Techstrong Gang – April 28, 2025

Hey, everyone. You know the biggest farms in Asia may be Scam Farms. You're watching Textron Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel. I, I am not in studio today 'cause of course, I'm getting ready to get out to San Francisco for the RSA conference. So I'm coming at you from a place called Highland Beach, Florida.

Not many people know it. It's a sleepy little three mile stretch of a one A. Um, but we've got a great show for you this fine Monday.

Um, a lot of going on, you know, pre RSA stuff. We're gonna, it's our last pre RSA gang. Let me introduce you to our gang members for today.

I wanna start off with someone making her first appearance here on the gang with us. We're really excited to have her though. If you follow the cybersecurity beat, you've probably read some of the things she's written over the years.

Teri Robinson. Terry, welcome and thanks for being here. Thank you.

I am so pleased to be here. I can't wait to get started. I think it's gonna be fun.

Looking forward to it. Joining Terry today also from a cybersecurity band, our resident Canadian, or is that an oxymoron? A resident Canadian, but he's up in Canada.

Anyways, our cyber expert, Chris Blask. Hey Chris. How are you doing?

I'm good. I'm good to be here. Uh, glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm an American in, in Canada, you know, so a Canadian family and everyone gets that confused and so do I. So I, I plan on adding to that more today, so, Very cool. Uh, also joining us today from New Mexico.

Looking great in that 4K ki in that 4K. Uh, he's the CEO of deploy hub, open source advocate extraordinaire. Our own Chay Reagan.

Hey, Chay, how you doing? I'm doing great, and I'm really excited to have Terry on another cyber expert. This is gonna be a great conversation.

Absolutely. And then rounding out the cast, it's the dean of our, of our panel. He's Chief content officer from Harrison, New York.

That's lefty throws Righty, Mike Vizard. Hey, Mike, how are you? And I, too am excited to see Terry on the show because we have another delegate from the great state of New York.

So finally Right here in Harlem. Great state of New York. Yeah, really.

Very cool. Mm-hmm. Um, all right, so let's kick it off, Mike.

I, you know, I said a little something on the opening. It seems Asia's has started a new kind of scam form. I I think this has, you know, been something of a dirty little secret.

But most of these scams online are actually being perpetrated by, uh, folks that have been roped into these, I guess scam rings is the only way to call it or run by these syndicates. Then they're all operating outta, uh, countries in Africa and other places like Asia, where they're basically turned into slaves that are driving these scams and send the people email and creating all kinds of false, now deep fakes and all kinds of stuff. And Chris, I know you've been following this for a while and, and it seems to be have become overwhelming, but is there anything to be done about any of this stuff?

I mean, the un kind of shine the spotlight on it, but it seems like to me that this is, you know, not just criminally wrong, but just gotten to a level of moral turpitude, Right? I, I'm trying to think of something here. Let's take a direction on this, right?

You know, so one, these criminals do criminal things, right? Organized crime does odd, oddly enough, organized crime. And this, you know, in the digital age has transitioned to the point where it is, it makes economic logical sense for cri criminal organizations to do these things.

And, uh, and the other half of it again, is, is how old this is, right? I happen to, I think maybe this is 10 years ago or so, you know, witnessed perhaps the last of the actual postal versions of this, you know, some good old boyfriend of mine here in Canada contacted me and said, Hey, I'm won the Irish Irish lottery, right? And I had to drive over to his house, look at this thing, get him to, you know, change his banking information that he'd already shared.

So, you know, this, this is, it, it, you know, in this particular case, in this, you know, the story we're, we're, we're talking about here, you know, this is one of these global existential criminal situations. You know, we're talking actual human slavery and, and, and exploitation. Um, so we can take it from any angle we like, you know, as a security person, I would like to, you know, you know, beat this horse again, that this is an example of how many fundamentals we're missing, right?

You have no idea. There's no way we can tell you have an elderly non-technically savvy, you know, family member, how they can distinguish something like this that is a scam from something that isn't a scam. So there's, there's problems up and down the stack with this one.

Yeah. I mean, to me, there's two main issues here. One is the scams that these people perpetrate, as you said, Chris, they prey on the e on the, on the weak.

They prey on the elderly. They, you know, they, they prey on the non-sophisticated or unsophisticated when it comes to this kind of stuff. And that, that's bad.

And, and, and guys, it's not just emails anymore. It's smishing, right? SMS messaging, it's phone calls, right?

We've all gotten those phone calls where, you know, someone gets on the phone and says hello, and you hear like the whole call center going on in the background. And you can imagine somewhere in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka or somewhere, is this huge boiler room operation, right? With, with hundreds or dozens at the very least of these people just smiling and dialing, trying to talk you out of your money.

Um, but what makes it really insidious is that the people who are doing the work here, sending the emails, making the calls, sending the text messages, are not, are not the, the heads of the criminal operations themselves. But this is akin akin to sex trafficking. It's akin to child trafficking.

They get these people in these places. And you're right, Mike, it's not just Asia. This happens in Africa, right?

I mean, it probably ha it probably happens in the US with illegal immigrants who, you know, get taken advantage of and stuff. Um, but they, they get these people in with the promise of, Hey, you're going to get a job and you can make hundreds and thousands of dollars a week. And then once they get them in there, there's no getting out.

You're, you're sucked into this life. You know? And, and, um, and so it is, it's a form of slavery.

It, it's, it's, it's abuse. So it's doubly bad, and it's time, it's high time. You know, these countries where this is taking place have a responsibility to crack down on it, Which is in the us by the way.

The us no, It's in the us. I, I don't doubt it. And I wanna pinpoint, I wanna point something out that, um, you know, when I had a C cousin, I have a cousin, she called me one day and she was in an absolute panic.

She had been, she had lost $40,000 in one of these scams. Um, she did not wanna tell anybody. She reached out to me 'cause she felt like she could talk to me and I could tell her what to do to protect herself in the future, which is part of the problem.

The shame that goes along with these scams, uh, is part of the way that they, they, uh, work. Because if I kept encouraging her to go to the police, they don't know what to do. You know, go, you know, call your, your local representative.

They didn't know what to do for her. So I finally said, go call a newspaper. So she finally got brave enough to tell her story to a newspaper, even though it was, she was full of shame and did not wanna do it.

They put a, a, they put a, a note in the local newspaper where she was, and they got hundreds of people calling and saying they had also been scammed. So there is a, there, there is a part of this, the success of these organizations, it is created by us being quiet about it and not really understanding the, the breadth of the problem. So I feel like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm the person who always talks about fixing problems, vulnerabilities when they get to production.

Well, these vulnerabilities are in production. How do we hear about them? How do we let the communities that are being hit know that this is happening?

And how do we, we, how do we res, how do we track this kind of, this kind of, um, illegal activity? Because in her journey, there was nobody to talk to, no one. And that's a problem in itself.

I was Gonna say a similar thing with family member. And the shame factor is huge. Didn't wanna talk about it, didn't want to, you know, uh, sort of spread the word told me, because she knew the kind of work that I did.

Um, and, and, and, and that was it. And we sort of locally spread the word to people quietly in, in her community. Um, the, on the other hand, my mother, who passed away at a hundred was adamant about not falling for a scam.

She would call somebody out if she got a phone call, an email, a, a text, or whatever she was on. So the other side. But yeah, it, and so I actually had this discussion, um, when I was closing out my mom's estate.

I was in her bank, and they had signs up all over in customer service, particularly aimed, aimed at elderly people, talking about the kinds of scams that they could, um, they could face and, and what to do, and the steps that they should, uh, take. I should have probably screenshotted, um, or taken a snap of what their advice was. But I did talk to the banker there, and they said, yes, we have people coming in all the time.

And sometimes they sort of sheepishly, you know, confess that something has happened. You know? Um, it's also when it comes to like pulling money out of accounts, uh, perhaps the financial institutions can be a little more aggressive.

I mean, if you see a, you know, an, an 80-year-old person coming in and wanting to pull out, I don't know, 40 or $50,000 out of an account because they're gonna then go to a kiosk at sort of k or something like that and convert it to, um, uh, Bitcoin or, or whatnot and send it, then, is that, you know, something that, that maybe they should ask a couple of questions. You can't, uh, invade somebody's privacy. But can you say, you know, is everything okay?

Do, are you sure you wanna do this? You know, I, I don't know what the answer is there, but Yeah. And in my cousin's case, Terry, she actually went to the bank and pulled the money out and did the transfer, and they begged her not to do it.

And she was convinced that she owed this money to them. Well, and I'm gonna Say one, the scammer that got my friend actually told her that people at the bank were in on it. So she needed to, you know, to be quiet to come.

Mm-hmm. Can I Make a suggestion here? I would suggest the following.

We know that these operations are being hosted in certain countries. We also know that there's a high probability that money's being slid out the back door from these operations to the people who run those countries. We are currently discussing the use of tariffs to be applied, the countries that are shipping fentanyl around the world.

If so facto, this crime is probably just up there with the same level of harm. We just don't quantify it as much. But since we all know at least three people who have probably been scanned, maybe it's time to get a little more aggressive with the countries that are hosting these operations.

A, a again, yeah, I'll just echo what's been said. I don't think necessarily even Canada, you know, you know, it might be entirely clean, and I have my thoughts about the US on this, but, you know, let me just suggest something else. And this is gonna sound as cliche and as, as trendy as it sounds in my head, but I think it's true chat, GPT, right?

You know, this, you know, I've, I think even on the, uh, recent episodes of this, I might have mentioned this, you know, I've had some homeless friends, some people in really dire straits and found myself saying, honestly, in saw chat, GPT. 'cause sometimes when you're all alone, just asking a question of anybody, you know, like you say Tracy, you know, people contact, I've been contacted similarly, my friends and family. It's like, oh, you, you know, because it's embarrassing.

And at, with all the flaws and all the downsides of these, what we call AI these days, you know, that might be the recommendation. That might be the sign in the bank. You know, we say to our friends, family, you know, critically, the older ones are less technically sophisticated.

If this looks weird, you don't wanna talk to anybody else. There's this little app, and it doesn't have to be literally chat GPT, but one of these AI apps just say, does this sound right? 'cause even if the answer is, as you, you find when you use these tools, even if the answers aren't totally correct, it's a good place to start.

And if you take this, you know, and, and go to Google and put in three words Irish lottery, you're not gonna get a lot of help. So maybe this is one of these cases we can point at that this new trendy class of tools has a real, yeah. Has a real benefit.

Because I can't think of anything else that's gonna help Couple of things here. First of all, Chris, I appreciate that sweet little old lady voice she used there. Um, you know, to ask Chachi, BT if this is right, I should save that.

But Mike, are you sitting here telling me the tariffs of the answer to, to cure this? I'm, I'm saying it's one tool in the kit, but we gotta get aggressive with these places that are hosting these. I don't know if tariffs, there's too much protect Yeah.

Abuse. And I don't, I'm not convinced that it's not, you know, these, they're not nation states. These are just, these are criminals.

These are, these are mobs, these are criminals that are doing it. And if they're in some small country in Africa, who cares about a tariff, right? That, And they're in Alabama, and you know, Illinois too.

Mm-hmm. I don't think it happens in places. It does that you would be surprised.

Well, and the other aspect of that is we we're already using tariffs pretty aggressively. I'm not sure what, how much more we can go without damage to us. No.

The, the, yeah. You know, and then it becomes politic. But I think it's political thinks, But it's never discussed.

The po it's never discussed. And this problem destroys as many lives as fentanyl does, and indeed. Mm-hmm.

And it's not discussed. And the people who are to targeted are shamed. They don't want to talk about it.

It's hidden. And we do not have a, a national discourse around this particular problem. Um, and I'm glad, Terry, that your bank has noticed is up for people to Understand that.

Yeah. I was think, you know, people, um, understand the downside of fentanyl, right? I mean, and they'll, they'll, they'll pontificate on it.

I mean, you know, just your average, uh, person on the street, I, I don't think they understand these kinds of threats. And also, I think there's a maybe some more judgment there with people. Oh, you were just dumb.

You were stupid, you got scammed. You know, which doesn't help the, the situ. I mean, I, I will tell you, you know, I, I bank with Chase, anytime I go to Zelle or wire money, I get so many popups that, and they want you to affirmatively click, right?

That you've read this stuff about, you know, once it's gone, it's gone. Make sure this is real. Make sure this is in a scam.

Here's some resources to check and blah, blah, blah. Now, I don't know how many people actually just click the button and move on, and how many actually read or follow through. But, you know, and, and again, depending on, on your view of gov, you know, what the role of government and stuff is.

Is this an individual responsibility thing, even though they are preying on the weak and the lonely and the elderly, but is it an individual responsibility thing? Or do we have a collective responsibility both from the corporate financial institution level as well as the government level to, to protect people from this? Yeah.

Empirically we do, you look at our history, right? You know, this is the ancient scam, right? This is this, you know, at the root of this is nothing new.

This is the shiny, you know, you know, glass ring that looks like a diamond that some desperate stranger is trying to convince you, you know, that you're gonna get a good deal out. You know, this is the, the desire as moist von lip big, you know, and would say it all the disc world books, right? This is that hope we all have.

So, Alan, yeah. I mean, we have been instituting laws and protections and mechanisms against this forever. So it's, so, it's part of y you know, yes.

Individual responsibility at the end of the day, but also laws and Mechanisms. I have another thing I'd like to see, because, you know, I'm clearly the radical in this conversation, but I would like to see Amazon and eBay and all these people who make a living off of transactions online to contribute to some sort of fund to combat this stuff. And that we set up, you know?

'cause ultimately we need to protect, Could we just start with them paying taxes on the income they make? No, I, I'm thinking that they have specific interest in this particular issue because it destroys the faith anybody has in online transactions in the first place, Right? But this isn't just, this isn't just e-commerce, right?

The, a lot of this is romance stuff, right? You know, they preying on a lonely man or woman. Oh, I'd like to get to know you, you know, as I've gotten older, I get a lot of these notes on the line.

No, I'd like, you know, so it's all, it's all part of that. Um, but anyway, I, I think we've talked this one. Now.

Let's take a break here on Textron Gang, and let's come back and talk about AI app security agents. I'm sure this is gonna be one of 50 that I hear in the next week at RSA. You're watching Textron Gang.

Hey folks, we're back in. As Alan alluded, there are all these new AI agents that are promising to review your code, make some suggestions about how to fix something if there's a security issue, and even look at the architecture itself to see if it's weak in the first place. Um, Down's point, there'll probably be tons of these tools coming along.

The first two that at least we're aware of is, uh, ender Labs and side code. But I can't imagine anybody who's in the DevSecOps space not having some sort of similar capability. But Tracy, uh, A, is this gonna work?

And b, is it gonna make a difference? Well, I think one of the important, um, pieces of information that comes from this indoor labs in particular is the acknowledgement that the code that we're generating, uh, through AI is not necessarily safe. And we've had this discussion in the past about the fact that when you start generating this many lines of code, you have more opportunities to have vulnerabilities in them, and it's harder to keep up with it.

Uh, so, you know, they're doing something pretty unique, and I'm happy to see that we're moving beyond just code scanning for, uh, vulner known vulnerabilities. And in this case, they were literally mapping, um, risk factors to, uh, to coding. Um, it looks like they've taken some time.

It says, if indoor in particular has looked at four and a half million open source projects. And yes, there's that many out there and there's more than that, um, to understand, uh, what the, what, what the structure of code is, looks like, where those, and how they map to those risk factors. So I think we're getting to a level of maturity that will actually make a difference, uh, in, in application security.

That being said, it's, there's always, you know, it's great to have a good goalie. It's great to have somebody standing in front of your house making sure the bad guys don't, don't get in. But when they do get in, we need a better way of responding.

And it looks like we're starting to think about responding. And you knows code is talking about using AI to fix things faster, understand how to fix things. If you, if you've ever gone through the process of trying to fix a vulnerability and you walk through the journey of that, it, you sometimes it looks like you should have a PhD.

It's not easy. It doesn't just say, you know, here's the, here's a GI repo that has a fix in it. Go pull this in.

You have a lot of work to do to remediate some of these, some of this code. So AI is where we, this is where we need to apply AI in the app security, um, problem. So yes, I believe this will make a big difference, but code, it will never be perfect.

And there will always be vulnerabilities that make it too production. We're not gonna be able to stop chaos any more than we can stop people from making bad decisions on who they talk to and give their money to. It's just one of those problems.

And there will always be new vulnerabilities discovered after we deploy code. So we're always gonna have some sort of issue. But, um, But at least in this case, in this case, what they're saying is, we're gonna go look at the structure of the code.

We're gonna go look at the architecture of the code, and we're going to do more than just find a known vulnerability and say, don't put that in there. It is helping us cha, it's helping us see the problem in a way that not every single programmer can see it, or not every ai, um, agent who's GE generating code might understand. It's a broader picture.

Terry, when I look at this, and you've been at this for a long time as well as I have, but you know, you forget, but the amount of technical debt we have on security and vulnerabilities in existing applications is massive. And so we might be at fixing all that legacy code for another decade. Or do you think we will just ignore that and kind of try to be better from Here?

Maybe a combination, because I, I, I, I think a lot of that legacy code does still need to be fixed, right? And all those dependencies, that's the, the, the, the issue too, right? Um, you have one thing that you might look up at that affects something else.

And I think that, um, you're gonna have to, to deal with the legacy, but I also think you have to have this path for moving, uh, forward. I was really excited about sort of this, this report and the, the, the opportunities there, because I think it could, you know, mean some great things for advancing security. I've often wonder, and maybe Alan has an opinion on this, but at what point do I really just spend time fixing a legacy app?

Or should I just go shoot the thing and replace it with something more modern altogether that runs more secure? You know, that sounds very logical, but that doesn't happen in the real world, and especially because it's just a security issue. That's certainly not enough for me to throw it out and start over.

Um, you know, the world is full of brown, dirty, messy fields, not green fields. Mm-hmm. And it, and if our answer was always, you know, out with the old in with the new, what a wonderful world it would be, but it, that's not the world we live in.

Come on. AI agents are gonna make it easy to build new software, right? No.

Well, Gary, and there are, we've using, we've used tools forever that does exactly that. You, you pass it a repo and it'll read, take it from one language to the next and modernize it for you, and then you get to clean it up and push it back out. But it doesn't necessarily fix your vulnerabilities or the architecture around that, that might encourage vulnerabilities, let's put it that Way.

Yeah. I'm kind of like Alvin, like the not having so sort of, uh, you know, creating a whole new thing. I, I, I don't know that that's practical or reasonable or what anybody's gonna do.

It reminds me, I was in Singapore, um, a year and a half ago, and, uh, just looking out, uh, from this tower in a guy that I, a business guy that I was, uh, having dinner with said, you have to, you know, look, look past there, the reclaimed lands, right? Because they took land from the sea or whatever. But he was talking to me about how in Singapore with their buildings, you know, you see all these new buildings, right?

They're very few old, whatever. He said, oh yeah. Every however many years we tear 'em down and rebuild them.

And I was just, you know, startled by that. But it, it seems to me that that's quite the investment and, and, uh, not so practical everywhere else in the world. And I think maybe the same thing, um, you have to, you have to fix the legacy.

So as much as you'd like to have shiny new stuff, Mm-hmm. I also feel like, and maybe this is just me, but so much of our focus these days is still on the source code. Like, we're gonna fix the problem at the root root.

And that's noble. But Alan, as you well know, most of what's running out there in the legacy environment is a bunch of binaries that, you know, I don't really see as many tools out there to go fix the binaries and the things that are actually running. This is the dirty little seeker, right?

We saw it during covid with the, uh, unemployment checks, the Ron, the COBOL system, and we don't have COBOL engineers, but, you know, app modernization proceeds at its own pace. And I, I'm, I'm of the opinion that there's not much any of us can do. Because when will a app get modernized?

When it pays to get modernized, right? When there is a bottom line benefit to doing that modernization, that outweighs the bandaid approach to what most of us do, then it gets modernized and you move from the binary to something modern or microservice architectures and all this. But until, until there's a profit motive there, it don't happen.

That's, you know, it's the market work and it's not a bad thing. Maybe I can, I can see a model though, where that dynamic is going to, if not change, get accelerated, right? Because the bad guys also have access to the tools that let them scan your code and then identify weaknesses and discover vulnerabilities.

And they'll be doing that a whole lot faster. And then they'll be creating the exploit a whole lot faster. So the amount of, uh, attacks against software could exponentially increase in the months ahead to the point where more businesses are gonna conclude that running a lot of legacy software is just too risky.

And this is why it gets, we get back to the point that we need to understand the things that we're not doing. And I think the things that AI could be doing better is that we don't really understand our risk when we see a vulnerability. So let's say there's some vulnerabilities in some legacy software.

Does that ever execute? Does that instruction ever get hit in the, in the binary? Does it actually ever do anything?

It could just be a package that was consumed and is sitting there. So we have focused so much on shifting left that we have forgot about shifting, right? And what do we need to do to protect the, the, the runtime environments, the end points, and how do we get fixes to them as soon as possible?

Um, the government right now, I think it's the Navy, is looking at, uh, trying to come up with a way to fix a vulnerability without source code, right? Do some kind of a, you know, a, a binary extraction and fix something and push it back in without the source code. I don't think it's possible.

And even if it is possible the first time you re-release the code into the, back, into the production environment, you probably are just erased what you did. So we, we, we have a lot of work to do on how to fix fast, how to, how to make sure we can, uh, remediate within, you know, in minutes, not the months that it's taking today. So mitigating and remediating vulnerabilities you can do without necessarily changing code.

You can shut off certain port accesses or, you know, use some sort of firewalls or, you know, uh, you know, pick a fence kind of stuff. Um, and, and those might be bandaids until you can get to the source code. But, you know, will AI let, let's get back to the topic at hand.

Will AI security apps security agents help us? Chris, you you got your hand up? Yeah.

I think this is a good, you know, good example of of definition, definition definitions and terminology. 'cause what everybody's saying is true, and we're talking about this as artificial intelligence, and to be clear, what we're talk, what we call artificial intelligence today is neither artificial nor intelligence. It is pattern matching at scale.

That's why these large language models work. We can get into the human language level of pattern matching. And this is what we're talking about, you know, for security and code.

And it is a wonderful tool, you know, like all the other applications for, again, what we are currently calling artificial intelligence. Um, but it has limitations. So you wanna apply this pattern matching at scale to, you know, the kind of trivial chat, GPT, human language matching, pattern matching search the internet kind of thing.

Um, recognize that it's gonna be wrong a fair bit of the time, but it saves a lot of time. You want to use it in this case, you know, for your massive, you know, all the things everybody's talking about here, great. It probably saves you a lot of time, but it's not gonna be right all the time.

And if you don't know that, then you've just picked up a hammer and you think it's an ax, um, it, it's, it's not gonna work out well. These are tools that have a certain function and a certain definition, and literally the, the, the term we keep using to refer to them is misleading. And we, it sets the wrong expectations.

It's not artificial and it's not intelligent. That sounds like the opening for another artificial, it is intelligent. No, got artificial or intelligence speak among these.

I, I'm not sure People care how it's done as long as it gets done and it's, and it's automatic, right? Yep. The automation right now for DevOps is if DevOps pipeline is critical, we've gotta figure out a way to get the fix back through as fast as we can.

Agreed. All right, we gotta take a break on this one. Let's come back and we've got a, a new royal edict coming down from Washington.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back in. There's yet another executive order being kicked around in Washington.

This one kind of talks about directing the Department of Labor and the Department of Education to inject more training and education for AI into the curriculums of K through 12 schools. Uh, there's a little irony in the fact that, uh, the president is ordering anything about the Department of Education these days since this is the department he is trying to eliminate. But Alan, in theory, is this an order you can get behind?

Well, look, any order that comes from up high from his highness right, is something we, we should put behind us. But that being, say, the Luna, the lunacy and hypocrisy of this whole thing. Yes, Mike, you pointed out the obvious, he's directing the Department of Education that he's closing down to go do something about education.

But wait, there's more. This is the same man who says we should let the states and the local school boards and the parents decide what, what curriculum it is and what books they could read or not read, and what we should burn and what, what names we can call our kids and, and everything else. But now he's setting edicts from up high for us to go do this.

This is, this is the reality of the lunacy that we live in. Now, is there anything wrong with saying, Hey, we should make AI part of their K 12 curriculum? Absolutely not.

I think we absolutely should do that. And it would be good if we had a functioning democracy in government where you had a federal department of education who can make those things happen. But you can't talk outta one side of your mouth and say that, and then do the kinds of things outta the other side of the mouth that this government does and expect to have any respect from the world and your constituents.

So that's the real problem here, right? Another baby gets thrown out with the bath water. We should be, think about this as a country.

We should be making sure our kids are AI native. So the irony of this is let's assume that this gets, you know, uh, embraced by school districts. They're gonna go look at countries, uh, that may have already started doing this to build a curriculum, right?

'cause what are you gonna teach a somebody in, you know, under third grade, let's just say that. Well, in Finland, they've started doing this. And you know, where they started Fake news?

How do you identify an a fake AI post? And, and there was a, a, I think it was CBS Sunday morning had a piece on this, and I read about it and I was fascinated. And they said, that's a, like a, a a 8-year-old in Finland can identify a fake news, uh, faster than a 30-year-old in the us.

So let's hope that we do this. Because if they do start an AI program and they start teaching us how to identify what's AI generated, which is a perfect thing to start doing at a yet first grader, then we're gonna have a much more educated public in 10 or 15 years. And maybe we won't find ourself in, in the place that we're at, where fake news is driving the discourse of Our country.

That's so I'm for it. Agreed. I read an Interesting, I read an interesting article yesterday.

Do you know of, of all of the, you know, baby boomers, gen Xs, yada, yada, of all of the, you know, generational groups in our country who is most susceptible to fake news and believing, you know, I would say teens, Gen Z. Gen Z. Yeah.

Gen Z, because they get almost entirely all of their news from social media. And they, even though it, it's almost counterintuitive. 'cause you think of them as digital natives, and so they would've learned by now, but no, they're, they're perfectly content feeding at the trial.

They've not been, Hmm. And Finland, Finland has recognized us because they've had so much coming from Russia. So they've had to figure out a way to defend their population against this kind of, uh, onslaught of, of Information.

And they're in agreement with Russia is bad as at this point. They don't wanna be influenced by them. Yeah, we, we kind of haven't come to that agreement in this country in a while.

I was gonna say too, um, that it is a little surprising, but they do get their information from social media. They also haven't been disciplined as maybe in my generation to be discerning about news and news sources and, and information. I mean, you know, maybe it was a luxury to grow up when there were, you know, res and then, not that they were perfect, but respected newscasters who, um, you know, you sort of trusted what you were saying there.

There was less, there were less news sources, right? You had three or four if you grew up in New York, you had, we would, we had, you know, would we have seven news stations? And they all had news seven TV stations, they all had news.

And then you had your, your newspapers and you, but today, a Gen Z person can't distinguish between, uh, PBS NewsHour and, and, uh, I don't know, name one of the disgrace, Fox newscasters who are out doing their own thing Now, uh, you know, Secretary Joe, They don't, they don't see A difference. Well, they don't and they don't understand what has gone behind her. The, the scenes at at place, like, you know, say NPR or the New York Times even.

Um, there's a whole editorial process. There's a whole discipline there, right? Um, for an, an editorial.

Yeah, yeah. So, so being able to be, being able to actually understand how to use a prompt in chat GPT Chris's recommendation to older people. If you're, if you think you're getting scammed use chat GPT mm-hmm.

It might, it may take some time to train most people to a, to actually do research using chat TPT. So the more we can teach that, the more we can get the more educated people voting. Okay?

I'm saying, well, I saw somebody saying, I mean, lemme lemme break my, Let jump in if I, you don't mind Now, let mem break my, my, uh, typical optimistic Pollyanna view. Well, I agree with, you know, all the points we've made. Absolutely not.

You know, to be clear, you know, this is not what any of you're talking about. This is a political regime that has appointed, uh, um, the autism zar, you know, about this guy. You know, David Geiger, right?

Who, uh, whose father lost his medical license because, you know, he, with his son who's now responsible for the autism tax task force, um, injected autistic kids my son's age, you know, when they were kids and, uh, blocked puberty and, and, you know, caused osteoporosis and, and should be in jailed, right? The African American museum at Smithsonian by executive order is now talk, uh, is ordered to not talk about race or previous American citizens like slave owners in any bad way. And that, oh, by, by the way, race is a biological fact.

So, no, you know, this is, you know, despite the fact that this makes sense on the surface, this is one of these cases. And ob you know, my, my political, uh, views are not any secret, but this is standard security. You have to be practical and pragmatic about what's being used in what context.

And unless you actually believe all of these things this administration believes, then you cannot be in favor of this because you know what they're going to do with it. This is Elon Musk and a group of these folks putting indoctrination powered by AI in the us uh, educational system. So, no, With, without any regard to how it might be used.

But, so here's the thing that, Oh, they're regarding, they have very specific names. They know how they, they want it to be. Look, here's, here's the thing to take.

Here is the thing to take away from all of this, to Alan's earlier point, education is run by the states. So if you're gonna be thinking about where you want your kids trained and how you want your kids trained in the age of ai, you might want to think long and hard about what state you're gonna live in because you know it's gonna be different in all 50 of them. So you might wanna think about moving if you're in a state that is either A, not taking it seriously, or b to Chris's point is using it to advance an agenda that has something to do with some vendor who's fond of Trump.

Think long and hard about where you're gonna live in the next decade. I mean, hypothetically, Mike, that's why someone might move from Florida to New York. That's shocking.

You know, and, and, And, and, And whose youngest kid is now on the honor roll? Go figure. Or or maybe that's why New Mexico's population has exploded the last four years.

It's exploded. Well, I don't know. I'm still calling it new.

I think it's New America now, isn't it? I still do. No, I think it was, Um, Anyway.

Hey, wait, wait. I could see where this is gonna descend into the first couple. It's, we gotta pull a plug.

We are, we will be back tomorrow from RSA conference. Very exci. No, we're not.

This is Monday. No, we're not. We'll be back here again, but I'll be at RSA tomorrow.

I won't be on Mike. You got the ship. All right.

We will Be talking about security. Surprisingly though. Okay.

Until though, everybody, Hey, we've got a great lineup of tech strong TV following today's Techstrong gang. So stay tuned for that. And until next time, Terry, thanks for joining the gang.

Yeah, we look forward to having you on often. Had a great time. Tracy, as always.

It's great. Thank you. Thank you.

Chris. Am I going to see you at RSA? You're sitting this one out.

I am sitting this one out. It's, it's hard to do, but have fun for me. I'll tell them you said hi.

All righty. Bye-bye everyone. We're out.