Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Conversations with masters of technology, those who produce it or those who use it.
Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Kenneth Wong, the Most Well Rounded CAD Journalist
We trade press releases for real stories with Kenneth Wong—writer, artist, photographer, and Burmese language instructor at UC Berkeley—exploring how tools, culture, and ethics shape the way we create. From tea leaf salad to Apple Pencil, from cloud CAD to AI, follow Kenneth's journey.
• Literary craft applied to B2B tech writing
• Pragmatic uses of AI for summaries, transcripts, and creative prompts
• Caffeine rituals, tea leaf salad, and cultural memory
• Life in socialist Burma and communal norms vs American privacy
• Drawing and photography on iPad, pressure sensitivity, and tactility
• Why consumer-grade UX often outpaces enterprise CAD
• Cloud adoption, subscription backlash, and industry inertia
• AI for design intent vs button hunting, where it truly helps
• Creative rights, style theft, face recognition, and ethics
• Teaching Burmese: rules vs reflex and cognitive load
• Travel to the Thailand–Burma border and personal risk
• Robotaxis, rideshares, and enjoying small talk
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Masters of Technology Happy Hour, where once a week I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person. I have to say, Kenneth, you're one of the most interesting people in the business. You do so many things that wish I was as rounded. First of all, I should introduce you to the people who don't know you. Kenneth, you're a writer, you're an artist. Yes. And is there anything I'm missing? I want to go into each of those.
Kenneth:Well, I'm a language instructor, Burmese language at UC Berkeley. Lately I have become a bit of a photography geek. We had a start in publishing at the same publication, which interested me. Our paths didn't actually cross at Cadence magazine, but I left Cadence, I think, and you joined. By the time I joined, Arnie Williams was the editor-in-chief. Right. So yes, he was the one who hired me. I'd heard stories about you, of course, because you were the predecessor. We never had a chance to work together on the same magazine, even though we did work on the same magazine.
Roopinder:I still have the first article I ever wrote for them. Did you keep all your issues of Cadence?
Kenneth:I still keep, yes, especially the first few articles, because at the time things were getting printed, and I was very proud of the fact that my news summaries were in print form. I saved them as proof of my milestone in the publishing industry. Had you been a writer before? I'd always been interested in writing. And had written and published literary short stories. But writing about technology for business-to-business publication was something very new. It was something that I learned to do first as a rookie editor summarizing press releases into news blurbs. And then later, when my editor-in-chief trusted me enough, he started giving me feature story assignments. So I became one of the people he turned to.
Roopinder:Well, he was smart to do that, that's for sure. I have always found your writing to be some of the best. I have to work really hard to get anything that's even close to what you do, Kenneth.
Kenneth:That's very kind of you to say, Roopinder. It was probably because I had a background in literary writing. So whenever I'm writing, I'm not just conveying facts, but I'm also trying to find opportunities to convey human elements or sights and sounds. If I'm talking about a conference in New Orleans, I would try to mention the heat and make the reader understand what it was like. Paint the picture, as it were, to give them a sense of place and a sense of being rather than just the nuts and bolts. If somebody just wants the nuts and bolts, they could read a press release. And they could even have ChatGPT summarize the press release.
Roopinder:No conversation these days is complete unless you talk about AI. So are you using AI yourself? Are you using LLMs and any type of AI?
Kenneth:Not necessarily for my B2B tech reporting gigs. Sometimes I would use it to come up with a summary or an outline of a long white paper that I just don't have the time to read the whole 20 pages or whatever. So I'll do that. But aside from that, in my personal life, I also use ChatGPT or any kind of AI to generate photo shoot concepts, for example, so that I could pre-visualize what it would be like to shoot a particular type of model in a particular setting. Sometimes I also used AI to practice language because I'm learning Thai and Japanese in addition to teaching my own native language. Those are the two clear examples of how I use AI in my life.
Roopinder:I have to apologize. But I apologize because I don't have a drink. I have yet to have a cocktail with a person on this show. I've got to try harder to sell this concept. But if you have a drink right now, I don't think I'll be able to do anything the rest of the day. You introduced me to this. Absolutely.
Kenneth:Yes.
Roopinder:I'd have to have some of that.
Kenneth:I would be glad to have some of that any hour of the day. Yes, it's it's a quintessential Burmese dish. So I grew up eating it, especially when I have to call an all-nighter for an exam coming up or something. My mom would make those for me, keep a steady supply of those to keep me awake so that I could keep studying. That's why I have fond memories of tea leap salad.
Roopinder:How much caffeine is in that? My wife and I went several times. She's very sensitive to caffeine. She had a buzz going on for a long time after that. I think because of the grinding of the tea leaves, you get all of the caffeine.
Kenneth:There are fermented tea leaves in it. Those fermented tea leaves definitely bring out the caffeine content of the tea leaves. I'm sure it's very potent with caffeine. That was the reason it worked. If I had to pull an all-night out of study for an exam, that would keep me awake.
Roopinder:Do you mean more than one in a day?
Kenneth:Oh, yeah. I remember when I was a kid, I was studying for my matriculation exam. My mom would every two hours or so bring an email so that I could study throughout the whole night. That's how she kept me awake.
Roopinder:She was doping you, Ken. It worked. You know what? My mom was doing the same thing in a different way. I didn't realize so much later that my mom, Indians, will have tea, milk tea, as they call it here. That's a staple that's served on the street. It's everywhere, everyone has chai. But most people don't realize chai. They call it chai here, is just means tea. So having people say chai tea is kind of redundant, right? So I would have tea in my milk, my baby bottle would have tea in it, not full stretch, but it must have been pretty strong. Throughout my childhood and to my adulthood, while I was living at home, I was going to college, I had a steady supply of tea. Every day I would have tea. Thank you, everybody does this. This is the norm. When I got to college, and for days I didn't have several days I didn't have, I wasn't at home, I didn't have tea. I got the worst headaches. And I didn't realize till later I started taking Anacin. I would be like, why am I getting these things? Didn't realize it was because I was going cold turkey on the caffeine.
Kenneth:When I was growing up in Burma in Southeast Asia, tea shops were more common than coffee houses. I grew up as a high school kid or college kid sitting around curbside tea shops outside in little plastic chairs and stools drinking tea. It was only when I immigrated to America that I grew the habit of drinking coffee instead.
Roopinder:I started drinking coffee when I had to get up at 4 a.m. to teach 8 a.m. classes. I was like, tea is not gonna cut it. I better have the strong stuff. You tell some very good stories about growing up in Burma. And I'm looking for your book, somewhere I have a book of short stories. Yeah, I don't see it now. I'm sure I have it here. Tell that story about how people used to watch television.
Kenneth:I grew up under a socialist regime. And the country was at the time, Burma, in the 1980s, rather isolated from the rest of the world. Many of the technology advances and Western items were not readily available. Television, for example, was one of those luxuries. So you had to acquire in a black market if you cannot get it legally. And one of my uncles was a black marketer. So he was able to get a TV. And the thing was, at the time, our household became one of the one or two households that had a TV. We had to make a decision, like the other houses that owned TV for communal purposes to whenever the broadcasting time starts. It was usually only about three or four hours in the evening. We would throw our windows wide open so that the neighbors would stand in front of our windows and watch our TV from the window. So it was rather a carnival-like atmosphere every night.
Roopinder:And you didn't mind. Look at all those people. I think we would do here. And I don't know how we might shoot them or something.
Kenneth:Because the notion of privacy was something that almost didn't exist, especially in the 1980s in Burma. So but we live in a community where every morning our neighbors would come and go unannounced into our houses. I remember every time the sun shift, one neighbors from one side of the street will go to the shaded side of the street. For them, it was completely normal. They'll just walk in and they just lie on the floor and do their own thing, you know, read a book or take a nap or whatever in your neighbor's house, living room, essentially. Yeah. That was okay. Yes, yeah. That was why I remember my mom had such a hard time adjusting to American life when she came here because she grew up in a neighborhood where every morning you had to be curious about what was happening with your neighbors, and to not know, to not care was unthinkable. All she could tell was, you know, there are people, little glowing shapes she could see in the windows behind layers of fox and curtains, and she didn't know who they were, she didn't know what they were doing, she couldn't find a way to say hello to them. She didn't even know if their neighbors were male or female. That was hard for her. It was really difficult to adjust what must seem like a very cold kind of society.
Roopinder:Where did your family move to when they first moved to America? San Francisco.
Kenneth:So for her, it was literally and metaphorically low.
Roopinder:I've got to say California has been the coldest reception we've gotten. We've lived in a several places. You know, we moved from the East Coast to California, from Midwest Milwaukee to Philadelphia, then to California. I find California, not that the people are unfriendly, but they're but they're not as warm and receptive to your their neighbors.
Kenneth:Californians were not as friendly. But for American standards that prize not being intrusive, Californians are quite friendly. Those would be signs of friendliness. No. I benefit from that.
Roopinder:I might be hugging everybody. Yes. It's not us. It seems to be prevalent, this idea of like we call it duck and cover, not something like that. But we'll see. Our neighbors are somehow quite aware of what we're doing, yet they choose to not take great lengths in ducking and running when they see us. It's like, wow. As opposed to in Philadelphia and Milwaukee, the concept of somebody moving into your neighborhood, we called it the casserole parade. People would come with dishes that they had made and present them to you just to say hello. And there was nothing like that when we moved here. I thought, it can't be us. It can't be me. I'm Indian. It can't be me. My wife is German-Irish. She's American. So what it wasn't us. It was definitely a California thing.
Kenneth:Yeah. Growing up, I looked at drawings by Norman Rockwell, those cover of cover illustrations from Saturday morning post. And I guess I guess I got the wrong sense of what America was like. It was this idealized America where neighbors would sit on the porch, drink iced tea, invite their neighbors to come in Thanksgiving turkey and all the neighbors uh all around you. That nostalgic America was the sense that I got. I thought that was real. But when I came here, I realized that some of it was real, but a lot of it a lot of it was just idealized version of America. I think I just have to understand that art portrays in many ways the kind of world that we would like to have, the kind of future that we w we wish we could have, but it's not necessarily reality. There are, of course, artists that focus on depicting reality with all its injuries and tragedies and everything. But Norman Rockwell wasn't one of those artists.
Roopinder:What do you attribute that to?
Kenneth:I grew up in a Buddhist country, which may have something to do with that, because there is always this idea that nothing is permanent. Things are constantly changing. So if you are holding on to things and refusing to accept changes, then that probably is the root cause of your anxiety and suffering. So I grew up with that idea. So I think that helped mitigate some of the unexpected things that I encounter in life.
Roopinder:Yeah. I've got to work on that. It doesn't come naturally to me. But I know the principle. One of my favorite sayings is something like what you just said suffering is impermanent. It's a Buddhist saying.
Kenneth:You're right. Another way of saying is this too shall pass, right?
Roopinder:So you mentioned your art. You were the first person I knew that was doing art on a I don't know if you can see it here, but on an Apple tablet and pencil, which by the way, I'm very upset because I have to use a Buddhist saying now. So I'm very upset. So I lost this. I have a version of I have two versions of this pencil. Yeah. The more expensive one, the Pro. Oh I just left behind in Nashville at Autodesk University.
Kenneth:Oh no.
Roopinder:I'm very upset. $129 for that pencil. That is a lot. The most expensive pencil I've ever bought. It's supposed to have a finder. It's supposed to be supposed to be able to use FindMy to find it. It was telling me it was at home.
Kenneth:Oh.
Roopinder:I'm very upset.
Kenneth:I can understand why I would be upset if I lose the stylus that goes with my iPad. Because uh when I draw, and I the f some of the first digital drawings that I did were did with Autodesk. It's a sketchbook, actually. And I can tell the difference because the pressure sensitivity of a stylus makes a difference because it is designed in such a way so that the harder you press, the thicker the lines are. And that's exactly how a paint brush would behave. So if I'm trying to mimic digitally how painting process feels like, that's exactly what you need. So I would be very upset if I lose the stylus and have to replace it.
Roopinder:Yes. I wonder if they have it next time I get one. I'll have to get it shorts with it so it gets replaced. But yeah, you see how I'm dwelling on this? I have to clear my mind of this problem. Go down to something else. Your art. I'm gonna show you some of the art on the video. It's on your Instagram, most of it, correct?
Kenneth:Most of my drawings are on Instagram. Sometimes I post them on Facebook too, but Instagram has become my art outlet platform. It's because Instagram is largely image-driven. So it suits my photography hobby and my painting and digital and watercolor painting hobbies.
Roopinder:Yes, that's right. A photographer as well. On my way to try to become Kenneth Wong, I said I would try to draw something. I would draw stuff on my on my iPad, which I still have not to do. Well, not just because I keep losing the pencils. I have to make an admission. I'll make a public admission here. You know what I'm doing on it? CAD type drawings. I'm actually using Freeform to draw things. This is not art. This is CAD type drawings. Like here's my here's my confession. So I'm I know CAD, I know studied CAD, I've used CAD, I've taught CAD, right? Many CAD programs, right? And I find myself using freeform, which is basically a sketch pad. I love it. Most of the time when I have something that I need to make, what I showed you was actually tool sheds. I'm making several tool sheds in the backyard. I like to design all the pieces before I go out there and cut. I'll pick up this sketch pad, the iPad of the pencil, and I'll draw in there because I can whip things up and erase. I'm not touching the CAD program, and I have not confessed this to anybody. I was supposed to be a CAD writer expert, right? Here I am using a sketcher because CAD is not easy to use. CAD is gonna take longer to use, it won't have any better effect. I don't know how Apple did this. Apple made something that's easier to use than a CAD program. Oh, it's not perfect, the lines aren't perfect. But watch what it does, Ken. The lines aren't perfect, but if I draw a straight line and hold it, it'll straighten it out for you. It'll straighten it out for me. And if I draw a rectangle, rough rectangle, it'll make a real rectangle, perfect rectangle. Circle, same line, same. It will make calculations. I could do two times the square root of three equals here's Apple doing things that CAD should do, math CAD should do. When I talked to these CAD companies, I actually have done this to them. I said, look, Apple can straighten out my lines and sketches and it can make circles and do calculations. Damn it, why can't you do that? Why can't I have a natural interface to my CAD program? Apple's not a CAD company, but they figured it out. They figured out what a good UI is. Which is sketching. Every engineer, this is why people avoid me now at CAD companies. And I tell them what CAD should be like, what CAD ought to be like in terms of simplicity.
Kenneth:I think you make a very good point. I can never quite understand why really cheap of free consumer targeted apps and programs are so much more intuitive than those thousand-dollar enterprise software packages that are heavy, bug-ridden, and more difficult to learn and use. It should be the reverse, you know. The price that you pay for paying a higher price should be an easier, friendlier user experience. But quite often I find that it's actually the reverse.
Roopinder:They're hard to use. It was kind of a cathartic moment that I realized it was only easy to use because I knew how to use it. Should I not use it for a while or have to learn a new CAD program, I gotta sit down, work at it, figure things out again, or remember them or look them up. I don't have to do any of that with the sketching program. The only program that has been able to somewhat duplicate hand sketching is Shaper 3D. It's a Hungarian company. Yes. And they uh I've covered them a great deal. I found them very interesting because they had an interface that used a pen, Apple pencil and iPad. The first time I saw it, I was in love. This was like, wow. He's actually just this was István Csanády. He's standing in front of an audience in San Francisco, where it's the first time he actually showed Shaper 3D in in the United States. He's gonna demonstrate Shaper 3D to us. This is not an ad. I'm not being paid to say this. But I thought, wow, this is what CAD should have been all along. He's using an iPad. The whole time I'm thinking, where's this guy's computer? He's gonna show us a CAD program. He's got nothing. He's got no he's not got no keyboard, there's no CPU. He's got an Apple iPad and a pencil. He proceeds to use a Parasolid-based program on an iPad with a pencil. He's just sketching and making parts. This was five, six years ago. I don't know what's wrong with people that they don't adopt that. Like all, I know it's so easy to use. I thought everybody will be using this. It's starting to appear on people's uh radar, according to them, they get a substantial amount of use, but it doesn't rank with the big four.
Kenneth:Engineering industry, the industry that we write for, is actually very stubborn and change resistant.
Roopinder:Is it? Yeah.
Kenneth:Because I've I've seen through my short little career, um 25 years or so. 25 years or so, you know, in it's a short period of time. And then somebody proved that you could do it, and now everybody is in a race to try to put their own cat programs into the cloud, right? And at one point, what we would consider paramolid and what we would consider uh direct modeling were separate houses of technology. They would never get married, and then you know, suddenly somebody showed that you could combine those two, and now it's a standard practice in most CAD programs to have both types of editing. I think it's just the industry wanting to keep things the way they are, because many of the revenue models are based on keeping things the way they are, so that's why it's so change resistant.
Roopinder:Yeah, there's a lot of conservatism keeping the status quo as it were, because that is the business model. That's right. I remember uh it was quite a issue with Autodesk to change your business model, remember, when they went to perpetual licenses to subscription. Yeah, yeah.
Kenneth:That's right.
Roopinder:Right. But CAD, like you said, is so far behind software in general. Everybody else was already shifting to cloud subscription-based revenue. CAD was fighting it. I remember people, they were so upset. Some of our colleagues were very upset that this was happening. This will never work, it's a big ripoff. It was, you know, you could you end up paying, you know, they did a lot of them were doing the math, you'd be paying 10 times as what you pay for the software eventually, things like that. I'm making up numbers, of course, to exaggerate.
Kenneth:I remember writing stories about people's reception of cloud-hosted CAD. I was writing a story when everyone was using Facebook and Twitter, all of them are cloud-based. You don't need to download anything. And most of the people that I interviewed probably were doing their banking already in the cloud, anyway. Yet they would tell me they want something they can download and install on their machine so they could physically own something. That feeling that they own something. And then the quite often they would say, What if uh the Internet is down? And then at least if you have the code, you could still run the software on your workstation, even if uh you're not connected. And all those sort of worries, of course. Today the attitude is that anything that's changed a lot, I think. People would prefer to use something in the cloud that they don't have to clog up their hardware.
Roopinder:There's a lot of advantages, right? The infinite computing, you could have an iPad, a Chromebook, even, right? And you can still draw on all the power. It seems like, oh my god, why didn't we do this years ago? We were really dumb to not take advantage of all the things that the cloud has. We are slow to move. How do you relate that to what's happening now with okay? So now we're accepted, cloud is more or less accepted by everybody except maybe defense companies. How do you relate that to what's happening now with AI? Where do you think AI is in terms of revolutionary concepts or big step changes? What stage on the Gardner curve do you think we are with that?
Kenneth:It's hard for me to say what point in the curve we are at, but a lot of people are willing to accept AI as an integral part of their life. And many of the routine tasks and operations uh most of the people I know are quite happy to let AI handle it. Because it really isn't the best use of my time to look for misspellings and uh misplaced comments. And so that's why automated spell checks and things like that are so good, because it it's a better use of my time. So I can focus more on content. And the same is true with AI. If you can automate the simple task like extruding something and turning a 2D profile into a 3D object, then the person designing it can spend more time thinking about higher concepts, like is really going to be a better grip for somebody using it, or will it save weight and things like that? Rather than thinking about where is the surfacing button and how do I execute an extra command? People really shouldn't be spending time thinking about those things. If AI can do it, that's so much the better.
Roopinder:I think you may have burst my bubble there. I thought everything that came out of you was gonna be perfect and you didn't need to proofread it. Use AI to do the proofreading, huh?
Kenneth:Well, in a way, I don't have to because all I have to do is click a button that has spell check and Microsoft Word will check grammars for me. So that is a form of AI, I suppose.
Roopinder:Yes. Okay.
unknown:Yeah.
Roopinder:I've had good luck with it cleaning up transcripts, by the way. In fact, if I run our transcript now, it'll take out quite a bit of the ums, ahs, you know, to clean it up like a copy editor at that point. You're absolutely right. Yes, yes, right.
Kenneth:Yeah. I remember in my early days in the career, I spent a number of hours every day transcribing the phone interviews that I did in order to get the quotes that I needed. Today I just uploaded to Auder AI program that I subscribe to, and it'll give me a transcript that is 98% essentially correct. The rest of the two percents are mostly because these are industry jargons that normal people would have a hard time transcribing. So I'm not surprised that AI doesn't understand it.
Roopinder:Yeah. There's some job security here because they don't, you know how SolidWorks is using their capitals in their name these days. We know that. Or they don't know how to spell 3D experience, or they don't know what the latest audit has just changed their name of their product to is something else, right? Or their three clouds.
Kenneth:Right.
Roopinder:We still have some utility here. I think so. You're right. Yes, yeah.
Kenneth:On the other hand, I always feel like it's a challenge for us to figure out if the AI can do something that I'm already doing, then I need to figure out how to do something else that the AI is not yet able to do, right?
Roopinder:We are supposed to be able to now propel ourselves, right? Right with what do they say, right on the shoulder of giants, right in the shoulders of AI and be better writers or better analysts or better researchers because we have these tools. That's yes, that's the best quote I heard about AI, because everyone worries about AI and losing their jobs to AI. The CEO of Trimble, Rob Painter, who said the only people that will lose their jobs from AI are the ones who don't use AI.
Kenneth:Yeah. Well, I do worry about misuse of AI, unethical use of AI. Right. For example, somebody using my drawings in a way that I don't approve of. Without any credit to me, they came up with something that is essentially a derivative of my drawing. That sort of thing. The lines are not very clear yet legally, because the laws always have to catch up with technology which evolves faster than the laws. So there are a lot of open questions about what is considered acceptable and what is not in the use of AI. For example, I would worry about a military regime using face recognition to identify dissidents. They could do it from video footages and photos, so they don't even have to be in the US to identify dissidents who are against military regime in Burma, for example. These sort of things I worry. These I worry. But those have more to do with people's decision to use the technology in a way that is reprehensible and unethical. The technology itself is available to use for either good or bad.
Roopinder:Yeah, it's very worrisome. Those both cases that you mentioned there, that your art could be stolen. I could easily say, make me a sketch in the style of Kenneth Wong by showing them your Instagram page, and I would have a derivative work and without any credit to you, pass it off as my own. Facial recognition also is a huge issue. I know that some of the facial recognition that's being done wholesale or broad-based or wholesale with the right word, in on a large scale by China to capture dissidents. And I think you were I recall from your article when you went your trip to the border town in Thailand, Burma. Your friend was worried about security. Was that because of he was being afraid of being recognized on spatial recognition?
Kenneth:That was less about technology, more about the sinister scam centers operating at this golden triangle of the border area. There are a lot of human trafficking and kidnapping of people to work in these scam centers. The fraud phone call that asks us to invest in non-existing companies or scam us out of our money by faking some sort of Amazon return and that sort of thing. I've been doing that for 10 years now. I started in 2015 and now it's 2025. So I've been doing it for 10 years now. It's a great opportunity for me to teach my mother tongue to foreigners and researchers and children of Burmese descent who want to get back in touch with their root. But the challenge that I underestimated was how difficult it is to explain some of the underlying rules as to why you use this word and not that word, and why your sentence structure has to be this way and not that way. I imagine it's the same for the native English speakers to have to explain, for example, when you use tell, talk, and say in speech and what's the difference. You know how to do this, but it's really difficult to spell out the rules as to why you have to do it that way. And the same thing is true for Burmese as well. I have to figure out some of the underlying rules so that I could explain to the students.
Roopinder:Sometimes there isn't a rule. You'll have to make up something and have an exception like I before e accept after see, that kind of thing.
Kenneth:Yes. And sometimes there is a rule, but it is not advisable for a learner to do this rule-based sort of thing. It's much better for the learner to develop the linguistic reflexes and instincts so that they could just do it without thinking about the rules. That's what it means to communicate in a language, right? Can you imagine having to think about all the rules about present perfect and past perfect before you decide to use a structure like that? You would never get to the point of uttering your sentence because you'll be so preoccupied with processing the rules. The cognitive burden is too heavy if you do a rule-based language approach. Sometimes I have to explain to my students, if you're a linguist and you're really curious about how Burmese language works, I'll explain through a rule, but after that, I'll encourage you to forget the rules because otherwise you won't be able to use it the way a native speaker would do. Yeah.
Roopinder:I want to go back to something you were saying because it's a very important subject, and I know it's important to you. When you went to the border town and you discovered it was this slave-based center for scamming people. Yes. I heard about that. The New York Times had reported it, but was that the story you were after, or were you there for the refugee population?
Kenneth:I was there to record the stories of the refugees that fled to Thailand, some legally, mostly illegally, through the border area after the military coup in Burma. So the scam center wasn't the story that I was trying to write, but the scam center's existence, the scam center operators had a tendency to kidnap people to work for them, particularly people who could speak English well with an American accent. Well, that was why my friends were worried about my security when I arrived there. So that was a concern for them.
Roopinder:Because of your English language skills and you were native Burmese, you would be a target.
Kenneth:I would be a prime target. If nothing else, I'm an American, so somebody could just call me ransom and ask for somebody to give them money to release me. So that's one of the reasons. Yeah, my friends were worried.
Roopinder:You're lucky to get out.
Kenneth:Considering the number of foreigners who go to the area and come back out, statistically, I don't think the worry was I wasn't that worried.
Roopinder:Would you be more worried in Haiti, for example?
Kenneth:Perhaps. And from the stories that I've heard about kidnapping in Mexico, for example, in certain Latin American countries where kidnapping is practically an industry, I would worry about that.
Roopinder:Yes, and uh close the door and travel to Mexico. I don't think it's because I'm getting old and paranoid, but I hear all these stories about uh, oh my gosh, it's that's happening in Mexico. People are getting hanging from bridges, people are getting kidnapped, Americans are being taken. I don't know if they're taken hostage. I don't know if the hostage thing is an industry there yet. But they'll more likely kidnap you. That's more profitable way of treating an American, I think. Yeah. Kenneth, I better let you go, but it's been great talking to you. Get you late to your teaching assignment. No problem. Are you going to Berkeley campus?
Kenneth:I'm going to get Berkeley campus. I usually take part, and it's a chance for me to catch up on reading and listen to my high-end Japanese podcast for my listening practice.
Roopinder:Oh, okay. All right. So get on that. Get on that part. We took the my first another.
Kenneth:And I'm very thankful that because of you, I have the chance to do it. Since then, I've done a number of times on my own Waymo experiences too. I always tell people that you would be more confident in the technology if you have written it. The speculation is where you are always speculating the worst case scenario.
Roopinder:Every one of those has been just as reliable as the time we went.
Kenneth:Trouble-free and reliable, just as the times that you and I rode together.
Roopinder:Yeah. I'm gonna find I'm gonna sound like a cheapskate because I keep bringing up cost, but I was ups, I was a little upset that they weren't cheaper though. I thought you don't have to have a human driver. This should be half price. But it turned out to be as much as, if not, the same as a Uber Lyft. Did you think that? Is it still like that?
Kenneth:I thought the price was almost equal, the same. That's true. I also enjoy taking lift and talking to various drivers because I'm always curious about what their mother tongue is and pick up a couple of phrases here and there if they happen to be Portuguese, for example.
Roopinder:That's your Burmese background. See, as uh Americans are gonna be like, I'm happy to have nobody in the car. Right. Isn't there a checkbox in Uber that you could say, please don't talk to me? I think it says that.
Kenneth:I've seen some drivers who marked in their profile that they speak limited or no English, and it turns out that they do speak English. So I don't know whether they check that box because they just don't like talking to the passengers. It goes both ways, I guess. You know, there are times when passengers would rather just be checking their iPhone and doing the emails while they are writing. And there are times when the drivers would prefer not to be interrupted, I guess. Yeah.
Roopinder:Yeah, yeah. All right, Kenneth, I keep keeping you longer. Would you come back and do another show sometime with me?
Kenneth:I'd be more than happy to join you and maybe even a few other people if they are willing to suffer through my presence. I would be happy.
Roopinder:Yes, suffer through mine as well. All right, very good. Maybe with you on board, I think I'd get more appeal. I'll tell Kenneth. Kenneth is coming. Looking forward to part two then. Okay. Very good. Great seeing you again. Yeah. And that concludes this episode of the Masters of Technology Happy Hour. I hope you enjoyed our chat and will join me as we talk to some of the most interesting people in the design and engineering software community.