The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Investing in AI

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

How best can Canada's earmarked AI funds be spent to stay competitive? Then, Laura Tamblyn Watts discusses her new book on how to care for aging parents. And, what is the state of entrepreneurship in Canada?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From epic camping trips to scenic local hikes, spending time outdoors is a great way to create lasting memories to share with friends and family. This summer, TVO is celebrating the natural wonders that inspire unforgettable adventures with great documentaries, articles, and learning resources about beloved parks in Ontario and beyond. Visit tvo.me slash Ontario summer stories for all this and more. And be sure to tell us your stories for a chance to win great prizes. Help TVO create a better world through the power of learning. Visit TVO.org and make a tax-deductible donation today. Let me read this tweet here. This is from someone who works at a venture capital firm in Silicon

Valley. Today, I met a company where the founder literally made me describe an app in text, and 20 minutes later, the entire app, back end and front end, was made and fully functional. Feels like the industrial revolution of software engineering. Okay, Christina, start us off on this. Will we look back on the era of massive teams of coders building an app much like the way we look at the pre-industrial era today? Well, I think when you frame it like that, people get a bit scared.

They get sort of resistant to that whole model because they think this is going to come in and take away jobs or replace people. But actually, when I look at this, I think about my washing machine. So I have a washing machine that washes clothes so much better, faster than I could by hand. And I'm not mad at it. I'm not worried that it's going to take away anything from my productivity. In fact, it allows me to do many other more enjoyable, more creative, more important work. But you know why? Because we understand what a washing machine is and we understand there are jobs in the creation of that machine.

We don't know that about this. We're figuring it out. And I think there's lots of choices. And there will be places where this will replace human labor This will replace certain software engineers in certain tasks for sure, but there's also so much opportunity I think if we over focus on the loss or the replacement we're gonna miss the opportunity to find that complementarity that Co-intelligence as Ethan Mollett calls it, where we can

have an assistant that helps us do more, better, faster. And you have to look at it from the concept of, you know, if we go back to the era of the coder, where like the apps that were being created just by those coders building it up overnight were not the things that were solving breast cancer, and they weren't the things that were solving some of the more harder problems that society has. So I look back at the natural evolution of a whole professional discipline where they started out, you got people interested in coding

and that became something, it became ubiquitous. And now the people that got really interested, they went into software engineering and you could see the building of the skillset. And so right now, a lot of the coders that I talk to, they don't want to do that app at the front end. Like they don't want to do that. They want to do the meatier problems

and they're evolving. So this is about the natural evolution, I think, of that industry. It had its time when the coding side blew up in terms of what the app is happening. And now I think we see that part of the productivity as essentially being solved. And we're trying to focus that mind that thinks in that logical way to some of the harder problems. And that's where you go from being a coder to being a software

engineer to being an AI scientist. And you start to see that evolution of people. So for me, it's a natural evolution of skills. Is there something particularly timely about why you wanted to write this book now? All of the time, in every circumstance, these days, we're talking about aging parents, but we're talking about it and pulling our hair out. What we haven't actually had is ways to have a kitchen table conversation

and still be liking each other enough to have dinner at the table afterwards. And that is what prompted it. Every poll I've ever seen says people want to live at home in familiar surroundings for as long as they can. I think we also know that the health care system, such as it is, home care, supportive care, PSWs, all that, it cannot handle that right now. So how's this going to work exactly? We've never had this demographic shift. I mean, you can't open the newspaper or turn on the radio without hearing about our aging demographic.

That's fine, but we need to move to some solutions. And certainly our health care system isn't going to to some solutions. And certainly our healthcare system isn't going to be the backbone. And it's already not, but that's going to be under even greater pressure. So what we're going to see is families, and I define that in the broadest possible terms, supporters, people who are part of our close-knit community,

they're going to have to lean in. And they're not just leaning in by providing some emotional support or even a little bit of tech support. It's actually financial. It's really health care in a heavy type of care environment. And it's also trying to think about preventive ways to stop those triggering events like falls from happening.

Well, let me follow up on that. Do you think, based on your experiences with lots of people who are dealing with this, are we ready for the complexity of care to come? Oh, not even beginning to be ready for it. But what families are saying is they are having this thrust upon them. And because we're having a different type of care relationship and the number of adult children,

and again, I use that term really very broadly, used to be, you know, you'd have eight kids and two parents and you could kind of divide it up. And if someone didn't have a good relationship, maybe that one kid doesn't involve themselves. What we call our caregiver burden has switched. And my experience, which I have six aging parents in my life, is not an unusual one, because there's different marriages

and there's different systems and fewer and fewer children. And so that means we need to be really creative for how we actually help to support our aging parents and not assume that our health care system is going to do it for us. You used a word there, though, the caregiver burden. We don't, I mean, we shh. I know we don't like to think of it as a burden to take care of our parents as they age, because

after all, they took care of us when we were just wee little ones growing up. But is it a burden? Look, it is. I mean, it's hard in the same way that actually having young children is a burden. It doesn't mean it's not also a joy. Okay. It doesn't mean it's not purposeful and meaningful. It doesn't even mean that it's not something you'd want to sign up for. It's really hard. And it's getting harder because we have fewer and fewer resources, unless you're truly rich. You started a business. Tell me how you did it.

So I actually started in my last year of university, and we were taking an entrepreneurship capstone course. I went to Western, the Ivy Business School, and I remember our professors told us to start by finding a problem that you're passionate about solving. And I think that's the key thing with entrepreneurs is they're working on the world's to-do list, and all the challenges that we're facing around sustainability and climate change, all these types of technologies that we're creating are going to solve these world's problems. And so I think in addition to the economic growth and some of the other points we're talking about,

it's also being able to solve these problems that we're facing and actually bring some of these technologies to market. So you are living the life of an entrepreneur right now. How old are you, can I ask? 25. You're 25. Yes. You're a small business person.

You're an entrepreneur. You do not have the security of, say, somebody who works for the province of Ontario in an office job down at Queen's Park. Yes. Right? Yes. So what's your life like? It's definitely hard. A lot of challenges.

A lot of people say that you face the highest highs and the lowest lows. Sometimes within the same day, you're trying to, you know, you do things like this where you're talking about your business, but you're also trying to manage your employees, manage your inventory, manage your cash flow. So a lot of entrepreneurs, about 73%, according to the BDC study, struggle with their mental health, struggle with these types of challenges where they're trying to navigate through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. So it's definitely hard, but you know that you're making an impact. And especially in my space where I'm working on menstrual health, something that impacts 50% of the population, I'm actually waking up every day and solving these problems and making an impact for a lot of different people.

Where'd you go to high school? I went to Lawrence Park. In Toronto? In Toronto. Did you at any point while you were a high school student think to yourself, of course I am going to be an entrepreneur? Definitely not. It's not something that's taught enough in high schools. And I came from an immigrant household where entrepreneurship was not normalized as a potential career path.

All my parents wanted was for me to get that stable corporate job, and I got it. And I came home one day and said, yep, I'm going to quit that job to work on this tampon business that has no funding yet, nothing available. But I think it is important to teach more students that this can be a career path. It's not just about encouraging more students to be entrepreneurs, but encouraging them to embrace the skills that you get as an entrepreneur, embracing this growth mindset where it's okay to fail, where it's okay to take these as learning opportunities, where you can learn about so many different types of areas of business, like marketing, finance, operations, encouraging them to have resiliency. And whether or not they become an entrepreneur, they take these creative problem-solving skills into the organizations

that they work for, and they think differently, and they try to solve problems. So not just encouraging more people to become entrepreneurs, but embracing the skill sets that you gain. Nadia, you know your big problem? Lack of energy. You are just not really energetic enough in the way you approach the world. No, I'm kidding.

All right. You just heard her talk about high school. Now, you're in the post-secondary sphere, where by that time, people already have a sense about what they want to be. But what about her point about high school? Do we put enough focus there on letting people know that entrepreneurship is an option for them going forward? I think definitely not. And Nadia's story is super

inspiring. I was smiling and happy the whole time. That's what we need. We need a lot more Nadias in this country. And I think we do need to start in high school. We need to start putting that thought in people's heads right from the very beginning that this is a possibility, this is what it could look like, these are the opportunities around it. I know you're asking about high school. I can tell you a lot more about university level. Sure. So, at Waterloo, our approach really is that it's sort of a pyramid. And so, if we want to get as many entrepreneurs coming out of Waterloo as possible, then we need to reach out to as many students as possible. So we're reaching out to

more than a thousand students every year, involving them in some degree, trying to get them interested, just thinking about the idea of entrepreneurship. And so step one is, how do we pick those people that might be interested? Those that are interested then go to the next step of the pyramid and we get them thinking about, okay, what are the big, as Nanyo was mentioning, what are the big problems in the world? And how do you try and solve some of those? But just think about problems and get them engaged with problems. And then you can think, okay, well, how do I create a startup to solve those problems?

How do we support them through it? How do we give them the business acumen? How do we give them the mentorship? And then you can start thinking about funding, creating ventures, et cetera. Some of these numbers that you were mentioning earlier, we have a decrease in entrepreneurship overall. I can tell you at Waterloo it's alive and well.

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