AI Bias, DEI and Tech Law w/ Bärí A. Williams

is a good one. So I do care about the initial idea. I I know some precedency investors who don't care about the initial idea. They're just like, this is an amazing person that The challenge we have is that most of the companies we've acted are raising five two million dollars. It's not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. So if your first original idea is really off base, you might not have enough time

to actually pivot to a new idea. Pivot are pretty common for us to precede normally because we're backing somebody pre product with the hypothesis, and sometimes you roll out the hypothesis in the form of a product and it turns out that the market responds to it in a very different way than you had expected. So whenever that happens, I always try to take founders through a set of questions to figure out did we get something wrong about

our initial hypothesis, And sometimes it happens. Sometimes the hypothesis was correct, but the market is less interesting than we thought once we get interest. So, hey, there's people who want to buy this product. They like it, song to them is kind of a pain. Servicing them's kind of a pain. There's a market here, but not one that like we as a company are like super excited to tackle.

And then sometimes you launch it and you go the product we launched was okay, and it's fine, but in launching it, we discovered something that we think is way more interesting. So the way I think about is it's always okay, I think to of it if you're doing it from a position of knowledge. What I worry about sometimes, though, is people who are flailing. They launched a product, it doesn't work immediately, so they launched another product that doesn't

work immediately. Sometimes you just have to like take a breath and figure out what did you learn? And sometimes the answer is the product is right, the market's just not ready for it. So do we want to hunker down and be patient and wait for the market to catch up with what we think or do we want to just say, hey, you know, we're way too early here.

We should probably abandon this and find something new. So a lot of what I try to get people to think through is what did we actually learn from this launch? What have we actually learned about the customer? And are we doing this from a position of information and knowledge and not from a position of like fearer panting. I'm well, Lucas, this is black tech, free money. I'm going to answer this you to some of the biggest names somebody brightness,

minds and brilliant ideas. If you black and building simply using techis and Chiga back this podcast. This fee Barry Williams this chief operating officer of Bandwagon, fan club data and identity analytics tech company focus on the sports and entertainment space. She's also a diversity inclusion and corporate social responsibility consultant. Prior to Bandwagon, she held executive roles at

companies like al Turtles, Stuff Up, and Facebook. Bar is a finger, not a coder, and I wanted to gather her thoughts on why it seems to be harder for black people who are non technical roles at companies that bill tech to see themselves as being in tech. Alternatively, if we say we work in HR are legal at a healthcare and energy company, we're much quicker to say we work in those sectors because there's still some the mystification that it needs to happen about what building tech means. Yeah,

there probably is um level of disconnect. I guess I would call it in terms of are you really in

tech or are you tech? A Jason and I think I feel like, particularly in my field, like being a lawyer, I feel like you're still in tech because there are certain things that you have to do and double check in terms and make sure the product doesn't violate any laws, um that your privacy is kept private, that you know something doesn't happen where the company ends up getting sued because of some discriminatory element of what it is that you created, or even if it's looking at it from

the lens of how inclusive is the product, like kind a blind person useless. So if the answers know, you may be opening yourself up not just two lawsuits. But people also neglect the fact that, you know, a tech company can do something and get horrible pr and get dragged, and that has absolutely nothing to do with whether the

product was good, bad, or and different. It could be you had a really terrible marketing campaign, but if you might have had a black marketer in that room, they would have told you that that Ancestry DNA where a slave runs away with her masters, not necessarily the best way to get us sign up for Ancestry DNA care. So, you know, sometimes it's about saving the company from itself, even if you don't think that that is a an

adequate tech role. And I'd say that because I'm married to a product manager, so he is very in and of tech and not tech adjacent. So but I still don't think that, you know, I don't think that those roles are tech adjacent. They're just as important to keep the company going is anything else. Do you think there's any level of feeling not included because we may not be able to code if we work at a tech

company and we can't say we work in tech. Yeah, I definitely think people will look at it that way. There are lots of people who look at it that way in a sense that oh, well, you're not really you're not really in the industry because you can't write a line of code. I sure can't, but I could tell you. You show me how what you've written and how it works, and I can tell you whether that's legal or not valuable. So I rebuke that whole idea in the name of Jesus, But I understand that some

people don't. UM. But I do think that there's definitely kind of a there's definitely a hierarchy, and people look at it. The people who can code, or the people who are product managers, are the people who are product designers. Those are the people that are really in tech. All your you know, your g n A functions, you're legal, your sales, your marketing UM hr dn I. They look at that as like it's not really you're not really

moving the product forward. You know, you've done a lot of advocacy for being in the room and trying to hold the door open for other people to be able to get in the room. But how can you admonish other folks to both strategically and successfully advocate for having more faces, you know, brown faces, black faces in the room. UM when everybody don't want us in the room. So how how can we do that and not feel like

we're in a precarious situation, you know, putting ourselves in jeopardy. Yeah, and I think that they're I wouldn't even say that. A lot of people don't want us. I said, most of them probably don't want us in the room because we're gonna point out things that they don't see because a lot of these people their coding and building products that it's it's solely focused on their lens and view

of the world, which is not the global population. Sorry to say that is not what the global population looks like. Y'all are actually in the minority. So they don't want us in the room. But I think what's important is, and I always lead from a diversity standpoint, is if you tell people how much money they can make or how much money they will lose, that is when they will listen. That is when they will care. They don't want to hear like I never ever start a conversation

with oh, well it's the right thing to do. Well, I have hell, we all know it's the right thing to do. But if people really cared about doing the right thing, it would have already been done. So but if I tell you, if you put out this type of marketing campaign with these visuals and this narrative, you're gonna get dragged on Twitter. That ad is gonna have to come down. You will have lost five thousand dollars. And however, many men and woman hours creating this ad.

So there's that angle. Or it's if you make it a product that is inclusive and has multiple use cases and functions and also maybe has an audio function, has a function that you know will allow that to have a blind person use it, you're gonna gain that much more traction because now more people can use your product. So that's more revenue. You know, you testified before Congress about AI bias, artificial intelligence bias, and the congressman asked

you about how that could be. You know, when you're just developing this this this software, and I guess some people might imagine that it's not inherently racist. It's just cold and right. But you know, can you speak to what's happening with the development of AI that should be potentially cause a concern for black and brown people as

we get more into a world that relies on artificial intelligence. Yeah, And when he asked me that question, I kind of I just remember sitting in church with my mom and she would just pinch me and say, fix your face, Fix your face. Because I was like, how, what do you mean? How is it? How could it possibly be inherently biases code? Well, who makes the code? People? It's unconscious biases, Like it's not like the code magically came

from the sky. A lot of things that go into making these algorithms that will tell you your credit score or your availability for a certain mortgage amount. It's based on stale data. So the example that I gave was, if you are basing this off of data from nineteen sixty five, well, they were still red lining in black neighborhoods, saying we couldn't having restrictive covenants and deeds and said

we couldn't buy in certain areas. So if you're using that data, it's going to be inherently biased because it's based on racist laws. And so if you are not updating that data or using additional data to corroborate what you have already coded, then you're doing it wrong. And the way that the easy summation of that for me is who fact checks the fact checkers because in this instance, the people that are coding the algorithms that will determine

your credit worthiness will also determine um. They also use this same kind of functionality in policing algorithms to tell police where they should go on certain times of days. And it's based off of previous crime data history. It's based off of moon phases, it's based off temperature records, it's based off of like randomness. So you're just gonna say, because in nineteen eighty five it was a d eight degrees in East Oakland, So now we need to send

twenty cars to patrol there tonight. Yeah. Like oh, and it's also based on sports team records, So I guess how do you gauge that? Because how many cop cars do you send in Order Dame when they win a big game and those kids storm the field versus the Warriors lose and you have had a bajillion cars around the coliseum, So like, how do you gauge? And a lot of that is gonna be you know, unconscious bias.

You're gonna send the twenty cop cars so where the majority of the black people are, but you know, those white kids storm in the field. Oh, they're just celebrating. Can you enlighten things on fire? Can you? Can you talk to me like a little bit about what's what's happening in the actual technology that allows it to be biased, like seeing certain faces versus other faces, thinking some people

look at like versus other people looking at like. Oh, well, if you're talking about like the unconscious bias and their actual test of that where you have to decide and that you get like I think three seconds to scroll through, um and I've taken this course. You have three seconds to decide if this person is like a good person

or a bad person. And it's interesting because you could see, you know, seek men with with their hair wrapped, or you could see a black woman with a natural hair, or your who's dark skin, or you could see a lighter skin black woman with straight hair, or you see a white lady, or you see a dark skin black man, and you literally just have to press the button and figure out, oh is this person not sure? And even just like not just looking at their face, but also

the clothing. Some of them had on college sweatshirts, which is gonna give you a whole difference view of that person, right, like, so maybe I might be afraid of your face, but if I see the fact that you're wearing a shirt and says Stanford, maybe I'm less afraid. And it's little subtle cues like that too. So you you're dealing with people who are taking those tests and to some extent are failing them. Uh, and those are the people who

are actually doing the coding. And it's then understanding that even little things like the hand dispensers in um in public bathrooms, like you go to the airport and I have to stick my hand under that thing three times before SoC will come out. And it's because it was designed for people with lighter skin hands and little simple things where it's not that you think people are doing it on purpose, it's just that is what they're used to, and so that is how they design the product, and

the same thing is transferred to code. Well, if this is the data that I've been given in order to base your credit score off of, and this is historical data of what the credit scores and certain based on your zip code, based on your age, if this is the information that we've had for the last ten years, well, then that's what I'm gonna use so we've already established in this conversation that you know, they don't want to send the room in the first place, you know, in

order to the people that you're advocating for, they don't want to send the room. And then at the same time, having us not in the room causes these biased situations to proliferate. You know, if to use a big word, not respecting the probably a bigger word than necessary. But so the million dollar question is is how do we get more of us in the room in order to be able to solve these problems for our future. I

think the answer to that is probably twofold one. It's going to take people willing to bring people into the rooms that are not carbon copies of themselves. And I say that because I think the status something like fifty three of tech employees are referrals. And let's just say, like if the company is probably six white males and the other is a mix of everybody else. But also in that forty percent would be predominantly Asian. Well, that

leaves us with at about probably five at best. And I know the one thing that I did when I worked at Facebook is every single person that I referred was a black woman. Even when I left, I still would float their resumes, give them to people who I knew were allies internally, and the good news is they all got hired. But it's because I knew who to pick and choose in terms of like advocating for them internally.

So that's one thing that it's hard to It's like nine times I'd attend if you have an internal advocate, that will get you farther down the line, But because there are a few of us there, it's hard to find an internal advocate. So usually it's a friend of a friend or somebody from that went to your college or your law school or your business school or what have you, and doesn't always have to be a a internal advocate, but somebody who knows how to navigate that

system and we'll we'll champion it for you. And I think the other piece to that is also just making sure that you know if if you get inside, you have to be to me. I always look at um. There was a line in my black graduation from Berkeley, and I think it was Michael Eric Dyson who gave the speech, and he always said he at the end of the speech, he said, be a trojan horse. So that's kind of how I look at everywhere I go is And I've seen two types of black people in

these companies. One is the type that's a trojan horse, and it's gonna hold the door open and advocate for other people to get inside, or if there are people already there, you advocate for them to get promoted, or you advocate for them to get better work assignments. And the second type of person I've seen is the type that wants to be the special Negro snowflake and they want to make sure the door slammed because they want to be one of a few. Like that makes you

feel special. Now that doesn't make me feel special, but but for some of those people, it's that is their calling card. That so the less the less of us that are there, the more special they feel. And so they want to make sure that the door is shut. And I have even seen d I practitioners like that, which to me is like, how do you have this job? Well, I mean, I know how you have a job because you're gonna be a yes person for the majority. But it just seems like a a cruel bait and switch.

But I would say it's it's gonna be that twofold. You have to have people that are on the inside that are gonna be trojan horses, and you also have to make sure that you have internal advocates and work your network. You know, tech is still, you know, a very new industry, may in may in the mainstream context. You know, if you think fifteen years ago, you just

started to get things like Facebook and etcetera. And then you know, so let's say let's call it twenty years that tech has been like in the dominant, you know, mainstream conversation, there are so many attorneys who maybe work in real estate law or maybe they work in criminal law, but they want to be in to this tech thing. How can they find their way into helping startups? Yeah, I would say there are lots of startups that um

can't retain large firms. So like if you think of like a MOFO or Cooley, UM, you know, they just can't afford the larger companies. And so the answer to that would be, maybe that person offers them discounted services just to get the experience to say that they've been

advising startups or helping startups. I think that's one thing that actually would be great in terms of bolstering your resume, and then who knows if that startup actually gets more funding than you would be the person that they would end up hiring as their first attorney, whether that's a general counsel role or some other um. The other thing you can do is I always tell people to make your experience analogous to whatever it is that you're applying for.

So people tend to look at resumes and they don't really or they look at job descriptions rather and they don't change their resume to fit the narrative of what

the job description is looking for. That is a huge no no. So for every bullet point that is on that job description, your resume needs to detail how you have either done something that is just like that and here are the results that I got from doing that work, or it needs to be an analogous argument meaning I didn't you know, I didn't necessarily do it this way, but this is something that I did that is very

akin to what it is that you're looking for. And I don't even I would start off with I haven't done this. I would just say, you know, in accordance with you know, X, Y and Z type of experience, I've done something analogists such as blah blah blah blah blah, and here are the results from that. So always make sure that you are reading the job description and making sure that your resume lines up with it. A lot of people simply just send the same generic resume out

over and over again. And also they need to be mindful that the way the job descriptions are written, it's you know, sometimes you can't tell what is I bucket them in three ways something what's a what's a must have? What is a nice to have? And what is a moonshot? Like we want you to have these, you know, five imperative skills. It would be great if you have these

three that are nice to have. And then like also if you speak Arabic and Japanese like we love it now, you probably are going to get that, but the other things you probably can. And um also be mindful that though the words and the phrasings that they're using in those job descriptions, those are the keywords that they're going to be searching for in their portal when they're looking to advance people to screening interviews. And so again, if you're just sending out a generic resume and it doesn't

have any of those buzzwords in it. There you're not going to get past the screen. So let's take the other arguments or the other case to this, and how does it start up that has potential court an advisor who may be a lawyer, like how to like what gets Barri's attention to for you to be an advisor to my thing? A good idea, Like honestly, I'm not someone who focuses solely on you know, how how fast can they go public or how much money can they

make or how much money have they already raised? And for me it's it's also the journey and like how passionate are these these people are this team about what it is that they're doing. And also I always try to ask people, you know, what what is the difference ferentiation factor between you and your competitors? Because at that point, I've probably looked at who who's your competition? How is

this different? Like what what's gonna be the factor that gets you noticed and gets you investment dollars and not crash and burn as opposed to these people who are already doing something similar may not be exact, but if it's similar enough people will pass on it. UM. So those are the things that really catch my attention. And UM and a deck, what is your what does your deck look like? If you have a thirty slide deck?

I'm not I'm not reading all that. And I can tell you from working with UM, working with startups and then working with people working with investors, that's literally the first thing they say they want a deck that is in ten slides or less, and ten is pushing it. It's the seven that's even better. How should start us be thinking about compensating advisors? Like is there a compensation

for an advisory role? Is there an equity package? Like how do you get you know, folks, really good attorneys to come on and give them some incentive to be there? Or do you need an incentive to be there? Um, it's gonna be on an individual basis. And always I always say you get what you negotiate. So that's something that people should always be mindful of. Is it's not gonna necessarily you don't You're not necessarily gonna always get what you deserve. You're gonna get what you can negotiate.

And for me, when I have done it, it's been a mix of actual just equity, and in compensation. Some people choose just compensation, some people choose just equity. It's really gonna depend on what that person wants and what

it is that the startup can provide. I would say nine times i'd a tend it's easier for them to provide equity because they may not have the cash on hand yet because they haven't raised So but if you're getting equity and they're doing a preseed round or anything else, like you're you're gonna be one of the few people that that's on the cap table, and that's a good place to be, particularly if they end up getting funding and they do go public or they're acquired. That's the

other thing people don't think about. Everyone's always so like, you know, short term, focused on how how long can we get to I p O? Well, maybe I p O isn't necessarily the best route to go. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to just get acquired by a larger company. I was looking at your website, and so many people have blogs on their website that do not get updated

because people got stuff to do. But like, you really go in on on your writing, right, And I wonder, like what makes you prioritize the thoughts that you have to say to publish them regularly. Yeah, I think because there's always something going on, particularly in the last I would say three years, there's there's always been something going on, whether it's in the tech space or it has to do with social justice. And like that was the thing

that I wrote um last was talking about. You know, all these tech companies made these pledges like after George Floyd, like, oh, we care so deeply, and we're gonna invest in black founders. We're gonna do business, you know, we're gonna do have more supplier diversity funds deviated and set aside for black owned businesses, and we're gonna have these hiring targets where we're gonna have of our leadership is gonna be black.

And it's like okay, And then you read the fine print and it's like by twenty six it's like, okay, well that's fine. At least you gave me something to work with, right, like I have, there's a metric and then there's a day. But that was my gripe. As it's been a year and no one has reported out on any of the the things that they've done, and like, where where is it? Because I could say I'm gonna do a whole bunch of things today and but I won't have them done until so. Does that mean you're

not gonna start working on them until so? For me, it's one of those things where it should be a constant progress report. And the other thing that gave me such pause about that was the idea of saying, oh, well, we're going to self audit and report out to the press was like, you know, no, that literally is like what I said. That's like if I punish my son and then tell him, well, what do you want your

punishment to be? And he says, I want cookies and ice cream and my Nintendo switch, and I say okay, and then I'm just gonna report out that he was punished. I'm not gonna tell you all that other stuff. So that,

to me, is not a viable option. There need to be independent auditors that are coming in and looking at that because there's no there's no incentive for the company to really tell us the truth, right, Like, they'll just report out the metrics that fit their narrative that makes it look like they did something, but they're going to completely bypass and maybe the other are four things that they said they were going to do. So we'll just

tell you about this one. Just focus on this one, and then you ask them, well what about the other four? What about them? We really did really great on this one though. Yeah, I mean when we have I don't want to call everybody in diversity theater, but there's a lot of folks who do do diversity theater, and we think when we have things like a George Floyd during a COVID pandemic happened, and so a lot of us do talk about how to who's holding these folks accountable

to what they said they were going to do. What has to happen to get to a place to where there is a body that holds people accountable to those promises? Like what is it shareholders that have to step in and organize, or like what has to happen in order to get to a place that we're saying we're no longer having to say somebody has to hold them accountable to such and such is holding them accountable? Yeah? I

think it should be. It's going to be a mix of shareholders and I would love to see like a coalition of independent auditors who kind of do this work um and then make them actually have to sign on to handle that. But I think that that's gonna be very difficult because these people they don't want to be held accountable. They want to continue to do what they're doing and do it in the dark. And when they decide to tell you something is when they decided to

tell you something, and it's it's troublesome. But I think that you know, press asking these questions, and that's why you asked why I published as much as I do? Because again, who fact checks the fact checkers or in this case, who's gonna who's gonna tell me what you've actually got gotten done? You had a year and like I want to see, I want to see the receipts,

and it looks like you don't have any. So what that tells me is you haven't started working on this, or if you have, your results were so abysmal you didn't even want to share them. So but I think there's a fast company like they don't they donated, but they they made their entire June issue around this topic. And I think if you have more people continuously asking the question, you can only avoid it for so long if they're like eight or nine publications asking you the

same question. And that's the other thing I thought was super interesting is then you have people who write independently or I'm but I'm a Fast Company contributor. But then you have other people who are doing things independently asking the question. You have people creating tools that are asking

the question. My favorite tool last year is one called layoffs dot f y I, where it listed all all the people who got laid off during the pandemic from UM I want to say, starting in March, and from a whole bunch of big tech companies down to like some smaller ones, but ones that are significantly funded. And and in some cases you could see the names of the people and a cursory glance of that the names

and the department that they were in. And it was h people, it will salespeople, it was d I people, it was all the people were typically people of color and women congregate the most in those departments. And you could look at some of the names and it was very clear I could probably guess what this person is. Yeah, But that's that's the thing. It's like, you have people who are doing it independently you have, you know, actual magazines and press asking the question, there's only so long

that you can hide this information. There was a blog post you did about social media and it being an extension of white privilege, and it was a white privilege in the office, and I specifically wanted to hone in on this one line you wrote. It said, Um, there's an added layer of complexity when you add tech and social media to this mix. Now you don't just get to know your colleagues in the workplace, but also by their digital presence and what they choose to comment on

or avoid. And I particularly asked this because I hire people. And I wonder because the first time I see a resume, I gotta look at Facebook, I got to look at Twitter. I want to see what you're talking about and who are you really beyond this resume that you gave. And I wonder your thoughts on how this continues to play out and the complexity in tech. I think that the complexity with it is like oftentimes you're you know, you're working with these people who are also building the tools.

And one thing that they did at Facebook is as soon as you accept your offer, I think within forty five minutes, of me accepting my offer. Um my soon to be colleagues sent me Facebook requests and I was like, oh, no, are we doing it? I don't know. I don't And my husband specifically said, why don't you just create the limited profile function and add them to that? And I said, honestly, that sounds like a lot of work, Like that's me

maintaining essentially to digital presences on one plant. For him, that's too much work. If you look, get what you're getting. So if you like I remember that might have been like the second or third week that I was working there and that man who had that really cute mud shot with the blue eyes and everyone loved him, and I posted something about it and my general counsel swiveled his chair because he sat at the next bank of chairs, and he was like, so that's what you like. I'm like, oh,

you got jokes calling okay? And I said, look, I don't want to know. I don't want a felon necessarily. I don't want him like, but it's a it's a cute picture. Cute what's what they calling prison bay or something's in prison but that's the thing. Well, prison bay ended up coming up. He became a model and married

like a millionaire, so he won, I guess so. But yeah, it was one of those things where you know, at any other workplace, nobody would have seen that because I wouldn't if you send me a friend request and like you just remain in purgatory. So I think it is the digital presence of you know, what are the things that you choose to comment on and what are the things that you ignore? And it's not like people don't

notice that. So whether it is you know, you didn't acknowledge that there was a string of people that were killed by police or armed vigilantes in the case of a mod Aubrey. If there you don't want to talk about that, or you don't speak on that, or you don't notice it, but you hear us talking about it in the break room or something, or you hear us talking about it outside of work, and you happen to just you know, join in with something like that, but

you don't say anything. Don't think that when you walk away that we weren't talking about the fact that you didn't say anything. And you know, I've been in other workplaces where something like that will happen, and you know, people will just completely turned pivot and run from the conversation. And but I've also been in a workplace. But then this is one of the people that I say was a great, great ally. When I was at Facebook is

this guy named Mark. And it was after Mike Brown had been killed, and I just didn't you have an open workspace? And I just didn't want to. I didn't want to stand there all day and sit there like where people could come up to me and act like this didn't happen, like you're just coming and you know, talking to me about whatever, and I just I don't

want to talk about that. So I went and locked myself in an empty conference room, and he went around the floor to all the conference rooms looking for me, and then when he did, he just knocked on the door and I was like sure. He was like, I just want to know if you're okay. And I was like,

how how long did you go around this building? He was like about ten minutes, and he's like, but I just wanted to know if you were okay because I saw you earlier this morning and then I didn't see you again, and I was like, honestly, no, I'm tired of this. It's exhausting, and he was like, I know. I was like, if you want to talk, let me know,

But like, that's the kind of thing like that. I clearly I noticed that versus everyone else who acted like it didn't happen, Versus a different colleague who was like, oh, wow, somebody was shot byl I don't even know. Okay, Like you have the luxury to not did not know or did not care. And that's what I mean by the extension of that versus you see people hopping conversations about politics or something else and then it's like, oh, he has a different view than I thought, or she is

probably a Karen and yeah. I mean you just look at that stuff and you notice it and you just file it away in the back of your head. Right. So that's what I mean by the extension of like you get to when they say bring your whole self to work. First off, I don't agree that necessarily everyone should bring their whole self to work, And I don't know one should bring a hundred. If you're gonna get

as close as you want, maybe bring eight. Even then, that eight I think is reserved for certain types of people, and those types of people tend to be straight able body, white man. Yeah. Um, I was intrigued by your post

the computer generated apocalypse that never happened? And I wonder where you see this particular trajectory progressing, um with regards to like social media, AI, venture capital even and if we stay on our current path, there are something that would say, you know, the wealth gap gets brought, the minority communities get hurt even more than they are. Is this the same thing as the apocalypse that never happened?

Or where do you see this progressing as we continue to go down the road of AI and certain people getting funded versus other groups of people getting funded and and the and the like. Um. I think what you could say in that case, I wouldn't say it would be a computer generated apocalypse that never happened. I would say computer generated apocalypse that did happen. Um. And I think we we all saw it. It all happened in real time with you know, disinformation all over everyone's social

media platforms. It's still happening in terms of just the vaccine, and people don't want to take the vaccine because well I read they're putting microchips, Like where are you all getting this? But it's one of those things that if you know you are using not you to sational outlets to get your information, which I don't think is necessarily always a bad thing. But like, I'm not taking any type of, you know, medical advice from Alex Jones on

Info Wars. It's just not ever gonna happen. And I definitely don't need Tucker Crosson to tell me that COVID isn't isn't really real and I don't need a vaccine while you were vaccinated, sir. So to me, it's we've seen this already happen in real time and it's still continuing to happen. And I think if there isn't any type of actual regulation, I don't know that you we can prevent it from getting worse. You. I mean, you've already thrown an election and now you're getting people sick.

So it's it isn't that it's not happening. It is happening. The question is how do we stop it? And I think the best answer that you have for that is and I don't know that social media companies in particular will like the answer or is right now, they are distinguished as platforms, which means they're not subject to certain regulation. But if you publishers now they have a responsibility and

but they don't want it, which I could understand. Their attitude is, well, we're just the mechanism and the portal for which you post and share whatever cat videos, pictures, or your kids or Trump lost the election or he won the election, whichever you choose, and they don't want to be responsible for having to take down information about Oh well no he won the election of stolen and you know those were loving tourists that visited on January six,

Like they don't want the responsibility of that, which I understand. But at some point you can't just continue to proliferate all of this, like you can't. It's that's essentially the equivalent, the digital equivalent of throwing a rock and hide in your hand. That's also why I there's another social media company that I like a lot called Telepath, because you actually have to use your real name and picture or

you cannot participate versus Twitter. It's like somebody would a cat photo and like don one, two, three four, and he's calling you everything but a child of God. So I think if they're some of that would be started

if people could not hide an anonymity. There was this period during COVID and right after the murder George Floyd, Um, where black people, I feel like, had this window of opportunity to capitalize is the wrong word, but for the sake of his conversation, capitalized on the attention that we had from VESI, capitalists, from corporations, for people who finally saw that we weren't crying wolf all these years, but that were they were actually actually systemic issues that kept

us from being able to progress in many different use of our lives. Um is that window now close? Are we are? We? Are we so far past it to where they don't have to talk about it anymore, they don't have to pay attention anymore. That is a good question. And I've thought about this for a while myself. Um I. My prediction was that it was probably gonna be over either after the election around January, after inauguration. I would

say it's not closed, but it's closing. And the reason being is, um, I think there's a course now at a different added element to it, where you have all of these voting restrictions being written into state laws, and you also have these two Democratic senators who refused to do away with the filibuster in order to right right that wrong and get federal legislation passed. Like they don't want the John exactly, they don't want for other people.

They definitely don't want the George Floyd Policing Reform Act. But I think as long as those things are still churning and on the table, the windows still open, And I would just say it was like it was open like this last summer, and it's probably open like this now, So it's it's there. It's just closing. But I also think that that's on us to like keep forcing it and keep pushing it. Black Tech Green Money is the production of Black and the Afro Tech, The Black Effect

podcast Network, and nine Hired Media. It's produced by Morgan Debonn and me Well Lucas, with additional production supported by Love Visas Lewis. Special thank you to Michael Davis. Since the carsa von Jan you know like the Wine. Yes that's his real name. Learn more about my guests and other technist as the end of it is an afrotech dot com. The video version of this episode will drop the Black Tech Green Money on YouTube next week, so I'll tap in joining Black Tech green money, leave us

a fire star rating on iTunes. Go get your money, peace and love,