Join us for a conversation with Alex Curtis from the Nashville Technology Council, as we uncover the pivotal role of data advocacy in shaping the tech policies that govern our communities and industries. From Alex's work in internet legislation to his advocacy for a diverse tech ecosystem, this episode provides rich insights into the strategies that empower tech members to effectively influence policy and legislation. Join us and gain a deeper understanding of the nexus between technology, policy, and education, offering a narrative that's both enlightening and essential for anyone passionate about the future of tech advocacy.
Hear firsthand how Alex's chairmanship of the advocacy committee for TECHNA is vital in forging a collective voice, and how collaborations across Tennessee are pushing for pivotal computer science education reforms. It's a testament to the power of community, relationships, and strategic engagement in driving forward progressive tech policies that benefit us all.
This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in how continuous learning and adaptation are crucial in an ever-evolving tech landscape, and for those who seek to understand the intersections of technology, policy, and innovation.
About Alex Curtis:
Alex is the Chief Development Officer for the Greater Nashville Technology Council. He developed the Council’s public policy program, leads the NTC Advocacy Committee, and advocates on behalf of Middle Tennessee's tech industry. Alex also works to promote the Middle Tennessee tech community through local and national communications.
Alex comes to the NTC from an innovation-policy perspective. Over his 20+ years in public policy, working for two U.S. Senators, one Administration, and a public advocacy organization that he helped grow into a thought leader, he worked to develop influential coalitions of tech companies and public interest groups. He honed his communication skills creatively explaining hard-to-understand concepts to legislators and the public. These include issue-based viral videos that became “Internet memes” recognized by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Moyers on America, and multiple episodes of The Daily Show.
Alex, his wife Magi, and their two adorable children live in Nashville. Alex received a BS degree in Business from Wake Forest University and a JD degree from the University of Akron School of Law.
Links:
Data 4 All Social Media Links
Charlie Yielding Social Media Links
Charlie Apigian Social Media Links
For more information please visit us at www.data4all.io or email us at charlie@data4all.io.
Join us for a conversation with Alex Curtis from the Nashville Technology Council, as we uncover the pivotal role of data advocacy in shaping the tech policies that govern our communities and industries. From Alex's work in internet legislation to his advocacy for a diverse tech ecosystem, this episode provides rich insights into the strategies that empower tech members to effectively influence policy and legislation. Join us and gain a deeper understanding of the nexus between technology, policy, and education, offering a narrative that's both enlightening and essential for anyone passionate about the future of tech advocacy.
Hear firsthand how Alex's chairmanship of the advocacy committee for TECHNA is vital in forging a collective voice, and how collaborations across Tennessee are pushing for pivotal computer science education reforms. It's a testament to the power of community, relationships, and strategic engagement in driving forward progressive tech policies that benefit us all.
This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in how continuous learning and adaptation are crucial in an ever-evolving tech landscape, and for those who seek to understand the intersections of technology, policy, and innovation.
About Alex Curtis:
Alex is the Chief Development Officer for the Greater Nashville Technology Council. He developed the Council’s public policy program, leads the NTC Advocacy Committee, and advocates on behalf of Middle Tennessee's tech industry. Alex also works to promote the Middle Tennessee tech community through local and national communications.
Alex comes to the NTC from an innovation-policy perspective. Over his 20+ years in public policy, working for two U.S. Senators, one Administration, and a public advocacy organization that he helped grow into a thought leader, he worked to develop influential coalitions of tech companies and public interest groups. He honed his communication skills creatively explaining hard-to-understand concepts to legislators and the public. These include issue-based viral videos that became “Internet memes” recognized by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Moyers on America, and multiple episodes of The Daily Show.
Alex, his wife Magi, and their two adorable children live in Nashville. Alex received a BS degree in Business from Wake Forest University and a JD degree from the University of Akron School of Law.
Links:
Data 4 All Social Media Links
Charlie Yielding Social Media Links
Charlie Apigian Social Media Links
For more information please visit us at www.data4all.io or email us at charlie@data4all.io.
On today's podcast of Data for All data advocacy. Welcome to the Data for All podcast. I'm Charlie Yildon.
Charlie Apigian:And I'm Charlie Epiglian, where we want to empower you to think different with data.
Charlie Yielding:And on today's podcast we're looking at a topic that we've talked about in general terms, but today we'll take a deep dive into data advocacy.
Charlie Apigian:Yes, and this is a topic where it has many facets, including inspiring and educating others, but today we are gonna focus on how tech, data and that new thing called AI is perceived and managed with our government and our communities.
Charlie Yielding:And so to help us with that today, we brought in a true expert on the topic, alex Curtis of the Nashville Technology Council. Welcome, thanks for having me.
Charlie Apigian:Absolutely. And I just have to say, can we go before we get to all the great stuff about Alex, Cause I'm, this is gonna be like a gushy cause. Alex and I have gone through trials and tribulations in this world of advocacy together. I in the beginning had no interest in this, Isn't that right, Alex?
Alex Curtis:You were very much a skeptic.
Charlie Apigian:I was a skeptic and-.
Alex Curtis:A skeptic of what Government? Oh, oh, oh yeah.
Charlie Apigian:I didn't want to get involved in the advocacy side. And Alex is like oh you know, why don't you come to DC with us? And I'm like and I think it was at the end of that, I remember it very well and I was at the end and he goes so what do you think? And I said I don't like this place, all right. And then what happened after that?
Alex Curtis:Alex, and then you've been like the biggest proponent of it, the organization, which is wonderful.
Charlie Apigian:And a lot of the reasons for that is because Alex is a true pioneer in the world of data advocacy, and I don't just mean that in Nashville. He is recognized throughout the country, especially through the other technology councils. There is a national organization called TECHNA. Alex is very involved in that, and you do lead the public policy for TECHNA as well, not just here in Nashville, correct?
Alex Curtis:I serve as the chair of the advocacy committee for TECHNA.
Charlie Apigian:Okay, and there's a reason why Alex is good at this stuff. And so, alex, I'd love for you just to tell your story a little bit, and then we'll start diving in up to all that other fun stuff.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, I'm very interested to hear.
Alex Curtis:Well, I don't know how interesting of a story it is, but the crux of it all is that I kind of started working on tech policy at an early age. I got the opportunity to intern on Capitol Hill when I was in college between my freshman and sophomore year I think it was and I got to. So I went to DC. I was one of those free, unpaid interns that you hear about. I worked in the United States Senate for the state of Ohio Senator, and it was an amazing experience. I was 17 years old and I didn't know what to expect. I think I'd been to DC in high school and have visited a few times, but didn't really have any passion for it. And then, when we just had the opportunity to intern for this new incoming senator and the neat things I got to do were I got to kind of serve constituents, so I got to help answer emails and mail, paper mail for constituents.
Alex Curtis:This was also during a time when this is 1995. So the internet was just coming out.
Alex Curtis:And one of the things I was doing while going back kind of to the dorms while I was living in DC was starting to program HTML and making web pages, and this was before the Senate had a website, and so I got the opportunity, because some of my work for there on the Hill saw that I was playing with HTML and they said, okay, you're gonna get to make the senators first website, and so that was a crazy thing you get to do during college internship.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, that's awesome.
Alex Curtis:And then I got to work on some tech policy too, which was an amazing opportunity. So a lot of the technology policy that was happening at the time where the Telcommunication Act of 1996 was being written while, I was there, so I got to help senators and policymakers understand what the internet was. Wow, yay. And so really tried to help explain kind of what the impacts of certain levers and switches on the for legislation were about, and that really kind of helped me understand, like okay, so this is really how the sausage gets made. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:And so I think that's why we're writing a lot of legislation, have probably little to no understanding of what they're writing about. Yeah, and they have a lot of policy wonks and a lot of lobbyists coming in and telling them why they need laws written certain ways. Sure, and so, as just kind of this lowly intern, I got to go and explain to my senator.
Alex Curtis:Here's how all this works and here's why writing it this way would have an impact on this or that, and so it was an amazing experience for me and I looked on talking about policy and understanding why these types of things matter, and on the other side, on the tech side of it, it was really neat because I we ended up being the second senator on the web by one day. We missed it. Oh, wow.
Alex Curtis:Senator John Afgecroft was the first senator and then my senator was second, and so it was a really neat experience. There was the first public website that I had ever made, so it was very rudimentary, but at the time it still lays kind of the foundation on how all Senate websites are kind of laid out.
Charlie Yielding:Oh really.
Alex Curtis:Like where in the navigation everything ends up being where your constituent mail and where listing of committees and things like that Still very much everybody kind of follows the same method from those days. So it was really neat and interesting opportunity and I got the opportunity during college during breaks to go back to DC and work in my local office to work for legislators, doing very much the same two things. And when I started law school I did the same thing. I got to work on the judiciary committee in the Senate, which was really neat during the time of Napster and oh yeah.
Charlie Yielding:A lot of copyright debates and fights and Like the big tech boom in the early thoughts right.
Alex Curtis:Tech boom and the big pitch for selling digital stuff online. That's true. And, like I said, napster was the big thing.
Alex Curtis:We installed Napster on a bunch of Senate computers to help them understand what it was to use this technology and how it made it number one easy to get access to that, but also to help them understand what the ramifications are for that, like selling that stuff online. Is it easier to sell online? Is it hard? And helping them to understand, and Famous hearings, with Senator Hatch talking to the RIA saying, hey, you need to be making this stuff available. And it was really neat times, right. I'm in the background of a lot of different epic kind of tech debates, especially on the Capitol Hill. That's awesome.
Alex Curtis:When the iPhone came out and there was a lot of talk about using and making apps available on the iPhone and things like that. Senator. Markey used my iPhone during the hearing because I was just a staffer and was able to give it to him. So it's a. Your iPhone is famous.
Alex Curtis:My iPhone is famous, so it was really just an important and neat time in technology to be working on tech policy, and I was one of the few early folks at the time who kind of had this span both seas of that right. So on the policy side, working on the policy but also having enough of a tech background to be informative and help people understand what the tech policy meant.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, I always say that we're the generation that lives one foot in, one foot out, because we've got a foot firmly in life without technology, but also one with the technology, and we're going to be the only generation that has that perspective, because our youngins they're just all technology, and so it's a unique place to be for sure, and I really think that's cool that you were there having that conversations, but it also seems like we're back to having some of those similar conversations with some of the new data and AI stuff that's been coming out recently.
Alex Curtis:Yeah, it looks a lot like the early 2000s.
Charlie Yielding:So it does feel the same to you Very much, so that's cool.
Charlie Apigian:All right. So where'd you grow up, Could?
Charlie Yielding:you say Ohio.
Charlie Apigian:I want to know about Little Alex.
Alex Curtis:Originally from Ohio, Northeast Ohio. I lived at Board and Raise there. I went to college in North Carolina at Wake Forest University and then that's where I did a lot of internships and things like that. From Back to Ohio for law school, the University of Akron Law School. There, you go Big on intellectual property there that's where the Inverter's Hall of Fame is and then, after law school, moved to DC to work on Capitol. Hill.
Alex Curtis:And I worked for a public interest group for a number of years. We worked on a lot of tech policy, fighting for really consumers and creators and startups to make sure that technology and the laws that were written enabled innovation.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, innovation ownership, things like that.
Alex Curtis:And new uses. Youtube today wouldn't exist without a lot of the tech policy that was written at that time so making sure that people can upload User-generated content was a new thing. Anybody that can broadcast, just like you guys are doing today. Anybody can have access to that and not automatically, but very easily find a growing audience without having to go through traditional channels. You don't have to get on one of the broadcast television channels just to be able to find an audience.
Alex Curtis:And it didn't used to be that way. Just like you're saying one leg in, one leg out, I think it's amazing how the world doesn't remember it wasn't that long ago when you couldn't just put your own stuff there and find an audience and find a large.
Alex Curtis:There's always a gatekeeper somewhere there's always a gatekeeper, and YouTube at that time was this huge opening for anybody could post. You didn't have to pay bandwidth charges, you didn't have to do all this stuff, and there was a lot of copyright debates about people posting stuff they didn't own to the website. But a lot of that had to get figured out in the law so that platforms like that could exist, so that innovators and creators like you guys today could have a platform to be able to do that. And that was world changing, and a lot of the people that owned the original platforms were the gatekeepers, wanted to write the laws in different ways.
Charlie Yielding:Oh, I bet they did.
Alex Curtis:Right, and so making sure that that open innovation could happen was really what I was and a lot of the people I work with is what we were fighting for.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, charlie, we are content creators, absolutely All because of Alex. We had that opportunity?
Charlie Yielding:Not true at all, but you saw it, that's what I heard, though, because of Alex and folks that have pursued the same things that he's pursued, we have an open and more fair internet that we might have had otherwise.
Charlie Apigian:I forget that there used to be the seven second delay or whatever it used to be. I mean, everything, including radio, used to have that, and there would be somebody there with a button in case you would have a swear word. Now we can say every F word we feel like, which we don't have to Fudge, fudge Farkin. No, no, not good enough.
Charlie Apigian:Not that one, not good enough, all right. So Akron, by the way, very close to where my wife grew up, and obviously I spent a lot of time in Ohio as well. Have a lot of family still in Ohio. The only thing we have against Alex is he roots for the wrong university. He's wearing red. I noticed that You're wearing blue, I'm wearing blue and my team wins more than yours over the last three years. That's all I'll say, even though we just lost our coach. But and I had the pleasure of watching the national championship with you but before we go into the trips that you have put on for people here in the community, what brought you to Nashville?
Alex Curtis:Sure. So in 2010, we were, I had a, I had a child in 2009, and my wife and I were trying to figure out what was next, and we were looking for opportunities to continue what we do, but do it a little differently and not live in a shoebox on Capitol Hill, and Nashville was an easy place to understand why it would make a lot of sense for us to move the area. We had family in Franklin and saw it as an opportunity to explore new opportunities, and so we did that, and, at least initially. I was working for the same organization, the public interest organization, public knowledge, and I started a project to help creatives understand how to leverage the technology that we just talked about to find to find an audience and make a living from their creativity.
Alex Curtis:So I worked with a bunch of bands initially to help them understand how to leverage a lot of these platforms to find audiences and help them understand why the policy mattered the exact same stuff that I just talked about why it mattered for them to have access to YouTube so that they could find an audience, and it ended up making them really good advocates because, as users of the technology, they understood why it mattered why, the law mattered, and then they became really good advocates and they could explain why it mattered to them, to policymakers, and so there was a wonderful byproduct of working with them directly to help them understand how to use the technology that they became really good advocates later on, and so soon after some of those big policy debates were happening, I was able to take some people from Nashville to help them advocate for themselves and help them tell policymakers why writing a law in a certain way made it easier for them to find their audience and do business, and not that it was cutting anybody's legs out for them, but they're small artists.
Alex Curtis:They didn't have to deal with the original gatekeepers. They could find their own audience and find their own living, and that was really important. That voice was really important to impact the different copyright laws that we're trying to change, how the internet worked.
Charlie Yielding:I'm really glad you were doing that, because I have very much enjoyed watching all of the power-burkers in media get their butts handed to them, for lack of a better word or lack of a better phrase. I very much like the fact that you really of what you were talking about earlier, where If we just decide that we want to do something, then we can do that thing, we can put it out, we can advocate for ourselves, and what stops us for being successful Isn't what somebody else is not allowing us to do or keeping us from, or something like that. It's just did we hustle enough? Did we find our audience? Did we do the things that have been laid out for us by these new Platforms and this new, you know, like legislation, outlook, cultural Application, whatever you want to call it?
Alex Curtis:right and I think I think there's a question of like whether you know competitions an important thing, and just because you've had a business doesn't mean you should Always main have that business right. Can't rest on your laurels, mm-hmm, especially if you're neglecting your audiences and so in your customers. Mm-hmm.
Alex Curtis:That was the big argument for a lot of it was that look, there's these newcomers that are changing the Opportunities for so many different people. Yeah, the internet is a complete platform game changer. Yeah and so how to? How can anybody leverage that? You know some of the existing gatekeepers didn't like that.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, they end up adapt. Some of them work their way into the new industries too, like we had a Podcast with a with a music person, and they were telling us about how mechanical licenses still work with digital, like infinitely copyable things, and and it very much feels like a monkey on somebody's back Just being getting carried along for the ride because nobody wanted to say hey, your time is done, time to get out of here, yeah, mechanical license deals with a piano player role.
Alex Curtis:Right, it's, it's the role of paper that you put in in a piano. Mm-hmm that that one, you cranked it Generated music. That's the mechanical piece of the license. That's where that comes from. Oh really yeah, and so that I mean, that's what we're still talking about when we're talking about licensing digital rights, mechanical licenses.
Charlie Yielding:But it still applied, though, when we were getting CDs and records and tapes, though because that's a mechanical aspect of it, correct or no, because that may be a mis-misconception on my part.
Alex Curtis:No, it's not because the machine was. It's not. It's not because that these things are physical, mechanical, physical things is because the original license was around a Piano player piano, so it's not new that it's obsolete.
Charlie Yielding:Correct, okay, it's been obsolete for a long time. I was not aware of that. There's a whole industry around that, though.
Alex Curtis:That's the thing is because there's a giant inch, if those are really difficult things to change and update and even though technology can make a giant, huge leap and Completely change paradigms, when you've got this existing giant industry to deal with that has for all forever dealt with mechanical licensing, it's hard to change. So like the MLC exists because Congress and a lot of people came to Congress to finally change some of that law so that there could be an entity like the MLC to help manage that and help artists figure out how they need to get paid.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, MLC being the mechanical licensing collective, and they are here basically to be and I we actually did a hackathon with them so we actually were able to look at the data. But it's all of the data for all of the rights to music and you have to go in to their system and say that's you yeah, you have to claim it.
Charlie Yielding:We talked about that some and yep and so money just sits there, sometimes without it being claimed and, yes, well, a record.
Charlie Apigian:One of the big recording companies has to keep that money for a certain amount of time, but then over time, they don't, so it's not to their advantage for you to get paid, so they're not going to be very active in that. So, yeah, it's, it is. It's amazing to think about the different evolutions of how technology has changed Music and the creation of content, but obviously it's so much more than that, and so did you go from there to where you are today, which is the National Technology Council.
Alex Curtis:Yeah, when I looked, when I was looking for opportunities here locally, I think the there was a giant hole for talking about tech policy locally, and obviously I mean what is the adage of? You know, if you're a hammer, all you see is nails. I'm a policy hammer. All I saw was policy nails, and I didn't see a lot of nails around, and so I had a few recommendations to talk to a few different people, and one of those was the leadership at the National Tech Council, where an amazing association that have been around for a number of years but was really more focused on Bringing the community together over a number of different ways, but rarely around policy.
Alex Curtis:I really didn't have a policy focus on it, and that was a giant missed opportunity in my Mind yeah, you saw what they were missing, what they were missing right, and so it was an opportunity there. I thought that it could be a new facet for the organization and something that could grow and really could be a powerhouse for, you know, working on on the laws that matter to the growth of the tech industry locally and we're talking more about state policy than federal policy but it was a great opportunity. You know the chamber does a lot of work on especially local policy, but no one was addressing tech issues and more and more, as Policymakers get into different topics, they will touch on tech issues and they will Impact business. And we saw that very quickly as I started to get getting, as I start, as I started to get engaged with the organization and worked with one of our previous CEOs to Start a job here and work a little more on communications as well, and we started an advocacy committee where we you know the methodology for building that building people starting to care about advocacy.
Alex Curtis:It had to be grown right. It didn't exist and so there was a lot of tried to be very methodical about. Okay, if I'm starting from scratch, how would I do this and what? What are the pitfalls I don't want to run into and one of the things that I wanted to make sure from the beginning me Could do to grow it. And it really was around because we're starting from scratch and no one knew us as an entity to do policy.
Alex Curtis:It was really about doing education, so working with our members to help them understand some of the different issues, because the organization put on tons of events. There was a great opportunity to do that, so we started hosting events around that and at each one of those events we wanted to make sure that one we were bringing audience to it to educate them. So the content was about education for most of the programs. We wanted to at least invite a policymaker so that they started associating with us, with working on policy, and started seeing faces that they could then connect with. And then, thirdly, is by looking.
Alex Curtis:Maybe this is data related, but looking at who, because each of those events was a based on a different topic but, touched on policy, looking at who attended each one of those events, so what butts were in what seats, sure, and that helped us understand. Okay, you might care about this technology just by purely looking at the guest list and then, as as a method of growing that Right, we, every time we, you know, had an event. If it was this related to this topic, then we know, oh well, they attended before. Maybe it's a policy issue that they care about. Let's send them messages about that and see if they respond, or see if they care and we're going to the Hill, let's invite them because they attended that event. And so you know if you're starting from scratch, you got it you know, the one Additional person makes a difference.
Alex Curtis:Yeah at each one of these things and then so we started doing that with the advocacy committee that we started at the NTC.
Alex Curtis:We Got a number of people that said they cared about advocacy and mm-hmm tech policy and Asked them for the issues that they thought were interesting and Started focusing on those and holding events and bringing policymakers together, starting to have hill days where we go to the local legislature Just to show that we existed yeah, right, because we didn't have a presence, we weren't, they didn't know us from Adam, yeah and really tried to bring to them the people that cared about tech policy. You were the one of the first people that joined those business. On the.
Alex Curtis:Hill and help those state legislators understand. Okay, here's the issues we care about, and for an organization like a tech council, which is a lot like a Chamber of Commerce for anybody who doesn't know what a tech council is. Our main issue is about workforce development right. I know how can we put more people to work in the tech industry, because there's a ton of jobs open.
Charlie Apigian:Mm-hmm yeah and that's why it was so easy for me to get involved, because, from an advocate advocacy perspective, I was the one that cared about people getting jobs. Yeah, and that was a huge issue, so so did you. I'm trying to remember the year that you started with 2015 2015. So was Brian Moyer or was it hot?
Alex Curtis:I'm hot, it was hot, okay and I just come off a mayoral campaign. I worked on one of the not winning mayoral campaigns and had Talked to Brian before that. It was a neat opportunity because I had been talking him for before for a little while and we hosted our first mayoral candidate Debate with the NTC. So we brought in all the candidates and got to do a little bit of kind of like speed dating with all the different candidates, the same way we do it today.
Alex Curtis:Yeah, that's cool I did that before I started with the NTC.
Charlie Apigian:Well, I'm trying to think if I was at that one because I got, yeah, because 2013 is when I started getting involved with the NTC, but it was probably more like 2015 when I really started getting involved and again, I think I've been on the board pretty much that For a while with that. So you came in in that year. When did? When did you feel like and I then I want to get into the issues, of course, but Obviously workforce development but when did you feel like advocacy was starting to take traction? You know, because Early on before you were in Nashville, there was no tech scene. It was, you know, hospitals were our tech.
Charlie Yielding:You mean in middle Tennessee?
Charlie Apigian:in the middle Tennessee. Yeah, yeah and so, but then all of a sudden, there's all these new tech companies coming and there's all these new tech jobs. And so do you feel immediately, or was it a slow burn?
Alex Curtis:For advocacy. Yeah, it took a little while. I mean, the tech scene was definitely growing. Tech for tech sake, right less.
Alex Curtis:It's just it's healthcare Tech yet like there were a lot of. There was a lot of action going on, grassroots, wise people holding meetups and things like that, talking about tech. That was that had been happening for years, and I attended a bunch of those meetups before I even started working at the NTC, so it was definitely there was a lot growing and happening. People were excited and getting engaged in different ways and Nash cocktail came. You know, I was at the TCS it was Dave Delaney's years before that, mm-hmm. I attended a bunch of those and so but advocacy took a while right. I think getting people to understand this is something that they should care about, they should be interested in, and really it was about you know, you talk a lot about data storytelling, not so much around data, but it actually was around data. I mean, I think, getting people to understand the issues that they really do care about and the applicable pieces to policy. Mm-hmm.
Alex Curtis:That's advocacy right getting people to find out, figure out the issues that they care about, the topics that they're interested in, and Then the different lovers that they can effectuate to change those things.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, see, seek to understand so you can be understood, right.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, right, yeah, and, and so early on you started doing the roadshow. So that's when I obviously started getting involved. You would do the days on the hill. Obviously, you're bringing people here, and then you obviously even go to DC and that I've always loved and I've gone to a few of those now Most of I think I have been to almost everyone. I want to get there this year if I can. But for me it's two things. It's like I loved, after the first year of being part of this, this slow burn, because the first year you go you're new. The second year you feel like you're doing the exact same thing again. The third year I was like, oh, they remembered us. And then the fourth year they're asking us advice, and so it was this slow evolution as we did that. But also I was so interested in the people that would go with us and these like-minded individuals that were interested in advocacy. Was that? Did you start those, or did Brian Huddleston start, or was that you at that time?
Alex Curtis:Sure, so we. Every year we go to DC with a national association of tech councils. It's called Techna, and Brian had been the year before to that, I think, at least the year before.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah.
Alex Curtis:I don't know if any of the other folks previous to Brian had done any of those, but yeah, it was a great opportunity. They hosted a Hill Day where they made it really easy for people that were flying in from all across the US to meet with their members of Congress. And they held like a half day program and sent people to the Hill Just to meet the legislators.
Charlie Yielding:Is this like individuals and organizations or just for organizations?
Alex Curtis:Sure. So the way most people did it most of the people local people did it were they sent their staff to this again kind of association program and then that staff went and advocated for their local membership as kind of representatives of theirs to visit the Hill. Cool, with my prior background in tech policy, we had done a few kind of Hill days where we brought in experts about a topic that didn't live in DC and took them around to the Hill and I did it a couple times and built like a little packet of here's how to do all this, here's how to, here's the things that matter, here's how to have a meeting, here's what to do when you're in that meeting, here's what you know, the follow-up messages and all the rest of that. So I had kind of a little experience of doing that. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:And I know, being on the policy side, on the actual staff side, in a lot of these offices it's great to talk to someone who's a representative of someone, but it's even better to talk to the person that actually is doing the thing that they're talking about. So it's one thing for me to represent the tech industry on behalf of our hundreds of members, but it's better to bring our members, it's always better to bring the people that are actually doing the thing, and so that was where I wanted to really change that fly-in program, being less about us as advocates of the tech industry and more helping the local members be advocates for themselves, because they're going to do a better job at it because they know the nuances of it and they have a lot more credibility.
Alex Curtis:Right, you're the people doing the actual work. You are the better advocate.
Charlie Yielding:I get that.
Alex Curtis:And so you know we had a little bit of education, but really a lot of it was more of like just do it, like let's just take you. It's a little baptism by fire, but we'll do that and try to help you understand it. And that program evolved really from just doing the fly-in, where you came in, ran to the hill and then left, to helping the people, helping the members that we brought have a better understanding and context for what it was like to live and work in DC, who are the people that are trying to write the policy, who are the people that are up there every day advocating for different things and how they can help you better understand the issues in such better ways than you may even understand the issue, at least from the policy perspective. And so, instead of doing a quick fly-in with the national group, we added some time to it to help again the members be educated, yeah, so they can see behind the curtain.
Alex Curtis:And better understand the context. And if you can understand, like, why the people up there are doing what they do, you're going to be a better advocate because you can explain it to them better. You can understand the audience better when you're trying to tell the story that you're telling, and so that was how we changed it over a number of years and ended up being a very you know people that go on it seem to enjoy it.
Charlie Apigian:Well, in last year 15 people, I think went. I've been on ones where there's only been like four of us and that was right after COVID, I think. You know it was slow to get back to that. And I agree we would go into a senator's office and, yeah, it's great if it's Alex and I, but you know, of course we like this topic.
Charlie Apigian:Now there's somebody from HCA, there's somebody from Tractor Supply, there's Alliance Burns, you know, and so when you get that group, that makes a big difference and they would listen a little bit closer and then they would get them to go to their companies. I know like we've had at least one of our senators that would then go to their facility and so getting them to see things on the ground here and the things that I learned early on because I was almost like, disappointed if we met with one of the staffers, right, but actually they literally run DC and you start I mean the Alexes of the world, when he was 20, was running DC. You start to learn that and so I mean there's a couple of staffers that I mean reached out to me after the last time we went and we're working on stuff together and it literally is turning into something, and for good. So those are the incredible conversations that we've had, and I always like we have a good shtick when we go in Alex and I, because we've been at these, we know you got to start quick and you don't want the introduction to be 15 minutes of your life.
Charlie Apigian:It's like boom, boom, boom. Let's get to the issues and then see where it goes from there. Make sure you hit something If they're from a certain area. All of that is fun. What is it that you like when you're talking to because I think people would like to know you're sitting in a Senator or a US representative's office? What is it that you feel is, first of all, worth the time to be there? And then, why do you like doing things like that?
Alex Curtis:I think what I like doing most in those meetings is listening, helping people to tell their story. I think you know the pre-work that goes into that. To help people if they've never done it before. To help them just like. Look, just be you. Tell them where you're from, what you do on a daily basis and what you care about. It's kind of it Is it be you, but be prepared. Be you, be prepared.
Alex Curtis:If you want to bring some handouts afterwards to give them, that's great, but you know what you care about. Just tell them what you care about and open up the conversation. They will hear you and they will say, okay, well, let me know about this or tell me more about that. But so much of those conversations. You get more out of them if you're actually sitting back and listening, not just because you're trying to hear everybody's stories, which is super valuable but, number two.
Alex Curtis:you're hearing where the disconnects are and you can help fill in. You're hearing where this person said something but no one caught it and you can jump on it or you can say well, hey, charlie, you know the senators has to ask you about this. Do you want to bring that up again? Or like I don't think they quite understood it, can you explain it from this angle?
Alex Curtis:And I think that's you have to have somebody in the room that's listening and paying attention to the dynamics of the room and who's saying what, who isn't saying what, so that those gaps can be filled in, so you can really get something out of that meeting, and I do think a lot of those meetings. Sometimes people come away from those meetings saying, well, we didn't pass a law or anything. It was like, well, that's not the point.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, it's like we're out here sowing seeds, right.
Alex Curtis:Correct. You're building relationships, you're building that bridge back to that person's local district. The next time they're in town or the next time they touch on a certain policy that they know little about, they may hopefully met with the person in the room that does know about it and that is their constituent and they can reach out later. Or, if it's something they want to know more about, they can reach out more and get more information from them and continue to build those relationships. And I think that's where we've had the most impact, not on the federal level. We don't really advocate for anything specific.
Charlie Apigian:Right.
Alex Curtis:It's mostly to help them understand who we are and vice versa, and that we're giant resources for them back in the district and when they think about certain policies, they need to ask us. Yeah, they need to talk to us. There you go.
Charlie Apigian:Yep, and I think, yeah, that's the part that Alex has done a great job, not just for him, but for the entire National Technology Council. And now is the model I think for other tech councils is we went in initially just to say we're here, and then we are the resource for them. And then they started calling when there was a tech related bill and they got the advice and if it wasn't Alex, he would get the right lawyer or the right technologist to answer those questions, or we'd put together a focus group, and so now, every time I feel there is a law, we don't have to go hunting for it. They're going to come to Alex, including. I mean, we know that there's certain people at the local level that are asking questions about AI and they've reached out to you and we've already gone and we have spoken to them to educate them and they trust that if we're talking about it because Alex brought them to us that they should listen.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, so is it generally. Just don't write anything right now, because we were talking about this on a different podcast. It's like let's not make any rash decisions on how we're going to qualify AI legally. I don't know. Whatever you call it, whatever policies we're going to write, but it feels like now is not necessarily the time. Is that what you're? What message are you sending in?
Alex Curtis:that. That's the message I would send. That's not what they're doing.
Charlie Yielding:They want something.
Alex Curtis:They want to act, they want to jump on the hype train. Quite frankly, I would say yeah, a lot of it is. They see that these are popular issues and they want to write legislation that has something to do with it.
Alex Curtis:Or maybe they see some aspect of it that they're concerned about. So we went and talked to a local legislator Again, just being in the right place at the right time, having another conversation, they approached us, said, hey, we're writing AI legislation, we want to hear more about it. So being able to be part of an organization that has hundreds of members knowing a number of them specifically that care about them, being able to pull those people and say, hey, come and talk about this, tell them your expertise, tell them what you know about and why they should first do no harm, yeah, yeah, yeah, do no harm, yeah, exactly that Hippocratic oath of policymaking.
Charlie Yielding:I mean, right now you just don't know, we just don't know enough to know if something is going to do harm or not.
Alex Curtis:That's a very informed point of view.
Charlie Yielding:But I would not say what that policymaking is so when they come talking about stuff, just send them my way. I'll inform them to do nothing, and then we'll be good. That's it.
Charlie Apigian:Advocacy done, you'll be on my list, yeah we've had those conversations and I was able to say that to them in person because Alex brought us to them. Don't you brag about it? Well, you know, I want to take a step back for a second because I think this is a great opportunity to educate people out there. We have federal, we have state and then we have local. Tell us a little bit of the differences between those and who would you approach in certain cases?
Alex Curtis:Sure, so let's do some examples. So right when I first started working at the NTC, a big giant debate that was happening at the time locally at the city level was about broadband deployment and new company, new entrants to provide more competition through fiber, which means like adding ISPs to the list of available ISPs.
Charlie Yielding:Very rarely does that happen. Yeah, Marshall Blackburn does not like that at all.
Alex Curtis:Well, very rarely does that happen, because it's super capital intensive. It costs a lot to string a wire, whether it's made out of glass or copper, to hundreds of thousands of homes across the city. You have to either put them on poles, dig holes the Google can tell us all about it now, right, and so that was the giant debate that was happening at the time at the local level, and so, as an industry organization, you have to put a different hat on than my previous hats, which were more consumer focused. Okay.
Alex Curtis:And so you're advocating for an industry or your members, so talking to policy makers about why competition is important, while at the same time having members that are the competition.
Alex Curtis:So, it's difficult, coming from an association perspective, where your actual members are the competitors and they want you to do different things, and so this. Actually that's true, and so that was why, at the foundation of setting up this advocacy committee, one of the first things that we did was come up with a policy statement about what happens when there's disagreement amongst members, and so, setting up from scratch, knowing that you're running an association, being part of association, that is going to have conflict, there are people that have different points of views, companies that have different interests, how you manage that.
Alex Curtis:And so, taking a local perspective, working with city council, we have a very interesting city council that actually looks a lot more like a legislature because it's got these at large legislature folks that look more like a Senate. Oh yeah, yeah.
Charlie Apigian:From a status perspective, it is a large city council.
Alex Curtis:It's huge and there's good things and bad things about that, but it was those folks that were deciding the policy. And so how you talk to them, how you show up at local meetings as citizens to talk about that policy, you advocate on behalf of industry as well, and so that happens really at the local municipal building and you go and talk to them. Over the months that it took they only had meetings once every month. They were talking about open sessions where they were talking about these things and you go and you say your piece right, you advocate for what that is. We didn't do a lot of lobbying or anything at the local level for that, but just mostly to say competition is important and even just the threat of competition had a giant impact on the cost of broadband Even before it had ever been deployed.
Charlie Yielding:Well, I experienced that the second Comcast had to relent. All my prices went down Across the board. I didn't even have to call them, they just changed the stuff because they were like well, now we got to compete with people, so let's do right by them, since we have to.
Alex Curtis:And we were lucky enough yesterday to have the new mayor come to our board meeting and talk a lot about different issues. One of the first things he talked about was that digital divide.
Charlie Apigian:Digital inclusion yeah.
Alex Curtis:People that don't have access to, people that still don't have access to basic broadband, let alone high speed broadband.
Charlie Yielding:Well, that go ahead. No, you go for it.
Alex Curtis:No, I mean, I think that's, you know, working at the city level. You know, working with the city CIO and different task forces over the years on those committees that worked on studies for digital equity is super important because again, it all feeds back to as an association that deals with growing the tech community. If you don't have people that have access to the internet, they can't participate in commerce.
Alex Curtis:They can't participate in education. They can't get a better job because so many of the jobs are posted online. They can't go to YouTube to learn new things or get online education.
Charlie Yielding:If you don't have access to the internet, you're missing a basic right, but that's a point of contention right now as far as, like, internet is not a right legally. But we do have a city here in Tennessee, in Chattanooga, that has public broadband internet and it is constantly being attacked, and it actually this kind of ties into another question that I wanted to ask you earlier with regards to opposition. So you're putting yourself in a position to say I want this. Well, what do you do when somebody else, like a big figure in the state of Tennessee, is like I don't want that very badly, and so now your button heads with them. So how do you deal with that? I mean, do you have a strategy or do you just do your thing?
Charlie Apigian:It depends on the issue. It depends on who those folks are.
Alex Curtis:If those folks are, like I said, if those folks are your members, that's a whole other consideration. If those people are external to my organization, that doesn't mean I can't be an advocate.
Alex Curtis:But it does become a little more difficult when you've got competitors and it's a different thing you can advocate for. But what I've tried to do is try to find people who care about whatever that issue is and try to help them understand how to be a better advocate. And so try to expose people to the issues, try to help them understand them and then try to find where their points of view are. So if we come to the table and say, OK, well, the industry is going to be generally harmed if this thing happens, or if this thing doesn't happen, who are the people that want to make it happen or don't want to make it happen? And if, as an organization, we decide to advocate for it, then we can better identify who could be better advocates for that and how we can pull them together and go march up to the hill or whatever it is and advocate for that stuff.
Charlie Yielding:So I want to spend some time with this particular example just to build out the full extent of what you're talking about.
Charlie Yielding:And so you've You've got a stated purpose to increase the tech awareness and jobs in middle Tennessee, in the surrounding areas and stuff like that.
Charlie Yielding:And so, as this is that being your stated goal, then it's your best interest to increase the tech availability and just the overall chances for everybody in town. And so you're looking at the issue of how do we get internet to everybody? Is that a? Do we approach that in like the capitalist way? Do we approach that into like the city needs to build a safety net kind of way? Do we approach that in some other kind of creative way that we just don't really have right now? Or you know a model that doesn't exist and then so, once you've decided that or like, is that something actually? I guess the better way to ask it is like is that the path that you take on making decisions of whether to or not to advocate for something Like in this case? Do you just see that as a potential solution and you just go for it, or does some other factor that I'm not maybe thinking about right now play into it?
Alex Curtis:Yeah, I mean, I think it depends on the issue.
Alex Curtis:I would say let's go for something that's a little less contentious and more easy to everybody could understand. Like tech education, right, you're not gonna get a lot of, you're not gonna get very many people that are gonna be competitive with tech education, meaning whether someone wants it or doesn't want it, most people want more education and so making sure that that kind of education is available to more people, who argues with that? Very few people, except for the people that own the purse strings that have to pay for things. But those people can take convincing, right that everything takes money. So everybody's, they don't care just that it's about tech education, they care about just spending money in general. And so things like tech education like again the mayor talked about a bit yesterday to you, you have to just find and start locking arms with the people that are passionate about it. People have all the reasons to drive that, and we're a regional organization and so being where the state capital is helps, but it can't just be the people in the state capital.
Alex Curtis:It has to be people across the state, and so not only you have to find people that are advocates about it, you have to find them all across the state, because it's really important for them to be talking to their policy makers that are in places that aren't where we are. They can be better advocates. Like in the same way of like when you go to the hill, the better advocate is the person that is represented by that legislator, and so me talking as a Nashvillian for people in Chattanooga, ain't so?
Charlie Apigian:used to.
Alex Curtis:So finding those people across the state again, no estate issue helping them be better advocates or locking arms with stuff that they're already doing in different ways. And then finding other national groups that care about that too, because there are a lot of national groups that care about education too. Codeorg really cares about computer science education. They were amazing allies and helped tremendously to that effort of helping things like computer science education across the state.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, and let's talk about that one, because that was a huge win. All three of us were involved in that. Charlie was on the education committee at that time.
Charlie Yielding:the other, Charlie- yeah, but barely, though. This is your time to shine here.
Charlie Apigian:But this is one where you can think of it locally, but it really is a state issue and a lot of times when you think about federal federal you're going after big dollars to make things happen like broadband. You needed federal dollars, but this was a state issue and you did get Memphis, chattanooga, I'm assuming, knoxville people as well, and obviously everybody here as well, as even down to like Murfreesboro, which is south of Nashville. You brought everybody from the state together. We did, I know, some educational stuff. What was that process like? And then what was the result of it?
Charlie Yielding:Yeah. What is it, though, that we're talking about?
Alex Curtis:first, sure so, and let me step back just a second Because I think this really ties back to data and you're suggesting some ideas of obvious topics tying a lot of what we're talking about to data, data advocacy, right. So an organization like ours is a workforce development organization. We try to, we care most about helping to grow the local industry, helping grow the, but personally, as people that work for this organization, why do we care?
Alex Curtis:We want to make this place a better place. Right, we want to live in the place. We want to live in the place that's growing and want to make sure that everybody has great opportunities. Well, workforce development is all about getting people into those jobs. And how do we know, like? We talk a lot about the industry in Nashville's growing, and it is by leaps and bounds. How do you quantify that? Where are the opportunities? So we didn't used to have a jobs report that said what the market looked like, what jobs were available, what are the skills that are necessary for those jobs? Where are the people looking? What's the supply look like? Right, and I know talking with you at least early on in those conversations and this is always the topic when we go to Capitol Hill is workforce development as a region. Are we developing enough talent to fill all those open jobs? And when you look at comparative data that we work with MTSU and have worked with them for a number of years to generate, a great report that helps break down all that data.
Alex Curtis:They look at national data so we can compare ourselves to other regions and comparatively, no, we're not doing enough. We're not doing like there's not enough happening to get more graduates to be able to fill those eventual entry level jobs and then especially export jobs. No, there's not enough talent yet, and so-.
Charlie Yielding:We can't rely on solely trains, plants.
Alex Curtis:It doesn't come out like, right, you have to build your own, and it's been said so many times like, the places that will continue to succeed are the places that planted the seeds. They did their own work, and so I mean, from a data-driven policy, being able to figure out okay, well, how many graduates do we have out of these programs? Okay, well then, how many butts in the seats are those classes do you have? You can't have graduates without having people attending the class.
Alex Curtis:If you don't have enough students attending IT classes, then you're never gonna have enough graduates. What does it take to get more students into those seats early on? Well, it turns out that kids are scared of tech in elementary school and high school. They don't know. They see it as a scary thing. If they see computer science that looks scary, they don't want to take another science class. I guess it's skewed by gender too, right, and it's very skewed by gender and race, you don't it's a problem right.
Alex Curtis:Because you see a lot of white dudes in tech.
Alex Curtis:It's a giant problem, but once you start working at the local level and talking to students and working with administrators and teachers and helping them to understand that a lot of this is problem solving skills, a lot of this is trying to just generally expose students to more tech and it's obviously become a lot easier every day as more students have devices in their own pockets. They're not as scared as they maybe were previously, but they don't program for those devices. Well, getting kids to understand that that is not such a scary thing. It can be a little. I think the barrier to learning tech can be steep, but it's not long.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, I think a lot's put on teachers though in that case, but I think that ties into the work you were doing as well.
Alex Curtis:But that's the other side.
Alex Curtis:So on the other side of that is not just that students don't get it so they can pursue a track like that, but you don't have enough teachers to be able to teach the students where they don't have the qualifications or the state laws written in a certain way that there would never be enough teachers because they can't do enough professional development to be able to teach those things.
Alex Curtis:And so, coming from all those angles, that really was what not just me and you give me a lot of credit and I don't deserve, but I think a lot of people across the state were very concerned about that. Folks like Meggy Gwekwe, those Code Crew in Memphis, john Warke locally there's a lot of folks that and the TSIN, the STEM organization locally, all coming at it from different directions, wanting students to have more access, wanting teachers to have more professional development. National groups like Codeorg, knowing the impact that code can have for student learning to build a tech career down the line, and then just our local tech industry. I just remember one of the times when we were talking about these jobs reports and you were just looking at we don't produce enough students Like look at these other students.
Charlie Apigian:It's not even close.
Alex Curtis:And you could never get there, even if you were at capacity to do that. You could never get there until you had enough students learning at a younger age to be able to get into those classes down the line or just even spark an interest.
Charlie Apigian:There you go.
Alex Curtis:Just build a vocabulary.
Charlie Apigian:And we used to always talk about it, where there's nothing worse than teaching bad computer science in eighth grade and if you don't put the resources behind it, it's not the teacher's fault. No, they're throwing sometimes the track coach at it and they're learning, and I would go into these classes with them and they're like please just take over a couple of my classes. I'm buried, isn't? I.
Charlie Apigian:They're trying to learn it at the same time as the kids and doing the best that they could. But what if there was resources behind it? And I know that our approach was just have a computer science class in the system. So if there's, we're not even talking about every school, we were just talking about having it within a district kind of thing. And because it was considered a vocation, it still is in Tennessee and most schools did not have something tech at all, and in Nashville I don't know if there was any at the time. Rutherford County had a few, Williamson County oh that's why it skirts.
Charlie Yielding:That's why Williamson County has its own building. The building for their entrepreneur stuff is because it's considered vocation.
Charlie Apigian:It is vocation. That's weird.
Alex Curtis:Yep, well, that's how I mean the academy model here in Nashville that we have. There are schools that do focus more on that.
Alex Curtis:And that's how the model is built. So two things. I think there's a few things to unpack there. I think the opportunities there are giant, right, but setting the policy aside for just a second so much more about advocacy is about not passing laws. It's very little actually. That's the last step, and getting people to care about the issue, helping educating them, understanding why all this stuff is important, is tremendous. But all the other stuff you have to do to get kids to care about tech is not just teaching it in schools when they're not in school. A lot of the stuff that we do at the organization is trying to get at kids when they're not in school. Right To help them get opportunities to just have time Like camps in the summer.
Alex Curtis:Or you guys have had traveling days.
Alex Curtis:Right, and that helps build connections in different ways, right. So you could be in a classroom trying to learn a computer science skill or some problem solving skill. But helping a student to see what it's like eventually to do that thing in life as a career is super important. And helping them see many views of that and helping them to see many people doing that, hopefully some of which look like them, is super important. I'm with you 100% on that. And so getting them out of the classroom and into the business or into the environment is a giant piece of advocacy too, because they have to understand what they could be down the line, and if they don't understand that, there's no way that they would be passionate just for computer science unto itself. I'm a geek, I like coding and some things, but most people aren't. And if we need like if.
Charlie Apigian:And we need a lot of people in tech that are not coders.
Alex Curtis:Correct, yeah, and I say code is the easy way to go for it, but there's so many different aspects of having a tech job and that's what's so important about taking kids to go see a company that isn't a tech company that employs so many tech people.
Charlie Yielding:Well, that's what, when the kids would come by our office back when we actually still had an office, that was what it was Like we don't do development, we do customer support, but they can see how we work with technology from top to bottom to get it done. And I 100% agree with the position of like you're showing those kids a new way to be, like a new possibility and as somebody who had that happen for me, I very much appreciate that and then right, and so there's also this dichotomy of like.
Alex Curtis:Yes, the overall reason why I, as an employed person at an organization that's like a chamber, do this is because there's more tech jobs to fill and so you want to get people into those jobs. But if you look at the data, tech jobs pay almost twice what the average job pays in middle Tennessee. That's a life changer, that's a family changer. If you can get someone into a career that pays twice what an average job pays and it doesn't take that much more education to get into that job for many entry level jobs, that's huge. You're automatically, you're very quickly. If you can get people to make that shift, you're very quickly getting people into better paying jobs.
Alex Curtis:All of a sudden, housing becomes more affordable. All of a sudden, education becomes more affordable. There's so many more opportunities when people have more resources and to the extent that we can help students know from an earlier age that that's an avenue that they could take and they could see oh, that person looks like me. They have a job that makes a lot, that maybe my parents make, or maybe that my family makes, or what have you. They all of a sudden have a goal, they have an inspiration, or even whether they're seeing something, a person that looks like them doing something that they could do or whether they go to an office and for whatever they're doing at that office, they get inspired by it.
Alex Curtis:That's why I think innovation is so should be so enticing to more people is because, there's so much excitement about seeing something cool and new that can really get kids especially interested in doing it and can inspire them to pursue a career, and so that's why I think innovation at large I think is super important to expose more people to, because I think it's inspirational too.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, change is definitely scary, but think about it for these kids. Like you're setting them up to break cycles and so that's definitely changed on their part. So you're creating change via innovation and proactive networking and advocacy and all this other type of stuff. But that's what it all boils down to is you're changing the perspective future of individuals in your community to increase their well-being overall.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, and an example like you, Charlie, who hasn't been to the Hill, hasn't gone and done that other stuff.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, well, I'm trying to say go do it. I'm not saying that because you're still doing advocacy. You still do advocacy even though you're not passing bills. I think that's very important to say, even to the point where, when you saw a gap in Nashville for training you all here at the Nashville Technology Council by the way, we haven't even mentioned we're actually at the Nashville Technology Council, tech Hill Commons. We're in one of their conference rooms right now. We're right next to their big room and their nice kitchen and so. But you guys are gracious enough to have us here, so excited to have you, but you chose to actually create those courses and you changed people's lives. So advocacy is more than just going out and saying somebody do it. You actually, here at the tech council and I know there's a lot of other tech councils that do this create those programs themselves. That's advocacy on its own.
Charlie Yielding:That's leading by example too.
Alex Curtis:And doing the work right. It's so much of the work that organizations like ours do are the hard work that a lot of people don't want to do or focus on, and it's tough stuff, but it's more. We're not in the classroom teaching. That's what you do Like. We're the apprenticeship program that we work with Nashville State and Vol State and Nashville Software School to put programs together to get people not only education but credit and help them down the line of trying to help them find possible jobs.
Alex Curtis:I'm not an educator, I don't know how to do that, but you see the demand and you have to go for what the opportunity is to help those people. And the other side of the equation is there's open jobs. We're also helping the industry that needs to have those jobs filled, yeah, and so there's a lot of work to do all around to help what we call the workforce pipeline, to get more people into that pipe. There's many different ways to go about it traditional ways, non-traditional ways, learning off of YouTube, whatever it takes to help people get into those opportunities, and helping businesses understand all the different new ways that people can come at.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, that's a big deal these days too.
Alex Curtis:It's a big education piece too that we've worked on for years to help companies and their HR departments change the way that they have applications written and don't rely so heavily on the three to five years of experience, especially in the latest technologies can you imagine if someone said three to five years experience in AI.
Charlie Yielding:There's a running joke on the internet for programming languages that you need five years of experience for the language that's been out for 24 months.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, there you go. By the way, what was the result of the computer science?
Charlie Yielding:and education.
Charlie Apigian:Is there a result at this point?
Alex Curtis:It hasn't been fully implemented yet it's being implemented right now but over four years.
Alex Curtis:there were four different years that we advocated for this and various different ways, and in the last run, it's always great to have the king rooting for you and so the governor decided to introduce his own legislation about it, which was super great leap forward and dedicate and do it the right way.
Alex Curtis:The first legislation that make it help to introduce was a computer science requirement, because he went right for it, knowing that that wasn't possible and folks didn't care for that. We compromised over a few years to say, oh, whatever, we just make it available and not a requirement. What if every school had it, the opportunity to make it available so a student could have access but not a requirement? And what would that take and how much money would that take to educate teachers and all the rest? And then finally, last year, the governor, after talking with the staff so many times, turned around and said no, we're gonna make this, we're gonna make it a requirement. And now we're gonna make it a requirement, we're gonna make it a funded mandate where they put dedicated dollars, recurring dollars, towards educating teachers and coming up with a plan to change how curricula was developed in that area so that teachers could get new qualifications very easily to do that. And then, after a few years, there would be a high school graduation requirement as well as some middle school requirements too In 2028, right.
Alex Curtis:No it's at the beginning of next year.
Charlie Yielding:I thought that by the graduating class of 2028. Graduating class of yes, yeah, sorry. The graduating class of 2028 is gonna be the first fully guaranteed to have computer science as a part of their education.
Alex Curtis:I actually don't think there's a delayed impact of it. So, I think starting the piece that was everybody was waiting on was kind of the ratification of the new education rules, and so I'm pretty sure that kicks in at the end of next year. So starting then is when students will start to have more requirements to be able to do that.
Charlie Yielding:So they gotta take extra classes. But that's not where it stops, though It'll be extra.
Alex Curtis:It'll be kind of a substitution of some other classes or a more new option. Yeah, sorry.
Charlie Yielding:So they'll have options for the comp site class. But also it's about changing the way that teachers are teaching. The analogies teachers are using it's like, instead of Tommy's got two apples, it's like Tommy's got two iPhones. It's simple stuff, but it's introducing a more tech based vocabulary to the youngins. Was it third grade when it started? Yeah, yeah. So that's a good age from a technology perspective for kids to start picking up on and whatnot, because their brains are getting there from us, and that was the other thing about all the policy was that we finally helped to get it passed.
Alex Curtis:Then we get to do the other hard work of working with bringing industry together to say, okay, well, are the specifications that the education folks are writing relevant to the industry?
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, that's what we helped with some right, which is exactly what I was gonna say.
Alex Curtis:That was the part.
Charlie Apigian:No, I mean you were already bringing it up.
Alex Curtis:So I mean that was the part that was wonderful, because we were able to bring industry, that are members, together and say, okay, let's review what's being proposed and give input, as they're asking. And we have a great opportunity to make an impact now. It rarely happens that industry has such a great opportunity to actually impact the K through 12 education piece of it.
Charlie Apigian:So I felt good about that?
Alex Curtis:Yeah, you should, because it was a great ability to have that kind of impact and it rarely happens. Thank you for participating.
Charlie Apigian:And it was a long. It's a long play If you're doing advocacy. It takes time, it takes trust.
Charlie Apigian:It takes all of those important things and I noticed early on because people were in such need of help, it wasn't people weren't interested in talking about high school and middle school, they just wanted people. And then over time it was like, well, wait a minute, now we live here. And so once you saw the roots of companies really here in Nashville and I think it took time then people got on board and then it just became a snowball effect and it was great to see. I was shocked that it became a requirement in every high school.
Charlie Yielding:Well, that was a change there at the very end.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah.
Alex Curtis:At least I didn't know about that. That's what the governor introduced.
Charlie Yielding:This one's yeah, because you were asking for way less. And then he was just like, well, let's do this. And you're like, oh heck, yeah, that's the way to do it, yeah.
Charlie Apigian:I think that's a great example of what advocacy can be, because it's so much more than just passing the bill, which was important, but you even did education well before any of that and advocated help introduce higher ed to companies. The fact that I'm here this is my gateway to companies has been the Nashville Technology Council, and that's been great for companies to see. Nashville Software School has absolutely benefited in the right ways, helping you and also helping companies get the talent that they need, and so that has been a huge thing, alex. Let's talk about the future a little bit. What do you think is?
Charlie Yielding:One last thing about the comps, I think, is you're shirking responsibility, like the positive type of responsibility it feels like to me. So I'm just going to say I appreciate you moving the ball and keeping it moving on. That Like that was very needed, but that is exactly the part that you've overemphasized today, and so for those of you who haven't been paying attention, he said multiple times it's about meeting people, it's about going to where they are, it's about getting to know what they think about things so you can better tell them what they should think about things.
Charlie Apigian:Absolutely. I just feel like I want to hit him right now. Why? Is that. Because it's good. It's good stuff. I feel like you know.
Alex Curtis:Because you're always a close-up.
Charlie Yielding:He's like damn it.
Charlie Apigian:He said a good thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, and I think that's a good thing. That's been an easy one, right? You know, like we've gone into offices and it's always been easy conversations because it's labor, workforce, it's it's education, um, is that some of? Do you feel like some of our future topics, uh, for advocacy, are easy ones, or are we starting to get into things that are a little bit on the harder side?
Alex Curtis:Yeah, I don't know where the next easy issue is. Um, yeah, we're starting to deal with some very contentious stuff, right? So, um, like last year's data privacy legislation passed. We have a couple of years dealing with, dealing with working on on that kind of legislation for a while, um, from an industry perspective, to try to make it as least onerous as possible, right? Um, a lot of this is around compliance costs. A lot of it is around how much it takes for a company to have to deal with it.
Charlie Yielding:They're always going to say that, though Every single, every single data privacy conversation, from a company perspective, it's like well, it's going to cost me, so the price is going to go up, so it's going to cost the customer For sure.
Alex Curtis:For sure, but at the same time, a lot of those costs are legitimate, but not not only that. You have one of the arguments that I spoke about that ended up being kind of a kind of the champion for the little guy. When we talked about it was think of during COVID, how your habits changed, not just online and all the rest of the changes, but, like you're about to trigger me, think of that you take advantage of today. Now, now that we're out of COVID, all the delivery services Right.
Alex Curtis:Think of the mom and pop restaurants, the pizza tiny pizza shop You're you were able to order from during COVID because of those new technologies. Yeah Right, yeah. Think of all the data that that pizza shop now has to deal with Just because they now use an online ordering system where they didn't ever do that. Before People phoned in, they took an order, pizza showed up, like the guy person showed up to get the pizza and then left. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:They have, if they're successful, hundreds of thousands of people's information now that they didn't have before, they didn't have to deal with before, and they're used to focusing on their dough and their ingredients and getting the pizzas delivered. They're not they're not an IT shop. They're not focused on PII. They're not focused on PII. Yep, did the people that give that, that provided them the service, set them up right? Did they? Did they have a third party service? Are they using something in the square space or something that they built themselves? I don't know, but, like there's a lot of people out there that are will be caught unawares of laws like that, yeah, and that's a giant barrier to doing business in a state and for an organization that I have to put the hat on now of a of a chamber, like organization that, again, for all the same reasons, we want to pass computer science, because we want to make this area a greater place.
Alex Curtis:We also want to make a place where people can build their own business and there's not giant barriers to entry for that. And do we have to be one of the first states that adopts that policy, when we've already got such a badge of honor of doing business very openly and freely in this state? So those are, those are things that have to be considered and that's the kind of legislation that we have to be more and more worried about, because these issues are attractive to policy makers, because I think it it. They're interested in them for various different reasons, but they don't necessarily understand the impact of passing legislation like that on Sure, On big business.
Alex Curtis:They're super savvy. They're doing business in multiple states, let alone international. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:They know how to deal with this stuff. They've already built their systems in ways that they don't have to worry about complying with local laws. Local business or mid-sized business doesn't necessarily think about those things. I'm not saying that they shouldn't. Yeah, I'm saying that they shouldn't figure out how to protect consumers' rights at all times. They need to be doing that and they are, but when they have new things, force it upon them, when they they're not thinking along those lines, having laws that have teeth to them like penalties and dollar penalties and criminal penalties and things like that. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:That really has to have a lot more education to it before you pass that. I don't disagree with that, and so and so. That's the kind of stuff that we're going to see more and more of when we talk about. Ai. You know, shortly after just last, when we were in DC, when we were in Las Vegas for CES, new legislation was introduced by press release talking about how to protect um use it, we're.
Alex Curtis:Nashville. We want to. We want to be super protective of music rights and people's people's artists rights, and um the governor worked to sponsor legislation um around helping to protect artists' voices, especially with with respect to generative AI.
Charlie Apigian:Yep.
Alex Curtis:And so, like, what are the ramifications of that? Like, that's is, are we talking about creating a new kind of right in local law that deals with that? Well, how does that even work?
Charlie Yielding:I do feel like, as far as, as far as legal stuff goes, like that's where government should focus right now is on intellectual property and copyright infringement and stuff like that, because ethically there is a line with AI that we have to figure out.
Charlie Apigian:Well, and those laws probably already exist in a lot of cases, and now you just have a new technology. That's part of it. Um, and I and I think what you're hinting at, uh, is a lot of your success has been in making sure they don't pass something that could hurt a lot of companies, a lot of individuals, and I know there have been many bills in the data policy world too, like four years ago, um, or whatever where it was up, and you're like, if that passes, that's going to hurt a lot of people and and, and they would get killed at the last minute or they turn into a study or something else. Um, I know that those successes are out there and so those are. You almost become a watchdog to make sure things don't get passed then.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, I've worked in an industry that's like not the most wealthy industry, but we did have to deal with GDPR when it when it was enacted, and for I can say from our perspective, like it's not that big of a burden, on tech companies at least. But I do think that something has to happen, because the opposite is like you've got a company that does business across North America and they've got 50 different data privacy policies that they've got to adhere to. So, like, should the, should the focus be on some federal, some federal rules, and then the states don't have to worry as much?
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, we, we we've had those conversations in DC.
Charlie Yielding:Uh and uh, I can say they're frustrating. Yes, that frustrating from. Well, we don't have to get into it from. Oh, I think you should. So so frustrating from what perspective.
Alex Curtis:I don't know if you want to say or uh, I think just say at the same time one, two, three go. No, I mean, I think the issue ends up being for some of those types of visits is that, um, right now, the current temperature in Congress is very gridlocked Right. You can't get. You can't get people to agree on the data privacy stuff, on things like data privacy, yeah. You may actually be able to get them to agree, but it ends up being politics about why they can't pass or why they can't move forward, and so that's that's the difficult stuff.
Alex Curtis:When we go to DC, we say, okay, you know, we don't want a state by state patchwork of laws. We don't want 20 different, 50 different. So you're already saying that type of stuff we do. Then when we say that needs to be done at the federal level, they say yeah, but we can get no one to agree on that, or like people are moving stuff but it doesn't go anywhere because of politics or what have you, and so that becomes. That makes it really difficult, that makes it open season for legislators at the local level to just start running with them.
Alex Curtis:Because, there's no one at a federal level that's actually going to solve the problem.
Charlie Yielding:I was actually surprised Like Tennessee is not normally a get ahead of the federal government on policy, policy, state, but with the data privacy they did, I was surprised when they did something. I'll say that.
Charlie Apigian:Cause at that time we were one of the first in the top not if it wasn't the top 10, it was. It was pretty close to that.
Charlie Yielding:There's still only seven, like seven states that have something passed.
Charlie Apigian:Uh enacted.
Charlie Yielding:Maybe we're up to like 13 or so. You're right. Inactive is what I mean.
Alex Curtis:Yeah, um, that will kick in, uh, july of 2025. So little time to help educate people and help understand how they understand.
Charlie Yielding:I don't think from the state. Like I read through it and it just didn't. It doesn't have teeth, like everybody's exempt from, uh, from doing anything, and the AG has to decide whether they're going to take something to court anyways. Like I can't sue a company here and and that's it. That's a big, that's a big miss on my part because, like what's the point in having data privacy if I, the consumer, I'm not protected?
Alex Curtis:What I would say is that it gives you a lot more breathing room to figure out your policies, to do it yourself, that's fair, that is fair, and it gives. It gives Congress a lot more time to take national action. And we've got something on the books. And there's something on the books that's not bad, that's a good perspective, right, and so, to the extent, again, go back, going back to do no harm. Mm, hmm.
Alex Curtis:There's a lot of what the conversation was about was to try it and it ours looks a little different than some of the other states because we tried to say, okay, what are some of the barriers we can, quite frankly, we can, put into the law?
Alex Curtis:that make it easier for more companies to still exist. With how to having to worry about implementing this until they get their act figured out? Yeah, until they get figured out. Okay, this might be something like if the legislature comes back next year and changes a digit. Well, that's going to screw them, right.
Alex Curtis:They could or they could come back in 26 after the years. After a year of impact, they're able to say, okay, we know fewer businesses are worried about this because they took the time to implement it. Yeah, and so that's better for most people. But at the same time, you still have a lot of companies that are big companies that are implementing the technologies and are focusing on that from the app level, from all the different service levels, and so they'll lead by example, and they might, you might get companies that come in as service providers say, look, we will solve small company will come and solve your problem by use this system and we're all compliant, regardless of where you are in the world. This, this policy right, and so that will help should lower the cost for those small businesses to end up having to comply with those rags. Yeah.
Alex Curtis:And the market worked Right. I think that that's an argument of like why we don't jump into drastic changes. Yeah, If you get the opportunity for people to come to the table and find ways to make things work, and then you end up having better policy written in it and then the end business business can still do businessy things. Yeah. And consumers end up getting protected. So I think that's the that's the end goal. Whether we get there quicker is the harder thing, okay, whether, if you implemented a draconian thing really fast, do consumers benefit.
Charlie Yielding:No, I mean, yeah, I'm with you. I understand what you're saying. Yeah, what you're saying, yeah, the I like that's a new perspective for me. Though, to do no harm on the beginning or in the beginning part, I 100% agree with it, because they they definitely could be messing stuff up, like, especially on the AI side, like I, I worry that they'll they'll make some sort of like this is banned or this is not applicable in these situations, so they'll they'll remove it from some situation that maybe it doesn't need to be removed from.
Alex Curtis:Well, I will say so. The language of that voice legislation finally came out yesterday, the day before doesn't even mention AI. Huh, the closest thing it talks about is algorithm, but it's mentioned once and it really has less to do about people transforming people's voices, to use another context, that, like chat, that GD, the generative AI, does, and more about creating rights, creating new rights in people's, in photos and videos and voice and audio.
Charlie Apigian:Wow, okay, yeah, yeah.
Alex Curtis:Which has nothing to do with AI. Then doesn't matter what the tool is. It doesn't matter. What the tool is it's more about. So are they a tech Creating a new right? So are they attacking NFTs, right? So a lot of this looks like name image likeness. Yeah. A lot of it. A lot of it looks like you know, not defamation law, but potentially like defamation law. Wow. Defamation law without the defamation right. It's all about like creating new, creating new rights in people's personas.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, it's, it's misuse of, like personal identity or like a sovereign identity.
Alex Curtis:Maybe the better way to say it. When was the last time you posted the Instagram or Facebook? Me. Or any social media. I mean every day. And when was the last time you posted a photo of someone that wasn't you?
Charlie Yielding:Uh, like was it me or my immediate family?
Alex Curtis:Yeah, I don't know, it included someone that wasn't you.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, for sure I do ones where I'm including them because I'm you do some of it, even in the background, even in the background. Oh, we'll just say all of them, all of them, like almost all of them, yeah.
Alex Curtis:So every one of those people in Tennessee would have a right to their image. Mm-hmm.
Charlie Yielding:I usually uh. So I like where you're going with that, because I think that that is a conversation that we need to have, but I do like I personally like to ask for permission before I take pictures here at Disney World and you're going to ask every person in the background for their permission. We'll see. Here's the thing I've got. I've got this thing called technology and I touched the person in the background and they disappear.
Charlie Apigian:Oh yeah, but I mean, I I know what you mean. It's like when I'm at a, a meetup, and I'm taking a picture for, and everybody's even waving in the background, it's almost like they are giving me permission, but I don't have a written permission.
Charlie Yielding:I think. I think that if you put up some, if you put an image up like that, though, and then the person comes and says please take that down, it's your responsibility to take it down.
Charlie Apigian:I would too, yeah, but that that right now is just personal courtesy, that's not law.
Alex Curtis:Right Is what if there's fines behind it and they don't have any process? There's no said process in the law.
Charlie Apigian:You're not in their house.
Charlie Yielding:Well, so so, just so everybody knows we're talking like a GDPR type thing for personal, personal use.
Alex Curtis:It's more like a state copyright in your persona.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, yeah, which that sounds like we have to bring Alex back, yeah. Like you're going to become like our referee commentator during football games. It's like and let's go to Alex, now for the new AI legislation, which that is not a joke.
Charlie Yielding:Yeah, that's not a joke at all.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, for sure we're going to have to bring you back for any of that. But since we're, we're already at a good amount of time. So we, we, we haven't even, we didn't even talk about AI or anything like that. So obviously we have to have when it becomes more mature, cause I don't think it's, I don't think we can talk about it yet and have everything that we say be negated next week.
Charlie Yielding:Oh we can talk about it though.
Charlie Apigian:We could talk, cause we're good at saying things, and then it the exact opposite happens the week after that's. That's how good, we are. Is there anything in the next year, alex, that you're excited about, or, whether it's the NTC here or within, anything that you'd like to talk about?
Alex Curtis:I think one of the big themes over this next year of programming is really to help to increase education for a lot of our members, I like hearing that. Right, helping them to level up their career, level up their understanding of so many of the things they work on.
Charlie Yielding:Well, reskilling workforce reskilling is is going to be something that people start talking about more and more as the years go by.
Alex Curtis:Right and back to the innovation side of things helping people to get excited, inspired by the innovation they see it doesn't even have to be the stuff that they work with. I think, seeing right, we went to CES. Yeah, my hope for at least part of that was to help the people that attended that get a little inspired by the crazy, amazing stuff that they saw.
Charlie Apigian:Unbelievable.
Alex Curtis:Yeah, and I my hope is to do more and more of that across across the year and increasingly to help people, you know, get excited about different things, Spark that enthusiasm for stuff. Maybe a lot of that's going to be AI and seeing crazy things that AI can do, but I think there's so much more and there has to be more that we do in the state and the region to talk more about innovation, to get people more excited about just pure wonder. Yeah. If you're interesting.
Charlie Yielding:I mean, that's where we're at. This is. This is a point of wonder, because nobody knows what we're going to look like in 10 years.
Charlie Apigian:But getting people inspired as opposed to fearful. I think that's that is a great, great, great thing to aspire to do here, and I think you are doing that. You have a lot of, of course, good events that are more on the social side. You do good ways that bring people together.
Charlie Apigian:Obviously, advocacy is is big, but you're right, the part that you know, the education, has got to become part of what we do here, because everybody is behind the scenes saying, okay, I'm a tech person, I should know everything about AI, but the truth is I don't know anything and I get that over. And I mean, you know, we've had closed door discussions with groups and they just want the one on AI and and that that, to me, is important. So the fact that you're creating that space for them has been really good. I mean, I know there's new peer groups that focus on, like chief data officers, which we've had on there's. You have a CSO one as well, and you're continuing to do that as well as creating community as well as now, the education to go with that. So, yeah, I'm excited about that because obviously I'm wanting to be part of that. And we'll continue?
Charlie Apigian:Yes, and you know I'm going to be part of that. So obviously, charlie, you've been involved with the NDC for a while and it's been a nice model here. I think other cities think of Nashville as the model, and there's a couple of mainstays. Sandy Hoff is one. She's been here for a long time. The other one that we can say is Alex has been here eight years, and so the two of you have been the mainstays here at the NDC and have helped grow it. Of course, not that doesn't mean other people haven't done amazing things, but you are the two that have been the glue for all of these years, and thank you for that, charlie.
Charlie Yielding:Anything else, no, I also appreciate the effort you're putting into things but, more importantly, the example you're setting of do not stop, keep moving.
Charlie Apigian:Yeah, that's great. I'm going to wrap it up, charlie. You good with that? Yeah, absolutely, alex. Thanks again for joining us today. If you all liked what you heard today, please just go to our website, dataforallio that's data, the number forallio. You can see all of our podcast episodes, as well as our videos. Every video that we put up on YouTube is listed there as well. And, of course, please subscribe on your favorite podcast player. And for that, charlie, I'm Charlie Epiglian.
Charlie Yielding:And I'm Charlie Ewing.
Charlie Apigian:And until next time.