YouSaid · the spoken record

Aaron Vandevender

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29
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2017-10-16
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2017-10-16
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  1. “I'm really excited about IR Labs, our smaller investments from FF Science and what they are doing is silicon photonics. And so they have a technology that they can use to manipulate light with silicon semiconductor lithography kinds of technology. And the idea would be to bring computing from an electrical standpoint into an optical.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “It's a news site. Their tagline is news for nerds stuff that matters. It was sort of the hacker news long, a decade before hacker news existed. And it was the central platform around which the Linux and open source community kind of crystallized. And so a lot of the developments in those areas in computing technology and physics sort of happened within that forum kind of during the sort of late 90s, early 2000s. And it's still around. It's still interesting, but it's definitely been sort of eclipsed by Reddit and Hacker News for a lot of its audience. But the depth and the thoughtfulness of what goes in there is still a little bit more.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I would say the hardest element is the context switching. One of the things I liked most about being a research quantum physicist is that you can think about one problem all the time and just go all the way all the way down. And so the paradox about being in venture is both a blessing and a curse, which is that you have to context switch between things that are very different very quickly. And so it's both super exciting and that you get to weigh in on a very diverse set of topics, but you do sort of miss the intellectual satisfaction of having one particular thing that you think about for years at a time and really ruminate on it and go as deep as it can go. And for things like quantum physics, it goes pretty deep. And so that's that can be a really satisfying to be done there.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Super exciting because of the computational potential is dramatically more than classical or von Neumann computing as the laptops and cell phones that we have in our pockets are known. And the reason is because in quantum mechanics, we have these strange counterintuitive principles that we call superposition, which says that things can be or exist in more than one place at the same time, and entanglement, which says that things can be connected to each other in an information sense, even if they're not physically connected, even if they're far apart. And using those principles, we can operate on information, on pure information at the quantum mechanical level, and learn things that are sort of core to the natures of the universe that would be impossible with a regular computer.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Everyone to have a voice, everyone to have an author now we're actually getting to a mode where that is becoming much more common and I think it's exciting.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “My favorite book is Tales of A Thousand One Arabian Knights, The Complexity and the Layering of it really appeals to me in that you have not just one continuous story, the novel that sort of holds together, but you have many, many voices that are speaking to each other and about each other through space and time and forming this really interesting kind of fabric of story and culture. I think that in some ways it's kind of like first version of Reddit where you have ongoing commentary and nesting and depth in a way that becomes a sort of coherent whole. And that's a very unique kind of experience if you haven't read it. That's very unlike most of the sort of novel type fiction that we're mostly accustomed to. Between the time that that one was written, it was sort of by itself in that style and now with the internet and the opportunity for”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Of answering the wrong question, it's like, well, you know, so we changed the goods distribution system, we changed the wealth distribution system that has been a consequence of the trucking system. And so now we're just trying to sort of force a replacement wealth distribution system that we can manage. And I think that there's sort of a lack of creativity there. What I think is actually a better way to do it, a more efficient way to do it than just sort of cutting people checks and mailing them out to what used to be truck stops, where those people are still not able to contribute as much as they could to the economy, you're losing out on a lot of the productivity gains that you could get from that goods distribution network. And that's where I think there's sort of really big opportunity is. So where I think those things really come from is actually, ironically, comes from proximity, comes from closeness. One of the myths that we have told ourselves about”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah. So I think the potential is probably there. My biggest concern, and to first order, I think that it's sort of correct, or maybe something more like negative income tax might be as sort of a mechanically better way to do it. We do have trouble decoupling wealth and virtue in our political system. One of the consequences of that is we like to put lots of requirements on certain types of welfare. So you think things like drug testing and worked well for and like limitations on what can be spent with welfare money. The hope is that if you can get rid of a lot of those social programs and the overheaded administrative costs associated with them and really free people up to do whatever they want with those resources, you end up with much more efficient system, much better outcomes. I think in terms of actually getting to the scale that's required, it may not be enough. There may not be as much efficiency to be gained as we think.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “People who build and service the robots, and that's true, there will be some of those jobs created, and they will be better jobs than trucker jobs. Those people will be more productive, they'll get paid more, they won't be on the road all the time, they'll be home for dinner with their kids. So it'll be a better life. But in terms of the numbers, it'll be much fewer of them. So just the sort of people that are directly involved with automating the trucking system is not going to do it in terms of ameliorating societal impact here. It's really going to be sort of the jobs that kind of don't exist yet that can't exist because goods distribution is so expensive. But if the goods distribution network gets so much better, then all those indirect jobs can be created.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “And there's a few things that are sort of set up to do that. If you think about businesses like eBay and Etsy, where you have folks that are creating things that people want or selling things that people want, but the biggest barrier to getting them to the customers, even if they can find them over the internet, is still costly to do the shipping. So, but if you have a much better, much faster, safer, efficient goods distribution system, then I think that really opens up a lot more possibilities for providing goods and services around the country. So my hope is that companies like and situations like Etsy and eBay can really take advantage of that good distribution system and provide a wealth distribution system for the folks that are out there. The sort of typical argument is that if you create these robot trucks, then there's no more drivers, but there's good jobs in the for the”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think the best way to do it is to use that good distribution system as to your advantage. So if you think about other times in the past where this level of societal upheaval has happened and a couple examples are we used to have 90% of the workforce involved in agriculture. Now it's less than 2%. And so because we invented tractors and combines, it was very disruptive, but it created a better situation in the long run because now we had much more cheaper food, much more available agricultural products. And so that freed up a lot of human potential to go and do other things, to event cars and become yoga instructors and like all the great things that we have in society that weren't possible when everyone was like forced to be involved in agriculture because we didn't have enough free human capital, human potential. So the best case scenario is we use that goods distribution to our advantage.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Is essentially just a gas station, a diner, and a strip club, right? Which are sort of all there for the purpose of serving the needs of the truckers and get the wealth distribution from providing that service. So if the truckers don't stop anymore and all the truck stops go away, I go out of business, then that's hugely disruptive for all the people that live in those towns that are all in those service industries. So if you replace the trucks with self-driving trucks, you end up with a much better goods distribution system, which is positive, but the trucking system is a much worse wealth distribution system. And so we need to think about what are the implications of that and how can those folks provide value to society so that the wealth is distributed by other means.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “So, the trucking system, we have Eisenhower's interstate system, and the road network on that's built around that. The whole trucking system does serve two purposes at the same time. One, it's a goods distribution system. So we load things on the trucks, we ship them around. That's how we get all the stuff that we buy at the store. But it's also a wealth distribution system and that you have wealth being generated at a few points of focus, things like factories where the goods are created in cities where knowledge projects are made and then shipped around on these trucks, but it's also distributing not just the wealth in the trucks, but the wealth to run the system too. So you think the truckers get paid to do that, and as they're driving around, they're kind of sprinkling that money all over the network. There's lots and lots of towns that are on interstate exits where the town”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think the societal implications are really huge. I think it's almost impossible to understand how big of a deal it is. If you think of, you know, in the last political cycle, how influential and how disruptive the idea of the out-of-work coal miner was, there's only a few tens of thousands of coal miners in the United States. So it's like a relatively small constituency, like population-wise, but had a very large effect on the overall political narrative. And so if you think that truck drivers, which are a thousand times more causing the same type of redundancy and displacement as cold swiners experienced as natural gas came online, then it is a big, big potential for societal upheaval. The way that I look at it is not so much just you can't just focus on the truck drivers themselves, but really on the whole network.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Only have access to a small amount, you are forced to make your algorithms more robust. And so you end up with a better result because they have to deal with that ambiguity directly.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “They can still do a decent job, then it doesn't hold up as a competitive advantage. I think a lot of folks in the self-driving car space maybe just assumed that since Google had already done the work of getting all of the street view data, that they had this insurmountable advantage that no one would sort of be able to build self-driving cars because they didn't have the same street-level data. But it turns out that most of our streets are not really that different. And so even if you have a much, much smaller data set than Google, you can still do a really good job of developing a self-driving car. And in fact, it almost forces you into a better position because if you have complete knowledge of the entire street grid, you can succumb to the temptation of programming in individual use cases where your agent would come to something that's ambiguous and you can just hard code in the right answer. Whereas if you”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Effect rather than a diminishing returns kind of effect. Most of the data sets out there have this diminishing returns effect. A good example is like genomic databases where people try and say, okay, well, we sequenced 10,000 people instead of 1,000 people or 100,000 people, implying that their data sets are therefore 10 times more valuable because they have 10 times more sequences. But if you don't actually see any new genes or new alleles in those 10x more sequences, you're just seeing repeated copies of the earlier ones, then you get this sort of diminishing return effects for your effort. A lot of the asymptotic ceilings of those data sets happen pretty early. And so thinking, well, I spent all this effort, now I have this really valuable data set. Well, you know, you probably could have done 90% as well with one that was 10% as big and competitor comes along and, you know, maybe they're not as have as much resources, but”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “No, not really. Most of the data sets out there or the defensibility of data sets out there, I think, are oversold. There is this very, it's a very compelling, very tantalizing notion that, oh, I just have so much data and nobody else has it, and therefore it must be special. But most of the data out there tends to be noise, and it's just a burden to process. Most of your algorithms are designed just to filter through it and not actually learn anything from it. And so that tends to not be nearly as valuable as people think it is. The other thing that where people get trapped up about the specialness of their data sets is that you would like to believe when a data set truly is valuable, it has this property that each new incremental piece of data is marginally more valuable to the whole thing than the last one that you put in. So you get this kind of accelerating.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, I think there are sort of layers to that ambiguity, right? There's different levels of abstraction that the ambiguity can present itself. And at some point, we will be able to deal with a full layer, which includes things like moral ambiguity and be able to make rational and reasonable decisions about that. And so I think when you get to the point of human level artificial general intelligence, then that's the kind of thing you're talking about. But there's still lots of problems that I think we can be able to solve where things are just sort of, you know, visual ambiguity, mechanical ambiguity, these types of things that hopefully will be able to make serious progress on the way to the human level general intelligence.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Able to, when you have things you haven't seen before, to be able to think about it in a higher level of abstraction and deal with the ambiguity in a reasonable way and still be able to move forward, most of the AI applications that we are using out there, deep learning pattern matching kinds of things can't actually do that, can't use abstract thinking to deal with ambiguity. They can only sort of say, well, this is just the closest thing that I've seen to it before. And so we're just going to go with that.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, so the place where I look for the real breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and where I would like to see the field progress more is in the way that it deals with ambiguity. I think that the biggest distinction between human intelligence, which is what artificial intelligence is meant to model after or meant to work towards, is that humans have a much higher tolerance for ambiguity. In computers where you have things are explicitly programmed, you have logic. Whenever there is a sort of corner case that wasn't envisioned by the programmer or a kind of boundary condition that is not explicitly handled, then things break down. And so it becomes very fragile. And that's exactly the kind of situation that our modern Homo sapien brains were evolved to process through and that gives us a huge evolutionary competitive advantage. So being”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “One way of describing artificial intelligence or a particular deep learning since the core of it is just matrix multiplication operations. You're just sort of doing linear algebra at industrial scale. We haven't gotten to the point for most of these things or most of the things that call themselves AI where you're really doing something that is fundamentally different. You're just making a bigger or just having larger scale doesn't actually change the nature of the calculation. And I would even sort of push back on when people tout their big data credentials that most of the things that are sort of big data are actually not that big. You would like to think of these petabytes and exabytes floating around there and coming up with really amazing insights that could never have been seen. But a lot of times it's really in the sort of megabytes and gigabytes kinds of range. And it's always beneficial to say that you have this big data edge when really it's just more marketing and branding.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Cachet by association because you're hanging out with baseball players. But that sort of petered out. And so then they got rebranded as data science and then as big data and then as”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So, I think that most of the things that call themselves AI out there are really just a rebranding. So originally, many, many years ago, we had actuaries and actuary science was like the most boring, the most mundane, the most tedious discipline. Actuaries were the people that even accountants made fun of. No one liked it. No one dreamed of becoming an actuary when they grew up. And nobody would go on dates with them. And so they sort of got together and decided that this is a terrible place to be in terms of the status relative to the value that they thought they were providing. And so they rebranded. And it's gone through several iterations. So first they became statisticians. And that was a little bit cooler than being an actuary. And that was the sort of like era of money ball where people are like, okay, you know, these guys are providing edges on sports and sports is cool. So you get a little bit of.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “To help the companies that once we invest in them to help them structure research programs and connect them to scientific resources and sort of give us some scientific credibility within that community.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So part of it is thinking it through from first principles. So understanding a lot of the backgrounds and what has been done before, what sort of possible you can should be able to reconstruct someone's argument for, yes, like we are able to solve all of the significant challenges here and like, you know, these things are hard. But there are also a couple of interesting heuristics that we use to sort of, as a check on the first principles thinking. One is just how thorough is the knowledge and the understanding of the people that are proposing it. Even if you don't necessarily yourself have the complete picture by just drilling down on specific aspects, you know, whether that person has like has all the answers and can go as deep as you want to go is a really good sign. If it turns out that we're thinking about it is very shallow, then that typically reveals itself pretty quickly.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Sure. So there's three parts. One is providing a scientific context for the investments that we make. So that's sort of keeping an eye on what is happening in academic and government science so that we have an overall idea of where things are going. Some of that is for sourcing, but a lot of that is just we don't want to invest in something that we think is going to be obsoleted by the next thing coming out of the labs. And so having that sort of overall framework, that sort of voice in the room where we have some idea of where things are going is super helpful. The second part is once we get interested in something into a company doing the scientific diligence so we can say this, yes, this is going to work or yes, this is the team that has the capability to get this sort of thing to work. And there's a very thin line between genius and crazy, right? So there's a lot of discrimination that goes on between the ideas that are just crazy.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Within our team to help evaluate them and cultivate some of those opportunities. So why don't you just join us? And so I did. Sounded like a super fun opportunity.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Certainly. So I spent most of my career building quantum computers and researching tiny things like microscopic black holes and atomic clocks. And at some point decided to transition from that into industry and the opportunity that availed itself was a company called Halcyon Molecular where we used quantum physics techniques to study DNA and biological molecules. So we built single atom resolution electron microscopes, which turns out to be very similar to building quantum computers and that you're manipulating the quantum states of individual atoms, but use that for biotechnology purposes. And that company was backed by Founders Fund. And so that's how I got to know the partners. And the company didn't work out, but we had a good relationship. And so they said, we are looking at doing more of these types of high technology, high science risk kinds of companies. We really want to have your expertise on.”

    2017-10-16 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Founders Fund's Chief Scientist on Why AI Is Mostly A Scam, Why The Value of Large Datasets Is Mostly Overplayed & The Societal Effects of 4m Truck Drivers Being Unemployed with Aaron Vandevender · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source