Techstrong TV – February 19, 2025

Hey everyone. You know what? We're gonna play a game today of geo Processor politics.

It's part of the New World Order. And Balkanization, you're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Happy Wednesday. It's Alan Shimmel here for Textron Gang. We've got a lot going on in the world as there seems to be going on in the world every day.

Um, got a smaller gang today. We had a couple people between weather and medical stuff, uh, not able to make it. So let me introduce you to, you know, we go to war with the army.

We have not the army we want. Let me introduce you to today's army gang here. Um, first of all, he got a chuckle out of that joining us from down in Austin, where it's a frigid, frigid day in Austin.

He is a FU analyst, CTO co-founder of Visible Impact Guy Carrier. Hey guy, welcome. Thank you.

And a proud member of the Allen Chimal Army. Even if he's not, if he, even if I'm not the army he wants today, well, Only the army he has. Well, you know, me and Rammy.

Uh, But, uh, yeah, no, it's good to be here again on this, uh, bridged Austin Day. It's 19 degrees right now, which is darn cold for central Texas. That is, that's, that's now right frigid for Central Texas.

Oh, man. Joining us also, speaking of frigid up in Harrison, New York. I don't know what the weather is there though.

It's our Chief Content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike. How are you?

I'm good. This is a Volunteer Army as far as I know. But do we need the institute a draft?

Uh, We might, I thought I was part of the draft. Well, I was thinking about bringing in North Korean troops. All right.

Some remote IT analyst. Uh, what the heck? What the heck?

Wouldn't it be the first time they jumped into someone else's war? Um, anyway, on that note, Mike, we've got a couple things to go over today. One is this part of a bigger issue that I'm gonna be addressing on my shimmy says this week, tomorrow.

And that is, you know, I call it the bulk balkanization of the tech world. And it's, it has a lot to do. You know, I think we're entering into a new world order, right?

The, we're seeing the death now of the post World War II new world order that was kind of modified with the fall of the Soviet Union, but we're going into a balkanization era, and, and it, it's affecting tech in general. Processors, CPUs of all things in particular. Talk to us about it.

Yeah. Things are, shall we say, a little on the Unsell side. Um, I'm not quite clear what's happening here.

And the one minute the President is saying that the Taiwan, when he stole our chip business, and we want it back the next minute, uh, we're talking with TMSC about they're gonna take over parts of Intel and the foundries, but they're gonna build those in the US and return. And who knows, maybe this is part of some larger exit strategy from Taiwan that we're gonna give back to mainland China someday. But Guy, what's going on here?

Well, to start with, um, I, I, I personally don't try, I try to avoid the words strategy or plan when it applies to the current US administration. 'cause I think it's a lot more shoot from a hip, um, approach. Uh, you know, that that's sort of an approach.

Just, you know, just get going and do something and say something depending on, um, what the will or wish of the moment is and what sounds like it's gonna be interesting and popular and supported. Um, I, I think that the broad perspective on this is pretty clear, which is exactly like you said. Um, it, you know, intellectually speaking globally and Europe and the United States, there, there has been this whole globalization push since the Bretton Woods Conference right after World War ii.

And it was supposed to be this global supply chain and this wonderman and amazingness of, um, all kinds of countries around the world specializing in what they could specialize in and, uh, uh, trade and all that other sort of stuff. Getting it all over the place on, I think there was already, thanks to the Great Recession, a little bit of concern, let's say popular non-intellectual concern about this. Um, so we, again, you know, people been saying, you know, built in the USA is better and all that other sort of stuff since the seventies, since the sixties when, when a lot of our manufacturing started to move offshore.

But I I, none of that had the real effect of slowing or halting globalization. What did was covid and the global shutdown of the supply chain and the sudden realization that there are certain strategic, uh, products that one does not want to have across an ocean. One would like to have onshore in your own nation, in our case, in the United States, but for other nations in their nations.

And one of those big strategic resources, even pre ai, was computer chips of many kinds. And so that led to the CHIPS act during the previous administration. The CHIPS Act has been this huge investment in onshoring to the United States Manufacturing, even if by a company like TSMC, the biggest chip manufacturer in the world.

And let's not forget that their equipment, the key equipment they use comes from basically one country as well in the Netherlands, right? It's this onshoring of the ability to create these chips. The arrival of AI made that even more acute made that need even more acute.

So that's kind of what's been going on this whole time. And it's been joined by this popular movement when people couldn't get basic goods like toilet paper and stuff during the, during the pandemic that we needed to be, have more stuff, more jobs, more manufacturing, more capabilities within the United States, in the case of some other kind of supply shock, like what occurred at covid. Now, when I go and say like, I don't really pay attention to plans, the strategies and all that other sort of stuff, the basic strategy such as it exists as this tariffs strategy, this idea that you're going to force other countries to do what you want by making it more expensive for them to import stuff into the United States.

The pre the statement by the president of Taiwan, I, I'm a little confused and maybe you can now clarify for me or for us, how this state somehow that Taiwan is gonna invest more in the United States. And I scratch my head as much as you do. See now, I say that all the time, thanks to you, Mike, I scratch my head as much as you do with this idea that we're gonna onshore everything, but we're gonna have TSMC, which is a foreign company owned and run it, which was what was being discussed like with respect to Intel's Intel Foundry business.

Again, that's onshore manufacturing, but it would be run from Taiwan. It's, that's all very confusing. But in the end, um, what we're talking about is, uh, uh, threats through tariffs to force something that's already happening and has been happening for the past four years, which is this move of manufacturing, chip manufacturing in particular, into the countries that use them so that they don't have to worry as much about the global supply chain.

And that is a retrenchment like Alan and Mike, you said that's a retrenchment away from the world order of the previous 50, 60 years of increased globalization, 75. Well, I think, I think after Canada, Canada becomes the 51st state, TMSC will just move there, right? Is that how that works?

I'm not gonna Take the day maybe on, it'll become the 52nd state. I, it's worth noting incidentally, that just recently, like within the last week or something, the State Department removed in, in its Taiwan information page or whatever it is, it removed a, a, a flat out statement from the US government that it does not support Taiwanese independence from China. It removed that and China reacted as well.

So there's this also this other piece of it of like sort of this nationalist Taiwan support side, or whatever you want to call it, that has not existed since Taiwan was created. So I don't know what's going on here. Alan, Step in.

So, guy, I have to tell you, first of all though, kudos for you for the historical context and laying this all out. You built a beautiful case there. Um, that was, that was really well, really done well, professorial even I might say in terms of the, the accused Yeah.

Strategy. I, I think, you know, we all kind of know what the strategy of the administration is. I call it T-S-O-T-W throw s**t on the wall.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. And see what sticks.

I mean, I used to call it MSU, like I'd say I went to MSU Bureau. Oh, Michigan State. No.

Make s**t up. Yeah, Well, that's basically what they do. But, but you know, it, it, again, This tariffs thing Don land on this tariffs thing really is a strategy.

It is a simple one step strategy. But, but here's the problem. But tariffs put on tariffs.

But it is, And they, yes, it is a strategy. This strategy would've worked real well in 1958, which is just about where Donald Biff Trump is stuck in, okay? When, when the US is the predominant market by 10 x over the rest of the world, and you put the barriers into doing business in the us, the, the rest of the world has to march in block step.

Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. And when you do tariffs, you are forcing other countries to do tariffs. I've said this before.

It's not an America first, uh, strategy. It's an America alone strategy because you are gonna put up tariffs. And then so is Canada.

So is Mexico, so is China, so is Europe, so is Brazil, so is South Africa. So is every other country in the world. And so what do you have, you have the balkanization here, and Donald Trump says, well, we still have the biggest market.

Everyone wants to do business with us. Yes and no. We have 330 million people.

4 billion. Let me say it again. 4 billion India.

India has more children in honors programs in school and math and science honors programs than we have children, period. So what's gonna happen here in short order is when the rest of the world says F you, and they put up their own berries and say, we don't want American goods. There's only so much we're gonna make in America that we can consume in America.

At the end of the day, a good part of our economy is still based on exporting food materials. Are we gonna have corn rotting in the, in the fields? 'cause we don't know what to do.

Oh, maybe we'll make ethanol out of it. I don't know. Are we gonna have crops rotting in the fields?

Because no one will buy our food. No one will take our meat, no one. And how the farmer's gonna feel about that.

We could buy American, but there's only so much Americans could buy. There's a lot more of them than there are of us. And that's the basic fallacy in this strategy, if you wanna call the strategy that's, you know, not to mention what it's gonna do for inflation and everything else.

Yeah. Coming back to the chips thing though, the part that I don't get guy is like, we seem to be talking like we can put up a, a semiconductor manufacturing facility in six months. And last time I checked, it'll be like closer to the end of the decade before any of these things come online.

Okay. I try to, I try to stay pretty open-minded in terms of, I'm, I'm not a big supporter of this administration's moves or actions. Um, I'm not a supporter at all in general, but I do understand that there's a lot of people who support it and liked what they're seeing.

And so I want to be respectful towards that point of view, even if I disagree with it. Um, so what you're referring to, Mike, however, is a classic political move, which is to take credit for something that has already been done by somebody else. Chip, the CHIPS Act is already creating, I mean, it's a, it's a roughly 18 month accelerated timeline to go from, from field to factory to to, to, to fab, right?

So, yeah, it's not gonna be six months, but you know, most of these, if not all of these new fab facilities, um, are are not going, or, you know, they're, none of them are online yet due to the CHIPS Act, as far as I know, at least if there are any. That's few. And so they are gonna come online this year, and the current administration's gonna take credit for it.

Well, even though had nothing to do with it, Guy. I don't know. I you're assuming they're gonna leave the money in the CHIPS Act.

The problem is the Chip Chips Act is part of, uh, this, they refer it the Green New Deal, and they want to cut the Green New Deal. Okay, so hold on, Alan. The CHIPS Act doesn't exist anymore in Newspeak.

Right? Okay. The CHIPS Act has been, you don't hear anything about the CHIPS Act anymore.

I think they called the Truth speak. If we're gonna go Orwell in here, You don't hear about the Infrastructure Act or what was it called? The Inflation Reduction Act.

Whatever, right? You, they, they, they don't exist anymore. What happened in the past four years doesn't exist unless there's a beneficial outcome, in which case it is thanks to the current administration.

It, it's, it's, like I said, it's an old political move, however, correctly, uh, uh, executed this time. So, but Mike, that's where it comes from. They can say all kinds of stuff.

People say all kinds of stuff, and when they get away with it, 'cause they get away with at least some of it, then Well, if you say it enough and loud enough, We wanna speak truth then Yeah. If, if you say it enough times and loud enough. But here's the thing, I don't think it's just a question of building a foundry.

I think it's, it's having the right people, the right training, the right materials, the right everything else. And, and again, if, if other countries aren't gonna buy what you're outputting because you've tariffed them, That's not so, so, I, I get where you're coming from, Alan, but I think the primary initial impact of the tariffs should they stick, um, is to the American Consumer, no doubt about it, prices up Tax on Americans. So and so, so the, the reciprocal tariffs on are going to affect the key citizens of those countries, the consumers in those countries.

No, It, it's Gonna, but the biggest impact on the world economy comes from the United States, you know, business and consumer not buying as much because it's more expensive. All right, so let me come back to this other point then. 90 More.

We have, we have talked about Intel as this national treasure in the past. So is Intel not so much a national treasure at this point? And we're gonna be happily slicing it up with some sort of strange arrangement with TMSC.

I mean, what's going on here? Suddenly the tenor and the tone has changed. Um, I think it started to change 12 months ago.

And then, was it five or four months ago when Peggy Gelsinger quit that? Was this sort of one of those moments in the news that suddenly causes everybody to take notice? Intel's um, main position has been in data center CPUs, um, less so in on the, on, on desktop and client devices, but still there as well.

I only say less so 'cause A MD ha has had long inroads into there, and it's a lower margin business. Um, and, uh, um, when Intel got creaky in, its in its, you know, sort of combo BAB and micro architecture strategy, when it started to get creaky in that and sort of slow moving, um, it wasn't so much notice because it was still a good default choice, especially for cloud instances. Uh, and it was just understood, right?

Um, what AMD's end run did in the end, combined with the sudden attention on the GPU. It just sucked all the wind out of Intel's sails. And I, I, I think you're right.

I I think that, you know, the mighty half fallen at this point, and, um, it's a pretty open, uh, CPU market, especially with arm jumping in. And instead of just being a, uh, a design firm, not only Ma Masi son is saying, wait a minute. Like, we gotta get in on this manufacturing game too, because there's just so much money out there.

So, well, I I think part of that is I wouldn't trust what anybody is telling me about the foundry, so I want to take control of my own destiny. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, there's, there's more to that too though, right? Um, look, let's, let's say the emperor has no close Intel, missed the boat on mobile chips and, and GP use, and, and everyone knew this for a long time already, uh, certainly on mobile, right? You wouldn't have Qualcomm as, as powerful as it is, had Intel had a, a mobile chip alternative.

And as a matter of fact, when you go buy laptops now, it's not uncommon to see SNAP J laptops, right? So in Intel kind of missed the boat on that. I mean, and quite frankly, when you talk about their server processes, processors, right?

You had xons, but you know, they, they just, they kept doing incremental of what they were already doing, incremental improvements on it, and they, and they missed markets. It happens. It's a rare bird like Microsoft that could miss the internet initially and still regain position that can maybe, you know, but didn't miss ai certainly, but Microsoft has been late to some of the big tech innovations in its space and still been able to recover kudos to them.

Intel missed these and, and, and frankly, their ability to recover is in doubt. Now, PSMC though has a history of making promises about moving stuff to America and doing stuff in the US and then not quite following through on it. There's already some T-S-M-T-S-M-C foundries in various stages of construction in the US that have never Thanks to the CHIPS Act Continue.

Yes, and absolutely with CHIPS ACT Money. Thanks CHIPS Act, because they were basically bribed, they were sent a buck a bucket load of money by, by the United States. But I don't believe those are functional or anywhere near functional yet.

No, no, no, they're not. No. They take, they, like Mike said, they take, they take two years to, to go online.

Wow. And, and when you have acts of Congress, like the CHIPS act or any act of Congress, it takes 12 months to just even like, get their ducks in order to ensure that the money's being spent correctly in the right places and all that other sort Of thing. So, but that's the way government functions.

That doesn't mean you come in and gut it. It, yes. But all of that being said, you know, especially as it relates to Taiwan, if you are TSMC, what do you do here?

You, you are in essence buddied up with the Taiwanese government, right? You want to maintain that status quo. You recognize that long term present administration may or may not do anything to prevent Taiwan becoming part of, uh, China.

Um, you know, there's patriotism and there's money, and they don't necessarily come into the same fist or hand here. And, and so that's gonna be some decisions that are made. But again, you know, this, this is CHIPS in particular, I think we're going to see this throughout tech, right?

We, you know, the, the concept of data, sovereign sovereignty is, is something we all recognize, right? I wanna keep my data within the borders of my country. What we're gonna enter into is tech sovereignty.

I want my tech here, and it's not just in the us. 'cause don't underestimate, the EU in mass is not that much smaller than the US market. The Chinese market is not that much smaller than the US market.

The Indian market is, is probably the fastest growing in the world. 'cause just of sheer numbers. So short term, it may sound like a good thing a year, two years out, this whole tech sovereignty thing.

And, and who loses for it? We all lose for it because as consumers, we're better off in a worldwide competition where we get to choose the best and the most efficient and the right tools for the job. Not what only I could get.

Like, you don't want to be a rush like a Soviet citizen. What was the name of the Russian cars, Mike, do you remember? No idea.

But we're gonna be coming back to talk about tariffs later this week. So, All right, we'll take a break here on Textron Gang. I, I got, I hear the music playing.

We're going to take a break. We're coming back and we're gonna talk about an Apple encryption angst here on Textron Gang. Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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Alright, folks, we're back with a, maybe a topic that's slightly less contentious, but probably not much less contentious. Um, the United Kingdom, the land of the Official Secrets Act is once again pushing Apple for access to encrypted data from in the name of security, oddly enough, uh, in this country, at different times. The FBI has kind of echoed a similar sentiment, but now we have, uh, people in Congress basically wagging their finger at the UK saying, how dare you want access to this information?

And this story is kind of a continuing, uh, adventure because law enforcement says we need access to encrypted data to catch the bad guys. And then other folks are saying, we have a fundamental right to privacy. And Alan, you've been watching this, can this ever get resolved?

Or is this, is there some middle ground here? Or is this like, we just gotta one side's gotta suck it up? Or, or, or whether they like it or not.

Well, look, thinking always go buy that program from the Israeli company that breaks the Apple encryption. But that being said, you know, I thought we did find, uh, sort of middle ground on this back around, you know, after nine 11 when under the w George W. Bush administration things were a little saner back then.

And, and they set up like a whole separate court system for when, uh, government can go in and demand these kinds of things. Now, breaking apple encryption was, was a different story, but, you know, but there was a, a court set up, right? And then that was obviously abused during subsequent administrations, and, and that kinda went away.

But, but here's the bottom line. The court's still there, Alan, The, the court is there. Yes.

I, I just don't know. Yeah. How much, you know, it's used.

In any event, what complicates this is, it's, it's crossing borders again, right? Data sovereignty, tech sovereignty, those us congressmen who were p****d at, at the UK with only two gladly approve US agencies being able to do it right Now, I don't know, Ron Wyden is one of 'em, and He's been a, well, Rob, they're, they're the minority now, guy. Fair Enough.

Yeah. He could yell and scream from the back benches, as they would say over in London, right? But the, the fact is, this is really an issue of do we have a fundamental right to privacy?

And yes, there are times when every one of us would say The heck with it, we need to get that information. I need to know if there's more attacks planned in a nine 11 kind of scenario, I, and I, that's a life or death for thousands per, you know, catastrophe prevented. But should it be up to an Apple, a Google, a Microsoft to be the, the defenders of that right.

To privacy, right? Because it's an individual's, right? Does, you know, to put it in legal terms, does Apple have standing to talk on our behalf or to represent on our behalf and say, no, you can't have the ability to unencrypt this, even though we have that ability, we can't give that to you.

Right? And that, that I think is, is a fundamental issue here. There's two issues.

Number one, do individuals have that, right? And when is the rights of the government, a government supersede that individual, right? So a classic balancing right of, of, of responsibility here.

And then number two, what standing does Apple, Google, or any of these companies have and standing in the way? So to me, that's, that's the, the pivotal issue issues here. It's not much different than a wiretap when, when the phone company would put the wiretap in it, as long as there was a court order, and they weren't gonna stand up and say, no, that phone is your private reserve, even though theoretically your home is your castle.

But, um, guy, I mean, is this kind of just, you know, legal grandstanding. I am really curious what the origin of this, um, strategy, uh, on the part of the labor government in the UK is. Um, but let's let, let, let's start by being clear about the difference between what you described Mike and what you are reacting to Alan, because you said the, the key two words, court order, court order is a process.

There is a warrant for wiretapping. There's a warrant for going into my personal safe to see what's in there, uh, or for script searching me or any of those violations of privacy. There is a process for that, a process, a due process, meaning one that involves, for example, a grand jury, uh, you know, 25 of my peers, um, evaluating the reasons and, and, uh, that sort of thing.

I know a lot of court orders happen on a more administrative basis from like a judge overnight or whatever. And that's, there's all of these are part of a process that weigh the safety of the public and, and the enforcement of laws against privacy. That's not what we're talking about here in the uk because the access that they're demanding is on demand access at any time with no particular press surveillance.

In other words, the ability to go in and take a look any old time they want, um, maybe that's unfair to say any old time they want, maybe they have a process as well. But there is a difference there. Uh, there have been cases, and I I'm not as expert in this particular field as as many, but there have been cases where, at least in the United States, the the government has, uh, or through process, there has been a warrant or a request for information from encrypted information held in the cloud.

And I think the companies have resisted or refused Apple's contention is that it has created a system where Apple itself cannot provide that access, but nonetheless, warrants can be issued and the demand can be made, and the target of the warrant can be, you know, compelled to comply, um, by decrypting or putting in their password or whatever it is that they do, or they go to jail in just for not complying. That's not what's happening here in the uk. I think that, Alan, this question of whether or not people have the right to privacy is a question that needs to be brought more public and discussed more publicly.

Because I think most people in the United States at least just assume they do have the right to privacy. But there is a long arm of legal argumentation that there is no such right to privacy in the US Constitution that some states do have, some US states do have the right to privacy in their constitutions, but that the United States constitution does not have it. Um, this is a really, But, but, but guy, there, there is an amendment bill of rights, undue search and seizure and, and, and, uh, due process clauses that you, you do have rights.

I mean, they might not call it a right to privacy. Oh, Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to do with privacy.

So then in other words, It's your right to Property. The circumspection around It comes out of a right to property, right? That's your Property.

I'm not sure there's a right to property in the constitution, undo search and seizure. I get the, the, you know, what, what had created the FIA courts, what created the situation where there was a process, however, secret before, you know, uh, doing surveillance, which is not something pursuant to a criminal investigation, it's just surveillance had to do with the, the principle that if it's, if a US citizen could be surveilled, could be spied on, there should be a process to ensure that that's not just done, you know, willy-nilly. Mm-hmm.

But there, there is maybe no Probable cause is, is the term, right? The constitutional foundation for that. And I don't know how the UK law works.

I think that is, I think you've, you, you've hit on exactly the main issue here, which is outside of the process of courts and adjudication and all that other sort of stuff where there's suspicious suspicion of a crime or a lawsuit or any other, outside of all of that, just as a general rule, should the government be, any government anywhere, be allowed to simply spy on anybody? Yep. So bega, you're talking about a very US specific probable cause, undue search and seizure, you know, these are constant US con UE process itself, very US centered view now happens to be the UK may in fact have a more evolved system of that than we do.

And I no constitution, however. No constitution, but they have their common law, not A written constitution. Yeah.

They have their common law. They have a longstanding, you know, going back to the Magna Carter of, of rights of individuals versus the monarchy, you know, the government. But what happened?

And, and so let's assume the UK has US style safeguards in place, right? To show probable cause before they would do such a thing. What happens to the next country when Libya wants to do it, or Syria or, or North Korea or whatever.

There's a lot of, there's 200 and something countries out there, right? And that I, you know, you, you're gonna start picking which countries really do have probable cause, which ones don't, and that's the ones I should do it to. If you're in Apple, you can't be in that position.

You don't want to be the arbiter of which country is, is really doing it right or wrong, right? So I think Apple's tried to take a, a smarty pants kind of excuse the term, but a smarty pants kind of thing saying, you know what, we don't have the ability to do it. It's encrypted and it's at our hands.

And now the UK's coming in and saying nonsense. I want you to build that back in there. I want that.

Yeah. So, so here's the second step, right? Which is that a DP, the, the, um, the, uh, encryption and protection data protection technology from Apple is not enabled by default.

You have to go in and positively say like, I want this on my system. Um, but essentially it's kind of like Apple has invented or designed or created something in the UK saying, oh no, you can't even have that. You can't offer that here, right?

Because that's Really the, the, that's the issue Here. That, that, but, but, but I don't get it. Like I still don't get it.

Apple doesn't wanna be the UK if they have any process at all, but for any specific case, they can run through whatever process they have to compel, you know, discovery or whatever the word is of whatever's been protected. And Apple doesn't have to have anything to do with it. The the end user does, but the end user won't give it to 'em.

If you remember back to when and They go to jail, Remember when Peak, yeah. But if I have like a terrorist situation, I can't just call up the End user. Well, that, that's what happened in nine 11.

Sharif, Kali or whatever his name is, isn't giving it up no matter how much we water tortured him. Um, but that, but, you know, go back for, let, let's drop the politics for a second. Go back to when PKI first came on the scene.

You guys are all of an age, you remember that was one of the cool things about PKI is, once I set up that public private key, no one, no one could get to that without me saying, okay, apple, Google, none of those people stood in in the way it was my encrypted data. And that was why that was one of the big draws for PKI one of the big. Yeah.

And, and that's you, you're hit. That's what it is. 'cause Mike, um, uh, in a terrorist situation, if the terrorists are dumb, they're going to get caught.

If they're not dumb, they're gonna use PKI or whatever the modern equivalent is, and Apple, Google, whoever, you know, who cares. The, the, the information will still be encrypted end to end. And I think to a certain degree, apple and Google, wish we'd go back to that and they get, but Yeah, my first reaction to the UK doing this was, this is dumb, but it was just a gut reaction.

Now I'm coming back to that. It's kind of dumb. What are they trying to do?

They want Apple to build it. Now That Silk Road is back. They're just, you know, just everybody can just use, you know, find some, some hacked encryption method on Silk Road if they wanna, Until, until, until, uh, quantum breaks that.

But who knows? Oh man. I was gonna mention Quantum.

Well done, sir. All right. Hey, we're gonna take a break.

Let's come back and talk about, uh, HoloLens and Microsoft, you know, pushing that off the table. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more.

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Home of Security Bloggers Network. Hey folks, we're back. We're gonna shift the gear a little bit, but we are now going on with the continuing saga.

What happened with, uh, Microsoft HoloLens, the latest is that they have taken the HoloLens that they were selling to the government and the military and shifted it over to an outfit called Andro. Um, I guess they will service that particular market. There are other niche markets that are using these headsets for various training use cases, but Guy, it seems like the notion that, um, really in these virtual reality headset things are gonna become a consumer product.

Is that dead at this point? What's going on? Well, uh, so this is really interesting, right?

When we talked on this show about, um, the, uh, Microsoft sunsetting, uh, uh, um, what, what it HoloLens two, um, uh, I, my reaction was Microsoft's got so mu I mean, their, their core strength is really in the business market and the enterprise market and, and public sector too, actually. And, uh, there's so many commercial and, and, and industrial applications to augmented reality or virtual reality. I don't get it.

It doesn't make sense to me. And I speculated at the time that, um, that HoloLens was being run outta the consumer side of Microsoft and, you know, is, uh, one, another one of these Mars and Venina situations where they just didn't know how to market it into the business and public sector side. And so now we come all the way around here, and we, we find out there's some, again, I'm gonna speculate, there's some enterprising sales scheme over at Microsoft that in 2018, so quite a while ago, um, went and sold, uh, augmented reality, uh, to military, which is just about the most obvious application.

If you've ever played a video game ever of augmented reality, um, would be military uses. And so this same sales team or the delivery team on it was like, wait, you can't shut this thing down because, you know, we, we, we, we got a military contract here, we got the nine figure deal, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so what do they do?

Well, Microsoft still wants to get rid of it, so they're giving it, I'm not giving it, they're selling it to Andal, which by the way, um, how many of these, the Lord of the Rings named, uh, secret Military, whatever, we have planter, we have Andre, I, there must be a bunch more out there. In any case, it both validates my contention that these things are, um, really best in industrial or public sector or commercial use, um, that Apple's own approach is, which is very consumery, is, um, you know, bound to, you know, fail or be so niche. It's whatever.

And then we, I think we have a new one from Google, if I remember right. There's, you know, there's a fair amount of new activity going on here, but that in the end, kind of like, you know, uh, driverless cars and, and driverless vehicles, it's really commercial that's ultimately gonna build that market. This is one particular contract in one particular instance.

Um, but, um, Microsoft has a long history of supporting in and enabling and selling, uh, software into the US military, um, knows how to do it. Um, I imagine there's a lot of personnel who are gonna move over from Microsoft over to Andrew to help them out with this. And, uh, in the end, was there a licensing agreement here as well?

I mean, they're not just simply selling the technology wholesale. 9 billion. Well, it's, it's the startup course of the program.

Theoretically, when you buy more, it'll probably get cheaper per, per per headset. Yeah. And, and come on, Mike, like this is a of the stuff thousand Up.

Let me, let me, let me, let me dive in here, guys. You do it. You do it.

Al all this Andrew, all industries, this isn't some kind of dummy corporation set up in Budapest, Hungary, is it? Correct? No, no.

I think Andrew from Longstanding military by soldiers one day. Is it like SOD operation? What are we talking here?

No, no, they're, well, they're Well known defense Contractor. Okay. That was number one.

Number 2 21. 9 billion to the US Department of Defense. You know, this is one of the things that I, I really think we, Over six years incidentally, just 'cause this started in 2018, continue.

The real issue is, you know, a lot of us are wring our hands about, or or joyfully clapping our hands in glee about what this do dodge, whatever Elon Musk and his merry band of Renegades are doing, but they're doing it on the civilian side of government for the most part. And, and here's the reality of the US government expenditures and, and budget when you take Medicare and Social Security and the Department of Defense budget and all its related agencies and all that good stuff, right? I think something like 80 to 90% of the US budget are on those three things.

Medicare, social security, DOD, everything else is peanuts. So you are sitting and, and, and trying to crack peanuts here, but you're not going to really affect the trajectory of this thing unless you really hit where the, where the real money is. And no one's gonna stand.

I don't think anyone, well, I should never say that, but unless you're willing to take, you know, some knives to some sacred cows, like a $22 billion virtual reality goggle set, you're never gonna, everything else is just peanuts. And I think that's what's needed to be done here. I'm sorry, guy, go ahead.

Can I pile on a little bit? Yeah, no, sure. Go ahead.

So somebody muted me, I don't know who Wasn't me? Uh, Yeah, no, it was me. Um, so 22 billion, roughly 21 point something billion, 9 billion for how many?

150,000, or is it 300,000? I don't remember. No, I don't think it's, I think it's 120,000.

How Many headset? 120,000 headsets. Okay.

Alright. So first of all, it's over, like I said, it's over six years, not counting 2025. But I think, Mike, what you were scratching your head about is, you know, dude, that's like $170,000 per headset.

That's More than the apple. That's lot money per headset. That's more than the Apple headset.

Little bit, little bit. That's why I alluded to the famous $2,000 toilet or whatever, because the, when, when, whoever it is the, the, uh, some defense agency probably that calculates the cost of things and that figures out what the right amount is to pay. And like all that other sort of stuff, they put every single bit into these programs.

So it's not just the manufacturing, it's the development, it's the support, it's the training, it's the this, it's the, that over and over again. And when you add all that stuff up, like, you know, the $2,000 toilet, it turned out that the equipment itself, that piece of the toilet itself cost a hundred bucks or whatever, and all the rest was the assumed lifetime of the toilet maintenance installation, the hours for the personnel, other sort of stuff. 7 million or $17 million or whatever.

It's just not how it works. And especially for, like Alan said, essentially brand new technology that's supposed to be used on the battlefield, but, or something like that by people or who are flying things or like whatever it is that they're doing, there's a lot of expense and investment that needs to go into that. And unlike a private company, you don't write it off.

You have to account for every bit of it, all self-contained what's in the program. So that's how I unscr your head if it's possible to do so much. Fair enough.

Well, look, maybe we could use the Apple headsets. They're a little cheaper. Um, anyway, well, the Apple headsets might wind up with that commercial, with that commercial.

I mean, I, I, I really, you know, maybe I'm just p*****g into the wind. Oops. No, the S okay, we're, we're, we're not a family Of sharks.

Maybe I'm just one smoke or something. But, but I think that, that a lot of the action, a lot of the real action, the real market making that happens happens with these things happens through B2B commercial applications, public sector investment, that sort of stuff. And we tend to get distracted by people walking around wearing goggles instead of just like seeing reality around them with their own two eyes normally.

Um, it's very distracting, but it's just, you know, it just points to the kind of innovation and creativity, um, that helped, you know, the capitalist world go around. Mm-hmm. So, just to be clear, Alan, do you think that the level of scrutiny being applied by the Doge set is gonna be applied to these military contracts?

Whoa. Hell no. Those are sacred cows.

It's sacred cows. It might be applied to potential blue origin contracts. That would be interesting.

But no, he, he wrote his check. He wrote his check. Anyway.

Well, so, so did we discuss on this show, or I, maybe I wasn't on it, on the, um, the 50 million, 200 million or 400 million going to Tesla for all electric Cyber trucks, military vehicles, the State department or something? It was military. It was for military, it was for electric, uh, Cyber trucks, Tanks or something like that.

Trucks, cyber trucks for the, for diplomats, I think. Yeah. I thought it was armored cyber trucks.

No, No, no, this is Different. That was a d is different. 400 million.

Oh. Anyway, look, we're overtime. Put a few of those together and you got a viable business Almost.

Well, then you gotta whatever. Don't get me started. Just a quick parental warning.

We do have strobe lights in adult language, so you're warned. Uh, Mike Guy, thanks for joining today on The Gang. We hope you've enjoyed this.

Happy Wednesday to you. Uh, we will be back tomorrow with another Textron gang. I think we also have a, uh, a Tech Field Day presentation on live today on Techstrong tv, as well as the rest of our tech strong TV lineup.

So check that out. Hey, you could download the Techstrong TV mobile app on Apple and Google if you'd like. Go check that out.

Our O-C-C-O-T-T app is, is coming soon as well. Um, I Agree. Is that encrypted or not?

You know, only if it has to be. Uh, but until that, thanks, we need the Peanut gallery. Here's another episode of Text Joint Gang.

Have a great day, everyone. We're out. This is Textron tv.

Hey everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. My next guest is Harry Wang. Harry is the VP of Growth and New Ventures over at Sonar.

You know, people we know from Sonar Source, but there's so much more there now. Uh, he's got some exciting news that just broke today, but first, let's welcome Harry. Welcome back to Tech Drunk tv.

It's good to have you. Thank you for having me again. Thank you.

Good to see you, Alan. Our pleasure. Harry, I, I mentioned, you know, you got some new news.

We're gonna make 'em wait just a little bit longer. Before we dive into that, let's first talk about you, right? VP of Growth in New Ventures.

There's a lot, you know, a lot could be hidden under those title. What exactly is the role there with that title? Yeah, it was, uh, you know, uh, it's a, it's a title that, uh, I invented with a permission from my CEO.

Um, but in a nutshell, I lead up, uh, our corporate development, business development as well as a new business incubation as Soner and, uh, excellent, uh, engineering product background. Myself, I have, uh, done my 12 duty in business. So this is a exciting combination of a different aspect of, uh, my profession.

You know, it's funny, in, in some of the startups that I helped co-found, that was kind of my role, Corp, uh, is dev, but you know how it is in startup world, you do that with a role like that. You're involved in sales, you're involved in marketing, you're involved in product, right? You're involved in every aspect of, you know, so the people worked on my team said, yeah, you come in, you kiss the baby and take the photo up, but you're really, you know, you're a little bit of everything there.

It's a, it's a, I, you know, I used to use the term Chief Strategy Officer, and that was before that became like a cool term, but, um, CSO was pretty good. Anyway, Harry, I, I mentioned a lot of people know Sonar, they know Sonar Source, right? Mm-hmm.

But there's so much, I mean, that's still big, don't get me wrong, but there's so much more to Sonar today. Give, if you don't mind, give us, uh, kind of your view of the lay of the land of what Sonar Sonar is today. Yeah, sure.

Uh, sonar, we know we are known in the industry for really helping developer building better software and building better software faster. And, uh, we came from a background of, uh, developer building a company building product for developers. Traditionally, we have been very laser focused on looking the code, helping our developer, our user detecting issues, whether it's quality issues or security issues within the IDE within the DevOps.

And as, as you said, you know, in the recent years, there are a lot of actually conversation about what is the role of a developer in this all AI centered world. Uh, we certainly actually looking, you know, what is the role of a sonar in this, uh, new changing paradigm of software developing lifecycle as well. So, um, with, uh, you know, um, the recent conversation we had that we are start rolling out more AI enabled feature and capabilities and trying to stay true to our core mission, which is really about helping, being helpful to developers and, uh, enable them to build faster and better.

A good way of putting it. All right, Ari, you guys got some big news. Come out today.

Share it with us if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So today we are announcing, we have closed an acquisition of, uh, auto Code Rover, which is, uh, Singapore based team specialized in using AI and, uh, leveraging the unique AI capability and the inventions they have, uh, out of, uh, uh, national University of, uh, Singapore to really actually helping developers, uh, remediate issues, right?

So this is not just about detecting issues bugs or security vulnerabilities in the code in the software, but also actually able to completely autonomously fixing those issues on the fly. Um, we are very excited about welcoming the Auto Code Robot team to the Sona family, and, uh, looking forward to integrating the technology and capability into the Sona Cube product family as well. Q So the name of the company that you acquired in Singapore was, what's it called?

Auto Rover Auto Code Rover, uh oh, work Auto Code Rover. Yes. Yes, you got it.

And, and then the name, uh, is, uh, you know, some was self-explanatory, right? So auto stands for doing things autonomously and, uh, this is very much a, a gentech AI based, uh, technology and, uh, product. And, uh, we are dealing with a code that just like, uh, you know, auto code or team is dealing with code, the sonar is actually, you know, all about code the fraud developers.

So this synergy is right there. This is a combination. It's really about being able to deliver insight into the code, but also being able to have actionable intelligence and being able to actually taking actions on those Code Rover as you can.

I'm a sci-fi fan and just like a Mars and Rovers on the Mars, this is really about not just actually US human developer doing everything end to end. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be actually hand off to the, the robots and the AI out there. And that's the, in a nutshell, what it Code Rover is about having the agent out there, fixing things, doing things for you, and being helpful to developers.

Got it. Thank you. So, you know, for me, Harry, a key thing here is the agent AI aspect of this, right?

Because, you know, we live in, we live in crazy times. Time is, you know, crunched generative AI is almost old hat already, even though, you know, we live in a bubble, we've been using it for two years. Uh, you know, your family and your wife's family or what have you, they probably don't use AI quite as much yet, but we're looking at the next thing, and we all think that in 2025, this agentic ai very, very well be that next thing where it's not enough that an AI helps you write or code something, we want it to go to the next step, right?

Yep. Yep. And, and so you need an autonomous agent that is capable of, of, I'm great to use the word thinking, but is capable of thinking about what needs to be done and then goes and does it, right?

It's, it's that, and that's a big leap that we shouldn't, you know, poo poo it. It's not, it's, it's a huge leap to say this is what you should do versus doing it. Yeah.

And, and that to me is, is a agent AI versus let's say generative ai. Generative AI may look at code and say, you know, you got some bugs here, there's a vulnerability there, and this is what you gotta do to remediate an agent actually going to do that is a whole nother level. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And, and Yeah, and that's the big thing to me. Uh, that's a huge piece of this.

Yep, yep. Absolutely. I think if you look at, and Alan, if we look back, um, the last couple of years where the generative AI becomes really a key topic in the industry and, and in the society, it's more a technology notion, right?

So it's a piece of, uh, computer science technology that's actually being able to do, predict wonderful things and then generating world documents and generating code, right? Um, and then the form of a product that general AI has been, you know, um, you know, helping, uh, the users is really in the form of, uh, uh, being assistant by and large, right? You go on to chat GPT to ask questions or in, you know, the developer world, you go into the id, you have co-pilot and you have other code assistant to suggest the code answer questions in the q and a in the chat form.

This is all being, uh, a system right next to you. But Agen AI to me is more of a, a different formation of the product and not necessarily the technology. So it's a more emphasized on how the product behave, not so much how it happens behind, under the hood, right?

So AgTech AI is really about, you have a entity out there, in this case, the AI agents doing the job more autonomously instead of, uh, you know, we as a human user asking the, asking AI to do step by step, you kind of giving them a, a more abstract task describing this task as if you asking, you know, uh, you know, my son or or someone else, uh, you close to, to do certain type of a task or course right, go shopping or whatever, right? But this is about giving them a more, um, less step by step guide, but the more of actually what your objective with the goal is and letting that agent itself the completely task more autonomously so you can go on to do more important, more high level task. I love it.

I love it. So you mentioned it closed already, well, sounds like it was a relatively smaller company so you could, you know, get it closed quickly. So congratulations to you and, and to the, uh, auto Code Rover team.

When do you think we'll see this technology incorporated into the SonarCube product line? Yeah, it's a good, great question. The team is basically at working out the product planning and obviously some of the underhood design as well.

And, uh, as in integrations, uh, you know, on the day of let's say integration, we probably haven't figured out all the answers. So that's the honest and true answer. Um, but my hope for the team and is really about being able to ship something fast to our users in, within the 2025 time horizon.

And, and if you look actually what we have announced in the past, just within our course from the key product, we have the AI code, fixed capability, AI assurance capability for our user so that they can actually start leveraging those capability internal capabil already ai, um, the Auto Code Rover technology is the essentially extension, if you will, right? So we detect the issues which suggest the fixes. Now we have the agent to be able to go out there, do more complete task end to end.

To us, this is about just actually working through some of the detailed technical designs and then being able to deliver that in the same consistent interface and the team is actually very, I'm very excited about the team and, uh, very, you know, group of entrepreneurs, and I have my confidence in them moving fast. And, uh, and, uh, we'll be back sharing the product news and the roadmap versa. I love it.

Harry, you may not know the answer to this, but I gotta ask anyway. Um, you know, GitHub has copilot and as does co-pilot, like functional, whatever you want to call it, but I, I call it co-pilot, like functionality in a lot of built into the IDs now. Yeah.

Right. And other products are building their own copilots that go into whatever IDE you are using and, and, and what have you. Um, what's interesting is some companies are, are saying that sort of table stakes, right?

You use my product because it comes with that. Other companies are saying, Hey, that's a premium feature. I may offer a free or low cost solution.

But to use the, the copilot AI like functionality is, is a premium feature. Mm-hmm. Agen ai, we, it's, it's even, you know, Salesforce obviously has agent force or whatever it is.

SAP announced last week, they're building agents into a lot of what they're doing. I, I don't know if the market has figured out, is that something you charge extra for or is that like just table stakes today that this is what people expect? Users expect this?

Yeah. What, what do do you think this ends up? Yeah, I mean, t you quite, um, earlier comment about the market, right?

So I, my my personal view is, uh, you are gonna see different variations of, uh, people, uh, the companies out there, uh, the vendors out there thinking differently in terms of how they monetizing capability, how they, you know, engage the users, right? To be honest, I think the market is not ready, is not settled about actually how the value is being delivered or, um, you know, what's the exchange of the value. Um, so we take a more open, we be more open minded here, and, uh, specifically with this acquisition, the capability we are launching to the user, we focus on actually thinking through the form of the capability we want to deliver in the product, and worry about actually how we actually, um, you know, running that as a business later, right?

So we don't have the full answer when it comes down to pricing packaging. Um, but I, maybe I want to take the opportunity to step back a little just to share some of my view and the sonars view on how the s the software development life cycle can evolve and, uh, will probably evolve in the next, uh, two or three years. So, with ai, I think, and specifically with a, uh, Gentech ai, I do think the developers are in the moment, in actually very exciting moment in time.

Now we have the ability to move up the stack, the upper level, the actually the type of task we wanna spend our time on. So, I, in, in my analogy, I would actually think that, you know, in the job, if you just look at job profession, job titles, I think every engineers out there, you know, are in the position to, you essentially do the software architect's job, right? So spend that means spending more time on designing the software.

You essentially understand the business requirement, focus on the high level designs of different components and how they relate to each other, nail down the data model, nail down the behaviors, and then really start delegating more of these repetitive tasks. For example, gimme a, you know, a stark template of how this actually, actually gonna be implemented, or how do I address the potential design deficiencies and the issues, right? So those detailed tasks, repetitive task that can be dedicated to the agent in, in this world.

So that means for developers, we can stay up level focused on more high level tasks, but also it means, now we actually also need to stay in the realm of actually how we gonna actually manage and trust all these agents out there. So there's a level of affection every single developer will need to be really stay actually being accountable to the outcome that is the software and being, having delivering reliable software and safer software, right? So now you have your peers not necessarily actually being your buddy programmers, but actually it's just a piece of ai, right?

How do you manage that? How do we trust ai? But I think that there needs to be some platform that allow the users, allow the developer to actually essentially measure, verify, and observe the agents out there and form a decision.

And, uh, so that's, that's actually critical elements of us staying true to the, the, the, the mission for the delivery and safe softwares. Um, so in that context, right? So what, uh, we with, uh, both this acquisition and also some of our homegrown technology is really focusing on two elements.

One, sonar as a platform is all about deliver higher quality and better software, and safer software fast for the user, right? So there's elements of assurance and trust elements for developers and for the organizations. That doesn't change whether the code is written by human or by ai.

So we continue to invest in that area. At the same time, AI is going to actually create more specialized, uh, being that actually pretty specialized agent who does code remediation, who does code suggestions, and who actually does maybe documenting generations and unit has written. There need to be some kind of a platform capability that allow human engineers to manage this as a platform.

So that's something we actually very interest in, how this evolving, evolve, and, uh, how solar is gonna be rather estate relevant to that. I love it, Harvey. We're over time.

I gotta wrap it up. People want to get more information though. Where can they go?

com. Uh, as always, uh, we, uh, we share all the latest and greeting days, uh, on our website, and, uh, expect we will be refreshing, um, our site, uh, with, uh, you know, article R information as we incorporate that into our products. Fantastic.

Congratulations to you and the whole sonar team, as well as the Auto Code Rover Rover team. Thank you. You know what?

This is, this is why so knows who they are. They stay on top of the latest stuff. Genic AI in Sonar Cube coming at you.

All right, we're gonna take a break here on Text Drug tv. We'll be back in a moment. Hey everyone, I'm Alan Shimel.

This is Mitch Ashley, and you're listening to DevOps Chats. Yeah, man, DevOps chats. We are back.

So, Mitch, I don't know, we got off track here for a couple months. As you know, you this RUM gig that you've undertaken where you're now VP of research for DevOps and related activities, and of course, I think it was really kind of the whole futurum, uh, merger acquisition that, I don't know, maybe that had a lot to do with it, but we, we, we, we dropped our cadence there and we got to get back into it, but it's good to have yard. It's good to be on with you.

It's good to be doing it. I mean, we've been doing this in, what, 2004 or so, somewhere around times. Yeah, we've been at podcasting thing.

So yeah, it was, it's been an interesting, we're only nine, 12 months or so. Nine months, I guess, has been since the RUM deal kind of popped up and we're, you know, it's all closed, all good. And we're all, yeah, I'm in this speed modified role now, and so, you know, interesting times for all of us excited about the future.

Yep. I, as am I. Um, but we could talk about that on the futur in podcast, always what FU podcast, which, but maybe one.

We will do one, but let, let's stick to DevOps for this one, if you don't mind. Absolutely. So, Mitch, I, I can't help but feel not complacent, but there's sort of a lu in the DevOps world.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right?

And I think it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a sign of the maturity of DevOps in that it just is, right? You're not, you're not fighting religious or political wars about DevOps anyway.

Um, you know, people I think understand what it is. I think that the relationship between DevOps and, and let's say platform engineering, cloud native, SRE, you know, all of these, not competing necessarily, but all of these adjacent frameworks, disciplines, they're all, you know, they, there was a lot of jostling for jostling for, for space and priority and what have you, but they seemed to have settled in a little bit waiting for, to see how AI disrupts it all. I think we've reached, I dunno if it's a plateau or just a point of convergence where enough enough of these things have come together and DevOps, you know, we, for long, for a long time, we felt like DevOps is on the leading edge, you know, and adoption.

And there's more people gonna kinda like cloud native was, and even cloud natives, Kubernetes, platform engineering, DevOps, even SREI think our, our mainstream, I mean, it's not like everyone everywhere is doing this, but if you look at the data, you know, I've done enough surveys, multiple surveys, now you're looking at, two thirds of organizations are in the, either they are kind of accelerating their adoption, they're in the standardization phase, or they're in what they call a mastery phase. They feel like they're doing DevOps really well, and it's used on a majority of project, maybe all projects in some cases, same as becoming true with Cloud native. Same, you know, Kubernetes is, is underlying everything now.

So a lot of stuff we've worked on in just in the past two years seemed like it was evolving, and now it's evolved. We've reached the next kind of, you know, maybe we're homosapiens now and, you know, you know, prior areas, areas of, of humanity or whatever in these technologies. But I don't, I'm not saying we're done.

You know, we've reached, we've reached Nirvana and this is it, but it is, it's a different place than when you're climbing the hill. Yes. And I'm, I don't think this plateau we've reached as necessarily Nirvana.

I, I think there is something to what I said earlier, which is I think people in, in some respects, waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding AI and how this is gonna change everything that we've, we've built these years. I think we're gonna talk about some of the anticipation, whether it's warranted yet or not. Um, but, but, but clearly, you know, as AI projects are trying to get them crawl out of, in some cases, get out of the pilot and prototyping stages and get into production, Matt's starting, you ask the question of, of like, okay, how does this fit with our workflows, our pipelines?

And is are they the same? Are they different? It's got this data thing that goes with it, you know, with the model or with, with the algorithms.

Um, and they update on their own cycle. It's not the same as just kind of the software we've been developing that's, you know, in whatever rust or Python or whatever language that we're using. Sure.

There's, that's kind of the next to, to really take, is understanding better, better how those pipelines converge or align, or where do they intersect. And getting more sophisticated of that. Because my concern, if we don't, then DevOps become the holdback for, we've got, now we got the AI assistance to production, but you, our software is not tying to it.

You know, how to update it in a way that can work with our release cycles of models and data, et cetera. So it's an important thing to work on. I think we're see a lot of vendors stepping up to start to address this.

Yeah. I also see things Mitch starting to evolve into what I call the app, and I hope it's not rebuilding the silo. Mm-hmm.

But does the app dev aspects of things, so platform engineering makes it easier for app dev, cybersecurity for the app dev cloud native for the app dev process. And then there's the, not to use the word ops, but you know, the, the deployment aspect of it and that, you know, the observability pieces of it and, and testing sort, I think is still in that app. But where in in DevOps we were really good at viewing it as one ball.

I think you are starting to see lines emerge here, right? Uh, and I think part of it is a reaction to the, to the shift left, or a, uh, you know, I think first we've shifted left and the, and now the pendulum's swinging back a little bit from, hey, you can't, you can't just shift everything left. There's some stuff that still belongs here on the right.

Um, or shift everywhere. You know, it's interesting, I did an interview with our Fred Jeff Williams, the CTO of contrast security last week. And his, his new thing, their new thing at contrast, I think they call it a VM, uh, it, it's, it's, uh, it's vulnerability management for production.

Hmm, yep. Vulnerability management for reduction. Well, gee, that sounds familiar.

Um, we've been, we've been to this concert. We saw this movie. I think we helped write that movie.

I think we're in the, you know, the, uh, the black and white version of the movie. And wait a second, you are going to tell me which vulnerabilities are critical and which ones are reachable and what, man, I wish I would've come up with these ideas and, and my boss Colonel can see this too. Oh my God.

Yeah. And, um, but, you know, in talking to Jeff, so what they're doing is they're really taking a very AppSec view of vulnerability, not maybe the vulnerability scanning that, you know, you and I were doing, it's still secure 20 years ago on infrastructure and operating system. Yeah, yeah.

It's more AppSec scanning, but in, in any event, again, you know, shifting Right, shifting, right. So, you know, I, I, like I said, I think this is a sign of the maturity of DevOps and people sort of waiting for this next shooter drop. Um, I know you had mentioned you, there was an article out in the Times, I believe about, you know, looking at unemployment figures that for the first time, and as long as I can remember, unemployment is actually up for software developers.

Yeah. Um, and it's the times of the Wall Street Journal. 7, it went up like two points, close to two point percentage points for it.

Um, you know, unemployment rate, which is, like I said, when did that happen? Right? What are, what about all these commercials of you want a recession proof job go into it?

Maybe not. And it's, uh, here, here's my opinion about it, is if, if you remember, we saw sort of the efficiency cuts after covid, right? We've gotta get more efficient.

So we're gonna like lop all these people off that we didn't hire that we don't need anymore. 'cause we overhired in covid times. And that was, you know, a bit of a reaction, maybe a big overreaction in some cases.

We're kind of, we're going through this cycle again of, oh, AI is here. We won't need the mid tier of developers, you know, according to Zuck, which I don't trust his analysis of developer skills, but here, this a whole nother topic and we won't need those people anymore. So we're gonna Hal lay all those people off to hire anymore.

Um, but it's more than just, of course, Facebook, it, it is this view of we're gonna need fewer developers so we can not hire as many as we had planned. So it's less hiring as opposed to always being layoffs. And, you know, I follow this base really closely.

We're not there yet. We're not there where AI's taking over developer jobs in any whole scale manner. Maybe it's, you know, a year away maybe, but it's, you know, people are still experimenting with, with ai.

I mean, I talked with a major compute platform, um, hardware manufacturer, and, you know, they've gone through the, uh, ideation and experimentation to, okay, now what of the, you know, 500 things we could do with AI and development across the SDLC, what are the handful of things we're really gonna center around? And were we gonna go pick a product to, you know, build around with co-pilot or a Udacity or, or whichever circle, um, you know, we're at this early mat maturation phase. So I think we're over rotating on not needing all these IT people.

At least, at least not yet. I, I don't disagree. I, but I, I, I don't know if it's solely AI that's responsible for it.

Hmm. Okay. Well say more then.

I think, I think part of it also is the current political, political economic climate interest rates, business climate, if you will. You know, Mitch, I was talking to a good friend of mine, you know, him, I, I don't want to mention names here, but he is the, he was the C-T-O-C-P-O for one of the, uh, larger, uh, gaming companies, uhhuh mm-hmm. In the world.

And he, I mean, he led the team that built their online gaming. He left or he is leaving because look, they, for the last whatever it is, four or five, six years, they paid him handsomely to build out this platform. And not only paid him, but gave him virtually car blanche to hire the software developers and team to build and operate this platform.

And it's been successful by any way. You want to measure it wildly. Yeah.

Yeah. But the bottom line is that this year, the push is not necessarily to keep growing that platform or keep upgrading it with new features or, you know, to keep innovating necessarily. It's more about maintaining, it's more about, we're not gonna grow the top line as much, but we're going to grow the bottom line instead.

And so we're not gonna pay people exhort, we're not gonna pay, you know, developers $300,000 a year. We're not gonna pay exorbitant amounts, you know, to lock in the leadership with, you know, all kinds of incentivized deals that are top line or code relate, you know, how much code you put out. And I, I think that's something we're seeing in corporate America, which is, you know, what we can't develop just 'cause we can, everything has to be tied to the bottom line.

Everything has to be tied to revenue. And if, if that revenue doesn't make sense, we can't do it. Well, it's, it's, we, we see this over and over again, right?

It's the, the time of I'll spend whatever it takes to be, to gain my market share and be competitive in the ga online gaming industry for one. You know, let's pick that. Okay.

Well, that's, you know, now it's commonplace as I'm every other ad on sports TV and every, for that on every other channel. You, you know, it, it's reached that point when there's some who argue, I think it was Paul Coman, is that his name? The Economist?

Yeah. Yeah. For many times.

Yeah. He, uh, he thinks we're gonna hit an AI bubble, right? We're kind of headed into the next cycle of this again.

And, you know, we, we of course, always overrate rotate. That's my favorite new word about it, or rotate, um, on, on AI investment. We saw that with deep seek, you know, pulling back a little bit.

Like, wait a minute, maybe it isn't always the next biggest hammer. Maybe there's more than one way to innovate, and whether we're gonna see a bubble or not, you know, eventually some kind of bubble's gonna happen with ai. I don't necessarily know if it's gonna be a big one or not, but that's, you know, today it's, I don't need developers tomorrow.

And when, where can I find them? Um, at the same time of, I don't have enough security, people still can't find the people that I need to, uh, secure all this AI stuff. Right?

So there's all these kinda successive waves of Yeah, we saw that bubble too. And the next one will happen, just like the next one will grow. Yep.

What, and you know, Mitch, I, as we were talking offline, and you mentioned an interesting twist is that while unemployment went up, like in IT general or software developers, the, the plan is that cybersecurity needs even more people than we always say. Mm-hmm. And that's gone down.

Mm-hmm. So, you know, if AI is one of the driving forces or of government, you know, regulations is one of the, another force in this, clearly. It, it, the, the message is, Hey, but we need to lock down what we have.

Well, it's, it's the, um, there have constraints all over again, right? We, we pushed the constraint to the next thing, you know, the, now it's security, right? How are we gonna secure all this?

And we already didn't have enough security people, and it'll be ops next or whatever the end next kind of constraint is. And Yeah. You know, we're following that pattern.

It, it's, it makes a lot of sense. You think about it in a systemic way like that. Yeah.

No, I think you got it. Holistic, right? No.

Mm-hmm. But it, it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out, because the good news is the market has a way of evening these things out, right? It's like fluid's finding its le lowest level there.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. You don't have enough software being developed.

They'll get more software developers. I, I don't think, as you said, that we're anywhere near to the point where we could just turn AI loose and develop the software someday. We'll still be saying, where are we gonna find those Java developers now to support all that Java code that was written way back when, you know, just exactly like COBOL today.

We'll go through that phase too. I, I think we will, Mitch, you were, you were out in Vegas, uh, last week, or actually two weeks ago now, and, uh, for the, uh, Dynatrace show speaking or maybe some legacy stuff, right? A lot of people don't know what to make a Dynatrace.

They've been around a long time. They've gone through some changes and evolves. I mean, there's a mainframe aspect of things, but observability and give us a report from, from the field in Vegas.

What, what'd you see there? Yeah, it was that Dynatrace performed. They had a number of, uh, of announcements and, uh, it was a very good conference about, I think it was about 2000 peoples, what they said were attending.

Um, the standouts for me was observability for developers. We've talked about using observability and development and test, but it's sort of like, yeah, same tool. Somebody else using it, the number one thing developers can sniff at as a tool that wasn't developed for them, right?

That's been being repurposed for them, and that tends to get rejected. But now we're, now we're talking about, um, being able to do kind of realtime data log information with tele entry information tied back into, eventually it is in the IDE, yet they've got their own, their own observability platform. But there will put it in the IDE to be able to say, here's, okay, got this issue from ops, I think it's in this area, pursuing it.

I can pull that data together through my lens of the world, which was my IDE as a developer, and start to really kind of analyze and do some real, real time assessment. And then you have their Davis ai, which is, you know, they've invested early on in ai some one of the companies that actually did, as opposed to claims to, and they're maturing that. At the same time.

The other standout thing for me was, um, enhancing Davis AI with Kubernetes information. Really leaning hard into Kubernetes observability, you know, as Kubernetes goes everywhere, okay, it's gotta be easier to run. We talk about how complex it is, and it is getting easier.

Um, but it is not only because of tools, but also AI support. And as that gets built more into tools, uh, that's also interesting. And I, I guess the third thing was a, a, a bit of a look forward on security, uh, cloud security, posture management coming out with something a little bit later this year, mid-year or so in that space.

So, you know, they've been around a long, a long time, or in relatively speaking, and, you know, in DevOps years, they've been around a long time. Um, but they're continuing to innovate, I'd say. Good, good, good to 'em.

And they're, yeah, I know, I, they're taking it seriously. They're not just, just hanging around. And I agree.

They, they have, they've reinvented themselves Yeah. In many ways. And look, they've got a great solution set.

Mm-hmm. I, I think they're, they're definitely a, a, a player to be reckoned with there. Um, Mitch, I, I wanted to close things off, though, with a, a heartfelt thank you to a friend of you and I, our friend Sasha Lare.

Yeah. Sasha is the co-founder of CloudBees. Of course, before that, Sasha was one of the key people at JBoss.

Right. But, you know, CloudBees always had a special place in my heart. com, CloudBees was the second sponsor that signed on and helped us get off the ground.

And, you know, we've been working with CloudBees ever since. Not as much recently. They've undergone, you know, their own set of changes.

But certainly for most of those years, Sasha's been a mainstay. Him and kk, and K, of course, KK left and he's come back, but, um, Sasha and Nas last week that he'll be stepping back from an active role. com, but for the DevOps community in general, in the open source community.

And, you know, I don't think he's done innovating, creating Businessing, you know, I'm looking forward to what's next for Sasha. But wherever it is, Godspeed and good luck, and we'll be watching. Yeah.

Thanks to you, Sasha. And, you know, that's part of my entry into, into DevOps, you know, Jenkins, we early Hudson, I mean, late Hudson, and then early Jenkins, um, getting involved in that. So, you know, he's done a great deal for this community, and I would, like you said, I bet there's more communities that will benefit from his, uh, DNA and innovation and entrepreneurship and technology.

So look forward to Absolutely. So, thanks Asha. Alright, so Mitch, you and I, of course spoke, let's, let's share it with our audience.

I think going forward for DevOps Chats, we're gonna focus on bringing in some key folks every two weeks when we do this. Um, key people in the DevOps community, whether practitioners, executives, vendors, what have you, we'll be lining them up. Of course, if you're listening to this and you think you'd be a good guest, or you have a suggestion for a good guest for DevOps Chats, let us know.

We'll probably be doing an interview and talk is the new format going forward. Mm-hmm. Right?

So two parts every episode, and I'm looking forward to it, man. I think it'll be, it'll be great. We used to do more guests when you and I did.

Yeah. Early podcasting on Still Secure after all these years, and they shimmy after all these years. Um, and there'll be some opportunities if people, you know, we're doing more and more, um, kind of full episode of things where companies on a sponsored basis come in and, and get a real chance to dive in a little bit deeper in conversation with us.

So there'll be be those opportunities too. So, we'll, we'll have some spotlight time where we take a little bit of time with companies, uh, or individuals coming in, as well as being able to offer something a little more, um, you know, thorough to folks that are interested in sponsor kind of thing. com.

Is that the best way to do that? That'll work. com.

There you go. com. And we, and work, we'll work from there.

Where can they hear about Shimmy sits? Where's that at? Tell us about that.

Thursdays, Thursdays two 30 on LinkedIn live. You know, we took a little excerpt from that Mitch Uhhuh and put it on YouTube shorts, uh, from two weeks ago, or three weeks ago. And it's got like 15,000 views already on YouTube shorts.

It's pretty cool. Uh, but yeah, I'm doing that every Thursday, always looking. If you want to join in on LinkedIn live, you can ask questions, comments.

We try to put it in there. We're just experimenting with different formats and it's fine. It keeps, I, you know, me, I, I don't have a shortage of things that I like to talk about.

Yep. Keep changing with the times, or suddenly you aren't with the times anymore. Well, you know, I, I'm shooting for the next Super Bowl halftime show.

Is that? Yeah, well, you know, Hey, I, I can just see you up there now. Rapping DevOps.

You bet, Mitch. This is a great way to get back on the wagon here with DevOps Chats. Looking forward to doing more, but until next time, I'm Alan Shimel.

And this is Mitch Ashley. Then you've just listened to DevOps Chats. All right.

You're watching or listening to, depending on your preference, episode 71 of Infrastructure Matters. Diane, I think we're in trouble 'cause Kimberly isn't with us this week. So we're going to touch some third rail topics that she would typically reign us in on.

We're going to be as, as apolitical as possible when we talk about some of the, uh, happenings around ai, AI ethics. We're gonna talk Intel, DataRobot, SAP, and Databricks in the same room. That's, uh, that's gonna be an interesting one.

Uh, of course, AI news and, uh, some internal, we've done some testing around Intel's Gotti three Pro, uh, accelerator. So a lot of great news. First off, well, let's, uh, start out with, uh, oh, I think I might have sold my Intel stock too soon.

Yeah, I think so. Uh, well, uh, Intel stock surged this week unexpectedly. Um, and there was a lot of speculation why, um, the, uh, you know, there's been a lot of criticism over, uh, Intel's leadership in the chip industry for the last decade.

Uh, and it's gotten increasingly questionable. Uh, and, and the stock has really reflected that. Uh, but the, the now the story is that, um, Intel is getting help or, or may get help from TSMC, uh, to modernize and catch their fabs up.

Now, why would a competitor like TSMC do this? The speculation is that, uh, is trying to head off tariffs. Um, the, uh, the Trump administration has, uh, expressed that, that the, you know, and na and named Intel that, um, uh, they would like to see, uh, uh, our chip companies do better, and they may put tariffs on, uh, Taiwan in order to, to bring that about.

And this may be a proactive maneuver, uh, to head that off. So that, that's the speculation. Anyway.

Wow. That is, uh, interesting. Bad fellows, and we'll get into, uh, uh, more interesting bad fellows in the second.

What do you think this means for the AI accelerators mobile? What's the downstream? Well, I, I think we're, we're headed for interesting times.

Um, the, there's, there's only so much you can do to catch up, uh, a fad in the United States. Frankly. We've got more, you know, advanced laws around, uh, environmental protection, uh, um, you know, building codes.

Uh, it, it takes longer to do things here. There's just some things, there's a limit to how much anyone can, uh, can aid, um, a or accelerated company in the United States. And there's a reason why, you know, people don't wanna punk six to $12 billion down in a fab Europe.

They can't get return out of it. They, you know, they can't do two, two nanometer anytime soon because of all the permitting and, and red tape and bureaucracy. And so the question I think is yeah, uh, is, is, you know, TSMC is probably hoping for something outta this, uh, try, they're trying to demonstrate something, but I'm not sure they're gonna be able to really help Intel in a, in a, in a dramatic way.

But they may not need to. They may just get points for trying. Yeah.

And I'm thinking that similar to how there's always boutique manufacturers for, believe it or not, still seven nanometer, nanometer, uh, processes, stuff that's using automotive all to the all time T-S-E-T-S-M-C, of course, we'll continue to lead the way when it comes to two nanometer and, and smaller, if you can imagine that. 5 nanometer processes, the, Or talk The other people, which is insane. So, uh, I think there's plenty of capacity.

TSMC has all of the work I think, that they can handle right now, and why not win some points with, uh, helping Intel out too big to fail. So DataRobot acquires open source AI startup agnostic, spelled with a Q agnostic. We're running outta, we're running out of, uh, uh, domain names.

Yeah, it's, um, uh, terms were not announced. Um, the, uh, the agnostic, uh, has a, a, uh, AI agent framework, uh, and application, um, a portfolio that, that aligns well with DataRobot, which is a, you know, place where you can put all your data and, and run all your AI apps. Uh, and you know, there, there's gonna be a lot of interest in creating a more consistent environment for AI instead of having all these patchwork, uh, you know, uh, AI models, um, and data lakes that, you know, you're doing rag against and all of these things that platforms like DataRobot potentially allow you to bring a little bit of order to the chaos.

Um, uh, but what they didn't have was anything to do with agents. And if you're not doing agent, uh, based AI this, this year, if you're not putting that in your product platform, you are behind. And this allows DataRobot to, to get into the AI agent space.

Um, it's, uh, it's unclear, uh, uh, their, their agnostic has, I think they said, um, 5,000 customers. Um, if you consider most of those are probably small, medium sized businesses, it, it probably, probably needed this to get the r and d money to keep their AI agent portfolio going. Uh, because if you haven't, if they're not inquiring or, uh, acquiring your ai, uh, agent, um, company this year, you won't be able to afford it next year.

And Yeah. And this interesting how this market continues to move forward. We haven't covered it yet, but, uh, it seems like people are moving away from this idea of independent agents to agent workflows.

So, uh, agents not necessarily doing, you know, random chores like you would think a chat GTP would allow you to do, but workflows specific to, uh, let's say cash flow or, uh, y'all order the cash or some, uh, some business process in which agents are specialized and have some type of chain of action, uh, programmability versus, you know, just generically taking the agent. So this is moving much faster than most of us can follow. Uh, it is, uh, and, uh, I've actually spent the last, um, month and a half or so doing a full survey on the AI agent based space and a report that will come out with at, at each trim here in the next couple weeks.

Uh, and I talked to a lot of, uh, companies and a few CIOs that are, that are, uh, uh, doing something with agents, and it's all around service desk of some kind. It could be internal service desk, it could be external, uh, but it's about orchestrating some outcome for a stakeholder, you know, an internal customer, an external customer, um, touch a really big, um, uh, road service network, uh, um, their CIO and they say people only log into their website two, three times a a year, and so they forget everything about it. And so they don't know how to change their address or update their payment system or anything like that.

Now, they can just log in, long as they can log in, they can talk to about, say, change my address. Okay, great. What is your new address?

And I'll update it in the system. Right. You know, that kind of thing.

So we're still seeing these, these, these, the crawl, walk, run, uh, thing where most people are at crawl with agents and, uh, but that's the kind of thing that they're doing. Yeah. You know, it's, uh, it seems like just yesterday we were talking about AI assistance being kind of the future of ai, and that is quickly falling by the wayside.

Like AI assistant becomes kind of a given in our own email. Uh, uh, Gemini has been activated mixed results and, uh, and, and in our emails, I think It all get back, you Know, we're moving much faster than most enterprises can a, adopt this technology. Speaking of data and data lakes and cleaning up data and organizing data, a surprise to me, at least both of us cover SAP and Databricks.

SAP and Databricks announced a partnership in which SAP can resell Databricks into their customer with allowing SAP, uh, SAP customers to use Databricks platform to analyze their data. I use the term hell is frozen over, because I never thought something like this would happen. Basically, this idea that, uh, you wanna do large data analysis, you want to across your entire data landscape, your SAP, uh, transaction data, along with your, uh, flat data within your file system, other databases, et cetera, and come out with business insights, kind of the magic of these huge data analytics platforms.

SAP has helped this capability close to itself with this own cloud-based analytics platform. I'm, I'm shocked. I think a lot of people were, uh, and, and confused because SAP has so many, uh, pre-existing offerings in this space.

If you look at SAP, data Intelligence Cloud, uh, SAP, critical Data Cloud, SAP, customer Data Cloud, SAP, datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud, and that's just some of them, um, you know, adding yet another data cloud, which is what they're calling us, um, uh, you know, powered by Datasphere is, um, makes SAP look like they don't have a clear strategy. They're not explaining how this fits into all those other clouds, which one should be up at the top, or how do, do they set off at the side in each one form a specific function. And it seems much more partnership based, uh, in terms of strategy as opposed to actually, you know, real organized product strategy.

So I think a lot of people were scratching their head, but clearly SAP customers and Databricks customers want this, you know? Uh, and and how Much of you, you think is waring off the eventual, I think it's gonna be a commoditization of analytics by ai. This seems like a, uh, I, I don't know if I've ever thought of this, but analytics as a, just a feature versus a standalone product.

Well, I mean, I think you make a good point. The, the commoditization is gonna happen because everything's gonna go into ai, and you're gonna be able to pull out most advanced analytics, you know, build me a 3D visualization of all of our sales processes over the last year, and boom, out, out it come, it, it, it comes in. So you need access to the data, you need it all connected.

And where SAP, um, you know, didn't have, uh, a clear story was how does SAP and Databricks coexist? This answers that question. The question is, is it a, is it a major problem?

Is this, uh, you know, uh, obviously SEP thinks there's a revenue stream to be had there, which is really important because we're having a hard time getting a lot of the world to, to move off of, uh, perpetual licenses to subscriptions. So we're seeing, are now seeing a number of these partnerships like they did with, uh, data Steer before and now Databricks today. Um, I, you know, I, I think it's a race to the bottom.

Uh, for the most part. This is something you'll be able to, to, to be able to do relatively easily and straightforward across the enterprise, uh, quite soon. Yeah.

And SAP has a critical problem ticking with this, uh, end of life of their legacy ECC product. Uh, by 2030 SAP customers are notoriously difficult to get to upgrade. Uh, I think, uh, the latest number, I saw that by 2025, up to 25% of their customers still will be on legacy ECC by 2030 and, uh, getting third party support from somewhere else.

So SAP is in essence competing against itself with this deadline. So, uh, you know, these are companies that have serious challenges. That's, uh, some of it is self-inflicted, uh, and some of it is the, uh, co competition against AI and the agility AI is bringing to organizations or the expected agility, which we'll skip down into the rundown to, uh, big competitor and enemy of SAP sometimes, because a lot of SAP runs on Oracle.

Larry Ellison, uh, wants all of our data. Yes, he does. Uh, and so it's hard, hard to read, um, much into what l Larry says, uh, given that he doesn't necessarily drive, uh, the entire industry like, you know, some of the other, you know, tech billionaires do.

Um, but yeah, he, he is suggesting, and he may be right about this, uh, that unless, um, unless, um, we put all of our, uh, available data at a national level, uh, into a master database, and, and he is, is suggesting all available genomics too, so that we can marshal all of our data and organize as a nation to be a competitive against China, that we're gonna be at a disadvantage. 'cause China will do it. China's definitely gonna do that.

Um, and, and of course, uh, it's, it's so self-serving because he, he thinks Oracle's the best place to do that. Um, and I'm, you know, I've done work with some of the other hyperscalers, like, you know, like, um, Bezos, same thing. Has, he thinks the only AWS is, uh, reliable and global enough to run a lot of important gov government services.

And he thinks the, these hyperscalers have built these global infrastructures, uh, that will allow nations to compete on AI nations to compete, um, globally at a, um, and on digital services, digital currencies, digital assets, those are all big conversations that, um, that haven't really been, uh, come to the forefront. But with big changes in, uh, you know, that are, are presidential administration, these things now seem much more likely suddenly than they have been in the past. Yeah.

Much of it seemed like big pie in the sky, man. You were at the AWS reinvent just this past year, and we're talking about, you know, this idea of putting, uh, digital currency on the blockchain. Now you're thinking, you know, I've seen, uh, with Doge this idea of putting all government transactions on the blockchain, and, and I'm all for transparency, but we end up with these really interesting, uh, dilemmas from a have and have nots perspective.

And one of the things I want to highlight from this Ellison, a subset of the Ellison comment, was, uh, vice President Vance in Paris announcing that, you know, he, the, this administration wants to take the shackles off of ai, uh, and, uh, ethics. And, uh, I think his, uh, term was somewhere around something to the effect, we need to stop hand wrangling around ethical AI and just advance AI as fast as possible to beat China. All the VCs celebrated the comment, they were like, yes, this is a, uh, this is the way to beat China and ai, the consensus is that China is level with us when it comes to models, if not ahead of us, when it comes to models.

The U and when I say us, I mean Western, uh, yes, towers and, and, uh, companies. And then, uh, as far as hardware, uh, the US and Western allies are ahead of China, and then people, the argument is that China is ahead when it comes to PE people, the, uh, people, process and technologies. I think this rises, uh, interesting dilemma for the enterprise.

Usually US regulations have gated our access to some technologies when they take that, those shackles off. Of course, there's opportunity, but there's also challenges in a global environment. The EU seems to be going in a completely different direction than the us.

Well, and if you look at, um, you know, responsible ai, I think is, is really the word more than ethical ai. 'cause it's more than just being ethical that you have to have to do with ai. You have, you know, we talk about first principles with great power comes great responsibility, and AI gives us is the, is the most powerful technology we have, and soon we'll be able to do things humans can't.

As I've talked about super intelligence, uh, you know, in the last show, um, what, you know, who's gonna, who's gonna have access to the best super intelligence, uh, that's gonna be a competitive global race. Europe, on the other hand, is saying, well, we'd rather be responsible more than we would want, wanna be number one. And they may win that bet.

If, if, uh, we end up having, uh, which I think is likely some, some accidents with ai, where it's used in a place that causes, uh, significant, uh, harms somehow, um, as people put it in more and more critical places, uh, and makes decisions without human intervention or human oversight and bad things happen, then Europe will be able to say, well, you can come here and use our AI because it's, it's safer and more responsible. Uh, we've actually have regulations. So they may, they may win that bet, who knows?

Uh, and they're trying because, um, the EU just announced that they're, they're, uh, they're trying to organize it at a, uh, at a national level across the eu, uh, because individually the, the countries can't compete with US or China, but collectively, uh, the eus got 450 million people. Uh, they're bigger than the United States if they could get or get organized. So they've just committed 200 billion, uh, to, uh, their AI efforts at an EE level, uh, to compete with us and China.

And, you know, of course their story's gonna be, they're gonna do it, be they're gonna do it best in terms of what's right for people. And, you know, is it, is, it's the, it's nice to have another horse in the race to see what, where that goes. Yeah.

Diversity of ideas is just as important as competition, which actually brings me to a point we did not put in the rundown. I don't know how we missed this as big news Elon Musk offered and, and, and some other investors. A group offered 97 point something billion dollars for open ai.

And this is a little complicated. Open AI is technically a non-for-profit. So I'm not quite sure how you offer to buy a non, this is beyond my, my, my financial expertise.

But essentially he's looking to take control of the, uh, uh, of the not-for-profit that manages the for-profit open AI company for 97 billion. 7 billion. Yeah, I saw that.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting to see, um, the, the question is, the, the rumor is that, uh, the third run of grok, so Grok three didn't go well. And so, um, they don't have a model.

They, it has spent an enormous amount of money, and they don't have enough to, to retrain it. That's the rumor. Can't confirm whether it's true or not.

Uh, but, uh, that's supposedly the reason where why, um, uh, Musk is making some kind of move that at least get something out out of it. I don't think, uh, I think OpenAI is actually worth more than that offer. But I think that there's, there's there, I think there's secret covenants or stock or something.

I mean, he supposed he must dive, uh, divested himself on OpenAI, but he, he has some in on the offer is my understanding, um, that make, that gives him special privileges to make that. Um, and, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Uh, but there is some question about whether guac remain competitive and, and some must have to do something.

Yeah, AI is moving much faster than we can keep up with both on the software side and the hardware side. Long, internally speaking, our sister company, signal 65, has published the results of their GDI three testing. Oh.

com to download the full report. And if you want to really geek out on numbers, our colleague Russ fellows wrote the report after all the testing, and we've been testing it for quite some time. Basically, it's on par with the H 100, which if you, you know, kinda look back and say, well, you know, H 100, what, what's the big deal?

Well, deep Seq was trained, allegedly on H one hundreds, uh, grok, uh, Xi uh, built their data center around H one hundreds, their super compute off H one hundreds while the B two hundreds. And the, uh, new chip sets from, uh, Nvidia all the rage, H one hundreds and Gaudy three is absolutely, uh, data center level quality for doing in unforeseen and doing enough AI for the vast majority of the enterprises. Any thoughts in general around just the non Nvidia market around AI chips and AI chip acceleration?

Yes, and the big question is, uh, in ai, it's what a developer's gonna use. And, um, if it's not Cuda, there's a big question about, you know, do I make it, do I commit to something that may not last? It doesn't have the heritage, uh, it doesn't have the, you know, the staying power as is c is not gonna go anywhere.

Every, everyone feels completely confident making these very, very large investments on top of that stack. Uh, and the question is, is, you know, chip, like gdi are new kids on the block with unproven track record, um, assure they're doing great today, but can they sustain the, the competitive races betting on goy good? Is it gonna pull ahead?

Uh, is it, is it cost competitive? Um, and, but most importantly, can they get developers to use it? Um, and developers don't know anything about it.

Uh, and so, um, that's, that's the real question. There's a, is a huge headwind to break out in AI chips right now. It's just, you know, NVIDIA's got a lock on the market.

Yeah, I will say, if this was Intel of two or three years ago, it, you know, we would say, well, it's Intel now. We're saying, well, it's Intel. You know, it's, uh, we, we could put, you know, a lot of faith in Intel two or three years ago that they would just span their way to, uh, market parody if not dominance.

Now, this Intel has way more problems than just catching up in ai, AI development, AI platforms. Uh, they did a lot to normalize the access to, got to, I'm sorry, to Cuda and Cuda cord. Uh, so they could hire, they, they could hire, hire away the complexity, but you're absolutely right, folks like deep see, deep seeks, uh, show what's possible when you, uh, program to a machine level, uh, and, uh, bypass.

Well, That right there is, that's the intelligent advantage. They need to tell that story that, you know, some of the most competitive ais are not using, um, a cuda. They're able, they're getting the best performance by going bare metal.

And so that, that's very interesting. Yeah. And the, the, I think someone should commission our Signal 65 folks to do that comparison to say, oh, if I went straight machine level on Gotti three, what are the, what does that get me relative to a B 100, 200, or whatever the latest Blackwell chip set is from Nvidia?

And is it worth the investment? What does it mean for my power and cooling? One of the things that we haven't talked about when it comes to deep seed and being able to basically run, uh, the entire model on a single Blackwell chip on like a digits, which is just air cooled, what does that mean for the power and cooling race specifically in the enterprise data center?

Yeah. Well, and I think that this whole conversation, uh, neglects the way that CIOs think about sourcing the job of the CIO is business continuity. At the end of the day, that's the only time they ever really get a phone call from anybody was when something doesn't work.

Um, you know, o other than that, they, you know, occasionally they, you know, they get a request, well, we'd like to do this or that, or use ai, but, um, uh, so they're looking for, uh, a, a stable, reliable partner. And they're, the question is, is, uh, the, the, you know, the Chinese government has been running these drills around Taiwan that raised a lot of supply chain questions about whether Taiwan something's gonna happen, um, within the next 24 months. That seems to be the analysis.

Um, you're, you're, you're, you're basically dry running, you know, a blockade of, of, of the, you know, it's a tiny island at the end of the day. Um, and with everything changing in all eyes, uh, elsewhere in the world on all these other geopolitical issues, there's a, there's a real concern that, that China may make their move. And so what I'm hearing from CIOs, uh, in my last CIO round table, uh, that, that I participated in with a bunch of Fortune five that are like Fortune 100 CIOs, is that they're looking, uh, to hedge their bets so that they don't have, uh, operational, uh, discontinuity when they can't get the ships they need to run their business.

So they're looking at the, at that level, and this is not the developer level, um, but developers are the king makers, but the CIO's now increasingly their eyes looking, what are my other choices? And this is about gaudi's really their, their biggest chance they can tap into that demand to hedge bets about what's gonna happen in the world that may cut, uh, you know, uh, US enterprises or everyone off from Nvidia chips. Uh, that's a big deal.

Yeah. Between tariffs, geopolitical challenges, when, when it comes to borders, we as, uh, we as a industry are appreciative that we don't do that. I don't do logistics.

I'm, I'm just happy that I'm not into the business of figuring out where I'm going to get supplies. The big oem, SO world, Dell, HBE, Lenovo, Cisco, the people who have to put these systems together in the end point, really have to think through how do they one not, uh, get on the wrong side of, of, of each one of these nations from a political perspective, but also able to mitigate some of this cost and access risk. It is a interesting conversation.

And, uh, we're, we're here for it. Diane. Let's put in a, a plug since, uh, LY isn't here, we can put in a plug for our CXO roundtables.

Oh yes. You don't know this, but we just signed on yet another client as of I think, uh, a few minutes ago to do another CXO round table. You want to fill us in on what is a cs?

We call 'em CXO salons. Yes, exactly. What Do, what do we do at these things?

Well, the, these salons are for organizations that, that want to directly tap into the zeitgeist or, you know, what are CIOs? Where's, uh, CTOs Chief Digital Officers if, if you prefer, uh, any of those digital CXO roles, uh, that you have, uh, you know, we've built up a community of such practitioners over the years. Um, we can bring them together to think about and, and discuss the, the challenges of the day, evaluate new product offerings.

So, uh, and their, their motivation is, you know, increasingly they're not feeling like they, they don't have a, a voice in a lot of product development. And in the enterprise, in enterprise products, 'cause it's moving so fast and being driven by Silicon Valley innovation, uh, that the, that a lot of their specific unique enterprise needs aren't being represented. This gives them a chance to get with leading product companies, uh, who are trying to build the future and get feedback from them.

But it can be used for many different things, uh, just as a, as a sounding board, as a, a forum to understand what the major issues of the day are around a specific topic that affects that, that given, um, a product offering. Uh, so there's a variety of ways, but if you want digital CXOs in a room, uh, we, we have gotten good at facilitating that, bringing them together and creating productive, useful, actionable outcomes. Concrete stuff comes outta these, and everyone really seems to enjoy the process on both sides.

I know. I enjoy the process of posting these, uh, on both as, as you said, on both sides. The CXOs, the various executives from actual end customers, and the vendor, the IT enterprise vendor gets get both get wonderful insights and we get the pleasure of just hosting these things and, and, uh, watching these conversations unfold.

There's really not much that we have to do other than throw in a question and watch the magic happen and keep everyone on track. com. Uh, Diane, as usual, I've had a wonderful time.

If you're thinking you've learned so much more, so much about the tech industry from these infrastructure matter episodes, you should share them with your grandmother. That's right. It will help her make more friends, whether she's at home enjoying the, the sooth soothing sounds of Keith and Dion, or if she has a social group that she can, uh, listen to this while paying bid with.

It's a gift for, it's a, we're recording this on Valentine's Day, so it's a great Valentine's Day gift for any of your grandmothers in your network. Until then, we'll see Next episode, the infrastructure matters with BB 72. Hello, along the latest edition of the Techstrong AI Video series.

I'm your host, Mike Vara. Today we're with Mike Leach, who, senior manager for workstations and horizontal solutions at Lenovo. And we're talking about the impact AI is gonna have on all those workstations and endpoints and everything else that we use every day.

Hey, Mike, welcome to the show. How you doing, Mike? Yeah, great to be here.

What exactly are we looking for these days in a workstation in the age of ai? Will every workstation need to have some sort of additional class of processors now to run these AI systems? Or is it in specific use cases?

I think a lot of people are, um, confused about exactly what an AI workstation is and by extension what an AI PC is. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a great place to be in the tech industry right now. Um, you know, AI is gonna be truly transformative.

It has been for the last five years, and the trajectory is, and the velocity of what's happening now is, uh, I guess stressful and impressive to see from my side of the fence at the same time. Um, when it comes to ai, it's all about the use case and it's all about the data. So, you know, your question on what type of compute power is needed, and, you know, it really depends, but what we have seen is this unprecedented demand for performance because, you know, AI is one of the largest computational lifts of our time.

You know, if you look at things like the internet or metaverse and, and the other kind of, you know, phases of the IT industry from, from years gone by, they didn't necessarily have a huge impact or a huge demand and, and drive for performance. Um, you know, we're still in the dial up internet days of AI at the moment. Um, but if you want to see the value, you know, you've gotta bring real world scenarios and real world business outcomes that can happen fast.

So you need performance, therefore you need our full high performance components. Typically, things like nvidia, GPUs, um, you know, they bring the most computational, you know, compute power to the table, and it's what's at heart of all of our Lenovo workstations. Will it always be a GPU that I need, or as time goes on, will there be other classes of processors and different ones will lend themselves to different use cases to your earlier point?

Yeah, ultimately, I think the, the easy answer is yes. I mean, what we've seen in the last 12 months, the birth of the A IPC, um, it's the addition of a new processing unit to the table. So we've forever been working in ward of CPU central processing units.

Um, and then GPUs were derived from, you know, gaming and graphics, and they're now very powerful co-processor for ai. But it's the birth of this NPU, the neural processing unit that's gonna be really key today. 0 of those types of processes.

So they are not a performance accelerator, but they are a very efficient processor of ai. So as AI becomes something that just runs in the background, and that might be a, you know, a constant background blur, that might be some smart antivirus, that might be some smart security tools that are running in the background, you need a processor that's almost custom built to drive those inference, those AI inference workloads and things like the NPU are gonna be critical there. Um, I think people are still confused to this day, and it's been a long running conversation about, well, where is that line between what we call a PC and a workstation these days?

And is it changing when we add these NPUs? Well, ultimately a workstation is a pc. Um, it's a high performance, it's the highest performing pc.

Um, you know, PC for us is a personal device. Um, whether that runs Windows or a Linux operating system, it's used by a user. You know, for us, workstations are the highest performing variance of that, you know, more memory, more CPU, um, more graphical capabilities, more expandability, but they're built to run those high-end workloads.

They're validated to run those high-end workloads constantly 24 7. So if you do a nine to five job, you're still using a workstation. But if the computes then running in the background and you are doing things, you know, in the hours where maybe you're not behind the desk, then, you know, a workstation has always been designed to give that, that that resilience and that robustness to those more all important workloads.

I think people can make a correlation in their head to, you know, a workstation and a high-end gaming rig, or kind of similar in people's minds, but, um, what exactly will be the tipping point that would require me to use a workstation to run, um, an inference engine per se, versus it's cl pretty clear that the people who are building AI models probably need the biggest machine that they can find. But, um, what do I need to run these AI models successfully and what will determine whether or not that's a workstation? Yeah, it's a fair question.

So if you look at the workflow, you know, AI today in the marketing lens is all about consumption. It's consuming intelligence has been created elsewhere, and I think many people overlook the fact, well, someone's gotta create that AI in the first place. If you look through the lens of like an open AI and chat GPT, they spent, you know, a large number of dollars creating the AI and actually training this master AI model.

Um, and then us as just mere consumers we're just inferencing and pulling from that locally on our devices. Now you can run those models locally. You don't need to pull them from cloud, you don't need to pull them from service systems.

And you know, as an organization, if you are working off very complex data or very unique data, think healthcare, think legal, think government type workflows, where you need to be able to do it securely, you have to have the performance to be able to run that locally. Um, you know, a model, a large language model doesn't have to be large. It could be small.

So everything from three seven to 70 billion parameters as an example, not all of those can run on your standard laptop. You know, anything over 3 billion parameters realistically, you need to drive on on a more high performance device. And anything more than 7 billion parameters has to really be a GPU accelerated device, which, which is a workstation.

Um, so it depends on that workflow back to the data and the workflow in the use case. Um, but at the moment today, you know, you need AI to be performing fast, otherwise it's quicker to just do it yourself the old school way. If you want to have that real time interaction and AI be that truly transformative element of the business workflow and it needs to be accelerated.

And, and that really happens on a workstation. Are we getting to the point too, where people are appreciating the latency involved in a lot of these inference engine applications because, well, if the inference engine is running in a data center somewhere, or in or up in the cloud, I I create a latency issue where I'm not really having that, uh, engaging realtime experience. So, um, will that factor into our heads about what kind of machines Where, yeah, you need to take, you know, do you take your data to the compute or do you take your compute to data?

Um, you know, I'm a big avid fan of using AI tools. It makes me a lot smarter and efficient. I think it's my superpower, don't tell my boss, but I think it's a superpower.

I can get stuff done quickly. Um, but I recently flew back from Europe on an airplane and, and kind of, I felt foul of the fact of like, I didn't have a fast enough internet connection for any of my AI tools to work. So I was, I was superman without his superpowers, and I didn't get done what I needed to get done.

So I think for me, latency is gonna be the killer, that that's why we have to have this hybrid AI kind of, you know, ecosystem where you do on the device what you need to do on the device, be that security latency or just the size of the data. And then you take that to maybe, you know, a, a remote desktop or a server or a cloud instance only when it's needed, and then you move that data around or that workflow around, depending on who's using it. Um, because you know, these AI tools at the moment, they're still in their infancy, but as they're widely adopted, I think, yeah, edge computing and doing AI at the edge where the data is located is gonna be the fastest and most efficient way to use it before it's then maybe bypassed and moved into the cloud.

To use your metaphor, therefore, latency is AI kryptonite, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean that's, yeah, I, I, I felt very, very weak on that flight back.

'cause I, I, I, I missed deadlines. I couldn't do what I needed to do because I was reliant too much on my, um, my cloud connected ai. So for the IT leaders out there who are trying to figure out how to plan infrastructure investments in the age of ai, what should they be thinking about today?

Because they're, many of them are trying to sort out, well, do I need to buy these things this year? Or should I wait till the bulk of next year when we're operationalizing ai? What's kind of the, the curve of where the software and the hardware comes together?

I, I mean, yeah, it, I wish I had the easy answer for that. You know, if you look at, you know, the average corporate customer who's, you know, they're, they're up for refresh on their devices and do I bite the AI PC bullet or not? And you, the answer is, you, you have to at some point, but do you wait, as of all new technology next years, there's always gonna be a faster version of something around.

Um, but you need to start somewhere. So this kind of AI adoption route, we are seeing a massive adoption now of these broader AI PCs. But the tools that are available to you as an IT administrator are vast, they're complicated, they're unique to you and your workflow.

But AI is what we are seeing and what Lenovo's doing is providing a lot of these AI enhanced IT administrative tools that make deployment of these new devices better, faster, easier, cheaper, so that you can adopt the technology when it's hot off the press, rather than wait for things to maybe mature because, you know, you're always on this kind of rolling refresh. Um, and that you have to give the right device to the right people at the right time. Um, and everybody across your organization isn't on a level playing field of who's working with AI or who can benefit from ai.

You know, we've got legal teams and customers that in those particular fields that are light years ahead of those working in maybe healthcare and life sciences, those in the financial industry of, you know, they're building their own AI models 'cause they won't take things from the cloud. So these domain specific use cases, you know, this whole user persona now for AI is changing. Um, and the good thing that where we come in from a device standpoint is we've addressed that with the widest portfolio of devices so that customers can have that choice without the burden then of worrying like, well, should I wait for this year's refresh or next year?

You know, when do I go? Because, you know, ultimately, you know, it, it's, it's an open playing field for that. There are of course a lot of options when it comes to workstations these days.

What are the factors that organizations should be looking for when they decide ultimately to partner with the provider of a workstation or any other platform? Yeah, I mean, they, they're complicated devices, you know, are burst out bubble now that I think we've got three plus million possible configurations of each workstation device. So, you know, the op, the complexity police when it comes to configurability are real.

But if we look at, you know, the use cases, what we've done, we've built out these, um, curated hardware configurations and these recipe cards for success based on user workflows and user persona. So if you're an, if you're an IT developer or you're an IT administrator, if you're a, you know, you're walking with manufacturing and you work with computational fluid dynamics, then we've got all of these reconfigured, these recommended kind of good, better, best scenarios so that you can then see what the recommended platforms are. And then we've got data to then help back up.

Well, look, this model is 32% faster than that model. So, you know, you know, when you base it on the hourly rate of the employee that's gonna be using that, you know, you can see that actually how much value are you gonna get from those new platforms. So we make sure we bring the hardware itself, but then help you kind of cut through the trees a little bit to find the golden nuggets then of, of real value, which we know those individual users are gonna obtain.

Um, what's the one thing that kind of makes you shake your head these days when you listen to people talking about AI and workstations and infrastructure, that kind of thing, where you just go, folks, we're missing the point. It's, again, I how I phrase this one, but it, AI is not magic. What you can do with it is magic.

Um, but it's putting some of that magic into a, into a format that is valuable for your business. So stable a fusion, I can create a picture of Mickey Mouse on Everest drinking a milkshake. Awesome.

What's, how's that valuable to me and my workflow? So you, you know, looking away at some of the gimmicky features of it, it's the ability, this superpower thing of you can naturally now obtain real world value from these vast amounts of data that your business has been, you know, sitting on and obviously building. Um, data is not valuable unless you can extract something from it, learn from your mistakes, better insights to predict the future, that sort of thing.

Um, but if you can give your employees that superpower, and again, your superpower, my superpower, everyone's superpower is gonna be slightly different. What's your biggest pain point? I'm sat on a thousand unread emails this morning and I'm like, cool, can someone pre-read those for me?

Um, and tell me which ones are the highest priority. So I don't fall into an inbox, you know, of hell, I can just luck out what's needed. But if I'm a, you know, if I'm a, you know, working in a law firm or if I'm trying to work through, you know, seven different documents on some, you know, legislation that's come in, then I need, I need a tool that's a little bit different.

So people don't appreciate that as good as chat. GPT is, and it was the, you know, the, the light bulb moment for AI for many of us is that, you know, everyone's use case is different. Um, so don't look at AI as just one thing.

It's a vast array of, of, of opportunities for, uh, efficiency. I also think at the end of the day, people are also trying to figure out, well, are the devices gonna be more expensive in the future? 'cause we've added more components and that's just gonna be the nature of the particular beast.

Or will these systems follow the traditional price performance curve? And we'll basically be paying roughly the equivalent for an AI workstation that we paid for a regular workstation a couple of years ago. I mean, it is, yeah, relative.

Um, I always tend to shy away from pricing conversation mainly because it's, it, it, it's almost irrelevant if you look at it at the context of, you know, employees aren't getting any cheaper. And if you look at what you are here to do, you know, I, I, I'm a big Formula One fan, and if I look at, you know, someone like a Lewis Hamilton of the world, if you put him in the cheapest race car, then you are wasting money paying him his huge salary if he hasn't got the right hardware or the right car behind him, but more importantly, the right team to go support him. So put it in context of the user, the software applications they're running, you know, the tens of thousands of dollars that, you know, they would be hemorrhaging every month if they were sat there waiting for the hourglass.

For me, putting a performance workstation into the hands of every employee will deliver more commercial value to the business. Yes, the device at a device price point is more expensive, but it's delivering so much better return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership, which ultimately you're drinking less coffee, you're smoking less cigarettes or whatever. So, you know, for me it's cheaper, but it's an upfront addition to CapEx, whereas maybe operationally it's cheaper to to, to go that route.

Alright, folks, you heard it here. Even in the age of ai, you can still be Pennywise and a pound foolish. Hey Mike, thanks for being on the show.

No, appreciate it. Thanks for your time. All right.

And thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Text Strong AI video series. You can watch this episode and others on our website. We invite you to check them all out.

Until then, we'll see you next time. This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw.

We're here with Patrick McNeil, who's the cybersecurity strategist for Guidepoint Security, and we're talking about all these scams we see lately, and they seem to be related to some sort of cybersecurity attack in one form or another. Most recently we had the Super Bowl, and then we had Valentine's Day, and there's all kinds of holidays coming up ahead, and it's gonna be more of the same. Patrick, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. What do all these things have in common?

Uh, they feel fairly sophisticated and is a lot of effort being put into them? Are they generally successful? Are people giving up millions of dollars to these people?

I mean, how pervasive is decision? Yeah, it's a, it's a, it is a very pervasive issue and I think with the Super Bowl, they, the, the scammers were pretty much preying on people's emotions and establishing a sense of urgency to do something. I think you'll see a little bit less of that around Valentine's Day, you know, unless, unless it's, uh, you know, right up the last part of, uh, the, the day and maybe somebody will get caught.

But, uh, we're seeing a lot of these, these new scams as being AI enabled. So because generative AI is now being brought in, there is a greater reach for their campaigns. They can hit more numbers, hit more email addresses, uh, they're more effective because they can craft a message that even if they're not an English speaker, really looks legitimate.

And then they're more complex so they can involve more medias or even have the AI do that initial interaction with you if you respond back to a text or an email. Is there any way to detect these? 'cause to your point, they are more sophisticated and they're also increasing in volume and asking mere mortal end users to catch every one of these seems like an impossible mission.

So how do we kind get in the middle of this thing and protect people? Yeah, it is, it is challenging sometimes and, and even an expert can, uh, occasionally fall victim. So it's really a matter of, you know, making sure that if they are establishing a sense of urgency, that you take a breath and actually reread that again, um, you know, anything last minute.

And instead of obviously clicking links, like they say they're from, uh, sports betting site or flower company or something like that, don't click on the link. If they say the company they're from, you can just go directly to the website. They're would typically be the same sale that they're texting you about, and if there's a discount code or something that they sent you, it's going to be available on the website.

If you just type it in, things will happen and, and you will mess up. So if you've put your payment for whatever it is on a credit card, you at least have the fraud protections to, to kind of back you up and, and help with that. Definitely don't use a, a debit card.

And if they're asking for something like cryptocurrency, that is almost certainly a scam. So to your point, um, it seems like there are two tells. One is there's a, some sense of urgency, but two is they're typically asking me to enter some sort of sensitive data into some system somewhere.

And assuming that, um, I'm gonna do that for whatever reason. Do people kind of need to have, like maybe we all just need a personal gut check here before we go do these things. And this is, is is it really a matter of education E Exactly.

It is a matter of education and, uh, kinda like I said, stop and take a breath. Exactly. It's a gut check and you need to rely on those instincts a little bit.

We are also seeing, uh, AI enabled scans on the HR or employment front as well. One of the, uh, partners that, that, uh, I work with in the, the incident response industry has actually seen an uptick of people that as soon as they change their, uh, LinkedIn profile, no kidding, 24 hours later, the scammers have correlated their identity with a phone number that they've got from a data broker maybe, and they're sending them texts from, you know, the CEO that would never contact a, a first time employee, and they've gotten more sophisticated. So they're not asking for, you know, uh, go to the store and get me Apple gift cards.

That's long gone. Now they're actually asking for, can you send me our customer list or other sensitive information? And even adding it a little, this is highly confidential.

It, it has something to do with the m and a process. So you really can't share this with anybody to try to scare you into not reporting this to your IT department. As we kind of play around with this, should we get to the point now where we just tell people to not trust anything and just assume that everything is fake and then work backwards from there?

Almost? Yeah, I mean, it is possible to impersonate or spoof some of the phone numbers that things come from. So if they know that you have a relationship with somebody else at your company, it might be possible.

I think in that case, uh, using an encrypted messaging app like Signal, um, you know, it establishes a little bit more trust because of the fingerprinting of the user's device. Of course, they also take your credit card and your debit card. I feel like they're also getting more adept at, um, bleeding you a little bit, right?

They're not just smashing and grabbing and taking a lot of money in one throw. They're kind of setting up something where, um, you know, they're hitting you up for, you know, 40, 50 bucks at a time and you might not notice. Yeah, it's, it's fairly common as, as I'm sure you know, to see a small dollar transaction.

And then later on they'll, you know, uh, send some more transactions. And there's also, you know, the, the typical cryptocurrency pig butchering schemes where they work on the relationship and, you know, suggest investments and stuff like that and try to get you to incrementally invest over time. Honestly, the, the easiest thing that we can do to prevent that transition from a low dollar to a high dollar transaction is to use the temporary credit card numbers that many of our credit card companies make available to us.

A lot of this, I feel, goes unreported 'cause a lot of people are, you know, they're embarrassed and they don't wanna share that they got conned and said, do we have to make this, uh, less of a, you know, an emotional issue and identify what it is? It's hardcore crime. Yeah, definitely.

We have to try to make the stigma go away, right? gov. And they'll, they'll take the report and they're tracking different groups in the different scams that are going on.

And what can law enforcement do about all of this? I mean, it seems like every time they break up one ring five more spring up, It That is definitely true. I know for a fact that the FBI works with our international partners to, you know, try to track these types of scammers down.

We've seen in Europe, there was a whole betting scam going around, uh, the UEFA soccer championships and they managed to shut down, uh, I wanna say it was something like 800 different scammers and multiple call centers all at once. So they, they where there are appropriate law enforcement, um, you know, extradition and relationships and stuff like that, they will go after them. But it, it does take a lot of time to, uh, investigate and break up those groups.

Of course, the bad guys are already using AI to clean up their language and make them seem like they are legit. Can we use AI to defend ourselves from these folks? Yeah, I mean, there, there are some, uh, consumer and enterprise services that you can subscribe to that will analyze text messages and the numbers they come from and the wording and stuff like that and classify them as spam for the actual attacks that are coming to your email, to your website.

You know, the, certainly the anti phishing systems that a lot of companies pull in have been incorporating ai and I actually had a report from a customer the other day that their amount of phishing emails had gone down drastically. And the only things that they're really seeing are the very highly crafted, sophisticated spearfishing attempts against their executives. So we are being somewhat successful, at least in, in the enterprise environment, at targeting some of that to your home email address that you may have a harder time with that In the folks who run our telecom networks help us out here, or maybe they are and we just don't know it.

They, they are, um, there are, uh, stir and shake in protocols to actually authenticate some of the handoffs, you know, from trucks so that they can block some of the spam that goes on. But, you know, for the large part, uh, unless it's being spoofed or maybe it's a, uh, a highly volumetric campaign where they're sending out thousands of texts at once, they are going to kinda let that through because it's not really up to them as to whether or not something is, you know, a phishing attempt or not. And the bad guys, are they hiring people who are essentially professional odd men and ladies who are engaging in what we, you know, like to call social engineering attacks, but ultimately they are basically cod Um, uh, does, do they hire more of these people as time goes on?

Or are they automating all this stuff with a handful of people? Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a mix. There's certainly some automation and grooming of that initial contact so that you can get somebody to engage further and then they transition to a human.

There are some call centers in areas where it's very difficult to find employment. So people are going to those places because they don't have a choice. That's the only job they can get.

And in some cases they are human trafficking, so they're, they're finding people in another country where they can't find employment, Hey, come to come to my country, there's lots of jobs, and they take their passport and put them to work in their call center where they have very minimal living facilities and are essentially held hostage because they can't go anywhere without their papers. So this is clearly not a victimless crime. In fact, some of the people who are perpetrating the crimes are victims themselves.

Exactly. Yeah. And, and they may have incentives or targets that they have to meet, uh, you know, in order to even stay employed there.

So Is there any discussion among the governments, among the world to kind of combat this stuff? Are they kinda helping each other out a little bit to get to the root cause of this stuff? 'cause a lot of those people you talk about are not sitting in Alabama, they're sitting in someplace halfway around the world, right?

Yeah. I, I personally have not seen anything at a, we'll say a government level, and it's, but it has been pretty much partnerships through law enforcement to, you know, collaborate and gather evidence and, and take them down. Should companies be educating their employees and having some training program, or is this some sort of civic course that we should be giving people, or both, You know, that would be really great if we could just assign that training to everybody, have your county send you to the, uh, phishing education session or something.

But yeah, all, all companies really should be doing some level of training. As we know, a lot of companies have, uh, phishing campaigns to try to catch you on that. And most of them are really targeted towards the enterprise types of things.

You know, oh, this is the fake Okta login page or something. However, you know, I think they should probably also look at things like betting scams and, you know, other types of things that employees would want to interact with on their personal time. Me, I'm voting for, they should teach this in the schools and starting maybe in A hundred percent Yeah, the Grammar school and everybody can get a, a notion of it and maybe the kids will come home and teach their parents, and this might be the way to go.

Kids are already teaching their parents so much, right? So it would be great if they could do that, right? And kids, especially the younger ones, when they see this stuff, they get outraged and they wanna do something about it.

Maybe we get we're just a little too old and we've been had one too many times, so we don't quite get as bent outta shape about It. I, I think I've, I've, as I've gotten older, I've gotten more suspicious of everything, especially being in the security field, I, you see so many things that are scams. It's hard to trust anything that's legitimate sometimes.

There You go. Hey, scammer, get off my lawn. All right.

Hey Patrick, thanks to me on the shop. Yeah, thank you Mike. Have a good one.

Talk to you. All right, back to you guys in the studio. Hey there, I'm Jennifer Gio and I am very happy to be here today presenting on Textron Predict.

Um, I am the chief Strategy officer of W2 communications and a longtime friend of the Textron, uh, family, so to speak. Um, and I'm really excited to speak with you guys today. Uh, when Alan Shimel first asked me to speak, my first thought was, what am I going to talk about for this audience?

It's a largely technical conference, and he said, anything you want, which, uh, he should have known better with me than to do that. But I got excited to talk about something that we don't hear a whole lot about at conferences, which is really the importance of self-energy and authenticity and so on. Um, and how we operate as leaders, as colleagues, and even how that extends into our personal lives.

Um, and then, you know, just to help us, uh, think beyond ourselves and how to benefit, uh, each other in that regard. Um, you know, I joked in the abstract that it's a little bit witchy, woowoo. Uh, it's not really, there's a lot of science to back this up, but I'm, I'm, I'm really excited.

So with that, um, I'll get started. Um, so moving into it, why, why should you listen to me? Well, you don't have to, but you're here, so you might as well.

Um, I've been in this industry for, in the cybersecurity industry for 25 years. Um, more than half of it been a VP role or above. And I don't mean that in a fancy, ego driven kind of, uh, yay, yay me been a vp.

Just that means I've made a lot of mistakes and I've also learned, learned a lot of good lessons. Um, and I'm happily, readily willing to admit the mistakes that I've made to you along this line. Um, if it helps you, uh, if you're interested in this topic, um, I've spent a lot of time the last two and a half years or so, really focusing on both, working on myself in terms of achieving higher self and getting into self energy from, honestly, from getting sober to doing deep intensive trauma therapy, to doing holistic work, to doing the spiritual work, to doing classes and certifications, even things like tarot and divination, which scares some people.

That's so, get you apart. Um, and so, you know, I wanna share what I've learned, and a lot of what I've learned, quite frankly, is through my wonderful therapist who focuses on something called Internal Family Systems, which is a lot of where self-energy comes from that concept or words talked about. Um, and so I want to share that with as many people as I can, noting that I am not a clinician, um, and I hope to eventually start a side NGO where I'm helping people do this for folks, especially underrepresented groups that don't have access to traditional, um, mental health care.

So that's me, why I'm here talking about this topic. And so I will get actually into the topic now 'cause that's what you wanna hear about. So what is self energy?

Um, and pause as if someone was going to answer. Then if we look at the strict definition of it, of self-energy, um, it's, it's really about operating from authenticity and inner alignment. And what I mean by that is that every part of you, your mind, body, spirit, it's a state of consciousness that includes your feelings and every element within you.

If we're familiar with different parts, we talk about our inner child, we talk about, you know, certain parts of our, our psyches, we talk about different things that, that motivate us. All of those need to be in alignment. If those things are in alignment and they're rooted in our values and our integrity, we are operating outta self-energy.

And if you go look at the IFS model that I was talking about before, and it's also, um, defined this way in other places, there's, there are eight Cs, which I did right in front of me so I didn't forget. So I don't wanna get confused. That come with self-energy, compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage and connectedness.

What do all of those things have together have to do with each other? They relate to things outside of us. They relate to people outside of us, even though it's self energy.

They are critical when it comes to the interactions with others. Um, and why does this all matter? Why do we even need to get to this whole, like, like, you know, you know, self energy piece builds trust, resilience, and influence, um, because people will trust you if you're true to yourself and you know yourself.

And no one's perfect with this. I don't know anyone that's perfect with this. Um, but it helps you make people for people first, excuse me, decisions instead of I first decisions.

So in contrast, um, you know, ego driven versus self-energy driven behavior, um, sadly a lot of people operated out of ego. Um, even healthy ego, quote unquote, um, which doesn't scale for extreme peace within, uh, within us that can lend itself to the outside to create trust and growth with others. Um, and that's really important.

And go, just going back really quickly to the trust and resilience and influence part. Um, you know, that's really important whether you're a leader in an organization, um, a you know, a a a critical peer to someone, a partner, a friend, what have you. Um, and it's not, you know, we talk about influencer.

We're not talking about the state of like being influencers. It's like people want to listen to you because they know what you're saying is authentic and that they trust that it's for the goodness of everyone around versus just you. So let's talk about ego a little bit and why it's a barrier.

Um, now if you've ever taken a psych 1 0 1 class, you know that ego isn't awesome. Um, but in this particular instance, I wanna talk a little bit about like what a good ego can provide it. It can provide a healthy sense of self-confidence, allowing you to believe in yourself, pursue your goals, face challenges.

Um, it can act as a positive motivator driving your personal growth, your achievement. Um, and it stops short of becoming self-centered or arrogant because that's when you get egotistical and nobody really wants to be around you. But if you go back to everything I just described, they're all very me oriented.

And the ego is kind of a divide between your true self and the, um, and what you present to the world. And if you, it's a sheen, for lack of a better term. That's what I was kind of calling it to myself this morning when I was thinking about what I was going to say.

Um, 'cause making decisions even from that quote unquote good ego can lead to self-centered decisions that have limited outcomes for others. So for instance, if, um, you know, I made the decision to do this talk today 'cause Alan asked me if I would wanna talk. And of course they said yes 'cause I wanted to help my friend and I love talk strong and I wanted to do all this.

Um, you know, but there might've been Sami going there of like, oh, it'd be great to, you know, speak about this topic. I wanna talk about that topic that's not coming from the place. That's my place of self energy.

So none of this is, is is perfect, right? It's, it's all something that we strive for. None of us are gonna be from the Dalai Lama here.

Um, but you know, even with a healthy ego, one becomes consumed by behaviors, the actions, and the thoughts of others. So going back to the ego, like I know in a healthy ego, like I think I'm good at my job. I think my friends like me, I think I'm a good cat mom.

I think the industry respects me, but they're all predicated on opinions of other people. And those things should not matter. We become consumed by the behaviors and actions and thoughts of the others around, of others, or excuse me, apparently it doesn't teach us how to talk others around us.

And it blocks the true self. It's the enemy of growth and ego is the enemy of growth and progress. Self-energy is how you get to growth and progress and trust and all the things I described before.

So this next slide, I hate text, fold slides, but I'm making you suffer through this anyway because I wanna make some points on here. Um, emphasizing ego-driven versus people first slash self-energy approaches. Um, people first approaches foster trust.

They build stronger relationships, they create environments where everyone feels, feels valued and motivated. And again, going back to the ego, you might think, well, I have an ego about good things I do about, you know, that are about me. It doesn't affect others, but it's still me led thinking.

So just picking on a couple of these things around, um, you know, decision making and the contrast there. Are you making a decision in a bubble or are you getting diverse input when you're doing recognition? Are you like, I did this.

I'm really proud of this. I'm doing this. Like my first rule of thumb as a manager is if something goes wrong, it's my fault.

If it's a win, it's the team. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going out giving around ation trophies and the team's not like, hey, we can, this is how we can do this better, but everybody should be really proud about this win, right? And this is how we are gonna work together to make things better next time.

Um, conflict resolution and work ethic. They're the, the, the contrast between those two things and how you address issues with people and make them feel safe. I'm gonna talk a little bit more of that, that safety moving, moving on, and I'll get you off of this very text heavy slide here in a second.

But there's just very nuanced changes in how we operate when you get to that self-energy piece. And so let me talk about the science of self-energy because it's not all witchy. Wooo, there is science behind all of this.

Again, a lot of this is predicated through, um, you know, clinician education that I've received or work that I've done. So there's a neuroscience behind authenticity. Um, brain studies, uh, have shown that operating authentically reduces your cognitive dis, I can never say this.

Cognitive dissonance means you do what you say, you say what you do, which means you're promoting cl mental clarity and reducing stress. Because if you don't say what you do or do what you say and all the things in between, you're gonna get stressed out because you're not being authentic with people and you're not telling the truth to people. And of course, that's going to stress you out.

Um, trust in oxytocin, authentic behaviors do stimulate the release of oxytocin. And I know many people have heard that term in different types of conversations, but really at its core, oxytocin is a hormone is associated with trust, planning and cooperation. So you can have that even in, um, you know, in just person to person conversations if you can achieve that level of trust and people can feel good about themselves.

Um, the impact on resilience from a scientific perspective, um, there are research studies that studies have linked self-awareness and inner alignment, which I was talking about before, the mind, body, spirit, all of that, um, to enhanced resilience, allowing people to recover more effectively from setbacks. We all have setbacks, um, you know, but do you let them keep you down? Or do you have the confidence and the, the anchor in your true self to get back to balance very quickly when something goes wrong?

And then back to leadership again since was this is what the majority of the talk is about. Um, it's also been studied that authentic leadership models demonstrate self-energy, fosters employee engagement, loyalty and overall and overall team performance, higher overall team performance. None of this we are a family stuff.

Um, you know, you don't wanna have en measurement in your work environment, but you know, you, I know I personally, if I, uh, if I respect my manager or someone that I look up to or a mentor or even colleagues, I'm gonna work that much more aggressively to get what needs to be done, done for them and much the opposite if I feel the other way or I might leave that job, right? So as a leader, I mean, this is different. You hear everybody's heard the term, just a boss and a leader.

Anyone can get promoted into boss. Anybody can found a company and poof, become the CEO. That doesn't mean that they're a leader, it just means they have the title.

These are the elements that get you to become a leader and help to foster more healthy environments. So, so we're getting into the self-energy wins and what are the types of wins that come with self-energy? Um, you know, trust and authenticity.

I'm not gonna go through, you are going to be like, wow, she's so repetitive about trust and authenticity and resilience and leadership, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Um, because it's really critical. Um, and it, the, um, uh, it, there, there's really no way around it.

Leaders who prioritize self-energy are more resilient, influential. And when you get to start self-energy, you can even start to read other people's energy very easily, which helps you in a leadership perspective. I'm not saying you who are their lead mind reader, but you can get a sense very quickly if someone's uncomfortable, if you need to do something to help them, if you need to offer them maybe a break if they're burnout or so on and so forth.

And I have a very good friend, um, Dr. Stacy Thay or if you know her, who is an absolute expert on that. So look up on some of her work on that.

I won't even try to repeat it. Um, but you know, the trust and authenticity, the improve resilience, the enhanced leadership, you're like, wait, leadership now you're talking about enhanced leadership. You know, this is where you are more perceived as trustworthy and influential, resulting in the higher team performance and satisfaction.

And I always tie this to some very important lessons I learned as a leader and as an employee. No one is more trustworthy than someone who says they need help. No one is more trustworthy than someone that says, I don't know.

And no one is more trustworthy than someone that says I was wrong. 'cause that shows they've got significant confidence and they know who they are. I don't trust people that don't do that.

That's just me. But that's, those are the leaders that you're like, okay, that person's gonna say I was wrong or I need help or this or that makes you feel more valued and it shows you that they're willing to be authentic with you. So I think that's a really important part to point to make positive emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation is something that's often misunderstood. And quite frankly, it wasn't until recently until I really understood it. Um, it's really having a, an emotional response that is conducive to what is happening in the moment.

It doesn't mean being a robot or being fully numb to the world because then you're not growing, you're not living, you're not experiencing, right? It's, you know, something goes wrong at work. Somebody messes up something that they're supposed to deliver, whether it's code, whether it's a paper, whether it's a talk, what have you, and you freak out on them.

That is not emotional regulation. That is not gonna win you friends versus I'm gonna give you some constructive feedback, let's work with this together. Or on a more personal note, I did this this morning, couldn't find my glasses.

I was like, ah, was it really that big of a deal? Do I not have 12 more laying around my house? Of course I do.

So that was not very emotional regulated, um, of me. So, so that's a really important part of self leadership, uh, self-energy and where it plays into leadership and where that's important. And then of course, higher wellbeing.

Again, I said this before, none of us are gonna become the Dalai Lama here, but operating from self energy aligns with just being positive psychologically, right? We're happier, we have more purpose, we're more fulfilled. Can I say that I'm always happy, purpose driven and fulfilled.

Absolutely not. But I strive for and I'm honest with myself when I'm not. Um, and you know, and I try to learn from those moments of like, how did I get here and how do I not get here again?

And how can I be better? Because if I'm not in a wellbeing state, I can't be helpful to others, which is what this is all about. No, I did also say in my abstract that I would talk about personal brand, um, whether you speak at a conference, whether you're on Mastodon, x, blue sky, you're doing blogging, what happened, what have you, you are marketing and I know a lot of people don't like that, but it's what you're doing and that is part of brand.

Um, and so what is your personal brand? Who are you to the world? You want your brand to be authentic so you're trusted, um, and you want your brand to be authentic because you want to be authentic.

More importantly, your values and your actions align and people can see it, your authentic, and that creates credibility. People wanna hear what you have to say, they listen. If it's obvious that you are doing promotion out there and self-promotion and it's clear that you're doing that because you wanna do it because you wanna see your face on the screen, people are gonna stop listening to you after a while.

You know? So build a personal brand that reflects integrity. What I have on this slide is a personal brand wheel.

It's a visual. I just need something to put on this slide. Quite frankly, I'm not a big fan of them, but it's a visual tool that maps out the different elements that make up a personal brand and a lot of like executive coaches and like B2C marketers and like P two P marketers and things like that, that are helping people figure out their brand use, things like this.

But if you look at the core, there's four things there at the core there, exploring, uh, spirituality, leaving a legacy, so and so on and so forth. But if you say, well, I wanna be known as a creator, but I wanna leave a legacy, those things don't align. So just again, just making sure that you have alignment and you're showing it in your actions external.

Don't hide who you are, be who you really are, and make sure that aligns with that integrity that you have and that self energy that you have accomplished by being calm and collected. Focusing on those eight Cs, again, the compassion, the curiosity, the clarity, the creativity, the calm, the confidence, the courage, the connectedness. I might have said a calm twice and then I might have forgotten curiosity, but I'm gonna say it just in case.

So just something to think about when you're presenting yourself to the world. So what does this have to do with cybersecurity and tech in general? Jen, why are you even talking about this thing?

I know somebody's thinking that, um, everything we do in this industry, or even if we're not directly working related to cyber in a different technical area, it's high risk. There's a lot of people that rely on us for stability, if not security, from protecting against risk and threat, protecting against insiders, protecting against poor ethics, poor leadership, what have you. Because high stakes environments lead to high stakes behavior if you aren't rooted.

Um, so you've gotta have trust in order to deal. I don't know anybody that it has a more stressful job than an incident responder. So my, my love and respect goes out to you and thank you for all you do if you're on this or if you hear this, but, you know, building trust and, and in terms of cyber, so you know, building trust, making sure that you have trust on your team.

So the more that you operate outta your self energy, um, the more people are gonna trust you. And, and not double, double think, double think. I dunno if that's a thing.

It is now what you have to say. They have confidence in the direction that you're giving them. You can make more quick decisions when it comes to a high stake environment.

Very emotional, regulated, quick decisions. So you can help solve the issue at hand. You have better collaboration and teamwork and can move faster as a unit through solving these issues.

You have resilience under stress. I mentioned earlier that anchor that brings you back to yourself. Um, that's very, very important.

And again, we talked about ethics, ethical leadership. Um, you're gonna listen to an, especially in a situation when it deals with cybersecurity and you're dealing with an incident. Um, you are looking to your leaders to have an ethical answer to these, to these questions.

And sometimes it can get really tricky in cyber. Um, but that's a really, really important element to this, is setting strong ethical examples or integrity is paramount in general. I even said this at a marketing conference.

I gave you a keynote at last, not this past December, but December, 2023, where I basically said, no matter what your job is in cybersecurity, whether you are a marketer or whether you are, you know, on the front lines of tech, if you don't care about the outcome, if you don't care about the ethics, 'cause of ethics of security, plenty of other industries out there for you, we have to care and we have to be rooted in ethics to be effective. So I'm gonna take a little sidestep here on the self-energy piece for a second, which is essentially it's still leadership with self-energy. We're not getting away from that since that's the topic.

But this is less about what you do and who you are and where your energy comes from and where those eight C's are rooted. So here's where I'm gonna get into for you. Our body is hundreds of chak of chakras, which is any point in, in this of spiritual power along the body.

Most of them are our feet, truth be told. But there are seven that get the most attention. Um, the fixture emphasizes the heart chakra due to the topic, um, which is the center of love and passion, which is where important leadership comes from.

You also have the crown, which is where, and intelligence, a third eye intuition and imagination throughout communication. Solar plexus, which is right of your upper torso, which is self-esteem and cons, confidence, your pelvic area, you have your sacral, which is pleasure and creativity. And that your lower spine, you have your root with first stability and groundedness.

A lot of people think that they, they do work on their throat or if they do work on their crown that they're gonna be better affected. Business communicators, when it's really working on the heart chakra, that's gonna make you more successful. Um, leadership and self energy.

Refe refers to the idea that a leader's personal energy level, including their motivation, enthusiasm, positive mindset, impacts their ability to lead and inspire. If you think several slides ago when I talked about how they had that motivation, enthusiasm for themselves, if they live this for themselves, all that motivation and enthusiasm is for you, for your team, for your company, for your organization, for the industry, and beyond leading to better performance and engagement for everyone. Um, listening over dictating inspiring trust and motivations, long-term impact and organiz organizational success, and just happiness, psychological safety, things like that.

And I'll talk about that in a second. So a quick little exercise, which I won't know if you do it or not, but just to give you an example. And if you don't get these notes, my contact info, um, will be at the end of this.

Feel free to reach out. So you're sitting here going, okay, so how do I even start to get to this? I want to know what my authentic self is.

How do I, how do I get to this really quickly? A few steps. Start with a prompt.

Grab a piece of paper. Write down one way you can act less out of ego. Think of something you've done recently that you make a decision out of ego.

Was it a talk that you gave? Was it a decision you made at work? Was it a decision you made at a, with a, with a friend?

Um, you know, and then flip it. How can you do the opposite? How can you do it where it, you're actually doing it from a state of self energy where you're actually like, all right, I'm calm, I'm connected, I'm clear.

What would I do differently in that situation? Journal about it. Share it with a friend, a therapist, spiritual leader, whomever.

Meditate if you want to. I said in the abstract, I'm not gonna make you meditate. I'm not gonna make you meditate.

It scares a lot of people. Um, but it can be as simple as just being quiet in the shower and thinking about it. That's how simple meditation can be.

Um, it doesn't have to be super complex the way a lot of other folks do it. And then write down steps to change it. Change your behavior if you wanna change it.

Um, I use reminders in my phone of things that I wanna change to get to a happier, more rooted, more, uh, integrity focused looking outward to help the world higher type of self. Um, yeah, sounds kind of funny when you think about it. How an old world that is.

But I also have mantras that I have a repeat every day. Every day. I repeat that I embrace my whole self, including all of my parts to make sure that I'm doing positive self-talk.

That's a part of that as well. So that's one example of how you can get there. Um, I won't get into too much 'cause we're getting close on time here, but, um, practical steps to align your energy outside of that exercise that I just gave you, which you could do for, for many different things.

Um, reflect on your core values. Do you know what your values are? Reflect on that.

Are you acting in them? Are you centered in them? Do you have to try?

Do you have to try? What's happening with your ego? Practice?

Mindfulness and self-awareness. I just talked about that. Um, but you could also go touch grass, do something else.

Find your thing. Embrace feedback. This is the difference between making decisions about who you are, based on what other people say, but find out from other people how you're received.

And think about it. Set goals. How do you wanna contribute to the world?

How do you want to contribute to the per to your personal and professional growth in a way to help others stay centered during cha cha challenges, excuse me, cultivate empathy based to not think I as an empath, which is kind of funny 'cause you can't do this if you're not an empath, but cultivate empathy. And that really means understanding other people's emotions. There are very gifted empaths that can feel the emotion of everyone around them.

There are few and far between, but cultivate that empathy and then reevaluate regularly. If I think about the last year of my life, I have had so many changes that I've had to reevaluate my value system and structure so many times to make sure that I staying aligned. And again, I mess up all the time.

So be patient. If this is something you wanna achieve, be kind to yourself. Be kind to others.

Be patient, whether there's, while you're messing up, be patient with others while they mess up. Be transparent. Help other people learn.

People might notice something different about you. Uh, tell them, you know, there's no, you know, nothing wrong, being honest, you could help someone else learn to do it, but it's not about being p perfect all the time. It's about making decisions that are rooted in, oops, excuse me, that are rooted in authenticity.

And again, as I close my contact information, my email, Twitter, or I can't call it x I'm sorry, blue sky, my LinkedIn are on here, is all about trust and authenticity, resilience, leaving the ego behind. Um, a quick call to action I'd challenge you all with is to start small with change. Focus on au authenticity and lead with integrity.

It just means start being honest with yourself and start acting in that way. I'm not saying you don't, but you know, put more emphasis on that. I've seen companies flourish and plummet based on this single simple concept, whether it's been adopted or not.

And no, I won't name them. The last thing I'll leave you with is a thought that I love, which is true. Success comes from who you are, not just what you do.

And do you have the courage to be that person? Be who you are to the world, or do you have to hide behind your ego? You'll be way more successful if you do the former.

With that said, I say thank you so much for having me. Um, you know how to contact me if you want to reach out, and I am grateful for this opportunity. Thank you to all the Textron team for having me.

Hello, my name is Chris Blak, and you have landed somewhere along the inevitability curve in this series. We've talked to interesting folks about hopefully interesting topics, looking at where we've been in the past, how we got to where we are right now, perhaps what that looks like, and with that, maybe some idea of where we're going in the future. So joining me today is Emerson Tan.

How are you? Emerson? Hello?

Uh, I'm in, uh, sunny Washington DC stuck in a basement because that apparently is that a, a a, a good place to, uh, uh, ride out a crisis? I think. I think that's a now, Right?

So, uh, speaking of crises, so I, I normally don't do a lot of intro stuff into this, but you know, I don't know how to describe your background. You have certain emergency response, cyber e economics guru from hell. Yeah.

What do you do? Um, so, goodness. So these days I run, um, my own little, I, I have my own little FinTech firm, which builds payment technologies for the developing world, um, but also cri like disaster resilient and crisis resilient, um, payment technologies.

Um, but my career history is somewhat insane because, um, I started out in, uh, computer security and the whole hacking world before, um, such things were a crime. I'm a lot older than I look. The reason I say the side of my head is because that's where all the white bits are.

Um, and, uh, from there, my career took me into the world of national security and cyber warfare For about a decade. I was the, um, head of external research and development for one of the first companies that ever produced cyber warfare, anything for the five eyes. Um, and in parallel to that, then I have, I've also got a 20 something odd year career in humanitarian aid, um, and disaster management.

Um, and all of those things have kind of come together to sort of like really my interest in, in, um, in resilience and, um, disaster and crisis management. Um, my academic academically, I studied planetary sciences at, uh, university College London. So, which makes Very sense.

Linear path, I can see it. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, it's, it's like earth and space science, you know, like computer hacking, cyber warfare, humanitarian, Emergency response Stuff, and, you know, Well, and that, you know, that is such the, the thing.

And you know, I've, I've, you know, I, I still get excited by getting on airplanes, right? And try to keep in mind the fact that I get to drink coffee at 30, 40,000 feet. It just below the speed of sound, which is kind of unique in the history of like, history.

Um, and, and, but, but this, getting to do what we do, you know, every, you know, Rakesh, uh, Bernie, you know, mutual friend was on, you know, we had one of these conversations a couple weeks ago, and it's just amazing. You know, none of us, I don't, you know, I think my, you know, I'm just lucky I fort come my way through everything. I don didn't, I don't have a high school diploma.

How did I get here? I don't know. But one of the defining characteristics about what I consider my community is that everybody's sort of like, you know, am I really, is this real?

Am I really, I'm in the White House, or I'm in wherever you, we get to. And it's like, really? So, you know, following that path, right?

This again, and this whole inevitability curve thing goes back to 19 91, 92. And I was trying to explain to my boss, Let you know, stop arguing about it. Let's assume for a second that everybody on earth is on the internet.

Say, you know, 20, 30 years from now, there's a line at that point you can look back. We'll all be sitting there looking back and say the distant future of 2024, looking back and say, oh, here's how it happened. Yeah.

I didn't say it's all an ever blow. It's like preor day Some once you get there. Yeah.

Once you get there. Exactly. So, um, so, so on on this, you know, I've done it, I've done a bunch, bunch of these sort of pieces, you know, over the last, uh, number of years.

Anyway. So in this series, just digging into it for half an hour saying, alright, where have we been? Where are we right now?

Where are we going? And you know, with your background, you know, we can take it a way we want, but you know, it's hurricane season. We've got all sorts of disasters.

We've got home is, you know, we're dealing with the, uh, outcome of that. Milton's about to take out my boats in Florida. Plus a lot of people's, you know, lives and livelihoods, and we've been responding to disasters.

We've been having disasters literally forever. Yep. And in our working lifetimes in the green room, we're talking about this a little bit just now, you know, things have gotten better, worse, different, right?

And they're going someplace. Yeah. Different.

I mean, so one of the things that's really, really clear, at least, so like if you, if you can, if you come to climate change and, and the effect of our pollution as, as humans, if you come to that as, uh, um, from, uh, the perspective of someone who, whose science background wasn't particularly great, right? You're, you're, this probably looks either terribly overblown or like terrifying or some conversation, some, like you, you, you, you, you see sort in these two emotions. Um, if you come from this sort of geo, from like someone who has a good understanding of like geological science and is kept up to date.

And if you come to this with someone, you know, with like a, you know, planetary sciences background, then what this is, is actually, it is about, if it is about that inevitability curve, because at this point, it's not like the 1960s where everyone was like, oh my God, you know, like, the world is gonna starve 'cause they're gonna run out phosphate or this and that, right? Or, you know, the world can only support 3 billion people, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. This is actually all about physics.

And one of the things that people don't properly gr is that the cold state that humans evolved in is not earth's default state. Earth's default state is pretty warm. It has, for most of its history, earth has had no ice at the poles.

Um, and for most of its history, um, it has had life forms, uh, latitudes that you just wouldn't think of. So, I mean, like, you know, the closest analogy of where we're going is probably the early Miocene. The early Miocene, you know, had, it was a, it was quite a few degrees warmer than it is now.

Um, it had giant snapping river turtles in Berlin. Uh, horses were about this big. Um, and it was significantly warmer.

Um, one of the reasons that we kind of like have kind of like not really sort of clocked all of this is that the techniques to actually look at the temperature record are actually very, very, very new. Um, I mean, like, we are talking, you know, like less than 50 years old to get down to the sort of like fine grain resolution that you actually be need to have to actually sort of like drill into these things. And, you know, it's also new that in fact, actually a lot of the analysis just simply hasn't been done.

But the physics will tell you that, you know, like if you go and shove a bunch of extra CO2 into the air, then you will end up with radiative forcing. And that's actually an experiment that you can do on your countertop with a couple of soda pop bottles, some water, a bit of sodium bicarbonate, and like a couple of thermometers. In fact, actually, I could go and rig that experiment right now with the, um, literally the contents of this, you know, of, of the kitchen here.

Um, and you know, like once you kind of like do that, I mean, it, it goes to show though that the, the terrible state of science education around the world, basically, you know, that, that, that we can't actually grok this, but what that world looks like and what we know from the geological record is that we evolved in a time of actual right. When times are actually pretty good storms were particularly huge, you know, um, Milton is the norm through geological history, which should be a real kind of like wake up call. It's like, it's like these sorts of things where you kind of like, you know, start to sort of like push the limits of like, what's actually extremes are the norming geological history, not the Clement environment that we, that, that we grew up in.

Because like, if you compare the history of earth, you know, a few billion years with human lifetime, we're at this big, Well, not just us, you know, 500 million years for anything much more interesting than, uh, than pon scum, right? Yeah. You know, like most of, most of first history now, like the, the dominant form of life was, you know, like unicellular, Right?

Not busy making oxygen, right? And that, so they've, let's think about where to take this, right? So to your point, you know, this has always been happening literally, literally forever.

We're literally evolved and all our ancestors are involved to deal with this sort of stuff. Now we're in this spot, right? Where we'd like to build along the coastlines and we'd like to not get wiped out by things.

And, and, and, and, you know, I'll, I'll say it, you know, the, the disinformation, the cognitive security campaigns are going on right now trying to convince all of us of seven different things at the same time. Um, we're gonna be like electric monks for anybody who gets that, uh, that reference. Um, and it's, You know, but but, but the reality is that we like these sort of things.

Like, you know, anybody looking for some optimism, Isaac Arthur, you know, look up Isaac Arthur on YouTube. Yeah. You know, the real science guys produce huge amounts of content.

You know, a lot of it, you know, this, this medium and far future looking in terms of decades and centuries and millennia, right? And the, the opportunity to in, on those timescales over the next could be decades, certainly over the next several centuries. You know, we could geo engineer the earth to maintain that happy spot where we are, which is not the natural state, to your point.

No. And I mean that, well, it's not the default. It, it's, it's always been natural, but the world, the word natural is kind of like, Yeah, comets hitting planets are all, is also natural, right?

Yeah. It, it's, it's, it's, it's like, but you wanna sort of keep it in that sort of like happy, sort of like, like in the happy spot. But the, the thing is, is that, and one of the reasons that, that all of this is turning out to be very much more complicated than everybody thinks, is that our understanding, um, of a lot of this is actually surprisingly weak, right?

The core, the core, the core physics well understood. We have natural laboratories and throughout the, the solar system that we can look at, um, uh, we have the geological record, but when it comes to actually the really fine grained stuff, our understanding is quite weak. I mean, just the other, just a couple of weeks ago I was in, um, I was in Tonga, uh, for the Pacific Island Forum, um, leaders Summit.

And I, I ran into a, a famous Australian environmentalist and, and naturalist by the name of Tim Flannery. And he's very famous for producing books like The Future Eaters. Um, he's, uh, a former Australian of the Year and, uh, like quite renowned in inside that community.

And he, and we were, we got talking and it turns out that we'd both been reading the same science papers, um, as have some of my old professors. And we all still talk. Um, and like, the amazing thing is, is that all of the models, for example, from the IPCC, actually, it turns out not all wrong.

We actually got, um, our sensitivity calculations, um, off by maybe a factor of as much as two. So in other words, the overall system might be twice as sensitive to CO2 levels than we previously thought. And what that means is that everything that you see that is marked in these reports as 2050 to 2100 actually should really be thought of as now, which is like, oh, and the thing is, is that we can manage the really gross, big changes, but this fine grain stuff needed to actually keep you inside, if you like, our comfort zone, um, we still haven't got a f*****g clue how to do any of that.

Um, and you know, it's the, it's the fine control. You know, you can stop somewhere running away. It's being venous, but it's really, really fine control that we, that we really, that we really struggle with.

And we'd be better off, frankly, um, trying to keep the he the hemostatic controls, you know, that provided by things like forests and coral reefs and, and so on and so forth, because those systems are actually better at self-regulating that very, very fine control than like humans. I mean, a good example of this is, um, sulfur dioxide. So because we don't like acid rain, we decided that it would be a good idea as a planet if we stopped putting sulfur in fuel.

So we took out sulfur from diesel, we took it out from aviation fuel, and we took it out from marine fuel. And the last of that to go was, um, marine bunker fuel and that, and marine diesel. And that happened about, I think it was like 20, 22, 23.

And what we've seen is basically a vertical rising temperature, because it turns out we've been running our own geoengineering experiment for the past, you know, like 80 years basically ever since the Royal Navy went, you know what, this whole coal thing, it's, uh, coal no good, no. And for battleships too big, too heavy and wins some Churchill went, you know what, we're gonna use oil. We're gonna turn all of our dread battleships turn running on oil.

And at that moment we went, right, okay, you know what? No more coal. So, and the rest of the, the world exploded and we started to start pumping all of this alpha in, in sulfur dioxide into the air.

And that experiment came to a pretty abrupt halt a couple of years ago, and now everything's just gone like this straight up, right? So we can run in this experiment, but it just goes to show how weak are actual, like, core like fine understanding of these fine grain mechanisms actually is. So, you know, like, could we do it?

Yeah. Could we do it with confidence? No, No.

Well, And I think that's as good a, uh, uh, some age of where we are, because I feel the same way, you know, as a kid I remember thinking that, oh, wow, I missed it. Everything's, you know, already sort of figured out, you know, and, and I look back at, you know, what I was reading then, you know, early seventies and so forth mm-hmm. And realize we didn't know anything, like literally compared, you know, the, the, you know, pick any individual discipline and every, you know, the best people on earth, you know, having this debate about things that these days we go, well, well, we all know.

I mean, literally know one of those. And the debate is now 10, 10 layers, uh, deeper in the same way, you know, to so many of the points you making, I hardly know which one to squirrel on. But looking on the future, you know, I, I think it's very easy to say that 50 years from now versions of ourselves, you know, um, or others, we'll be looking back and feeling exactly like I do about 1970, which is like, it seemed we knew so much, but I, I just want to, you know, sort of challenge the, the stock, uh, public, you know, common, uh, assumption, right?

Is that we'll never know. It's like, that's not true either, right? No, these are not infinite systems.

You can find the boundaries and you talk about, you know, biosystem regulating climates and so forth. You find out that a lot of the things you, we can take the path we're on right now, we'll just have Moore's Law and we'll have faster computers. A lot of things are beyond computational management.

You literally can't get there from here. Yeah. So it's not that we're gonna math out the, the speed Problem, Right.

You know, we're not, we're not gonna, you know, there's no future version where we know where every cubic centimeter of air is moving, but we can understand the systems well enough. And, and the, and, and the thing to me is, is, is the, like, there are two way there, there are two ways that you could go. You can either de devolve and decentralize the system so that, you know, like, or you can try and centrally control it all.

And the problem we're trying to centrally control it all is that there's a span of control problem. Um, and I think that when it comes to trying to work out, for example, how to keep the planet livable or try and keep it within that safe, happy zone, um, it's big enough and complicated enough actually that you should just be able to, that we actually just need to be able to agree on a bunch of core principles, you know? And then it's like, okay, everybody, you know, like, you know, leave it to the trees, you know, leave it to the trees, the fish and the, and the, and, and the coral to actually do the actual like fine, you know, like fine twiddling of the knobs and the rest of it.

And you know, like if, if we think that like, putting sulfur back into the fuel, I mean, 'cause then it becomes a management problem, right? Because the thing is, is that you, you end up with this situation where once you commit to actually trying to manage it yourself, you are committed to do that forever. Forever.

And the minute that you take your finger off the scales and the rest of it, it will be bound to whatever the physics says there, where wherever the physics says there is gonna go and out of the happy place. And that's bad because we know from the history of humans that we are supremely bad at running anything forever. Um, funnily enough, actually the closest thing to forever is actually probably the Catholic church, because the Catholic church, as it turns out, actually is the linear successor of the Roman Empire.

And if you ever look at the, the, the, the, um, the names that the Catholic church uses inside of its organization like parishes, diocese, and so on and so on, right? They're actually the lineal descendant of the Roman military province organizational structure. But that's the closest thing that we actually have to, so you gotta talk about actually trying to commit to managing something forever.

That's probably the closest that you've got. And that's not very old in terms of like geological history. Well, in the, You know, as I've, as I've thought through all this stuff, you know, I, I expect, you know, there's such common expectation that, you know, we're not gonna live till, you know, Wednesday, right?

You know, this, this, this again, you know, boomer era, um, legacy pounded into me. And it's like, it's either gonna be 19, you know, it's gonna be overpopulation 19 70, 19 84, 19 99, 2000, the apocalypse is coming, you know, and it turns out there's been lots of apocalypses sort of forever and afterwards we all clean up and, and move on to the next one. Yeah.

Um, it Always, I always, I always tell people, there will always be people, the only question will be how many and under what conditions will they live? That's it. That, that is literally it.

You look at civilizations through history, they kind of like go through this sort of curve where they, I mean, like, so, you know, here's a, here's a, here's a, here's an example. The Mayan civilization is still there. The only difference is, is that they're in like, like the, the, the, the culture is still there except they're just in little villages up on the hills and, uh, and the rest of it.

And they're no longer in these sort of like, great cities and the rest of it. And they all speak Spanish and kucher, you know, they're still there. You know, the, the, the, they're not the do, they're not, you know, they, they're not a dominant, hyper dominant civilization anymore.

So, you know, like the, for us, the aim of the game should be, we wanna like keep, keep ourselves, we as individuals wanna stay alive, but also like, we quite like our civilization as it is, you know? So we wanna make sure that all of that knowledge survives and our ability to do things like, you know, not die from a paper cut or, or, I mean, like, one of the most amazing things that you can do is it turns out that you can actually directly trace the history of vaccines by going to a cemetery that has been in continuous use, um, for the last like, couple of hundred years and go to the children's section action. Oh, yeah.

You able to do your ancestry tree at some point. And, you know, you go back a couple generations, all these little leafs, you know, that never went very far. It's just like, oh, everyone died before they were like five.

Right? Well, you know, either bur giving birth or being born was the most dangerous thing, you know, we can, You know, like you make it to 35 and you're something like, you know what, actually I'm good. You know, it's like, oh yeah, I've dys I've, I've had all that s**t.

I'm, I'm good. Well, you know, It, it, it's so common, you know, people, folks our age. Right.

You know, uh, just love to get into the, oh my God, I'm so all disse and everything else. I'm sorry. Just go through the whole thing.

Bonus rounds. Bonus. Hey, look, hey, I have remember to re point that this is actually just wearing out guess.

Yeah. Well, exactly. It's like, it's like, oh, you are old enough now that, that's a prob guess what, that's something that like your ancestors just didn't have because Right.

They didn't have aches and pains because they were dead. That's right. Yeah.

37, all your poor old man, you got all your load still. So, so what, what, so like, the aim of the game should be, it's like, we enjoy all of this stuff, and the aim of the game should be, well, we actually wanna make sure that our descendants, your kids, you know, and their kids like, can enjoy the same stuff. It might be slightly different stuff, but we want them to have the same sort of like broad, broad fulfilling lives that we, in our incredibly varied careers have taken for granted.

Right. Well, And that does a perfect segue into this, into just looking forward. Right.

You know, I, and just in my own experience, right, and the things I've seen in, in emergency response and disaster recovery of all sorts, you know, cyber and physical whatnot. And what Rakesh and I were talking about in the 20, 25, 30 years, you know, that, that he's been, you know, involved with that. You know, when you see, right now we have starlink, you know, you know, showing up in the middle of emergency response, now you got 150 megabits, you know, broadband, that changes a lot of things.

And Dr, I mean, you know, quad cop is, and drones, I look out five years, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, our ability to respond to disasters like we're seeing right now will be fundamentally, fundamentally actual conversation purposes, fundamentally different. If I can send out, not just, you know, helicopters, you know, from enthusiasts and people who happen to have helicopters, but just a fleet of bloody drones to find every individual within 90 minutes, you know, assess them. And we won't imagine, be able to go back to where we are today.

I, i actually think somewhat differently, which is that one of the problems that we have is that we've built a bunch of systems that are in fact, actually both ubiquitous and actually very brittle. And it's that brittleness that is actually a problem. So yes, starlink is great.

The problem with these constellations, for example, is that you can only have a couple of them, Right? And they are actually, in many respects, quite, quite vulnerable. Um, Well, but let's just ratchet forward really quick on that, so that Yeah, I, I agree.

Yeah. I, I love, you know, I, especially, I love SpaceX. That company is amazing, the stuff they're doing, everybody there, it sounds very controversial these days, but there's only one of them that makes me nervous.

I'm a security geek. Anything can happen to one of anything. But just, just inside this topic, you just assume that if I was, you know, responsible, gimme a 10 year timeline in, in a reasonable budget to develop, you know, a disaster response drone, you know, uh, fleet capability, you could, you know, drop in a container mm-hmm.

Into someplace like Dan Andrews, Tennessee and have it up all the valleys and find all the people. Um, yeah, you can do that. And it doesn't need any, you know, you take brittleness and fragility and in, uh, you know, some of them are gonna die and some of they're gonna run into trees and some of 'em battery, you know, they won't be able to get a connection.

You can build that with today's tech. You can. And, and the, the cost of not having that becomes enough to actually have that.

So I think that's the kind of thing you realistically forecast, you know, one in two decades out, that emergency response turns in, you know, the time it takes, the time it has taken in North Carolina to get to some of these folks, uh, has probably got to them, them all by now. But you never know. It gets really windy up there and those little Oh, yeah, yeah.

No, I mean, the thing is, is the other thing to, to bear in mind as well is that I was told, you know, right. It's the classic William Gibson quote, the future is already here. It's just not even the distributed, and in my mind, the, so like, like I tend to take quite a, a, a, a pessimism is the wrong, pessimistic is the wrong word.

Realistic, Yeah. Possibly realistic. Um, realistic is not a bad word.

So we, we kind of have this sort of, so both of us grew up in a world of, essentially a world that wasn't actually at war. And this is not, again, The norm, The norm, the norm is in fact actually a state of pretty much permanent warfare. If you look at the history of the United Kingdom, for example, um, it's actually been at war with France for most of it Or itself the rest of the time, Although, yeah, yeah.

Basically it's like there was always war somewhere, usually with France, often with somebody else into the mix. But one of the fascinating things about the second half of the 21st century in my mind is that we now have a state, or, or the second two thirds of the 21st century, is that once again, we have a state of permanent war, but not war. And the thing that actually is, I find actually most fascinating is, especially when it comes to the cyber stuff, is that you end up in a state of war, but not war.

It's undeclared war, but it's still fundamentally war. And what I find fascinating is the, for example, Russian botnets amplifying the disinformation and misinformation, which is actually now impeding the response to Hurricane Helene and now threatening to actually get people killed. Oh, Has of Florida.

Um, because, you know, like you have things saying, you know, like, no, don't evacuate. You know? And so it, well, It's, you don't wanna stop there.

The, the, the, you know, with as a binational co, uh, family, right? With Canada, the US to, to compare to the same time during the pandemic, if the US had the same per capita death rate, COVID death rate as Canada, there would be 700,000 Americans alive today. Right?

And that's, so we're, we're past the point of potentially killing people with disinformation. And in fact, I think that's, again, if I switched hats, if I was a bad actor, I would be more concerned with my ability to run free in the disinformation space, not lasting much longer. 'cause the costs are getting high enough that we have to find ways around this, this, if we're stuck in this, again, over the long curves.

If we can never, if we, the state of not having any agreement about what exists, if this stays like this and or continues getting worse forever, we, we can't have electricity. Yeah. We're f****d.

Yeah. That's, that's actually the thing. And that's, that's one of the things that's actually really interesting is that this appears to be a generational thing.

So again, but the, the question, the, the question is, is can we sustain ourselves through this transitional phase to younger people who have a much better set of information hygiene in their heads? Because they've grown up in an information where everything in an environment where everything is hostile. But the thing is that, is that they're not in charge Yet.

That's right. Yes. Well, I mean, like, if you've noticed like, like, like the boomers are still f*****g in charge.

'cause they make up the largest voting block. They, after this election, they won't. But right now, in this set of elections that's happening globally, the boomers are still the largest voting, you know, the largest effective voting block.

Even though they're not an absolute majority, they're the ones that still come out and vote. And that's why 2024 is such a pivotal year because it's like, if you end up with another four years of institutional decay, chaos, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like that's super bad news because your ability to sustain yourself and recover in the next 30 may be really badly impacted. Um, like the, the, the only thing that gives me any hope at all is the fact that when you talk to really young kids, you know, in their, in their late teens, early twenties, you know, not even in their late teens, like, you know, like mid teens, like know the twenties, they are far more aware and skeptical about like, you know, like what YouTube and the algorithms actually feeding them.

Um, but that also explains why basically, you know, like Zuckerberg and, um, uh, you know, like elongated rodent and, you know, the rest of these, a man allowed to square on this thing. So it's the internet. We can say anything we like, The rest of these f*****g pricks are so absolutely terrified of this generational change because that generation's coming up has far less tolerance for their f*****g b******t than ours does.

And the boomers do. I mean, every billionaire is an institutional failure. And giving billionaires effectively personal rights to shape our informational environment is a catastrophe because they don't serve our interests.

They're not even interested in keeping the planet livable. Because, you know, like if you ask Elon, it's like, I'm gonna f**k off to Mars. And it's like, well, enjoy cancer buddy.

You know, and, and, and so because we've handed that over to them, you know, certainly here in the west, we've handed that over to them. Their, it's their interest that shape that, that information environment. And they're all about low taxes, wanna f**k off to Mars.

And if they wanna live on some, like compound out in the South Pacific and the rest of, well, the rest of us drown, they don't care. But if you talk to much younger people, they are riven with everything from climate. I mean, like one of the saddest things recently, actually, as I was talking to a friend of mine has a 14-year-old daughter, and that daughter has a self-harm problem.

And when asked about or so, like self-harm problems more often than not have to do with a feelings of loss of control. Right? Right.

And terrifyingly, it is actually climate anxiety that actually dry in her case, that actually drives some of that behavior because they feel that the world around them is outta control. And the adults who should be in charge and looking after interest are not, Well, I have three kids in their twenties. Right.

You know, so I feel this one very, very deeply. Right. And I, I, you know, for anybody out there, you know, listening to us old guys talk about this, you're gonna have it tomorrow.

You just are right. You'll have challenges to deal with, maybe really bad ones, probably really bad ones. And then, you know, there's mortality at the end of it.

So I don't think that, uh, and I know we could talk about this stuff forever, we have to end at some point. But I think this is the sort of thing, you know, my work with folks like you and Rakesh and the, the whole, you know, security world, networking world, emergency response, humanitarian stuff, is that we will just continue to continue to get better at this stuff. You know, we'll continue to have existential crisis.

There's always going to be a vo on battle fleet coming to destroy earth, but we'll work it through. And I, I couldn't agree with you more that I think a lot of this is generational. I don't think I am wired correctly in the head to, you know, fully understand how, how we're gonna do some of this stuff.

But I can see a generation growing up that is, We need to be much more okay with the idea of like, you know what, uh, I don't have all the answers. These old f*****g guys certainly don't have all the answers. And the rest of me, you know what, why don't we ask a bunch of why, why don't we ask the young people?

Why don't we ask the ones who actually have like, like a real, like stake in it. A stake in it. Yeah.

Yeah. And you know, like, like the wiser wa the wiser wise leaders listen to listen to the, listen to all of their stakeholders to use like corporate horse b*****k speech. But in this particular case, like, like the stakeholders are actually in this particular case are a bunch of like 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 year olds, right?

And actually, you know, because ultimately, especially when you're talking about things like the climate and the rest of it, the decisions that we make today are irreversible on the 20 to 30 to 50 year thousand year time timeframe, right? So in other words, if we are, as it looks like committed just with the amount of CO2 that's in the air right now to somewhere in the region of two degrees of warming, right? That's enough to tip us out of the environment that contemporary human homo sapiens grew up in, that is enough to tip us out of the environment that all of our principle food species grew up in, that evolved in, right?

And what that means is, is that actually, like, we now need to start thinking in terms of like, it's not like the world winks out of existence when I pop my clogs. 'cause I can do that, just go crossing the road here quite easily. It doesn't stand out in the middle of Road Island Avenue and just say, come get me, right?

Like we, we actually, we, we, we need to actually really start thinking about this in terms of like, okay, well what's the effect for the next generation and the generation after that? And then actually start, and you know what, they're right in front of us when that 14-year-old like shows up with a bleeding arm and the rest of it. And like when you ask them, well, why do you cut yourself?

And they say, well, the world is spiral. You know, the world is spiraling outta control. Literally everything's on fire.

And you know, like, I can't see a Peter, we should actually listen. We shouldn't just go, oh, you know what? It's all right.

We're just gotta put you some antidepressants. Uh, uh, you know, like everything will be fine. And um, you know, like, let's go back to like counting all the zeros in my f*****g bank account because you know what, that is totally synthetic.

And those wounds and those scars remain right? You know, we, we should we, you know, like we need to start doing a lot better by these folks. And like, so the way that I think about things is that we should be building for a much deeper set of resilience.

We should not be saying, well, you know, what if we just build the house of cards just higher and higher and higher and higher and higher, you know, like, and if I'm just the guy building like the house, the, like the last couple of steps on the house, the cards, everything's gonna be fine. You know, it's like, well actually, you know, we actually do run risks of kind of like basal collapses. And so what we need to actually do is say, well, okay, if we're gonna start, if we're gonna think about engineering, well, you know, like do we always engineer, for example, for an always online environment?

And I would answer, that's actually a really stupid idea. Don't do that because, you know, like human agency will ensure that you will not always have an always online route. I mean, starlink is a brilliant example of this, right?

Starling, it's like, it's a universal, always online environment. You know what, half a dozen ASAP missiles and the rest of it, and that's it, it's game over the whole system. Well, yeah, I, I'm gonna end on a, on a positive note because I think that it is the whole point.

And, uh, you know, I think that, you know, a lot of the answers that, that we'll find that, again, these may be outside my, you know, survivable age range may take, you know, another 50 years and so forth to work through it. But I see it in the, I see it in the hands and the mouth of my kids' generation, which is mental. Absolutely Right.

We have so much room to improve so that we ourselves and individually can enjoy this world. And I think a mentally healthy world will come up with solutions to all these issues so much faster than we muddle through right now. That, that may be the key by itself just maybe 50 to a hundred years from now.

People are just way better in their heads. So they're not going through all the agony of, well, I think actually, Honestly, I honestly think that actually like a good, like a, a really good start would be simply getting it into people's heads that the endless pursuit of like nine or 10 or have 12 zeros or have mentioned, you know, in, you know, of, of some fictitious value in the rest of it actually isn't the be all, end all of existence. No.

You know, as, as the great, uh, uh, great philosopher, uh, John Paul join, John and Ringo told us, you know, money can't buy me love, but, uh, and, and will, so at that point, we're gonna take another green room 'cause we're getting into the, the, the length limits here. So thank you ton I, No problem. Thank you everyone for coming along and uh, we will catch you with the robotic camera next time.

Alright, Very good. Hey everyone, you know what? We're gonna play a game today of geo processor politics.

It's part of the new World order in Balkanization. You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone.

Happy Wednesday. It's Alan Shimmel here for Textron Gang. We've got a lot going on in the world as there seems to be going on in the world every day.

Um, got a smaller gang today. We had a couple people between weather and medical stuff, uh, not able to make it. So let me introduce you to, you know, we go to war with the army.

We have not the army we want. Let me introduce you to today's army gang here. Um, first of all, you got a chuckle out of that joining us from down in Austin, where it's a frigid, frigid day in Austin.

He is a FU analyst, CTO co-founder of Visible Impact Guy Carrier. Hey guy, welcome. Thank you.

And a proud member of the Allen Chimble army. Even if he's not, if he, even if I'm not the army he wants today, well, Only the army he has. Well, you go, you know, me and Robbie.

Uh, but, uh, yeah, no, it's good to be here again on this, uh, bridged Austin Day. It's 19 degrees right now, which is darn cold for central Texas. That is, that's, that's now right frigid for central Texas.

Oh, man. Joining us also, speaking of frigid up in Harrison, New York. I don't know what the weather is there though.

It's our Chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm good.

This is a volunteer army as far as I know. But do we need the institute to draft? Uh, We might, I thought I was part of the draft.

Well, I was thinking about bringing in North Korean Troops. All right, some remote it And, uh, what the heck, what the heck? Wouldn't it be the first time they jumped into someone else's war?

Um, anyway, on that note, Mike, we've got a couple things to go over today. One is this part of a bigger issue that I'm gonna be addressing on my shimmy says this week, tomorrow. And that is, you know, I call it the bulk balkanization of the tech world.

And it's, it has a lot to do. You know, I think we're entering into a new world order, right? The, we're seeing the death now of the post World War II new world order that was kind of modified with the fall of the Soviet Union, but we're going into a balkanization era and, and it, it's affecting tech in general.

Processors, cpu, usable things in particular. Talk to us about it. Yeah.

Things are, shall we say, a little on the unsettled side. Um, I'm not quite clear what's happening here. And the one minute the President is saying that the Taiwanese stole our chip business and we want it back the next minute.

Uh, we're talking with TMSC about they're gonna take over parts of Intel and the foundries, but they're gonna build those in the US in return. And who knows, maybe this is part of some larger exit strategy from Taiwan that we're gonna give back to mainland China someday. But Guy, what's going on here?

Well, to start with, um, I, I, I personally don't try, I try to avoid the words strategy or plan when it applies to the current US administration. 'cause I think it's a lot more shoot from the hip, um, approach. Uh, you know, that that's sort of an approach.

Just, you know, just get going and do something and say something depending on, on what the will or wish of the moment is and what sounds like it's gonna be interesting and popular and supported. Um, I, I think that the broad perspective on this is pretty clear, which is exactly like you said, um, you know, intellectually speaking globally and Europe and the United States, there, there has been this whole globalization push since the Bretton Woods Conference right after World War ii. And it was supposed to be this global supply chain and this wonderment and amazingness of, um, all kinds of countries around the world specializing in what they could specialize in and, uh, uh, trade and all that other sort of stuff, getting it all over the place.

Um, I think there was already, thanks to the great Recession, a little bit of concern, let's say popular non-intellectual concern about this. Um, so we, again, you know, people saying, you know, built in the USA is better and all that other sort of stuff since the seventies, since the sixties when, when a lot of our manufacturing started to move offshore, but I I, none of that had the real effect of slowing or halting globalization. What did was covid and the global shutdown of the supply chain and the sudden realization that there are certain strategic, uh, products that one does not want to have across an ocean.

One would like to have onshore in your own nation, in our case, in the United States, but for other nations in their nations. And one of those big strategic resources, even pre ai, was computer chips of many kinds. And so that led to the CHIPS act during the previous administration.

The CHIPS Act has been this huge investment in onshoring to the United States manufacturing, even if by a company like TSMC, the biggest chip manufacturer in the world. And let's not forget that their equipment, the key equipment they use comes from basically one country as well in the Netherlands, right? It's this onshoring of the ability to create these chips.

The arrival of AI made that even more acute made that need even more acute. So that's kinda what's been going on this whole time. And it's been joined by this popular movement when people couldn't get basic goods like toilet paper and stuff during the, during the pandemic that we needed to be, have more stuff, more jobs, more manufacturing, more capabilities within the United States in the case of some other kind of supply shock, like what occurred at covid.

Now, when I go and say like, I don't really pay attention to plans, the strategies and all that other sort of stuff, the basic strategy such as it exists is this tariffs strategy. This idea that you're going to force other countries to do what you want by making it more expensive for them to import stuff into the United States. The pre the statement by the president of Taiwan, I, I'm a little confused and maybe you can now clarify for me or for us how this state somehow that Taiwan is gonna invest more in the United States, and I scratch my head as much as you do.

See now I say that all the time, thanks to you, Mike, I scratch my head as much as you do with this idea that we're gonna onshore everything, but we're gonna have TSMC, which is a foreign company, own and run it, which was what was being discussed like with respect to Intel's Intel Foundry business. Again, that's onshore manufacturing, but it would be run from Taiwan. It's, that's all very confusing.

But in the end, um, what we're talking about is, uh, uh, threats through tariffs to force something that's already happening and has been happening for the past four years, which is this move of manufacturing, chip manufacturing in particular into the countries that use them so that they don't have to worry as much about the global supply chain. And that is a retrenchment like Alan and Mike used, said that's a retrenchment away from the world order of the previous 50, 60 years of increased globalization. 75.

Well, I think, I think after Canada, Canada becomes the 51st state, TMSC, we'll just move there, right? Is that how that works? I'm not gonna take, We come the 52nd state.

I, it's worth noting incidentally that just recently, like within the last week or something, the State Department removed in, in its Taiwan information page or whatever it is, it removed a, a, a flat out statement from the US government that it does not support Taiwanese independence from China. They removed that and China reacted as well. So there's this also this other piece of it of like sort of this nationalist Taiwan support side, or whatever you want to call it, that has not existed since Taiwan was created.

So I don't know what's going on here, Alan, Folks step for guy. I have to tell you, first of all though, kudos for you for the historical context and laying this all out. You built a beautiful taste there.

Um, that was, that was really well, really done well, professorial, even I might say in terms of the strategy, I, I think, you know, we all kind of know what the strategy of the administration is. I call it T-S-O-T-W, throw s**t on the wall. Oh, throw s**t.

Yeah. And see what sticks. I mean, I used to call it MSU, like I'd say I went to MSU, it was like, oh, Michigan State.

No, make s**t up. Yeah, Well that's basically what they do. But, but you know, it, it, again, This tariffs thing land on this tariffs thing really is a strategy.

It is a simple one step strategy. But, but here's the Problem. Threaten tariffs put on tariffs.

But it is, And yes, it is a strategy. This strategy would've worked real well in 1958, which is just about where Donald Biff Trump is stuck in, okay? When, when the US is the predominant market by 10 x over the rest of the world, and you put the barriers into doing business in the us the, the rest of the world has to march in block step.

Unfortunately, that's not the case anymore. And when you do tariffs, you are forcing other countries to do tariffs. I've said it's before, it's not an America first, uh, strategy.

It's an America alone strategy because you are gonna put up tariffs. And then so is Canada. So is Mexico, so is China, so is Europe, so is Brazil, so is South Africa.

So is every other country in the world. And so what do you have? You have the balkanization here.

And Donald Trump says, well, we still have the biggest market. Everyone wants to do business with us. Yes and no.

We have 330 million people. 4 billion. 4 billion.

India. India has more children in honors programs in school and math and science honors programs than we have children, period. So what's gonna happen here in short order is when the rest of the world says F you, and they put up their own berries and say, we don't want American goods.

There's only so much we're gonna make in America that we can consume in America. At the end of the day, a good part of our economy is still based on exporting food materials. Are we gonna have corn rotting in the, in the fields?

'cause we don't know what to do. Oh, maybe we'll make ethanol out of it. I don't know.

Are we gonna have crops rotting in the fields? Because no one will buy our food. No one will take our meat.

No one. And how the farmer's gonna feel about that. We could buy American, but there's only so much Americans.

Goodbye. There's a lot more of them than there are of us. And that's the basic fallacy in this strategy, if you wanna call it strategy.

That's, you know, not to mention what it's gonna do for inflation and everything else. Yeah. Coming back to the chips thing though, the part that I don't get guys, is like, we seem to be talking like we can put up a, a semiconductor manufacturing facility in six months.

And last time I checked, it'll be like closer to the end of the decade before any of these things come online. Okay. I try to, I try to stay pretty open-minded in terms of, I'm, I'm not a big supporter of this administration's moves or actions.

Um, I'm not a supporter at all in general, but I do understand that there's a lot of people who support it and like what they're seeing. And so I want to be respectful towards that point of view, even if I disagree with it. Um, so what you're referring to, Mike, however, is a classic political move, which is to take credit for something that has already been done by somebody else.

Chip, the CHIPS Act is already creating, I mean, it's a, it's a roughly 18 month accelerated timeline to go from, from field to factory to to, to, to fab. Right. So, yeah, it's not gonna be six months, but, you know, most of these, if not all of these new fab facilities, um, are are not gonna, or you know, they're, none of them are online yet due to the CHIPS Act, as far as I know, at least if there are any.

It's few. And so they are gonna come online this year, and the current administration's gonna take credit for it. Well, I don't, even though it essentially had nothing to do with it, Guy, I don't know.

I You're assuming they're gonna leave the money in the CHIPS Act. The problem is the Chip Chips Act is part of, uh, this, they refer it the Green New Deal, and they want cut the Green New Deal. Okay, so hold on, Alan.

The CHIPS Act doesn't exist anymore in Newspeak. Right. Okay.

The CHIPS Act has been, you don't hear anything about the CHIPS Act anymore. I think they called the Truth Speak if we're gonna go more. Well in here, you Don't hear about the Infrastructure Act or what was it called?

The Inflation Reduction Act, whatever. Right? You, they, they, they don't exist anymore.

What happened in the past four years doesn't exist unless there's a beneficial outcome, in which case it is thanks to the current administration. It, it's, it's, like I said, it's an old political move, however, correctly, uh, uh, executed this time. So, but Mike, that's where it comes from.

They can say all kinds of stuff. People say all kinds of stuff, and when they get away with it, 'cause they get away with at least some of it, then Well, if you say it enough and loud enough, We wanna speak truth. And Yeah, if you, if you say it enough times and loud enough.

But here's the thing, I don't think it's just a question of building a foundry. I think it's, it's having the right people, the right training, the right materials, the right everything else. And, and again, if, if other countries aren't gonna buy what you're outputting because you've tariffed them, That's not so, so, I, I get where you're coming from, Alan, but I think the primary initial impact of the tariffs should they stick, um, is to the American Consumer.

Oh, no, no doubt about this. Prices go Up tax on Americans. And so, so the, the reciprocal tariffs, um, are going to affect the key citizens of those s the consumers in those countries.

No, It, it's Gonna, the biggest impact on the world economy comes from the United States, you know, business and consumer not buying as much because it's more expensive. All right. So let me come back to this other point then.

90 more. We have, we have talked about Intel as this national treasure in the past. So is Intel not so much a national treasure at this point?

And we're gonna be happily slicing it up with some sort of strange arrangement with TMSC. I mean, what's going on here? Suddenly the tenor and the tone has changed.

Um, I think it started to change 12 months ago. And then, was it five or four months ago when Pat Gelsinger quit that? Was this sort of one of those moments in the news that suddenly causes everybody to take notice?

Intel's um, main position has been in data center CPOs, um, less so in on the, on, on desktop and client devices, but still there as well. I only say less so 'cause a MD has had long inroads into there, and it's a lower margin business. Um, um, and, uh, um, when Intel got creaky in, its in its, you know, sort of combo BAB and micro architecture strategy, when it started to get creaky in that and sort of slow moving, um, it wasn't so much notice because it was still a good default choice, especially for cloud instances.

Uh, and it was just understood, right, um, what AMD's end run did in the end, combined with the sudden attention on the GPU. It just sucked all the wind out of Intel's sails. And I, I, I think you're right.

I I think that, you know, the mighty half fallen at this point, and, um, it's a pretty open, uh, CPU market, especially with arm jumping in. And instead of just being a, uh, a design firm, suddenly Masi Mai so is saying, wait a minute. Like, we gotta get in on this manufacturing game too, because there's just so much money out there.

So, well, I I think part Of that is I wouldn't trust what anybody is telling me about the foundry, so I want to take control of my own destiny. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, there's, there's more to that too though, right? Um, look, let's, let's say the emperor has no close Intel, missed the boat on mobile chips, and, and GPUs use, and, and everyone knew this for a long time already, uh, certainly on mobile, right? You wouldn't have Qualcomm as, as powerful as it is, had Intel had a, a mobile chip alternative.

And as a matter of fact, when you go buy laptops now, it's not uncommon to see SNAP J and laptops, right? So in Intel kind of missed the boat on that. I mean, and quite frankly, when you talk about their server processes, processors, right?

You had xons, but you know, they, they just, they kept doing incremental of what they were already doing, incremental improvements on it, and they, and they missed markets. It happens. It's a rare bird like Microsoft that could miss the internet initially and still regain position that can maybe, you know, but didn't miss ai certainly.

But Microsoft has been late to some of the big tech innovations in its space and still been able to recover kudos to them. Intel missed these and, and, and frankly, their ability to recover is in doubt. Now, PSMC though has a history of making promises about moving stuff to America and doing stuff in the US and then not quite following through on it.

There's already some T-S-M-T-S-M-C foundries in various stages of construction in the US that have never Thanks to the CHIPS Act Continue. Yes, and absolutely with CHIPS ACT money. Yeah.

Thanks to the CHIPS Act, because they were basically bribed, they were sent a buck a bucket load of money by, by the United States. But I don't believe those are functional or anywhere near functional yet. No, no, no, they're not.

No. They take, they, like Mike said, they take, they take two years to, to go online. Mm-hmm.

And, and when you have acts of Congress, like the CHIPS act or any act of Congress, it takes 12 months to just even like, get their ducks in order to ensure that the money's being spent correctly in the right places and all that other sort Of thing. So, but that's the way government functions. That doesn't mean you in and gut it.

Yes. But all of that being said, you know, especially as it relates to Taiwan, if you are TSMC, what do you do here? You, you are in essence buddied up with the Taiwanese government, right?

You want to maintain that status quo. You recognize that long term present administration may or may not do anything to prevent Taiwan becoming part of, uh, China. Um, you know, there's patriotism and there's money, and they don't necessarily come into the same fist or hand here.

And, and so that's gonna be some decisions that are made. But again, you know, this, this is CHIPS in particular, I think we're going to see this throughout tech, right? We, you know, the, the concept of data, sovereign sovereignty is, is something we all recognize, right?

I wanna keep my data within the borders of my country. What we're gonna enter into is tech sovereignty. I want my tech here, and it's not just in the us.

'cause don't underestimate, the EU in mass is not that much smaller than the US market. The Chinese market is not that much smaller than the US market. The Indian market is, is probably the fastest growing in the world.

'cause just of sheer numbers. So short term, it may sound like a good thing a year, two years out, this whole tech sovereignty thing. And, and who loses for it?

We all lose for it because as consumers, we're better off in a worldwide competition where we get to choose the best and the most efficient and the right tools for the job. Not what only I could get. Like, you don't want to be a rush like a Soviet citizen.

What was the name of the Russian cars, Mike, do you remember? No idea. But we're gonna be coming back to talk about tariffs later this week.

So let's, all Right, we'll take a break here on Text TRO Gang. I, I got, I hear the music playing. We're going take a break.

We're coming back and we're gonna talk about an Apple encryption angst here on Textron Gang. Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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Let's revolutionize your tech journey. Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, we're back with maybe a topic that's slightly less contentious, but probably not much less contentious.

Um, the United Kingdom, the land of the Official Secrets Act is once again pushing Apple for access to encrypted data from in the name of security, oddly enough, uh, in this country at different times. The FBI has kind of echoed a similar sentiment, but now we have, uh, people in Congress basically wagging their finger at the UK saying, how dare you want access to this information? And this story is kind of a continuing, uh, adventure because law enforcement says we need access to encrypted data to catch the bad guys.

And then other folks are saying, we have a fundamental right to privacy. And Alan, you've been watching this, can this ever get resolved? Or is this, is there some middle ground here?

Or is this like, we just gotta one side's gotta suck it up? Or, or, yeah. Or whether they like it or not, well, Look, they can always go buy that program from the Israeli company that breaks the apple encryption.

But that being said, you know, I thought we did find a sort of middle ground on this back around, you know, after nine 11 when under the w George W. Bush administration, things were a little saner back then. And, and they set up like a whole separate court system for when, uh, government can go in and demand these kinds of things.

Now, breaking apple encryption was, was a different story, but, you know, but there was a, a court set up, right? And then that was obviously abused during a subsequent administrations, and, and that kinda went away. But, but here's the bottom line.

Well, the court's still there, Alan, The, the court is there. Yes. I, I just don't know.

Yeah. How much, you know, it's used per, in any event, what complicates this is, it's, it's crossing borders again, right? Data sovereignty, tech sovereignty, those US congressmen who are p****d at, at the UK would only two gladly approve US agencies being able to do it right now, I Don't know, Ron Wyden iss one of them, and He's been a, well, Rob, they're, they're the minority now, guy.

Fair enough. Yeah. He could yell and scream from the back benches, as they would say over in London, right?

But the, the fact is, this is really an issue of do we have a fundamental right to privacy? And yes, there are times when every one of us would say The heck with it, we need to get that information. I need to know if there's more attacks planned in a nine 11 kind of scenario, I, and I, that's a life or death for thousands per ta, you know, catastrophe prevented.

But should it be up to an Apple, a Google, a Microsoft to the, the defenders of that right, to privacy, right? Because it's an individual's, right? Does, you know, to put it in legal terms, does Apple have standing to talk on our behalf or to represent on our behalf and say, no, you can't have the ability to unencrypt this, even though we have that ability, we can't give that to you.

Right? And that, that I think is, is a fundamental issue here. There's two issues.

Number one, do individuals have that? Right? And one is the rights of the government.

A government supersede that individual, right? So a classic balancing right of, of, of responsibility here. And then number two, what standing does Apple, Google, or any of these companies have in standing in the way?

So to me, that's, that's the, the pivotal issue issues here. It's not much different than a wiretap when, when the phone company would put the wiretap in, well, as long as there was a court order, and they weren't gonna stand up and say, no, that phone is your private reserve, even though theoretically your home is your castle. But, um, guy, I mean, is this kind of just, you know, legal grandstanding.

I am really curious what the origin of this, um, strategy, uh, on the part of the labor government in the UK is. Um, but let's let, let, let's start by being clear about the difference between what you described Mike and what you are reacting to Al because you said the, the key two words, court order, court order is a process. There is a warrant for wiretapping.

There's a warrant for going into my personal safe to see what's in there, uh, or for script searching me or any of those violations of privacy. There is a process for that, a process, a due process, meaning one that involves, for example, a grand jury, uh, you know, 25 of my peers, um, evaluating the reasons and, and, uh, that sort of thing. I know a lot of court orders happen on a more administrative basis from like a judge overnight or whatever.

And that's, there's all of these are part of a process that weigh the safety of the public and, and the enforcement of laws against privacy. That's not what we're talking about here in the uk because the access that they're demanding is on demand access at any time with no particular press surveillance. In other words, the ability to go in and take a look in the old time they want, um, maybe that's unfair to say in the old time, they want, maybe they have a process as well.

But there is a difference there. Um, there have been cases, and I I'm not as expert in this particular field as as many, but there have been cases where, at least in the United States, the, the government has, uh, or through process, there has been a warrant or a request for information from encrypted information held in the cloud. And I think the companies have resisted or refused Apple's contention is that it has created a system where Apple itself cannot provide that access, but nonetheless, warrants can be issued and the demand can be made, and the target of the warrant can be, you know, compelled to comply, um, by decrypting or putting in their password or whatever it is that they do, or they go to jail in just for not complying.

That's not what's happening here in the uk. I think that, Alan, this question of whether or not people have the right to privacy is a question that needs to be brought more public and discussed more publicly. Because I think most people in the United States at least just assume they do have the right to privacy.

But there is a long arm of legal argumentation that there is no such right to privacy in the US Constitution that some states do have, some US states do have the right to privacy in their constitutions, but that the United States constitution does not have it. Um, this is a really, But, but guy, there, there is an amendment bill of rights, undue search and seizure and, and, and, uh, due process clauses that you, you do have rights. I mean, they might not call it a right to privacy.

Oh, Yeah. But they're not, they don't have to do with privacy. So then in other words, It's your right to Property.

The, the inspection around It comes out of a right to property, right? That's your property. I'm not sure there's a right to property in the constitution, UE search and seizure.

I get the, the, you know, what, what had created the FISA courts, what created the situation where there was a process, however, secret before, you know, uh, doing surveillance, which is not something pursuant to a criminal investigation, it's just surveillance had to do with the, the principle that if it's, if a US citizen could be surveilled, could be spied on, there should be a process to ensure that that's not just done, you know, willy-nilly. Mm-hmm. But there, there is maybe no Probable cause is, is the term.

Right? You know, the constitutional foundation for that. And I don't know how the UK law works.

I think that is, I think you've, you, you've hit on exactly the main issue here, which is outside of the process of courts and adjudication and all that other sort of stuff where there's suspic suspicion of a crime or a lawsuit or any other, outside of all of that, just as a general rule, should the government be, any government anywhere, be allowed to simply spy on anybody? Yep. So bega, you're talking about a very US specific probable cause, undue search and seizure, you know, these are constant US con UE process itself, very US centered view now happens to be the UK may in fact have a more evolved system of that than we do.

And I No constitution, however, No constitution, but they have their common law, Not a written constitution. Yeah. They have their common law.

They have a longstanding, you know, going back to the Magna Carter of, of rights of individuals versus the monarchy, you know, the government. But what happened? And, and so let's assume the UK has US style safeguards in place, right?

To show probable cause before they would do such a thing. What happens to the next country when Libya wants to do it, or Syria, or, or North Korea or whatever. There's a lot of, there's 200 and something countries out there, right?

And that I, you know, you, you're gonna start picking which countries really do our probable cause, which ones don't, and that's the ones I should do it to. If you're an Apple, you can't be in that position. You don't want to be the arbiter of which country is, is really doing it right or wrong, right?

So I think Apple's tried to take a, a smarty pants kind of excuse the term, but a smarty pants kind of thing saying, you know what, we don't have the ability to do it. It's encrypted and it's at our hands. And now the UK's coming in and saying nonsense.

I want you to build that back in there. I want that. Yeah.

So, so, so here's the second step, right? Which is that a DP, the, the, um, the, uh, encryption and protection data protection technology from Apple is not enabled by default. You have to go in and positively say like, I want this on my system.

Um, but essentially it's kind of like Apple has invented or designed or created something in the UK saying, oh no, you can't even have that. You can't offer that here, right? Because that's really The, the, that's the issue Here.

That, that, but, but, but I don't get it. Like, I still don't get it. Apple doesn't want to meet That the uk if they have any process at all for, for any specific case, they can run through whatever process they have to compel, you know, discovery or whatever the word is of whatever's been protected.

And Apple doesn't have to have anything to do with it. The the end user does, but the end user won't give it to em. If you remember back to when, and They go to Jan, Remember when Pete, But if I have like a terrorist situation, I can't just call up the end User.

Yeah. But that's what happened in nine 11. Sharif, Kali, or whatever his name is, isn't giving it up no matter how much we water tortured him.

Um, but that, but, you know, go back for, let, let's drop the politics for a second. Go back to when PKI first came on the scene. You guys are all of an age, you remember that was one of the cool things about PKI is, once I set up that public private key, no one, no one could get to that without me saying, okay, apple, Google, none of those people stood in in the way it was my encrypted data.

And that was why that was one of the big draws for PKI one of the big. Yeah. And, and that's you, you're hit.

That's what it is. 'cause Mike, um, uh, in a terrorist situation, if the terrorists are dumb, they're going to get caught. If they're not dumb, they're gonna use PKI or whatever the modern equivalent is, and Apple, Google, whoever, you know, who cares.

The, the, the information will still be encrypted end to end. And I think to a certain degree, apple and Google, wish we'd go back to that and they get, but yeah, My first reaction to the UK doing this was, this is dumb, but it was just a gut reaction. Now I'm coming back to that.

It's kind of dumb. What are they trying to do? They want Apple to build it.

Now that Silk Road is back. They're just, you know, just everybody can just use, you know, find some, some hacked encryption method on Silk Road if they wanna, Until, until, until, uh, quantum breaks that. But who knows?

Oh man. I Was gonna mention Quantum. Well Done, sir.

All right. Hey, we're gonna take a break. Let's come back and talk about, uh, HoloLens and Microsoft, you know, pushing that off the table.

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Hey, folks, we're back. We're gonna shift the gear a little bit, but we are now going on with the continuing saga. What happened with, uh, Microsoft HoloLens, the latest is that they have taken the HoloLens that they were selling to the government and the military, and shifted it over to an outfit called and Android.

Um, I guess they will service that particular market. There are other niche markets that are using these headsets for various training use cases, but Guy, it seems like the notion that, um, any of these virtual reality headset things are gonna become a consumer product. Is that dead at this point?

What's going on? Well, uh, so this is really interesting, right? When we talked on this show about, um, the, uh, Microsoft Sunset, uh, uh, um, what, what it HoloLens two, um, uh, I, my reaction was Microsoft's got so mu I mean, their, their core strength is really in the business market and the enterprise market and, and public sector too, actually.

And, uh, there's so many commercial and, and, and industrial applications to augmented reality or virtual reality. I don't get it. It doesn't make sense to me.

And I speculated at the time that, um, that HoloLens was being run outta the consumer side of Microsoft. And, you know, it was, uh, one, another one of these Mars and Venus situations where they just didn't know how to market it into the business and public sector side. And so now we come all the way around here, and we, we find out there's some, again, I'm gonna speculate, there's some enterprising sales team over at Microsoft that in 2018, so quite a while ago, um, went and sold, uh, augmented reality, uh, to military, which is just about the most obvious application.

If you've ever played a video game ever of augmented reality, um, would be military uses. And so this same sales team or the delivery team on it was like, wait, you can't shut this thing down because, you know, we, we, we, we got a military contract here, we got the nine figure deal, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so what do they do?

Well, Microsoft still wants to get rid of it, so they're giving it, or I'm not giving it. They're selling it to, and which by the way, um, uh, how many of these, the Lord of the Rings named, uh, secret Military, whatever, we have planetary, we have Andel, I, there must be a bunch more out there. In any case, it both validates my contention that these things are, um, really best in industrial or public sector or commercial use, um, that Apple's own approach is, which is very consumery, is, um, you know, bound to, you know, fail or be so niche.

It's whatever. And then we, I think we have a new one from Google, if I remember right. There's, you know, there's a fair amount of new activity going on here, but that in the end, kind of like, you know, uh, driverless cars and, and driverless vehicles, it's really commercial that's ultimately gonna build that market.

This is one particular contract in one particular instance. Um, but, um, Microsoft has a long history of supporting and, and enabling and selling, uh, software into the US military, um, knows how to do it. Um, I imagine there's a lot of personnel who are gonna move over from Microsoft over to Andrew to help them out with this.

And, uh, in the end, was there a licensing agreement here as well? I mean, they're not just simply selling the technology wholesale. 9 billion.

Well, it's the, it's the startup course to the program. Theoretically, when you buy more, it'd probably get cheaper per, per per headset. Yeah.

And, and come on, Mike. This is a of the thousand dollars, 2000 toilet. You brought it up.

Let, let me, let me, let me dive in here, guys. You Do it, you do it all. Personal sander, all industries.

This isn't some kind of dummy corporation set up in Budapest, Hungary, is it? Correct. Not gonna, no, no, no.

I think Andrew from Longstanding military blow by soldiers one day. Is it like almost SOD operation? What are we talking here?

No, no, they, they're, well, they're A well known defense con. Okay. That was number one, number 2 21.

What's me? 9 billion to the US Department of Defense. You know, this is one of the things that I, I really think we, Over six years, incidentally, just 'cause this started in 2018, continue.

The real issue is, you know, a lot of us are ringing our hands about, or or joyfully clapping our hands in glee about what this do dodge, whatever Elon Musk and his merry band of Renegades are doing, but they're doing it on the civilian side of government for the most part. And, and here's the reality of the US government expenditures and, and budget when you take Medicare and Social Security and the Department of Defense budget and all its related agencies and all that good stuff, right? I think something like 80 to 90% of the US budget on those three things, Medicare, social security, DOD, everything else is peanuts.

So you are sitting and, and, and trying to crack peanuts here, but you're not going to really affect the trajectory of this thing unless you really hit where the, where the real money is. And no one's gonna stand. I don't think anyone, well, I should never say that, but unless you're willing to take, you know, some knives to some sacred cows, like a $22 billion dollar virtual reality goggle set, you're never gonna, everything else is just peanuts.

And I think that's what's needed to be done here. I'm sorry, guy, go ahead. You Can I pile on a little bit?

Yeah, no, sure. Go ahead. So somebody muted me, I don't know who Wasn't, uh, Yeah, no, it was me.

Um, so 22 billion, roughly 21 point something billion, 9 billion for how many? 150,000, or is it 300,000? I don't remember.

No, I don't think it's, I think it's 120,000. How many Headsets? 120 hundred 20,000 headsets.

Okay. All right. So first of all, it's over, like I said, it's over six years, not county 2025.

But I think, Mike, what you were scratching your head about is, you know, dude, that's like $170,000 per headset. That's more than The apple. That's per, that's more than the Apple headset.

Little, little bit. That's why I alluded to the famous $2,000 toilet or whatever, because the, when, when, whoever it is the, the some defense agency probably that calculates the cost of things and that figures out what the right amount is to pay. And like all that other sort of stuff.

They put every single bit into these programs. So it's not just the manufacturing, it's the development, it's the support, it's the training, it's the this, it's the, that over and over again. And when you add all that stuff up, like, you know, the $2,000 toilet, it turned out that the equipment itself, that piece of the toilet itself cost a hundred bucks or whatever, and all the rest was the assumed lifetime of the toilet maintenance installation, the hours for the personnel, other sort of stuff.

7 million or, or $17 million or whatever. It, it's just not how it works. And especially for, like Alan said, essentially brand new technology that's supposed to be used on the battlefield, but, or something like that by people or who are flying things or like whatever it is that they're doing, there's a lot of expense and investment that needs to go into that.

And unlike a private company, you don't write it off. You have to account for every bit of it, all self-contained within the program. So that's how I unscr your head if it's possible to do so much.

Fair enough. Well, look, maybe we could use the Apple headsets. They're a little cheaper.

Um, anyway, please. Well, the Apple headsets may wind up with that commercial, with that commercial. I mean, I, I, I really, you know, maybe I'm just p*****g into the wind.

Oops. Said The s No, it's okay. We we're, we're, we're not a family of Shark.

Maybe I'm just open smoke or something, but, but I think that, that a lot of the action, a lot of the real action, the real market making that happens with these things happens through B2B commercial applications, public sector investment, that sort of stuff. And we tend to get distracted by people walking around wearing goggles instead of just like seeing reality around them with their own two eyes normally. Um, it's very distracting, but it's just, you know, it just points to the kind of innovation and creativity, um, that helped, you know, the capitalist world go around.

Mm-hmm. So, just to be clear, Alan, do you think that the level of scrutiny being applied by the Doge set is gonna be applied to these military contexts? Well, no.

Hell no. Those are sacred cows. It's sacred cows.

It might be applied to potential blue origin contracts. That would be interesting. But no, he, he wrote his check.

Maybe he wrote his check. Anyway. Well, so, so did we discuss on this show, or I, maybe I wasn't on it.

Um, the, um, the under 50 million, 200 million or 400 million going to Tesla for all electric Cyber trucks, military vehicles, distinct department or something. Not military. It was for military, it was for electric, uh, Cyber Trucks, tanks or something like that.

Cyber trucks for the, for diplomats, I think. Yeah. I thought it was armored cyber tax.

No, no, no, this is different. That was a different, is different. 400 million.

Oh. Anyway, look, we're over time. Put a few of those together and you got a viable business Almost.

Well, then you got to whatever. Don't get me started. Just a quick parental warning.

We do have strobe lights in adult language, so you're warned. Uh, Mike Guy, thanks for joining today on The Gang. We hope you've enjoyed this.

Happy Wednesday to you. Uh, we will be back tomorrow with another Textron gang. I think we also have a, uh, a Tech Field Day presentation on live today on Tech Drug tv, as well as the rest of our tech drug TV lineup.

So check that out. Hey, you could download the text on TV mobile app on Apple and Google if you'd like. Go check that out.

Our O-C-C-O-T-T app is is coming soon as well. Um, is that encrypted or not? You know, only if it has to be.

Uh, but until then, thanks. We need the peanut gallery. Here's another episode of Text Joint Gang.

Have a great day, everyone. We're out. This is Textron tv.

Hey everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. My next guest is Harry Wang. Harry is the VP of Growth and New Ventures over at Sonar.

You know, people we know from Sonar Source, but there's so much more there now. Uh, he's got some exciting news that just broke today, but first, let's welcome Harry. Welcome back to Tech Drunk tv.

It's good to have you. Thank you for having me again. Thank you.

Good to see you, Alan. Our pleasure. Harry, I, I mentioned, you know, you got some new news.

We're gonna make 'em wait just a little bit longer. Before we dive into that, let's first talk about you, right? VP of Growth in New Ventures.

There's a lot, you know, a lot could be hidden under those title. What exactly is the role there with that title? Yeah, what's, uh, you know, uh, it's a, it's a title that, uh, I invented with a permission from my CEO.

Um, but in a nutshell, I lead up, uh, our corporate development, business development, as well as a new business incubation as sonar and, uh, excellent. My engineering product background myself. I have, uh, done my 12 duty in business.

So this is a exciting combination of a different aspect of my profession. You know, it's funny in, in some of the startups that I helped co-found, that was kind of my role, corp, uh, biz dev. But you know how it is in startup.

Well, you do that with a role like that. You're involved in sales, you're involved in marketing, you're involved in product, right? You're involved in every aspect of, you know, some of the people who worked on my team said, yeah, you come in, you kiss the baby and take the photo up, but you really, you know, you're a little bit of everything there.

It's a, it's a, I, you know, I used to use the term Chief Strategy Officer, and that was before that became like a cool term. But, um, CSO was pretty good. Fantastic.

Anyway, Harry, I, I mentioned a lot of people know Sonar and they know Sonar Source, right? Mm-hmm. But there's so much, I mean, that's still big, don't get me wrong, but there's so much more to Sonar today.

Give, if you don't mind, give us, uh, kind of your view of the lay of the land of what Sonar Sonar is today. Yeah, sure. Uh, sonar, we know we are known in the industry for really helping developer building better software and building better software faster.

And, uh, we came from a background of, uh, developer building a company building prop for developers. Traditionally, we have been very laser focused on looking at the code, helping our developer, our user detecting issues, whether it's quality issues or security issues within the IDE within the DevOps. And as, as you said, you know, in the recent years, there are a lot of actually conversation about what is the role of a developer in this all AI centered world.

Uh, we certainly actually looking, you know, what is the role of a sonar in this, uh, new changing paradigm of a software development lifecycle as well. So, um, with, uh, you know, um, the recent conversation we had that we have start rolling out more AI enabled feature and capabilities and trying to stay true to our core mission, which is really about helping, being helpful to developers and enable them to build faster and better. A good way of putting it.

Alright, Ari, you guys got some big news. Come out today. Share it with us if you don't mind.

Yeah, absolutely. So today we are announcing, we have closed an acquisition of, uh, auto Code Rover, which is, uh, Singapore based team specialized in using AI and leveraging the unique AI capability and inventions they have, uh, out of, uh, uh, national University of, uh, Singapore to really actually helping developers, uh, remediate issues, right? So this is not just about detecting issues bugs or security vulnerabilities in the code in the software, but also actually able to completely autonomously fixing those issues on the fly.

Um, we are very excited about welcoming the Auto Code Robot team to the Sonar family and, uh, looking forward to integrating the technology and capability into the Sonar Quba product family as well. Sonar Cube. So the name of the company that you acquired in Singapore was, what's it called?

Auto Rover Auto Code Rover, uh oh, work Auto Code. Rover. Rover, yes.

Yes, you got it. And, and then the name, uh, is, uh, you know, uh, somewhat self-explanatory, right? So auto stands for doing things autonomously and uh, this is very much a agen AI based, uh, technology and, uh, product.

And, uh, we dealing with a code just like, uh, you know, all the Code rubber team is dealing with Code. The sonar is actually, you know, all about code for developers. So the synergy is right there.

This is a combination is really about being able to deliver insight into the code, but also being able to have actionable intelligence and being able to actually taking actions on those code row as you can. I'm a sci-fi fan and just like a Mars and Rovers on the Mars, this is really about not just actually US human developer doing everything end to end. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that can be actually hand off to the, the robots and the AI out there.

And that's the, in a nutshell, what it Rover is about having the agents out there fixing things and doing things for you and being helpful to developers. Got it. Thank you.

So, you know, for me, Harry, a key thing here is the agent AI aspect of this, right? Because, you know, we live in, we live in crazy times. Time is, you know, crunched generative AI is almost old hat already, even though, you know, we live in a bubble, we've been using it for two years.

Uh, you know, your family and your wife's family or what have you, they probably don't use AI quite as much yet, but we're looking at the next thing, and we all think that in 2025, this agentic ai very, very well be that next thing where it's not enough that an AI helps you write or code something, we want it to go to the next step, right? Yep. Yep.

And, and so you need an autonomous agent that is capable of, of, I'm going great to use the word thinking, but is capable of thinking about what needs to be done and then goes and does it, right? It's, it's that, and that's a big leap that we shouldn't, you know, ppo it's not, it's, it's a huge leap to say this is what you should do versus doing it. Yeah.

And, and that to me is, is Agen AI versus let's say generative ai. Generative AI may look at code and say, you know, you got some bugs here, there's a vulnerability there, and this is what you gotta do to remediate an agent actually going to do that is a whole nother level. Absolutely.

Absolutely. And, and yeah, and that's the big thing to me, that's a huge piece of this. Yeah, absolutely.

I think if you look at, and Alan, if we look back, um, the last couple of years where the generative AI becomes really a key topic in the industry and, and in the society it's more of a technology notion, right? So it's a piece of, uh, computer science technology that's actually being able to do predictable, wonderful things and then generating word documents and generating code, right? Um, and then the form of a product that general AI has been, you know, um, you know, helping, uh, the users is really in the form of, uh, uh, being assistance by and large, right?

You go on to chat GPT to ask questions or in, you know, in developer world, you go into the ID you have copilot and you have other code assistant to suggest the code answer questions in the q and a in the chat form. This is all being, uh, assistant right next to you. But Agen AI to me is more of a different formation of the product, not necessarily the technology.

So it's a more emphasize on how the product behave, not so much how it happens behind, under the hood, right? So AgTech AI is really about, you have a entity out there, in this case, the AI agents doing the job more autonomously instead of, uh, you know, we as a human user asking the, asking AI to do step by step, you kind of giving them a more abstract task describing these task as if you asking, you know, uh, you know, my son or or someone else you close to, to do certain type of a task or course right? Go shopping or whatever, right?

But this is about giving them a more, um, less step by step guide, but the more of actually what your objective with the goal is and letting that agent itself to completely task more autonomously so you can go on to do more important, more high level task. I love it. I love it.

So you mentioned it closed already. Well, it sounds like it was a relatively smaller company so you could, you know, get it closed quickly. So congratulations to you and, and to the, uh, auto Code Rover team.

When do you think we'll see this technology incorporated into the SonarCube product line? Yeah, it's a good, great question. The team is basically at working out the product planning and obviously some of the underhood design as well.

And, uh, as in, in integrations, uh, you know, on the day of let's say integration, we probably haven't figured out all the answers. So that's the honest and true answer. Um, but my hope for the team and is really about being able to ship something fast to our users in, within the 2025 time horizon.

And, and if you look actually what we have announced in the past, just within our course on key product, we have the AI code, fixed capability, AI assurance capability for our user so that they can actually start leveraging those capability in internal capabil ready ai. Um, the other code roller technology is the essentially, uh, extension, if you will, right? So we detect the issues which suggest the fixes.

Now we have the agent to be able to go out there, do more complete task end to end. To us, this is about just actually working through some of the detailed technical designs and then being able to deliver that in the same consistent interface. And the team is actually very, I'm very excited about the team and, uh, very, you know, group of entrepreneurs and I have my confidence in them moving fast and, uh, and that we'll be back sharing the product news and the roadmap versa.

I love it. Harry, you may not know the answer to this, but I gotta ask anyway. Um, you know, GitHub has co-pilot and as does, uh, co-pilot, like functional, whatever you want to call it, but like, I call it copilot like functionality in a lot of built into the IDs now.

Yeah. Right? And other products are building their own copilots that go into whatever IDE you are using and, and, and what have you.

Um, what's interesting is some companies are, are saying that sort of table stakes, right? You use my product because it comes with that. Other companies are saying, Hey, that's a premium feature.

I may offer a free or low cost solution, but to use the, the copilot AI like functionality is, is a premium feature. Mm-hmm. AgTech ai, we, it's, it's even, you know, Salesforce obviously has agent force or whatever it is.

SAP announced last week, they're building agents into a lot of what they're doing. I, I don't know if the market has figured out is that something you charge extra for or is that like just table stakes today that this is what people expect, users expect this? Yeah.

Where do you think this ends up? Yeah, I mean, to you quite, um, earlier comment about the market, right? So I, my my personal view is, uh, you are gonna see different variations of, uh, people, uh, the companies out there, uh, the vendors out there thinking differently in terms of how they monetizing capability and how they, you know, engage the users, right?

To be honest, I think the market is not ready. It is not settled about actually how the value is being delivered or, um, you know, what's the exchange of the value. Um, so we take a more open, we'll be more open-minded here, and, uh, specifically with this acquisition, the capability we are launching to the user, we focus on actually thinking through the form of the capability we want to deliver in the product and worry about actually how we actually, um, you know, running that as a business later, right?

So we don't have the full answer when it comes to pricing packaging. Um, but I, maybe I want to take the opportunity to step back a little just to share some of my view and someone's view on how the, the software development life cycle can evolve and, uh, will probably evolve in the next, uh, two or three years. So with AI, I think, and specifically with a, uh, Gentech ai, I do think that the developers are in the moment, in actually very exciting moment time now we have the ability to move up the stack or up level, the actually the type of task we wanna spend our time on.

So I am, in my analogy, I would actually think in the, in the job, if you just look at job profession, job titles, I think every engineers out there, you know, are in the position to, you essentially do the software architects job, right? So spend that means spending more time on designing the software, you essentially understand the business requirement, focus on the high level designs of different components and how they relate to each other, nail down the data model, nail down the behaviors, and then really start delegating more of these repetitive tasks. For example, gimme a, you know, a starting template of how this actually gonna be implemented, or how do I address the potential design deficiencies and the issues, right?

So those detailed tasks, repetitive tasks can be delegated to the agent in, in these world. So that means for developers, we can stay up level focused on more high level task, but also it means now we actually also need to stay in the realm of actually how am we gonna actually manage and trust all these agents out there. So there's a level of actually every single developer will need to be really stay actually being accountable to the outcome that is the software and being, having delivering reliable software and safer software, right?

So now you have your peers not necessarily actually being your buddy programmers, but actually it's just a piece of ai, right? How do you manage that? How do we trust the ai?

But I think that there need to be some platform that allow the users, allow the developer to actually essentially measure, verify, and observe the agents out there and form a decision. And so that's, that's actually critical elements of us staying true to the, the, the, the mission for the delivery and safe softwares. Um, so in that context, right?

So what, uh, we with the, both this acquisition and also some of our homegrown technology is really focusing on two elements. One, sonar as a platform is all about deliver higher quality and better software and safer software fast for the user, right? So there's elements of assurance and trust elements for developers and for the organizations.

That doesn't change whether the code is written by human or by ai. So we continue to invest in that area. At the same time, AI is going to actually create more specialized, uh, being that actually create specialized agent who does a code remediation, who does code suggestions, and who actually does maybe documenting generations and unit has written.

There need to be some kind of a platform capability that allow human engineers to manage this as a platform. So that's something we actually very interesting how this world evolve and, uh, how soner is gonna be rather estate relevant to that. I love it, Harvey, we're over time.

I gotta wrap it up. People want to get more information though. Where can they go?

com. Uh, as always, uh, we, uh, we share all the latest and greatest, uh, on our website and, uh, expect we will be refreshing, um, our site, uh, with, uh, you know, article code r information as we incorporate that into our products. Fantastic.

Congratulations to you and the whole sonar team, as well as the Auto Code Rover, uh, Rover team. Thank You. You know what, this is, this is why so knows who they are.

They stay on top of the latest stuff, genic AI in Sonar Cube coming at you. All right, we're gonna take a break here on Tech Drunk tv. We'll be back in a moment.

Hey everyone, I'm Alan Shimel. This is Mitch Ashley and you're listening to DevOps Chats. Yeah, man, DevOps chats.

We are back. So, Mitch, I don't know, we got off track here for a couple months. As you know, you this fu gig that you've undertaken where you're now VP of research for DevOps and related activities, and of course I think it was really kind of the whole futurum, uh, merger acquisition that, I dunno, maybe that had a lot to do with it, but we, we, we, we dropped our cadence there and we gotta get back into it, but it's good to have ya.

It's good to be on with you. It's good to be doing it. I mean, we've been doing this in, what, 2004 or so, somewhere around how many times?

Yeah, we've been at the podcasting thing. So yeah, it was, it's been an interesting, we're only nine, 12 months or so. Nine months I guess, has been since the future MDO kind of popped up and we're, you know, it's all closed, all good.

And we're all, yeah, I'm in this, uh, full speed, a modified role now, and so, you know, interesting times for all of us excited about the future. Yep. I, as am I.

Um, but we could talk about that on the FU and podcast. Oh, wait, well, future podcast, but we'll do one. But let, let's stick to DevOps for this one, if you don't mind.

Absolutely. So, Mitch, I, I can't help but feel not complacent, but there's sort of a lull in the DevOps world. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Right? And I think it's not necessarily a bad thing, it's a sign of the maturity of DevOps in that it just is, right?

You're not, you're not fighting religious or political wars about DevOps anyway. Um, you know, people I think understand what it is. I think that the relationship between DevOps and, and let's say platform engineering, cloud native, SRE, you know, all of these, not competing necessarily, but all of these adjacent frameworks, disciplines, they're all, you know, they, there was a lot of justling for jostling for, for space and priority and what have you, but they seem to have settled in a little bit waiting for, to see how AI disrupts it all.

And I think we've reached, I dunno if it's a plateau or just point of convergence, were enough enough of these things have come together. And DevOps, you know, we, for long, for a long time, we felt like DevOps is on the leading edge, you know, in adoption. And there's more people gonna kinda like cloud native was, and even cloud natives, Kubernetes, platform engineering, DevOps, even SREI think our, our mainstream, I mean, it's not like everyone everywhere is doing this, but if you look at the data, you know, I've done enough surveys, multiple surveys, now you're looking at, two thirds of organizations are in the, either they are kind of accelerating their adoption, they're in the standardization phase, or they're in what they call a mastery phase.

They feel like they're doing DevOps really well, and it's used on a majority of project, maybe all projects, in some cases. Same is becoming true with cloud native. Same, you know, Kubernetes is, is that underlying everything now?

So a lot of stuff we've worked on in just in the past two years seemed like it was evolving and now it's evolved. We've reached the next kind of, you know, maybe we're homo sapiens now and, you know, you know, prior areas, areas of, of humanity or whatever in these technologies, but I don't I'm not saying we're done. You know, we've reached, we've reached Nirvana and this is it.

But it is, it's a different place than when you're climbing the hill. Yes. And I'm, I don't think this plateau we've reached is necessarily nirvana.

I, I think there is something to what I said earlier, which is I think people in, in some respects, waiting for the other shoe to drop regarding ai AI and how this is gonna change everything that we've, we've built these years. I think we're gonna talk about some of the anticipation, whether it's warranted yet or not. Um, but, but, but clearly, you know, as AI projects are trying to get them crawl out of, in some cases, get out of the pilot and prototyping stages and get into production, Matt Skar ask the question of, of like, okay, how does this fit with our workflows, our pipelines?

And is are they the same? Are they different? It's got this data thing that goes with it, you know, with the model or with, with the algorithms.

Um, and they update on their own cycle. It's not the same as just kind of the software we've been developing that's, you know, in whatever rust or Python or whatever language that we're using. Sure.

So there's, that's kind of the next tool to, to really take, is understanding better, better how those pipelines converge or align, or where do they intersect. And getting more sophisticated of that. Because my concern, if we don't, then DevOps become the holdback for we got now we got the AI assistance of production, but you, our software's not tying to it and you know how to update it in a way that can work with our release cycles of models and data, et cetera.

So it's an important thing to work on. I think we're gonna see a lot of vendors stepping up to start to address this. Yeah.

I also see things, Mitch starting to evolve into what I call the app. And I hope it's not rebuilding the silo. Mm-hmm.

But does the app dev aspects of things, so platform engineering makes it easier for app dev, cybersecurity for the app dev cloud native for the app dev process. And then there's the, not to use the word ops, but you know, the, the deployment aspect of it and that, you know, the observability pieces of it and, and testing sort, I think is still in that app dev. But where in in DevOps we were really good at viewing it at as one ball.

I think you are starting to see lines emerge here, right. Uh, and I think part of it is a reaction to the, to the shift left or a, uh, you know, I think first we shifted left and the, and now the pendulum's swinging back a little bit from, hey, you can't, you can't just shift everything left. There's some stuff that still belongs here on the right.

Um, or shift everywhere. You know, it's interesting, I did an interview with our friend Jeff Williams, the CT of Contrast Security last week. And his, his new thing, their new thing at contrast, I think they call it a VM, uh, it, it's, it's, uh, it's vulnerability management for production.

Mm. Yep. Vulnerability management for production.

Well, gee, that sounds familiar. Um, we've been, we've been to this concert. We saw this movie.

I think we helped write that movie. I think we're in the, you know, the, uh, the black and white version of the movie. And wait a second, you are going to tell me which vulnerabilities are critical and which ones are reachable and what, man, I wish I would've come up with these ideas.

And my boss, you Colonel can see this too. Oh my God. Yeah.

And, um, but you know, in talking to Jeff, so what they're doing is they're really taking a very AppSec view of vulnerability. Not maybe the vulnerability scanning that, you know, you and I were doing, it's still secure 20 years ago on infrastructure and operating system. Yeah.

It's more AppSec scanning, but in, in any event, again, you know, shifting. Right. Shifting.

Right. So, you know, I, I, like I said, I think this is a sign of the maturity of DevOps and people sort of waiting for this next shooter drop. Um, I know you had mentioned you, there was an article out in the Times, I believe about, you know, looking at unemployment figures that for the first time in as long as I can remember, unemployment is actually up for software developers.

Yeah. 7, it went up like two points close to two point percentage points for it. Um, you know, unemployment rate, which is, like I said, when did that happen?

Right? What are, what about all these commercials of you want a recession proof job go into it? Maybe not.

And it's, uh, here, here's my opinion about it, is if, if you remember, we saw sort of the efficiency cuts after covid, right? We've gotta get more efficient. So we're gonna like lop all these people off that we didn't hire that we don't need anymore.

'cause we overhired in covid times. And that was, you know, a bit of a reaction, maybe a big overreaction in some cases. We're kind of, we're going through this cycle again of, oh, AI is here.

We won't need the mid-tier developers, you know, according to Zuck, which I don't trust his analysis of developer skills, but he had this whole nother topic, and we won't need those people anymore. So we're gonna halay all those people off and not hire anymore. Um, but it's more than just, of course, Facebook, it, it, it is this view of we're gonna need fewer developers so we can not hire as many as we had planned.

So it's less hiring as opposed to always being layoffs and, you know, follow this base really closely. We're not there yet. We're not there where AI's taking over developer jobs in any whole scale manner.

Maybe it's, you know, a year away maybe, but it's, you know, people are still experimenting with, with ai. I mean, I talked with a major compute platform, um, hardware manufacturer and, you know, they've gone through the, uh, ideation and experimentation to, okay, now what are the, you know, 500 things we could do with AI and development across the SDLC? What are the handful of things we're really gonna center around and where we're gonna go pick a product to, you know, build around with a co-pilot or a Udacity or, or whichever circle.

Um, you know, and there we're at this early maters maturation phase. So I think we're over rotating on not needing all these IT people. At least, at least not yet.

I, I don't disagree. I, but I, I, I don't know if it's solely AI that's responsible for it. Mm.

Okay. Well say more then. I think, I think part of it also is the current political, political economic climate interest rates, business climate, if you will.

You know, Mitch, I was talking to a good friend of mine, you know, him, I, I don't want to mention names here, but he is the, he was the C-T-O-C-P-O for one of the, uh, larger, uh, gaming companies, uhhuh mm-hmm. In the world. And he, I mean, he led the team that built their online gaming.

He left or he is leaving because look, they, for the last whatever it is, four or five, six years, they paid him handsomely to build out this platform. And not only paid him, but gave him virtually carte blanche to hire the software developers and team to build and operate this platform. And it's been successful by any way.

You want to measure wildly. Yeah. Yeah.

But the bottom line is that this year, the push is not necessarily to keep growing that platform or keep upgrading it with new features or, you know, to keep innovating necessarily. It's more about maintaining, it's more about, we're not gonna grow the top line as much, but we're going to grow the bottom line instead. And so we're not gonna pay people exor.

We're not gonna pay, you know, developers $300,000 a year. We're not gonna pay exorbitant amounts, you know, to lock in the leadership with, you know, all kinds of incentivized deals that are top line or code relate, you know, how much code you put out. And I, I think that's something we're seeing in corporate America, which is, you know, what we can't develop just 'cause we can't, everything has to be tied to the bottom line.

Everything has to be tied to revenue. And if, if that revenue doesn't make sense, we can't do it. Well, it's, it's, we, we see this over and over again, right.

It's the, the time of I'll spend whatever it takes to be, to gain my market share and be competitive in the ga in gaming industry, for one. You know, let's pick that. Okay.

Well, that's, you know, now it's commonplace as on every other ad on sports TV and every four ad on every other channel. You, you know, it, it's reached that point when there's some who argue, I think it was Paul Kuman, is that his name? The Economist?

Yeah. Yeah. For many times.

Yeah. He, uh, he thinks we're gonna hit an AI bubble, right? We're kind of headed into the next cycle of this again.

And, you know, we, we of course always overrate rotate. That's my favorite new word about it. Or rotate, um, on, on AI investment.

We saw that with deep seek, you know, pulling back a little bit. Like, wait a minute, maybe it isn't always the next biggest hammer. Maybe there's more than one way to innovate, and whether we're gonna see a bubble or not, you know, eventually some kind of bubble's gonna happen with ai.

I don't necessarily know if it's gonna be a big one or not, but that's, you know, today it's, I don't need developers tomorrow and when, where can I find them? Um, at the same time of, I don't have enough security, people still can't find the people that I need to, uh, secure all this AI stuff. Right?

So there's all these kinda successive waves of Yeah, we saw that bubble too. And the next one will happen, just like the next one will grow. Yep.

What, and you know, Mitch, I, as we were talking offline, and you mentioned an interesting twist is that while unemployment went up, like in IT general or software developers, the, the plan is that cybersecurity needs even more people than we always say. Mm-hmm. And that's gone down.

Mm-hmm. So, you know, if AI is one of the driving forces, or if government, you know, regulations is one of the, another force in this, clearly, it, it, the, the message is, Hey, but we need to lock down what we have. Uh, it's, it's the, um, theory of constraints all over again, right?

We, we push the constraint to the next thing. You know, the, now it's security, right? Uh, how are we gonna secure all this?

And we already didn't have enough security people, and it'll be ops next or whatever the n next kind of constraint is. And Yeah. You know, we're following that pattern.

It, it's, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it in a systemic way like that. Yeah. No, I think you got it.

Holistic, right? Um, mm-hmm. But it, it's gonna be interesting to see how it plays out, because the good news is the market has a way of evening these things out, right?

It's like, Lou, it's finding its lowest level there. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

You don't have enough software being developed. I'll get more software developers. I, I don't think, as you said, that we're anywhere near to the point where we could just turn AI loose and develop the software someday.

We'll still be saying, where are we gonna find those Java developers now to go support all that Java code that was written way back when, you know, just exactly like COBOL today. Um, we'll go through that phase too. I, I think we will, Mitch, you were, you were out in Vegas, uh, last week, or actually two weeks ago now, and, uh, for the, uh, Dynatrace show speaking or maybe some legacy stuff, right?

A lot of people don't know what to make a Dynatrace. They've been around a long time. They've gone through some changes and evolved.

I mean, there's a mainframe aspect of things, but observability and give us a report from, from the field in Vegas. What, what'd you see there? Yeah, it was that Dynatrace performed.

They had a number of, uh, of announcements and, uh, it was a very good conference about, I think it was about 2000 peoples, what they said were attending. Um, the standouts for me was observability for developers. We've talked about using observability and development and test, but it's sort of like, yeah, same tool.

Somebody else using it, the number one thing developers can sniff out as a tool that wasn't developed for them, right? That's been being repurposed for them, and that tends to get rejected. But now we're, now we're talking about, um, being able to do kind of real-time data log information, telemetry information tied back into, eventually, it isn't in the IDE yet.

They've got their own, their own observability platform, but they will put it in the IDE to be able to say, here's, okay, got this issue from ops, they think it's in this area, pursuing it. I can pull that data together through my lens of the world, which is my IDE as a developer, and start to really kind of analyze and do some real, real time assessment. And then you have their Davis ai, which is, you know, they've invested early on in ai some one of the companies that actually did, as opposed to claims to, and they're maturing that.

At the same time. The other standout thing for me was, um, enhancing Davis AI with Kubernetes information. Really leaning hard into Kubernetes observability, you know, as Kubernetes goes everywhere, okay, it's gotta be easier to run.

We talked about how complex it is, and it is getting easier. Um, but it is not only because of tools, but also AI support. And as that gets built more into tools, uh, that's also interesting.

And I, I guess the third thing was a, a, a bit of a look forward on security, uh, cloud security, posture management coming out with something a little bit later this year, mid-year. So in that space. So, you know, they've been around a long, a long time, or in, relatively speaking in, you know, in DevOps years.

They've been around a long time. Um, but they're continuing to innovate, I'd say. Good, good, good to 'em.

And they're, yeah, I know, I, they're taking it seriously. They're not just to say hanging around. I agree.

They, they have, they've reinvented themselves Yeah. In many ways. And look, they've got a great solution set.

Mm-hmm. I, I think they're, they're definitely a, a, a player to be reckoned with there. Um, Mitch, I, I wanted to close things off, though, with a, a heartfelt thank you to a friend of you and I, our friend Sasha Lare.

Yeah. Sasha is the co-founder of CloudBees. Of course, before that, Sasha was one of the key people at JBoss, right?

But, you know, CloudBees always had a special place in my heart. com, CloudBees was the second sponsor that signed on and helped us get off the ground. And, you know, we've been working with CloudBees ever since.

Not as much recently. They've undergone, you know, their own set of changes. But certainly for most of those years, Sasha's been a mainstay.

Him and kk, and K, of course, KK left, then he's come back. But, um, Sasha and Nas last week that he'll be stepping back from an active role. com, but for the DevOps community in general, in the open source community.

And, you know, I don't think he's done innovating, creating Businessing, you know, I'm looking forward to what's next for Sasha. But wherever it is, Godspeed and good luck, and we'll be watching. Yeah.

Thanks to you, Sasha. And, you know, that was part of my entry into, into DevOps, you know, Jenkins, we early Hudson, I mean, late Hudson, and then early Jenkins, um, getting involved in that. So, you know, he's done a great deal for this community.

And like you said, I bet there's more communities that will benefit from his, uh, DNA and innovation and entrepreneurship and technology. So look forward to Absolutely. So, thanks Sasha.

Alright, so Mitch, you and I have of course spoke. Let's, let's share it with our audience. I think going forward for DevOps Chats, we're gonna focus on bringing in some key folks every two weeks when we do this.

Um, key people in the DevOps community, whether practitioners, executives, vendors, what have you, we'll be lining them up. Of course, if you're listening to this and you think you'd be a good guest or you have a suggestion for a good guest for DevOps Chats, let us know. We'll probably be doing an interview.

Ed talk is the new format going forward. Mm-hmm. Right?

So two parts every episode, and I'm looking forward to it, man. I think it'll be, it'll be great. We used to do more guests when you and I did.

Yeah. Early podcasting on Still secure after all these years and be shimmy after all these years. Um, and there'll be some opportunities if people, you know, we're doing more and more, um, kind of full episode of things where companies on a sponsored basis come in and, and get a real chance to dive in a little bit deeper in conversation with us.

So there'll be those opportunities too. So, we'll, we'll have some spotlight time where we'll take a little bit of time with companies, uh, or individuals coming in, as well as being able to offer something a little more, um, you know, thorough to folks that are interested in sponsor kind of thing. com.

Is that the best way to do that? That'll work. com.

There you go. com. And we, and work, we'll work from there.

Or can they hear about Shimmy Sits? Where's that at? Tell us about that.

Thursdays, Thursdays two 30 on LinkedIn live. You know, we took a little excerpt from that Mitch Uhhuh and put it on YouTube shorts from two weeks ago, or three weeks ago. And it's got like 15,000 views already on YouTube shorts.

It's pretty cool. Um, so yeah, I'm doing that every Thursday. Always looking, if you want to join in on LinkedIn live, you can ask questions, comments.

We try to put it in there. We're just experimenting with different formats and it's fine. It keeps, I, you know, me, I, I don't have a shortage of things that I like to talk about.

Yep. Gotta keep changing with the times, or suddenly you aren't with the times anymore. Well, you know, I, I'm shooting for the next Super Bowl halftime show.

Is that? Yeah, well, you know, Hey, I, I can just see you up there now. Rapping DevOps.

So you bet, Mitch, there's a great way to get back on the wagon here with DevOps shots. Looking forward to doing more. But until next time, I'm Alan Shimel.

And this is Mitch Ashley, and you've just listened to DevOps Chats. All right. You're watching or listening too, depending on your preference.

Episode 71 of Infrastructure Matters. Diane, I think we're in trouble 'cause Kimberly isn't with us this week. So we're going to touch some third rail topics that she would typically reign us in on.

We're going to be as, as apolitical as possible when we talk about some of the, uh, happenings around ai, AI ethics. We're gonna talk Intel, DataRobot, SAP, and Databricks in the same room. That's, uh, that's gonna be an interesting one.

Uh, of course, AI news and, uh, some internal, we've done some testing around Intel's Gotti three Pro, uh, accelerator. So a lot of great news. First off, well, let's, uh, start out with, uh, oh, I think I might have sold my Intel stock too soon.

Yeah, I think so. Uh, well, uh, Intel stock surged this week unexpectedly. Um, and there was a, there a lot of speculation why, um, the, uh, you know, there's been a lot of criticism over, uh, Intel's leadership in the chip industry for the last decade.

Uh, and it's gotten increasingly questionable. Uh, and, and the stock has really reflected that, uh, uh, but the, the now the story is that, um, Intel is getting help or, or make it help from TSMC, uh, to modernize and catch their fabs up. Now, why would a competitor like TSMC do this?

The speculation is that, uh, is trying to head off tariffs. Um, the, uh, the Trump administration has, uh, expressed that, that, you know, and, and named didn't tell that, um, uh, they would like to see, uh, uh, our chip companies do better, and they may put tariffs on, uh, Taiwan in order to, to bring that about. And this may be a proactive maneuver, uh, to head that off.

So that, that's the speculation. Anyway. Wow.

That is, uh, interesting. Bad fellows. And we'll get into, uh, uh, more interesting bad fellows in a second.

What do you think this means for the AI accelerators mobile? What's the downstream? Well, in, I, I think we're, we're headed for interesting times.

Um, the, there's, there's only so much you can do to catch up, uh, a fad in the United States. Frankly. We've got more, you know, advanced laws around, uh, environmental protection, uh, um, you know, building codes.

Uh, it, it takes longer to do things here. There's just some things, there's a limit to how much anyone can, uh, can aid, um, a or accelerated company in the United States. And there's a reason why, you know, people don't wanna punk six to $12 billion down in a fab here.

They can't get return out of it. They, you know, they can't do two, two nanometer anytime soon because of all the permitting and, and red tape and bureaucracy. And so the question I think is yeah, uh, is, is, you know, TSMC is probably hoping for something out of this, uh, try, they're trying to demonstrate something, but I'm not sure they're gonna be able to really help Intel in a, in a, in a dramatic way.

But they may not need to. They may just get points for trying. Yeah.

And I'm thinking that similar to how there's always boutique manufacturers for, believe it or not, still seven nanometer, nanometer, uh, processes, stuff that's using automotive all today, all time. TS TSMC, of course, will continue to lead the way when it comes to two nanometer and, and smaller, if you can imagine that. 5 nanometer processes, the, Or talk, Uh, the other, which is insane.

So, uh, I think there's plenty of capacity. TSMC has all of the work I think, that they can handle right now, and why not win some points with, uh, helping Intel out too big to fail. So DataRobot acquires open source AI startup agnostic, spelled with the queue agnostic.

We're running out, we're running out of, uh, uh, domain names. Yeah, it's, um, uh, terms were not announced. Um, the, uh, the agnostic, uh, has a, a, uh, AI agent framework, uh, and application, um, portfolio that, that aligns well with DataRobot, which is a, you know, place where you can put all your data and, and run all your AI apps.

Uh, and you know, there, there's gonna be a lot of interest in creating a more consistent environment for AI instead of having all these patchwork, uh, you know, uh, AI models, um, and data lakes that, you know, you were doing rag against and all of these things that platforms like DataRobot potentially allow you to bring a little bit of order to the chaos. Um, uh, but what they didn't have was anything to do with agents. And if you're not doing agent, uh, based AI this, this year, if you're not putting that in your product platform, you are behind.

And this allows DataRobot to, to get into the AI agent space. Um, it's, uh, it's unclear, uh, uh, their, their agnostic has, I think they said, um, 5,000 customers. Um, if you consider most of those are probably small, medium sized businesses, it, it probably, probably needed this to get the r and d money to keep their AI agent portfolio going.

Uh, because if you haven't, if they're not inquiring or, uh, acquiring your ai, uh, agent, um, company this year, you won't be able to afford it next year. And Yeah, and it is interesting how this market continues to move forward. We haven't covered it yet, but, uh, it seems like people are moving away from this idea of independent agents to agent workflows.

So, uh, agents not necessarily doing, you know, random chores like you would think a chat GTP would allow you to do, but workflows specific to, uh, let's say cash flow or, uh, yeah, order the cash or some, uh, some business process in which agents are specialized and have some type of chain of action, uh, programmability versus, you know, just generically taking the agent. So this is moving much faster than most of us can follow It. It is.

Uh, and, uh, I've actually spent the last, um, month and a half or so doing a full survey on the AI agent based space and a report that will come out with, uh, heat trim here in the next couple weeks. Uh, and I talked to a lot of, uh, companies in a few CIOs that are, that are, uh, uh, doing something with agents and it's all around service desk of some kind. It could be internal service desk, could be external, uh, but it's about orchestrating some outcome for a stakeholder, you know, an internal customer, an external customer, um, touch a, a really big, um, uh, road service network, uh, um, their CIO and they say people only log in with their website two, three times a a year, and so they forget everything about it.

And so they don't know how to change their address or update their payment system or anything like that. Now, they can just log in, long as they can log in, they can talk to about, say, uh, change my address. Like, great, what is your new address?

And I'll update it in the system. Right. You know, that kind of thing.

So we're still seeing these, these, these, the crawl, walk, run, uh, thing where most people are at crawl with agents and, uh, but that's the kind of thing that they're doing. Yeah. You know, it's, uh, it seems like just yesterday we were talking about AI assistance being kind of the future of ai, and that is quickly falling by the wayside.

Like AI assistant becomes kind of a given in our own email. Uh, uh, Gemini has been activated mixed results and, uh, and, and, and our emails system. I think it'll all Get back, You know, we're moving much faster than most enterprises can adopt this technology.

Speaking of data and data lakes and cleaning up data and organizing data, a surprise to me, at least both of us cover SAP and Databricks. SAP and Databricks announced a partnership in which SAP can resell Databricks into their customer with allowing SAP, uh, SAP customers to use Databricks platform to analyze their data. I use the term hail is frozen over, because I never thought something like this would happen.

Basically, this idea that, uh, you wanna do large data analysis, you wanna across your entire data landscape, your SAP uh, transaction data along with your, uh, flat data within your file system, other databases, et cetera, and come out with business insights, kind of the magic of these huge data analytic platforms. SAP has held this capability close to itself with this own cloud-based analytics platform. I'm, I'm shocked.

I think a lot of people were, uh, and, and confused because SAP has so many, uh, pre-existing offerings in this space. If you look at SAP, data Intelligence Cloud, uh, SAP, critical Data Cloud, SAP, customer Data Cloud, SAP, datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud, and that's just some of them, um, you know, adding a yet another data cloud, which is what they're calling us, um, uh, you know, powered by Datasphere is, um, it makes SAP look like they don't have a clear strategy. They're not explaining how this fits into all those other clouds, which one should be up at the top, or how do, do they set off at the side in each one form a specific function.

And it seems much more partnership based, uh, in terms of strategy as opposed to actually, you know, real organized product strategy. So I think a lot of people were scratching their head, but clearly SAP customers and Databricks customers want this, you know? Uh, and and how Much of you, as you think is waring off the eventual, I think it's gonna be a commoditization of analytics by ai.

This seems like a, uh, I, I don't know if I ever thought of this, but analytics as a, just a feature versus a standalone product. Well, I mean, I think you make a good point. The, the commoditization is gonna happen because everything's gonna go into ai, and you're gonna be able to pull out most advanced analytics, you know, build me a 3D visualization of all of our sales processes over the last year, and boom, out, out it come, it, it, it comes in.

So you need access to the data, you need it all connected. And where SAP, um, you know, didn't have, uh, know a clear story was how does SAP and Databricks coexist? This answers that question.

The question is, is it, is it a major problem? Is this, uh, you know, uh, obviously SAP thinks there's a revenue stream to be had there, which is really important because we're having a hard time getting a lot of the world to, to move off of, uh, perpetual licenses to subscriptions. So we're seeing are announcing a number of these partnerships like they did with, uh, data Steer before and now Databricks today.

Um, I, you know, I, I think it's a race to the bottom. Uh, for the most part. This is something you'll be able to, to, to be able to do relatively easily and straightforward across the enterprise, uh, quite soon.

Yeah. And SAP has a critical problem ticking with this, uh, end of life of their legacy ECC product. Uh, by 2030 SAP customers are notoriously difficult to get to upgrade.

Uh, I think, uh, the latest number, I saw that by 2025, up to 25% of their customers still will be on legacy e CCC by 2030 and getting third party support from somewhere else. So SAP is in essence, competing against itself with this deadline. So, uh, you know, these are companies that have serious challenges.

That's, uh, some of it is self-inflicted, uh, and some of it is the, uh, co competition against AI and the agility AI is bringing to organizations or the expected agility, which will skip down into the rundown to, uh, big competitor and enemy of SAP sometimes, because a lot of SAP runs on Oracle, Larry Ellison, uh, wants all of our data. Yes, he does. Uh, and so it's hard, hard to read, uh, much into what l Larry says, uh, given that he doesn't necessarily drive, uh, the entire industry like, you know, some of the other, you know, tech billionaires do.

Um, but yeah, he, he is suggesting, and he may be right about this, uh, that unless, um, unless, um, we put all of our, uh, available data at a national level, uh, into a master database, and, and he is, he is suggesting all available genomics too, so that we can marshal all of our data and organize as a nation to be a competitive against China, then we're gonna be at a disadvantage. 'cause China will do it. China is definitely gonna do that.

Um, and, and of course, uh, it's, it is so self-serving because he, he thinks Oracle's the best place to do that. Um, and I'm, you know, I've done work with some of the other hyperscalers, like, you know, like, um, Bezos, same thing. Has, he thinks that only AWS is, uh, reliable and global enough to run a lot of important go government services.

And he thinks the, these hyperscalers have built these global infrastructures, uh, that will allow nations to compete on AI nations to compete, um, globally had a, um, and on digital services, digital currencies, digital assets, those are all big conversations that, um, that haven't really been, uh, come to the forefront, but with big changes in, uh, you know, that are our presidential administration, these things now seem much more likely suddenly than they have been in the past. Yeah. Much of it seemed like big pie in the sky, man.

You were at the AWS reinvent just this past year, and we're talking about, you know, this idea of putting, uh, digital currency on the blockchain. Now you're thinking, you know, I've seen, uh, with Doge this idea of putting all government transactions on the blockchain, and, and I'm all for transparency, but we end up with these really interesting, uh, dilemmas from a have and have nots perspective. And one of the things I wanted to highlight from this Ellison, a subset of the Ellison comment, was, uh, vice President Vance in Paris announcing that, you know, he, the, this administration wants to take the shackles off of ai, uh, and, uh, ethics.

And, uh, I think his, uh, term was somewhere around something to the effect, we need to stop hand wrangling around ethical AI and just advance AI as fast as possible to beat China. All the VCs celebrated the comment, they were like, yes, this is a, uh, this is the way to beat China and ai, the consensus is that China is level with us when it comes to models, if not ahead of us, when it comes to models. The U and when I say us, I mean Western, uh, yes, towers and, and, uh, companies.

And then, uh, as far as hardware, uh, the US and Western allies are ahead of China, and then people, the argument is that China's ahead, when it comes to pe people, the, uh, people, process and technologies, I think this inter rises, uh, interesting dilemma for the enterprise. Usually US regulations have gated our access to some technologies when they take that, those shackles off. Of course, there's opportunity, but there's also challenges in a global environment.

The EU seems to be going in a completely different direction than the us. Well, and if you look at, um, you know, responsible ai, I think is, is really the word more than ethical ai. 'cause it's more than just being ethical that you have to have to do with ai.

You have, you know, we talk about first principles with great power comes great responsibility, and AI gives us is the, is the most powerful technology we have, and soon we'll be able to do things humans can't. As I've talked about super intelligence, uh, you know, in the last show, um, what, you know, who's gonna, who's gonna have access to the best super intelligence, uh, that's gonna be a competitive global race. Europe, on the other hand, is saying, well, we'd rather be responsible more than we would want, wanna be number one.

And they may win that bet. If, if, uh, we end up having, uh, which I think is likely some, some accidents with ai, where it's used in a place that causes, uh, significant, uh, harm somehow, um, as people put it in more and more critical places, uh, and makes decisions without human intervention or human oversight and bad things happen, then Europe will be able to say, well, you can come here and use our AI because it's, it's safer and more responsible. Uh, we've actually have regulations.

So they may, they may win that bet, who knows? Uh, and they're trying because, um, that the EU just announced that they're, they're, uh, they're trying to organize it at a, uh, at a national level across the eu, uh, because individually the, the countries can't compete with US or China, but collectively, uh, the eus got 450 million people. Uh, they're bigger than the United States if they could get or get organized.

So they've just committed 200 billion, uh, to, uh, their AI efforts at a eu, EU level, uh, to compete with us and China. And, you know, of course this story's gonna be, they're gonna do it be they're gonna do it best in terms of what's right for people. And, you know, is it, is, it's the, it's nice to have another horse in the race to see where, where that goes.

Yeah. Diversity of ideas is just as important as competition, which actually brings me to a point we did not put in the rundown. I don't know how we missed this as big news Elon Musk offered and, and, and some other investors.

A group offered 97 point something billion dollars for open ai. And this is a little complicated. Open AI is technically a non-for-profit.

So I'm not quite sure how you offer to buy a, not this is beyond my, my, my financial expertise, but essentially he's looking to take control of the, uh, uh, of the not-for-profit that manages the for-profit open AI company for 97 billion. Yeah. 7 billion.

Yeah, I saw that. Yeah. Well, it's interesting to see, um, the, the question is, the, the rumor is that, uh, the third run of grok, so Grok three didn't go well.

And so, um, they don't have a model. They, it has spent an enormous amount of money, and they don't have enough to, to retrain it. That's the rumor.

Can't confirm whether it's true or not. Uh, but, uh, that's supposedly the reason where why, um, uh, Musk is making some kind of move to at least get something out out of it. I don't think, uh, I think it, uh, open AI is actually worth more than that offer.

But I think that there's, there's there, I think there's secret covenants or stock or something. I mean, he supposed he must dive, uh, divested himself on OpenAI, but he, he has some in on the offer is my understanding, um, that make, that gives him special privileges to make that. Um, and, but I don't think it's gonna happen.

Uh, but there is some question about whether guac will remain competitive and, and some must have to do something. Yeah, AI is moving much faster than we can keep up with both on the software side and the hardware side. Long, internally speaking, our sister company, signal 65, has published the results of their GE three testing.

com to download the full report. And if you want to really geek out on numbers, our colleague Russ fellows wrote the report after all the testing, and we've been testing it for quite some time. Basically, it's on par with the H 100, which if you, you know, kinda look back and say, well, you know, H one hundreds, what, what's the big deal?

Well, deep Seq was trained, allegedly on H one hundreds, uh, gr uh, Xi uh, built their data center around H one hundreds, their super compute off H one hundreds while the B two hundreds, and the, uh, new chip sets from, uh, Nvidia all the rage, H 100 hundreds and Gaudy three is absolutely, uh, data center level quality for doing infra and doing enough AI for the vast majority of the enterprises. Any thoughts in general around just the non Nvidia market around AI chips and AI chip acceleration? Yes, and the big question is, uh, in ai, it's what are developers gonna use?

And, um, if it's not Cuda, there's a big question about, you know, do I make it, do I commit to something that may not last? It doesn't have the heritage, uh, it doesn't have the, you know, the staying power is, is Cuda is not gonna go anywhere. Every, everyone feels completely confident making these very, very large investments on top of that stack.

Uh, and the question is, is, you know, chips like Gouty are new kids on the block with unproven track record, um, assure they're doing great today, but can they sustain the, the competitive races betting on gouty good? Is it gonna pull ahead? Uh, is it, is it cost competitive?

Um, and, but most importantly, can they get developers to use it? Um, uh, developers don't dunno anything about it. Uh, and so, um, that's, that's the real question.

There's a, is a huge headwind to break out in AI chips right now. It's just, you know, NVIDIA's got a lock on the market. Yeah, I will say, if this was Intel of two or three years ago, it, you know, we would say, well, it's Intel now.

We're saying, well, it's Intel. You know, it's, uh, we, we could put, you know, a lot of faith in Intel two or three years ago that they would just span their way to, uh, market parody if not dominance. Now, this Intel has way more problems than just catching up in ai, AI development, AI platforms.

Uh, they did a lot to normalize the access to, got to, I'm sorry, to Cuda and Cuda cord, uh, so that they could hire, they, they could hire hide away the complexity. But you're absolutely right, folks like deep seek, deep seeks, uh, show what's possible when you, uh, program to a machine level, uh, and, uh, bypass. Well, That, that's right there is, that's the intelligent advantage.

They need to tell that story that, you know, some of the most competitive ais are not using, um, a cuda. They're able, they're getting the best performance by going bare metal. And so that, that's very interesting.

Yeah. And the, the, I think someone should commission our Signal 65 folks to do that comparison to say, oh, if I went straight machine level on Gotti three, what are, what does that get me relative to a B 100, 200, or whatever the latest Blackwell chip set is from Nvidia? And is it worth the investment?

What does it mean for my power and cooling? One of the things that we haven't talked about when it comes to deep seed and being able to basically run, uh, the entire model on a single Blackwell chip on like a digits, which is just air cooled, what does that mean for the power and cooling race specifically in the enterprise data center? Yeah.

Well, and I think that this whole conversation, uh, neglects the way that CIOs think about sourcing the job of the CIO is business continuity. At the end of the day, that's the only time they ever really get a phone call from anybody was when something doesn't work. Um, you know, o other than that, they, you know, occasionally they, you know, they get a request, well, we'd like to do this or that, or use ai, but, um, uh, so they're looking for a, a stable, reliable partner.

And they're, the question is, is the, the, you know, the Chinese government has been running these drills around Taiwan that have raised a lot of supply chain questions about whether Taiwan something's gonna happen, um, within the next 24 months. That seems to be the analysis. Um, they're, they're, they're, they're basically dry running, you know, a blockade of, of, of the, you know, it's a tiny island at the end of the day.

Um, and with everything changing in all eyes, uh, elsewhere in the world on all these other geopolitical issues, there's a, there's a real concern that, that China may make their move. And so what I'm hearing from CIOs, what, uh, in my last CIO round table, uh, that, that I participated in with a bunch of Fortune five that are like Fortune 100 CIOs, is that they're looking, uh, to hedge their bets so that they don't have, uh, operational, uh, discontinuity when they can't get the ships they need to run their business. So they are looking at the, at that level, and this is not the developer level, um, but developers are the king makers, but the CIOs now increasingly their eyes looking, what are my other choices?

And this is about gaudi's really their, their biggest chance they can tap into that demand to hedge bets about what's gonna happen in the world that may cut, uh, you know, uh, US enterprises or everyone off from Nvidia chips. Uh, that's a big deal. Yeah.

Between tariffs, geopolitical challenges, when, when it comes to borders, we as, uh, we as a industry are appreciative that we don't do that. I don't do logistics. I'm, I'm just happy that I'm not into the business of figuring out where I'm going to get supplies.

The big OEMs, O world, Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Cisco, the people who have to put these systems together in the end point, really have to think through how do they one not, uh, get on the wrong side of, of, of each one of these nations from a political perspective, but also able to mitigate some of this cost and access risk. It is a interesting conversation. And, uh, we're, we're here for Diane.

Let's put in a, a plug since, uh, LY isn't here. We can put in a plug for our CXO roundtables. Oh yes, you don't know this, but we just signed on yet another client as of I think, uh, a few minutes ago to do another CXO round table.

You want to fill us in on what is a C, we call 'em CXO salons. Yes, exactly. What Do, what do we do at these things?

Well, the, these salons are for organizations that, that want to directly tap into the zeitgeist or, you know, what are CIOs? Where's, uh, CTOs Chief Digital Officers? If, if you prefer, uh, any of those digital CXO roles, uh, that you have, uh, you know, we've built up a community of such practitioners over the years.

Um, we can bring them together to think about and, and discuss the, the challenges of the day, evaluate new product offerings. So, uh, and their, their motivation is, you know, increasingly they're not feeling like they, they don't have a, a voice in a lot of product development in, in the enterprise, in enterprise products. 'cause it's moving so fast and being driven by Silicon Valley innovation, uh, that the, that a lot of their specific unique enterprise needs aren't being represented.

This gives them a chance to get with leading product companies, uh, who are trying to build the future and get feedback from them. But it can be used for many different things, uh, just as a, as a sounding board, as a forum to understand what the major issues of the day are around a specific topic that affects that, that given, um, a product offering. Uh, so there's a variety of ways, but if you want digital CXOs in a room, uh, we, we have gotten good at facilitating that, bringing them together and creating productive, useful, actionable outcomes.

Concrete stuff comes outta these, and everyone really seems to enjoy the process on both sides. I know. I enjoy the process of posting these, uh, on both, as you said, on both sides.

The CXOs, the various executives from actual end customers, and the vendor, the IT enterprise vendor gets get both get wonderful insights and we get the pleasure of just hosting these things and, and, uh, watching these conversations unfold. There's really not much that we have to do other than throw in a question and watch the magic happen and keep everyone on track. com.

Uh, Diane, as usual, I've had a wonderful time. If you're thinking you've learned so much more, so much about the tech industry from these infrastructure matter episodes, you should share them with your grandmother. That's right.

It'll help her make more friends, whether she's at home enjoying the, the sooth soothing sounds of Keith and Dion, or if she has a social group that she can, uh, listen to this while paying bid wis. It's a gift for, it's a, we're recording this on Valentine's Day, so it's a great Valentine's Day gift for any of your grandmothers in your network. Until then, we'll see you next episode.

Infrastructure Matters will be 72. Hello, along the latest edition of the Techstrong AI video series. I'm your host, Mike Vara.

Today we're with Mike Leach, who, senior manager for workstations and horizontal solutions at Lenovo. And we're talking about the impact AI is gonna have on all those workstations and endpoints and everything else that we use every day. Hey, Mike, welcome to show.

How you doing, Mike? Yeah, great to be here. What exactly are we looking for these days in a workstation in the age of ai?

Will every workstation need to have some sort of additional class of processors now to run these AI systems? Or is it in specific use cases? I think a lot of people are, um, confused about exactly what an AI workstation is, and by extension what an AI PC is.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a great place to be in the tech industry right now. Um, you know, AI is gonna be truly transformative.

It has been for the last five years, and the trajectory is, and the velocity of what's happening now is, uh, I guess stressful and impressive to see from my side of the defense at the same time. Um, when it comes to ai, it's all about the use case and it's all about the data. So, you know, your question on what type of compute power is needed, and you know, it really depends, but what we have seen is this unprecedented demand for performance because, you know, AI is one of the largest computational lifts of our time.

You know, if you look at things like the internet or metaverse and, and the other kind of, you know, phases of the IT industry from, from years gone by, they didn't necessarily have a huge impact or a huge demand and, and drive for performance. Um, you know, we're still in the dialup internet days of AI at the moment. Um, but if you want to see the value, you know, you've gotta bring real world scenarios and real world business outcomes that can happen fast.

So you need performance, therefore you need full high performance components. Typically, things like nvidia, GPUs, um, you know, they bring the most computational, you know, compute power to the table, and it's what's at heart of all of our Lenovo workstations. Will it always be a GPU that I need, or as time goes on, will there be other classes of processors and different ones will lend themselves to different use cases to your earlier point?

Yeah, ultimately, I think the, the easy answer is yes. I mean, what we've seen in the last 12 months, the birth of the A IPC, um, it's the addition of a new processing unit to the table. So we've forever been working in ward of CPU central processing units.

Um, and then GPUs would derived from, you know, gaming and graphics, and they're now very powerful co-processor for ai. But it's the birth of this NPU, the neural processing unit that's gonna be really key today. 0 of those types of processes.

So they are not a performance accelerator, but they are a very efficient process of ai. So as AI becomes something that just runs in the background, and that might be a, you know, a constant background blur, that might be some smart antivirus, that might be some smart security tools that are running in the background, you need a processor that's almost custom built to drive those inference, those AI inference workloads and things like the NPU are gonna be critical there. Um, I think people are still confused to this day, and it's been a long running conversation about, well, where is that line between what we call a PC and a workstation these days?

And is it changing when we add these NPUs? Well, ultimately a workstation is a pc. Um, it's a high performance, it's the highest performing pc.

Um, you know, PC for us is a personal device. Um, whether that runs Windows or a Linux operating system, it's used by a user. You know, for us, workstations are the highest performing variance of that, you know, more memory, more CPU, um, more graphical capabilities, more expandability, but they're built to run those high-end workloads.

They're validated to run those high-end workloads constantly 24 7. So if you do a nine to five job, you're still using a workstation. But if the computes then running in the background and you are doing things, you know, in the hours where maybe you're not behind the desk, then, you know, a workstation has always been designed to give that, that that resilience and that robustness to those more all important workloads.

I think people can make a correlation in their head to, you know, a workstation and a high end gaming rig, or kind of similar in people's minds, but, Um, What exactly will be the tipping point that would require me to use a workstation to run, uh, an inference engine per se, versus it's cl pretty clear that the people who are building AI models probably need the biggest machine that they can find. But, um, what do I need to run these AI models successfully and what will determine whether or not that's a workstation? Yeah, it's a fair question.

So if you look at the workflow, you know, AI today in the marketing lens is all about consumption. It's consuming intelligence has been created elsewhere, and I think many people overlook the fact, well, someone's gotta create that AI in the first place. If you look through the lens of like an open AI and chat GPT, they spent, you know, a large number of dollars creating the AI and actually training this master AI model.

Um, and then us as just mere consumers we're just inferencing and pulling from that locally on our devices. Now you can run those models locally. You don't need to pull them from cloud, you don't need to pull them from service systems.

And you know, as an organization, if you are working off very complex data or very unique data, think healthcare, think legal, think government type workflows, where you need to be able to do it securely, you have to have the performance to be able to run that locally. Um, you know, a model, a large language model doesn't have to be large. It could be small.

So everything from three, seven to 70 billion parameters as an example, not all of those can run on your standard laptop. You know, anything over 3 billion parameters realistically you need to drive on on a more high performance device. And anything more than 7 billion parameters has to really be a GPU accelerator device, which, which is a workstation.

Um, so it depends on that workflow back to the data and the workflow in the use case. Um, but at the moment today, you know, you need AI to be performing fast, otherwise it's quicker to just do it yourself the old school way. If you want to have that real time interaction and AI be that truly transformative element of the business workflow and it needs to be accelerated and, and that really happens on a workstation.

Are we getting to the point too, where people are appreciating the latency involved in a lot of these inference engine applications? Because, well, if the inference engine is running in a data center somewhere or in or up in the cloud, I, I create a latency issue where I'm not really having that, uh, engaging realtime experience. So, um, will that factor into our heads about what kind of machines Where, yeah, you need to take, you know, do you take your data to the compute or do you take your compute to the data?

Um, you know, I'm, I'm a big avid fan of using AI tools. It makes me a lot smarter and efficient. I think it's my superpower.

Don't tell my boss, but I think it's a superpower. I can get stuff done quickly. Um, but I recently flew back from Europe on an airplane and, and kind of, I felt foul of the fact of like, I didn't have a fast enough internet connection for any of my AI tools to work.

So I was, I was Superman without his superpowers, and I didn't get done what I needed to get done. So I think for me, latency is gonna be the killer. That that's why we have to have this hybrid AI kind of, you know, ecosystem where you do on the device what you need to do on the device, be that security latency or just the size of the data.

And then you take that to maybe, you know, a, a remote desktop or a server or a cloud instance only when it's needed. And then you move that data around or that workflow around, depending on who's using it. Um, because you know, these AI tools at the moment, they're still in their infancy, but as they're widely adopted, I think, yeah, edge computing and doing AI at the edge where the data is located is gonna be the fastest and most efficient way to use it before it's then maybe bypassed and, and moved into the cloud.

You use your metaphor, therefore, latency is AI kryptonite, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean that's, yeah, I, I, I felt very, very weak on that flight back.

'cause I, I, I, I missed deadlines. I couldn't do what I needed to do because I was reliant too much on my, um, my cloud connected ai. So, for the IT leaders out there who are trying to figure out how to plan infrastructure investments in the age of ai, what should they be thinking about today?

Because they're, many of them are trying to sort out, well, do I need to buy these things this year? Or should I wait till the bulk of next year when we're operationalizing ai? What's kind of the, the curve of where the software and the hardware comes together?

I, I mean, yeah, it, I wish I had the easy answer for that. You know, if you look at, you know, the average corporate customer who's, you know, they're, they're up for a refresh on their devices and do I bite the AI PC bullet or not? And yeah, the answer is you, you have to at some point, but do you wait, as of all new technology next year is, there's always gonna be a faster version of something around.

Um, but you need to start somewhere. So this kind of AI adoption route, we are seeing a massive adoption now of these broader IPCs, but the tools that are available to you as an IT administrator are vast, they're complicated, they're unique to you and your workflow. But AI is what we are seeing and what Lenovo's doing is providing a lot of these AI enhanced IT administrative tools that make deployment of these new devices better, faster, easier, cheaper, so that you can adopt the technology when it's hot off the press, rather than wait for things to maybe mature because, you know, you're always on this kind of rolling refresh.

Um, and that you have to give the right device to the right people at the right time. Um, and everybody across your organization isn't on a level playing field of who's working with AI or who can benefit from ai. You know, we've got legal teams and customers that in those particular fields that are light years ahead of those working in maybe healthcare and life sciences, those in the financial industry of, you know, they're building their own AI models 'cause they won't take things from the cloud.

So these domain specific use cases, you know, this whole user persona now for AI is changing. Um, and the good thing that where we come in from a device standpoint is we've addressed that with the widest portfolio of devices so that customers can have that choice without the burden then of worrying like, well, should I wait for this year's refresh or next year? You know, when do I go?

Because, you know, ultimately, you know, it's, it's an open playing field for that. There are of course a lot of options when it comes to workstations these days. What are the factors that organizations should be looking for when they decide ultimately to partner with the provider of a workstation or any other platform?

Yeah, I mean, they, they're complicated devices. You know, our burst out bubble now that I think we've got three plus million possible configurations of each workstation device. So, you know, the op, the complexity police when it comes to configurability are real.

But if we look at, you know, the use cases, what we've done done, we've built out these, um, curated hardware configurations and these recipe cards for success based on user workflows and user persona. So if you're an, if you're an IT developer or you're an IT administrator, if you're a, you know, you're a walking with manufacturing and you work with computational fluid dynamics, then we've got all of these reconfigured, these recommended kind of good, better, best scenarios so that you can then see what the recommended platforms are. And then we've got data to then help back up.

Well, look, this model is 32% faster than that model. So, you know, you know, when you base it on the hourly rate of the employee that's gonna be using that, you know, you can see that actually how much value are you gonna get from those new platforms. So we make sure we bring the hardware itself, but then help you kind of cut through the trees a little bit to find the golden nuggets then of, of real value, which we know those individual users are gonna obtain.

Um, what's the one thing that kind of makes you shake your head these days when you listen to people talking about AI and workstations and infrastructure, that kind of thing, where you just go, folks, we're missing the point. It's, again, I how I phrase this one, but it, AI is not magic. What you can do with it is magic.

Um, but it's putting some of that magic into a, into a format that is valuable for your business. So stable fusion, I can create a picture of Mickey Mouse on Everest drinking a milkshake. Awesome.

What's, how's that valuable to me in my workflow? So you, you know, looking away at some of the gimmicky features of it, it's the ability, this superpower thing of you can naturally now obtain real world value from these vast amounts of data that your business has been, you know, sitting on and obviously building. Um, data is not valuable unless you can extract something from it, learn from your mistakes, better insights to predict the future, that sort of thing.

Um, but if you can give your employees that superpower, and again, your superpower, my superpower, everyone's superpower is gonna be slightly different. What's your biggest pain point? I'm sat on a thousand unread emails this morning and I'm like, cool, can someone pre-read those for me?

Um, and tell me which ones are the highest priority. So I don't fall into an inbox, you know, of hell, I can just pluck out what's needed. But if I'm a, you know, if I'm a, you know, working in a law firm or if I'm trying to work through, you know, seven different documents on some, you know, legislation that's come in, then I need, I need a tool that's a little bit different.

So people don't appreciate that as good as chat. GPT is, and it was the, you know, the, the light bulb moment for AI for many of us is that, you know, everyone's use case is different. Um, so don't look at AI as just one thing.

It's a vast array of, of, of opportunities for, uh, efficiency. I also think at the end of the day, people are also trying to figure out, well, are the devices gonna be more expensive in the future? 'cause we've added more components and that's just gonna be the nature of the particular beast.

Or will these systems follow the traditional price performance curve and will basically be paying roughly the equivalent for an AI workstation that we paid for a regular workstation a couple of years ago? I mean, it's, yeah, relative. Um, I always tend to shy away from pricing conversation mainly because it's, it's almost irrelevant if you look at it at the context of, you know, employees aren't getting any cheaper.

And if you look at what you are here to do, you know, I, I, I'm a big Formula One fan, and if I look at, you know, someone like a Lewis Hamilton of the world, if you put him in the cheapest race car, then you are wasting money paying him his huge salary if he hasn't got the right hardware or the right car behind him, but more importantly, the right team to go support him. So put it in context of the user, the software applications they're running, you know, the tens of thousands of dollars that, you know, they would be hemorrhaging every month if they were sat there waiting for the hourglass. For me, putting a performance workstation into the hands of every employee will deliver more commercial value to the business.

Yes, the device at a device price point is more expensive, but it's delivering so much better return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership, which ultimately you're drinking less coffee, you're smoking less cigarettes or whatever. So, you know, for me it's cheaper, but it's an upfront addition to CapEx, whereas maybe operationally it's cheaper to to, to go that route. Alright, folks, you heard it here.

Even in the age of ai, you can still be Pennywise and a pound foolish. Hey Mike, thanks for being on the show. No, appreciate it.

Thanks for your time. All right. ai video series.

You can watch this episode and others on our website. We invite you to check them all out. Until then, we'll see you next time.

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Patrick McNeil, who's the cybersecurity strategist for Guidepoint Security, and we're talking about all these scams we see lately, and they seem to be related to some sort of cybersecurity attack in one form or another.

Most recently we had the Super Bowl, and then we had Valentine's Day, and there's all kinds of holidays coming up ahead, and it's gonna be more of the same. Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me. What do all these things have in common? Uh, they feel fairly sophisticated and there's a lot of effort being put into them.

Are they generally successful or people giving up millions of dollars to these people? I mean, how pervasive is decision? Yeah, it's a, it's a, it is a very pervasive issue and I think with the Super Bowl, they, the, the scammers were pretty much preying on people's emotions and establishing a sense of urgency to do something.

I think you'll see a little bit less of that around Valentine's Day, you know, unless, unless it's, uh, you know, right up the last part of, uh, the, the day and maybe somebody will get caught. But, uh, we're seeing a lot of these, these new scams as being AI enabled. So because generative AI is now being brought in, there is a greater reach for their campaigns.

They can hit more numbers, hit more email addresses, uh, they're more effective because they can craft a message that even if they're not an English speaker, really looks legitimate. And then they're more complex. So they can involve more medias or even have the AI do that initial interaction with you if you respond back to a text or an email.

Is there any way to detect these? 'cause to your point, they are more sophisticated and they're also increasing in volume and asking mere mortal end users to catch every one of these seems like an impossible mission. So how do we kind get in the middle of this thing and protect people, People?

Yeah, it is, it is challenging sometimes and, and even an expert can, uh, occasionally fall victim. So it's really a matter of, you know, making sure that if they are establishing a sense of urgency, that you take a breath and actually reread that again, um, you know, anything last minute. And instead of obviously clicking links, like they say they're from a sports betting site or flower company or something like that, don't click on the link.

If they say the company they're from, you can just go directly to the website. There would typically be the same sale that they're texting you about, and if there's a discount code or something that they sent you, it's going to be available on the website. If you just type it in, things will happen and, and you will mess up.

So if you've put your payment for whatever it is on a credit card, you at least have the fraud protections to, to kind of back you up and, and help with that. Definitely don't use a, a debit card. And if they're asking for something like cryptocurrency, that is almost certainly a scam.

So to your point, um, it seems like there are two tells. One is there's a, some sense of urgency, but two is they're typically asking me to enter some sort of sensitive data into some system somewhere. And assuming that, um, I'm gonna do that for whatever reason.

Do people kind of need to have, like maybe we all just need a personal gut check here before we go do these things. And this is, is is it really a matter of education E Exactly. It is a matter of education and, uh, kinda like I said, stop and take a breath.

Exactly. It's a gut check and you need to rely on those instincts a little bit. We are also seeing, uh, AI enabled scans on the HR or employment front as well.

One of the, uh, partners that, that, uh, I work with in the, the incident response industry has actually seen an uptick of people that as soon as they change their, uh, LinkedIn profile, no kidding, 24 hours later, the scammers have correlated their identity with a phone number that they've got from a data broker maybe, and they're sending them texts from, you know, the CEO that would never contact a, a first time employee, and they've gotten more sophisticated. So they're not asking for, you know, uh, go to the store and get me Apple gift cards. That's long gone.

Now they're actually asking for, can you send me our customer list or other sensitive information? And even adding it a little, this is highly confidential. It, it has something to do with the m and a process.

So you really can't share this with anybody to try to scare you into not reporting this to your IT department. As we kind of play around with this, should we get to the point now where we just tell people to not trust anything and just assume that everything is fake and then work backwards from there? Almost?

Yeah, I mean, it is possible to impersonate or spoof some of the phone numbers that things come from. So if they know that you have a relationship with somebody else at your company, it might be possible. I think in that case, uh, using an encrypted messaging app like Signal, um, you know, establishes a little bit more trust because of the fingerprinting of the user's device.

Of course, they also take your credit card and your debit card. I feel like they're also getting more adept at, um, bleeding you a little bit, right? They're not just smashing and grabbing and taking a lot of money in one throw.

They're kind setting up something where, um, you know, they're hitting you up for, you know, 40, 50 bucks at a time and you might not notice. Yeah, it's, it's fairly common as, as I'm sure you know, to see a small dollar transaction. And then later on they'll, you know, uh, send some more transactions.

And there's also, you know, the, the typical cryptocurrency pig butchering schemes where they work on the relationship and, you know, suggest investments and stuff like that and try to get you to incrementally invest over time. Honestly, the, the easiest thing that we can do to prevent that transition from a low dollar to a high dollar transaction is to use the temporary credit card numbers that many of our credit card companies make available to us. A lot of this, I feel, goes unreported.

'cause a lot of people are, you know, they're embarrassed and they don't wanna share that they got conned. And so do we have to make this, uh, less of a, you know, an emotional issue and identify what it is? It's hardcore crime.

Yeah, definitely. We have to try to make the stigma go away, right? gov.

And they'll, they'll take the report and they're tracking different groups and the different scams that are going on. And what can law enforcement do about all of this? I mean, it seems like every time they break up one ring, five boards spring up, It That is definitely true.

I know for a fact that the FBI works with our international partners to, you know, try to track these types of scammers down. We've seen in Europe, there was a whole betting scam going around, uh, the UEFA soccer championships and they managed to shut down, uh, I wanna say it was something like 800 different scammers and multiple call centers all at once. So they, they where there are appropriate law enforcement, um, you know, extradition and relationships and stuff like that, they will go after them.

But it, it does take a lot of time to investigate and break up those groups. Of course, the bad guys are already using AI to clean up their language and make them seem like they are legit. Can we use AI to defend ourselves from these folks?

Yeah, I mean, there, there are some, uh, consumer and enterprise services that you can subscribe to that will analyze text messages and the numbers they come from and the wording and stuff like that, and classify that as spam for the actual attacks that are coming to your email, to your website. You know, the, certainly the anti phishing systems that a lot of companies pull in have been incorporating ai and I actually had a report from a customer the other day that their amount of phishing emails had gone down drastically. And the only things that they're really seeing are the very highly crafted, sophisticated spear spearfishing attempts against their executives.

So we are being somewhat successful, at least in, in the enterprise environment, at targeting some of that to your home email address that you may have a harder time with that. And the folks who run our telecom networks help us out here, or maybe they are and we just don't know it. They, they are, um, there are, uh, stir and shaken protocols to actually authenticate some of the handoffs, you know, from trucks so that they can block some of the spam that goes on.

But, you know, for the large part, uh, unless it's being spoofed or maybe it's a, uh, a highly volumetric campaign where they're sending out thousands of texts at once, they are going to kinda let that through because it's not really up to them as to whether or not something is, you know, a phishing attempt or not. And the bad guys, are they hiring people who are essentially professional on men and ladies who are engaging in what we, you know, like to call social engineering attacks, but ultimately they are basically cod Um, uh, does, do they hire more of these people as time goes on? Or are they automating all this stuff with a handful of people?

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a mix. There's certainly some automation and grooming of that initial contact so that you can get somebody to engage further and then they transition to a human. There are some call centers in areas where it's very difficult to find employment.

So people are going to those places because they don't have a choice. That's the only job they can get. And in some cases they are human trafficking, so they're, they're finding people in another country where they can't find employment, Hey, come to come to my country.

There's lots of jobs. And they take their passport and put them to work in their call center where they have very minimal living facilities and are essentially held hostage because they can't go anywhere without their papers. So this is clearly not a victimless crime.

In fact, some of the people who are perpetrating the crimes are victims themselves. Exactly. Yeah.

And, and they may have incentives or targets that they have to meet, uh, you know, in order to even stay employed there. So Is there any discussion among the governments, among the world to kind of combat this stuff? Are they kinda helping each other out a little bit to get to the root cause of this stuff?

'cause a lot of those people you talk about are not sitting in Alabama, they're sitting in someplace halfway around the world, right? Yeah. I, I personally have not seen anything at a, we'll say a government level, and it's, but it has been pretty much partnerships through law enforcement to, you know, collaborate and gather evidence and, and take them down.

Should companies be educating their employees and having some training program, or is this some sort of civic course that we should be giving people, or both, You know, that would be really great if we could just assign that training to everybody, have your county send you to the, uh, fishing education session or something. But yeah, all, all companies really should be doing some level of training. As we know, a lot of companies have, uh, phishing campaigns to try to catch you on that.

And most of them are really targeted towards the enterprise types of things. You know, oh, this is the fake Okta login page or something. However, you know, I think they should probably also look at things like betting scams and, you know, other types of things that employees would want to interact with on their personal time.

Me, I'm voting for, they should teach this in the schools and starting maybe in A hundred percent Yeah, the Grammar school. And everybody can get a, a notion of it and maybe the kids will come home and teach their parents, and this might be the way to go. Kids are already teaching their parents so much, right?

So it would be great if they could do that, right? And kids, especially the younger ones, when they see this stuff, they get outraged and they wanna do something about it. Maybe we get we're just a little too old and we've been had one too many times.

So we don't quite get us been outta shape about It. I, I think I've, I've, as I've gotten older, I've gotten more suspicious of everything, especially being in the security field, I, you see so many things that are scams. It's hard to trust anything that's legitimate sometimes.

There you go. Hey, scammer, get off my lawn. All right.

Hey Patrick, thanks to me on the shop. Yeah, thank you Mike. Have a good one.

Talk to you. All right, back to you guys in the studio. Hey there, I'm Jennifer Gio and I am very happy to be here today presenting on Textron Predict.

Um, I am the Chief Strategy officer of W2 communications and a longtime friend of the Textron, uh, family, so to speak. Um, and I'm really excited to speak with you guys today. Uh, when Alan Shimel first asked me to speak, my first thought was, what am I going to talk about for this audience?

It's a largely technical conference, and he said, anything you want, which, uh, he should have known better with me than to do that. But I got excited to talk about something that we don't hear a whole lot about at conferences, which is really the importance of self-energy and authenticity and so on. Um, and how we operate as leaders, as colleagues, and even how that extends into our personal lives.

Um, and then, you know, just to help us, uh, think beyond ourselves and how to benefit, uh, each other in that regard. Um, you know, I joked in the abstract that it's a little bit witchy, woo woo. Uh, it's not really, there's a lot of science to back this up, but I'm, I'm, I'm really excited.

So with that, um, I'll get started. Um, so moving into it, why, why should you listen to me? Well, you don't have to, but you're here, so you might as well.

Um, I've been in this industry for, in the cybersecurity industry for 25 years. Um, more than half of it's been a VP role or above. And I don't mean that in a fancy, ego driven kind of, uh, yay, yay me been a vp.

Just that means I've made a lot of mistakes and I've also learned, learned a lot of good lessons. Um, and I'm happily, readily willing to admit the mistakes that I've made to you along this line. Um, if it helps you, uh, if you're interested in this topic, um, I've spent a lot of time the last two and a half years or so, really focusing on both, working on myself in terms of achieving higher self and getting into self-energy from, honestly, from getting sober to doing deep intensive trauma therapy, to doing holistic work, to doing spiritual work, to doing classes and certifications, even things like tarot and divination, which scares some people that's so witch you will apart.

Um, and so, you know, I wanna share what I've learned, and a lot of what I've learned, quite frankly, is through my wonderful therapist who focuses on something called Internal Family Systems, which is a lot of where self energy comes from that concept or words talked about. Um, and so I want to share that with as many people as I can, noting that I am not a clinician, um, and I hope to eventually start a side NGO where I'm helping people do this for folks that, especially underrepresented groups that don't have access to traditional, um, mental health care. So that's me, why I'm here talking about this topic.

And so I will get actually into the topic now 'cause that's what you wanna hear about. So what is self energy? Um, and pauses, if someone was going to answer.

Um, um, if we look at the strict definition of it, of self energy, um, it's, it's really about operating from authenticity and inner alignment. And what I mean by that is that every part of you, your mind, body, spirit, it's a state of consciousness that includes your feelings and every element within you. If we're familiar with different parts, we talk about our inner child, we talk about, you know, certain parts of our, our psyches, we talk about different things that, that motivate us.

All of those need to be in alignment. If those things are in alignment and they're rooted in our values and our integrity, we are operating outta self-energy. And if you go look at the IFS model that I was talking about before, and it's also, um, defined this way in other places, there's, there are eight Cs, which I did right in front of me so I didn't forget.

So I don't wanna get confused. That come with self energy, compassion, curiosity, clarity, creativity, calm, confidence, courage and connectedness. What do all of those things have together have to do with each other?

They relate to things outside of us. They relate to people outside of us, even though it's self energy. They are critical when it comes to the interactions with others.

Um, and why does this all matter? Why do we even need to get to this whole like, oh, like, you know, you know, self energy piece builds trust, resilience, and influence, um, because people will trust you if you're true to yourself and you know yourself. And no one's perfect with this.

I don't know anyone that's perfect with this. Um, but it helps to make people, for people first, excuse me, decisions instead of I first decisions. So in contrast, um, you know, ego driven versus self-energy driven behavior, um, sadly, a lot of people operate out of ego.

Um, even healthy ego, quote unquote, um, which doesn't scale for extreme peace within, uh, within us that that can lend itself to the outside to create trust and growth with others. Um, and that's really important. And go, just going back really quickly to the trust and resilience and influence part.

Um, you know, that's really important whether you're a leader in an organization, um, a you know, a, a a critical peer to someone, a partner, a friend, what have you. Um, and it's not, you know, we talk about influencer. We're not talking about the state of like being influencers.

It's like people want to listen to you because they know what you're saying is authentic and that they trust that it's for the goodness of everyone around versus just you. So let's talk about ego a little bit and why it's a barrier. Um, now if you've ever taken a psych 1 0 1 class, you, that ego isn't awesome.

Um, but in this particular instance, I want to talk a little bit about like what a good ego can provide it. It can provide a healthy sense of self-confidence, allowing you to believe in yourself, pursue your goals, face challenges. Um, it can act as a positive motivator driving your personal growth, your achievement.

Um, and it stops short of becoming self-centered or arrogant because that's when you get egotistical and nobody really wants to be around you. But if you go back to everything I just described, they're all very me oriented. And the ego is kind of a divide between your true self and the, um, and what you present to the world.

And if you, it's a sheen, for lack of a better term. That's what I was kind of calling it to myself this morning when I was thinking about what I was going to say. Um, 'cause making decisions even from that quote unquote good ego can lead to self-centered decisions that have limited outcomes for others.

So for instance, if, um, you know, I made the decision to do this talk today. 'cause Alan asked me if I would wanna talk. And of course they said yes 'cause I wanted to help my friend, and I love T strong and I wanted to do all this.

Um, you know, but there might've been some me going there of like, oh, it'd be great to, you know, speak about this topic. I wanna talk about that topic that's not coming from the place. That's my place of self energy.

So none of this is, is is perfect, right? It's, it's all something that we strive for. None of us are gonna be from the Dalai Lama here.

Um, but you know, even with a healthy ego, one becomes consumed by behaviors, the actions, and the thoughts of others. So going back to the ego, like I know in a healthy ego, like I think I'm good at my job. I think my friends like me, I think I'm a good cat mom.

I think the industry respects me, but they're all predicated on opinions of other people. And those things should not matter. We become consumed by the behaviors and actions and thoughts of the others around, of others, or excuse me, apparently it doesn't teach us how to talk others around us.

And it blocks the true self. It's the enemy of growth. Ego is the enemy of growth and progress.

Self-energy is how you get to growth and progress and trust and all the things I described before. So this next slide, I hate text pulled slides, but I'm making you suffer through this anyway because I wanna make some points on here. Um, emphasizing ego-driven versus people first slash self-energy approaches.

Um, people first approach this foster trust. They build stronger relationships, they create environments where everyone feels, feels valued and motivated. And again, going back to the ego, you might think, well, I have an ego about good things I do about, you know, that are about me.

It doesn't affect others, but it's still me led thinking. So just taking on a couple of these things around, um, you know, decision making and the contrast there. Are you making a decision in a bubble or are you getting diverse input when you're doing recognition?

Are you like, I did this. I'm really proud of this. I'm doing this.

Like my first rule of thumb as a manager is if something goes wrong, it's my fault. If it's a win, it's the team. Now that doesn't mean I'm not going out giving around ation trophies and the team's not like, Hey, we can, this is how we can do this better, but everybody should be really proud about this win, right?

And this is how we are gonna work together to make things better next time. Um, conflict resolution and work ethic there. The, the, the contrast between those two things and how you address issues with people and make them feel safe.

I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that safety moving, moving on, and I'll get you off of this very text heavy slide here in a second. But there's just very nuanced changes in how we operate when you get to that self-energy piece. And so let me talk about the science of self-energy because it's not all witchy.

Wooo, there is science behind all of this. Again, a lot of this is predicated through, um, you know, clinician education that I've received or work that I've done. So there's a neuroscience behind authenticity.

Um, brain studies, uh, have shown that operating authentically reduces your cognitive dis, I can never say this. Cognitive dissonance means you do what you say, you say what you do, which means you're promoting cl mental clarity and reducing stress. Because if you don't say what you do or do what you say and all the things in between, you're gonna get stressed out because you're not being authentic with people and you're not telling the truth with people.

And of course, that's going to stress you out. Um, trust in oxytocin, authentic behaviors do stimulate the release of oxytocin. And I know many people have heard that term in different types of conversations, but really at its core, oxytocin is a hormone is associated with trust, planning and cooperation.

So you can have that even in, um, you know, in just person to person conversations if you can achieve that level of trust and people can feel good about themselves. Um, the impact on resilience from a scientific perspective, um, there are research studies that have linked self-awareness and inner alignment, which I was talking about before, the mind, body, spirit, all of that, um, to enhanced resilience, allowing people to recover more effectively from setbacks. We all have setbacks, um, you know, but do you let them keep you down?

Or do you have the confidence and the, the anchor in your true self to get back to balance very quickly when something goes wrong? And then back to leadership again since was this is what the majority of the talk is about. Um, it's also been studied that authentic leadership models demonstrate self-energy, fosters employee engagement, loyalty and, and overall team performance, higher overall team performance.

None of this we are a family stuff. Um, you know, you don't wanna have a measurement in your work environment, but you know, you, I know I personally, if I, uh, if I respect my manager or someone that I look up to or a mentor or even colleagues, I'm gonna work that much more aggressively to get what needs to be done, done for them and much to the opposite, if I feel the other way or I might leave that job, right? So as a leader, I mean, this is d you hear everybody's heard the term, just a boss and a leader.

Anyone can get promoted into boss. Anybody can found a company and poof, become the CEO. That doesn't mean that they're a leader, it just means they have the title.

These are the elements that get you to become a leader and help to foster more healthy environments. So we're getting into the self-energy wins and what are the types of wins that come with self-energy? Um, you know, trust and authenticity.

I'm not gonna go through, you are gonna be like, wow, she's so repetitive about trust and authenticity and resilience and leadership, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Um, because it's really critical. Um, and it, the, um, uh, it, there, there's really no way around it.

Leaders who prioritize self-energy are more resilient and influential. And when you get to start at self energy, you can even start to read other people's energy very easily, which helps you in a leadership perspective. I'm not saying you who are they be mind reader, but you can get a sense very quickly if someone's uncomfortable, if you need to do something to help them, if you need to offer them maybe a break if they're burnout or so on and so forth.

And I have a very good friend, um, Dr. Stacy Thayer, if you know her, who is an absolute expert on that. So look up on some of her work on that.

I won't even try to repeat it. Um, but you know, the trust and authenticity, the improved resilience, the enhanced leadership, you're like, wait, leadership now you're talking about enhanced leadership. You know, this is where you are more perceived as trustworthy and influential, resulting in the higher team performance and satisfaction.

And I always tie this to some very important lessons I learned as a leader and as an employee. No one is more trustworthy than someone who says they need help. No one is more trustworthy than someone that says, I don't know.

And no one is more trustworthy than someone that says I was wrong. 'cause that shows they've got significant confidence and they know who they are. I don't trust people that I do that.

That's just me. But that's, those are the leaders that you're like, okay, that person's gonna say I was wrong, or I need help, or this or that makes you feel more valued. And it shows you that they're willing to be authentic with you.

So I think that's a really important part to point to make positive emotional regulation. Emotional regulation is something that's often misunderstood. And quite frankly, it wasn't until recently and until I really understood it, um, it's really having a, an emotional response that is conducive to what is happening in the moment.

It doesn't mean being a robot or being fully numb to the world because then you're not growing, you're not living, you're not experiencing, right? It's, you know, something goes wrong at work. Somebody messes up something that they're supposed to deliver, whether it's code, whether it's a paper, whether it's a talk, what have you, and you freak out on them.

That is not emotional regulation. That is not gonna win you friends versus I'm gonna give you some constructive feedback, let's work with this together. Or on a more personal note, I did this this morning, couldn't find my glasses.

I was like, ah, was it really that big of a deal? Do I not have 12 more laying around my house? Of course I do.

So that was not very emotional regulated, um, of me. So, so that's a really important part of self leadership, uh, self energy and where it plays into leadership and where that's important. And then of course, higher wellbeing.

Again, I said this before, none of us are gonna become the Dalai Lama here, but operating from self-energy aligns with just being positive psychologically, right? We're happier, we have more purpose, we're more fulfilled. Can I say that I'm always happy, purpose-driven and fulfilled.

Absolutely not. But I strive for and I'm honest with myself when I'm not. Um, and you know, and I try to learn from those moments of like, how did I get here and how do I not get here again?

And how can I be better? Because if I'm not in a wellbeing state, I can't be helpful to others, which is what this is all about. No, I did also say in my abstract that I would talk about personal brand, um, whether you speak at a conference, whether you're on Mastodon, x, blue sky, you're doing blogging, what happened, what have you, you are marketing and I know a lot of people don't like that, but it's what you're doing and that is part of brand.

Um, and so what is your personal brand? Who are you to the world? You want your brand to be authentic.

So you're trusted, um, and you want your brand to be authentic because you want to be authentic. More importantly, your values and your actions align and people can see it. You're authentic and that creates credibility.

People wanna hear what you have to say, they listen. If it's obvious that you are doing promotion out there and self-promotion, and it's clear that you're doing that because you wanna do it because you wanna see your face on the screen, people are gonna stop listening to you after a while. You know?

So build a personal brand that reflects integrity. What I have on this slide is a personal brand wheel. It's a visual.

I just need something to put on the slide. Quite frankly, I'm not a big fan of them, but it's a visual tool that maps out the different elements that make up a personal brand. And a lot of like executive coaches and like B2C marketers and like P two P marketers and things like that, that are helping people figure out their brand.

You use things like this, but if you look at the core, there's four things there at the core there, exploring, uh, spirituality, leaving a legacy, ET and so on and so forth. But if you say, well, I wanna be known as a creator, but I wanna leave a legacy, those things don't align. So just again, just making sure that you have alignment and you're showing it in your actions external.

Don't hide who you are, be who you really are, and make sure that aligns with that integrity that you have and that self energy that you have accomplished by being calm and collected. Focusing on those eight Cs, again, the compassion, the curiosity, the clarity, the creativity, the calm, the confidence, the courage, the connectedness. I might have said a calm twice and I might have forgotten curiosity, but I'm gonna say it just in case.

So just something to think about when you're presenting yourself to the world. So what does this have to do with cybersecurity and tech in general? Jen, why are you even talking about this thing?

I know somebody's thinking that, um, everything we do in this industry, or even if we're not directly working related to cyber in a different technical area, it's high risk. There's a lot of people that rely on us for stability, if not security, from protecting against risk and threat, protecting against insiders, protecting against poor ethics, poor leadership, what have you. Because high stakes environments lead to high stakes behavior if you aren't rooted.

Um, so you've gotta have trust in order to deal. I don't know anybody that it has a more stressful job than an incident responder. So my, my love and respect goes out to you and thank you for all you do if you're on this or if you hear this, but, you know, building trust and, and it in terms of cyber.

So, you know, building trust, making sure that you have trust on your team. So the more that you operate outta your self energy, um, the more people are gonna trust you. And, and not double, double think, double think.

I dunno if that's a thing. It is now what you have to say. They have confidence in the direction that you're giving 'em.

You can make more quick decisions when it comes to a high stake environment. Very emotional, regulated, quick decisions. So you can help solve the issue at hand.

You have better collaboration and teamwork and can move faster as a unit through solving these issues. You have resilience under stress. I mentioned earlier that anchor that brings you back to yourself.

Um, that's very, very important. And again, we talked about ethics, ethical leadership. Um, you're gonna listen to, and especially in a situation when it deals with cybersecurity and you're dealing with an incident, um, you are looking to your leaders to have an ethical answer to these, to these questions.

And sometimes it can get really tricky in cyber. Um, but that's a really, really important element to this, is setting strong ethical examples or integrity is paramount in general. I even said this at a marketing conference.

I gave you a keynote at last, not this past December, but December, 2023, where I basically said, no matter what your job is in cybersecurity, whether you are a marketer or whether you are, you know, on the front lines of tech, if you don't care about the outcome, if you don't care about the ethics, 'cause of ethics of security, plenty of other industries out there for you, we have to care and we have to be rooted in ethics to be effective. So I'm gonna take a little side step here on the self-energy piece for a second, which is essentially it's still leadership with self-energy. We're not getting away from that since that's the topic.

But this is less about what you do and who you are and where your energy comes from and where those eight C's are rooted. So here's where I'm gonna get into for you. Our body is hundreds of chac of chakras, which is any point in the, in this of spiritual power along the body.

Most of them are our feet, truth be told. But there are seven that get the most attention. Um, the fixture emphasizes the heart chakra due to the topic, um, which is the center of love and compassion, which is where important leadership comes from.

You also have the crown, which is awareness and intelligence. A third eye intuition and imagination throughout communication. Solar plexus, which is right of your upper torso, which is self-esteem and cons, confidence, your pelvic area, you have your sacral, which is pleasure and creativity.

And then your lower spine, you have your root with for stability and groundedness. A lot of people think that they, if they do work on their throat or if they do work on their crown, that they're gonna be better effective business communicators when it's really working on the heart chakra, that's gonna make you more successful. Um, leadership and self-energy refers to the idea that a leader's personal energy level, including their motivation, enthusiasm, positive mindset, impacts their ability to lead and inspire.

If you think several slides ago when I talked about how they had that motivation and enthusiasm for themselves, if they live this for themselves, all that motivation and enthusiasm is for you, for your team, for your company, for your organization, for the industry and beyond leading to better performance and engagement for everyone. Um, listening over, dictating inspiring trust and motivations, long-term impact on organiz organizational success and just happiness, psychological safety, things like that. And I'll talk about that in a second.

So a quick little exercise, which I won't know if you do it or not, but just to give you an example. And if you don't get these notes, my contact info, um, will be at the end of this. Feel free to reach out.

So you're sitting here going, okay, so how do I even start to get to this? I want to know what my authentic self is. How do I, how do I get to this really quickly?

A few steps. Start with a prompt. Grab a piece of paper, write down one way you can act less out of ego.

Think of something you've done recently that you made the decision out of eco. Was it a talk that you gave? Was it a decision you made at work?

Was it a decision you made out of with a, with a friend? Um, you know, and then flip it. How can you do the opposite?

How can you do it where it, you're actually doing it from a state of self energy where you're actually like, all right, I'm calm, I'm connected, I'm clear. What would I do differently in that situation? Journal about it.

Share it with a friend, a therapist, spiritual leader, whomever. Meditate if you want to. I said in the abstract, I'm not gonna make you meditate, I'm not gonna make you meditate.

It scares a lot of people. Um, but it can be as simple as just being quiet in the shower and thinking about it. That's how simple meditation can be.

Um, doesn't have to be super complex the way a lot of other folks do it. And then write down steps to change it. Change your behavior if you wanna change it.

Um, I use reminders in my phone of things that I wanna change to get to a happier, more rooted, more, uh, integrity focused looking outward to help the world higher type of self. Um, yeah, sounds kind of funny when you think about it, how old world that is. But I also have mantras that I have a repeat every day, every day.

I repeat that I embrace my whole self, including all of my parts to make sure that I'm doing positive self-talk that's a part of that as well. So that's one example of how you can get there. Um, I won't get into too much 'cause we're getting close on time here, but, um, practical steps to align your energy outside of that exercise that I just gave you, which you could do for, for many different things.

Um, reflect on your core values. Do you know what your values are? Reflect on that.

Are you acting in them? Are you centered in them? Do you have to try?

If you have to try what's happening with your ego? Practice? Mindfulness and self-awareness.

I just talked about that. Um, but you could also go touch, grasp, do something else. Find your thing.

Embrace feedback. This is the difference between making decisions about who you are, based on what other people say, but find out from other people how you received and think about it. Set goals.

How do you wanna contribute to the world? How do you want to contribute to the per to your personal and professional growth in a way to help others stay centered during cha cha challenges, excuse me, cultivate empathy. They used to not think I was an empath, which is kind of funny 'cause you can't do this if you're not an empath, but cultivate empathy.

And that really means understanding other people's emotions. There are very gifted empaths that can feel the emotion of everyone around them. There are few and far between, but cultivate that empathy and then reevaluate regularly.

If I think about the last year of my life, I have had so many changes that I've had to reevaluate my value system and structure so many times to make sure that I've stand aligned. And again, I mess up all the time. So be patient if this is something you wanna achieve, be kind to yourself.

Be kind to others. Be patient, whether there's, while you're messing up, be patient with others while they mess up. Be transparent.

Help other people learn. People might notice something different about you. Uh, tell them, you know, there's no, you know, nothing wrong, being honest, you could help someone else learn to do it, but it's not about being p perfect all the time.

It's about making decisions that are rooted in, oops, excuse me, that are rooted in authenticity. And again, as I close my contact information, my email, Twitter, or I can't call it x I'm sorry, blue sky, my LinkedIn are on here, is all about trust and authenticity, resilience, leaving the ego behind. Um, a quick call to action I challenge you all with is to start small with change, focus on auth, authenticity, and lead with integrity.

It just means start being honest with yourself and start acting in that way. I'm not saying you don't, but you know, put more emphasis on that. I've seen companies flourish and plummet based on this single simple concept, whether it's been adopted or not.

And no, I won't name them. The last thing I'll leave you with is a thought that I love, which is true. Success comes from who you are, not just what you do.

And do you have the courage to be that person? Be who you are to the world, or do you have to hide behind your ego? You'll be way more successful if you do the former.

With that said, I say thank you so much for having me. Um, you know how to contact me if you want to reach out, and I am grateful for this opportunity. Thank you to all the Textron team for having me.

Hello, my name is Chris Blas, and you have landed somewhere along the inevitability curve in this series. We've talked to interesting folks about hopefully interesting topics, looking at where we've been in the past, how we got to where we are right now, perhaps what that looks like, and with that, maybe some idea of where we're going in the future. So joining me today is Emerson Tan.

How are you? Emerson? Hello?

Uh, I'm in, uh, sunny Washington DC stuck in a basement because that apparently is that, uh, a, a a a, a good place to, uh, uh, ride out a crisis. I think. I think that's a position now, Right?

So, uh, speaking of crisis, so I, I normally don't do a lot of intro stuff into this, but you know, I don't know how to describe your background. You have certain emergency response, cyber e economics guru from hell. What do you do?

Um, so, goodness. So these days I run, um, my own little, I, I have my own little FinTech firm, which builds payment technologies for the developing world, um, but also cri like disaster resilient and crisis resilient, um, payment technologies. Um, but my career history is somewhat insane because, um, I started out in, uh, computer security and the whole hacking world before, um, such things were a crime.

I'm a lot older than I look. The reason I say the sides of my head is because that's where all the white bits are. Um, and, uh, from there, my career took me into the world of national security and cyber warfare For about a decade.

I was the, um, head of external research and development for one of the first companies that ever produced cyber warfare, anything for the five eyes. Um, and in parallel to that, then I have, I've also got a 20 something odd year career in humanitarian aid, um, and disaster management. Um, and all of those things have kind of come together to sort of like feel really my interest in, in, um, in resilience and, um, disaster and crisis management.

Um, my academic academically, I studied planetary sciences at, uh, university College London. So this makes Perfect sense. Linear path, I can see it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's like, it's, it's like earth and space science, you know, like computer hacking, cyber warfare, humanitarian, Emergency response Stuff. And, you know, well, You know, that is such the, the thing, you know, I've, I've, you know what I, I still get excited about getting on airplanes, right?

And try to keep in mind the fact that I get to drink coffee at 30, 40,000 feet and just blow the speed of sound, which is kind of unique in the history of like, history. Um, and, and, but, but this, getting to do what we do, you know, every, you know, Rakesh, you know, mutual friend was on, you know, we had one of these conversations a couple weeks ago and it's just amazing. You know, none of us, I don't, you know, I think my, you know, I'm just lucky I four's come my way through everything.

I didn't, I don't have a high school diploma. How did I get here. I don't know.

But one of the defining characteristics about what I consider my community is that everybody's sort of like, You know, I'm really, is this real? Am I really, I'm in the White House, or I'm in wherever you, we get to. And it's like, really?

So, you know, following that path, right? This again, in this whole inevitability curve thing goes back to 19 91, 92, and I was trying to explain to my boss, let you know, stop arguing about it. Let's assume for a second that everybody on earth is on the internet.

Say, you know, 20, 30 years from now, there's a line at that point you can look back. We'll all be sitting there looking back and say the distant future of 2024, looking back and say, oh, here's how it happened. Yeah.

I didn't say it's all happens blow. It's like preor day Once you get there. Yeah.

Once you get, exactly. So, um, So, so on on this, you know, I've done it, you, I've done a bunch, bunch of these sort of pieces, you know, over the last, uh, number of years. Anyway.

So in this series, just digging into it over half an hour saying, alright, where have we been? Where are we right now? Where are we going?

And you know, with your background, you know, we can take it a way we want, but you know, it's hurricane season. We've got all sorts of disasters. Own is, you know, we're dealing with the, uh, outcome of that.

Milton's about to take out my boats in Florida. Plus a lot of people's, you know, lives and livelihoods, and we've been responding to disasters. We've been having disasters literally forever.

Yep. And in our working lifetimes in the green room, we're talking about this a little bit just now, you know, things have gotten better, worse, different, right? And they're going someplace.

Yeah. Different. I mean, so one of the things that's really, really clear, at least, so like if you, if you can, if you come to climate change and, and the effect of our pollution as, as humans, if you come to that as, uh, um, from, uh, the perspective of someone who, whose science background wasn't particularly great, right?

You're, you're, this probably looks either terribly overblown or like terrifying or some conversation, some, like you, you, you, you, you see sort in these two emotions. Um, if you come from this sort of geo, from like someone who has a good understanding of like geological science and is kept up to date. And if you come to this with someone, you know, with like a, you know, planetary sciences background, then what this is, is actually, it is about, it is about that inevitability curve.

Because at this point, it's not like the 1960s where everyone was like, oh my God, you know, like, the world is gonna starve 'cause they're gonna run out phosphate or this and that. Right? Or, you know, the world can only support 3 billion people, da dah, dah, dah, dah.

This is actually all about physics. And one of the things that people don't properly gr is that the cold state that humans evolved in is not earth's default state. Earth's default state is pretty warm.

It has, for most of its history, earth has had no ice at the polls. Um, and for most of its history, um, it has had life forms at latitudes that you just wouldn't think of. So, I mean, like, you know, the closest analogy of where we're going is probably the early osi.

The early osi, you know, had, it was a, it was quite a few degrees warmer than it is now. Um, it had giant snapping river turtles in Berlin. Uh, horses were about this big.

Um, and it was significantly warmer. Um, one of the reasons that we kind of like have kind of like not really sort of clocked all of this is that the techniques to actually look at the temperature record are actually very, very, very new. Um, I mean, like we are talking, you know, like, oh, less than 50 years old to get down to the sort of like fine grain resolution that you actually be need to have to actually sort of like drill into these things.

And you know, it, it's also new that in fact, actually a lot of the analysis just simply hasn't been done. But the physics will tell you that, you know, like if you go and shove a bunch of extra CO2 into the air, then you will end up with radiative forcing. And that's actually an experiment that you can do on your countertop with a couple of soda pop bottles, some water, a bit of sodium bicarbonate, and like a couple of thermometers.

In fact, actually, I could go and rig that experiment right now with the, um, literally the contents of this, you know, of, of the kitchen here. Um, and you know, like once you kind of like do that, I mean, it, it goes to show though that the, the terrible state of science education around the world, basically, you know, that, that, that we can't actually gr this, but what that world looks like and what we know from the geological record is that we evolved in a time of actual, like when times are actually pretty good storms were particularly huge, you know, um, Milton is the norm through geological history, which should be a real kind of li wake up call. It's like, it's like these sorts of things where you kind of like, you know, start to sort of like push the limits of like, what's actually extremes are the norming geological history, not the Clement environment that we, that, that we grew up in.

Because like, if you compare the history of earth, you know, few billion years with human lifetime, we look this big, Well, not just us, you know, 500 million years for anything much more interesting than, uh, than pon scum, right? Yeah. It's, it's, you know, like most of mo, most of the first history now, like the, the dominant form of life was, you know, like unicellular Right?

Busy making oxygen, right? And that, so they've, let's think about where to take this, right? So to your point, you know, this has always been happening literally, literally forever.

We're literally evolved and all our ancestors are involved to deal with this sort of stuff. Now we're in this spot, right? Where we like to build on the coastlines and we like to not get wiped out by things.

And, and, and, and, you know, I'll, I'll say it, you know, the, the disinformation, the cognitive security campaigns are going on right now trying to convince all of us of seven different things at the same time. Um, we're gonna be like electric monks for anybody who gets that, uh, that reference. Um, and it's, You know, but but, but the reality is that we like these sort of things.

Like, you know, anybody looking for some optimism, Isaac Arthur, you know, look up Isaac Arthur on YouTube. Yep. You know, the real science guys produce huge amounts of content.

You know, a lot of it, you know, this, this medium and far future looking in terms of decades and centuries and millennia, right? And the, the opportunity to in, on those timescales over the next could be decades, certainly over the next several centuries. You know, we could geo engineer the earth to maintain that happy spot where we are, which is not the natural state to your point.

No, and I will get that. Well, it's not the defaults, it, it's, it's always been natural, but the world, the word natural is kind of like, yeah. Comets hitting planets are also, is also natural, right?

Yeah. It, it's, it's, it's, it's like, but you wanna sort of keep it in that sort of like happy sort of like, like inver comm, the happy spot. But the, the thing is, is that, and one of the reasons that, that all of this is turning out to be very much more complicated than everybody thinks, is that our understanding, um, of a lot of this is actually surprisingly weak, right?

The core, the core, the core physics well understood. We have natural laboratories and throughout the solar system that we can look at, um, uh, we have the geological record, but when it comes to actually the really fine grained stuff, our understanding is quite weak. I mean, just the other, just a couple of weeks ago I was in, um, I was in Tonga, uh, for the Pacific Island Forum, um, leaders Summit.

And I, I ran into a, a famous Australian environmentalist and, and naturalist by the name of Tim Flannery. And he's very famous for producing books like The Future Eaters. Um, he is, uh, a former Australian of the Year and, uh, like quite renowned in inside that community.

And he, and we were, we got talking and it turns out that we've both been reading the same science papers, um, as have some of my old professors, and we all still talk. Um, and like, the amazing thing is, is that all of the models, for example, from the IPCC, actually, it turns out not all wrong. We actually got, um, our sensitivity calculations, um, off by maybe a factor of as much as two.

So in other words, the overall system might be twice as sensitive to CO2 levels. And we previously thought, and what that means is that everything that you see that is marked in these reports as 2050 to 2100 actually should really be thought of as now, which is like, oh, and the thing is, is that we can manage the really gross, big changes, but this fine grain stuff needed to actually keep you inside, if you like, our comfort zone, um, we still haven't got a f*****g clue how to do any of that. Um, and you know, it's the, it's the fine control.

You know, you can stop somewhere running away. It's being Venus, but it's really, really fine control that we, that we really, that we really struggle with. And we'd be better off, frankly, um, trying to keep the he the hemostatic controls, you know, that provided by things like forests and coral reefs and, and so on and so forth.

Because those systems are actually better at self-regulating that very, very fine control than like humans. I mean, a good example of this is, um, sulfur dioxide. So because we don't like acid rain, we decided that it would be a good idea as a planet if we stopped putting sulfur in fuel.

So we took out sulfur from diesel, we took it out from aviation fuel, and we took it out from marine fuel. And the last of that to go was, um, marine bunker fuel and that, and marine diesel. And that happened about, I think it was like 20, 22, 23.

And what we've seen is basically a vertical rising temperature, because it turns out we've been running our own geoengineering experiment for the past, you know, like 80 years basically ever since the Royal Navy went, you know what, this whole coal thing, it's, ah, coal no good. No. And for battleships too big, too heavy.

And with some Churchill went, you know what, we're gonna use oil. We're gonna turn all of our dread battleships turn running on oil. And at that moment we went, right, okay, you know what?

No more coal. So, and the rest of the, the world exploded and we started to start pumping all of this alpha in, in sulf dioxide into the air. And that experiment came to a pretty abrupt halt a couple of years ago, and now everything's just gone like this straight up, right?

So we can run in this experiment, but it just goes to show how weak are actual, so like, core like fine understanding of these fine grain mechanisms actually is so, you know, like, could we do it? Yeah. Could we do it with confidence?

No, no. Well, And I think that's as good a, uh, uh, some age of where we are, because I feel the same way, you know, as a kid I remember thinking that, oh, wow, I missed it. Everything's, you know, already sort of figured out, you know, and, and I look back at, you know, what I was reading then, you know, early seventies and so forth, and realize we didn't know anything.

Like literally compared, you know, the, you know, pick any individual discipline and every, you know, the best people on earth, you know, having this debate about things that these days we go, well, well, we all know. I mean, literally know one of those. And the debate is now 10, 10 layers, uh, deeper in the same way, you know, to so many of the points you make, I don't hardly know which one to squirrel on, but looking on the future, you know, I, I think it's very easy to say that 50 years from now versions of ourselves, you know, um, or others, we'll be looking back and feeling exactly like I do about 1970, which is like, it seemed we knew so much, but I, I just want to, you know, sort of challenge the, the stock, uh, public, you know, common, uh, assumption, right?

Is that we'll never know. It's like, that's not true either, right? No, these are not infinite systems.

You can find the boundaries and you talk about, you know, bio systems regulating climates and so forth. You find out that a lot of the things you, we can take the path on right now, we'll just have Moore's Law and we'll have faster computers. A lot of things are beyond computational management.

You literally can't get there from here. Yeah. So it's not that we're gonna math out the, the Speed problem.

Right. You know, we're not, we're not gonna, you know, there's no future version where we know where every cubic centimeter of error is moving, but we can understand the systems well enough. So, and, and the thing, and, and the thing to me is, is is that like there are two way there, there are two ways that you could go.

You can either de devolve and decentralize the system so that, you know, like, or you can try and centrally control it all. And the problem we're trying to centrally control it all is that there's a span of control problem. Um, and I think that when it comes to trying to work out, for example, how to keep the planet livable or try and keep it within that safe, happy zone, um, it's big enough and complicated enough actually that you should just be able to, that we actually just need to be able to agree on a bunch of core principles, you know?

And then it's like, okay, everybody, you know, like, you know, leave it to the trees, you know, leave it to the trees, the fish and the, and the, and, and the coral to actually do the actual like fine, you know, like fine twiddling of the knobs and the rest of it. And you know, like if, if we think that like, putting sulfur back into the fuel, I mean, 'cause then becomes a management problem, right? Because the thing is, is that you, you end up with this situation where once you commit to actually trying to manage it yourself, you are committed to do that forever.

Forever. And the minute that you take your finger off the scales and the rest of it, it will rebound to whatever the physics says there, where wherever the physics says there is gonna go and out of the happy place. And that's bad because we know from the history of humans that we are supremely bad at running anything forever.

Um, funnily enough, actually the closest thing to forever is actually probably the Catholic church, because the Catholic church, as it turns out, actually is the linear successor of the Roman Empire. And if you ever look at the, the, the, the, um, the names that the Catholic church uses inside of its organization like parishes, diocese, and so on and so on, right? They're actually the lineal descendant of the Roman military province organizational structure.

But that's the closest thing that we actually have to forever. So you wanna talk about actually trying to commit to managing something forever. That's probably the closest that you've got.

And that's not very old in terms of like geological history. Well, in the, You know, as I've, as I've thought through all this stuff, you know, I, I expect, you know, there's such common expectation that, you know, we're not gonna live till, you know, Wednesday, right? You know, this, this, this again, you know, boomer era, um, legacy pounded into me.

And it's like, it, it gonna be 19, you know, it's gonna be overpopulation 19 70, 19 84, 19 99, 2000, the apocalypse is coming, you know, and it turns out there's been lots of apocalypses sort of forever and afterwards we all clean up and, and move on to the next one. Yeah. Um, well, I always, I always tell people there will always be people.

The only question will be how many and under what conditions will they live? That's it. That, that is literally it.

You look at civilizations through history, they kind of like go through this sort of curve where they, I mean, like, so, you know, here's a, here's a, here's a, here's an example. The Mayan civilization is still there. The only difference is, is that they're in like, like the, the, the, the culture is still there except they're just in little villages up on the hills and, and the rest of it.

And they're no longer in these sort of like, great cities in the rest of it. And they all speak Spanish and Cher, you know, they're still there. You know, the, the, the, they're not the do, they're not, you know, they're, they're not a dominant hyper dominant civilization anymore.

So, you know, like the, for us, the aim of the game should be, we wanna like keep, keep ourselves, we as individuals wanna stay alive, but also like, we quite like our civilization as it is, you know? So we wanna make sure that all of that knowledge survives and our ability to do things like, you know, not die from a paper cut or, or I mean, like, one of the most amazing things that you can do can, it turns out that you can actually directly trace the history of vaccines by going to a cemetery that has been in continuous use, um, for the last like, couple of hundred years and go to the children's section. Oh yeah.

You able do your ancestry tree at some point. And, you know, you go back a couple generations, all these little leafs, you know, that never went very Far. And it's just like, oh, everyone died before they were like five.

Right? Well, you know, either birth, giving birth or being born was the most dangerous thing, you know, we can Do before. And then, you know, like you make it to 35 and you're something like, you know what, actually I'm good.

You know, it's like, oh yeah. Five decent tree. I, I've ry I've, I've had all that s**t.

I'm, I'm good. Well, you know, It, it's so common, you know, folks our age, right. You know, uh, just love to get into the, oh my God, I'm so all dis hurts and everything else.

I'm sorry. I just go through the whole thing. Bonus rounds.

Bonus. Hey, look, hey, I remember to your point, and this is actually Just wearing out guess. Yeah.

Well, exactly. It's like, it's like, oh, you are old enough now that that's a problem. Guess what?

That's something that like your ancestors just didn't have because Right. They didn't have aches and pains because they were dead. That's right.

Yeah. 37, oh, you poor old man. You got all your limb Still.

So, so, so like, the aim of the game should be, it's like, we enjoy all of this stuff, and the aim of the game should be, well, we actually wanna make sure that our descendants, your kids, you know, and their kids like, can enjoy the same stuff. It might be slightly different stuff, but we want them to have the same sort of like broad, broad fulfilling lives that we, in our incredibly varied careers have taken for granted. Right.

And that a perfect segue into this, into just looking forward. Right? You know, I, and Just in my own experience, right, and the things I've seen in, in emergency response and da disaster recovery of all sorts, you know, cyber and physical whatnot, and what Resh and I were talking about and the 20, 25, 30 years, you know, that, that he's been, you know, involved with that.

You know, when you see right now we have a star link, you know, you know, showing up in the middle of emergency response, now you got 150 megabits, you know, broadband, that changes a lot of things. And Dr, I mean, you know, quad coppers and drones, I look out five years, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, our ability to respond to disasters like we're seeing right now will be fundamentally, fundamentally actual conversation purposes, fundamentally different. If I can send out, not just, you know, helicopters, you know, from enthusiasts and people who happen to have helicopters, but just a fleet of bloody drones to find every individual within 90 minutes, you know, assess them.

And we won't imagine being able to go back to where we are today. I, I actually think somewhat differently, which is the, one of the problems that we have is that we've built a bunch of systems that are in fact, actually both ubiquitous and actually very brittle. And it's that brittleness that is actually a problem.

So yes, starlink is great. The problem with these constellations, for example, is that you can only have a couple of them, Right? And they are actually, in many respects, quite, quite vulnerable.

Um, Well, but let's just ratchet forward real quick on that, so that Yeah, I, I agree. Yeah. I, I love, you know, I, especially, I love SpaceX.

That company is amazing, the stuff that they're doing, everybody there, it sounds very controversial these days, but there's only one of them that makes me nervous. I'm a security geek. Anything can happen to one of anything.

But just, just inside this topic, you just assume that if I was, you know, responsible, gimme a 10 year timeline in, in a reasonable budget to develop, you know, a disaster response drone, you know, uh, fleet capability, you could, you know, drop in a container mm-hmm. Into someplace like Dan Andrews, Tennessee and have it up all the valleys and find all the people. Um, yeah, you can do that.

And it doesn't need any, you know, you take brittleness and fragility in, in, uh, you know, some of them are gonna die and some of them are gonna run into trees and some of'em battery, you know, they won't be able to get a connection. You can build that with today's tech. You can.

And, and the, the cost of not having that becomes enough to actually have that. So I think that's the kind of thing you realistically forecast, you know, one in two decades out, that emergency response turns in, you know, the time it takes, the time it has taken in North Carolina to get to some of these folks, uh, has probably got to them all by now. But you never know.

It gets really windy up there and those little Oh yeah, Yeah. No, I mean, the thing is, is the other thing to, to bear in mind as well is that I was told, you know, right. It's the classic William Gibson quote, the future is already here.

It's just not even distributed. And in my mind, the, so like, like I tend to take quite a, a, a pessimism is the wrong, pessimistic is the wrong word. Realistic, Yeah.

Possibly realistic. Um, realistic is not a bad word. So we, we kind of have this sort of, so both of us grew up in a world of, essentially a world that wasn't actually at war.

And this is not, again, The norm. The norm, the norm is in fact actually a state of pretty much permanent war. If you look at the history of the United Kingdom, for example, um, it's actually been at war with France for most of it Or itself the rest of the time, Although, yeah, yeah.

Basically it's like there was always war somewhere, usually with France, often with somebody else into the mix. But one of the fascinating things about the second half of the 21st century in my mind is that we now have a state, or, or the second two thirds of the 21st century is that once again, we have a state of permanent war, but not war. And the thing that actually is find, I find actually most fascinating is, especially when it comes to the cyber stuff, is that you end up in a state of war, but not war.

It's undeclared war, but it's still fundamentally war. And what I find fascinating is the, for example, Russian botnets amplifying the disinformation and misinformation, which is actually now impeding the response to Hurricane Helene and now threatening to actually get people killed Oh, yes. Of Florida.

Um, because, you know, like you have things saying, you know, like, no, don't evacuate. You know? And so it's, well, It's, you don't have stop there.

The, the, the, you know, with as a binational co, uh, family, right. With Canada and the US to, to compare to the same time during the pandemic, if the US had the same per capita death rate, COVID death rate as Canada, there would be 700,000 Americans alive today. Correct?

Right. And that's, so we're, we're past the point of potentially killing people with disinformation. And in fact, I think that's, again, if I switched hats, if I was a bad actor, I would be more concerned with my ability to run free in the disinformation space, not lasting much longer.

'cause the costs are getting high enough that we have to find ways around this, this, if we're stuck in this again, over the long curves. If we can never, if we, the state of not having any agreement about what exists, if this stays like this and or continues getting worse forever, we can't have electricity, yeah. We're f****d.

Yeah. That's, that's actually the thing. And that's, that's one of the things that's actually really interesting is that this appears to be a generational thing.

So again, but the, the question, the, the question is, is can we sustain ourselves through this transitional phase to younger people who have a much better set of information hygiene in their heads? Because they've grown up in an information where everything in an environment where everything is hostile. But the thing is that, is that they're not in charge Yet.

That's right. Yes. Well, I mean, like, if you've noticed like, like, like the boomers are still f*****g in charge.

'cause they make up the largest voting block. They, after this election they won't. But right now, in this set of elections that's happening globally, the boomers are still the largest voting, you know, the largest effective voting block.

Even though they're not an absolute majority, they're the ones that still come out and vote. And that's why 2024 is such a pivotal year because it's like, if you end up with another four years of institutional decay, chaos, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, you know, like that's super bad news because your ability to sustain yourself and recover in the next 30 may be really badly impacted. Um, like the, the, the only thing that gives me any hope at all is the fact that when you talk to really young kids, you know, in their, in their late teens, early 20, uh, not even in their late teens, like, you know, like mid-teens, like no, the twenties, they are far more aware and skeptical about like, you know, like what YouTube and the algorithms actually feeding them.

Um, but that also explains why basically, you know, like Zuckerberg and, um, you know, like elongated rodent and you know, the rest of these, am I allowed to square on this thing? So it's the internet. We can say anything we like, The rest of these f*****g pricks are so absolutely terrified of this generational change because that generation coming up has far less tolerance for their f*****g b******t than ours does.

And the boomers do. I mean, every billionaire isn't institutional failure and giving billionaires effectively personal rights to shape our informational environment. It's a catastrophe because they don't serve our interests.

They're not even interested in keeping the planet livable. Because you know, like if you ask Elon, it's like, I wanna f**k off to masks. And it's like, well, enjoy cancer buddy.

You know? And, and so because we've handed that over to them, you know, certainly here in the west, we've handed that over to them. They're, it's their interest that shape that, that information environment.

And they're all about low taxes, wanna f**k off the Mars. And if they wanna live on some like compound out in the South Pacific and the rest of the world, the rest of us drown. They don't care.

But if you talk to these much younger people, they are riven with everything from climate. I mean, like one of the saddest things recently, actually, I was talking to a friend of mine 'cause a 14-year-old daughter, and that daughter has a self-harm problem. And when asked about or so, like self-harm problems more often than not have to do with a feelings of loss of control.

Right? Right. And terrifyingly, it is actually climate anxiety that actually dry in her case, that actually drives some of that behavior because they feel that the world around them is outta control.

And the adults who should be in charge and looking after interest or not. Well, I have three kids in their twenties. Right.

You know, so I feel this one very, very deeply. Right. And I, I, you know, for anybody out there, you know, listening to us old guys talk about this, you're gonna have a tomorrow, you just are right.

You'll have challenges to deal with. Maybe really bad ones, probably really bad ones. And then, you know, there's mortality at the end of it.

So I don't think that, uh, and I know we could talk about this stuff forever, we had to end at some point. But I think this is the sort of thing, you know, my work with folks like you and rake and the, the whole, you know, security world, networking world, emergency response, humanitarian stuff, is that we will just continue, continue to get better at this stuff. You know, we'll continue to have existential crises.

There's always gonna be a vo on battle fleet coming to destroy Earth, but we'll work it through. And I, I couldn't agree with you more that I think a lot of this is generational. I don't think I am wired correctly in the head to, you know, fully understand how, how we're gonna do some of this stuff.

But I can see a generation growing up that is, We need to be much more okay with the idea of like, you know what, uh, I don't have all the answers. These old f*****g guys certainly don't have all the answers. And the rest of it, you know, what, what do we ask a bunch of why, why don't we ask the young people, why don't we ask the ones who actually have like, like a real like Stake In it.

A stake in it. Yeah. Yeah.

And you know, like, like the wiser wa the wiser wise leaders listen to listen to listen to all of their stakeholders to use like corporate horse boic speech. But in this particular case, like, like the stakeholders are actually in this particular case are a bunch of like 13 and 14 and 15 and 16 year olds, right? And actually, you know, because ultimately, especially when you're talking about things like the climate and the rest of it, the decisions that we make today are irreversible on the 20 to 30 to 50 year thousand year time timeframe.

Right? So in other words, if we are, as it looks like committed just with the amount of CO2 that's in the air right now to somewhere in the region of two degrees of warming, right? That's enough to tip us out of the en environment that contemporary human homo sapiens grew up in.

That is enough to tip ust out of the environment that all of our principal food species grew up in, that evolved in, right? And what that means is, is that actually, like, we now need to start thinking in terms of like, it's not like the world winks out of existence when I pop my clogs. 'cause I can do that, just go crossing the road here quite easily, just stand out in the middle of Road Island Avenue and just say, come get me.

Right? Like we, we actually, we, we need to actually really start thinking about this in terms of like, okay, well what's the effect for the next generation and the generation after that? And then actually start, and you know what, they're right in front of us when that 14-year-old like shows up with a bleeding arm and the rest of it.

And like when you ask them, well why do you cut yourself? And they say, well, the world is spiral. You know, the world is spiraling over control.

Literally everything's on fire. And you know, like I can't see a computer, we should actually listen. We shouldn't just go, oh, you know what?

It's alright, we're just gotta put you some antidepressants. Uh, uh, you know, like everything will be fine. And um, you know, like let's go back to like counting all the zeros in my f*****g bank account because you know what, that is totally synthetic.

And those wounds and those scars remain Right? You know, we, we should we, you know, like we need to start doing a lot better by these folks. And like, so the way that I think about things is that if we should be building for a much deeper set of resilience, we should not be saying, well, you know, what if we just build the house of cards just higher and higher and higher and higher and higher, you know, like, and if I'm just the guy building like the house, the, like the last couple of steps on the house of cards, everything's gonna be fine.

You know, it's like, well actually, you know, we actually do run risks of kind of like basal collapses. And so what we need to actually do is say, well, okay, if we're gonna start, if we're gonna think about engineering, well, you know, like do we always engineer, for example, for an always online environment? And I would answer, that's actually a really stupid idea.

Don't do that because you know, like human agency will ensure that you will not always have an always online route. I mean, starlink is a brilliant example of this, right? Starlink iss, like it's a universal always online environment.

You know what, half a dozen ASAP missiles and the rest of it and that's it, it's game over the whole system. Well, yeah, I, I'm gonna end on a, on a positive note because I think that it is the whole point and uh, you know, I think that, you know, a lot of the answers that, that we'll find that, again, these may be outside my, you know, survivable age range may take, you know, another 50 years and so forth to work through it. But I see it in the, I see it in the hands and the mouth of my kids' generation, which is mental.

Absolutely Right. We have so much room to improve so that we ourselves and individually can enjoy this world. And I think a mentally healthy world will come up with solutions to all these issues so much faster than we muddle through right now.

That, that may be the key by itself just maybe 50 to a hundred years from now. People are just way better in their heads. So they're not going through all the agony of addressing.

Well, I think actually, Honestly, I honestly think that actually like a good, like a really good start would be simply getting it into people's heads that the endless pursuit of like nine or 10 or have 12 zeros or have mentioned, you know, in, you know, of, of some fictitious value in the rest of it actually isn't the be all, end all of existence. No. You know, as, as the great, uh, uh, great philosopher, uh, John Paul join, John and Ringo told us, you know, money can't buy me love, but, uh, and never will.

So at that point, we're gonna take another green room 'cause we're gonna getting into the, the, the, the length limits here. So thank you Amber. I No problem.

Thank you everyone for coming along and uh, we will catch you with the robotic camera next time. Alright, very good.