Apple-Intel Deal, GPS Interference and AI’s Entry-Level Job Shakeup

All right. Hey everyone, welcome to Monday on Techstrong gang. The news cycles are so crazy these days.

You think you got a handle on things Friday when you leave. And I pay attention during the week. I watch my headlines, I check my mail, I do everything.

But you come in on Monday, and it feels like whatever you were doing Thursday or Friday is already ancient history. It's old news. So now we've got new news.

Poor Mike Vizard, and John Swartz, and Natan, and the rest of our editorial team are up all weekend making sure we have fresh stuff for Monday because Friday's not even good enough anymore. That being said, welcome to our Monday edition of Techstrong Gang. We do have fresh stuff, fresh gang members, freshly returned gang members.

We're going to hear all about it. Well, maybe not today, but soon. Let me introduce you to our gang for today.

I mentioned our own Steven Foskett was globe-trotting around the world and, well, specifically one location. But Steven, it's good to see you back here, and I appreciate it. I know you've got to be jet lagged, and you're not even officially back, but we couldn't keep you away.

I couldn't stay away from the gang. Thank you. Nice to be here.

Excellent. Joining Steven, we've got a new gang member today, Liz Safran. I've known Liz probably longer than she'd care to admit because- Yes ...

there would go her 25-year persona, right? That she's not 25 anymore. But Liz, it's great to have you on here and looking forward to your opinions.

Thank you. Great to be here. And then joining Liz and Steven, of course, are our crackerjack team of editorial folk.

From the West Coast, John Swartz, from the East Coast, Mike Vizard. And gentlemen, welcome and thanks for coming on. Mike, I hate to sully this Apple Intel thing with Trump's name, to tell you the truth, to be honest.

But is it a good thing? I hope this doesn't turn into an Iranian peace negotiation. Well, before we get started, I would like to note the passing of Alan Greenspan.

Yes. And I bring that up because, well, he was a big believer in free market, disciple of Ayn Rand back in the day, and coined the term irrational exuberance. So what better day to talk about what's going on with Apple, and Intel, and Trump?

So here we are with something that's starting to feel like a national AI chip policy, where the invisible hand of the market is being somewhat muddied, shall we say, John? So explain to us, what is this report about? I don't think it's fully confirmed yet, but what's going on?

Yeah, no, he jumped the gun like he always does. We talked about pre-announcing things like, oh, I don't know, peace treaties, opening the Strait of Hormuz. Just throw this into the pile.

So Trump, I think he pre-announces something that Apple and Intel are talking about. And again, we talk about this through a geopolitical lens. This makes me very skeptical.

So, I hope it happens. It would be interesting. It would mark this significant milestone in securing US technology supply chain by reducing our over-reliance on TSMC, for instance.

But in essence, on Thursday, I believe, Trump announced that Apple's agreed to partner with Intel to design and manufacture semiconductor chips domestically, which is part of this obsession of the administration. And it's interesting, and I'll give you some context. Two things that just jump out at me as a cynic are that the government owns a piece of Intel, and what a surprise, the stock went up 11% when this was announced.

Number two, Tim Cook, who is stepping down as CEO on September 1st, is now going to be heavily involved on global policy and regulatory relationships. So I'm sure this has been discussed, but it's kind of been blown out of the water. And again, if it happens, it would represent a strategic shift of notable status for Apple, which has historically relied on TSMC to produce its advanced silicon.

And it also, in a sense, kind of builds on their $600 billion, and I'm skeptical about this as well, I'm sorry, $600 billion commitment for domestic manufacturing. It also obviously helps Intel. And I talked to Jack Puller, our friend and Friday gang member, and he made a couple of interesting points.

He said this, if it happens, and he was also being somewhat careful about it. He said this solidifies Intel as a valid second source of silicon and marks the first real step of rebuilding a US silicon business, and also it gives Apple price leverage in a sense. And he said, which I thought was really interesting, he wouldn't be surprised if AMD, NVIDIA, and Google join Apple in using Intel's fab to ensure availability since TSMC has kind of sold out their 2nm and 3nm through at least 2027.

So on paper, it sounds interesting, but again, and I'll probably hand this off to Alan because I know he has thoughts on this. I throw salt in the air when I hear these things. It's supposed to be over your left shoulder.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, something like... Or maybe it's the right shoulder, I don't remember.

Well, thanks for handing it off, John. Pleasure. Well, my question is this: where on the truth meter does this rank up to Iran giving up their nuclear program, Israel and Hezbollah stop fighting in Lebanon, or anything else that this administration talks about?

But here's the real deal. You ever hear the snow Eskimos selling ice in the winter? Right?

Just picture that. Put that picture in your head. You're TSMC.

You're already sold out for the next two to three years on your highest level silicon that Apple's going to want to use. Where else was Apple going to go? Samsung?

They make DRAM chips. You know what I mean? Thank you, Captain Obvious.

Now, you've got Nvidia who's already invested in Intel, right? You've got Apple who's trying to keep the chief loudmouth, at least for the next couple of years till they could usher him off the stage, if not sooner. Alan Greenspan lived to 100, God bless him.

Not everyone lives to 100, thank God. But that being said, this is, to me, a big nothing burger because I don't know when and if we'll ever see Intel producing Apple chips again, quite frankly. Stephen, back in the day, there was always a second source agreement.

It was just considered good business. Yeah. And it feels like much of the same in the sense that, and half the time, those second source agreements never actually produced anything because they were just there for just in case.

And so are we going to wrap a flag around this thing when it's really just a second source agreement, which is nice to have but may not result in much of anything, to Alan's point, an actual chip showing up in an Apple platform that shows up at a store somewhere? I think this is a lot more than a second source agreement. As you mentioned, first off, with the AI-driven chip supply crunch, it's very likely that many companies are searching for another source for chip production other than TSMC.

Now, TSMC obviously has the most mature and advanced chip manufacturing in the world. But Intel has been fighting to regain their position there. Samsung actually has very competitive process nodes as well.

There are other manufacturers that could produce these things. I'm not at all surprised to hear that Apple is eager to have another chip supplier, especially when at the same time now-- By the way, Trump wasn't the one who really announced this, if this makes you feel any better. "The Wall Street Journal" talked about this back in early May, so it's not like nobody saw this coming.

Everybody saw this coming. To your point, it's kind of a nothing announcement. Of course Apple's going to be looking for another supplier.

Of course Intel is the logical supplier because they've got the next best process, and also because they're a domestic supplier. If I was Apple, I would be very much touting that to the Trump administration to get in their good graces. But this I think is likely to happen.

I would not be at all surprised. The Mac insider reporters and analysts are suggesting that this could apply primarily to, I don't want to say lower-end chips, but maybe lower demand chips in terms of volume for the M series, for the Apple laptops, for example, or for the lower-powered chips or the alternative other chips in the Apple silicon landscape. Apple has also recently signed another agreement with TSMC to secure their next generation process node for their most advanced iPhone chips.

So I do think that this is likely going to happen. I am not at all surprised by it. It certainly is in line with what the analysts are reporting inside in the semi space, and frankly, it's good business all around.

So I don't think it's a big example of Trump going off the handle. I also don't think that it's a big example of anything that's too shocking. In fact, I would be shocked if other companies weren't also looking at Intel as an alternative supplier.

Now, if only somebody could make more RAM and flash chips this year. That would be a big one. Well, that was my question.

Is this deal for the M-series chips, or is this for RAM, DRAM chips? I'm hearing from analysts that this is for the M-series chips. Certainly not, Intel is not capable of making RAM or flash.

That's not something their process can do. So I would guess that it's the M-series chips. Now, Apple could shock us all and introduce the next A series on the Intel process node, and that would be absolutely amazing.

It'd be huge news. But I think that they're going to take a more cautious approach, which is what they always do, which is to start small and then move up as things prove themselves out. So I'm betting M series.

Liz, let's get you in here for a second. Yeah. Well, looking at this, like you said, through a geopolitical lens, I think it's interesting that he announced this shortly after coming back from China, right?

And perhaps feeling like he needs to, I don't know, why it feels like it's kind of going back from Taiwan, right? Is he setting the stage for something to happen over there? That came to my mind.

But also, Tim Cook is stepping down in September, right? And in the news it says he's a supply chain guy. He offshored or was involved in offshoring.

Now he's reshoring and he's leaving and saying that there's going to be unavoidable huge price increases. And so as an Apple consumer, when is that coming and how much does that mean and how will it affect-- Are people going to start getting other kinds of phones or even their low-end stuff is still more expensive than others? So I wonder about the disruption or what the downstream effects of that are going to be.

Yeah. Yeah. He was there.

I'm glad you mentioned the price increases because he did foreshadow that. I think it was in a "Wall Street Journal" interview perhaps. But in any events, what he's doing, interestingly also, is that he's making the transition.

So he's still going to be with Apple. He's going to be the executive chairman, but he's going to focus on global policy and regulatory partnerships. So this is kind of more probably in his wheelhouse, and I'm thinking perhaps he had a short discussion with Trump and reiterated what Stephen said had been talked about.

And maybe Apple even nods and makes an acknowledgement in their September announcement, which is usually the second Tuesday in September, which is their hardware announcement. So maybe they might address this. I don't know, but I think it's inevitable, but I'm just not sure at what scale.

I think part of the issue here, though, is we're trying to wrap a flag around Intel, right? So now the phrase is going to be as American as apple pie and Intel, and I'm not sure that's going to sell overseas, Alan. " Certainly, in the digital sovereignty market, specifically in the EU, the fact that Intel is partially owned by the government- Yeah ...

and takes their marching orders, so to speak, I would be hesitant to use Intel too if I'm in an EU country. Yeah. And if it's 10%, who's calling the shots, right?

If we have a fickle administration that's strong-arming decision-making, how will that impact their ability to execute? Well, in terms of- They've been trying to reshore. I'm sorry, just really quickly.

Yeah. They've been trying to reshore manufacturing through these state-backed investments as well as their targeted tariffs. Yeah, but you know what?

Apple has too much at stake to, like to Steven's point, take the latest iPhone, A18, A19, whatever the heck it is. They're not going to bet the next version of the iPhone on Intel being able to manufacture this. As Steven says, I agree with him, they're going to start off slow and low and then let Intel prove its ability at two and three nanometer kind of chips and see what we got there.

But look, what does this mean? Where's TSMC's incentive to start building in the US? " Or does TSMC say, "Look, Intel can never do this stuff.

" Right? We've already got Nvidia committing $150 billion a year to us here in Taiwan and building new headquarters and all that stuff. How much of this, John, do you think is just pure theater because- Yeah ...

by the time that deal comes online, there'll be a different administration. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing that it always comes back to.

They make these announcements, like I want to go back to the $600 billion commitments, something that Cook did to mollify Trump because he knows he won't be around five years from now. And I think we're seeing the same element of this. Just keep him happy until he gets distracted by the next thing, which will happen 15 minutes later anyway.

So when I see these things, and I go back to what Alan said about Steven there, if it happens, it's going to be at a modest level, which is better than nothing. But again, I roll my eyes whenever I see these things. When Apple announced the $600 billion commitment, initially it was $500 billion, then they raised it, and we all just scoffed at it.

" And there's a little bit of that with this announcement and anything involving the administration and trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. I don't know. Hey, guys, we're kind of over time on this segment, though.

We got to hop in here. I was hoping my GPS would warn me, but it appears they've been blocked. Mike, what's the story?

So there have been these reports for a little while now about this jamming of GPS signals, and now a professor at the University of Texas thinks he's been able to at least trace that back to some activity that Russia's been up to, and that may or may not surprise some folks. But it does give everybody a little pause here because, well, Steven, are GPS satellites basically not very secure and very fragile, and yet these are the things that we're counting on for all kinds of defensive purposes, never mind commercial purposes. And so have we just overlooked this little soft underbelly of our infrastructure?

Steven, you're anything. Steven, I think you might be on mute. I think we should point out that GPS jamming is nothing new.

This is something that has been happening globally for a very long time. Certainly, most of it has happened from ground-based sources, and it's been fairly local. So for example, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, during the Iran war, there was GPS jamming in the Strait of Hormuz.

These things happen, and it's a pretty well-known technology. I think the interesting aspect, well, there's a couple interesting aspects to this particular story. Number one, that it's space-based, not ground-based.

Mm-hmm. This is specifically using Russia's EKS satellites, which is essentially their ballistic missile tracking satellite constellation, and the fact that they're repurposing that to do GPS jamming is, well, pretty interesting use of their technology that's already up there in orbit, because these satellites were not intended to do this. The other interesting thing is that it went completely unnoticed for five years.

Right. This had happened. Nobody really was aware of it.

Nobody noticed it at the time. " ... in this channel, and sure enough, it looks like there's been GPS jamming with these Russian satellites.

So, I think that's the interesting aspect. Now, in terms of the fragility of GPS, it's not a particularly robust technology, but it is one of those nice technologies that's very well distributed and that there are alternatives to. There's ground-based, there's assisted GPS.

I don't think that this is a major threat, though I do think that this could become a significant problem if it becomes widespread or frequent that Russia or any other country is turning GPS jamming on and off at will. That could be really annoying and could cause problems with just regular civilian operations because, of course, everything is GPS-driven now from air traffic, to shipping, to you and I driving down the road. Mm-hmm.

Let me ask the follow-up question to that, though. Are there alternatives to GPS that we should be thinking about? Are there things coming down the pipe that may be a little more robust, shall we say?

Well, certainly there are a lot of other GPS-like systems. Europe has their own. Russia has their own.

So there are lots of different satellite-based navigation systems. There's also, of course, a terrestrial GPS that's used, for the most part, in your phone or your car or so on, that uses cell towers and other technologies too. It's GPS-based, but it has additional sources of information.

So again, this is not a catastrophic problem. It's a bigger problem for aircraft and military than it is for you and me. Drones.

Yeah. Drones, yeah. I think that the Russians are sneaky, and this might be apples to oranges, but it reminded me of when they were testing out doing attacks on critical infrastructure, like heating and electrical companies back in 2015.

They were stealthy, and they were test-driving their ability to do attacks. And so what strikes me as interesting about this is that it's been under the radar for so long, and we don't really know what they were doing or how they plan to use whatever they've been learning to do, right? Just imagine the civilian chaos that it could cause if it wanted to pawn the system and screw stuff up.

So I think that we should... I don't want to get all, "Oh, the sky is falling," but I think it's worth acknowledging that there might be a strategy behind this which is bigger than just the immediate technological implications. But here are the immediate technological implications.

You've got Ukrainian drones blowing up oil depots in Moscow. In Moscow, on the outskirts of Moscow. Moscow's covered in black clouds from a drone attack.

That's not going to sit well with Comrade Putin, right? This is- Well, also from a Russian off-target anti-aircraft missile. Yeah.

Well, that's what they're saying. Yes, one of the things. But my understanding is, and the Ukrainians, you've got to hand it to them.

They have built a killer drone industry where they're exporting them now as well. But my understanding is they use civilian GPS and they're not using Elon's targeting stuff because they don't want to be dependent. I think they are using- My understanding is that their long-range drones actually have a Starlink dish on them.

So they are still using Star- because I had heard they were moving off of that because they didn't want to get shut off. Who the heck knows? But the bottom line here is GPS can become a strategic- Mm-hmm ...

for war, for those kinds of purposes as well as others for industrial and commerce. I remember back in my Still Secure days, the Department of Interior was a big customer of ours. Mitch Ashley and I used to go in and meet with them once a month.

And I remember meeting with the US Geological Survey people, and they've got sensors on the Himalayas down to the Mariana Trench and everything in between, literally. They were wide open because these are scientists. They don't think with this kind of technology.

They want it to be open. They want everyone to be able to access this info. They don't think along the lines of it being critical infrastructure that someone could weaponize.

And so I'm afraid it's not just GPS. I think a lot of our, quote-unquote, science here is subject to these kinds of jamming and attacks. Will we see satellites attacking each other, though?

That's what I'm waiting for. To your point, I would be very surprised to discover that China and the United States did not have similar programs and similar capabilities. Mm-hmm.

We give as good as we get, right? Yeah. Yeah, the Russians are always probing, re-engineering, and to Liz's point, and I don't mean to be too sinister, but I really do think this is a question of maybe eventually what the Russians could do, or the Chinese, or the US in terms of air superiority, use of drones, data centers in space.

Maybe I just feel strange- Yes ... because I was reading a book about Vietnam and about our air superiority, which the US has clearly had, and when I see these types of stories, what really scares me is that this wasn't uncovered, and we mentioned this, by classified military intelligence, but by university professors using public data. Well, that we know of, John.

That we know of, right. Publicly. But Because here's another angle.

Let me play the anti-cynic. Why did Russia spend the bullet right now doing this? Because now, before things get too far out of hand, maybe we have the time and bandwidth, no pun intended, to harden these systems a little bit, right?

And make them a little less susceptible to it. Right. On page one of the "We're Going To War" manual is disrupt the enemy's communications.

It's like the first thing you do. Yeah. " That it may not be as good as we think.

I thought our military used a different network than the civilian GPS. Still, I think they certainly- That's what they do. They do.

Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't mean that they can't be hacked.

And it also, the Russians are also masters of misinformation and disinformation, so it could even look like overriding stuff and causing confusion. I just think there's all kinds of ways that this can be weaponized that we're maybe not thinking about. So I don't know whether if it's their satellites, what would we need to harden?

Like, what would be the takeaway? Our satellites? Our Starlink satellites?

Or how would we- Or the software underneath that they're in there. Yeah. The US military absolutely does use the exact same GPS system.

It was designed and built for the US military, and this is their system. There's a weakened version for civilian use, but it is exactly the same satellites, the same frequencies, the same transponders, the same system. So yes, this is basically an attempt to attack the Western military positioning capability.

That doesn't mean that that's all the US has got. It doesn't mean that this was successful. I think it's interesting that they tried it out in 2021 when they were active in the Donbas region and after the invasion of Crimea.

I do think that this was a probe, an attempt to try something more than it was an attempt to prove something. They're probing. They're seeing what effect it would have.

Mm-hmm. And if the answer is, yes, it works, but we don't think it will have a big effect, then we may not see this very much, especially as we've said, there's other alternative forms of positioning. Another thing we should mention, kind of a final thing, I guess, is that GPS is also used for precise time signals, and that's actually perhaps more important than navigation.

Most of the internet is built around time that is derived from GPS signals. So that is something that very much could disrupt or cause communications impacts way beyond navigation. If suddenly all the routers and switches all around the world decided that packets were delayed or that they were out of order or something, that could be a much actually more serious issue- Yes, could be ...

than the navigation flickering on and off on civilian aircraft. I agree. Wait, so you're saying the next time I'm late for a meeting, I can blame Putin?

Is that what that's about? There you go. That is exactly what he's saying.

Yeah. Blame everyone. That's what you should do.

You've never been late for a meeting. What are you worried about? But that being said, I did read an article recently, the cat and mouse of the military technology game.

The Ukrainians are doing something else now where they're testing out high altitude balloons to which they attach a drone or a missile, a payload, and then basically the balloon gets carried by the wind, by the atmosphere, and at some point it gets released. Just when it gets released, the drone, missile, whatever payload, takes its coordinates, sets its mark, and then shuts off all other navigation and just goes. It's a relatively dumb device, but it's also, you can't jam it because there's nothing to jam.

And the Russians tried to counter that, but of course, the wind seems to blow west to east over there. So the balloons weren't they wound up blowing them back into Siberia. But anyway, the Ukrainians are finding cheap technology ways to overcome very sophisticated kinds of attacks, so it's an interesting cat and mouse game.

Yeah. Well- Oh, shout out to Frank Vizert for the story, by the way. Oh, yes.

Great story. Yeah. Frank does interesting stuff.

I just want to give him his credit where it's due. All right. Frank is the brother, and if it has anything to do with military and tech, that's his- Yes ...

favorite wheelhouse. Okay. Little nepotism going on.

Yeah. All right. No, not here.

But anyway, let's jump to our next segment, Mike. This is one, we're revisiting the AI job market. What job market?

Well, it's interesting times, and I'm going to ask Liz this, but there's a report talking about how, well, I guess what we need is kids coming out of college that have a lot more experience than they normally do, and we're basically looking for colleges to now train our students so that they can behave like the trainees that have, I don't know, five or even more years of experience. And I can't help but wonder if that's possible anytime soon, but I worry, Liz. Are we looking at a couple of lost generations of college students here because- I absolutely think so.

So my niece just graduated from From Bard. I was gonna say Wesleyan, but it was Bard College. And so I went to her commencement, and Fareed Zakaria, you know who he is, a CNN commentator, he was the speaker.

And of course, AI came up, and like in so many other universities, it was getting a lot of boos. And I think that people... My niece is a photography major, and she's going to Berlin, so she's not going into tech.

And I think those are the jobs where you're going to see the real difficulties of highly educated kids not being able to find jobs soon. But young people, and also I do a lot of AI safety work here in New York City, and there's a lot of young people, they're really disillusioned about AI, and they're either leaving jobs, or they're getting laid off. And so I think that when we hear all this hype about all the stuff that's going to happen with AI and all this disruption, I think we're going to start to see it very soon here, because how are you going to know who to hire, right?

Instead of being like a pyramid, the job market's like a diamond, right? Where there's very few people that can get in, and maybe they could spread out. But I just think people don't know what it's going to look like, and kids are angry and uptight.

And I have friends who are highly trained who are much younger than me, and they can't find jobs, including in cybersecurity. So, yeah. So I feel like this is pushing my doomer button big time.

So I shouldn't prepare to turn my son's bedroom into my study anytime soon because he might be back. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

He might not leave. Or if he's gone, yes, he might be back. And yet there's this counter-narrative going on.

Jeff Bezos just fell into this. He was at a, what is it, a French tech conference called Viva Tech, and his big argument, among other things he talked about, were that job losses, was all this talk was overblown, and matter of fact, there are going to be more jobs. We just don't know what they're going to be in a few years.

I think Altman's been saying this. They all say that. Mario's been saying it.

They've all reversed course, right? And yet, Mike sent me something today from Gallup, where they found that if you even use AI once a month or occasionally, you're three times less likely to lose your job. But you have to have a job first.

And I don't know. I look at this and I think, what does this job market want? People with experience have been looking for jobs for one to two years on LinkedIn, and then college graduates are having a hard time as well.

So I'm like, are there jobs, or who are getting these jobs, or are these jobs actually existing? I don't know. So I think that's the scary part, John.

We've been talking about it on here now for more than a year. I've done "Shimmy Says" on it. What exactly are these new, exciting AI jobs that we're going to be creating?

But let me say, I don't doubt that they're going to be there. I don't doubt that we're going to create entirely new industries, entirely new jobs, entirely new technologies based on AI, right? I used to think AI was very much like the internet, the dot com time, and think about what that did.

But I'm now more convinced than ever that AI is more like electricity. These large language frontier models are going to be utilities. But think about Thomas Edison, right?

Created sort of the electric utility model, if you will. Well, not Thomas Edison, the government and everyone working with him. But it was General Electric and these other companies that created whole industries around electricity.

I think that's what we're going to see. It's not going to be Anthropic or OpenAI that creates these jobs. But by having that juice in the system, if you will, that electricity, there are going to be industries that get spun up here that are going to have a lot of jobs that go with them.

From here to there, though, is scary as hell. You're at the bottom- Well, yeah ... of the mountain.

You're exactly right. What is the timeframe? " It's like- It's a scary thing ...

five years? I mean, college kids- And if you have no idea what the jobs are, how do you upskill and reskill, right? Yeah.

How do you train people? Yeah. How do you...

So here's the paradox in my mind, though. So we have it clearly that there's kids coming out of school, and there's people in the workforce today that don't understand AI enough. And yet on the other side of that, I'm also starting to see people, the only thing they know is AI, and they don't know how the thing actually works underneath it that they're trying to do, and therefore, they can't recognize AI slop when they see it.

So I'm kind of seeing these two extremes, where what we need is something that fits more in the middle, right? I need people who understand how things work and how they can use AI to make the thing work better. But I feel like we're on both ends of the pole here and not to the middle where we need to be.

Mike, I think the AI police are after you. I'm hearing sirens. Better be careful what you're saying.

I don't know. John, go ahead. On that one, I would say that I think the thing that employers have been looking for and will be looking for, if I have to give someone advice, I also have young adult children who are in the workforce now, and the advice I would give them, the advice I would give anyone, is to learn how to be a good employee.

I think that that's one of the biggest challenges when employers are searching to hire, whether it's in retail and restaurant, or technology and media, or finance, high tech, whatever, is you're looking for people who understand what it means to be a good employee. Show up, do the work, accomplish the goals of the organization, that sort of thing. And ultimately, if people have those kind of skills, and if they can demonstrate those kind of skills They're going to be having a leg up in the job search market no matter what happens with AI.

I do worry about the macro problem of people who overestimate the capabilities of current AI systems and decide that they don't need to hire people because they assume that these systems are capable of things they're simply not capable of. But at the same time, AI is useful for accomplishing many sort of mundane tasks and actually some not so mundane tasks, and that does shift the job economy. I mean, frankly, it looks a lot like what has happened, you mentioned electricity, factories, so much.

Basically, every generation has had the job market disrupted by new technology, and every generation has had winners and losers in that, and I expect the same thing is going to happen. But, if somebody is worried about getting a job after college, I would say make sure that you're able to make a case for yourself and convincingly demonstrate that you can support the mission of a potential employer, rather than worrying so much about the specific skills that you have. Right.

Yeah, there was an interesting op-ed, and I think it was in "The Times," but I forget. But it was making a comparison to what happened in the crash of '29, where only 2% of the people actually had any stocks. But we managed to talk ourselves into a depression, at least he argued, because everybody was paralyzed by the Wall Street crash, so they stopped buying in general, and then that just cascaded on top of that, and things became worse and worse.

And his point was, we're in the danger of maybe doing the same thing with AI, where we're talking ourselves into a recession because we're not quite thinking through the unknowns that are there, but we're kind of thinking that maybe things are going to be worse than they are. And so then people stop hiring, and then when we stop hiring, we have less money to spend, then et cetera. I'm not sure I buy the argument entirely, but it was worth- Yeah, I don't buy that argument This is like the superficial kind of surface fear that the companies that are most embedded or most associated with AI are the companies that are doing these massive layoffs.

I'm thinking of Meta, Amazon, even Microsoft's had some layoffs. And I think it just sends this message to the general public, and there's a sense of panic a little bit about this and the unknown, and it's a representation of a small group of companies, but it kind of permeates, I think, our culture. Yeah, because there's high-skilled, talented people.

Like when Meta did the second recent 8,000 person layoff, I was at an event, and there was like three people who had just gotten their slips. It was a all tech is human event, like networking like crazy, looking for another job. And I also don't know if you guys have heard this, but in the rush for businesses to integrate AI into whatever they're doing, what I'm hearing people...

So it's always somebody that knows somebody, that the AI doesn't work as good as they say. So the human worker is not just checking the work of AI, it's redoing the work of AI. So it's not making them more productive, it's making them less productive because they're working longer hours.

But yet the studies say top 20%, back to what Gene Kim said, very high-performing IT teams. These surveys are saying that they're seeing huge productivity with increases with AI for certain jobs. We'll have to see.

I wanted to cite an example of a really great story, though. I might have spoken about it before. I was at Cisco Live a few weeks ago, as was the Tech Field Day team.

And I met one of the people Cisco introduced me to, is the CIO for the LSU Tigers, LSU University. And they started with a very small thing of just having a couple of kids monitor their SOC, which was actually being monitored by a commercial company, but the kids were helping. It went from that to the kids actually being the monitors of that SOC.

It went from that to other colleges copying that and monitoring their own SOCs. It went from that to this commercial company then outsourcing the kids. They offer what they call Tiger SOC, from the LSU Tigers, and you could have the kids monitor your commercial operation.

And the kids, they don't get paid as much as a regular SOC analyst, and they have adult or regular SOC analysts as level two, but the kids do such a great job that it would end up being a huge productivity boost for the commercial company. And when these kids are graduating school, the CIO assured me 100% of them are hired. As a matter of fact, they usually have multiple offers because the commercial company who's been working with them wants to take them all, but these kids can go anywhere because they've been running SOCs for three years or whatever.

I think that's really cool. So shout out to the LSU. I'm not a big fan of their sports because we're Gators in my house, but shout out to them.

What a great project. Where does that end? Do I now bring that down to the high school level and I got child labor working on security?

How far do we want to go? Depends where you live. Who do you think's doing your SOC right now?

I'm hoping that it's somebody- I mean, seriously, do you ever check who's working in the SOC? I'm assuming- You probably ask too ... I'm hoping it's a professional of some type, and at least reasonably well-trained.

Do you know if this was part of their class, like for credit, or was it an internship? No, this was not credit at this point. They get paid for it And a lot of these kids, quite frankly, it was the difference between going to college or not.

Right? And so it's been franchised to other schools. Other schools are doing it, too.

New Jersey Institute of Technology was one of Liz'- So you know what's next, right? These kids are going to enter the cybersecurity portal and move from college to college, depending on how well- There is that coming, and we'll have to have a soccer- The NIT- National playoff ... AI?

Four teams are not enough. Anyway, we got to pull the plug on today's Techstrong gang. The theme here, though, guys, is increasingly it's becoming apparent we're moving into an AI-first world.

That's the message. That's that crosscutting, and I think we'll be continuing to discuss that, but for another day. Steven, welcome back from Madagascar.

Is that still the right name, right? Not Mozambique? Absolutely.

Madagascar, baby. Madagascar. And- Yeah Like the movie ...

actually, if you look on Bluesky or Mastodon, you'll see I posted a bunch of photos. If you're wondering what the heck I was doing there or if you're really into lemurs, check out #Madagascar on Bluesky because there's a lot of content. Zaboomafoo.

Liz, thank you for making your debut. We hope to have you back here soon on the gang. Mike and John, as usual, great job.

Thank you for watching. You watch Techstrong Gang. Of course, if you caught this live, great.

tv, the Techstrong OTT app on just about any screen that you like to watch this kind of thing on, or our YouTube channel, Techstrong TV YouTube Channel. There's a lot more coming at you. We've got Techstrong TV playing.

But until tomorrow, on behalf of the gang, enjoy. Have a great day, everyone.