Seeking the Recursive BOM of Truth – The Inevitability Curve EP15

This is Textron tv. I am Chris Blak. Welcome to another episode of The Inevitability Curve.

Uh, with us today is a good friend, Dennis Devlin. Devons, how are you today? Good morning, Chris.

Very well and delighted to be here. And where is here for you? Where are you in the world today?

Um, I'm living in, uh, Palm Beach County, Florida. Not far from Mar-a-Lago, but our paths don't cross very lof. Um, that's right.

Well, you actually have been on the boats. You know, you're one of the, one of the few people we have multiple times. Twice.

Yeah. Twice. That's right.

As I've sailed, uh, up and down in different versions of these things, so that, you know, as we're discussing in the green room, right. You know, the topic today, the title of this episode, you know, quite often. I don't know until we're done with it, but this one, you know, you and I had a conversation, uh, a couple weeks ago, and we're gonna expand on that.

So, so the recursive seeking the recursive bill of materials of truth, you know, and I think I'm gonna go there, right. You know, as we look back, uh, I think we need to, to look all of human history in the last half million years. Right.

And most of that time, I think, you know, again, I'm not the expert, you know, people who look these up, but these, these sort of timeframes, I think, you know, four, four and a half hundred thousand years of that was communities, you know, we're living together. I mean, you know, everybody, you know? Sure.

The bill of materials of truth is your life experience. 'cause you, everyone you're going to meet, you've met already. You live with them forever.

You know, everybody knows. So it was a very short supply chain of truth then. But we get into the 40, 50,000 years ago, it seems ago, it seems to be humans started getting into these civilization things, larger groups where just not necessarily know everything.

And the things, you know, we were producing, you're not necessarily getting everything from the person who produced it. So I think that that transitional period, right? Think how profound that was.

You know, for hundreds of thousands of years, no one ever met anybody They didn't know to suddenly having to work out how you trust people, you're, you're meeting during your lifetime. And I think that's similar as we're discussing in the green room, right? You know, the transition going on right now is that same sort of fundamental, we're just working things out.

Absolutely. Or am I exaggerating? Uh, no, you're not exaggerating at all.

If you think about it. Um, human interaction was face-to-face, and it wasn't until we could abstract commerce with some sort of currency. Um, you were actually trading one thing or another.

Okay? So face to face, think of, um, the dilemma we've always had with identity management. In information technology, you can only prove your identity by one of three things.

Something, you have something, you know, or something you are, for most of the millennia, it would something you are right. You would see the person, you say, yep, that that's who they are. Credentials, known credentials, or carried credentials are a very recent, um, uh, artifact.

Um, so people were accustomed to face-to-face truth. Remember? Um, I go back on the internet a long time.

I, I was very fortunate in my career. Um, I started in industry in 1972. I was actually one of the first computer security people, I think in 1974, because we put in a system for, um, for communication across the complex with coaxial cables.

The systems didn't leave buildings that we owned, and yet we had identity management. We had, um, uh, accountability. Uh, we had the law of lease privileges.

We had, you know, uh, uh, credentials that were only known by the individual. So, so that there was accountability. Um, and I had the good fortune of meeting.

My first mentor in security was a guy named Robert Courtney from I bm. He's the person who, uh, allegedly coined confidentiality, integrity, and availability testifying before Congress very early on. And this was in, um, again, in 1974.

And he came in to work with us for the day. And I just, I was fascinated listening to him. And he said something that I knew was important at the time, and I wrote it down and memorized it.

And he said the definition of what he called computer security was the prevention of accidental or intentional disclosure, modification or destruction of digital information. Now, that's kind of stood the test of time, but to the point you were making about authenticity, um, how do you define that something is confidential? How do you define who has the authority to change that information?

And how do you define was the authority to, to, uh, destroy that information without having some sort of attestation of ownership, attestation of fact attest, attestation of, of truth, and, um, as oh, oh, okay. So, so, so fast forward 1985, I was at Harvard University, and I had the, I I left industry and, and, and went to higher ed. And I had the good fortune of having a very early static IP address.

Think of it in, in those days, I went back and used, I used chat GPT to look, there were 2000 hosts on the entire apon net in 1985. And there were 50,000 accounts. And I had the good fortune of having one of them.

Um, it didn't, it, it, it wasn't on a PC or a Mac because they didn't support T-C-P-I-P. They had to go through, through a host or, or if you had A-A-A-A-A-A Unix workstation, um, you, you could, uh, rent T-C-P-I-P. But again, if you think about it, kind of everybody knew everybody else.

The vetting process was affiliation with an institution of higher education or research center or, or whatever. So go from 2000 or 50,000 users in 1985 to whatever the godforsaken number is today. All of us, Right?

All of us. Literally, the, the world population. And, and, and I think of, I think it was in the, in the, in the Atlantic.

Um, there's a famous cartoon of a dog sitting at a workstation and, and, and, and, and, and the, the balloon says on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. And that's the definition of the problem of authenticity and attestation and vetting. Now.

So the identity of the people involved is, is one aspect. The next aspect is the information that they're talking about, or, or, or, or, or disclosing, discussing. And if you think about it, it needs to be a very high barrier of entry to become a publisher, right?

The, I mean, uh, to be a book publisher or a, or a newspaper publisher or whatever, um, you kind of have all sorts of infrastructure. Um, and, and, and this was for printed media. This is pre-digital.

Um, uh, you, so, so there were reporters, there were editors. It was a tremendous vetting process that took place. So by the time you read, uh, a, a, um, a reporter in the New York Times, or by the time you watched w Cronkite on television, a lot of vetting had taken place.

So there was an imprimatur or imprimatur, however you say that word. Um, there was an attestation that this was a fact that you could believe. Right?

So, I, I'm sorry, sorry for rambling. I Was gonna say, I got a key on the time part of it. Right.

You know, and I, I, I have such good conversations in the Green Room before these episodes, right? Yeah. I just, you know, wish I could capture that because we were, we had, you know, we, but I'm gonna try to tease it back out here 'cause time, right?

You were talking about the, uh, consumer opacity. You know, the, you and I grew up with everybody, you know, tend to grow up with where we go to the store, you buy a thing, you can't see anything particularly about where it came from, what it cost a car. Cars used to have the price.

We go to the car dealership and say, price, and they give us price. And we go, okay. So now we know, you know, before we go, what it costs to build, what the components are, what the options are, what the cost of the dealer costs.

We have all, all this transparency as consumers. And that resonates so much with, with my common threads. 'cause again, supply chain security has been my main track for the last five, six years.

Right. And I love it. 'cause you just, you know, you know, just, just like, you know, we're saying who's on the internet now?

All of us, who's in the supply chain? What's the supply chain? Everyone, everyone and everything, right?

Because if we're gonna come up with a supply chain security system that works, we can't say for this set of companies, right? Or this set of countries, because that's not how supply chains work. Everything's connected.

Everything is connected. If I can't see what's, if I can see only so far down, my transparency goes, goes so far down, at some point I can't keep the lights on. And the, you know, the point I'm not making, you know, trying to get to is the, uh, time.

Right? And I see this, again, this is what I think when I talk about inevitability curves, right? You know, I see things falling a certain direction.

If they continue, you're just creating a more and more barriers, more and more pressure to make some sort of change, right? Because to continue going that direction, X, y, z maxes out halfway there. So obviously, if we're gonna get to that point, we'll just come up with something other than X, Y, Z, right?

And today we'll take the, take the social media side, you know, the public information is just saying publishing, um, the time to publish and the resource necessary to publish has gone from significant to near zero. Correct. Um, in the last 30 years.

Um, and there has not been a commencement rise in anything, like any sort of attestation system that, you know, going all the way back to my initial conversations that we started to develop 40, 50,000 years ago. Sure. How do I actually trust someone I'm not actually dealing with directly all the time?

We've gotten pretty good at that in a human scale. Slowly, we've gotten pretty good at that in the industrial age, you know, supply chain. Uh, we're not, we haven't figured out how to do that in the nanosecond.

Everyone's, you know, a global publisher, disinformation, misinformation, influence campaigns have no barriers to entry. Right? Right.

I mean, if, if you think about it, the first problem was, like I said, identity management, right? It was the, the, the dilemma was always sharing the secret, right? Because unless you have a secret at both end, you, you can't encrypt.

And I had a good fortune of meeting with Diffy one time. We were stuck. We were at a meeting and, and our flights were canceled, and we're sitting there drinking wine at the bar.

And, and, and he told me the, the story of when he came up with the notion of the public key, private key split splitting the key here. And that was a breakthrough. Because before that happened, you couldn't, you may not know exactly who it is, but at least it's a known entity at the other end, right?

And, and we don't have anything like that with information. Tim Burners Lee, I, I mentioned, I read an article he wrote recently where he said he was, he was frustrated that the web did not become what he thought it was gonna become. Right?

He thought it was gonna be individual publishers. And now we've gotten lazy, we've gotten concentrated with, um, social media sites and so forth. And, and people use that for publishing.

But it's publishing in an echo chamber. So, so you, so, so there, there, there isn't, you know, while, while there's this facade of authenticity, it really isn't, you know, and, and, and we still have not, are, are the police ready to board you? No, no, no.

Just no checking somebody else. No, we still haven't, not this time. Right?

Those people, you people, You people. But, um, so, so the, so, so he, he, he wanted individuals to be publishers. But to your point, when individuals are publishers, I'm taking a history course, right?

And I'm sorry for rambling, but this, my brain works. My, my brain works. Like I brain, I'm taking a history course, right?

I'm sorry for that. I just turned 75. And, and I wanted to try to get a sense of why we're where we are, right?

So this history course starts in 1750, right? And it talks about what, what's the professor's great, is a guy named Mark Rose. And he talks about what life was in, like in 1750, and people were, it was kind of okay, right?

They could communicate and so forth. And then the British started getting onerous, and they imposed the stamp act. And we think of the stamp act like the Boston Tea Party, but it also affected freedom of the press.

It also affected the Federalists being able to communicate ideas to other people. And those were some of the things from 1750 to 1776, people got really upset because they couldn't communicate the way they wanted to. And that was part of the, the justification of the revolution right?

Now. Now, I, I realize this is off, off subject from, from the bill of materials of, of, uh, of authenticity. I don't think it's Yeah.

Truth. Yeah. Well, yeah.

But because you said something that there, you know, people were getting really cranky with, right? And that I, is one of the, I think particularly in an engineering sort of technocratic world that I live in, you know, is, you know, one of the things I struggle with explaining most of my peers, because sociology is a thing, right? And I think a lot, you know, when I look at the size of a path, potential path, I see it had some inevitability curve thing.

Um, as you get to these, to the signs of it, people just get crankier. That's really what it is. You know, as you reach the edge of that, there's just, you know, to, to overcome that amount of crankiness, something big has to happen, right?

Otherwise, we'll, we'll go back, back to the middle. And right now, I think I, I believe this strongly across any political ideological spectrum, everyone is exhausted trying to figure out what's true. Everyone.

Mm-hmm. You know, I have very good friends, you know, lifelong friends that, that I, that we've completely disagree politically. And you know, they're say like, you know, a friend is a truck driver, right?

He's saying, you know, even, you know, today at the truck stops, the truck driver doesn't even be talking to each other because they believe so many different things that, you know, it used to be easy. You believe this or that. And if I believe that, you know, hey, we're all get along.

But now it's like, I believe that, oh, I believe that too. And, and this, well, oh, not that part, right? One of the frame.

So we, in this Racal justtruth world, right, where everybody is, is dissatisfied. One of the framers of the constitution was Monroe and Monroe, and in a, in thing called Federalist Can, one of the Federalist papers talked about Heather. There will always be factions and, you know, like splinter groups in the country.

But what they did was with the Louisiana purchase and some of those things, expanding the country kind of diluted that. So, so factions were separated in space, and they were separated in time because communication took a long time, right? So some thinking had to take place before you could react to something.

Now, everything happens in mere real time with information that you have no idea what the origin of it is right now. Now again, think of what we did with identity management. We put, we put public key infrastructure in place so that there was a central repository of truth about identities, right?

That could be used to sign and seal messages going back and forth. So you had non-repudiation and you had secrecy. Right?

Now, think of information itself. I I've heard of people talking about using NFTs for, I mean, the problem with digital information, uh, Nick, Nick Neg Ponti wrote a book called Being Digital back in the years when, when I was at Harvard. And he said, when, when Adams become bits, everything changes.

Every copy is an original, right? So, so we came up with NFTs and we were gonna, we, we were gonna authenticate the original digital representation of something that, that's kind of like being the tallest dwarf, you know? I mean, it's, it is a, it's an oxymoron, right?

I mean, every copy is, is an original. So, so, so the notion of authenticity, what you and I talked about with the, with the bill of materials, what was I was thinking of, of, um, it was a guy I met when I was at Harvard, um, uh, uh, Dick Nola, and I think he worked with Boeing on the bill of materials. And, and they wanted to say, I wanna build one airplane.

It says, okay, that then I need this many fuselages and this many wings, and each wing is made up of this many things. And, and you could ultimately figure out how many screws you needed to put the whole thing together, right? Right.

Information is kind of the same thing, right? And, and that was when, when I first heard about blockchain, I thought, this will be interesting, but who is the ultimate authority to de deem something true? Well, let, let me see if I can use that as a segue.

So we, we talked a lot about the past. We're talking a lot about the present, right? And I think this, you know, this, you, the other half of the president might tell us about the future.

And, you know, and, and you know, it's PKF with Diffy, right? You know, it's done great work. And, and that's been a wonderful thing.

And the PKI structure worked, right? It's always been one of my favorite whip boys because it's, ah, do we really, you know, we're gonna build a global internet, you know, thing, and we're going to arbitrarily, you know, create a couple certificate certificate authorities, and everybody's gonna believe those, why Exactly. Those and not, you know, anyways.

Um, so I saw that as a, as a step along the way, right? And my work in, in supply chain, you know, one of my litmus trips I keep sticking in the soil, you know, is how often people say, where is the singular repository going to be? Because if you're thinking that, you're missing the whole point, right?

And I think this leads to our, our, our, our topic of truth. Because in, in supply chains, look, you know, I've, you know, software supply chains, lots of different people can attest to what's inside their software. That's what, what is sbo what a software bill material is all about.

Could be the people who made the software, could be somebody who analyzed the software, could be, you know, your old uncle's head, who knows, right? And lots of people could, you know, gather those up or put a directory together to say, here are the good ones. And they could be a government, you know, it could be our government, somebody else's government, a state government, local government, you know, a, a flower knitting club, who knows.

But isn't that what blockchain is supposed to be a distributed repository of authenticity? io, plugged Ning Foundation project that Medi and Azar and I jumped up at, uh, uh, sy in, in 2019 is really my one experience with that, right? You know, as I, you know, all your blockchain experts, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's, you know, so blockchain is just a repository method, distributed real ledgers.

You, I have two or more magic ledgers that if anybody writes or delete know erases anything, they all change at the same time. Mm-hmm. And in, in a, you know, so, you know, to my point, there is not a blockchain, there's not some authoritative ledge ledger out there.

It's just a way of creating authoritative ledgers that are authoritative to a given level of authoritative, depending on, you know, who you are setting it up. Right? Okay.

And in supply chain, I see really good uses for that, where you have a, you know, high you, you want a, you know, high non repudiation, you know, I wanna know that if I'm gonna grab an artifact outta this particular repository, I have a very, very high level of comfort that it really is something that I can plug into my operations this second. And there are others, um, where the other parts of supply chains where you don't need all that rigor, you know, or a Mongo database, you know, having the same sort of attestations is perfectly fine. Right?

Right. And that there is no authoritative source, not universally authoritative source. It's all relative.

So I guess, you know, the, the, my, my poit I'll put out there for, for debate for a moment is, all along the internet really should have been fully distributed, right? And, and, you know, Jordan, one more war story. I just learned this, right?

You know, 'cause I and am my DY and Andrew Flint invented network address translation, 1991 or two, uh, totally outta the blue, never read anything about it. Just 15 minutes at a whiteboard. I'd always thought, um, that, uh, John Mays, who, uh, invented the picks and one of the group wrote the original RFC also independently came up with it.

Mm-hmm. But I just found out that there actually was, I wasn't part of that conversation at the time, but there was resistance to network address translation, because the internet was supposed to be peer-to-peers with no walls. Every host can see every host, basically.

Right? And, and of course, we live in a highly natted world these days. Um, and we all used to that.

And there's no other sort of way to get there. But I guess my point is that fundamentally the internet shouldn't have a single authoritative source for X, Y, Z, whatever. It's, it should enable people to create authoritative sources that then Darwinian, you know, succeed or not, you know, they're effective at providing the service, being truthful in this case, being reliable or not.

And I, so I, so I think that the positive path forward as we embrace more of the, you know, it's not the US federal government going to set up the truth repository. It's us techies. We're gonna come up with mechanisms where people can set up, you know, systems for testing the truth to each other.

Isn't That kind of what PGP was? And you know, like circles of trust, that sort of thing. Um, right.

Yeah. We've been edging there, right? Have you read Enders Game?

You know, the, the novel lenders game? No, the classic sci-fi. Uh, but there's, it is very popular, but it's a couple hundred years in the future, aliens and so forth.

But the key point is there's a couple kids, right? And two of the kids, you know, they're all gen, you know, three of 'em are geniuses. And the two that, you know, one goes off ender does the, he's the hero and the other two stay at home on earth, and they assume personas on the internet, this sort of pre-internet, uh, novel.

And at that time, you had to earn the right to get inside the circles of trust. So you can literally sit there and debate with the world leaders if you can, you know, on the world stage if you could, you know, uh, get there. And it's only a pager two, a description, but I always thought that's how it works out, right?

You have to, you know, not just everybody gets to talk in every room. That's just chaos. Not just the elites who were there in the first, first place, but somehow, you know, through earning the right by arguing.

Well, we can, you know, all argue together. I'll, I'll send you the recent article I read by Tim Berners Lee, because it, it was exactly that. His vision was that it was gonna be a really, you know, distributed peer kind of a, of a web.

And instead we've had these concentrations that become echo chambers that are reinforced by negativity, because that's what keeps you online. And, um, and, and, and, and his whole premise was how do we break that? Um, well, Let's take, let's take that as the, the segue for the future, right?

Because, you know, I've all, I really as the host, I shouldn't, you know, lead the lead, you know, lead the question so much. But too bad, my show, the, uh, because I, I feel very strongly about this. I think we're in a, a, a, a species wide, you know, ponderance that goes back, let's just say the French Revolution and trying to work out whether humans are intrinsically scumbags that need to be beaten by authoritative figures, or if we're, you know, on average intrinsically, you know, intelligent self, you know, enlightened self-interest and so forth.

Because if we're the first, then forget democracy or freedom of speech. It's just not practical. You know, we literally have to be, you know, ruled forever, thousands of years, forever.

If the second is true, then yes, all these, you know, boy Scout dreams of democracy and freedom of speech and open systems, uh, work. So I think that while the present is a mess, I think at some point in the future, maybe decades out, not centuries, um, Darwin selects for transparency. But right now, so what we see right now can't survive over the long term.

I've always believed governments get in the way. I, I, I can remember an experience, uh, one of the places I lived, uh, I was trying to learn Windows antique, and I ran into this guy in the laundry room. Um, he was, I was living in a condo.

He ran into this guy in the laundry room, we got talking. He was really good in, in Windows antique. So we had dinner together one night.

Turns out he was from Russia. He had grown up in the Soviet Union, and we started comparing notes of what we had learned in terms of propaganda as kids. And had it not been for the government, he would've been one of my best friends, two, two governments, you know?

And so the organizations of government get in the way. Institutions get in the way. Um, I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I think I agree with your point that in a real, um, egalitarian peer peer, um, uh, federated society or, or for your pure federated network, um, we would have a much better chance of, of doing something, uh, that, that follows the virtuous cycle rather than the vicious cycle.

Um, and, and kind of reinforcing A, those are two, two interesting V words, right? Virtuous and, and vicious. Not really opposites, but you know, and it's not so much virtuous.

It's, it's lower, it is more productive. Yeah. It's less friction, less strain.

Vicious is a, is a good word for it, you know, it's, it's unproductive. It's stresses. Things get broken.

It's unproductive. You know, I've worked on security for, uh, many, many years and I, i, it, it, I still find it interesting when I'm talking to my peers, you know, when someone gets, well, it's not about money, you know, this is about security. It's about the right and wrong and virtue and so forth.

I'm like, yeah. So how do we pay for that? Because when you find a way, when you know, as a professional, you know, as a, you know, personal with a job and a career and you know, interest in helping businesses and so forth, I see opportunities and money flows this great thing.

But what I also see is, is evolutionists, you know, 'cause when I find that I can get security in is usually by saying, look, you don't need to do this, but your competitor's going to, and they're gonna lower their costs and they're gonna have better customer retention. They have better trust with our customers. They're gonna spend less time selling and more time fulfilling orders.

So more profitable. And in three to five years, they will put you outta business. And, you know, sure.

Maybe take over your company, buy you and fire you. 'cause you're the one who decided not to do this. That's Stuart Phillips right there.

Back in, I think it was 2001, I gave the first presentation ever to the board of directors of what is now Thomson Reuters. In, in that phase, it was just Thompson and everybody was nervous. I'm sitting between the CIO and the, and the, uh, the CFO and, and I was like the sacrificial lamb.

You know, I was the CISI was the sacrificial lamb to, to present to them. And I'm thinking, what could I possibly say to these people that, that that would resonate? You know, I'm not gonna talk about the technologies that we use or anything else.

So, um, somebody told me that at the executive level, they think in threes. So I started thinking about risk, and I said, there are really three risks that, that we're trying to manage. Okay.

Risks to revenue, risks to reputation and risks to regulatory compliance, right? The revenue part is your, your your point with customers. Um, if a customer thinks somebody else is a more secure, uh, more trustworthy provider of products and services, they're gonna go there.

Right? And, and if there's a breach, they're not gonna want to use our, our stuff. Reputation affects investment and all you guys are compensated with, um, stock options and, and everything else.

Reputation hits the stock price. Okay? And regulatory compliance has its own ROI and it's not return on investment, it's risk of incarceration because you, you, as you as fiduciary officers of, of, of the institution, this is when Sarbanes Oxley came up and I turned to the CFO and I said, you know, if our, uh, financial statements are are corrupt, I'll tie yellow ribbons around all our trees until you get outta prison.

'cause you're the guy that signed it, not me. Like, you know, we're, we're partners. If, if, if we make those more secure, that helps me and that helps you.

We have a common good, but you're the one that's taking risk on this. And all of a sudden it looked different to them. You know?

I mean, see, your executives deal with risk all the time, right? And, and they said, but you come in with these mumbo jumbo metrics. I said, okay, well, we'll try to come up with metrics that are more, that have a line of sight to the strategic mission of the business.

And that was a tipping point of our program program became very successful after that. Well, and, and that's, you know, that wasn't just comps and Reuters. Right.

You know, you know that at that time, you know, and you know, the ciso, the sa sacrificial lamb, I always think of the Fusible link, right? Yeah. That little piece of Mel that melts, you know, it's like a sacrificial pop.

But that, that was, that was the, that was the era when CISOs were that link. Right. You know, and Yeah.

And folks like you were out there making those arguments and winning them. Now, I think that's, you know, boards tend to get this a lot better these days. Took a long, long time.

Yeah. And I think in this, you know, for the prognostication of the future part, I think this is, you know, you know, huge endemic, common problems are also huge, you know, opportunities. Sure.

When most people are sick and tired and tired of, and it's waste and it's taking up time and it's expensive, then whoever invents that mouth crap, you know, is going to take over the world. Right. And I think that's what we're lining ourselves up for.

I think it's not just, you know, this decade, you know, these last couple administrations or whatnot. I think the, the time span that I, and, and, and even more so you have worked through this information system sort of shows how we got here. And yeah.

And I think shows that this, there's this big log jam and, and everybody's cranky, and the next thing has to come around to replace it. Where it's not, where we don't live in a world where nobody knows what's true. Now, I'm gonna try to play Chris Blas and, and, and get us back on the other topic.

Um, please. The, the home, my latter, when we talked about the bill of materials of truth, and we talked about recursion, it's because facts and truth are not totally atomic. They're usually based on something else.

And, and we were making the analogy with supply chain that, um, I, I remember in the pharmaceutical industry, we had batch lot control. And if we found one ingredient that was bad, I, I developed one of their systems that you could do batch lot control, trace that to all the batches of product that went out, that, that, that you could do a recall. It's very early, um, you know, uh, a supply chain sort of thing.

Well, truth is the same way. Like you're, what you're citing as, I mean, that, that, that's why term papers have have a, a seller or a, a, uh, footnotes. And, and, you know, and how do we do that?

You know? I mean, uh, I mean, in The time available, In the time available, where does that repository live? Where are those relationships established in a, in a trustworthy way?

Um, and, you know, that's the, the, the circle of trust, the, the, the, who is it Phil Zimmerman? Was he PGP? Yeah.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I mean, that was breakthrough thinking at, at, at the time. That kind of a, of a structure can work, but it's not gonna work fast enough.

Right. And because it's, it's all gotta be about speed, right? You know, the, the every conversation, whether it's literally in the supply chain space or, or any other these days, I find myself saying, all that information was available at the beginning, all true.

And if you needed it, if there was a flight crash investigation, NTSB thing, we would find over the next six to 18 months all of the information. So it's all there, it's all just a matter of time. I mean, what about good ai?

A lot of us use chat GBT for, for researching things. Um, I mean, could, could we come up with an authoritative AI engine that would help with some of that? Well, a again, you know, I, I would worry less about authoritative, you know, we're about more effective now, if somebody finds it and says, okay, I will use that authoritative for me.

Right? And this is the recursive bomb to me. Right.

You know, I, i, because people start saying, well, who's gonna declare what's true? It's like, I don't care. Nobody, um, that's not how I saying before.

We're just Trustworthy. I would Just like, of authoritative, Right? I would just like to, I would like to be able to, to people to see what I say, and I write what I post and so forth, and have a pretty damn good idea that that really was me.

Now, whether it was true or not, ah, you know, but I did it. You know, it was me. Yeah.

Right. That's, you know, and I think, I think, you know, one of the problems we have is as technology and, you know, policy and, you know, academic geeky folks, we're trying to find the perfect solution when we realize, and this is where the threat across human history comes from, right? So I think in early civilizations take that, you know, say it was 40, 50,000 years ago, we somehow, over a couple generations, couple centuries figured out how we can trust that third party.

And it worked. Obviously civilization continued to grow, and it wasn't perfect, and it no, still hasn't been. And so I think rather than be authoritative repository, But it wasn't an abstracted third party, you know, distance makes a difference.

Okay? I mean, I can, I can trust somebody that I can see and touch and, and, and interact with the anonymity, the abstraction. Um, I, I think something else has to compensate for that.

Well, the, you know, the Silk world, Mesopotamia, all these little clay tablets, the clay tablet inside the clay tablet, right? Yeah. Yeah.

You know, that was actually a fascinating, and I love to, to be able to fly on the wall. We thought of that one was like, like you say, we're like bit diffy or something. You're just sitting there with a coffee or whatever the equivalent inside of you, wait, we'll grab it.

Oh, when you break it, when you get there. Um, and so we've, we've done well enough and there's always been people who can, you know, find a way around that, but not enough to be just obvious from doing it. And we're at that point again, right where we can't continue, I don't think much further forward in reducing our ability, you know, to, to know things.

We're, we're approaching some critical minimum, and it costs a lot. It takes us all time, energy. Our productivity is low.

It's reducing costs everywhere. So I think we'll find a way. Here's an interesting thought.

Do you think that, and, and I'm sorry for interrupting, but, but I think it's important if you look at the, the way our democracy is being practiced right now, right? Uh, when people talk about, when people talk about maga, they talk about the fifties. I grew up in the fifties.

I was born in 1950, right? I remember it vividly. And there was some good stuff, but there was also, there was also polio.

I knew a kid in an iron lung. I mean, there, there were a lot of things that, that weren't as peachy as, as people would, would make it. Um, but oh my god, what was I just gonna say?

'cause it was profound. Um, I'm drawing a blank. Um, the, I forgot what I say.

Go ahead. Oh, hell help me. Yeah.

Yeah. I, I just searching there myself. So the, uh, talking recursive bomb, right?

Know how we get third party mm-hmm. Um, abstracted, uh, trust. Um, the, uh, I was gonna, um, we just did, did say this, you know, we actually did, we, we put together reasonable methods for this in the path, right?

And I, and again, I think, you know, let me, you know, I, as I talk about supply chain, you know, over the last six, seven years now, I, I, one of the things I find my kids self keep saying is, all of these contracts, all these relationships are already written down, right? It's already exists. You know, there's a PDF somewhere that both parties signed.

It has the rules, the regulations are written down, the laws are written down, the, you know, everything, every single step in the supply chain is already represented in text, in available texts that anybody could compile, you know, from end to end for the supply chain of anything. It would just take you a long time, right? And I think, you know, you look at all the spots in, in the actual literal supply chain, logistics people, you know, big power companies and so forth.

There's lots of processes. And those processes used to be paper, they used to use fax machines. They've been, you know, advancing along, uh, all, all, all this time.

So again, it's not just, you know, about security. You know, these systems have been automating, you know, those contracts that are in a filing cabinet that someone has to call someone in legal to pull and photocopy are now online, right? Um, inside the company, you might be able to pull up online in on your intranet, if that's still a word.

Um, I think they end up being electronically available to automated systems with appropriate authority in real time all the time so that I can read every contract or I can have read for me, right? You know, I, my, I talk about authority. My AI says, alright, I have the Authority Act for Chris Blak, and I have acting under this contract that you second party have already agreed to.

And in that contract, it says that you will have the right, uh, clauses in your contracts all the way upstream. So the, under these conditions which have now been met, you will go and fetch for me, or asked to go and be Feb for me this information, this very moment, deliver it to me, you know, in the next 30 seconds. You know, otherwise there's a fine of $30,000.

And I could build that today that all that technology exists. Yeah. I mean, a lot of that exists now.

com for half price. Um, so I, I renewed it. The stuff that I had been searching for in terms of family tree and history and so forth.

As soon as you renew, it pops up all these suggestions. So it has gone and done, or word recognition in old documents and photo recognition and all sorts of things. And it's absolutely fascinating as things get digitized, more and more connections get revealed, and you can start to reconstruct what, what took place before without you having to do all the research.

And these are even international. I was in, we were in, um, in Dublin one time when I was at Trinity College trying to find my ancestors. And you have to know what parish they were in, what church parish.

And, and, and I didn't know this thing found up. I mean, this kind of amazing, It really is. And you are amazing.

And, but we have, uh, you know, used up all the available time that we can get in this Okay. In this Forum though. So, uh, Dennis, thank you for this.

Thanks for all you've done, for all of us all these years. Thanks for being a good friend. Thanks for coming out to my ridiculous boats.

You know, you, you saw these things in a, in a maturity level that is not commonly known. So thanks for No, it's, it's been a, it's been a fun opportunity and a fun, fun experience to, to know you and know, know the Twains and, uh, and, and thanks for this. And, uh, and if I can think of the profound thing I was gonna share before, I'll, I'll, uh, I'll send it to you.

Well, we can, we can come back and do it as a short, Okay. It's a deal. All right.

You welcome. Thank you again, Dennis. Thank you everyone for coming along.

Uh, feel free, there's more on text, on tv, and you follow the inability curve. Sponsors are welcome. Cheers.

Bye.