Visa Shifts, AI Labor & Tech as a Public Utility | TSG Ep. 891

Visas Visas. Who's getting the visas? I think we're changing the program.

Or are we yet? We're going to kinda in flexor, we'll see what the Trump administration wants to do around visas coming into the country. Broadband security.

We're gonna talk lot, a lot of great things. You're watching Textron Game. Welcome, welcome back again.

Great, great. Have you here. We've got a great panel assembled folks that you know and love.

If you've been watching Textron gang, Dan O'Brien with their future and group COO President and Kate Scarsella. Chris Lass and John Schwartz, and myself, Mitch Ashley. Good to have everybody here.

So John, you wanna kick things off talking about the discussions around visas and kind of what we think might happen or what they're talking about doing? Yeah, it's kinda like back to the future. So we, the H one B visas being revisited by the Trump administration.

There's a plan according to the new head of, uh, US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This gentleman's name is Joseph Edlo. He talked to the New York Times and told them, told the, the newspaper that the Trump administration plans to revamp the, uh, visa system for skilled workers by prioritizing those who are in higher wages.

They also wanna make us, US citizenship tests more difficult. In a sense, it's kind of signaling this direction that they've been going in terms of immigration policy and maybe even an admission that even predates them to the Biden administration. That the domestic workforce isn't large enough to support our country's ambitions in AI and emerging technology.

That's been an issue for years. Just getting back to Edlo, he insists the current randomized lottery process should be replaced with a system that prioritizes employers offering higher wages. And in terms of the current testing system, what they want to do is they wanna make it a little bit harder.

They wanna ask more questions and they want more correct answers. Uh, basically that's, that's where it all comes down to. So these are two things that are going on.

They've been proposed. They're trying to ram through, ramrod it through. And I, and I it brings me to this Dan, Dan O'Brien.

What are the end goals here? Um, where do you think this is going, or what do you think the intent is? Yeah, listen, I, I think H one Bs are, uh, a complex topic because they're wrapped up in so many, you know, larger thematic things, right?

It's about every, you know, not only immigration policy, it's about, you know, skilled labor and building a competitive workforce. You know, it's about, you know, really building American competitiveness and key strategic, uh, you know, key strategic industries. Uh, and, and there's certainly a labor component, right?

You know, in terms of how H one Bs affect the, you know, non-bias workforce, uh, the citizen workforce, right? So, uh, you know, end of the day, I think the, the goal of H one B is, is really good goal and noble goal, which is, you know, we want to make America the place that the most talented and skilled labor from across the world gravitates to, you know, a lot of that starts in academia. We've got some of the best, you know, kind of colleges, universities, and institutions.

H one Bs is really about trying to, you know, take all that talent that comes here to learn, um, and, you know, make them permanent citizens and, and find a way to get them, you know, kind of into our workforce. Uh, I think, you know, there's been a little bit of, you know, kind of stray, you know, stray from the intent, I would say. And that's where overhaul may make sense.

And that, you know, like anything, when you know, it gets into the hands of government and sits there for too long, things tend to stray away from original intent. And, you know, other economic incentives start to take over. Uh, you've got lots of examples of, you know, tech layoffs and, you know, non visa workers getting laid off, visa workers getting, uh, kept on because they're kind of locked in at a, a lower salary rate, right?

Um, I think it's a really timely topic, right? We've seen the talent war in AI really pop off over the past couple of months. It's like, you know, free agency in some of our, you know, largest sport leagues.

Um, you know, I think, you know, probably an apt analogy there in terms of the, the money being thrown around and, and the demand for talent. Um, so, you know, it's a worthwhile topic to tackle. You know, I hate to see it ram through anything that happens quick in Washington always seems to, you know, have, have a little bit of an aura of something a little bit shady or nefarious, right?

So I think a good open conversation on this and a bipartisan solution of getting back closer to the intent and the, again, the intent being build a really competitive labor force for American strategic industry. Yeah, that's, that's interesting. I was just a, as a follow up, Dan, I'm, I'm really glad you brought up the idea of all these layoffs happening.

At the same time, we have these acquisition wars where we have meta famously offering a hundred million dollars to open AI employees. Um, we've got all these rumors of Apple and meta pursuing companies that they wanna acquire to acquire the talents. And what this is a backdrop, it kind of adds yet another dimension, but I think the intent, as you said, has always been, has always been pure, I think bipartisan viewpoint is to bring, to keep and maintain and as much talent as possible.

I'm not sure what, what the rest of you think, but that this backdrop of, of so many layoffs at places like Microsoft, while at the same time these companies are spending outrageous amounts of money, I think of open AI binding giant AI company. It's just an interesting, crazy time we're all in. Well, I think the Acquihire trend is really, you know, a regulatory failure, right?

You know, we've gotten to the point where some of these companies are so large that, you know, they're effectively blocked from making acquisitions, um, you know, by, by the FTC, right? And so the Acquihire trend is really, you know, free markets at work, finding a way around, you know, kind of government regulation that maybe no Longer makes sense. Yeah.

That, that was the scale ai, uh, example where you basically pick off some of the highest ranking people and most valued employees, and then you kind of dismiss the rest of the company and then let them fend for themselves, or you do a licensing agreement with them as Google has done. It's, it's, it's really kinda like a wild west atmosphere out there. And I think this in a sense, maybe they're trying to bring some sort of balance or normalcy to the, to, to the proceedings.

But we'll see, You know what I wanna point out, um, Nick patients, uh, who's head of AI in the analyst group here at futureum, we wrote a great analyst insight report about Acquihires talking about all these acquisitions, people going after talent. You, you know, Dan, it reminds me of in after World War ii, the race to gobble up all the rocket scientists. We, uh, the US had operation paper clip, and I believe we attracted like 1600 rocket scientists, and Russia was trying to get 'em and all, you know, of course, that's what started our NASA program and Warner von Braun, et cetera.

So we're, we're kind of in that again, with the AI race. And I think it's, the thing about the random part of the lottery that I'm not so sure about it is maybe it's more fair, but it doesn't mean we're getting the best people. The, the, and if you're going after people in material sciences or AI or rare earth or whatever areas that we need to kind of build up, you know, the US capabilities, I think you wanna be more targeted.

And my first reaction was, we want the most people that'll get hired at the biggest salaries. But I think that's the, the after effect, the effect is getting the right people who will attract those kinds of salaries, which is in the end, I think, a good thing. Getting back to where autocracy Yeah, I, you know, these are all good ordinance, right?

Yeah. But, uh, again, let's step back back a bit. You know, I'll take a personal position on this.

Uh, uh, uh, this is part of the narrative that, you know, American needs to be pure. We need to, you had to get everybody, get the foreigners out of our universities, get the foreigners out of our business, get the people who don't agree with this out and build walls around and have a, a, a national supply chain and have no trade imbalances anywhere. Just have a completely, you know, isolationist to approach.

And you obviously, you know, the way I say that doesn't indicate that I think it's a bright bloody idea. But, you know, even if you do, you have to calculate these things in. And, you know, what, how much talent, um, are we prepared to lose in service of that, that pur uh, uh, uh, and where do they go?

You know, do, are we creating competition around us? You know, this, again, these are all interesting issues. You know, these systems, you know, all of these systems we talk about in, in forms like this, they're all complicated, they're all messy.

They all have problems with 'em. This one I can criticize all day long, and, you know, each of these issues, you know, you bring up great issues, happy to talk about them, but personally, I don't believe that's what this is about. This time.

I think it's part of the same story. We all know that this is part of, Kinda like this isolationism. Yeah.

Sorry, Kate, you go ahead. Yeah, No, no problem. And Chris, let me like echo what you're saying because I, I believe that same thing.

And what do we, we are, we do have agriculture. I mean, we do have these other, um, vertical industries that do not necessarily, you know, bring in this higher echelon of, of people that we're looking for. So I don't think it's, it's easy.

And I think by putting regulation, we also, um, prohibit, um, companies from really trying to, to manage their own companies the best way that they know how I continue to see government stepping in, in places where it's, it's a very fine line at the end of the day. And, and I don't see this as a, as a, as the solution. Well, and as a, as an American, you know, the multinational, the multinational family, and like, I think everybody on the screen here, I'm an international life, you know, I can look at this from both sides.

You know, I'm very partisan for my country, you know, this is where I'm from. You know, I want America to do well, but I'm telling you, from an international per perspective, this is opening up all sorts of opportunities for, for others to make systems that may outcompete, you know, my home country just on sheer logistics and quite often on the basis of what we've founded our country on. Well, I, you know, I, I, I'm, I understand the nationalism and the, you know, we wanna have people like us that live here, kinds of arguments or things that, you know, are, is that what it's really behind this or not?

I, if I put my, kinda, let's look strategically at what's important for our country. You know, we, we have the greatest economic engine, we have the greatest company building engine and innovation engine in the world. And I think we're at a place where, you know, rather than saying, let's overhaul the, the Visa system, why don't we say we want the 5,000 best AI people, material science people, then whatever, we'll say H one B program or not, I don't really care about that.

We want you to come, we want 'em to be here, and we'll compete against any other country in the world to get them here. And that's, that's an open fair competition. I, I don't care where you come from, whatever, now we gotta watch out for spies and things like that, that there, there are consequences and side effects that can come from that, but I think that's what we want to go after.

And we want, we want the best and brightest here. Whether they make the most money or not isn't necessarily the question, but, uh, this is the place I think the world will benefit the most by them being part of the us. Yes, I say that out of great self-interest too.

Yeah, I mean, it does like this basic, um, tinge of nationalism with involving anything around this administration. I mean, I'm, I'll, I'm gonna kind of, uh, highlight what Alan would probably say. It's, it's like in a sense, in a sense, I understand what the, what the administration is trying to do, but the, the fact that it's from this administration always gives me pause.

But I also think that we look back at the Biden administration, this was something they were trying to navigate as well. And I think the ultimate goal was the same. I think the way this administration will probably handle will be heavy handed, but I also think that they're gonna have a fair amount of input and collaboration with the tech industry, which is basically in bed with this administration.

So in the end, it will probably help tech more so than any other industry. Alright. Anybody else?

Anything to say? We'll move on to our next topic. Alrighty.

Why don't we do that? Um, thanks. We'll, well, I guess we'll have to watch and see what happens.

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Hey, there's a very interesting thing that just went on. There's a 50-year-old Arizona woman who pled guilty in February to her role in this massive North Korean IT worker scam that generated more than $17 million for that country this week. She was sentenced eight and a half years in prison.

Her name is Christina Marie Chapman, and her sentencing's, the latest step in the justice department's wi widening crackdown on North Korean workers scams, which have proliferated since about 2020. Kate, can you talk a little bit more about this and, and kind of the, the logistics of what they were doing? Sure.

So Christina, uh, so Chapman basically created what was called a laptop farm. And she was storing dozens of company laptops, configuring them to allow remote access, um, by North Korean agents posing as US citizens. She, um, she stole, there was stolen identities from 68 plus Americans.

And, you know, as you said, 17 million in illicit revenue, which is, you know, crazy. The other, um, significant point here is that it went cross vertical industry. So what do we mean when we say that it was media organizations, which is fascinating in itself, aerospace and tech companies in this time that we live in, uh, from media, uh, and disinformation.

I think it was very, um, definitely an industry that, that there was a reason why they went over that. And what the other unfortunate thing that I see with this case is that it will push companies to go back to a centralized model. And that's concerning, um, for, you know, in order to, you know, shows the vulnerabilities of remote workers, right?

And so the response is, you know, usually there's something that happens and then we have the response, and the response is, oh my goodness, let's bring everybody back to, you know, the, you know, the shop. The problem with that is it does create a centralized workforce. And I believe in this day and age, it's really important to have a distributed workforce.

So, uh, yeah. So Chris, what do you think, um, when you look at this, Uh, you know, let me, lemme start all, all the way on the outside to be clear. I'm looking at this professionally, coldly and academically.

So, uh, um, from the outside, I, I am just impressed that, that, uh, this individual did such a clean hack. So simply, you know, with a couple laptops and just sneaker net, right? That, that, you know, as, as a, as a fellow fellow hacker, well done, um, as a, as a, as a active professional in this, I think this is a good example for us to, as you say, it, show a weakness in the system and, you know, follow the next step of your, your comment.

And we, we sort get into the last segment where you say, okay, I can put my company in Salt Dome underground and hire more employees and mind mato, you know, that point gets fragile too. So we have to have both, we have to have these remote workers, but we can't have someone literally as simple as just getting a couple laptops and a control c, control V, and all of a sudden you, you know, that breaks into our system. So we need supply chains.

The things that are going on in supply chain security and threaten talent and information sharing over the last decade have been really amazing. The last five years have been really good in supply chain, particularly, and I think they apply to this exact case. You know, if you find yourself relying on a system like this for remote workers, then maybe it's the wrong system.

And if there isn't anything else available in the market, then you should look for one that is, because I think it's possible now, Well, not only that, Chris, right? We have security mitigation controls that would have shown that, you know, like anything from identity and access to end endpoint detection response, you know, being able to show, you know, dual actions on keyboards, on, you know, on a mouse. And there are tools today, really good tools out there, and I find that we continually within organizations choose not to put those security mitigation controls in place over and over and over again.

And it baffles me. Yeah. I kinda had the same reaction.

No, I had the same reaction, Kate, which is, we have, we have technology to solve this. You would've seen that when a device comes on on board and you went through a scan or, or start doing something nefarious, and not everybody can afford to put endpoint protection on their devices, but it's not that expensive. You can spend a lot of money on it, but it's not that, you know, out out of the wild.

Crazy. It's kind of funny, this Korean operation seems like they opened up their own a remote branch of Geek Squad in the US from Korea to That's Funny. You're so right.

You're absolutely right. Business where, Uh, Chris, I stepped on you, you were gonna say something. I was just gonna say, right, you know, because, because you're both right.

You, you know, you can, you know, obviously the, the targets were not doing all the things they could have out of the box. And there's interesting reasons for that. And when I say you can now, I mean, if you were really diligent, did the right things and had the budget and hired the right people, and they were good, and you coordinated plans, you could have done all these things two, three years ago, 10 years ago maybe, who knows?

But I think that we're at the spot where in two or three years, if you are not doing these things consistently all the time, you don't exist as an organization because I don't know anything about this individual who did this, but I'm telling you, if it had been me and all these companies were doing in the top 10% of what companies do, I'd break all of 'em anyways. Um, and it turns out any amateur can do it. 'cause I'm assuming she didn't have any great cybersecurity jobs because again, this doesn't require them.

You can literally just do, uh, a random things. And sure, if you have a whole sector to go after and there's 200 companies, maybe 40 of them, you can't get into, I'm being really generous. So it's the reality of doing it as opposed to the ability to do it.

I think that we're on the cusp of Can I ask you a quick, so this, this, These types of scams have proliferated, especially in the last few years. Is that tied into leveraging AI tools to scale their operations? Or, or is it something else?

Limited extent, probably, but the speed of things, yes, it leads to that, but I don't think there anybody's using 'em appropriately on, on either side. So I think the defenders have an advantage if we move, right? Sorry.

And I think to Mitch's point, right, it's, it's literally, or, um, in both Chris, I mean, it was, it was so simple. It's remote access. I mean something, you know, as Mitch said, like this geek squad, I mean literally that's how simple this, and, and it, it's brilliant.

I, I mean, you know, back to Chris's point, I mean, this was, it is brilliant and the simplicity of it is brilliant. I Think this is an area for some innovation. And let me throw out a wild, crazy idea.

There's this thing called open telemetry and a whole bunch of vendors band together and said, you know what? We're not gonna differentiate by the agents that we put on our devices. We're gonna differentiate by the telemetry information that comes from all of those devices.

And yes, we'll still have agents too. I think something similar like that could happen. Microsoft started locking down some of the things you can't do in the operating system any longer, partly in response to the CrowdStrike incident, um, that caused it to blue screen.

Not only that, but they needed to do that. Apple has already done some of that. Why isn't this protection?

Why is endpoint protection built into the operating system? Just make it secure from the beginning. Let the management systems, you know, that's where all the workload and the workflow and all the real, you know, heavy lifting has to be done.

And I think that would, I'd love to see an open source project like that. I agree with you, Mitch. I mean, I do think innovation is the way out of this.

I'm not, I'm not sure it comes down to, you know, the endpoint protection, protecting the device. This, to me feels more of a, we've gotta start to actually wrestle with how do we connect digital and physical identity in an increasingly digital world. Like how do we know that the actions being taken online are by a real person, by the person who that, you know, actor claims to be, right?

I mean, that's, that's ultimately the issue here. And, you know, feels like biometrics could be an issue, but there's a whole world of privacy and, you know, anonymity concerns there that, uh, I think we're gonna have to wrestle with as a society. But, you know, this is in increasingly creeping into our lives.

Anybody who's flown recently knows that you're getting your picture taken at TSA and they're using AI to make sure that it really looks like all the images they have of you on file, right? Uh, but I think that's increasingly the issue here is how do we make sure, you know, digital and physical identity can be tied together and people are who they say they are when they're acting in this digital world. You know, we're not far from doing this scenario where that that person, men or women who are might be, um, could actually have digital avatars that lock, you know, walk, talk, you know, interact like people.

So they, they could have had, you know, 20 of them out there running around interfacing with different companies once they're good enough to not to be able to detect it easily. So it, it's gonna get easier to do this kind of thing. To your point, Dan, connecting the physical identity with the digital presence in whatever form that is.

Yeah. You know, and I, I think this whole story, this segment is, is a good example for me to try on this one, right? You know, to be clear, North Korea and the North Korean regime can bite me.

You know, I could not be immor opposed to any, uh, set of people on earth. Um, however, you know this, I like this story because this stuff happens all the time. Doesn't matter who the threat actor is.

And it, as we discussed, illustrates how sim it illustrates a structural flaw and in, and what we were just saying. Uh, damn right. You know, the, the, yes, it's all true.

And, you know, and in this forum we're talking about things, you know, that are happening right now. Things our audience can understand and do things with. AI is the term we use about this new semantic systems and so forth.

And you all know, you know, on the screen and maybe some of the listeners getting the, that's a big focus of mine, but I'm not gonna sit here and preach it all because we need to think through this. But for the same reason as I like this whole story, I like the idea you have everything you just said, Dan. 'cause yeah, we need to do all that.

And if you think we're going to config file our way through this, I challenge that. I think we can build semantics systems. I think what we're calling AI right now actually lends itself directly to all these issues, but it's not what we're using it for.

And I think this calendar year, a lot of people will figure that out and will in forms like this, I predict for a New Year's show, we'll be looking back to shows like this and saying, oh yeah, that's right. How we, you know, so we'll get there one step at a time and we're learning, All I know is they still have to install and a anti-malware software. That's kinda ridiculous.

Really? Do I really need to do that? Why isn't it, why isn't already there?

Wishful thinking on my part. Alright, well, I think we've, uh, done well on this topic. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back with the textron gang.

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We are back on the gang and, uh, we're gonna talk about something moving the goalposts we're alluding to. The FCC is set to vote to abolish a policy goal of defining high-speed internet as a thousand megabits per second for downloads and 500 megabits per second for uploads, which was proposed by the Biden FCC. Well, we're under the Trump FCC and they're proposing to maintain the benchmark at a slower 100 megabits per second per downloads and 25 for uploads.

In a sense, they're, they wanna lower the goal for a benchmark speed. And I'm wondering what does this lead to, Chris? What, what are we looking at now?

Oh, well, you know, outta the bench. I don't like it. Right.

You know, and I can argue like, like we do in these things of poor against, you know, various things and policies and benchmarks and whatnot. But, you know, this is, you know, to me it's a, it is a visual regression. We're we're lowering our aspirations and setting our expectations lower.

And as we get practical about this, bandwidth matters, you know, this is digital democracy, you know, people's access to information is directly connected to their abilities from childhood to, you know, birth to death and setting lower, uh, capabilities and access to information for ba you know, for lower economic strata. You know, that's how you get ants. Um, so, you know, one outta 10 would not recommend Wait in, in a sense, I mean, what lowering the benchmark speed is likely gonna create less investment for fiber networks and higher speeds they enable, right?

Dan? Is, it is, in a sense, it seems counter to what's going on right now in the rest of the Industry. Yeah, listen, I think there, there's some good, there's some good motive behind this in that they're really trying to allow for what I consider to be incremental technologies like starlink and, you know, project Cooper from Amazon that are really taking and distributing what would be historically considered pretty good bandwidth to places that have never really been built out by, you know, fixed infrastructure.

But, you know, I, I think we continue to consume, you know, more compute, more data. We need more and more bandwidth. Um, you know, the, the existing regulation was actually really well incentivized to kind of drive private industry to continue invest in the infrastructure that the country needs.

Um, you know, I think it's being pulled back in order to really protect, you know, kind of this, what I again consider a complimentary technology and that, you know, I I just feel like this would be better served by having left the existing kind of regulation in place and really try to find a different way to create incentive on building out kind of the satellite style, um, connectivity that is really, um, you know, spreading to parts of the country that have been underserved by, you know, existing infrastructure investments. Yeah, I'd agree with taking an additive strategy on this is makes a lot more sense to me. Uh, I spent some time in, in the broadband and also the cable industry.

And when they put these standard is in place, the part of the, in the motivation for doing that is thinking of the network, whatever presence it is, whether it's wireless now it's satellite with the two as well as, you know, fixed cable and fiber is really having, having a substrate to innovate, whether it's businesses, people at home in school that we've got the technology, we've got the platform, we had the network to be able to do this. And frankly, competitively, internationally, we have to keep up. We can't just, well, the mo the, it isn't what the market will bear, it's what the market will tolerate.

Because unless people invest in providing new services at higher speeds, they'll just continue to kind of milk the, the revenues that we get from that. But that's how we got one gig today. 0 that's put together by Cable Labs.

I, I, I ran it there. I also had led a company called Kerio that did all the certification testing of DOIs equipment, and that's what spawned, uh, uh, spawn DOCSIS or that standard over cable and fiber to move from one gig to 10 gig. That's, that's the goal.

And then you actually borrow a lot of technology from wireless, uh, to be able to do that. Some real innovation happened from that. So I think to your point, Dan, it's, it should be additive.

What can we do to help the satellite folks or other alternatives? Uh, maybe there's a, a point of presence where we can, the popup networks or whatever kind of business model might evolve out of what the military does today. There's a lot of innovation and opportunity to happen.

I don't think lowering the standard's gonna fuel that. Well, let me argue the opposite of I start with Right. You know, so yeah, as I said, everyone's really not a big fan of standards and regulations and laws and so forth if we put 'em in when we have to.

And sometimes they're really useful. But Dan, you touched on a use, um, important thing and, and starlink, you know, I'm, I'm an early starlink user. I, I, you know, know the nice lady that built the damn thing.

Hi Gwen, if you're watching good, good choice. Um, it, and it is screaming fast down, but slow up doing a show like this, have a long upload and it's a different thing. And both in the, you know, I can set up five miles offshore and do a show like this.

And in those environments we look a lot of high and low latency and high and low bandwidth communications between devices on, you know, uh, devices on open water and in civic ai, we're looking at the same thing. It's really a lot of low bandwidth stuff in the similar way. We overprocess, we're gonna have Moore's log at faster process and bigger machines, bigger super computers.

And at some point you say, we could distribute this and we don't need all that. So all of that applies to my thoughts about this because I i, if it's always true, then we have to have exabyte downloads or something and we can't have TV anymore or something. And it, it's not how that works so well.

Yes, I wanna keep this one going up to all the points I was making. We also need to rethink how we're using bandwidth anyways, but that's a broader topic. I mean, I, I agree.

Um, first with what Dan was saying, um, so sticking here with Dan, um, it's unfortunate that we have to, uh, you know, change these standards because, you know, just coming from a network perspective, uh, which, you know, many of cybersecurity people came from, you know, this whole idea of, um, of load balancing and, and I don't know why we can't create like the, like an initiative like that. Like it doesn't take away, um, why do we need to take away from one for the other? Why can't we just keep the one running, you know, let that horse run and the other one will, will, let's incentivize it Sure.

But not take away from those standards. I I, I don't, it just doesn't make any sense to, for me, I don't agree. Yeah.

I just put myself in the shoes of, you know, say a consumer in rural Appalachia who has never been able to get good connectivity, are they not going to be thrilled with a hundred megabyte per second starlink connection because it's not labeled, you know, high speed. Uh, they are, I think that, you know, they're thrilled to, to get the innovation, um, and, and be consuming something that's still very competitive in the market. But, you know, that doesn't really go away from the need to take our, you know, massive data center buildouts and our, you know, large, you know, high concentration cities and really drive them more towards, you know, high performance, you know, fiber, uh, and, and optical connections, right?

So just feels really misguided. Um, and you can't help but wonder, you know, whether, you know, Musk's influence within the administration is play here, right? Um, you know, obviously, uh, you know, uh, a Bezos on the other side with Amazon on the Project Cooper side, but, uh, you know, uh, as we've said in the past segments, uh, very tight tie between the tech industry and the current industry.

There's like this basic disconnect here. It's al, Al seems to me too, is at the same time where the FCC is looking into this, we've got, as Dan pointed out, we have this data center build out in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, where, you know, the access to high speed may be wanting in some areas. So, um, to me it just, I don't know, it just isn't, doesn't quite make sense, but that's me.

No, that's a good point, John, right? Yeah. Sorry Mitch, go ahead.

Oh, no, no problem. You go ahead, Kate. Well, I, I, I mean, you know, to your point, and even, you know, going back to, to the city, why not use fiber optics?

I mean, fiber optics is proven. It's just, it's, it's proven. It's fast.

So I think, you know, and then going back to the data center, we need that type of speed in those areas. It doesn't mean that we have to take away from those for, you know, the person in Appalachia, as you pointed, Mitch Yeah, a decade ago I had the only DSL on Douglas Lake in, in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Right.

You know, so I lived this. Right. You know, and, and so much of it, and again, you know, at the topic is sort of off topic, but if I had systems back then they would just understand that I don't really need that 20 megabyte file all, you know, just slow it down because I'm doing something else.

And at the technical level, we talk about quality of service protocols and everything else, but we, again, we reach a level of complexity. And having helped me, we have these semantic tools that are laying around that can understand your Dan and Kate and what you're doing and slow things down for us without us having to vi all the files by hand. No, no, I, I was just gonna say part of the, the regulatory front is who is leading and what their approach to regulation is.

Wheeler who ran FCC for a while was really pushing, uh, net net neutrality and these kind of standards. I think that neutrality kind of got, got a lot of attention because, you know, now the carriers can't do anything that favors them in terms of how they run their network or what they use with the data that's traversing over it. And maybe you can, you can question whether that was a good thing or not.

And Carr, I don't remember. I think his, Brandon Carr is, his name is the FCC head Now, he was opposed to net neutrality and he was more, he was in favor of deregulation, but he did like the wireless industry. So there's biases with whoever comes in.

And I think it's, yes, it's Musk and, and others, but it's also who you put in charge to lead in it. It is a very political position, the FCC, 'cause it drives a huge amount of income, uh, revenue for, for the us. Go ahead.

Go ahead Dan. Thanks. Yeah, no worries.

I I, I was just gonna add, you know, at some point I think we have to have the debate, you know, what point does connectivity become a public utility, right? Like water, energy. I mean, I, I feel like we could argue we're already there when we've been there for a while.

Um, but you know, it's interesting. That doesn't come up in the context of a debate like this. And, and this is exactly the kind of, you know, all my pla past po political, uh, positions collapsed into one on, on this sort of thing.

Because I think if we codified that in our traditional way right now, in 10 years, we would realize it was incredibly stupid. Right. You know, we can look at our, our recent past and say, here's how it's going to the future, but I just fundamentally disagree.

So how exactly we navigate that and, you know, I don't know, you know, I may have to, you know, even burn my libertarian old hat, right? Because it's complex. We don't know, but we need to talk through, we need to think through it.

Yeah. I mean, what's more valuable, the post office coming to your house every day, or, you know, reliable digital connectivity. Um, we've read our rats.

I'm not sure they're the right ones anymore. Right? And how do we make a, a, a, a group decision on that without investing in a legacy type technology and infrastructure that's just about to die and then, and all the other usual failure states, but maybe we're smart enough to navigate that.

Well, and you have to go back to first principles of what is important about the network. It's data. That's the only thing that traverses over a network is data, right?

It's the oil of a pipeline, in this case, a network. And if we had constrained pipelines for getting oil to different places for refineries and gas and technologies that, that deliver those goods to, you know, the nation that would star us, that would star eCommerce, that would, I mean commerce, that would starve transportation. Many things.

And to your point about, you know, whether you wanna nationalize it or become a ra, uh, a, you know, a utility or we, we favor it with regulation and like a utility, it really is because if we constrain it or we don't lift it up enough to grow with, with what our needs are, we will continue to bump up against constraints, uh, that we won't be able to take advantage of. And we're gonna go get those 5,000 AI scientists to, to come to the United States, join our Visa program, but they wanna have a network to do what they can do because they're gonna think of innovative things that take five times as much bandwidth as we use today. And that's, that's about building that platform that we innovate on.

That's a nice, that's a nice that, sorry, I said that's a nice tie in, uh, pitch to the Visa thing is it kind of is related, like how do you, how do you encourage your maintain or key people here? Well, at the same time you're doing this other thing the FCC is looking at. I mean, is this kind of a, it's kind of a cross mixed, mixed message.

Well, and I think, you know, mi Mitch, what you said that it was, was, was very good, but let me, let me flip it over or take obsession with, uh, uh, exception with it. Because I think what, you know, the most important thing about the network is the people. And, but we've built networks for the data, you know, and how fast can I get the data and how much data and the quality of the data and everything else.

And we kinda lost the fact that it was humans. And, and, and again, we made ais, but damned if they don't act just like humans, and we forgot about them too, right? So we can get all the data moving back and forth, but we don't understand that my mom lives in Indiana and she, you know, does this and that.

We're, you know, and our systems don't recognize any of that, then yeah, we'll just keep engineering to the, to the zeros, you know, and increasing the bandwidth and having a Moore's Law thing when we, none of us actually wanted those things, but we wanted to be able to talk to our grandkids and watch movies and, and, and, um, so we need to, you know, if that makes us sound a little hippie, then I think that's kind of the point, right? So you're saying we should go back to using Gopher and some early standards for, you know, looking at large bulletin boards. Well, I think if we look at, at what we actually want, maybe some old stuff.

You, I know things that, that I have downplayed all my life rituals and traditions and, and rhythms and so forth. You know, turn not to be very human things. And we bake those out of our systems and we get really high bandwidth, but no fidelity, so who cares, right?

Well, we don't always recognize what, how important an innovation is. 'cause I remember seeing Mozilla for the first time and I thought, what would you do with that? And then I start thinking about it.

You start coming up with ideas of my first reaction. Okay, all right. Looks like a document reader.

But no, it's a lot more than that really usually innovative kind of technology. Well, we'll see whether they, uh, pull this back. Certainly, uh, that's the direction that they're heading.

So. Well, thanks everybody for being with us today. Thanks to our great panelists, uh, gang members that have joined us, and we appreciate you spending your time with us too.

You know, we've got a lot of great programming that's coming up on Textron tv. You know, we, uh, yesterday we had the, uh, the VMware event really that's talking about the VMware platform platform nine and some really innovative things that, uh, VMware has kinda restructured about, we talked about on the gang yesterday too. com.

You'll find a place you can go watch it on demand. I think it's worth checking out some really good talks and presentations there. Dan, Kate, John, Chris Taylor behind the scenes.

Thank you everybody, and we will see you next time on the Textron Gang.