the CPM model of your life, right? Facebook is charging advertisers $100,000 to be in your feet, right. And now let’s take it to musicians, that’s just attention. But musicians are creating an asset that last forever, right? That goes on Spotify and gets a billion streams, which they get paid 0.000001% of that. And when we say a billion streams, right, that’s literally a billion dollars. Every every stream is almost equivalent to another. And if you do that right now, that’s why Spotify has any results of where they are. Spotify has a business issue, not product market fit issue. They clear like almost a trillion dollars. But they’re just structuring their business all these weird ways and why they had most of it over to us.
Hillary 51:05
So how does your How does brain wrap, cover that pain?
Micah Brown 51:11
Your use the disadvantage as an advantage. So the disadvantage is scale, right? If you’re a musician you value you have finite time you have finite tastes, you don’t want to dilute yourself, right? What’s that saying that? Hey, your music is worth point. 000000001. All right. So when you do make a bunch of music, monochromatic music, you make so much music, that you gain the system? How do you do that? For that sound? You think, and then you spend the hour making something. And that’s basically if you break it down into a nutshell, it’s like
Daryle Serrant 51:50
a check TPT for for music musicians to help you help you help facilitate the music generation process.
Hillary 51:58
And to beat the system, because how things are set up you it’s all about volume, volume. Yes. And we’re not created to put out amazing things and volume or quickly that quickly.
Micah Brown 52:12
We are what against the technology, the way the technology? Because we do people literally get on Instagram and create 50 videos a day, right. But the way the format compresses into a mixed and mastered song, into taste into SEO into whether SEO goes to into the verses into the lane, that’s the bit that we can do. We just never had a tool that allowed our brain to be the extensible. Because here’s the thing. However you look at the technology horizon, right. However you look at bioinformatics, are you looking at biomimicry, have you look at mental computational capability? Have you looked at all of those things compressed into a computer? Our brains are always still going to be the model. Why? Because of P equals NP? I know you know that. Yeah,
52:59
yeah. Yeah. Okay, explain. I guess I don’t like a loss there.
Micah Brown 53:03
P equals NP. It’s like, if I if the if that door is over, then there’s 12345 parameters in there, right? And we’re gonna go through that door. Five of us are always gonna go through the door, right? But what if there’s half of us? Well, then we’re never gonna get through the door. Because if that half a person is attached to you, you’re always gonna be trying to go through the door that half a person. So it’s however many finite problems exist for finite solutions. The brain is the only machine that can do that. And they had to create it because it’s a black box, because scientists literally don’t know how the brain is able to process so much information. We know what dendrites are, we know attend to right? So we know what the limbic system is, we can give all these things names, but I still have like books.
Daryle Serrant 53:44
I was just curious, how did you map vocabulary to like, emotion? Like, did you like sample a whole bunch of different people to
Micah Brown 53:54
actually I did. The who study, the Alexander who studied 2016, came out Berkeley. And it was the first study for voxelwise modeling. And I heard about it through kind of some mutual scientists. And we took that and we mapped it down with EEG. The study is done in something called fMRI functional magnetic resonance information, like me, because you put some in the tube and scan them. And mostly what it does is structure. So they basically resolve what are called voxel wise addresses in the structure of a person’s brain. There’s actually not one versus bringing six people’s brains together. What we did is, first that we took that structure and the mathematical model that came with it. And we were able to use EEG headsets, specifically motif headsets, and numerable lenses, one of their prototypes, which was very powerful, which was the one you probably seen the picture. That was like one of one create. And we were able to spend about a week at the hackathon mapping about 100 people. And then that’s the same proprietary model we found today.
Daryle Serrant 54:56
Okay, awesome. Interesting. Yeah. So you leverage that understand? Ready to do it was awesome.
Hillary 55:02
hearing your story and I know there’s so much more to it that we could even cover in like an hour, obviously. But you’re you’re an inspiration. I’m not to like belittle it, but to people like Josh’s question about how do you show people who haven’t seen the opportunity that there is one. I mean, we need people that have done it. And maybe we’re born, even wired with some of that ambition, because I know, we’re all kind of wired differently, but to just go out and do it. And so yeah, I just commend you for all you’ve accomplished. I know you’re still young 35 Oh my gosh. End even though I’ve probably understood like 40% of the words to use, in a way, you’ve made me feel less threatened by technology. So in a weird way, that made me feel more excited about what’s
Micah Brown 55:53
so much exciting. It’s just like I say, it’s all conversation, right? If you took a stone age person, and you put them right out from like, 18th century BCE, and you gave them one of these, and you didn’t show them Donald Trump, right, and you didn’t show them the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party, they like, this is a friggin magic wand, right? That person will be the most productive entrepreneur ever was found
56:14
right now. Referring to the magic wand,
Micah Brown 56:17
like, that’s the seriously, you literally got, he’s still got his overalls on and whatever. You just gave him this. And he started typing stuff and talking into it, and it was doing stuff ever more even no matter what economic level you are. It’s well known that Metro PCS, you can get one of these potential.
Joshua Aguirre 56:35
So you mentioned this launch in February. Yeah. How can we promote you?
Micah Brown 56:41
Yeah, I’m just telling you about, um, so. So I think the way I’ve been making businesses up until now is I create SAS businesses, right? So we get client, corporate client, usually, and we build the business well, in the case of bringing up this universal user database, the big main client, right. And we went through the Abbey Road incubator, and that’s how they became my client. And so basically, I’m simplifying the business. I’ve sold Centrum capital, the singularity and this bring around right and bring up is the consumer facing thing. And singularity is a fund that invests in things. So when I go to London in February, I’m going to really announce the fund what it looks like, that kind of stuff. I’m going to talk about the sale you guys kind of have some advanced information on that, which is cool. And then people will know about it, people will be able to actually spring up at scale by headsets from you Gee, wow, that’s amazing. Young guys, the best way for people to get rain wrap don’t live and literally has a little tripod, and then I’ll put the password on the live live brain will put it in
Joshua Aguirre 57:46
thanks so much for your time and absolutely.
Micah Brown 57:51
Thank you so much.
Valery 57:56
And I could have just kept on coming more.
Hillary 58:00
Like I need to journal. It was so fascinating though. Like, even though there were so many things are over my head. I felt like I understood the essence of what he was saying. That’s so great. Like,
Valery 58:10
I love that yeah,
58:11
you’re like this is really references. I
Valery 58:13
was like, yeah, that’s something that could definitely just like listen to yeah, I’d be like I’m here I’m actively I like
Hillary 58:18
what he said about how we have to change how we measure the word like what makes us worthy, not worthy, but like the worth of like how smart smart you are or we because we’re the educational system is measured by the grades that you get and it’s not a new concept but the tests but yeah, like how someone can fail a test then go home and be this crazy piano. So
Joshua Aguirre 58:45
it was fascinating to just hear like how he would who would bring everything to a very like clear. Yes, that process. I love that London has gotten so far.