Shawn Flynn  01:33

Now, Shmuel, you’ve had this amazing career, and our audience needs to find out. Tell us about your background and a bit about what you’ve done up to this point.

Shmuel Silverman  01:43

Well, it always starts with curiosity. I always wanted to know how things are working and broke them apart since childhood. But the most important thing for us is that in the early 2000, I worked as Director of Advanced Technology and Strategy in Motorola. Through this work and working with some amazing inventors, I figured out that it’s not just all about invention. It is invention with intention and understanding the picture of the future. If you don’t understand a picture of the future, and you don’t understand your value proposition, it’s a no go. Technology is just an enabler.

Shawn Flynn  02:21

What technology were you working on at this time?

Shmuel Silverman  02:24

Just before starting in that position in Motorola, we were working on taking all different area interface, 3g, 2g, wireless, and GSM, and other things that were in that space, even actually analog and digitize them, move everything over IP. 

So we created a big large network that can talk, any air interface, any air interface technology over IP. Later, we moved into 4g, and at that time, when we were talking early 2000, in the group that I worked in Motorola, we moved all the police departments and all the police or private communication talks into IP. It was all packets, all IP, forget analog. It was a big difference in the world.

Shawn Flynn  03:11

Later I want to get it into 5g. But before we get there, we need to hear a little bit of background. Can you tell us a little bit about 1g, 2g, 3g? What that means, what it does, the history, so we can kind of pave that path to 5g.

Shmuel Silverman  03:28

So, cellular wireless started around the early 80s. And you can think, you know, just give 10 years for every G and you can come to today. So 1G was in the 80s to in the 90s pre. So, you can go like every 10 years, you can see a major improvement and jump in technology capabilities, capacity, and enablement of communication. It started with Voice. It was only analog, it moved to narrower channels within analog to use the air interface more efficiently. Then it started to be further and further digitized, starting from GSM, Edge, which was an improvement on GSM. Still somewhere in the 2g, then 3g which is your MTL, and further to 4g that we know and love today, and 5g is a big step. It’s probably the biggest step we’ve seen, compared to all the previous steps that we’ve done in wireless technology.

Shawn Flynn  04:32

Now, I’m kind of curious how wireless technology compares to Moore’s Law, which is microchips where the number of transistors on a micro chip doubles every two years, though the cost of computers is half. How has wireless technology kind of related to this?

Shmuel Silverman  04:48

Well, this is interesting. So there is no data in 1G. So you can think of it as a zero step. You go to a very low kilobits per second in the second step, in a second jump. And the third jump, we are starting to look at the high hundreds of kilobytes per second. And the fourth we are two gigabits per second and in the fifth we’re looking at 20 gigabits per second. All those jumps seem to be over 10x with every year, every 10 years, you see 10x jump.

Shawn Flynn  05:25

Tell me about the timeline for 5G implementation in our daily lives, how long for infrastructure to build out?

Shmuel Silverman  05:34

So 5G is a big change relative to 4G, 3G and 2G. When the first systems were created, the cost of antennas, the cost of base stations, the cost of those systems are very high. And in order to get back the benefits from those system, we wanted to reduce the number of antennas. A single antenna is like $5 million, just to put it down. So we wanted to reduce the number of base stations and get maximum coverage to those base stations. So today, every two miles, about plus minus every two miles, we have a base station. In some areas, it’s every 20 miles. And we maintain that all the way through from 1G to 4G. 5G is a game changer. We need about 100x more base stations because the coverage is so much smaller. So we need an area of a 4G base station, we will need 100 5G base stations. Wait a minute, we didn’t finish ahead of the problem. The problem with 5G is that now the normal wired communication, the wires that connect to the base station to deliver the data from the air interface that ends up on the antenna to the base station back into the center. This wire is too slow. Today it’s enough to have it wired that can do let’s say 20 gigabit per second, 10 gigabit, even 5 gigabit per second would be awesome to connect it as a backhaul to that antenna, to that base station.

Shmuel Silverman  07:11

To some extent, yes, because they will experience or get experience with this new technology, and implementing this technology, and it will impact their economy because new businesses will be created and the way we do things today will be different. This picture of the future enables technologies and in use in value propositions that do not exist today.

Shawn Flynn  07:11

How are the city’s going to be reimagined with this technology?

Shmuel Silverman  07:11

With the 5G, we need at least 20 gigabit, mostly 40 gigabit per second connection. So 40 gigabit connection is, well, most wire lines just don’t do that. Think about your house, what’s the best capacity you’ll get? You know, you can get a router and you get probably 10 gigabit per second and your wires are not even rated for 10 gigabit. Most of the wires that you will use in your house, if you don’t use wireless, if you use wires, will be in probably one megabit per second. So now we need to put a new infrastructure that does not exist. And we need to double it times 100 for every base station that we have. That’s a big undertaking. We didn’t start doing it in the US but in Europe, some places are starting to do it. So the roll I expect it to be actually slow. I don’t expect 5G to roll before the mid 20s. But I expect it to roll slowly first in Europe, then maybe other places in the world and then it will also come to the US when it will be economically feasible to do.

Shawn Flynn  08:23

By a country implementing this technology, how much will it benefit their economy? Are they going to, in some ways surpass the US, if the US doesn’t implement this?

Shmuel Silverman  09:06

It really depends on those cities. But let’s kind of close our eyes and think about, let’s start with something simple, self-driving car. Today, we are investing lots of effort creating AI and machine learning tools that can be set inside a car, making the car extremely smart, almost like human and allow the car to drive by itself. We call it self-driving cars. And we imagine that in the next few years, we will have lots of those driving around. Of course, there are also laws and regulations that need to change and maintained in order to allow things like this to happen. In the world of 5G, we no longer need a smart car inside the city. We actually can better do with a car that is not that smart. Anyway, you take a car, you take everything out of it, except leave the engine inside and some remote control and put the AI somewhere in the cloud. Now the AI can drive the car. What limits cars today or what we can’t envision today, how those systems will work or realize them is communication. We need to communicate with that car. And we need very little delay on our communication. 

If we have 20 gigabits per second channel to talk to this car, now we can basically manage the car like marionettes. It can be big AI that controls hundreds of cars. It’s much more economic every time we need to upgrade or change a system, we do it in a cloud. It’s very easy and fast. We don’t need to do it in every car by itself. If we have bugs or we solve a new problem or create something or a new feature, we can have it there. Now we can deliver information back into the car. We have captive audience, maybe or maybe not. Think about cars for free. You sit in a car and I’ll play a commercial while it takes you someplace. You don’t need to pay, huh? Not too bad idea if the commercial is interesting. I mean, some people will sign up for it. It’s easy, or you pay for the drive, which is also okay. But it’s all being done from the cloud. Wait a minute. In order for you to be down with the cloud, you’re doing 5G. With 5G, you need spectrum. So now, car operators become spectrum owners. So they need to apply to the FCC for spectrum, the same thing as anybody else.

Shawn Flynn  11:31

What spectrum?

Shmuel Silverman  11:33

So we’re talking about here interface which is electromagnetic waves, basically, or interference within an electromagnetic field. Those interference or the frequencies in which we are talking are this is the air interface. This is the physical medium that transfers or moves data between our phones or between the two antennas that are talking to one another. The air interface is very, very expensive. It’s not a commodity. People are paying billions of dollars for their chunk of air interface in their area and they pay it or they license it from the FCC.

Shawn Flynn  12:10

So this would be radio stations right now or cell phone carriers right now? They have a special spectrum that they operate in, only they can do that?

Shmuel Silverman  12:19

Exactly. They are using their spectrum. So if you’re running your 4G phone and you’re with At&T, AT&T has their piece of spectrum that you’re sharing with all their clients. If you are, I don’t know, Vodafone, it will be Vodafone, etc, etc. Different service provider. So these service providers which are cellular service providers, they own the infrastructure, they own the networks, they own the base stations and they own the air interface. And they have the economical model to do that and this is how they make money. Now can you imagine that a car operator company, a taxi company if you wish, that has no drivers. They bought and maybe even timeshare an AI somewhere in the cloud. 

The *inaudible* in Amazon somewhere on their cloud. And this AI needs to communicate with all these cars and communicate through air interface. So that operator needs to own some air interface. And mostly dedicated because you do not want your car to be interfering with any other car. You want your car to drive, not to stop. You don’t have any smarts in the car. And if the AI stopped working, you are actually stuck in a car somewhere. By the way, a car that does not have a steering wheel. No, it doesn’t even have windows. You just sit in the car. You think you sit in your saloon in your home and you’re playing a computer game and it’s supposed to be getting from one place to another and suddenly you’re stuck. You don’t even know where you’re stuck. And you can imagine that five years later, people will not even know maps, because you don’t need a map. You don’t need to navigate anymore. We just tell the system, “Hey, take me from one place to another and just end up being there after a very short period of time.” How about that? So we forget about how to use a map. We don’t know how to drive anymore. We never need to drive anymore because the car is either driven or it’s driving for us. It’s a very different world than the world that we’re living in today.

Shawn Flynn  14:22

Shmuel, right now, huge corporations are spending billions and billions on autonomous car, the technology, why not use the LIDAR and all the systems that they’re building, instead of using 5G? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

Shmuel Silverman  14:38

So the way I think about it is we need to use something that is a combination between the two. There is a space for headless cars, and there is space for AI in the car. The challenges that we are facing with AI in the car is let me tell you a story. Let’s say you drive slow, 15-20 miles an hour. Your turn, you do a right turn into a street and you see a red ball and a boy picking between two cars, he’s about to jump into the road, you immediately hit the brakes and veer to the left, and you hit a bicycle. Now, if you’re me, you’re probably at that point, stop sleeping for a long time. Kind of like you see your life running in front of you and your heart is in your throat then whatever it is that you feel emotionally. If you’re an AI, you’ll probably reboot because you feel very ashamed. So what do you do when you’re an AI in a car, if you’re a 5G in the cloud and you can see around the corner, way before this car will show up, you can slow it down and manage it. They are what we call you know again, interesting,  corner issues and corner cases associated with AI that we do not know how to solve or have a hard time to solve today. And with 5G we will be able to solve, either with an AI in the cloud or with a completely different system.

Shawn Flynn  16:02

So right now, the AI, the computers, everything has to be in line of sight for the car to react. But with 5G, it’s not line of sight anymore. It’s actually the whole ecosystem, talking and communicating to each other.

Shmuel Silverman  16:16

Exactly. The entire city is live, you know everything that has happened 10 streets away from you, a 100 streets away from you. And then you can make a decision, you can foresee, you can reroute, you can do other things. That’s why I’m more in favor with an AI in the cloud. Further, an AI in the cloud drops the cost of a car significantly. So now you can focus the AI in the cloud, and manage the city correctly and effectively. Now, obviously, far away from the city may be a different story. But inside cities, I don’t see any reason for the AI to be in a car.

Shawn Flynn  16:55

So once you leave the city, the AI kicks in, all the sensors, all the lasers everything back in the city, they turn off right into 5g.

Shmuel Silverman  17:06

Shawn, you think like you’re driving the car and you’re on the car, forget it. When you leave the city, you’ll step into a different course, between cities, it’s a different car. Inside the city, you have a car that is extremely cost-effective. And most of the traffic and traffic issues that you have are inside the cities, not outside the cities. Outside the cities, either you drive it yourself or you get an AI that drives you. But there are less issues and less corner issues associated with driving cars outside cities on highways.

Shawn Flynn  17:37

So go back to the spectrum they use, what laws and regulations will be required for that?

Shmuel Silverman  17:45

That’s very interesting. So now we have many people or different operating companies who are supposed to compete, but normally it’s from the FCC, but now we have local authorities. So which car company can operate within my city? Do I govern that? Now you start to see local governments who can dictate who can operate in my city and not. Can I allow Uber? Or can I allow anybody else to operate in my city? How do they operate? How do they interact with each other? How much they can charge or not? How much do they pay to the city? The city never owns air interfaces until now. Now we’re talking about cities owning air interfaces well, or at least participating in this big game. This is a new economic reality that we need to deal with. And I’m not sure if there are laws and regulations associated with what happens when a car that was driven by an AI got into an accident. But I don’t know, who pays for it? How do we ensure this entire world, as this AI-driven, managed and controlled, 5G, it seems to be complex at this time. There are many issues that need to be resolved just to allow, to enable a simple thing, quote-unquote simple thing, self-driven or self-driving car.

Shawn Flynn  19:14

So it’s very interesting. We just interviewed Jonathan Reichental about smart cities and the dynamics between corporations and local government and technology being implemented. And it sounded from his episode that corporations can have so much power but right now, from what you’d mentioned, it sounds like the local government will actually have this counterbalance of the spectrum.

Shmuel Silverman  19:39

In laws and regulations, they will have to decide what to allow or not, what they get or not, and who can play in their space. Then if they do not use that power, then yes, then corporations will win. But we are the people and hopefully, we will maintain some control over what’s going on. The way to control it is laws and regulations. So if you, as a corporation, want to play in my town or in my city or wherever it is, you need to abide by my laws and regulations.

Shawn Flynn  20:11

Another thing that was brought up in that interview was data and the data that cities collect. What’s going to happen with data when 5G is implemented?

Shmuel Silverman  20:20

Oh, now we’re stepping into an all new world. When we’re talking about 5G, the amount of data is huge. Right now, cities do use wireless everywhere. Many cities have wireless everywhere, they will have cameras that take some pictures and more information, but they can’t see everything or be in everything. There is limitation, capacity limitation, how much information visual or not that you can somehow collect, compress and deliver and analyze in any data system. Mostly right now, it’s a delivery system. We are not fast enough. In 5G, we can now drop very low power sensors that can take high resolution images like we have in our phones, etc. But they can have like thousands of those spreads around a single room. And they can communicate most of it to the cloud really fast. So the resolution of information that is associated with our privacy, but what we associate today with our privacy and anonymity is going to go out the window. It’s really hard to maintain privacy and anonymity when somebody can see you at high resolution anywhere you go. Now, anything you do, 24/7.

Shawn Flynn  21:40

What about the storage units for all this data? Is it at capacity right now? What happens in the future once 100x?

Shmuel Silverman  21:47

The capacity needs to be at least 100x or the analysis of the information needs to be done at much faster and compressive, and then store only what’s important. You know, think about our brain, I mean, our eyes can see at what? A hundred 50 megapixels at least, if not more, but they can see a lot. With this amount of data, we don’t have perfect memory of every frame that we see. And we see what? 20 to 30 frames per second, we see fast. So, the same thing will be, we analyze some of the information, some of it we store, some of which we do not store. Some we do forget, the same thing would be with those AIs and brains and clouds. We don’t need to store everything, but we can definitely analyze and see everything. So if I want to know what Shawn Flynn is doing at this moment, I’ll know. And this is a little bit scary because I actually do not want to know but I do not want every person on the planet to be able to have access for it because security issues and you know, at the end of the day, every security can be broken. It is just a question of time, and then there is access to every information channel coming from the ground. So this 5G enables a lot of information on each and every one of us, selectively be picked by the big government or wherever the government is, or whoever can enter those channels and collect the data.

Shawn Flynn  23:23

How else is 5G going to affect security because from what it sounds, data can transfer so quickly? There’s gonna be more implementations or more of an impact to data security that we haven’t mentioned.

Shmuel Silverman  23:37

And this is interesting, some of the limitation on security or some ways for us to secure sa ystem is by preventing communication in and out to those facilities. Whatever those facilities. So let’s say somebody is working in Apple, and he wants to steal information or get some information and he may have access to this information. We’re in the Apple facility, but he can’t really take it outside unless he take it on a hard drive or some physical device. This is today, but tomorrow, if I can, in one second, communicate 20 gigabits outside of that facility. And I can do it wirelessly, which means at the time that he takes to walk by the window, I can communicate something outside of the building that is supposed to stay inside. Then probably we need to mask all these facilities from 5G. So here’s new technology for you, a big thing that prevents 5G from communicate in and out of a facility. But hey, if all our phones are 5G, and we want to communicate, at least they need to communicate internal to the facility, they cannot communicate externally. So now we’ll start to see all sort of segregation and all sorts of new appliances if you wish that created this kind of firewalls where 5G doesn’t exist. It exists inside but it doesn’t outside of them, etc. All those security problems will be solved. But they will be solved with new appliances, new technology, new methods of applying that, which is again, a new opportunity for businesses.

Shawn Flynn  25:20

So in other words, in my business, certain rooms in that could be dead zones?

Shmuel Silverman  25:26

Exactly. And intentionally such, you want to go through those dead zones to be able to communicate freely knowing that nobody else can listen.

Shawn Flynn  25:35

How else are businesses going to be impacted in the future?

Shmuel Silverman  25:39

Well, first and foremost, we need to understand what is the picture of the future, and we need to ask ourselves which technologies that do not work today well are actually enabled. And that’s how fast they will come. Let’s start with AR and VR. We would like to, through AR and VR, communicate to the cloud very fast, because we are providing imaging and other type of data. That imaging is being analyzed in real time. Think about Google Glasses and envision those devices, it will tell you what’s going on and what you’re looking at, etc. In order to enable something like this, you need vast amounts of high speed communications. 

You need communication for every glass in the room and if you have 500 glasses walking, we are entering a mall. Your glass speaks up, “I’m in the mall. Everything I look at, I know the price. I know what it is. I know who bought it. I know all the information about it just as I walk inside the mall.” But I have what? 5000 people walking in the mall. I need all of them to get all this information in real time. Every person I’m looking at will tell me his name, what you know about him, his social status, what was the last thing he blogged on, or bleeped, or googled or did. That’s a lot of information and I can get it in real time. And I may pay for the service. Here you are, new service based on social media search, who is the person I’m talking to right now? Hey, I actually really want to know is this person was in the past caught cheating or doing things? Can I trust him? Would you pay for a service like that?

Shmuel Silverman  27:22

So when you start to think about all the different things that can come in with this real communication, but also things… Some of them are positive, but if you need this communication to happen, you need to be able to communicate a lot of data with very little delay for 5G. So now, Google Glasses will be enabled. Right now, they’re blocked.

Shawn Flynn  27:43

Can you talk a little bit about what Google Glass is for people out there that might not be familiar with it?

Shmuel Silverman  27:49

Google Glass which is beautiful is like, think about somebody who wears glasses that are from the outside, they look transparent and look. He sees you through glasses, two normal glasses, but the glass inside, as he looks at you, he gets information. And this information is displayed on the inside of the glass. You can’t see it, but he can see it. Now this information comes to him based on some connection to the cloud, to a server that provides this information on the Google Glasses. You have a small camera that actually looks at you and reports this information to the cloud. The cloud analyze it and say, “Oh, I can recognize this person using pattern recognition or facial recognition or any other type of recognition algorithm.” And then it will give you information, give me, the owner of the glasses, information about it.

Shmuel Silverman  28:39

What’s nice about it is think about a mall or a place you go to buy. Now you no longer need stickers that tell you what the price. You look at it, you know the price. You want to go someplace, you tell your glasses, “I want to go to this.” It will display a map for you. It will tell you where you are on the map relative to where you should go, etc. It’s a very convenient thing to manage your life. Now drop the glasses. And let’s put something in your eye instead of glasses. So you no longer have glasses. You have something in your eye. What’s nice about 5G is that it requires a very tiny antenna. The antennas are actually very small, and communicate a lot of data. And if I can actually, on my eye, display what I want to see or get information, I don’t need glasses anymore. So glasses is just a step in the right direction. 10 years later, 15 years later, they’re gone.

Shawn Flynn  29:35

So this timeframe is we’re talking 10 years from now, 15 years from now, we’re not talking 2021 or 2022?

Shmuel Silverman  29:44

No. So Google Glasses are enabled almost immediately with 5G. So yes, so inside and indoors in terms of coverage. You can have all these many, many small base stations that communicate and you can create this communication technology. So if you think about enablement, indoors are more enabled or can go first, way ahead of outdoors 5G coverage, because indoors I can put those infrastructure and base station or small access points in place who can do 5G, while outdoor… Now I need a lot of infrastructure with long cables and a lot of concentration of communication because all those cables at one point are going to one box. And that box wants to go to another box and now you got 200 cables on 20 gigabit per second. Now I need two terabits per second on *inaudible, etc. So we start to get into higher and higher speeds when we go outdoors. Indoor, we can actually enable it in a more effective way.

Shawn Flynn  30:49

So what other business models or changes to existing models might occur?

Shmuel Silverman  30:54

So we were talking about the Internet of Things, IoT systems for a long time. The biggest challenge for IoT was, let’s say you put sensors everywhere. How do you communicate to all your sensors, same thing like Google Glasses, it was really hard to communicate with them. And what we were thinking is that we can connect those small sensors or IoT devices to one another over the air interface. 

But the problem with this type of connection is that every step you make, every jump you make between one device to another until you get to some infrastructure that can collect this data… Every jump you drop in your capacity by half. So after pinfall jumps, basically you get no capacity. So even if you have 200 megabits per second, after 20 or 30 jumps, it’s just like, you get one, one bit maybe. So the idea is that we need 5G. Now you do have much more spectrum and you can make those jumps. Now those jumps are actually small in terms of their stance and the coverage is small so the interference is less. So you can start to think about a very small cloud of devices and *inaudible* clouds because if I have 100 devices in this room, it’s their own cloud. They communicate between themselves very quickly. And they can share… And one of those devices we have close to the door can now talk to a device outside in the next room, yes? Now we start to connect and create that kind of wireless networks that look like mesh networks, but they’re much higher capacity and more effective in the way they are.

Shawn Flynn  32:34

What are mesh networks?

Shmuel Silverman  32:37

Mesh networks are devices that one device can talk to all of the other devices around it and vice versa. In today’s technology, they will interfere with one another in this would drop their capacity and the amount of data that it can actually send. In 5G, they will send it over short distances, collaborate with only a small team without interfering order. In 2G, 3G and 4G, there’s a lot of interference because the coverage is high. In 5G, the coverage is very small.

Shawn Flynn  33:08

How will the cost of computers, cell phones, and other electronics change with this new technology?

Shmuel Silverman  33:14

Oh, significant. So the reason we need a smart, we need smart in the phone is because we want to do all sorts of calculations and graphics, and all sorts of other application that requires a lot of processing power. If we will run those applications in the cloud, instead of in the phone, we need to deliver them straight to the phone. And the delivery system is through wireless and wireless right now in 4G is quite slow. If we have 20 gigabit per second going to the cloud from let’s say, your phone, the phone that you have, why do I need a graphic processor for it? Why do I need a CPU that runs like, who knows how much and why do I need an expensive phone? The only thing that I need is a screen. We call it the headless phone. And the headless phone is a phone that will cost you 50 bucks are actually given to you for free because now it’s so cheap. And the phone actually runs in the cloud. All the application in the cloud, the only thing that the phone does is the communication. So I have a device that can communicate 5G. And that’s the only thing it does, communicate 5g and has got a screen, and everything else, all the apps, everything else runs in the cloud.

Shmuel Silverman  34:30

Same thing for your computer. Your computer should not be that smart. You should not pay $400 for your computer, or definitely not 4000 for your gaming computer. The only thing that you need is a screen and ability to communicate to the cloud. Once you have this, you can run your game in the cloud. Your screen is here. But the game is in the cloud. There is only one millisecond delay, there is no way we can even notice it. So you’re looking at hundreds of frames per second at 4k resolution coming to your device and these devices, brainless device. This is awesome. Now you can pay for your service and you actually get a service instead of paying for your expensive phone. And don’t worry if you drop it into water, it doesn’t matter, you can get another one. It’s so cheap.

Shawn Flynn  35:20

It sounds like there’ll be a great opportunity for emerging countries, emerging areas that may not have the budget or the daily income to afford a thousand dollar computer to have access to all the information in the world.

Shmuel Silverman  35:35

It sounds like it, but it’s not. Remember the base stations and all the networks, they still need the infrastructure. And the problem is that before the infrastructure, you can’t bring this smart nest capability to the edge devices. Edge devices are your phone, your computer there at the edge of the network.

Shawn Flynn  35:56

Will there be room for startups to compete in the space or will only large established corporations be involved with this new technology?

Shmuel Silverman  36:05

So at the lower level, yes, at the lower level, we can see only large established corporations able to devise or create this specific technology to communication level. But from a business perspective, now things are actually opening up. As I mentioned like before, taxi companies that are basically practically are gone because of Uber, etc. are can come back now, and actually own cars because it’s kind of like cheap to create a system like this. You don’t need very expensive cars. You don’t need to be Uber with billions of dollars to invest in AI because you can actually timeshare AI, even between those companies in the cloud. There are new business models that are created to enable that. There are things that we can do with technology, with information. 

For example, provide… Talk about the veracity, the veracity of the person you are talking to. If you’ve never met the guy and you don’t trust him, how do you know you can, whatever he says actually makes sense? Or is true. Or maybe you want to figure out whether he tells you the truth based on the stress level and how he speaks. You can go with a virtual lie detector on you 24/7. You can know, when people are talking to you, what are their emotions in this moment, because your system, the only thing that it does, the only thing that you do, or your sensors that are on your body are doing, they’re sending information to the cloud, and there will be an AI that will analyze it and give you suggestions. “Hey, you know, this woman, you’re talking to right now, she is stressed. Maybe you can be a little bit more gentle and just ask her, ‘Hey, what’s going on with you right now? How can I help you?’ Or maybe you can use a more gentle language and so forth.” 

Shmuel Silverman  37:59

You know, we may be better communicators as results. Think about it positively. Here’s a new application for you to improve the way we communicate. Oh, how about the way we sell. I want to sell you something okay? How do I react if I’m not the perfect salesperson, if I’m not somebody whole will completely tune-up to your emotion and your current state of being because if I am, it will help me to be more empathic and more gentle and be a better communicator. Now if there is something in my ear that tells me how you probably feel at this moment, based on your tone, based on your voice or body posture, how you move, how fast your eyes are reacting, your pupils are reacting to, etc… Are you sweating or you’re not?

All this information can be analyzed in real time and give me some edge to become a better communicator. We do. How about that? Here’s a new application. Now, I can’t get all this information today unless I put you in a room and with all the sensors around you and analyze it. But tomorrow, I can do that because I can have those sensors on me picking up all this information of you sending to the cloud and getting this big smart machine learning coming back and telling me, “Hey, here’s what you can do better, or how about asking the follow-up questions.”

Shawn Flynn  39:24

So with this, I have to ask health concerns. You’d mentioned power stations everywhere, antennas everywhere. Should we be concerned?

Shmuel Silverman  39:34

Not so sure yet. It’s a good question. And I hear about health concerns with regard to wireless in general. Yes, if you take your wireless station and communicate or use it at a very high power, which is few a watts, and you lean on it or you’re close enough, you’ll probably be excited by it, meaning your water will be excited. Okay, there we are. Technology. Let’s go back. The spectrum of communication that is being used for 4G today is the same spectrum you use for your microwave. The only difference is power. Your microwave uses very high power, and your base stations are very low power. The same thing is going to happen with 5G and 5G spectrum is even higher frequencies than just 4G. It includes 4G, and it goes 10x and 20x higher. So it goes anywhere from your two gigahertz all the way to 200. When you think about this as a spectrum, people will say, “Oh my god, are you ultravioleting me or are you X-raying me? What are you doing with all this stuff and all this energy?” It’s a big question. But if it’s low enough energy, then we wouldn’t notice. It will not excite our bodies. It’s only when we concentrate the beam.

Shmuel Silverman  41:00

Okay, so here is a tool to actually cause damage. You take 100 base stations like this and you focus the beam on a single point in space. And of course, if you’re sitting in that point in space, you’re going to be a little bit hot, very fast. But well we can imagine all sorts of crazy things with this. But the important stuff is that that’s not the intention and this is not how the system is working. Although we are using thousands of antennas and focusing beams in order to communicate with a device, we cannot go the distance, without using what we call *inaudible*. This is okay many, many antennas like you know, you have your wireless base station, your house or your wireless access point and you see four or six or eight or 12 antennas on it. It means that it collects a partial information on each antenna and then combine it all for the information. This is how you get higher capacity because you get better sensitivity and you can hear more data. The same thing we are doing with 5g, but then we do it with thousands of antennas instead of just four or five. We also do beamforming, which is when we send information, we create a beam of information. So it goes to your phone and it goes far away to hit your phone. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get this dense information.

Shawn Flynn  42:24

So what would happen if I am outside of a major city and the infrastructure hasn’t been built up for 5G and I have my dumb phone?

Shmuel Silverman  42:33

Oh, then you’ll do 4G or you dumb phone is dead. So the dumb phone will still be able to do voice communication all the way to 2G. So all our phones even today can do GSM I mean, you can go and connect… to a GSM out in the boonies, out there, outside, far away from the cities. So the infrastructure will be built such that it will continue and maintain. And our phones will continue to be able to communicate at least to do voice communication, but when it comes to data communication or running an app, that’s questionable when you go out there. But at the same time, I mean, if this is not what you do all the time, why would you pay so much for your phone? Why would you care?

Shawn Flynn  43:15

What excites you the most about this technology?

Shmuel Silverman  43:20

I like the fact that the business models are changing and that things are enabling and open up the space for innovators and for people to create and to dream about a different world. And if you dream the correct world, and you add your bet, then your investment will be extremely successful. 

And of course, if you… missing your dream, it will be a problem. The value proposition sometimes changes based on technology being enabled. I’ll give you an example. Remember Kodak? A big company, used to print money. Kodak’s value proposition was “captured the moment.” Then came digital and Kodak thought to capture the moment digital is fine. No, it’s not fine. It wasn’t about capturing the moment, it was sharing the moment. There is no Kodak *inaudible*. I mean there is but they lost it.

 It’s all about sharing the moment. We are human, we like to share this information. We capture it in order to share. So when new technology comes, the value proposition sometimes shifts. It’s really hard to figure it out. And large corporations will best out of this world because they will miss it. Well, at least one would hope. Because we like to see change. I mean, I love Google, but you know, God save Google. But at the same time, I would like to see other companies I would like to see how they stand. I like to see people being successful. I love Facebook, but the fact that they took WhatsApp off the table is not that appealing to me. You know, Facebook, WhatsApp? What’s the connection between Facebook and WhatsApp? Nothing except for WhatsApp is connecting, is basically an alternative social network. It connects lots of people, for free, completely secure, to communicate any way they want to, through their mobiles. Facebook thought that’s not a good thing to have a competitor and just took them off the planet. I’m hoping that when 5G shows up, where you will see many companies changing the game, such that there will be new giants showing up and not just the existing. So I’m looking forward to it. I mean, this is exciting.

Shawn Flynn  45:31

Shmuel, what are you currently working on?

Shmuel Silverman  45:33

Now, the latest project I’ve been working on or started to work on is using AI to predict crops. Yes, you know, think about falling. If you have a field, full off, let’s say vegetables, and you plant this field and it takes you six weeks, 12 weeks or whatever it is to finish the cycle and sell your crops. If you go to the market to sell your crops, you need to be able to predict how much crop I’m going get in order to negotiate the price. And the price difference could be significant between what you predict and negotiate to begin with. And now you end up with this delta, is significant enough that let’s say your ROI on your field is X percent. If you can improve your prediction by 50% accuracy, by 50%, you can improve your ROI, five to 10x. Five to 10 X, it’s a big difference. Most of the systems that exist today cannot do that. And I’m working with this exciting company to actually build a system that improves it by over 50%. Now, the question is, how do you protect the system like this from IP perspective? Because I do not want Google to jump in and just do it because they can. I want this company to make the money. How do we do that?

Shawn Flynn  46:54

That sounds like another episode, Shmuel. We’re gonna have to get you back on the show. And if anyone wants to find out more information about you, what’s the best way to contact you or get in touch?

Shmuel Silverman  47:06

You can find me @shmuelsilverman. You can look for Shmuel Silverman Inventions. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on shmuel@multi-innovation.com. And look at multiinnovation.com or on Medium.

Shawn Flynn  47:22

Right. We’re going to have all those links in the show notes. So visit the website, The Investor’s Podcast and click on Silicon Valley. And I also want to thank Kurt Highland. He’s the one that introduced me to Shmuel probably about two years ago, that created our friendship and allowed this interview to happen today. So Kurt, I want to thank you. And, Shmuel, I want to thank you one more time for taking the time to be on Silicon Valley.

Shmuel Silverman  47:44

Shawn, thank you for having me.

Outro 47:46

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