Billy Riggs (00:41)
Welcome, welcome, welcome to Rewiring the American Edge. I'm Billy Riggs and we are excited to be here today and diving into a topic on building a smarter workforce from classrooms to code. according to my co-host, Vipul Vyas we can't fart around anymore. We got to get active.

and he is throwing down the gauntlet because he sent me an article this week and Gauntlet AI is, basically throwing down the gauntlet and, hiring coders, in our local, ecosystem and New York Times story there are coders working at.

Chipolte. We've been talking about this all week. How do we make sure that our workforce keeps up with the pace of change? Vipul Vyas, how you doing, my friend?

Vipul Vyas (01:28)
Good, good. Yeah, I think it's the topic dejure. I think you can fart around, but you get the implications of doing so, or you end up living with them. And I don't think you can be overly prescriptive in terms of, if you're government, for example, I don't know if we really know enough to say this is what to do or this is what to do, but you have to be open to

Billy Riggs (01:35)
Hahaha ⁓

Vipul Vyas (01:53)
to flexible, you have to be open-minded and flexible to experimentation. And that's one thing we just haven't been good at recently. And I think the example of the school that you were mentioning in the New York Times article was in Austin. If I'm not mistaken, that was taking in people and kind of the modern boot camp. And we saw this recently, like in 10 years ago, people were going to boot camp to become coders. Now they're going to boot camp to do other things, to become prompt engineers or what have you.

Billy Riggs (02:07)
Yeah. Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (02:20)
And there's this real fear that robots will replace first white collar workers and then blue collar workers. And if you want to look at templates for this, obviously it's not rocket science. have the blue collar workers were replaced by cheaper blue collar workers overseas and that displacement has created wealth inequity or inequality rather. And you're seeing that.

Billy Riggs (02:32)
you

Vipul Vyas (02:44)
at the sort of mid-tier white-collar

workers, like in IT, where a of those IT jobs were outsourced overseas. So there was sort of China that was taking a lot of jobs, and the manufacturing side, you had automation taking a lot of jobs in the farm, and then you're bringing in migrant labor as you need it, because those are the people who are willing to do those jobs. And then you have some of the lower end IT jobs.

in the recent past going to places like India and Eastern Europe, et cetera. So you have this sort of constant picking away of some of those professions. Theoretically, we're ratcheting everyone up, but there are a lot of people being left behind. And I think the implications of that is the wealth inequality that everyone talks about. And the further implications of that are people not being terribly sympathetic.

Billy Riggs (03:33)
you

Vipul Vyas (03:34)
to when a healthcare CEO gets shot or an executive at a large hedge fund like BlackRock, was an unfortunate

murder in New York. That was very sad. But people, you see people curing those things. And I think that is a function of people determining that the current system doesn't work for them.

and is unlikely to work for them in the process to change it.

also doesn't work. And so there becomes an embrace of radical actions and radical solutions in the face of all that. And where I'm going with that is if AI comes along and accelerates those trends that are already perceived to be problematic in terms of that inequity, I keep saying that, it's really inequality, then

that's going to be a problem. So, yeah.

Billy Riggs (04:22)
Yeah, yeah, and I think we've got a lot

of, we've got a couple of different trends. We've got AI and increasing productivity. We've got increasing income inequality. And then at the same time, we have global tariffs and ⁓ increasing global isolation.

And so we've got these three trends all happening at the same time. And I think those compound the complexity of this issue. And there are two articles that we cited in this introduction that was the Gauntlet AI article, which was what Vipul cited, which was a 12 hour training program in Austin where participants, they work 80 to 100 hours a week.

⁓ and at the end of the, that training program, they, ⁓ the, goal is that they would receive a $200,000 a year job as an AI engineer. And we should make that, that clear that it is an AI engineer. And that is a differentiation from, the counterpoint, which, and I really empathize with, this is the time of year where many of you listeners, you may be dropping your kids off as a freshman in college and.

You know, that's what a joyous occasion to be to be starting off on, that journey. Uh, but at the same time, uh, if you're starting as a computer science graduate, um, at the tail end of that degree, the New York Times is showing that that in an article that, a lot of those graduates thought they'd be learned, they'd be landing these $165,000 cushy jobs at Amazon and Microsoft and

They're interviewing these people that are struggling to find work and ending up at working places like Chipotle. So, you know, long story short is those, those students and those graduates are, are having to be entrepreneurial and while that's not a bad thing. And we heard from, from my brother-in-law, Parker Hancilman, who is that entrepreneurial individual. And we, we, it's important that we train our young people to embrace.

American and I think global, we should say international entrepreneurialism and global entrepreneurialism, whether or not you're American, you're European, you're Asian. I think being an entrepreneurial individual is a lesson that we should impart wherever you live on the planet. The big question that frames the rest of the episode is, and Vipul I hope you agree with me on this, is what is the future of work?

and training for the future of society, whether or not you're in America, whether you're a listener in Europe, whether or you're a listener in Tokyo, what does the future work and how do we close the gap between skills and opportunity? I was hoping we could go to a segment maybe on what it means to be a lifelong learner because both of us

in higher ed and me continuing to advance as a higher ed administrator. I think a lot about the future of education as thinking about lifelong learning and thinking about what a degree is. And we've long thought about a degree as something that has to evolve. And we thought about maybe a credential should also be something that is severable.

A credential should also be a micro credential and a credential should be not only just a degree, but it should be a micro degree. It should be a micro credential. And so maybe we can start talking about this idea of lifelong learning. The idea used to be to go to school and get your degree, but you're set for life, but maybe that doesn't cut it anymore.

Vipul Vyas (07:59)
It's possible, I think the...

The challenge now is if expertise becomes commoditized, what do you get credentialed in? Because credentials imply some form of expertise or capability. And if that in itself is under attack, if that's what's becoming commoditized,

You know, where does the value lie? I don't know. That's the challenge. And I think you have to become a lifelong learner just to be relevant anyway these days. But if I look at it like that in a quality point I made before, if you look at the, not to say anyone's life is easy, but if you look at the people at the very top, they probably have more true free time if they wanted to take it than they want, than they probably do take. But...

Billy Riggs (08:21)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Vipul Vyas (08:46)
that's available to them. They could do a 40-hour work week and if they manage their expectations could probably live just fine, right, if they temper their expectations. Whereas in the low end of the labor market to kind of feel like you are participating at a level equal to every, relatively close to everyone else, people have to work three, four jobs. They have to kill themselves. They don't have much free time at all, comparatively speaking.

Billy Riggs (09:03)
Mm-hmm.

Vipul Vyas (09:09)
And so I think that will get worse. That'll get worse. Now, the counterbalance to that is what does that mean? mean, how does, what does that translate into everyday, know, practical things? I'll just say this and then I'll kind of pause is that we went from pretty centralized, we went from the farm, which was relatively fragmented.

family farm to industrial production, the move from a economy to an industrial one. And in that move, there was the power of scale. You started with, know, cottage industries first that was also fragmented. But then you got the benefit of scale, you got people in one giant factory to efficiently pump out whatever widgets are pumping out. And the benefit was getting concentration of labor concentration of

capital infrastructure, et cetera. Now with AI and maybe 3D printing, I'm probably, that's probably wishful thinking and blockchain and cryptocurrency and the Web3, all those things basically may facilitate decentralization so that the scale that you had before, the need for scale that you had before maybe isn't as critical. So maybe what that means is you can prevent the hoarding of

Billy Riggs (10:18)
you

Vipul Vyas (10:23)
capital and wealth among the very few people because what this does is truly it does democratize things. Now there's these processes undulate. You democratize things and someone's going to come in and consolidate.

Then you kind of break that up and then you get democratization again then it kind of flows back to you know gets concentrated again. So for example and everyone's going to be a YouTuber.

and they could side hustle that that way. And then all of a sudden YouTube is basically the only game in town. Well, there's probably a few, but limited number of games in town because you get a network effect until you get a re-concentration of power. So I'm hoping that AI might actually democratize the means of production to use a Marxist term there, but we'll see.

Billy Riggs (11:12)
Yeah,

yeah, I mean, I, I still think that, you know,

If we were to step back, I still think that this example that you brought up, Gauntlet AI is a really good example of has traditionally been called a micro degree credential. And this idea of badges, boot camps, nanodegrees is a really good way of incentivizing

lifelong learning and this idea of at the end of the day

skills are degrading faster and faster and we need more skilled people than ever. but the skills that we teach, don't match the jobs of the future. So we have to balance that mismatch.

We have to align education with the workforce. And so there's, there's a pattern of aligning the skills that are depreciating with the future of the workforce.

And so we're training for what, and then we actually have to align that with the future of where industries are going. So, take for example, the architecture industry, it's like, where is building technology going? And if building technology is going to wood-based construction, if we're going mainly to mass timber,

⁓ then we should be training students to design using software that only models based on mass timber. And we should not do any modeling using other, technology. And we should be emphasizing those materials in their education.

⁓ And I think when I've looked at like some of the prototypes, for example, that some of the professors at Berkeley are using, there's a lot of, emphasis that they're putting on rammed earth and some of these creative, sustainable, really new, interesting,

earthen technologies. And I think we aren't even keeping up with where technology is going. And that's where industry is way far ahead of us. And that's where education is three steps behind in terms of how we're preparing students to where industry is going. And that's, I do think we're, not preparing our classes fast enough to where industry is advancing. And, and I think we have to really do a better job of advancing.

⁓ how we teach to where, to how quickly industry is actually advancing a technological change.

Vipul Vyas (13:39)
Well, how does that happen? Because that process has not ever been terribly fast, as we all know.

What kind of changes that complacency, what's the remedy for it? Because the pressures are not being felt there yet. I think they probably ultimately will be, but not right now. question.

Billy Riggs (14:00)
Well, I think some of it is like, is what we're seeing is like ingesting that within industry, ingesting those trainings within, industry training programs. Maybe this is where companies come in. I think Amazon has done some stuff with retraining programs.

Microsoft and Google have done some certificate programs. So maybe this is an opportunity for industry to come in and initiate the partnerships with universities, with high schools. And so maybe there's an entree for companies to get directly involved with universities, with high schools, with

educational organizations and to initiate, to be the initiators.

Vipul Vyas (14:47)
To drive that stuff, yeah.

Billy Riggs (14:49)
Yeah.

And, to basically specify, what it is the needs are and to basically say, here's, here's how you can fill the talent pipelines, whether or not it's for big tech or whether or not it's for the green collar jobs that, Parker was talking about; the future

middle class workforce that we need in the US that's going to drive manufacturing.

Vipul Vyas (15:13)
Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. Like, it's probably gonna come from outside to your point, meaning people like those mentioned in the article, like the whole bootcamp thing was from the outside. That was not from, you know, traditional institutions. So I think that's probably what's gonna happen. Totally agree.

Yeah.

Billy Riggs (15:37)
Where do you think philanthropy sits in this whole picture?

Vipul Vyas (15:42)
Probably has a decent role because I don't think existing institutions and whether that's a government or educational institutions can probably move quite fast enough. And they also don't have the capacity to experiment as easily. They have existing obligations, there's existing responsibilities that...

keep them from being able to make lots of bets. Whereas, and that's probably fine, like the goal might be to let these smaller players actually experiment and kind of determine what is sensible, what makes sense, and then co-opt it and then do some of those similar things. Once you figure out what works, once you figure out, know, this is the right, X, Y, is the right approach, like the example in the article. But I think,

⁓ It's going to be hard for them to really innovate. To some degree they can. I think you are seeing some innovation in educational institutions like in the Middle East, like in Dubai, UAE, primarily because they're so new, or many of them are relatively new, that there's no existing set of stakeholders to keep happy, no existing infrastructure to try to feed. And so they're able to...

There's a lot of AI work, for example, happening in the UAE for that reason, especially in medical education.

Billy Riggs (17:01)
Yeah.

Yeah. So let's, if guess if we were to step into that global context, do we, do you think we do have a risk of losing a bit of the workforce edge if we don't act a little faster?

Vipul Vyas (17:17)
We already have. I don't think we've totally realized it because, you know, we're not that plugged in. if you go overseas and I mean, don't get me wrong, we still have a lot of it here. There's no doubt, but it's not assured that we're going to keep it and not assured that what we have isn't going to get taken away in terms of,

the leads that we have in certain key industries. So I would say to answer your question, we're already seeing the locus of certain types of innovation move away. We're not perceiving it because it's not something we've bothered to look at. know, historically, people from different countries have looked at the US and say, here's where the latest and greatest is happening. This is where you look to know what's coming next.

And in many cases that's still the case, but we have never had a muscle really that's well formed to look externally to say, I got to keep an eye over here because that's where the new stuff's happening. That's not how we've been trained to think for a really long time. And so we don't even know what we're not seeing because we're not geared to look for it.

Billy Riggs (18:00)
you

Yeah.

you

Vipul Vyas (18:20)
But like I said, know, a of stuff in China, a lot of stuff in the Middle East where you wouldn't even have

traditionally thought to look is where stuff is happening.

Billy Riggs (18:28)
Yeah, guess I guess also why you I would say we do know where to look and this is about global competition and we know precisely where to look in its. It's not about shiny gadgets or technology it's about human capital and the way we we train and up skill the human work force is.

is really has been our competitive advantage for the better part of a century and a half. And unless we invest in that, we likely will fall behind. And my worry, and we cited this to start off with, is we have these trends of social disinvestment.

Vipul Vyas (19:00)
trouble.

Billy Riggs (19:10)
It being that had these three trends of increasing global isolation. And then we had these streams of increasing divides between the wealthy and the poor. like basically what we've seen is with decreasing amount of Pell grants, the increasing cost of higher education.

it's increasingly costly, for people to, of lower income to get a, ⁓ a college degree. ⁓ and so my, my fear is that we saddle many, many, many Americans with an increasing amount of to get a higher degree. We make it increasingly out of touch for people to advance their education.

Vipul Vyas (19:39)
Yeah.

Billy Riggs (19:56)
And we put education out of touch for many Americans and therefore we reduce the capacity for them to be competitive in the workforce. And that is how we reduce our competitive edge globally. And our global competitiveness hinges on that human capital.

Upskilling our workforce will define American competitiveness on the global level. And my fear is by not educating that workforce, we do risk falling behind, not just in AI tech, but across the global economy. So if we don't rewire the education to workforce pipeline, we do risk falling behind.

Vipul Vyas (20:34)
everything.

Billy Riggs (20:44)
And that is a huge economic risk that it's really about global competition.

Vipul Vyas (20:51)
I think that's all true, but I'm not sure we have the inclination, motivation, prerequisites to make that happen. I don't know. I don't know. mean, just because it takes such a change in an existing, well-established system, that it's not easy. Even with everyone's best intentions, it's just very hard

Billy Riggs (21:09)
Yeah, it's not.

Vipul Vyas (21:14)
it's very hard to make those changes when people perceive kind of what you've had is been working for a really long time. You haven't had to make huge changes. And so there isn't probably a sense of urgency because everything's kind of happening slow-mo because these are compounding effects, like all the changes being made by educational systems overseas, for example.

they don't have an effect immediately. They get a little bit better over time every day over the period of many, many years. It has, like I said, a compounding effect. And one day you wake up and you see that you're way far behind. But that also means that there's no sense of urgency that's really created so that an established system has the motivation to change because most established systems also have the existing vested interests and

it becomes just very difficult to do something that you don't feel you necessarily have to do. So for example micro-credentially, do we see universities doing that? Maybe, and possibly like that's kind of what executive education is analogous to doing courses, video courses, doing short three-month courses or even you know several two three week courses.

maybe that becomes, you know, that sort of your curated education on demand as needed. And that's more efficient than, getting a big four-year degree. But that's not how things are set up. But probably, a fair bit of experimentation worth doing.

Vipul Vyas (22:39)
I think Your point around lifelong learning makes sense, of course. However, I do worry about two things. One is, where do you get credentials then if... ⁓

The expertise is commoditized. My pushback on my own argument is that someone has to direct AI as to what problems to solve and what priority and wrestle with those things. And you have to have intimate knowledge of the subject to make those calls. And so it's like giving someone a backhoe and replacing a shovel. They still need to know they want to build a pool. They still need to know they want to dig out a foundation versus something else.

Billy Riggs (23:07)
You

Vipul Vyas (23:12)
You know, it's where do you want to aim this thing? Now even maybe AI can be used to help you decide what those priorities should be, but someone has to wrestle with that. In the end, AI, least today, can't be accountable for stuff. It can't own a decision. It's used to execute on one, but it doesn't own it. And the second thing is when it comes to the micro-prudentialing point you made, it's a really good one, is who's going to do that micro-prudentialing?

There has to be some credibility to the credentialing entity for third parties to be able to feel comfortable with those credentials. Now, obviously, if those things come from bigger universities or established institutions with existing credibility that they can draw upon, that's better easier. But my previous point was, I'm not sure they're able to do that very quickly just because it's,

existing institutions, they just have too many existing masters to serve to innovate very quickly and that's okay. They probably should leave that to smaller players like in the private enterprise, in private enterprise and then once you know people figure out what the formula is they can enter then.

Billy Riggs (24:18)
Yeah. I mean, I think that's precisely right. mean, think you have to have, and that's why we do a lot of the accreditation work that we do at places of higher education. We focus on really making sure that we can deliver high quality, high fidelity.

Vipul Vyas (24:30)
Mm-hmm.

Billy Riggs (24:38)
education and stuff that meets a, intellectual standard that, has a high, the meets a high, high academic standard and a rigor that, is beyond reproach. And, yeah, I think that's a, that's a, ⁓ a really, good takeaway.

And, ⁓ you know, think if I had one closing thought from my end, it's that, I, think I'm still struck by, by something that we were focusing on a couple of minutes ago is to say this, this alignment alignment of skills.

And kind of what struck me is really hitting on this idea that maybe, kind of the, there's really an opportunity for, companies to be the initiators and for companies to really, Talk to, to, institutions of higher education and to really ask, what they need and to initiate and to specify, we need this and,

maybe even to provide learning conduits for students. And then it could potentially, could initiate placement opportunities. At the end of the day, that emphasizes for students specifically that for them to enter the workforce, learning those things isn't optional.

learning those things is essential. And I think that's the key nugget that maybe young people can take away from them to keep their American edge. Lifelong learning isn't optional. It's essential. And maybe that's the key quote of today. Lifelong learning ain't optional. It's essential.

Vipul Vyas (26:06)
Yeah.

Billy Riggs (26:17)
So Vipul, final word from you to wrap us for the day.

Vipul Vyas (26:23)
⁓ Only that This is probably not the end of the conversation just the beginning because this will this will be something that will come up Routinely, we'll look back at some of these conversations and well, We were way off the mark or maybe we're close but things are gonna evolve pretty quickly

Billy Riggs (26:37)
Yeah. Yeah, I would say absolutely. This is going to be there. There's no one answer. We, we've been talking about these cycles of learning and the, these, ⁓ this guy or learning for a while in higher education. It's not something that's, that's new. so if, if you're listening and you've had experience with, retraining or a bootcamp or a failed attempt, attempted a failed attempt at learning. I know I've tried to.

a little bit of a learning a second language with ⁓ this Duolingo stuff. And it's not not been a an easy adventure for me. So maybe that's a fun little nugget for one of our next episodes. We'd love to hear from you. If you have other things, we'll come back to I know we had some comments from from some of our listeners that we're going to come back to. We've got some some great listeners from Ireland that have asked some questions on

Vipul Vyas (27:07)
nice.

Billy Riggs (27:26)
automated vehicles and some policy there. We're gonna come back to you on some of that. We appreciate some of the questions you've been coming to us with. So we're gonna dissect that and come back to that in a future episodes. But until then, keep learning, keep building, ⁓ keep rewiring that global edge. Peace, love, and blessings. Talk later.

Vipul Vyas (27:45)
Thanks.