Violent AI, Pentagon Pushback & Hidden AI Agents
Transcript
Hey everyone, happy Wednesday and welcome to Techstrong gang. As I say almost every day, there's so much news going on, there's so much to talk about. It's hard to just pin it down to three things.
But we got three great things to talk about today. We're going to jump into it, but first let me introduce you to our gang members today, and what a fine gang it is. Joining us from West Coast.
He's back home in the valley, our bureau chief for, I forget what he is, but he's whatever he wants to be. John Swartz. John, good to see you.
It's good to be here. I missed you. I think I missed you.
I was leaving Chicago on Thursday, but I think you may have had a flat tire that day. I got a flat tire coming home from Naples, Florida, not Italy. But I was in a loaner car from the...
It's a long story. Loaner car from the dealer, and they started yelling at me because evidently you're not allowed to take it out of the county, but no one told me. Mm-hmm.
It was an adventure, but I got my car back. Anyway. And Naples is Red Sox country, so I'm not saying there was a correlation between that and your flat tire.
It might have been. I was actually in Fort Myers, which is really Red Sox country there. But the flat occurred in Naples.
Anyway, John, thank you. It's great to have you on. It's good.
Joining us from Denver, that's in Colorado, also not in Italy, our one and only Andy Mann. Well, it's actually Boulder. And from the Space Coast, he's the space man.
We're going to be talking about space today. My friend JP Morgenthal. JP, good to see you.
Good to see you, everyone. How's everybody doing? So Mike, a lot of AI going on here.
Yeah. A lot of AI. A lot of people are getting very- Agitated ...
perturbed. Agitated. It's stirring the pot.
It's a force for social change. It's also unfortunately getting violent, and we condemn all that kind of behavior, but it also is kind of reminiscent of what happened in the insurance industry earlier this year or last year when that executive was shot in New York, and now people are throwing Molotov cocktails at Sam Altman's house, and all kinds of mayhem ensuing, but John- Well, they're taking, they're shooting bullets I heard. Yeah.
Heard a lot of people are blaming this guy Swartz for an article he wrote. I don't know, but John? Yeah.
Well- What the hell is going on? another day we can talk about some guy who stalked me, a prisoner who stalked me for something I wrote, and he's tried to sue me. But that was a long time ago.
But yeah, there are some crazy people out there, and as Mike said, we live in dangerous times with highly volatile acts of violence, threatened destruction, and this escalates to the White House, right? So in this environment, this hostile environment, this highly keg environment, within a couple of days, Sam Altman, who is the face of AI, which he wants, and which he may be regretting now for a few days, at least, his house was attacked twice within a couple of days, first with a Molotov cocktail, and then with gunfire. So at the same time this was happening, in Indianapolis, there was a councilman's house that was riddled with gunfire over this proposed data center, which is tied into AI.
So we've got these three acts of violence. The ones involving Altman are interesting because in the Molotov cocktail case, they grabbed the suspect whose motives were based on this manifesto that he wrote, and I'm going to just quote from it. He talked about the purported risk to humanity and impending extinction.
He also was detailing along with his beliefs, he had a list of other AI executives he intended to attack according to criminal complaints. I reached out to a couple of people I talked to, one of whom I've known for a long time who's an AI consultant, and they were shaken, to say the least, and also extremely paranoid because we talked about this idea of how AI was not viewed in these terms for such a long period of time until recently. And given the events of the news, as fast as they move, the big tech, the bros and their culture, their ties to the White House.
This person, this friend of mine said it's scary and threatening, and she's wondering whether employees are going to be targeted, and not just the executives. I also talked to a guy who's a security expert, and he said that acts of violence is happening on a more condensed timeline, and he believes that there's like this radicalization or theory of thought about AI and what it can do, and I think it's being stoked by things like layoffs, this fear that most of us are going to be displaced. The fear of the unknown, which also ties back is, as Mike was talking about, the insurance industry.
I even think about the turn of the century and what happened in our economy and how that led to the labor movement, et cetera. But this is all happening with everything with AI happens in a more condensed timeline, and what I'm afraid of is we're going to see more of this. We're going to hear more of it, at least.
So I don't think this is an AI per se problem. I think what we have here is a distinctly American problem. We have become, we always were, let's face it, but certainly over the last...
Not going to blame politics, but I'm going to blame politics. We have a political environment that encourages violenceRight? It takes a good gun to stop a bad gun and all that good stuff.
And we encourage ... " It starts there, and it works its way down through that whole movement where it's okay to be violent. That's how we settle things.
" Right. You say stuff like that, and then you're surprised when stuff like this happens. Mm-hmm.
It starts there. Now, that being said, John, you're onto something. It's not the turn of this century or the turn of the last century.
It was the turn from the 1800s to the 1900s, now two centuries ago, and that's where we saw a huge amount, and very similar, civil unrest. The robber barons, the Gilded Age, the disparity between haves and have-nots and income disparities, these things always portend violence. To the French Revolution, off with their heads, let them eat cake.
Right. AI just happened- Yeah. to be the whipping boy, but poor Sam Altman.
I'm playing cards and flowers right here for Sam. He set himself up as the lightning rod. Yeah.
I'm sorry, Alan, yeah, I misspoke. I meant the turn of the 20th century and the urban migration that kind of reshaped the global workforce. But in any event, so Sam Altman got what he wanted, and sometimes you regret what you want.
And I think he's trying to tamp down this accelerated temperature. But without getting political, I am going to be political, he's standing on the stage with the very people who are stoking this kind of violent rhetoric- Yep ... and hatred.
So he's going to be closely aligned and signified as part of this bro culture. And it's not just him. I also think this applies to Bezos, especially Zuckerberg, and I'm almost sure, and this is probably worth a story, that the security details for these folks is probably escalating significantly.
That's probably the big expense item that's going on behind the scenes right now. John, I interviewed, we've had them on a couple of times, the folks at Black Cloak, who specialize in executive security, both cyber and physical, and I asked them about that very issue, and yeah, that stuff is through the roof. And it's not just Sam Altman or the individual, it's their whole family, their children- Mm-hmm ...
their spouses. Yeah. Savannah Guthrie's example has shown that this is now not limited to the individual, right?
It's the families. Yes. Yeah.
And that's where my friend comes- And the- Sorry, Andy. That's where my friend comes in about whether this extends to the employees of these companies, especially like an OpenAI or a Meta. And look, while the violence is obviously deplorable, and we do not accept that at all, the emotion behind it is entirely understandable.
And Alan, I actually agree with you politically. We are living in a culture of violence, but even more so, we're living in a culture of lawlessness. Yeah.
January 6th violent offenders get pardoned. Even just today, we're looking at new executive orders or new actions by the Department of Justice- Yeah ... to try and pardon January 6th insurrectionists from the Proud Boys.
We're aggressively and violently attacking our neighbors, bombing people in boats coming into our country supposedly bringing drugs. But the lawlessness of officials literally taking bribes with no accountability at all, committing crimes, the president being immune and promising to pardon his cabinet for committing crimes on his behalf. It's not just the violence, although the violence is definitely part of this country at the moment.
It's absolutely this idea that oligarchs and robber barons, talking about going back to earlier centuries, that these modern-day robber barons are able to do whatever they want. They can steal all of our content and use it to train their gen AI, and that's apparently fine. But it seems the supporters of those people are the ones who are being violent.
You would expect- Yeah ... that your let them eat cake would occur, but no, we haven't seen that kind of violence. Hey, where's Jack Palmer when you need him?
The backlash hasn't come from the people who are getting screwed by that behavior. It's the ones who are violent are the ones who are supporting that behavior, you'd think. I think it's- So what are they so angry about?
They're winning. I think there's more violence maybe on one side, but there is violence on both sides and there's- Yeah ... it's not- You know what's crazy?
Yeah. So sorry, Mike. You know what's really crazy is that when we had the United Healthcare CEO assassinated essentially- Luigi ...
Luigi became a hero. He was a hero among, especially younger folks, including some people I know. I was a little bit taken aback by that, but the level of frustration that the system doesn't work and it only rewards those who resort to violence, who agree with the people in charge, that is an undercurrent in a lot of this.
And AI, I think, is just stoking it as faster as anything else. Yeah. But I'm telling you, historically, and I'm talking now as a history of government politics major, income disparity drives it.
It drives violence. Mm-hmm. It's what drove Karl Marx and Engels and the whole movement on that.
It is the story since the 1700s. Mm-hmm. It used to be religious theology-based political theory, economic-based political theory.
When you haveSuch disparate income inequality like that And not just income, Alan, but also disparity in power base, right? Yeah. The ability to affect change.
Lots and lots of societies get along with strata of people at various socioeconomic levels very peacefully. But in this country especially, the ability to affect change has been taken out of the hands of individuals- Yeah ... significantly.
" Meanwhile, workers getting laid off. Meanwhile, exactly right, Bezos, Zuckerberg, others, millionaires, billionaires making record profits, and everyone is disempowered from affecting change. There are- How crazy will this ultimately get?
Because, to Alan's point, going back to the turn of the 1900s, if I'm not mistaken, it was 1901 when McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist- Yeah. Right ... and things were crazy back in those days.
And are we at the beginning of that again? I hope not. You know something is really kind of creepy, and it just went a little bit viral today.
So Snap announced 1,000 layoffs, 16% of its workforce. At the same time, they're using AI as part of the efficiency plan, which might be justified to some extent. But in any event, there's a photo circulating of Evan Spiegel at Coachella and celebrating the day before it happens.
And what I'm trying to say is that there's this heightened awareness or more visibility of these folks who are celebrating their lifestyle out in the open, at the same time they're taking these actions. And I think that plays a part into this- Oh, absolutely ... sense of disparity and hatred.
Yeah. No, you got this mega yacht coming through, and you're laying people off. It is.
But you know what? We only have a minute left in this. I do want to focus on not just the violence and the clear brewing anger, right?
It reminds me of 1968, right? There was so much anger with young people about Vietnam, about civil rights, peace, and everything. And we lost Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and there's so much violence.
Kent State. But let's turn this, though. Let's focus on AI for a minute.
AI is drawing the lightning rod position here because it is disruptive. It will be more disruptive, and people are scared to death. Worried, really worried about, "Hey, I just graduated college.
I got $150,000 in loans. " Right? And so AI, and Sam Altman as the poster child for it, has put themselves in this lightning rod position where they're going to draw the ear.
They're going to be on that front line. And, like you said, John, be careful what you wish for. Be careful what you wish for.
I hope no one loses a life or any other tragedy. I think Aleem Cummins is putting in some interesting text items also around how this is related to ethical AI and transparency, and the more people understand about something, the less scary it is, the less inclined they are to do things that are maybe crazy. I hope.
I think someone put a nice comment in live here. Mm-hmm. Right?
I'm seeing that- Yeah ... we got to separate the technology from the leadership of this. And thank you for mentioning that.
Mike, we got to jump, though, to our next segment, and it's still AI- Right ... related, but what do we got? Well, we've been talking about this effort led by Anthropic to basically use AI to find every vulnerability that ever existed in the history of software.
And some of that is also apparently connected to their concerns about giving AI tools to the United States government, which may use that in a way that could be offensive in nature. And so we've been talking about it, but let's connect a couple of dots, and you did an article, Alan, on this. But are these things related?
Is this conflict with the United States government, Anthropic, directly related to the fact that, well, this next model they have could be used for Armageddon? Yeah. Well, if not for Armageddon, for unlawful acts.
Let's leave it at that. So this was something that occurred to me when all the Mythos Glasswing stuff broke last week. Just to lay the foundation, though.
About a month ago, a month and a half ago, there was a big brouha over Anthropic refused to let the DoD use Claude, to use their AI, unless they agreed to Anthropic's usage policies. " And our, what's he called, Secretary of War? Whatever.
Our favorite, whatever. I'm not going to say anything. Our Secretary of War took great umbrage to this and basically pulled the five-alarm fire, claiming that Anthropic was an enemy of the people, or whatever the right term is.
And of course, his boss over there went all along for it because he's all for this kind of thing. And they declared Anthropic persona non grata, made it very difficult. And some of us, and probably some of us on this panel, said, "Good for Anthropic for standing upFor their principles, and it was a good thing to do.
When this Mythos thing came out, it became really clear to me. I don't have anyone to cite as a source or d**p t****t or anything, but I've been around this world long enough to put two and two together to see four. They saw what-- They already had Mythos.
They've had this for a couple of months. They saw it, not just that it could find vulnerabilities, but it writes exploit code. Giving this to the DoD is giving them a blank check to go break in and bring down and create havoc wherever they want.
And the DoD will be, or the DoW, whatever they call themselves, will be the purveyor of what's lawful or not. And so I had a lot of respect for Modi and Anthropic when this first happened. I have a s******d more respect for them now, knowing that this is probably why they didn't turn it over.
They didn't trust these people to put their grubby hands on it. Wait, I think though the ship has sailed because OpenAI today is talking about their alternative to what Anthropic- Well, let me just say this, I think you've got Molotov cocktails getting thrown into Modi's house. Well, I guess that's going to be the correlation here because, at the end of the day, governments are going to have this capability.
So that's- They are, but- That horse is out of the barn ... new role. New role for the United Nations.
And I know that over the years, their role has become less valuable, less pertinent around the world. But this is a clear requirement for something like the United Nations. Look, we are in deep trouble here.
So but JP, wait one second. I just got to quote Michael Corleone for you. " It's not a naivety.
We are in deep trouble. China. Oh, we are, but I don't think the UN's the cavalry.
You think China doesn't have the technology? Oh, absolutely. You think Russia doesn't have the technology?
Absolutely. Maybe it's not up to the level of Anthropic's yet, but clearly we know how once you have AI working on AI, building AI, how quickly the maturation cycle accelerates, right? And we've just basically raised the red flag that says there's vulnerabilities here to take advantage of.
Well, we know that they're coming for them, and they've probably been working to them. So if it becomes a race, there's no winning here. This is a zero-sum game.
We are either going to, like nuclear weapons, agree not to use them, or we are going to suffer a very, very bad fate. So Andy- I don't-- Andy, do we need a non-proliferation treaty, as JP is kind of suggesting? Or, is this going to be one of those circumstances where everybody will sign the treaty but pay no attention to it anyway?
Well, that's roughly, yeah. Because JP's absolutely right. Everyone's going to get this.
And I hate to do the devil's advocate thing because I think I'm with you, Alan. I think Modi's done really good things here, in the face of very difficult political circumstance and commercial environments. But to play the devil's advocate, aren't we just protecting our own country by doing this?
Aren't we, as a nation-state, allowed to be offensive in some of our cyberattacks in the ways that some of our adversaries are already being offensive? Iran, Russia, China, or North Korea already attacking so many of our infrastructure, private companies, utilities. Ah.
Look, I think it's out there. I do think there needs to be legislation. I think it was Chris Van Hollen, pointed out recently, Senator of America, recently pointed out that we've legislated all the revolutions over time.
Why aren't we legislating this one? Why is there no guardrails at all? I don't know that the UN's the right place, JP.
As you say, they've been soft for years. But national boundaries won't work here. You do need some sort of global-- If it's not the UN, I'm not aware of any other global organizations that could potentially do it.
But you're right, An. Look, let me tell you, sometimes silence is louder than noise. The fact that this whole Project Glasswing, 40 leading companies.
I was just on the phone with the Linux Foundation talking about this with them because they're in Project Glasswing, Linux. No government representation. Yeah.
Who would have thought? If I would have told you three years ago we had this potential catastrophe looking at us, potential thing, and we didn't have someone from CISA, someone from the federal government, some Homeland Security, some freaking NERC even. Something from the government, because you're going to need this.
It's too big an issue. Right. Not to sound too cynical, but I was almost relieved that there was no government intervention or involvement.
To the point that it's already gone, yeah. These guys can't negotiate anything. What they do is they tear up agreements, and then find themselves trying to negotiate themselves.
They're not negotiators. They make themselves a deal. They're incapable of it.
They're inept. But also, the justice or the law of observers or people who are supposed to be providing the advice to say, "Don't do something that's unlawful" beforehand, are absent. So now basically what will happen is we'll say that we're going to go do something, do it because we said it was lawful, and then-Three years later, there'll be a court case saying that, "You know what?
" But by then, the damage is done. It's already been done, yeah. That is- Can I mention the OpenAI's kind of play into this area?
And again, I don't mean to beat on them, but I will. They're in a very defensive posture where they're coming up with these ideas of how ethical and... I think one of the issues that really has hit them is because of Anthropic's stand that they made against the Defense Department, Claude use is skyrocketing and the whole kind of narrative about OpenAI, they're hemorrhaging customers.
They want to go public. So they're kind of in this desperate mode where they're trying to make nice and trying to seem responsible as much as possible, and I think the whole thing is just kind of laughable. But I'm sorry, I had to vent.
No problem, John. This is a safe space. It's just us.
Not to worry. But we appreciate it, and I think it's true, and I think what Andy said is true. I think what we're all saying is true.
Unfortunately, again, we're kind of powerless as this thing plays out. Mm-hmm. I don't know what the right answer is.
I don't know where the solution is other than, I'll go back to Star Trek. We may have to go through sort of a dark period before Zephram Cochrane discovers the warp drive. Warp drive.
Yes, you're absolutely right. And the Vulcans come to rescue us or something. I don't know.
There's going to be a run on shovels for digging holes in backyards to create bunkers. Is that what you're saying? Can I tell you one thing that concerns me, and it's concerned me for a long time.
We've spoken about this before, gentlemen. In the absence of legislation, in the absence of accepted practice, this comes down to individual developers to decide these things. This is down to individual product managers to make global ethical decisions.
This is unacceptable for my people. As a CTO, as a CPO, the people developing software, building, I've got to use AI in my environment. Which one do I choose?
I'm just some rando. I'm not running a government, but I've got to try and figure out which one of these people are the good guys. Which one's going to get me banned from traveling next week?
Which one is going to blow up the world the week after? I want guidance. It's that crazy.
I agree. Someone's got to help me. You know what?
But there are certain folks who will say, "Well, that's right, Andy. " And that's the world we're living in, I guess. It does seem like 1968.
You're right, Alan. It is. Hot time summer in the city.
It could be the summer of discontent. I think someone coined that phrase once. But anyway, let us move on.
Hey, I got a feel-good story for us to end with, Michael. Tell us about it. Are you sure?
Because there's a way of looking at this. So- Always looking for that dark cloud over the silver lining, aren't you? So basically, they have open sourced the code that was used on Apollo 11 to get us to the moon, and this is all coming out at the same time that we have just spent several billion dollars trying to get an Artemis rocket up there that didn't even land on the moon.
" And I understand they're using Mythos to look for vulnerabilities in it. Yeah. Well, first of all- Machine code.
Assembly language ... the software, you want to talk about this in an AI-centric universe that we're building. This was really assistive.
The software that was used was for mathematical computation to assist the astronauts in understanding their environment, but all the decisions were made by humans. Okay? So the 4K is like really your HP calculator on steroids back then, helping them to understand navigation, the trajectory, and be able to dynamically compute factors based upon the space environment because there's only so much that could've been pre-programmed, and you had to deal with your current environment.
So, it wasn't OpenClaw running the damn ship. It was a bunch of humans and Houstons, and then astronauts all interpreting the data and making decisions in real time. So no, I don't think it's shaming.
I think it's almost Smithsonian in release, in that, look where we've come from. Here's a great learning example. This is what it took to get to space.
But realize that it took ... My fear is that maybe our astronauts aren't as educated as they were in the '60s and '70s. They weren't coming from the same, or needed to come from the same pedigree, in order to get into space and to land the ship.
Right now, it's almost like we've gone from a 1960s Corvette, needed a mechanic that has specialty understanding of the engine timing and the way everything works, to the guy that hooks up the ODB connector at Jiffy Lube. And maybe Artemis is more now Jiffy Lube workers versus what we had in the '60s and '70s. That's a way to look at it I agree.
Let me put this out there just for grins. But why don't we just, in this race to Mars, and I know we want to send humans to Mars, but heck, just put a bunch of open Claude bots in the rocket, send it to Mars, and watch them build a society, and then see how long it takes them to come back and destroy us. What do you say?
Look, I have a process that I run daily to extract some sports information from a webpage that can't be automated, the way it's written. It knows about bots. But I can run a Claude bot on the page now, Claude in the browser, and it works great.
But Claude decides every day that he's going, or she, it, is going to change the CVS column headers. And I put in finally, "Use these headers," in the prompt. But I just don't understand why every day it would choose to pick to use different headers or add columns, reduce columns.
It's the same prompt daily. Now, you want to use that to go to Mars? Let's make a left today.
We'll make the right. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine.
No, it's that random. Well, you tell it you made the left instead of the right, it tells you, "Oh, my bad. " You're right.
We should've gone right at the- Yeah ... crosswalk. I'm just wondering.
You know what? But in the meantime, I've got to be honest with you. I'm so far down this agentic rat hole, I'm ready to order a case of Jolt Cola and get some pizza over here.
I was up till 1:30 last night playing around with code and stuff. I haven't done that, I think, since 1997 or six. It's stupid.
You're not alone. Yeah. You're not alone.
I know many people- But there is something to it. Yes. But hear me out.
You know what? The best and the brightest. It was Kennedy's Camelot, but it also used to be about NASA.
NASA was the place. If you were literally a rocket scientist, you wanted to be at NASA. That's where the best and brightest went to work, and pushed the envelope.
And you look at what they accomplished. 4K. Our average song is three megabits, thousands of times bigger.
On 4K. But to your point, JP, and it's in the picture that I posted with this article, descending to the moon, two alarms went off, triggered by this 4K worth of data. Mm-hmm.
Abort. Abort the landing. But it didn't have the power to do that.
It would just give you a warning. " And they landed. Otherwise, they might not have ever landed on the moon.
You're right. " Nah, it's over. Yeah.
I'll tell you, Alan, just a real quick note on that, the nostalgic perspective. I live near Port Canaveral. I cruise a lot now out of Port Canaveral.
And there's still something every time I get on the ship, board the ship, I go to that side and I see the big NASA building, I just feel something inside. It is still- Yeah ... majestic to me.
I'm glad you said that, JP- It's so meaningful ... because I had that same reaction. It was like going back to the can-do attitude and what the United States or what NASA could do, and then we went through that long dry patch where they were in the wilderness and the funding was an issue.
And it's a return, and I'm so encouraged by that. And I'm glad that a whole new generation gets to experience what we did when we were kids or when we were younger, or for that matter. John, I watched the landing as it happened randomly.
I happened to be in a pub, because that's what I do. Yeah. Imagine that.
I happened to be in a pub. Television's on. It's not on the game, it's not on the Broncos, it's not on the Nuggets, it's not on the Avs.
It's on Artemis II. And the entire pub cheered at the touchdown. Yes.
And it occurred to me just exactly what you said. We have an entire generation who has not experienced that, and has definitely not experienced that as a community experience. And I just want to say, A, refund NASA.
B, I want to also give a shout-out to the actual computers who made that original Apollo mission possible. I'm not talking about the 486 equivalent 4K RAM. No, the ladies.
I'm talking about the women with pencils and calculators- Yep. Slide rulers ... who also stood up and were recognized with Artemis II.
So the 4K of RAM, you're right, JP, it's a little bit of a furphy, because there were dozens of human computers, the women doing the calculations. Love that movie, by the way. All behind that.
Great movie. So wait, I just want to put a finer point on this. Are you saying that you don't feel the same level of national pride when a SpaceX rocket goes up- Absolutely not ...
and goes and sends around a couple of satellites? Absolutely not. Well, I know- You know it, Mike ...
I've worked four years here. Every time I'd get the notification one of the SpaceX was going up, I'd run down the block- Yeah ... to see it.
" So... Were you running down the block to see it, or wondering if it was going to explode, or what was the motivation? No, no.
A rocket going up is still a rocket going up. It's cool. I lived in Orlando for a little while, and I did get to see a couple of launches from my back garden, and that's just bizarre.
Especially if you're an Australian, right? We don't have a space program. No.
So for me to be able to see that as an American was actually amazing. And we had lunch with an astronaut. My kids ate their macaroni and cheese and ran out.
I didn't let that s*n o* a b***h leave the table. Yeah. I took 100 pictures.
It was Cory Overstreet, I think his name was. He did three missions, two repairs on Hubble. This guy had-- You talk about the right stuff.
He had a law degree, a doctor's degree, and a PhD- Yeah ... in engineering. Okay?
You know- He fixed the Hubble Space Telescope. I couldn't get enough. He ran from me.
Yeah, but- ... I don't know what my kids were, but I was happy. Go ahead, John.
Oh, sorry. Years ago, I was lucky enough to interview Buzz Aldrin, and- Wow. He was interesting beyond belief.
He had an eclectic number of views. But he explained to me how he helped conceive the launch and trajectory of the Moon landing. And I started looking into his background.
All these people are incredibly accomplished. And to me, it was just absolutely fascinating. It was like, I talked to him for about an hour.
He was very generous with his time. But it just blew my mind what this guy had done, how he helped not only step foot on the Moon as a second person, but the fact that he had such an influence among thousands of others. Anyway, it was humbling.
It is. The right stuff, that was a generation, and I'd love to see that return. I don't know if it ever will, in all honesty.
I'm just glad that I'm not the only one who can't get bloody Outlook to work properly. Yeah. These people are the smartest people in our galaxy, and even they can't get Outlook working.
It's all right. But don't worry, we have space tourism, and people are spending millions of dollars- And if we want to make that private, I do think there's a role for private in space. Just like there was the privateers in the great exploration of the New World and so forth.
But anyway, we're almost out of time. I wanted to try to bring this all together, which is something I've been trying to do the last couple of shows. Mm-hmm.
We discussed some pretty far-flung things today, right? We discussed the violence and AI being the lightning rod for it. We discussed what was going on, potentially why one company didn't feel safe handing over their AI capabilities to our government, to our Department of War, Defense, whatever it is.
And then we looked back at the greatness of the Apollo, of the NASA heyday during-- And don't forget, it was a space race that fostered all that, right? If it wasn't for the Soviet Union, we wouldn't have an Apollo. We wouldn't have had that in that timeframe.
So you do need a pressure point to do it. But how do you tie these three together? I think it goes back to something, and I don't know if it was one of the Kennedys said it or someone else, but with great wealth or with great power comes great responsibility, right?
And we're talking about technologies and things today that will result in great power being afforded. And if it's not coupled with great responsibility for the common good, we got trouble. We got trouble.
We do. I got a little applause. Thank you.
Anyway, that's our show for today. Hey, man, whether you're watching this on YouTube, and please do watch it on YouTube, or you could go to our app, which is available on streaming and Androids and iOSs and so forth, or on Techstrong TV. Check it out there.
But do watch us. We appreciate it. JP, Andy, John, Mike, thanks for joining.
Thank you for watching. I'm Alan Schimmel. We're out.
