Techstrong Gang – October 28, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Monday. Have you voted yet?

If you haven't, time is growing short. If you're eligible vote. This is an election where everyone should voice their opinion, but we're not gonna talk politics here.

We've got great stuff here because you are watching Textron Gang. Hey everyone. Alan Hummel here at Techstrong.

Welcome to Monday. It's a, it was a long weekend. I hope everyone enjoyed it.

The start of the World Series Yankees, Dodgers Classic. Um, it is, as I mentioned in the opening, really just a few days here before election day. So it's time to get, get busy on that.

And I will tell you, there's more than just presidential elections going on. There's a lot of local elections and ballot amend amendments to state constitutions and ballot measures. If you're gonna vote, you should vote up on what's gonna be on the ballot there for you and, and figure out what, who you or what you're voting for.

But enough about voting. We, today we're gonna talk about AI coding. Um, the government throws down an in to ai, the federal government that is, and when it rains of pours for Boeing, they had a another little boom boom.

Um, we're gonna discuss all that and where we introduce your first, though to our gang members for today, coming at us from New Mexico, where she's not going to Cube Con, uh, in two weeks. So she'll remain in New Mexico. She's the CEO of Deploy hub.

And our frequent gang guest here, Tracy Reagan. Hey, Tracy. How are you?

I'm good, Alan. Thank you. Yes.

I'm not gonna be going to CubeCon. I'm gonna be sitting here on my mountaintop working, getting some fun, fun. Done.

If, if the mountain won't come to Cube Con, maybe Cube Con will come to the mountain. Oh, God, no. No, no, no, no.

Okay. Uh, joining Tracy out west, also from the mountains in Colorado, it's FUT VP text drunk CTO, Mitch Ashley. Hey, Mitchell.

How are you? Good. Good.

It's the peak to peak Textron gang from that. Yeah. This one, this set of mountains here in Colorado.

Great to be here. Thank you. My favorite mountain to see another mountain from is when I'm on Halala in Maui, looking across the Manolo.

I know you big eyelet or monarchia as the sun comes up. Yeah. As the sun comes up.

That's a good one. Anyway, moving from Colorado, New Mexico, Hawaii, all the way to North Carolina. It's our gang member Hopely, she hope.

How are you? Hey. I am well.

Very well. And speaking of mountains, finally here in North Carolina, blue Ridge Parkway as reopened after, uh, hurricane Helene. So, uh, Good for you guys.

I'm glad to hear that. Yeah. Yeah.

So, uh, there All of those political bend about caravans can go back and forth. Yeah. Guys are inundated.

They're in a swing state. Yes. Speaking of swinging, let's go to our Yankee fan.

He's besides themself at the World Series as our Chief content Officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike. How are you?

I'm good. The Dodgers are on their way to the Bronx, so we'll see how it goes. But I'm pulling out every, I'm sure.

Do we? Here we Go. Do we give them a Bronx cheer, Mike?

Yeah, we, well, we'll see when they get here, man. We, you know, we gotta win first. Win.

Yeah, win. Okay. All right.

So let's dive into things. Our, our first block, Mike, is around the next wave in AI coding. com articles behind this one, but why don't you, uh, set the table here for us?

Yeah, so this week we've got this big GitHub conference coming up, and of course, they've been driving this whole GitHub copilot thing for a while, but we're starting to see a lot of alternatives. Uh, augment showed up with, I think, $98 million in total funding. It's run by Scott Deon, who used to run Pure Storage and was back at Web Logic and BEA back in the day, littler smaller companies.

Zen Coder has an alternative too, and I think there's gonna be a boatload of these things that are coming out. I'm gonna start with hope, but, you know, one of the things that I've talked to some folks about is that the current generation of these tools are kind maybe a little on the whole hum side. Some folks are saying maybe if they're lucky, the junior developers accept maybe 20% of the recommendations from these tools, and the senior developers are increasingly ignoring them.

So, do we need a whole new generation of these things? Where are we? I don't know.

At, at the current stage that we, we do really, um, there are still a lot of challenges with these tools. I know there was, um, the Dora 2024 report that says the impact on delivery and performance is still inconsistent for organizations that want to have some, uh, clear line to understand the payoff for these tools. They, they will be struggling with that.

Um, to me, if you want a tool that will help you, uh, with testing to understand your testing coverage, are you running the right types of tests? These tools can be very useful. Um, if you are a very experienced developer, I don't think they are going to add that much to the arsenal.

Maybe, you know, checking on a few things. Uh, for consistency sake, uh, newer developers probably will get more out of it. But then you run the risk of them learning the wrong, uh, practices and the wrong patterns, because the tool is only regurgitating what it's been given.

And if it hasn't been given good information, you're not gonna get good information back. So, I think there are still a lot of challenges and limitations. Maybe a few years down the line, there will be something really, really great.

But right now, I think it just feels more like, um, you know, just something fun to play with than something to rely on for work on a day-to-day basis. Tracy, are you seeing the same thing? 'cause some of the folks are also saying it amounts to a glorified, uh, type of head spell checker at the end of the day.

Well, I believe that's where we started. Um, and, you know, in terms of the competition, Alan says this all the time, right? If you're not in the top three, go home.

And I find that, you know, co-pilot's been out there, it's already gained a lot of, uh, attention. And people are starting. We, uh, our, uh, open source developers talk about using it.

Steve uses it. I, I, I know a lot of people who, who use copilot. So putting, uh, it is gonna be a very competitive industry, let's just put it that way.

Uh, but some of the other, the other article that was, uh, that was posted here to talk about today was the, um, philanthropic, uh, AI with the ability to move your mouse. Um, you know, I've been working on our website and I swear I have carpal tunnel. I would love to get rid of the mouse altogether.

So I believe that there are some ways or some, uh, new tools that we could go beyond just trying to compete with who can generate the best source code. Um, the other, the other topic is generating code around LLMs. Because AI is moving so fast and we do have a learning curve, I feel like that will be helpful as well.

So, are you in the top three? If not, go home, I suppose. Um, and yes, please.

Let's get rid of the mouse. You know, one of my pet peeves is in every form I see, is when you get to your state, all I have to do is enter two letters, NM and they want me to pick up my hand, grab my mouse, click, and scroll down to find my state. If, if that would be just done automatically for me, I'm happy with that.

So I, I found that article to be very interesting, this idea of predicting where you need to be and giving you a tool tip at the time. That would be amazing. That would be amazing for end users of all kinds.

Not just developers working in like a visual studio environment or a WordPress environment where you're really clicking all the time. So, yeah, let's keep developing these kinds of tools. But I don't know about just code generation.

I think that that's kind of done. Mm-Hmm. Mitch, you ready to give up your mouse?

Come on. Toss it. Open the window and just throw it out.

I have a special relationship with my mouse that, uh, I can't discuss on Dextron gang. So, but, uh, now, you know, I, since Alan opened up about, you know, have you voted yet? We're, we're at the stage of, you know, across all these things.

It's, it's a tie. And anybody that's in the lead kind of doesn't matter. 'cause it's gonna change anyway.

And yes, copilots made a lot of progress, but, um, you, you, you have to look at the trends, not, not what's happened today, because these startups and, and the innovators will, some will succeed, some will have ideas that will generate better ideas that aren't what they're doing today. So what I, what I was, I'm really excited about is seeing AI applied to specific problems. Not just, you know, uh, gen ai type me, type me some code taught me some code so I don't have to pick up my mouse.

Um, it, it, there, there's agents now that analyze your code. And, and I predicted this, that it will be, uh, that are good at, or supposedly good at repairing, applying, uh, pa patches and fixes to code. Um, there's also LMS that have been trained on higher quality code instead of just the masses of code that are out there.

I imagine we're gonna see, uh, LLMs that are, uh, specialized in Java three point whatever, or JavaScript. This, you know, really, really finely tuned models over time. And then of course, the ability to kind of front that in front end, that with, well, here you're using these versions of things and here's in combination how you can use ai.

On the other hand, some of the products where, well, we give you three versions of cloud of Claude, and you have these other models to choose from. Well, no, no wonder the door metrics say that we're losing productivity. This is what my explanation for it was.

And I think it's bearing out, is it takes experimentation and learning to figure out to use this. It's not a pick up a hammer and there's a nail, and I stop start pounding. I gotta figure out what a nail looks like before I can start pounding, you know, or, or I'm hitting the wrong things until I find the nail.

It's kind where we are. And I think there's a dumb, there's, oh, sorry Alan, but I, no, I think there's a dumbing down of, of software development in all this process as well. Um, I'm surprised by how many of you know junior programmers really don't understand the command line, and they are writing software for a platform, right?

So we, they're, we're all too siloed. We're siloed. You know, we have developers who are siloed now are giving tools that are just basically helping them, you know, could potentially just say, go generate this, but then that doesn't even, you could use your large language model and say, please generate this piece of code for me.

Um, but is it a good code? So there's gotta be an a level of expertise. And I, I was surprised by that Dora metric that said, um, only seven and 7% said that there was, or in the survey they said that productivity had only gone up 7% using these tools.

That's kind of astonishing to be, to be honest. And but they did say there was better quality and documentation, but only like 3% better quality. So what are we doing?

That's what people said that they was better quality or better documentation. It's not the actual facts, right? It Was better quality or Off those numbers, The delivery rate.

Instead the delivery rate was actually down. So that was kind of where, so here Here's my thing. Yeah.

That's, you guys all just sound like, Hey, get out. Go play in front of your own house, which old people you Lawn the porch. Let's be real clear here.

There's a wave coming. Either get out your surfboard and learn how to surf that wave, ride this wave, or just sit on your porch and say, go play in front of your own house. But it may not be here right now, but it's coming a lot sooner than you think.

Mm-Hmm. Right? And I pity those poor junior developers, because if they don't get senior real quick, we're not gonna need 'em.

Because this is coming, this is coming. It gets better week in and week out, day in and day out, month in and month out, it gets better. And when you see all these companies emerging, when they say emerging, that means we got money.

Someone gave us money to, to develop this. And it's gonna create more innovation. It's gonna create more competition, right?

And with more competition is going to come better product. And so guys, we're, we're only at the beginning of this wave, right at the headwaters of it, if you will. But it's coming and it's coming sooner than you think, I think, which is some of the people who told us last year that it was here are losing credibility.

And that's making room for some of these newer players. And I don't disagree on your timeline, but, um, you know, there's old cowboy wisdom that says never mistake a clear view for a short distance. And I think that's been going on for the last year or so.

I love the guy from the Bronx gives me cowboys. Cowboys, yeah. I think we'll see some reka moments.

We haven't had any eureka moments, meaning we've applied all these AI to all these different parts of the, the problem or the work that happens in software development. A lot of it, which is in code, by the way. But there will be some signposts along the way.

That's why, I mean, you, you can't watch the polls. You gotta watch the trends, right? And there will be some pickups, there will be, eventually something happens with copilot or something else that said, man, this made a difference.

And it's gonna be a narrow part. It's not gonna be like, okay, junior developers, we we're letting you go. We're we're, we don't need 'em anymore.

That's, you know, that's, that's an overtime kind of thing. So I think we have to watch this as you, what I wanna be skeptical about is I want to hear about the problems that it's helping solve and is, are those valuable problems to solve? That's what the market will respond to.

The rest is, um, potential or hype A lot, I think. Right? We've gone through a lot of hype.

I I really do. It's been a serious hype cycle in this one. But I do believe, I, I think Alan's absolutely right.

We the, it's coming. So how will it change things? Well, you know, when I first started developing, you know, as a programmer, um, on the distributed side, the mainframe was different.

But on the distributed side, I was not just a programmer, but I was also a DevOps engineer. We didn't call it that. I, configuration management.

And I also was a platform engineer. I had to, we had to manage the process from cradle to grave. And over the years, we have become very, very siloed.

And I think what's gonna happen is that those junior engineers are going to be looked, they're going to be asked to do more than just code. They're gonna be asked to, to start managing a broader part of the, uh, the factory, which means that they need to have a better understanding of architecture. They're gonna have to have a better understanding of operations.

They're gonna have to have a better understanding of how this code that they're, that they're generating is assembled. What the dependencies are, how to manage it. 'cause we're gonna have thousands of dependencies.

I mean, we are already in a, a massive death star when it comes to open source packages. Who's consuming what? That's where our resources need to be put.

If we can get code to be generated, that's great. There's a lot more jobs to be done. But I believe that what the, the, the, the, the young developers coming out of the university right now, they're so focused on learning a, a particular software language.

I would hope that the universities would start teaching a broader aspect of software development, including DevOps, operations, platform engineering. That's where we need the help. And I'm hoping that's what will ha.

Security. Absolutely. And, you know, just secure, let's just call it safe software because we can talk about a large language model not being broken into, but a really bad bias.

So safe software, how do we train, how do we bring out of universities, uh, new, new graduates who understand what safe software should look like? They should understand what a command line looks like at minimum. You know, one of the things I learned, Tracy, is from hiring lots of developers over time, you kind of figure out what you, what you like to hire for, what kind of roles, generally speaking, I'm generalizing.

The best developers were always people who knew the stack, not just how to write software for it. Exactly. They could, and they could set it up.

It's not that they're the best, you know, it could be the best platform engineer or the best DevOps engineer, but they knew it. They, they could set it up. They, they knew Linux.

They knew how installed Kubernetes. They know how to, you know, uh, manage containers. They knew how to manage the source code system or whatever we're using, whatever that stack looked like, they figured it out and learned new parts of it.

Because the code is part of a system. It's not just code. It's not something that sort of floats above everything else and, and doesn't kinda really ever touch ground.

It touches ground. And, uh, you know, if you're building something, you, it just like, if you're building a house, right? It starts with the foundation and on up, and eventually the furniture looks really good, but if the house ain't sound, you know, that furniture's gonna fall down.

And that's kinda the same thing with developers. And, and, and so I always looked for the full, not the full stack developer, but the developer who knows the stack. Yes, exactly.

And that's what we, that's what we lack right now at the university system. They don't know the full stack. And oftentimes they're taught, you know, visual studio, or they're taught very specific tools, uh, and I believe that they, they miss out.

And we need, need that knowledge. They're more got to advocate responsibility for the code. And the developers are just gonna go, Hey, the AI tool did it.

And if it didn't work, not my fault. So, um, you know, is that where we're headed with this? Because right now, you know, there's plenty of instances out there where AI and code shows up doesn't work, and people just SHR it.

I, right. I don't, I don't know that we can, I mean, if, if you are delivering code that is not working, even if you have had a, a pair programmer that is an AI tool, I think you will not be employed. Right.

If You had a code generator, doesn't have to be ai. Right? It's still your fault if it doesn't generate the code you want.

Yeah. But, um, I, I, I do think, you know, in some very small organizations, one of the things that this will enable that I have seen, if we're, if we're looking outside, uh, large established companies, there have been stories. I've seen anthropic, you know, as a point where there has been some, you know, some small, let's call it a startup, but it's, you know, one or two people that have an idea and they say, you know what?

I don't know how to write code, but I can go to Claude, tell it my idea. Claude will generate the code. Claude will show it to me.

Um, you know, in the sandbox as it's working, I take that, I copy it, and now I go, to me, that also is a very, very big risk with some of these coding tools, is getting people who are not developers at all, right. Who are now delivering applications, and they don't understand testing. They don't understand compliance.

They don't understand so many, Why aren't they developers? Because they didn't write the code, because they don't understand those things. This, this is my thing.

500 million developers by 2030. Yeah. It may not be the developers you're looking for, but they're developers.

They're developing code, they're bringing code to market. Yeah. They're, they're doing, they're doing a big copy and paste, and it works.

So, you know, it's out there in the wild and people will start stress their information to it. Um, Yeah, I think that's the mission, is we have to prepare for a world of 500 million developers who may not be the developers that we think of, right? You wanna call 'em citizen developers or proletariat developers, or any man developers.

But they nevertheless will use their AI tools to generate code and, and go, go forth and maybe prosper, maybe not prosper. We're putting those tools in the hands using What said Batman slogan about the hero you deserve again. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a Hero you Get, right? I just wanna remind everybody too, that we, we've been here before, we had code generators in the nineties.

I used to use one Teon ca had a product called Teon that I used to use back, I Used to One, there was a big, there was a big, big movement around case this computerated software engineering. And many of us on the, who were coding on the mainframe and CI CS DB two, we loved our, our tell on, and there were other, uh, I bm I can't remember IBM's, um, code generator, but there were plenty out there. Um, I just say this because we used these tools before.

We survived them quite well, and it didn't change that much on the mainframe. It gave us better code. Uh, but you certainly had to learn to use the tool, and you had to have the knowledge in order to apply what was being generated.

So just a point out there, we've been, we've been here before. This is not new. Mm-Hmm.

I think it's just a matter of scale now though. If I can sit at home, write an app, app goes viral, it's not secure, has all sorts of problems, the the potential fallout there is just going to be so much bigger. Um, Yeah.

Well, I think it'll be the platform engineering team's job to make sure that it doesn't get out there with too much, too much, you know, security risk and everything else. And the DevOps teams. It's never the developer's fault.

Um, All right. On that note, we'll take a break here on Textron Gang. Let's come back.

The government has said, Hey, or at least our government, the federal government here has said, Hey, AI is real, and we're gonna make it an asset. You're watching Techron Gang, Accelerate your DevOps journey at DevOps experience 2024. Join us for an exhilarating experience that will transform your DevOps practices.

Explore emerging trends in DevOps and advanced platform engineering techniques. Learn how to integrate security while leveraging AI to drive efficiency and innovation. Mark your calendars for October 16th, 2024.

Discover how to improve operational velocity and foster a culture of continuous improvement, ready to elevate your DevOps strategy. See you there at DevOps, experience 2024. Alright, folks, we're back and we're talking about this AI mandate from the government.

And the funny thing about it was, I feel like it was written by ai, because when I read it, I looked at all the verbiage and I said, this is the exact same description they used for securing software supply chains. And it was like, they just ripped and replaced all the different verbiage, and it was almost identical. So, Mitch, I don't know if you read it, but it seems to me like we are running the same playbook again.

And I guess that's a good thing. We're running it earlier than later. But, um, is, you know, what was your sense of looking at this thing?

Uh, it, um, it, it's one of those kind of strikes you as a bit of the obvious, just like the first one did, right? I mean, it, they weren't going very far, very far afield. And, you know, the sky is falling and prescribing wild, crazy things.

But I think what we saw happen with, uh, what came from Biden earlier was agencies start to then put together, here's our policy. We're gonna require SBOs, for example, when we're talking about software, supply chain security, um, ai now withstanding here, of course, you know, it gets a bit more complex because I'm not always sure are we, are we at a stage where we add it? We can tell what is our software using ai?

In other words, it could be through external systems. Doesn't doesn't mean we're packaging LLMs in our software, right? This could be through, uh, a open API calls.

So some of those things might be obvious, but there's a lot of models. You could set this up on some other system, you know, take it off of hugging face, and that's, that's part of the system that it's running in. So I think it's, it's good to bring focus on it and do it earlier so we can start to think about what do we have to worry about?

What are the practical steps to do? And as long as the government doesn't, you know, mandate what the process is, um, I think we'll, we'll have some, I hopeful we'll have some good steps we can learn from. They won't always be the right step.

Matter of fact, I'm sure they won't be. But, um, let's at least start working on it. So I'm, I'm all for this.

Okay. Thumbs up from Mr. Ebert.

There. I I, I have some thoughts on this. I was gonna go last, but hope do you or Tracy?

No, I just am happy that we are still talking about the u our US government pursuing, you know, you know, initiatives that ensure that the, the us you know, leads the world on the discussion around, you know, trustworthy, safe ai. Um, we've avoided it. So, you know, I don't know how, how, how strong a memorandum is, but I do know that NIST has participated quite a bit in this.

And for the first time, I, I find it interesting that NIST a's starting to develop code, open source code for people to use. And in the past they've just been standards. So there is some movement around this.

And I believe the Biden administration has been pushing it pretty hard, or at least the, the, uh, he's been, you know, pushing those teams to look into this and do something about it. So I'm glad we're having the conversation and I'm glad that NIST is, uh, is kind of leading the way and taking bigger steps, uh, towards teaching us how to build safer software. Mm-Hmm.

In the AI world. Yeah. The, the piece that I am looking forward to and seeing how it all plays out, is, um, they've said they're, they're collaborating within industries as they move forward with this.

And how that will then roll into, um, what the standards are. Because yes, there, it's great to have latitude and it's great to have freedom in, in how, um, organizations will meet requirements or what they interpret as being the requirements. But what will it look like, um, once it is applied to the medical sector, once it's supply to the finance sector, um, and how deeply will they go with these collaborations?

And the one thing that I would love to see is if they are taking more of the lead from the private sector, can we actually speed up the government response to changes in regulations? Um, I don't think it's just the United States government, but often governments are seen as being so slow, but the changes in, or the perceived changes in AI are coming so quickly. Um, will it make it almost a moot point in some ways if the government can't keep up?

So if they really are serious about those collaborations, are they actually going to act with speed and adapt, um, the memos and other regulations to keep up with it? That was an important part of this memo too. Hope is a recognition that AI's moving too fast.

Yeah, we're not gonna stop it. Um, let's embrace it and understand it, use it, learn from it, and work together as a, as the industry, you know, public and private, to figure out what things we should put in place. So, you know, rather than building the walls or, you know, rating how safe it is, like the EEU AI Act is, and then sending, there'll be penalties if you don't do blah, blah, blah, blah, little premature to be able to know what safe means, right?

Yeah. And to have how organizations might do that, which is why I'm sure Apple pulled out. So mm-Hmm.

I'm not trying to be all, uh, rose colory glasses on this, but it didn't come out as some dogmatic, you know, here's AI and here's what we're gonna do to, to squash it. 'cause it wouldn't squash it anyway. And the other thing it talked about is that, that so much of the funding, um, and where AI is coming from is such at the top view, right?

So I'm, I'm ho and that can be that I, I think that's dangerous is that it's certainly not very democratic. Uh, and it, so it did talk about getting, uh, you know, funding in the hands of smaller businesses to pursue ai. So maybe we'll see more funding opportunities coming out of the, uh, the US government in, uh, from nist, uh, on this topic to help smaller companies invest in AI in ways that we cannot start creating really useful solutions and solving problems Problem.

So let me make a little room here to unfurl my American flag and roll myself in it. Okay? There's something lined up.

Think, I think, let's, let's call this for what it is. This is a national mandate to keep America great. And I'm not talking about running around like a clown in a red hat.

You wanna keep America great, AI is the next great technology. We had the lead, we invented AI basically here. And what they're saying is, we're going to keep that lead and we're gonna make AI a national strategic asset of the United States of America.

Dammit. Nice. And that's what we're gonna do.

Okay? We got By. That's what this is about.

We, and, and I applaud, I, and I've said this before, I applaud the Biden administration through all four years, they have been more tech, I don't want to say savvy, but they, they've got their finger more on the pulse of what's going on in tech than a lot of administrations Democratic and Republican have had in the past. I agree. Right?

They, they, they, they are doing things that us in the tech world say, make sense. This is another one, right? Yes.

Let's broaden the base of AI innovation in America. Let's make sure that foreign en foreign entities that don't have our best interests at heart are not using AI against us. Let's share our AI innovation with our allies, right?

Let's make AI part of what we do here into, you know, woven into the fabric of our technology industries and the way we regulate and innovate and, and everything else. Unfortunately, we, unfortunately, we don't have a Congress that'll put, you know, they have the power of the purse that will put some money, as you say, behind this jc, right? Because anything that gets done by these mandates and executive orders are so, of course, subject to our court system, which, you know, can kick it back to Congress.

And, and Congress doesn't have the will to get stuff like this done and the Whis of the next presidential cabinet, right? They can undo mandates. Well, um, with, with, with all due respect to Captain America over there, I have noticed this trend that says, Hey, every time we call something a national security strategic asset, it's not too long before we write, start writing bailout checks put together by the taxpayers to keep this thing afloat.

So I just hope for once, maybe that we're doing this in a way that doesn't ultimately wind up with yet another tax bill for the American citizens. You know what they said the same thing about nasa. Mm-Hmm.

And we Did it never gone Automotive and everything else that we've done over the years. So, you know, there's a pattern. Look, you know what?

The automotive companies paid us back with interest. Mm-Hmm. This is the business and job of government to facilitate, to make our lives better.

And AI is something that could do that And to, and keep, and again, disperse all our companies that can, you know, bring more income into the us, you know, coffers because they're hiring more people. It's, it's the, it's a, it's, it's, it's, it's a and It creates innovation. Look, I mean, look at that.

Yeah, exactly. You know, we're gonna talk next about our friends at Boeing and SpaceX and stuff, but look, look, look at the space industry that's been spawned right? By, by investments of American government dollars.

And look what some of the members of that industry are doing with that money around the world and talking who they're talking to. We'll get to that in a minute. You know what?

You're cheating. You get, you're moving ahead. Moving ahead.

Anyway, I I, I do think it's a good, it's a good thing. I think we all recognize, uh, the, both the potential, the power and, and the threat of ai. So we'll see how this rolls out.

And, and as Mitchell, as you said, a lot of it will depend on the next administration. And do they continue this, expand this, curtail this, you know, that's, that's the, and that's why you should vote. Anyway, let's take a break right here On Textron gang.

We'll come back and we're gonna talk about boom, boom goes Bowie. Um, you're watching Textron gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation. We are your go-to for reaching IT leaders and practitioners worldwide.

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But, um, if you haven't noticed Boeing had yet another incident. Usually they have all kinds of problems of their own these days, but this one involved a satellite that blew up and knocked out internet service in places like Africa and the Middle East. And it's part of an ongoing series of issues.

At the same time, we are starting to see all these starlink satellites are going up. The demand for those things is incredible. Uh, there's conglomerates in India now that want to build their own.

There's folks in China that want to build their own as well. And it seems like this is becoming a national strategic issue, because now, now there's reports saying that, uh, Elon Musk and the folks at Sterling, uh, that request of Putin said, you know, we won't let the Taiwanese have access to these starlink things. And I feel like this is becoming the next great national security issue.

And, but are we paying enough attention to it, Alan? I mean, it seems like because these things are satellites that are in Africa, we're not quite understanding the implications of this whole conversation. Well, oh, contraire my friend.

I, I think we understand the implications of it very well, and I think it's understood at the government level as well. Here's the dilemma we're in, right? This is classic the kind of stuff Tracy talks about.

When you put all your apples in that big company basket, you are beholden to that big company basket, right? How that big company goes. You go, if you have a broader base of, of, of, uh, industrial support, no one company can dominate.

And so you are much less susceptible to the ups and downs of any one company here in the US We've put a lot of apples into Boeing's basket, not just in commercial planes, but as we see here in satellites, knights taking men to the moon, the, you know, and, and the, the next adventure of space. And look, Boeing's become sort of schlep rocks lately. You know, they're, they're, they just, you know, they're in a slump.

They're in a slump. They, they need to, you know, be taken outta the lineup maybe for a couple days. That being said, I abhor with a capital A, I abhor the idea of replacing Boeing with SpaceX because SpaceX and Elon Musk is a loose cannon who will go to anybody that is gonna make, give Elon more power and money, hence our Putin conversations here.

And, and not giving a US ally, the government in Taiwan, internet access via his company. If a foreign adversary has that kind of control over the US company that's going to, we're putting all our eggs in their basket to launch our space vehicles and something, something's very wrong. We need a broader base of space.

You know what Jeff Bezos blue origins out there. We, we don't have to pick just billionaire space companies, but we need more space companies. We need more a broader base of this technology.

And there are plenty up here in the Space Coast in Florida, there's a bunch of them. But we need more companies. We need more government support.

I am poor giving, putting all of our eggs into Elon's basket. He's proven who he is. So I'm not saying he's a great person, you know, very smart, but that's where I am.

And just to emphasize that, um, you know, Boeing alone, they claim that 40% of their, their revenue comes from the US government, um, probably around 15 billion a year. Uh, you know, SpaceX is getting there, not quite, not quite there. I'm sure Elon would like to be there.

Uh, he's got a ton of con of contracts. I think he's collected about 15 billion from the US government over the say of the last 10 years or so. So we all have to realize that, you know, Elon Musk and Boeing are not out there being real capitalistic companies in the sense that you're competing and having to work really hard to make sure that you're delivering a perfect product because they're getting contracts from the US government.

And I think that makes you a little bit lazy. Uh, and I think we're seeing that with Boeing, and it's way too much power in the hands of, of a few. So the Crane Creek part of this thing is one of the candidates now wants to put Ellan in charge of the committee to review the efficiency of the agencies that overseeing the companies that he runs.

So I pretty much guarantee that the first thing that's gonna happen is, you know, any agency that's overlooking what SpaceX is up to do is gonna get no funding Whatsoever. And then we're gonna have this kind of dilemma where, but that, that's the kind of go that, it's called fascism. It's called fascism, right?

It is. It's, this is how Mussolini made the trains run on time, and Hitler made sure the, the, the, the, uh, showers worked really well. And we did all of you have your corporate cronies, like the Oscar Schindler's though, he went the other way.

But you have your corporate cronies that you give your contracts to. And, and, and by the way, it's the same cronyism that we see in Russia, right? It's oligarchs.

What, what's the difference? Elon Musk is not an oligarch. The nice thing about Boeing is it's more of a broader based ownership, and you don't have a single kind of head there, right?

The CEOs get their heads chopped off as all in as French Kings during the re revolution, but, um, you, you like that right? Hedge left. What did you eat this weekend?

I don't know. I don't know. I was in New York, but, um, anyway, You know, but anyway, we shouldn't be having, you know, like the Boeing CEO, what is he bringing in?

Probably, I don't know, 40 million a year. So, Poor guy. Uh, exactly.

Uh, based on government contracts, 40% of his business is coming from something that's just gonna be handed to him. They don't have to really work that hard. But here's the, Here's the other bad part about Boeing.

Forget Boeing about, forget about the government contract aspect of it. If Boeing gets out of the jetliner business, the airline business, there's only one airline manufacturer in the world left. Airbus.

Airbus, yeah. We had no competition. There was a time when I was growing up, you know, I walked five miles uphill and then five miles uphill home.

But we had McDonald Douglas, right? And they made great jets, and you had Boeing, and you had nor well Grumman would, I grew up in Long Island. Grumman was a huge Navy.

Uh, you know, they made the f 14 com, Tom Katz there, Tom Katz came outta there, as well as the Ludo module. Um, you, you had several civilian aviation companies that were building planes. You had choice, you had more competition.

It made them all better. Boeing was never better. Now when they had to outcompete some of the other American companies.

Now of course they compete with Airbus, but you know, they've fallen on hard times. And we need a broader base of, of, you know, of startups, of companies that compete, because that's what capitalism is, that's what market dynamics are. And we don't know that I, I'm a little concerned that, you know, what Eisenhower called the industrial military complex is becoming the industrial space complex with the same results and the same impact.

And it doesn't seem like it's very competitive whatsoever. No, I think we're past that. I think Yeah, that's already happened, Mike.

Right? You know, John Schwartz used a term on one of our calls, uh, he used a term authoritative bias. And I feel like companies like Boeing have this, uh, that, that those in government look at them as, uh, the authority on this topic, and they get benefits for it, right?

They, they get 40% of their income coming from the government. They don't have to worry. They just have to worry about 60%, which is really nice, to be quite honest.

So that authoritative bias, authorit authoritative bias is a problem in so many areas. And Elon Musk is that as a person who people assume what he says is, is gonna be the best, right? It's gonna be true.

It's gonna be the best. And I feel like that's where we've come, um, in terms of these deep tech, uh, companies that only people with this, this author, this authoritative bias, are gonna be funded or going to be looked at as, as, uh, an entity that can deliver. So how do we break that habit culturally, and how do we break it within our government is gonna be really challenging because we're starting, we've done it.

As Alan points out, we've ruined pretty much the, our, the industry around, you know, aviation. Ellen, and I know this the hard way. It, our procurement, government procurement system is set up exactly that way.

It's the large companies that all the subs are under, and the only way to get in. They win the contracts. And it's all the, uh, subcontractors to the subcontractors, to the subcontractors that you have to get in to be part of.

Its just, it's changing that system. That would be a big deal. That would be very difficult to change, I think.

Well then I would put it this way. So we have the control over the revenue flow. So maybe we need to redirect that 60% of the revenue to ensure that there's a level of competition in this space instead of, you know, right now there is a tendency to wrap ourselves around that American flag.

And these are American companies, and they're only American companies when they're losing money, and when they're not losing money, they're international companies. So, I don't know, But now who's being naive now was thinking, you really think we're gonna redirect that revenue flow? Don't you understand?

Who puts these people in there seats? Do you think Elon Musk is out campaigning for that dude outta the goodness of his heart or his, who are his or his patriotic feelings deep in his South African heart? Not at all.

Not at all. No, he's doing this 'cause he's been promised Carp Lodge for his company, and he's gonna make sure the government's efficient as long as they all drive Teslas and use starlink. And use starlink.

Exactly. Okay. Mm-Hmm.

This is, this is the way our, unfortunately, this is the, a good chunk of the way our government works. Money makes the world go around there and, you know, you bar your influence, your lobbyists and, and everything else. We, we, you're saying, you're saying that, you're saying that there is no hope and there's no ability to change that dynamic.

I'm looking for an island to live on, like just, I'm Hiding on my mountain. I is there. Yeah.

It starts with having a Supreme Court that overthrows, was it United Citizens? United Citizens. United Peoples United, it starts with a Congress that has the will to stop Congress, people from insider trading and owning stocks and taking lobbyist money, public funding of elections, take private money out of elections.

There's a lot we can do that would help do that, but there's a lot of money stacked up against those things. This is true. But hey, the more we talk about it, the more people are aware of it, the more they start to think about it.

You know, 500, 500 million developers that are getting to do something. Um, anyway, hey, I think we've, we've killed this one here on a Monday. I don't have any Cole Trace, Mitchell, Mike, anything else you wanna add?

Vote, Vote. All right. Yeah, go vote if you can.

If, if early voting is still open in your state or jurisdiction. If not, November 5th is, is election day. That's a Tuesday as it always is.

Make sure you vote. Um, until then though, or until tomorrow, we've got a great tech, strong TV line up, not as, not as lively as this show, but it's a great tech, strong TV line up following. And, uh, we'll be back tomorrow with even more and exciting.

Well, I don't know if it'll be as exciting, but we'll have more tech, extra G tomorrow. Have a great day, everyone. This is Alan Hummel.

We're out.