Hacking the Policy Curve – The Inevitability Curve Podcast Ep19

Hello, my name is Chris Blas, and I'm your host again for another episode of The Inevitability Curve. And with me is another long-term friend Ken Wick. He was currently in Crackow Paul.

And how you doing Ken? Doing well today. Thanks Chris.

Uh, thanks for joining me. And, and I didn't mention this in the Green room because I, uh, is a weird little fact. Blas is a very, um, unusual name.

There aren't a lot of us. Uh, my grandfather, my paternal grandfather was born in Germany and went to his deathbed, swearing to God. It was not a Polish name.

Um, it is, and interesting, I learned this in the early nineties when I saw the movie Shine, um, was, uh, was, was listed in Poland as Blas. So Blas means either Shine or brilliance, that kind sort of thing in, in Polish, which is, uh, very flattering. Uh, the only other place I find linguistics is in Swedish where it means dish water.

So I think one of our polish is better. Yeah. One of our in agent ancestors p****d off a swed somewhere.

Um, so we've been dishwater ever since. But, so you and I have been doing this stuff for an awful long time as we're talking about the green room, you know, the, the policy nature, right? You know, policy hacking after, you know, a couple decades of, you know, configuring crypto systems is kind of all that's left.

You know, why are we doing things? Why are things done that way? Where have the policies been?

Where have they now, you know, when was the last change? Who changed them? Why?

Right. In, in my, you know, building and sailing boats up and down the Florida coast in the last, uh, three years, I found that the most interesting thing, you know, not how do you get solar power or how do you get starlink or how do you connect the iot to the A, B, C, but what are the rules in this section of water? Why are they there?

How did they get there? When was the last time they changed? Who changed them?

You start to understand that and you can design the systems around it. Right? And, and as as usual in this series, we look way back.

Right. And, and you were talking about the green room a little bit. We can, anybody familiar with human history can look at, you know, these last several thousand years of documented civilization and see things like trade in Mesopotamia with all the clay tablets and all the codes and policies that have been developed since who changed them, why they changed them, how that worked.

Um, and quite often how that didn't work out on the end. Right. So, lemme see if I can put any of that form of a question.

Um, looking, looking back over your career, you know, either in the time of your career or the, the history you've referenced, how's your path towards policy hacking evolved? Well, it's interesting. At the beginning of my career, I thought they were an impediment, you know, start, I started on the technical side, starting on the, uh, the grunt side, so to speak, and policies, procedures.

They were sort of an impediment to getting the job done in a lot of ways. They weren't, you know, perhaps that would, that was just my vision of it. And, and it wasn't too bad.

But as I evolved, especially when I, uh, my experience at Citibank started to shape that, when I learned, uh, the most important thing there was learning how to deal with bureaucracies, the technical aspect of the job was one thing, but my God, learning how to deal with the people and the different groups and the unholy bureaucracy that that corporation had had, uh, built, I think it was almost, it's seconding only to the US government, but the learn to see the value of it and why these things, why the policies were in place and what they were for. So it was a huge, to develop that governance it to understanding why that was important or why it was so cr critical. Because the technology, as you said, that the how to do it, the little things, the bolts, that can just be anything.

As technology evolves, it's replaced. Those things change. So knowing the technical details of how to do it isn't an important to understand why you need to do it and what needs to go there.

So what needs to replace it and why, as, as time evolves, because you, you, you have those guidelines and rules in place for a reason. Sometimes it is bs, sometimes it's, uh, developed by those who don't know what they're doing or shouldn't be doing it. But most times, hopefully gotta, it, it's developed by those who have been there, done that, and know that it's there for a very good reason.

You know, one of the, you know, now that I'm not spending all my time with the boats, you know, um, yeah, I, I think about all the things that I, that I've learned along the way and the problems. I, I think that the, the analogy of bubble mar bubble markers fits no, no better than this conversation, because out on the water, if you're anywhere, but let's take the, the shallow waters of the Florida East Coast and the keys, you applied, you know, you, you sail down the Intracoastal and across the Florida reef, and you'll see a lot of policy markers, you know, literal, you know, telephone pole kind of thing with this nice sign on it that says, this is the right side. This is the left side, you know, you know, no swing or whatever.

It's, um, and you see a lot of, and those, those are expl explicit policy murs, you know, there's a formal policy that's written down, agreed by somebody, somebody took the effort of, of, of expressing the policy in the physical environment. So the people who are there know there's a policy policy, and then you get these little white posts that stick up outta the ocean all over the place. And those are referred to, um, by, by the people who know as Babu, which is basically someone who goes back and forth here, you know, either hit that shool or couldn't find that, uh, that gap in the shoal often enough, they finally came back and they stuck a post in the water.

And when you spend time in an environment, um, as I've done in that specific environment, you know, being able to see the reason and logic of those, of the implicit policy, why are people doing things? You know, why did someone take their time and express this policy in this place, uh, at this time? It tells you so much practical information and literally about where you drive your boat, you know, and when you do and how you do, and it's, it is the, and it's, it's practically fascinating, right?

Because the, the, the patterns of these people, they're sponge fishermen in this area, or whatever it is. Yeah. I think it, it reflects hard lessons that were learned often fatal lessons that were learned, Right?

And, and the analogy to the corporate environment and, and the international environment in which we, we, uh, really wanna get, you know, to talking about is act. Right. You know, companies die, you know, people lose their jobs, you know, uh, countries go into conflict, wars happen, right?

And kinetic things happen in the real world. It's all the same patterns, all the same policies. And you know, we can't, you know, with, with your involvement in, in everything you're doing and, and mine and my work, you know, if we can't talk about all this about looking at the international policy state that we're all in right now, and I, you know, I make no bones about my position.

I think, uh, like my country, I think, uh, the US is making missteps in policy, interpretation, implementation, um, and that has long-term effects, the media effects and long-term effects. And in, in the same way these policies were developed over long time for lots of good reasons. Now, it's The softest way I've ever heard you talk about that.

Wait. Um, and, you know, maybe, maybe that marker shouldn't be there, right? But, you know, why is it there?

How did it get there? What was, you know, walking around pulling markers out and expecting to be able to implement new policies on grand scales is naive beyond words. I agree.

I mean, I, I agree that there's questions of whether they should be there or not, but perhaps the way it's being implemented now to, uh, change things is not the best way. And, and it's, you know, I, I think we, you know, again, trying to play my Alex Rebek role here, and not just soapbox, but you know, there are competitive advantages here. You know, I, I'm only a Canadian shark, you know, I'm in Canada, you know, my, my wife is Canadian, my kids are Canadian.

We've lived in both countries. You know, I'm currently a US resident changing K resident. We've been playing that for like a couple years, not related to the current, uh, international situation.

Yeah. But I'm spending a lot more time looking at this policy stack, you know, that's called Canada. That it has its own rules and regulations and reasons for having them and how it responds to current conditions, I think is an indicator of what healthy policy structures, you know, uh, why they're better than poor ones.

I think the evolutionary forces are in favor of structures like this. Again, whether that works at or not, and the odds are better in the, you know, here, if no are reason, simply because the policies are more seen and robust. What do you, what do you, and looking around the world, what are your thoughts on, on that?

And say it as hot topic as you like. Well, God, it's interesting. The first thing that came to my mind, at least the last part, was think about the evolutionary concept of the, uh, policies and robustness of it is obviously the human body in life in general is a reflection of it.

There's a lot of waste and, uh, things that should have been done if engineered from scratch should have been done better. But they evolve. They work, therefore they stay.

And a lot of the same thing. We see that in the governments today in policies of, there's a lot of crap and waste and b******t. But because it works, it has stayed.

Whether it's the best, whether it's the most efficient is not necessarily the reason. It it's there. It's 'cause it, the, it was the whole learning evolutionary process.

So I agree there, from a, a standpoint of internationally, it's very interesting to the, my perspective is to almost have like a paradigm shift of how things work. And it's, uh, I see things through a different lens out here. So especially over the last year, actually the last couple years, it's been interesting because in, in different ways.

But that's getting a little bit political. But, um, that's Okay. I mean, just, I mean, one of the things I I found very interesting since I moved here, and this is I'll getting outside of policy a little bit, is, and I had some conversation with friends about this is the, uh, so-called freedom of America.

You know, the land of the free able to do things that you can't do, uh, anywhere else in the world, which is a little bit true and also may be true governmentally. But the infrastructure that built up around it, like to say the civilian infrastructure, the legal infrastructure has created such tight constraints legally that everyone's in America is really more constrained. There from, and I'm not talking criminal law, I'm talking civil law, lawsuits, liabilities, insurance seems like that, that I see in here, specifically in Poland, people being a lot more free than in the US in some many ways.

Uh, the, there are ramifications of that, which is if you walk around, you find out if you do something stupid and get hurt, you know, it's like tough s**t. You did that. Why'd you do that?

Like guard where you go up a, a steep hill. Uh, there's a, got a wonderful monument here to, uh, God, I'm embarrassed, I can't think of his name. He was part of the re a Polish, Polish soldier, famous man, uh, part of the revolutionary American Revolutionary War.

He did so much in Iner to help Americans gain their independence. And I can't think of his damn name here, but wonderful thing, huge mound. But you go up this trail, and I'm thinking the entire time going up this thing, which is pretty high on the sides, you fall down, you're going down, gonna get hurt, if not killed no guardrails.

You won't see that in the us. The it in front of the castle here, wild, wild castle. The, uh, the buffalo dragon breeds fire every couple minutes during the summer.

Kids are climbing all over it, and it's breathing fire. I'm just thinking, my God, I can only imagine the women screaming about, oh my god, little Timmy, oh no, you know, this is too dangerous. You know, I'm gonna sue you.

You can't do this. They could hurt, you know, that granted, it's safe, but it's the same time. There's a lot of, and those are just small examples of just little things where just it's, the guardrails aren't here.

It's, you're more free to, to do things and make mistakes. And the way the US used to be now, it's so tied up in the court system with all the, the, the log laws and procedures that you're yeah, free in theory, but at the same time tied up. Y you know, let me, I am a I'm gonna, uh, uh, agree with that and, and, and see if I can tease that out.

And it's interesting 'cause you and I have have discussed politics and sparred politic, you know, just disagreed, you know, ly and had our, had our positions. Um, you know, I have belonged to all three major political parties in the US and, you know, Fadden believed on, on behalf of each of them in their own time. Um, so, but, you know, but, but it's, it's the policies.

And, and so here's, here's, you know, this, you know, most of my left, my friends of mine mind to the left will picking for this. But I think you have a point, and as an interesting example, there are apparently two individuals, um, who are behind the playground safety movement, you know, started in the US in the se se 1970s, you know, we all like to joke Boomers, like, you know, or Gen X folks like us, like to joke that, you know, we hung upside down from, you know, steel monkey boomers over concrete, which we did. Yeah.

Right? Yes. Right.

And what's interesting is that in the two thousands, 2010s or whatnot, one of those individuals, um, turned around and started, uh, um, working on projects to basically make sure that there were broken glass in playrooms. Right? And, and because it was interesting reading his point on it, it's like we lost something, right?

You know, and, and each of these policy choices we make, and this is, this is, uh, and I do get, I get get in these conversations with my left-handed friends quite a, quite a lot because I understand, you know, it's like that child fell, you know, got hurt. That's a tragedy. It is.

And if we had that rule that this policy in place, that won't happen, and that's true. Now, is it a good thing? Well, obviously the kid didn't get hurt.

It's not that simple. I'm sorry. It just isn't right.

You know, that bubble market made perfect sense, right? And it worked there for years. And then there was this storm, and there was this one time, and we found out that, that it's, that it was just a terrible idea or whatever they, you know, they, they can't develop a great analogy for that.

But you make a good point. You know, we have sort of incremented our way into safety, right? And to be clear, even in this, you know, interesting world we're living in today, we live in the safest world that has ever existed by orders of magnitude, you know, each of us individually, that's on, on every bloody level.

But we're terrified and we keep trying to come up with the next rule to keep us that much safer. I think, I think the international affairs going on right now are a good reflection of the, the error in that. Because when you take that view, as I think is happening in, in our country and the states, now you have somebody who just disagrees and comes back and takes your same argument to 11.

Right. You know, we can't say these things. Guess what?

You can't say anything or you can't say this. Right. Exactly.

And it, it, it, it aligns up more than people in opposition of the current administration would like to think. Yeah. Uh, many years ago, a friend in a, uh, listserv Yeah.

Going back in time here, um, how probably many people might have been on it to listen to this DC stuff. I used to run my Shipley. But it was talking about that, about how some of the downfall the world started to change the, with the Nerf world, you know, we're, we're looking for safety.

And that started when with the medical advances with children, it was expected, you know, some, you didn't even name the children until they were a few years old because they're expected to die. A certain percentage of them, right? Graveyards are filled with children from a hundred years ago, 20 years ago, because of and beyond, because they, the life expectancy was low.

And those who survived, learned to survive. Part of childhood was learning how to survive and to not do stupid s**t. When you are still young enough and small enough that the stupid s**t you do is gonna be fairly safe in general, there's gonna be a learning curve.

You're gonna break bones, some might die. But that was expected because you, I won't say toughen 'em up, but learn how to be human and not to do those stupid things. But as they started to survive and be the, the health and the medicine improved the attention to 'em to keep 'em that way, to keep them healthy, keep 'em alive, which obviously is a good thing, but it became almost over obsessive to the whole north world to put the bubble wrap around them and never let anything bad happen to 'em.

And as you mentioned, the Gen X and and beyond, we grew up just like learning those lessons. Yeah. Of see, when the streetlights come on, do whatever you want.

And we learned, we broke bones, we did things, we got hurt. Kids these days aren't allowed to learn those lessons of what not to do and how not to get hurt. Hell, we, you fall down as a child, you get banged up and scraped and ah, you no big deal.

You do the same thing. Now as an adult, that's a bigger fall. You're a lot more mass and bad things happen, kind of, especially the older you get.

I'm still recovered from a fall. So it's the kids, those lessons important, those are important lessons of life that just the, these generations aren't receiving. And, you know, and I am a parent, you know, I, I've got three kids, my oldest turns to 30 this year.

Um, you know, I, they're wonderful human beings to be clear if in case they happen to watch any of dad's boring, you know, work stuff. Um, so I don't have any regrets of my parenting, you know, that, you know, the result work speaks for itself. However, right.

You know, I've wrestled with these same issues and I've tried to, you know, we, we, uh, uh, our youngest Terry was born while we're living, you know, here in Canada on a lake. And we had our own beach, you know, right by the house. And our friends from the city would come, would come up, and no child was allowed to be within say, 17 miles of the water, unless there was a phalanx of at least, you know, 25 incompetent adults sober, staring at them the whole time.

And family would toddle outta the house naked by herself and go down to the beach and play in the sand. And, you know, you know, the, the social pressure, you know, that we had friends, you know, long time friends, you know, getting extremely angry and, you know, voicing at in great length. And my point was, you know, I want my kids to grow, you know, not being terrified of everything.

Right? Yeah. Make decisions and think about how that works out.

Um, but you know, I, and I, you know, I am old, you know, we're gonna find one. Um, I, I love their generation. I think they're gonna solve a lot of problems that our generation is not structurally wired to.

I think they'll be fine. Um, but, you know, they carry that legacy from our generation, you know, we just fried so bloody hard. Even parents like myself who may have, you know, taken laziness and tried to make a virtue of it and let the kids figure things out themselves.

Yeah. My kids are raised in that same culture. It's Mel, and it's so much to worry about, and I wanna try to turn this into a, you know, to a more of our topic, but because it is the same thing, countries and economies and ideologies and societies, you know, compete in an evolutionary fashion against each other, looking for nutrient ingredients of belief or economies or whatever.

It's Right. And I think what we're seeing right now on the international policy scale, you know, on behalf of my country in the United States is, you know, a framework failure of policy proportions, right. Taking this sort of thing and, and, and, you know, taking the, the, the slow erosion of policies or accretion of policies and abusing them without restriction because the policies weren't that good.

Right? And, and the, but the evolutionary pressures, again, I I think Canada is actually in pretty good shape. I think a lot of parts of the world will get advantage out of this, you know, because Oh yeah.

There policies are more conducive to, to taking advantage or surviving or, or, or not having the same problems. So yeah, I, I see a lot of the same thing where there's, uh, Whatever you think of some of the policy decisions being made now, there's gonna be a lot of change that's gonna benefit a lot of people in other parts of the globe, I think. And it's, uh, I, I'm seeing that here in, in Europe, the conversations around especially, it's was fascinating.

It just last year, seeing the, to take the Ukraine, Russian War into, uh, as a topic here, old 50, 60-year-old NATO equipment, US equipment, but some of it was, you know, from many o any many other areas of, of, of Europe as well, uh, Swedish, German, et cetera, was kicking the ass of the Russians just destroying their equipment and their people and just doing an amazing job. Just a, a limited amount because there wasn't a hell of a lot being sent over there. But this is old stuff that was actually built to fight the Russians that are finally fighting the Russians.

And you see high Mars and Patriots and the, the way they, and the way the equipment and the drones that the Ukraine is just developing on the cutting edge, the way they were getting through Russian defenses, that Russia was, you know, a leader that was one of their, besides oil was arm sales. And so they were selling a lot of arms, and here's our top tier equipment, it can't be beat, no one can do it. And here's this 6-year-old equipment just beating the crap out of it, you know, like the rest 400 and so on state of the art Yeah.

Getting hit by a, you know, $50 drone being blown up. It was selling the hell out of us manufacturing weapons manufacturers. I mean, it was just like, here Firestone just like, wow, this, everyone wanted to go and get by the US manufactured weapons because of how well they were doing.

That was just last year. This year there was a switch where it's, wait, wait a second, US equipment comes with a huge, uh, cost. Actually, no, this actually does, I, I, I've gotta be fair, this goes back actually the last several years too with under the previous administration where Biden imposed the restrictions of, no, you can't use, if this is US made equipment, you can't use it in this way.

We're dictating how you we're you, yeah, you have it, but you have to do the way, use it way we want you to, it comes with rules and restrictions. European equipment, Hey, you, you have it, do whatever you want with it. And this administration is sure showing the same thing of just that, but in some ways it got even more harsh with what you could do with the equipment and would just show that yeah, maybe while it's superior, we can go with something a little bit not as good, but has no strings attached to it whatsoever.

And now the, you know, the French arms manufacturers are just going like crazy. German is starting to go and ramp up, or Germany, I should say. And it's just been, it's been a huge switch between fire sale from the US to now just, eh, it's, it's toxic.

We don't wanna do it and buy, we, we'll buy some because we have to right now, but we want to get off of that. We want to get rid of that. So it's Take, take that let just look forward, right?

You know, 'cause the, you know, I, I have to admit right now I'm, I'm having really concerns that I might be addicted the chat GBT, right? Because only the last really two months, you know, have I just been actually trying to use this tool for purposes. And I kinda love it.

It's gonna amazing. And it's doing, you know, some of the things that I've been looking for over the last decades, you know, over the last five, six years in the supply chain, um, uh, possibly in there. And that I'm fully aware that I'm probably in this little, you know, pop culture friend phase where, you know, I'll look back and say, yeah, you know, can't believe I thought I could do all that.

So that big fat caveat out there, I think what we're currently referring to is ai, um, actually does give us the possibility to get the visibility and policy environments that we've never had before. 'cause whether it's disinformation, misinformation, influence campaigns, or just normal, you know, difficulty in, in dealing with, you know, life and policies and, and those evolutions, um, one of the things working against us is it's impossible to see, right? You can't tell you, nobody knows, you know, law, you know, you, you're all in favor of law and order.

Uh, you want everyone who breaks the law to immediately get charged and fine and arrested for it. You're breaking the law right now. We all are somehow.

Yes. And we don't know because there are some bloody many, and it is physically, literally impossible to understand where we fit in the policy and environment as individuals, as organizations, as nations. Um, just because of the sheer volume and complexity of it.

I think that's going away. I think the kind of, and again, we'll just say a ai, we get to say Moore's law or horsepower or anything we want, but I think we're getting to a level of tech that is able to interpret our policy environments well enough and fast enough to allow us to make decisions based on more than everything else. We just talked about this sort of reactionary policy evolution over time.

Um, so first, am I being outrageously optimistic there, or does that make any sense at all? Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm, I'm trying to place where you're going with how you think AI's gonna help with that a little bit.

It's, uh, I, yeah, it's, it's time to, time to transparency, right? You know, in, in supply chain, you know, every, every time I look at these sort of issues, um, and supply chain is just such a, a great cartoon of it. All of the information I need to solve, problem A exists now, you know, the only burden I have is my time to actually get that information.

You know, if, if I really, really, you know, we're looking at a plane crash or whatnot, we can find out that yes, you can find out what software was running on the radial plasma forge that made an individual blade inside a turbine if it's crashed, and we're spending, you know, a couple years and millions of dollars to find that information. So the information already exists. So the time it takes me, and I think this is happening in supply chain and threat intelligence, cybersecurity at large right now, is that we're collapsing the amount of time it takes to do things that would previously just be inconceivable.

Like you just say, yeah, that'd be great if we had a thousand people in a, in 10 years. But we don't. And I think the same, and again, without, you know, defining what ai, and again, AI is a terrible acronym, but Right.

But this mass, you know, there's this mass pattern matching, you know, policies are written documents that can be interpreted that, that act like code, that in fact, our code policies are all executable in, in the, you know, real time runtime environment we call life. And I think we're getting tools that can literally read our codes and help us to understand them fast enough for us to make more intelligent dec you know, decisions at each level, you know, personal, organizational, and national. I agree, except for the caveat that right now it's the limitation with the AI in general is like, you know, I agree with the term as you just said, there's some issues there, but it, the, the trusting the data, I think it does a great job of, of gathering the data.

I think it does a great job of giving you the correct data, but it also gives you incorrect information. And that's the issue of trying to discern what's correct and what's incorrect. You know, as an example, getting into a policy and the ai, I was recently just trying to discern what was in, um, asking Grock about, uh, Alaska bill one 30, uh, was it, uh, 1 34 dealing with cybersecurity and it had some other issues to it.

And just trying to get some very specifics there about exemptions. And I kept asking it, I'm comparing the PDF of the actual literal bill to what it was spinning out to me distilling. And it kept on giving me incorrect information.

I called it out on it just like, what the hell? This not here, you're hallucinating. And I finally, oh yeah, I guess you're right.

This was early iterations of the bill and associated documents that were associated with it that I got this from not the actual final bill. It's like, but unless I knew that, and unless I checked it, it was dead on and everything else, but it was just, it had some incorrect information. And I see that a lot where it can be very competent in its answers.

But unless you actually are also knowledgeable in the, the subject, which you know, is a problem when you're not, because you use it when, when you're not knowledgeable to gain the knowledge, it, it's, that's gonna be an issue unless it gets resolved. And that's gonna be a tough one because of all the, uh, the information that's trained on, and is it gonna, is it gonna have the current information? Is it gonna know what's correct and what's not?

Correct. It's a lot of disinformation out there. Well, you know, I've, you know, I've used this analogy all the time and it still makes the most sense to me, is I see all of this stuff as a really good intern.

And if you're, you know, I, I'd love to, if you're a graduate student out there and you wanna learn a lot of things, you know, I love, you know, good interns and so forth, and I'll take you seriously, and I'll take your research and I'll read it. And as you're saying, Ken, I may point out exactly where you're wrong. It's like, that was beautiful, however, right.

There was more rehears and you know, more so it's the same sort of thing, you know, as, as I use these things myself, like I say, like I say in my daily life, you know, just, you know, it's practical. I'm feeling how it works and as I'm advising others, yeah. This is not at a maturity level where you let it do a lot of things.

Um, and the human still needs to be there to make the decision. And I mean, and, and I don't, I, I can't recall right as I was sitting here, if you gave an exact example, but I've, maybe I was just picturing in my head, but it all comes down to the individual. How important is it to me?

And if I'm not certain, I mean, you know, I am certain if I got it from the internet that it may or may not be true. Whether it's Google or Grok or chat GBTI know it said it, it says it right there looks good. And if it doesn't matter that much, I'm probably acting on it.

Why not? You know, I got other things to do. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. If it's more important, it's up to the user, you know, I know I said that. Let me ask it differently and again and again.

So if you do those things, and if you don't do those things with a, a good postdoc intern, then you're gonna make a bad decisions anyways. Same thing. A hundred percent agree.

Heck, that's sort of funny. I actually did use, uh, did do an initial, uh, chat GPT, uh, tryout with writing a thesis. And, and even with references, right?

You start looking up the references and it was just like, this doesn't exist. It just made 'em up whole, I mean, whole wholesale, just completely just, here's, here's the paper, here's the author, here's pages. It's like, this doesn't, this isn't real.

Well, I'd love to, you know, this, you know, I don't think there's anybody even, I can put this on topic, but I do love this, right? You know, I love the hallucinations and that, and it eagerness, it just wants to please, right? And just, just like an intern or you know, somebody you're working with is like, that's a warning sign.

You know, I think you're probably willing to say something 'cause you think I want to hear it and you catch it doing that, like literally doing just that. So a hundred percent. But I agree with you.

It is, it is amazing tool at aggregating all that disparate and huge amounts of information down to something that's at least you can work with, Right? We, which, you know, thank you that because it takes us back to our, our, you know, my, my positive, I think, I think savvy individuals and organizations are doing this now, but we're very, very early now. This is one of these fast moving things.

Three years ago, the answer is no. Even a year ago, I probably say the answer is no. I say I today, I might be a little early, but I think folks are starting to understand this, that you can use these tools exactly like that.

You can't trust them. But, and when it comes to, you know, this particular issue, you know, the policy, again, we're talking politicians, right? You know, you know, I think it was Win Schwartel who gave the first talk to the US Congress about cybersecurity at all.

And as a community, we, you know, we spent the, the intervening couple decades complaining about how politicians don't understand this stuff. They're never going to, that's not their job. They don't have time.

Agreed. But maybe they'll have time as they evolve to understand how to use these tools for this exact purpose. You know, putting their policies they're arguing against or proposing in a, in a richer context with better results.

Well, here, let me scare you a little bit. I didn't tell you this the way I was able to live here in Poland. I came here on a student visa po, you know, policy hacking, as you say.

You know, I came here, it was like looking for ways to stay here, get a permit. I came here student visa, so I'm getting my master's, master's degree, business and finance at Y Leone University, one of the oldest universities. Very cool.

But especially coming back at my age. And so I'm in there with all these children, you know, the twenties, thirties, children, but it was culture shock and seeing how good they are at cheating. I mean, it's amazing.

I mean, i, I, it, it's like they could teach classes. It just, it's mind blowing how well that, and AI chat, GPT, et cetera, is one of the main tools, oh, on a test, you know, on the phones, whatever, figuring these answers out or doing the homework and everything is just, you know, using AI to, to bypass the system and to cheat the system to get the good grades. On one hand, I applaud them.

On the other hand, I mean, I've been, I see hear stories about it too with medical students and others passing their classes and their degrees based purely on AI and not actually knowing the underlying, which is, that's, to me is the scary part. It's just a, a huge current generation of people that don't understand the underlying rules and are relying completely on these tools to do it for 'em. Well, and I'll, let me, let me, you know, as, as is my want, um, acknowledge that.

Well, well, you know, looking at the other side, yeah, it's a, it's, it is, I think the tactical term s**t show, right? You know, and we're, we're have all sorts of problems are coming out of this, however, right? Yes.

There's a, however seemed Like, it seemed like about 2007 perhaps, but right around that, that period, every 2010, I noticed a phenomenon where up until that point, if I'm on a, on a work call, you know, with a bunch of people and somebody, somebody says something I don't know anything about, and I'm not talking, I will Google it up, read about it, learn about it before popping in, you know, three minutes later with my thoughts on the topic. And it felt like cheating up until that point it felt like cheating. Like you, you know, and then I found out you could say that I just looked this up and then say your thing, and everybody's fine with it, and we're all doing it.

And in fact, at right about that point, it became, you know, I, I remember getting annoyed and it sort of went away since, but there were people, you know, always say, I'll get back to you on that and everything else. It's like, look, Bob, you haven't talked for 17 minutes. You know, you have like, how can just contribute to the conversation now instead of expecting us to all get together an email over the next three weeks and get your thoughts together.

And I think we may be, you know, again, acknowledge all the downsides where you're talking about, you know, lack of expertise. You know, we got you, you got whole new generation hacking the, the certification system with all those downsides. But maybe we were wrong in the first place, maybe expecting everyone to have memorized all these things to get this, this certification was wrong because, well, I don't, in the real world that they're gonna be living in, they're going to have these things all the time.

So, well, I, and that's, I have no issues with the helping as a tool to bring up stuff to not to memorize, because memorization, of course, that's whole nother discussion about the loss of ability to memorize and remember things these days. But just to say that you can outsource that, no problem. But you still have to understand the underlying fundamentals of how to use information and why it's important and what part's important, et cetera, and how to interact with it.

And that's the part that I think is the problem. It's not just pulling up an answer and just like, aha, you know, I did you, you know how to get to it. Like we did.

You mentioned Google, you know what to look for, you know how to get to it. You, you understand the fundamentals of how to use that information here. It's just, hey, what do you do?

This is, you know, it's everything. It's not learning the rules, it's not learning how to do things. It's just learning how to use, uh, AI more effectively.

Which, if it could be trusted, outstanding, but, and it is good in some respects, but you have those caveats. You had a, I think that's something to be wary of. Well, I, I think this is one of these, you know, things that are right smack in the, in the, you know, 10, 20 year inevitable building curve with happens.

This isn't gonna happen. You know, we'll see a lot of these cases where, you know, they got that far in their career without knowing anything. Um, but we'll see, you know, our, our qualification, certification, education, uh, evolve to keep that from happening.

'cause it, it is a massive problem that's gonna happen everywhere. I don't dunno how we'd fix it in advance and it's too late, right? But I, I still see it like, like Wikipedia, my kids were of that generation where I get these notes saying, you know, you know, or talking to my kids who were working on a project and my teacher doesn't let me use Wikipedia.

Like, that's cute. Here's Wikipedia and here's what it says. Now if you copy and paste that and now you're an idiot, um, but if you don't at least look at that, you're also an idiot.

You know? 'cause that's, yeah, It's, it's a jumping point. And that's what it's something to start with and to how to work with it.

Exactly. Right. You know, and, uh, yeah.

So we, we've moved past that conversation where right now having this conversation and we will in fact 'cause, 'cause there were people actually copy and pasting Wikipedia and, and submitting it as papers for a while, um, until they, you know, realized that's the way could lose, uh, lose your, uh, your, uh, your, your college degree. True. And the source material you have, it's the same thing as ai, is it?

Correct. Who knows, you know, parts of it. Yes.

I, I grew up with, with the encyclopedia Bri Britannica. But anyways, you know, actually getting the monthly right and yeah. Was that accurate?

You know, read some old books sometimes, you know. No, True. Good.

Not exactly. It was, it was a reference point too, just like, okay, you referenced it and Yeah, exactly. I think Wikipedia does offer that.

At least here's the, here's the references good to start with. Jump off and look into other places. Of course, I think there's better places to look than Wikipedia, but still, yeah.

Points made. Yeah. So I think we've, we've probably beaten that, that horse to death, but we'll find, uh, we will, like everything else, we'll find out, you know, those of us who live far enough into the future to see how these things work out.

It'll be like cobol, I Think, uh, Those who know how to do will be called back up, Hey, charging, whatever, you know, Like the Voya Voyager engineering, uh, team. Yes. You know, that's, yeah.

Those are folks I'd like to meet. But, uh, at any rate, I think with folks like you working on it, you know, and, uh, and the, the forces around us, we'll, again, I think we'll find our way through this. I expect, you know, that in 20 years ago what we see is how we figured out policy and, and interpreted and used it today as being sort of horribly naive.

We'll, we'll see. Be I say that about a lot right now, just like, yeah, let's just wait and see. Yeah.

Alright, well I will wait and see you again at some point. Um, we, uh, uh, I'd love to get back to, uh, to the Fatherland, the motherland, you know, where blasts come from and, and, uh, tour Poland with you sometime. But in the meantime, that'd be awesome.

Thanks for everything you do and thanks for your time today. Welcome. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Appreciate it. Alright, thank you folks. We'll see you again.

Cheers. Alright, bye.