Understanding Crypto, Blockchain, and AI With Alula

I was telling everyone they were idiots. I was like, "This is a fake thing. It's a Ponzi scheme." I was wrong. Where did I go wrong there? What was where was I off? I still don't understand how the technology has taken off. >> They own their own Bitcoin. They're storing their own keys. They have it offline. It's in a hardware wallet. That person in essence becomes their own bank. >> Hey everyone, welcome to Ambition Aligned. I'm your host Devin Kum, CPA, MBA, lecturer at universities and doing lots of other fun stuff like PCG consulting and advising AI startups. Today I'm talking to my good friend Alula from college. He's a founder and

has an expertise in blockchain technology and AI and we go all over the place. We talk about crypto, we talk about AI, we talk about what I didn't understand about crypto and what I wish I knew and I learned a ton. So I think it's going to be really valuable for all of you and I hope you enjoy the show today. Everyone welcome to Ambition Aligned. I'm your host Devin Kum, CPA, MBA, lecturer at universities and doing lots of other fun stuff like PCG consulting and advising AI startups. Today I'm talking to my good friend Alula from college. He's a founder and has an expertise in blockchain

technology and AI. And we go all over the place. We talk about crypto. We talk about AI. We talk about what I didn't understand about crypto and what I wish I knew. And I learned a ton. So I think it's going to be really valuable for all of you. And I hope you enjoy the show today. It feels like yesterday we were in college together and wow, you know, 10 years goes by pretty fast and we got to do a reunion or something. But I really appreciate you coming on. really appreciate you staying in touch and would love to hear today more about what you're doing right now and you're working on some amazing projects and it really excited me to hear some of the

businesses that you're building. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's great great to reconnect and you know I think I think back of our days at Cal State Northridge accounting students business students and business honors program is where we our paths crossed initially and you know it's just a really great and inspiring seeing your journey you know similar to you I I did the public accounting track initially out of school so just went into public accounting focusing mostly on tax and technology

early on during you know my time in college at Sea Sun, I was bitten by the innovation bug and a big, you know, curiosity really sprung around blockchain technology and what it potentially could mean for the accounting profession around audit, right? So, my curiosity at the time was if there's a immutable perfect ledger recordkeeping system that could exist that, you know, no one could cheat, no one could manipulate, will the world need as many auditors? And so that kind

of that thought process that curiosity really spun an entire career around digital assets. Fortunately over the years I did some work in in other accounting firms helped build a SAS product for digital assets crypto and you know really focusing on understanding from a data perspective how to properly track and report uh activity on blockchains basically. So you know at the end of the day it's a transparent fully visible recordkeeping system and because of its visibility

anyone could technically query information from there and be able to figure out what happened. So if there's you know like I had clients that had various types of activity over the years whether it's business related activities investments or different types of things where you know they need to report for a tax purpose what was the gain what was the loss what was their overall activity for their business or their personal investments. And so a lot of that data just being able to get it is one thing and then being able to communicate from

an accounting perspective from a tax perspective. Uh that's kind of the magic and the art or whatever. So that's kind of where the curiosity started over the past I'd say like two three years whenever chat GPT came out. I went from being an all tricks low code no code guy to all of a sudden learning Python learning JavaScript learning all these different programming languages. And you know now with the advent of live coding and everything else I'm able to basically spin up a lot of different

types of solutions including AI agents for businesses. And so that's kind of the main focus today. My company I'm the founder of is called Edge Consulting Labs. We're kind of at the intersection between an AI blockchain like venture studio venture kind of group and then we're also consultants. And so I advise, you know, existing crypto companies and platforms on strategy. And then I also help enterprise companies and businesses

that are interested in accepting crypto or using the technology to be able to implement it. So that's kind of areas of the expertise and how I got here. How do people send you money, man? You nailed like all of the buzzwords for a successful, you know, fundraising round like AI, crypto. He just kind of like crushed it all out in one go. I love it. and consulting, right? And so, yeah. So, you got to send like a zel after this for everyone to just go fund you because >> I accept crypto. So, yeah, you could send me stable coins or anything

digital. >> Well, I have so much to pick your brain on. We have a short time and I'm sure I'll bring you back on. I want to hear what your business does and how it helps and I want to build up to that with like a foundational understanding and I want you to kind of I think with this dialogue I wanted you to tell me where I went wrong because I remember when we were in college crypto was just starting to take off and Bitcoin was that was kind of the main one at the time. There wasn't even these derivatives like Ethereum and and whatnot. I think those were just starting to take off about 10 years ago. And I was telling everyone they were idiots. I was like this is a

fake thing. It's a Ponzi scheme. I like the idea of blockchain being auditable and I can see how that could change companies, but I just can't imagine getting Coke or Kaiser or these companies that have been forever to ever adopt this stuff. And I was, wow, I was wrong. People are using it. I've seen maps of companies using stablecoin like it's changing the way the world work. And so where did I go wrong there? What was where was I off? still don't understand how the technology has taken off so far and what the real advantage

to it is. >> I'd say first off you were not by yourself. You're not alone during that whole time. I think probably the biggest consensus by everyone really at that time was that hesitation and apprehension to kind of you know with the technology or whatever. And I think like the most famous person I remember right around that time was Jamie Diamond from JP Morgan. And you know he said the same exact things that he said, right? It's a scam. He'd fire anyone from his company that was dealing with stable or

crypto or anything like that during that time. Um and yeah, a relatively early phase in the evolution of crypto. I think the total market cap was barely, you know, not even a trillion dollars, right? it was before it kind of reached that point in the adoption curve. I'm a big fan of history. I think like for me, I love history. I love learning about humanity and how we've uh over the millennia interacted with each other, transacted with each other. And

throughout all these different periods of time, there's always been different types of currencies that people and governments and societies have accepted. I think today when you look at Bitcoin, at least for me, when I look at the context of when Bitcoin came out to the public when it was released, I always think about the period of time after the financial crisis basically in 2008, 2009. And I think about the banks failing, the government bailing them out, society being upset because here's

this massive bailout of banks, but what about the people that lost homes, the people that lost everything that they had during that period of time? And so there was this ideological battle between the people and the establishment in a sense, right? And so I think Bitcoin really did come out as a alternatively where you can have a system where you can have individuals being able to transact with each other to be able to interact financially with each other without the need for a centralized third

party, right? Without the need for a central bank, any government or anyone in between. two individuals could, you know, someone could buy 10 with 10,000 Bitcoin, two pizzas, right? Someone can do all of these things, whether it's good, whether it's bad, they can still transact in this system. You fast forward today and leading up to today, too. Your explanation is great, but it sounds like the value prop one of the key ones is now you have this benchmark for exchange that you can exchange different currencies for

without being charged the all all the different fees that you'd get charged for translating currency. Does that seem like one of the big value propositions that you're saying or am I missing that? Yeah. So the fees that's a big part as well because there's always intermediaries, people in the middle that kind of facilitate the transfer that are able to collect a fee or make some sort of profit between that interaction. I think additional piece would be the ability for individuals to

transact with one another without the need for a centralized party. Right? So like for example if someone wants to like if they have their own bitcoin right and they own their own bitcoin they're storing their own keys they have it offline it's in a hardware wallet that person in essence becomes their own bank that person can get on an airplane with a billion dollars in a flash drive and hop on a plane with that billion dollars in their pocket right that

person has the ability to freely transact they could send payments to people they could do whatever they wanted they can or irrespective of a bank telling them that they have an account with them and that the bank is allowing them to send or wire money across the border or do whatever. I'd say what stood out to me the most would be more like the the libertarianish kind of principles behind cryptocurrency in the sense that it's a self-s sovereignty type of currency where you have the ability if you choose to

>> manage your own asset and be able to be your own bank in a sense. >> That's fascinating. So like yeah regulations just didn't keep up. Like when you go to another country if you have more than 10,000 bucks in your pocket you got to report it. But it sounds like if you got your flash drive, well, there's a question of is that really in your pocket or not? Is it's somewhere else? And so you kind of got around the regulation, right? The necessary regulation, which is beneficial from a libertarian or capitalist kind of view of, well, now you're not hindering money flows anymore. And now you can have more of a

global free market. Is that kind of the argument? >> That is a big part of it. Yes. >> That's cool. I didn't know about it that way. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Are countries. Do you know if are there people trying to catch up? Do you know if there's like laws of like I don't I just want to be straight. I don't know. We didn't do the legal research here on what countries have laws about carrying the flash drive in your pocket, but are countries kind of catching wind to this. Do you know or >> I'm sure there are. Again, you know, this isn't legal advice or anything from either of us, but um I'd say, >> you know, there's reporting requirements. There's a lot of different

types. For example, like KYC, right? Know your customer. There's rules that are in place when a person sets up a Coinbase account for example that they provide identifiable information their name their social security number their business the company and EIN number and so from that perspect is onboarding and regulatory framework but yeah I think it is interesting because yeah the $10,000 cash limit but if you have a million dollar worth of Bitcoin

I mean technically if you just know your seed phrase for example the password to accessing your wallet that's in your head, right? So, it kind of it's a shift on a lot of like thought processes, right? Like I think a lot of established things like even even now, you know, the the new rules around FHA, you know, being able to basically look at your Bitcoin holdings or your crypto holdings and being able to then, you know, lend you money to purchase a home, for example, right? like things like that have never been, you know, a reality in

the past, but today, you know, some some kid could have, you know, a Dogecoin, you know, arsenal of tokens and have a lot of capital that way and, you know, now they can, you know, finance a home or, you know, buy a business or something, right? >> Yeah. Well, and I want to like I want to acknowledge there's kind of I'm sure there's a dark side to it. Like I was in marketplaces before and there's a whole evil element of human trafficking and that kind of stuff that happens with money laundering and all of that with marketplace but I'm not going to focus on that here. I just want to say like I'm sure that there's an element there

but for the purpose of the conversation we can kind of steer away from that. I just want to acknowledge it on its face. >> Yeah. Actually I was in New York for a blockchain summit in September. It was a few months ago, but the focus was on regulators and kind of their methodologies and practices for being able to catch a lot of this nefarious activity on blockchains. You know, the first thing that a lot of times people even in the early days of Bitcoin had a misconception of because of you being able to transact freely, you're able to act basically in complete anonymity. And

that's actually not the case. Blockchain basically gives what's more of a pseudo anonymous layer. So, you know, even though I don't know who's doing what, I could track all that beyond the chain. So, I could see, you know, somebody purchased some illegal product on a marketplace. I could see the wallets that are interacting. I could see where they're onboarding and offboarding. A lot of times the regulators or the government agencies or all these different entities, all they have to do is just follow the transactions on the

blockchain and eventually leads to some sort of on-ramp or off-ramp where a person's identity is actually shown. So it's probably more secure than cash. >> Yeah, it's fascinating because you get all the advantages that you're saying, but you actually also have the legal advantage over cash where like carrying cash over the border is a major problem for buying drugs or pursuing legal illegal activities. At least the police have a train of, hey, here's or the federal regulators have a chain of, hey, here's where these activities are happening and we know these activities are being purchased and they can kind of chase down location-wise at least.

>> Yeah, that's fascinating. I think one of the biggest areas right now when it comes to cryptoreated scams, a lot of times people will exploit the contract. There's a saying in crypto, the code is law, right? So everything is programmatically designed. So if like there's a smart contract, you know, Alula sends Devon an item, when Devon receives the item, payment from Alula's wallet will be automatically sent to Devon's wallet, right? That's programmatically there. Now, what

happens is sometimes there's people, really smart kids, a lot of times that fight exploits within these different codes and smart contracts and they take advantage of that. You've seen kids that are in their 20s racking up 20, 30, 40, 50, you know, million plus and and and stolen funds. And even in those cases, they steal the funds. They try to wash and launder away the evidence as much as they can, but eventually that information flows back. And so there's a lot of really big cases currently in the

New York courts and uh in the federal system actually focusing on some of these exploits. So it's a very fascinating space and data is king. So >> yeah. Wow. That's amazing. So what So that helps me understand where I miss there's a lot of value props here, right? So it sounds like there's a value prop of you don't have intermediary fees anymore. Similar to like when you had stock brokers that would charge you commissions. You don't have to worry about changing currency or any of that. You have more of a free market, a global free market. And there's actually some benefits over cash from a legal

perspective. And there's just more there's some more stability. I guess I that that argument I struggle with where like hey it's an inflation hedge. It's like well it's also very speculative right and it it's very volatile compared to most but inflation edges but I struggle with that cuz gold is an inflation edge too and it's pretty volatile. Anything else I'm missing there from a primary benefits that you that are arising. >> I would say one of the key primary benefits at least when we're talking in the context of coin would be I'd say probably one of the number one reasons

why Bitcoin is really awesome and that has to do with its scarcity model. So by design in existence there will only be 21 million bitcoin that will ever exist. Now each bitcoin you can technically like someone has like a dollar they could buy a dollar worth of bitcoin today right you can you know it could be den not broken down into amounts but the fact that it's scarce the fact that there's only 21 million that's ever going to be in existence I think in the long term that drives like

the you know kind of the like right now what we're seeing is many like Micro Strategy and GameStop are now actively putting coin on their balance sheets right? They they hold treasuries, they keep the Bitcoin, their books look good, they raise more money, they buy more Bitcoin, they continue to do that. But in the future, you might end up seeing a world where these companies end up becoming like banks basically, right? Where they have massive amounts of coin holdings and the world is basically full

of all this different type of activity and value and you have stable coins being able to facilitate daily transactions. But the digital version of gold is a much more scarce version of gold where you know gold technically is infinite because who knows what they could just dig up tomorrow and some country somewhere but with Bitcoin there's a finite cap 53 million or however many millionaires living in the world today right if every single millionaire said I want one bitcoin or I want some bitcoin exposure it's

impossible for them to do that so I think certain aspects of that would be value ads to what Bitcoin represents. >> Yeah. It's almost like a global global currency at that point that a global Yeah. global store of value like gold except more finite. And to your point, I never thought of it that way is if it does continue to catch on and everyone wants it as an inflation hedge. It's just so strange to me because it has a store of value, but becomes like the ultimate Ponzi or ultimate like ladder of well because it's so scarce and you

got to get in and you weren't first and the next person comes in and buys out and I don't know what I guess the only risk I see is what if everyone decides to sell at one time but that risk hasn't materialized. It it actually has been relatively it's been volatile but steadily if you look over the last 10 years it's gone up pretty steadily. So how do you fit in? I mean, if you have any comments on that, I'd love to get your perspective, but also curious about what you're doing in the space or your business particularly or what's captured interest and how does that interrelate with AI? >> More than happy to share that. I think

my last thing on the Bitcoin comment was, I've never met a single person that has come to me and said, "I regret buying Bitcoin." Myself included and everyone else always says, "I wish I bought more Bitcoin. I wish my college tuition Bitcoin instead of, you know, paying for school. I take on more debt. That's fine. But you know what today would be a lot different right? So >> but in terms of what I do today so I I mentioned earlier I'm the founder and and recently I gave myself the title chief innovator of consulting labs and

so basically what I focus on is building. So I have a personal brand called my crypto world. That's a crypto with a zero and not an O. And so I've always been like a builder in this space. I've always been, you know, developing things and experimenting and learning how this technology works. Um, so basically what our main focus with consulting labs is using low code, no code tools and various different types of, you know, solutions out there to build tools and different products and things like that. So right now our main

product that I'm working on is called edge flow. And what EdgeFlow is is basically an inventory intelligence tool for small businesses. So the idea is that most small businesses, you know, you go into a small business a lot of times like they're, you know, keeping their records in Excel. They have, you know, different types of systems that they're dealing with for ERPs and things like that. But if you ask a business owner, hey, what is your cost of goods sold for a particular item that they deal with in their inventory? Nine out of 10 times, most of those business

owners won't know the answer right off the bat. And so that's what ES Flow is trying to solve. Basically what we do is we have a integration capability where we can connect to different types of ERP systems or self-managed Excel spreadsheets. We are able to take the data regarding inventory and then tokenize those real world assets. So create a digital twin a representation of that using the Hideera blockchain and then the business owner has a tool that they can interact with to ask questions or figure out what's going on with their

business. And so >> what is the blockchain? Why why the blockchain? what does that add to it? >> So, pitchflow initially is focusing on inventory. Our goal is to get into payments. And so, the first part is is creating digital real world representations of items. So, think like a luxury jeweler for example, has a bunch of inventory. Um, she maintains a lot of her information manually or uses some ERP system, but a lot of the visibility into the business isn't really there. And so with edge flow,

we're able to create digital twins for all of the different items that she has in her inventory. And then through edge POS basically, which is our our POSOS system, we're able to integrate uh Circle, which is the parent company for USDC, their payment network. and do that using stable coins. A small business is able to lower their credit card processing fees from upwards of 2.9% all the way down to 0.1% using the stable coins. So that's kind of the main

focus there. It's giving the businesses insights into their operations and then lowering their operating costs associated with transaction fees. And throughout that whole time, the blockchain when someone purchases an item, the digital twin, the NFT is given to the person who's purchasing it in exchange for the USDC token basically. So, it's a kind of a way to take a real world asset and create a digital copy to allow a transaction. >> Wow. Okay. So, here are a few advantages here and I just want to make sure I'm following. So when you're doing this,

first is if someone's to make a payment for this asset, your platform would then be able to transfer that payment or process that payment with less fees because you're using the blockchain. >> Is that the right am I saying? Okay. >> Exactly. >> Second is now I know when you with inventory management is a mess for most companies because they are using Excels or even ERPs or if you acquire even the bigger companies, you're acquiring a lot of small companies, it's really hard to standardize. say all these fragmented systems thing. If you migrate through your system, it all goes through the blockchain. So, it's all auditable now.

You know where things are going and where they're coming and it's all become standardized and you can implement. It sounds like you have APIs to bring it all in from different systems to standardize it. >> Exactly. >> That's huge. >> Yeah. It's really, you know, I feel like today there's a lot of really powerful tools out there and so I'm actually a resell partner and affiliate for N10. So, I mentioned >> Oh, great. I So, you know, using tools like and and you're actually able to create these automated processes where you can ingest

data. You can then kick off. It's almost like an orchestration engine basically and you can then have the ability to create the tokens, create the payments logic so that the tokens are transferred one by one and then you're also able to create the logic for kicking off AI agents as well. So the idea is you know we have like an ongoing spreadsheet that is basically being updated in real time as things are being added and things are being sold. Um the AI model is able to feed from that information and then you

know a small business owner could say hey you know what were my sales for today right here's all the information. Here's your top selling item. Here's some items that you need to restock up on. Right? like all these little things where for the small business it's really a matter of empowering them because you know just like back in the day they said in the future there will be a personal computer in every home. Well, you know, we're past that. We have personal computers in our pockets at all times, our cell phones. And so now we're at the point where in the future everyone should have their own personal AI

assistant. And so that's where we're aiming it for at Edge. >> That's amazing. Yeah, I can't imagine how valid it would be just to speak to your phone. I already used Chat GT and Gemini and all of them and compare each other way too much. But just to like it's like calling somebody be like, "Hey, how was my inventory? What were my cost of sales? >> Hey, did did you process the payments? Did we collect the payments for it? What was my average fee? How much am I saving from this?" For people watching this who don't know, it like takes company sometimes 30 days, 60 days to close the books to figure out what was sold. And

then you have these aggressive like inventory management and physical management systems that you have to overlay. And it sounds like this could solve a lot of it. Like I guess how do you think of if inventory gets lost or what or if inventory breaks like breakage or theft would this help with that too? >> Uh so so there there's a couple elements you know someone asked a really great question today in our hello feature hackathon working session and it was around real world assets. They said,

"Okay, what if someone has a car, right, and the car gets damaged, right? How do you update that in the NFT?" And so there's there's caveats to like different cases. I think with the car one, my example for them was almost like there would be kind of like a third-party service where they would it's almost it's called like an oracle where like let's it's like an appraisal service that someone specifically provides to this network and their job is just basically to validate that the vehicle is still in the same condition

that it's in or if there was some damages what's the new value for it and then that information their vote their decision updates the the logic associated with the NFT so that there's now metadata and tags that updated to the to the you know current state of it. Now with the case of items that are missing at least with that flow the way that I've designed it is there's two parts to it. So one is like a manual piece where you can update information add information whether it's like skew numbers or descriptions or values. So

part of it could be you know the ability for an owner to just go in and say hey this these items were lost in a fire or some sort of No, I know. It's cooking with me now. It's a completeness thing. So, the blockchain's complete. It never is going to get deleted or anything. But so, you're always going to know what was originally a sale. >> It's just as the data migrates, you can tag it with metadata that's going to state like, oh, this doesn't exist anymore. It was broken or destroyed or something. But that still keeps the flow alive, which is actually really valuable

from an audit perspective. Like, oh, it you can't change the past. There's a true time and audit log associated with it. >> Exactly. Exactly. So, it wouldn't be a case of like, hey, I'm just going to delete all of this inventory for my books after I, you know, like all that lower my cost of sales. >> The ability to update information, the ability to have like an updated provenance and understanding what exactly is going on and how the values are transacted over time. I think that piece is there. And then you know then then it opens up a lot of doors because

with what you're able to do now is create logic right so you could say based off of these tags this is you know this is how you recognize information that's cuz that's tagged as a loss for example right and we won't you know because it's a lost item there's no way that someone could sell that item right so if it's lost it's lost even if it's on the books it'll never be sold >> that's so cool so I'm curious what how do you make sure that a blockchain links to an an existing item on day one. Could

there be fraudulent inclusions of inventory? >> Yeah. >> Or how do you prevent that? >> Yeah. And so like uh you're saying like in the beginning someone could just say, "Hey, I have a million dollars worth of inventory. I'm going to go to the bank now and show them this information and you know." >> Yeah. Exactly. >> So So from that perspective and that's a great question. I think first off it's the focus of this tool. You think about it like any of these personal finance apps that are out there, right? Like I can plug in my my checking account to

these personal some of them have capabilities where it's like you can adjust information in there or whatever. But no one's going to look at the personal finance app and say because of the XYZ app, we're going to lend you money or something. The goal of Edge Flow is really to give small businesses a tool that allows them to actually be able to run their businesses better. So for them, it benefits them to be honest. It benefits them to be truthful. It benefits them to be transparent because for them they're getting access to a

tool that then will allow them to be better at running their business to improve how they actually operate. You can create millions of fake items, but then you'll never get the sale because no one's going to buy those fake items because someone goes to your store and they're like, "Okay, want to buy all the let's donut shop for example. You say you baked a million donuts today. You're going to sell a million donuts, but at the end of the day, you only sell a few dozen because that's all you really have. The real world that piece is really the connection between the

digital and the physical. >> The physical is missing. You know, you could have the digital all you want, but you know, there's no real physical kind of economic value that's being created. Now let's hypothetically you did create a million token don for your donuts and you you you know over the years create a million donuts and every time you sell a donut you Dunkin Donuts can be a great customer that case right I guess that it makes perfect sense to me of I was in the financial due diligence kind of mindset.

We had a client or I had a client once who you like we're looking at a target and the target said they had all this stuff and then once we got there none of it existed and they were just inflating their and so that's why you hire financial due diligence experts because we go and audit we audit your stuff and you go hey you probably shouldn't buy this company for $30 million so you have nothing that they've promised and or purport to have and so that's what I was thinking and you're saying hey that's not the point of the tool at the end of the day you still need someone to go and make sure the stuff is actually there that's awesome man >> and even for the auditor. This benefits

the auditors more because here's an immutable record that says this is what's supposed to be there. And when you're doing your physical inspection and you're doing an inventory and you're like, "Hey, I only see three dozen donuts here." >> Yeah, I got another chain here, but then I also want to leave space faith for you to tell me kind of what you're working on next and how the audience could support you. But the chain is that brings up an interesting phase of like human elements and AI. And so I'll lead with like I'm using AI more than I ever thought I would like to help me prepare for my college lectures. So I'll give

you an example like today I was trying to figure out how do I reframe a business 101 lecture to start off the course to match all the learning objectives but like weave in my personal narrative journey of like businesses I've started that have failed and businesses that have done well. And I was able to leverage a book, benchmark against the book, put against stories I've written about my own businesses and divide that all into an outline and then create a slide presentation that's probably in the top 1% of anything we ever got in college in like an hour and

a half. That's kind of how I'm using AI day-to-day. And I'm always curious since you're on the forefront of this, are you doing similar things or how are you imagining how humans and AI interact and how are you benefiting from it since you're on the forefront? Absolutely, man. A firm believer that AI is a powerful tool that can enhance our capabilities. I felt it's an additional benefit to leverage AI because I can use AI tools for everything from helping me manage my social media presence, helping

me evaluate different deals and prospecting, helping me with coding, programming, prototyping, planning trips, personal kind of things. It's a very powerful tool to allow us to do a lot of different things. I have family members that are older. Like my mom, they love using Chad PT. They use it all the time for various types of things, right? I was at an event at Cal State Northridge not too long ago was the workforce of the future. They had IBM speaking there. One of the speakers

had a very interesting quote. They said, "Don't worry about AI taking your job. Worry about the person who knows AI taking your job." And I think AI is the ultimate equalizer and massive opportunity for us. So the fact that you as a professor are using it in preparing your curriculum, personalizing it, aligning with what it is that you want to to the students, I think is exactly what AI's capabilities and benefits are for. It's more than just

putting in text and getting a response and just running it. It's like you analyze, you think about it, you use multiple tools. You don't just use one there like so many facets to it and also you don't rely upon it to think for you. You use it as a tool to enhance your abilities and everything. A very powerful agent for us for the AI. >> Oh no. It's awesome. I'm curious because that's something I've been wanting to pick your since you're so embedded in the space and you'd be surprised how

many people aren't right. Like it's still something like at least in the accounting world. I read a report from the C CPA saying less than 8% of professionals are using any AI tool and the big four from what I'm aware of they're not even allowed to on the jobs because of security issues and so to me it's like this is a big hindrance you guys are going to be way behind pretty fast to your point the people who know AI are going to take your jobs what I'm worrying about is students it's so interesting and I'm curious to see your perspective is I've been trying to like how do I design a course where I almost feel like multiple choice

are kind of a thing of the fast. Like, what's the point of having a multiple choice exam when all of the world's knowledge is not just a search away, but like even faster? You can grapple with it. And so, I've been trying to rephrase like our essay questions or live discussions going to become more valuable cuz I'm seeing that I'm just curious your thoughts cuz I'm seeing it on when I do interviews or when I meet with people, you can tell the people who know something like yourself, you're clearly an expert. You're clearly like, "Man, I just want to talk to you forever about this." But you see people who are like, "Oh, I need to go check. Oh, I need to go research this because we're

getting you can already see especially the younger generation is reliant on AI. And so it's like how do you get comfortable knowing and understanding the topic knowing that people are probably past the point of being grilled to learn material? >> It's a it's a great question. You know, I think our generation is very fortunate because we grew up in an era where you know like I remember dialup internet, right? Like I remember buying like all these things. So it's like the the world has completely changed. And so today

like kids like even younger kids like our kids for example like now there's you know kind of discussion around AI for children and and things like that and and for me I feel like those those social issues are massive areas where there needs to be like a collective decision, right? It's it's kind of one of those things where it's almost like within academia for example like the future of academia

like there has to be kind of like a a common consensus of some sort around best practices and and how to prepare students. It's kind of challenging because it's like at the same time it's like you know you're going to have different styles of teaching, you're going to have different goals. But I think like recently there was a someone was speaking about some politician was talking about no need for learning how to code. AI is going to code for you, right? And I had made a comment on

about, you know, hey, if AI could code um you know what's the point of learning to code? I could just go to cursor and type in what I want and prompt it and all of a sudden I have a UI. I can create a prototype. I can do all these things. And interestingly enough, the people that commented, a lot of the software engineers and the career CS people, they were adamantly against what I was saying. Of course not. You're going to need a deep insights and understanding and all that. And so I think in terms of what people need, I think question formats like

multiplechoice, testing people on their actual knowledge is the key. like if it's a multiple choice, if it's a project, if it's you know whatever, like if someone uses AI or someone doesn't use AI, it's like understanding how to get the answer is the key. You know, like ask question that maybe if you ask Chad GPT, you'll get three or four different things, but really if you understand this topic, you'll reach this final answer that is the same final answer as someone who doesn't use CHP,

right? expecting everyone to say, "Hey, you know, to take one side or the other, it's just not going to work." Some people are just not going to learn how to code. No one need to learn how to code. For entrepreneurs, for business students, it was just a brilliant time to be alive because now you have an idea. Go build a prototype. You could just watch video, build a prototype, and so cool. >> Yeah. So I mean I I think I love what you're saying because that's kind of I've approached I met so many professors or teachers who are like you got to disclaim if you're using chat GPT. We

have an honor code here and I think the best thing is just to assume they're all going to use it. Assume everyone's going to use it and let's just figure out a way to still teach the material despite it. So maybe don't give essay questions to take home. Like that's probably they're going to solve that one pretty fast. Any smart kid is going to just dump that in. But like can you have discussion prompts? Can we uplevel ourselves that profession? We can do better. you like they don't need to worry about that anymore. We can get them to really understand the heart of the material. >> Exactly. And I remember when we were in school when they had the graded curves in the class, it used to drive me crazy

because, you know, we were we were the good students. We were busting our butts. We were studying. But sometimes, you know, you have some students that would be helping each other or whatever, and that would screw up the the curve for the class, right? So as anything what AI has done now is it's raising the bar cuz at a very bare minimum if you use AI you should get the answer and then you so it's almost like it raises the bar where it's like okay either you're learning the topic and you're you're excelling and you're able to compete against people who use AI or

you're able to use whatever tools is around you to be able to get to the right answer but either way the bar is now raised because the wrong answer is no longer acceptable like there should be no you So if you're allowing your students to use AI and man like you know like a C is impact like you everyone should have a B+ or more reverse curve. >> It does curve the first time. >> Yeah, exactly. Like hey you fail if you get below a 95, you know, cuz like you should be acing this thing. That's

hilar. That's actually a really interesting idea. Okay, I got to ask you because I'm just really curious that you're in it. Have you found any weird prompts or like models that you are specifically using that you're like, "Hey, this is really cool and I don't think other people are using it this way." >> My recent one, probably not even a new one. There's probably a lot of people that do it, but what I like to do is basically like I'm working on a a project and I'm like, "Hey, Chad GPT or I like Gemini more recently. I've just

been using that more." But >> Pro is pretty solid. Excellent. Yes. So, I'll just say, "Hey, we're partners in this right here." Like, "You're going to be my lead developer, my partner, you know." So, just like having that element where it's like, "Okay, we're working on this together." And then throwing in additional things. I was doing an application for venture fund wanted to sign up. So, and the models that I was working with say, "Imagine you are the reviewer. What areas where I fall short

or where I can improve, right?" And so like having that dialogue of back and forth versus just taking the first response that you get back and saying that this is you know the best thing possible is actually really helpful. >> No, it is I really like the partner one and that's except I'll throw one at you that I've done is like I'll find well first off best practice it can't you can't just rely on it. It's an extension of thinking and I found it's really valuable for like I'm pretty scatterbrained and creative and open and my problem is I focus on too many different things and having it help me think through a thought to the end is so

helpful but you got to go battle with it through the chain. What I've done is I'll be like rate this idea like rate this if you are an expert in this field rate the idea from one to 10 over these different areas where am I missing it like where could I do better and then I'll be like give it to another model and be like play devil's advocate where did they get this wrong and you can use the think of to like really if that's the full picture of a situation and then you have to still come in with judgment and be like I could just agree with this I agree with this but man your thinking power just so similar I like the idea of saying it's a partner though hey you're

a partner in this help me figure it out and help me battle battle to understand or help me check if you were to review this what would throw you off and changing those roles really will change how it responds. >> Absolutely. and and yeah and I really like your approach as well because you know going point by point and looking at where things could be improved I think is a very valuable take as well because yeah at the end of the day it's like there's confirmation bias there's all these issues that are existent with an AI you can have a model hallucinate you

can have all these that becomes huge risk right so you want to be able to mitigate that as much as possible and I think the more that you're looking at things strategically the better because that allows the model to refine itself and really get to a better loops. >> Oh, cool. Now, thanks for going down that rabbit hole with me, man. What are you working on next? How could we all support you and what's next in the future for you? So, next time we have I want to check in on all the success that you're having. >> Absolutely. So, I'd say the most exciting part besides the edge flow and the Hello Feature hackathon, which I

really really am excited about, I think the Alula Z.xyz release is one of my next projects as well. So working with basically like the P token community, we the WEO community, there's basically like this whole co-op of decentralized participants. We're putting together AI for real estate, AI for accounting, AI for tax and basically it's just like courses and then also there's like communities and materials to really just like focus on empowering

small businesses. So I if anyone's interested on hats or any of the social media, my crypto world with the zero and then alulaz.xyz once this launches, you can catch that as well for more content about education and everything. >> Awesome. Yeah, I'll put in the links, man. If you ever need a guest speaker or anything, more than happy to show up. So then I ask everybody, I just do like a rapid fire at the end because I'm always just curious to keep it a little light. What's your favorite Oh. Well, what do you prefer? Sweet or savory? Oh, it's a

good one. >> What's your favorite dessert? Yeah, I got a sweet tooth, too. >> Yeah, Whole Foods dress lattes. >> Oh, Whole Foods specifically. >> Yeah, I don't know what they do with their dressings. Whole Foods got me hooked. So, >> they do a really good like berry cake, too. Some of that stuff's really good, man. This winter is a deadly season for me. I got to I got to cut before winter because I'll just gain 15 pounds. >> Yeah. What's your least favorite thing or least favorite piece of advice that everyone gives?

>> You know, I have to say it's parenting advice around when you're a first time parent, you're about to have kids and people tell you you lose sleep. You know, I always felt like why would like as you know, leading up to it, why are you negative about But then when I had my kid, he was a perfect sleeper. So, we were like, okay, this wasn't even true. >> Yeah, that's I completely agree with you. There's something really unfortunate. I wish the dialogue would change there where we could stay more positive because there's a lot of people not having kids anymore because we're so negative and there's so many rewarding beautiful parts of having a family. Like I've never met anyone where I was like,

"Hey, do you wish you didn't have the kid?" And they're like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I would I would totally just throw them in the ocean." You know that never you never get anyone saying that stuff. Even the bad parents still want to show up with the kids. So I wish that's a message that people need to understand more. And then out of out of everything we talked about today, what do you wish the audience would leave with? Like if you could say one thing to everybody, what's the one thing you wish they would leave with today? >> You know, I would say for specifically like maybe your audience or you know people coming from that traditional finance academia like that world, I

would say jump in. When it comes to AI, web 3, I think like learning getting some sort of involvement in that space is really a really big opportunity today. I think there's a growing trend where people who have these skills that people in the traditional, you know, finance, accounting, all that have, there's a huge need for those skills within this new kind of economy that's being created within the digital asset world and AI and everything else. So, I would say just, you know, jump on board,

learn a new skill, have some fun, experiment, and yeah, that probably be the takeaways. >> I love it, Alula. And it was a pleasure. I'm really glad we caught up again. Hope you'd come on again some other time. Could give us an update how the hackathon and everything goes. Best of luck on it.