The Profitability of Corporate Altruism – The Inevitability Curve EP11

This is Textron tv. Hello, my name is Chris Blas. I am your host again for another episode of the Inevitability Curve, where we take issues very specific, very general issues, look back at where we've been with these issues in the past, try to figure out where we are, uh, today.

And with any luck, it's some idea of where we may be going in the future. So with me to today is a very dear friend, bill McGee. Bill, how are you?

I'm awesome, Chris. How are you doing? I love life.

Where in the world are you again? Right now I'm in, uh, a little town called Alpine, Utah, and, um, we're on the verge of a winter storm warning headed our way. And so we're in the, we're in the throes of transitioning from fall, winter transitioning.

And I think that's, as we're talking about in the degree, I think that's gonna be sort of our popup. We'll see where it goes. But as everybody knows, you know, so this, you know, in, in, in future this, we're reporting this after the two hurricanes, uh, Helene and Milton hit Florida in the southeast, hurricane Milton passed the eye passed over, uh, mark Twain and Sam Clemens, the solar powered starlink enable odd vessels.

I have, uh, north of the academy at the moment. So leaving, I'll be leaving in a few days to go deal of those open to damage sailing down on the keys. And at the same time that, you know, we're also, the whole world is sitting here a couple days later saying, did we just catch a 20 story falling stainless steel water tower from space before we hit the ground?

Right. You know, SpaceX has done this amazing fee for launching the, the fifth test flight of their starship, uh, development, uh, process for anybody who's missed this. You know, it's a two stage thing where one stage goes up, it's basically like a really long, uh, runway for planes.

You can think about that way. It just goes up. And then the other spaceship thing goes up in space, goes that, uh, goes wherever those things go.

And then this thing, bloody thing came back in. Landed. And Did you see that?

Yeah, I did. It was, it was remarkable. I mean, it landed right on the landing pad, that launchpad.

Yeah. And, and with the little two little pins on two little rails by two mechanical chopsticks that were perfectly time with AI and, and, uh, on, on the ship itself, on the arms. Anyways, we're at that point.

So if this seems, uh, uh, uh, interesting conversation, it's not just because de I will do that anyways. We're in a funny times. Right?

And, and again, as we're saying in the, in the agreement, we look back and maybe the topic today is change in transition. You're, you're a student of you of ancient history, religious texts and so forth, where we've been as a hu uh, human culture and anybody, you know, look back that far, sees that we've gone through phases. The most phases we're typically separated by transitions, which themselves are historically always noticeable.

You know, we're there, and it's a bit cliche to say that, you know, our entire lives have been into one of these big transitions from the, you know, industrial age to the cybernetic age of where, where we're going. But right now, right. This, you know, today, this year, last year, the last 3, 4, 5 years, next, 3, 4, 5 years, five years feels particularly cruxy.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Some, um, the, the, the last time we had a big transition like this, I think was in the, um, end of the 19th century where, you know, you had Darwin and you had changing science, and you had Freud changing psychology, and you had, or even inventing psychology to our degree, you had literature changing, you had art changing, you had music was in a big transition. All those things were all kind of happening at the same time. And that seems to happen quite often, right?

The, we didn't just invent the car, several people invented the car at the exact same time, right? And, and, and so history tends to kind of lead to these things where everything's in transition. And we're in a, we're in one of those things right now where we're in a huge social transition.

We're in a huge political transition. We're, we're in a huge, um, technological transition. Um, art is changing dramatically because what, what does it mean when art crashes into, you know, the digital world music, the whole music industry has gone, undergone a dramatic change in terms of how you create it, where you get it, how you monetize it, all of that sort.

So it, it's this, it's this global shift that's happening and it's creating a lot of, of tension and, and, and a lot of, uh, of, um, energy, good and bad at, at the same time. And, and we're seeing it. We're seeing it everywhere, right?

It's, it's reflected in, in our daily lives, in the economy and in our political structures and everything. Religion. Religion is undergoing a dramatic shift right now.

Um, and that's, you know, and that's creating a lot of tension. 'cause so many of our kind of social norms and the standards by which we've always kind of lived our lives, at least for the last century or so, are, are undergoing dramatic change and shift. You know, marriage is probably irrelevant at this point for the most part.

And, um, which is a huge dramatic social change. So yeah, it, it, it's a, it's an understatement to say we're in an inflection point. Well, and I like the fact that you started with, you know, late, late 18 hundreds.

Right. You know, so, and if you, if you put yourself in the mind of those people at the time, right. You the late Victorian era, right.

You know, where so much has changed, gone from wooden sailing shifts to steam and power and locomotion, you know, our current obsession with steampunk, right. You know, we, we put ourselves in, in, in the mindset of those people thinking they've achieved and then just follow that straight path, that linear future. Right?

The first idea that God is dead happened then, and it, that's what threw everybody off. Right? Not that I'm not making a statement on whether God is dead or not, but I'm just saying that was the conclusion.

Freud and Darwin and those guys and, and the religious community, the response from that community was extreme like today. Well, and, and that, that, I guess the point that I'm not quite making here is, is that standing there at that time, you might have fallen about to this pinnacle. Right.

And that the future is going to, you know, follow from that in some so linear or fashion, when really that was all the pre pre league, you know, the actual term of the century 1900, world War I, world War ii, the first half of the 20th century, were not, I don't think predictable in many ways from an 1895 perspective. Mm-hmm. Oh, oh sure.

A lot of similarities now, you know? Yeah. We looked at, at the future from where we are today, and I think quite opera people are missing the point as we sort of did that.

Yeah. I, I think one of the things that's really interesting is that being able to predict the future is an easier proposition, I think, than, you know, in, in, in broad strokes than, than most people think. And part of it's because we can look back at that 19th century and we can see kind of like where all that was headed and what was going on, and you can make, draw logical conclusions about what's happening.

Um, I, I talk to people all the time and they're very concerned and worried about the future and what's it gonna look like, and, you know, and I think we're on the verge of something pretty awesome. Well, and on that note, let me, you know, again, you know, you know the story, but you know, for everybody else, you know, reiterate what it, what I mean by inevitability curve, right? And you just said it, right?

You know, the, the ability of future is not that hard. Now, in specific detail, it's almost infinitely hard. However, right?

As you think about this, you've seen where we've been time, we've gone through some of those things, whatever goes, we're talking about, you know, how that worked out. I think what you mostly can do about the future is limited. You're gonna say, alright, you, these things are probably completely off the table, and these things are really hard to see how we get there from here.

So it leaves this path ahead where all the really likely things are right. And right. The big question is how violent is it going to be for us to get to that point?

And yeah, by my definit definition of, I mean, you and I are, you know, InfoSec folks, we've dealt with conflict, you know, for 30 and four years now. You know, we're trying to defend A for B, they have to understand what A and D are, are doing, who they actually are, what they want, you know, what are the risks. Um, and you know, so it's not typically, it is not kinetic, you know, is it is not physical, you know, conflict and violence.

However, you are all part and parcel of the same things. And we've both worked with military infrastructure domestically and inter internationally, and thought through all these things, right? So conflict is a, is a, is, is, is a, is is standard, right?

We're always, you know, and, and you know, we can take this as far as we'd like individuals, we all have interests and motivations. We wanna get through the day, we wanna go to bed, you know, not too worried. We wanna take care of our interests.

And you know, even where we can work jointly with others, we're compromising, you know, we're, there's, there's friction, um, when they get to extremes and when things get kinetic and so forth, right? Right. And that's the, that's the question I've, I've been considering, right?

Is that we've always kind of laid out this, the future is either Star Wars or Star Trek, right? We either create this utopian society or this dystopian society. And, and I always kind of see Star Trek, I mean, star Wars as a prelude to a Star Trek future, right?

They're struggling for getting past that dystopian existence that they have, and creating something where there's, there's cohesion and, and, and, and we're kind of at that same, we're kind of at that, in that beginning right now, right? Where it's, it's one or the other. And I think in the Star Trek vision version where it, there's a utopian thing where everybody has a place and, and that's inevitable.

I feel like the question is how much, how much are we gonna have to go through in order to get to there? So just from an economic perspective, right? Um, basic universal income makes perfect sense in terms of transitioning from a, um, physical workforce to a automated workforce and people no longer needing to do certain sorts of things and transitioning to other sorts of, of activities.

This question is how much are we, how much effort is going to take to get the people who control the capital to agree to give that money to the people? And what's gonna have to happen? Are we gonna be able to logically convince 'em that makes the most sense?

Are we gonna be able to pass laws that make that happen, or they're gonna be an uprising and we're gonna just take it? I, I don't, that's the part that's hard to, to, to tell, but it's, it's going to happen. We're, we're going to have to move in that direction.

Well, they're taking a philosophy to that point. I think the, you know, revolutionizing up and tear down rebuilding is hard and it's expensive, and it's unpleasant and it's costly, and in every return we can either ha Right? Which puts it on the banks of what I see as likely futures, you know, it doesn't mean we can't get there, it's just that it's not the preferable for anybody.

You know, everybody loses, right? So I don't, I I don't see, you know, large capital transverse, you know, and I'm concerned, you know, as they, you know, you and I have debated this for a long time, you know, but gee, that's two of us. You know, I am the right paying guy this time, you know, because I kinda like capitalism.

I like the idea that everybody could work really hard, come up with some crazy idea, better themselves financially, you know, have more money and do whatever the hell they want with that. Um, but again, within Linux, right? You know, it's like the game monopoly, you know, that you win by getting a hundred percent of the entire money supply, right?

Right. And the situation, you have object, object question in capitalism, right? Anybody doesn't take into any economics classes, there's this thing called the money supply.

It's how many dollars there, there are when you, when people start complaining about printing money, or they're talking about is expanding that money supply. So there's a difference between a world where anybody can get very, very rich and have a lot of money and a world where anybody can have more and more percentage of all available money, right? I think that's the, the, the kind of problem we have right now, right?

I don't have any problem with people getting still rich, but when we're really just transferring, you know, 30% of all available money from the middle class and, and people who really need it to people who really don't need it that much, that's where I think we can find some, you some way to have it be a transfer. It isn't, you know, the rich Yeah. The problem is we transferred a lot of power with it, right?

And so that's, that's the question is people, I think people are much more likely to give up money than they are power. And that's, that becomes the tricky bit. Well, you know, let's let, let me try to dig into that one right now.

So as we were talking about in a green room, right? You know, you and I have worked together for a long, long time messaging for for-profit capitalists, companies and so forth. And one of the things we both can argue for I'm wrong, is that it's actually good capitalism to be honest and transparent and really, really clear about what you are doing and not doing as a company, right?

Mm-hmm. Hopefully get, and we've competed against companies that, that aren't right? And, you know, we won Yeah.

Over, over, right. You know, then, you know, the, so, you know, bill and I met in the early firewall days, early nineties, you know, bill was one of my best, you know, firewall, resellers, ware firewall, you know, talking into moving to Utah. We went down there, you know, I joined Cisco, you joined me, ran the firewall business there.

Everything followed along since then. But, but you know, that opportunity of the late nineties to say, okay, yes, we're a big corporation. Yes, we're a big for-profit corporation called Cisco, right?

You know, we're selling almost all of the, you know, internet hardware. Honor came from us, and Bill and I were selling the firewalls. And you know, here's a, you know, I will continue not to mention the name, but you'll remember this.

There was a vulnerability found in the PIX firewall, and it was real, and it was bad. And there was an individual, you know, researcher that found it. And I talked to that person and I said, all right, tell you what, give us 10 days so we can get a fix out there.

You know, get some protection behind our customers, and I will give you so much credit. Yo know, you're gonna be the most famous person. You as much as I have any influence on that, off you go.

And he and that person agreed. And then a day later, they published the vulnerability. I have not said their name out on sense ever, right?

But what you and I, and and the fix team did is we, when I, when I put our press release that day, said, yeses of vulnerability, as you've heard, yes. We're aware of you working like crazy, uh, to fix it. And we did.

And we took, and we, and we took care of people, and I'm sorry, I forgot to go soapboxing on this, but when I left Cisco started a sim, uh, sim company in the first VC pitch, you know, uh, uh, par Iman and Phil gave, went through all the slides and had this, you know, Silicon Valley, uh, investor, lean forward and say that billion dollar, uh, uh, Cisco thing, how'd you do that? I said, well, we built a team that would die for each other. We were honest with our, uh, with our customer, was customer with the market, and we took responsibility and build trust.

And this Silicon Valley investor lean forward and says, no, you can tell me. It's like, it's not a, and here we are, 20 something years later, you are literally, you know, working for a Fortinet, you know, big, you know, internet company, a big for-profit capitalist company. And your job now, as you described it, uh, to me a minute ago, is communicating with the outside world about who Fortinet really is.

And I can only imagine when you say that, you mean it, like, it's just better, faster, cheaper, better capitalism to be honest and transparent. Oh, absolutely. That's, that's the whole, that's the whole gist of it, right?

And, and, um, and, and, and it's painful sometimes, right? Because there are competitors who aren't interested in behaving that way and pretend they don't have problems and like the point fingers. And, and, but at the end of the day, you know, our, our growth rate's pretty impressive, um, because people respond to that sort of a thing.

They, they, yeah. Have we had problems? Absolutely.

Anything with more than a thousand lines of code, you know, has a problem. And so how do you handle that? How do you manage it?

Responsible disclosure is fundamental to being a good citizen, being a good member of the, of the community and, and, um, playing a, a responsible role. And, and one of the things I've loved about our careers has been that while we've worked for, you know, wildly successful capitalist organizations, the at the core, at the heart of it is still a measure of, of altruism. The idea of we're trying to help and protect people, um, from a system that is largely, you know, outta control and, uh, and, and, and far more dangerous than I think most people have any, um, any real idea.

And, um, and, and I love that. I love, I love being in that spot. Well, lemme try to put these threads together.

So we, you know, as we're talking about here, you and I have been saying these things for 20, 30 years in exactly those places where, you know, our peers at the time were like, no, kid, you don't understand. This is real business and we can't go telling the truth all the time, everything else. Yeah.

And we've been, right now, we're in this world where sb mowing shoutouts, SB mowing, you know, that, uh, content creator that owes lawn for free, you know, makes a lot of money on the YouTube so forth, but people get their yards cleaned up and they do. Mm-hmm. And it's actually good for them, right?

Yeah. And those person gets comp compensated. And I think we've all gone through this, say, let's say the last three years as you know, all of us, and we'll just pick on people our age.

You know, we're getting used to this. We we're watching a lot of this stuff. We're saying, okay, is this a scam or is this real?

And I don't know who, I can't even remember his name, right? There's this individual who does this SB mowing thing. I think they were the first ones to really go viral with, with that.

And it's a couple others now. Good for that. Um, but they're real, right?

They're a real person who really is doing this. They have a landscaping company. They thought it would be good for their business, good capitalism to do good works, actually do good works and not fake it, because that's high risk.

And so just actually you go do something nice and it works. And, and, and that's just the first example in my head. And they're counter examples.

There's, you know, yeah. Like, you know, the, the giving money to homeless people, right? You know, the channels and, and contact creators, you know, that's a tricky subject.

Are you getting rich off of poor people or you're actually taking your platform to actually help them? We're all, I think, individually and culturally processing that. How do we determine your intent?

But if you're doing good works and it's easy to process, because I can't think of how you can be faking this, then you'll do well, you'll do well in a capitalist environment. And I think that points to the future, you know, the shorter term that I, you know, years and decades I worry about because I lived through this. My kids are, are gonna live through those.

But I think we've seen in our little experiment over three decades, a, a change from everyone in the business world believing that it's a little r in the least, you know? And you gotta keep it that way to over and over again. And now quite often demonstrations in the public space that your best business interest are being honest and being decent, and being moral, being ethical and opportunity.

Well for it is a really good example. My daughter, Heather owns a company called 17 Asset Management that's going, um, they've gone public, they sell, they sell investment opportunities. And basically the whole idea is they've created a series of, of, of investment, um, tools that allow organizations that want to invest based on the, um, un uh, 17 charter things about human development.

You know, is it, and so there's, there's, the question is, if I'm gonna invest my money, do I invest it in ways that, you know, I just don't wanna know how you're making that money and how you're gen, or are we gonna try and invest our money in ways that also do good? And the movement shift towards that has been pretty dramatic. There's this huge move towards that.

Is she, she had a conversation recently with, uh, one of these, you know, billionaire hedge fund managers who said, I hate everything that you're doing. I hate this. Um, because at the end of the day, it should just be about how I'm gonna make the most amount of money.

And, and, and there should be no morality involved in it. However, all of my customers wanna do this, and so I need to know how you're doing it, right? And, and so kicking and screaming, the old guard is coming along, and all the millennials who are in charge of their companies now, they, they have this vision of, if we're going to make money and we're gonna invest their money, let's, let's do good.

How do, how do we, how do we do this to, to for positive? And so she's in the catbird seat right now because she's zipped at, at the place where we said, oh, let me show you how to do that. And, uh, it's really exciting to watch this company explode, um, as they, uh, as this, this opportunity gets out into the marketplace.

And, and so I think you're right. I think that's Now, is there a lot of people pushing against it? Absolutely.

You know, politically, and what's really ironic to me is that all of the disinformation and the anger and the frustration and the pushing and stuff is coming from the community that had had all of the power, which is largely the, you know, the religious side of things are the ones who are the most up in arms and the most likely to not be telling the truth or doing the things that are the most, uh, uh, above board in terms of, uh, um, um, uh, in terms of those things. But, but as I said, I'm as a history of that sort of thing. This is not the first time that's happened.

When, when, when the church becomes the, the catalyst for resistance to good change. And it's because the power, power dynamics are shifting. Well, you know, in the, you know, Terry Proctor, one of my favorite authors, the old disc world thing and so forth, he does this I four times, you know, through his, his books.

But it's, you know, the awful irony, you know, the doing good things is good for me, right? You know, can I just do a selfless action? I just, you know, do something that, that has no benefit from me whatsoever.

Uh, no, sorry. You can't. And in fact, you know, and you know, as we're talking about here, even at the corporate level, if you're, you're honest and transparent and, you know, corporations are made of people, you know, they're, they're human beings in there then.

And people are generally moral creatures. And we actually will be more productive and therefore more profitable to our company. We're happy if we're feeling good about what we're doing and whatnot.

And, and the, and again, you know, you know, you can, no, you can tell me, you know, what's the trick? Right? There's no trick, right?

In fact, trying to fake sincerity and moral and ethics and so forth is takes a lot of work. It's really, really hard, you know, that's called act. It's a whole, you know, realm of expertise than most of us don't add.

Turns out it's just better, faster or cheaper, and therefore are profitable, competitive, making it more productive to be decent people, right? And, and the the problem is, is that most of our economic models don't include that. They're based on the notion of self-interest and, and purely self-interest.

And the idea of altruism isn't calculated into the model. And, um, and so, but that, that's real. And it's, it's kind of the, the, the flaw in, in a lot of, uh, economic modeling is that people are just gonna try and do the right thing for no personal benefit whatsoever.

Well then, but I, I think, you know, as we get brutally pragmatic about this, you know, going forward, um, we have to actually build it in. We have to, we have to factor it in. And, you know, I I, because I think, well, that's what Heather's doing in her company, right?

They're, they're, they're accounting for that in their, in their whole business model. It's, and that's why so radical. Well, right?

Yeah. But it, but it, I think one of the things that makes it difficult is we're caught on two sides. You know, because if you're really trying to be moral, ethical, and so on and so forth, you don't wanna think about your self interest.

You just wanna do your thing, but your self interest is there. And it always is. Oh, abs yeah.

That, that, it never goes away. So, so I think on that side of the equation, you know, making it okay to be comfortable with saying what your self-interest is and saying, well, you know, in the security community, this is a huge issue. If you are a part of a working group, you know, in, in some standards organization or whatever, and you are seen as to self-promoting, it's over, right?

Your ability to achieve whatever is you wanna achieve is not Oh, yeah. That's a delicate that I spend a lot of time on in, in my current position, is just like finding the spot between saying, Hey, we, we've got a really good solution and we can really, really help you without over patting ourselves on the back, right? And, and, and over, over self-promotion is, is a death nail.

And I've, we've seen that. You and I have both seen that, where companies come in and they go like, we are the best thing since sliced bread and, and we're gonna change, right? And they go, yeah, we, yeah.

And, and they go, they go away. Well, but, but again, I think, but I like what you said about being honest about what's your self-interest, is that no, no one's, I, I, I think very few people carry an illusion that, that that self-interest isn't a, is a, isn't a powerful driver and things that we do. And so, but being honest, articulating that, that doesn't really upset people like you might think it does.

My self-interest is we wanna do this and we wanna make a whole lot of money doing this, and we wanna empower our employees, and we wanna be able to let people go on vacations and buy their own homes and do all the things that we wanna be able to do. But at the end of the day, our, our top priority is to sell there. I mean, we're all coin operated, but being, being open about that is, is part of that responsible disclosure process.

Well, I think that's, you know, that's a good place to end the, the conversation as as possible, because I think that is the future. I think that's the inevitable, mean free path. It's the, the center of the, the likely, uh, probabilities is, it ends up being much more and more and more.

It continues to be profitable personally and corporate and capitalistic and morally and ethically to be really transparent about why we're doing things right, and that it's okay to have self-interest and as long as you're clear on what they are, right. And you're not trying to fool anybody. And, and then it comes down to our behavior.

It's like, you know, the personally resident as an organization, if you want to then go out the market and work groups or whatnot, say, these are my self-interest, uh, and to pursue, so I'm gonna call you all stupid and say, I'm smart. I take all the oxygen, give a shook, I don't think work. Yeah.

You end up, we've just seen recently, you know, over and over again, and, and it's even in the technology space that you end up in jail Yeah. Consequences to actions. You who would've thought it.

So I, I know the two of us can go on forever, but, uh, right. Yeah. I was like, we're just getting rolling, right?

Yeah. But, uh, our time is not right. So if that, any last thoughts you have?

You don't you think we're going into a positive future or how? Well, I think that the last thing I wanted to say is that most of the stuff that we're dealing with is neither good nor bad, right? I get asked all the time, you know, people are afraid of like, ai, what, oh, it's gonna be scary or it's gonna, and, and AI is neither good nor bad.

It's, it's, um, it, its potential for misuse is high. Um, but at the end of the day, we'll only put up with that for so long. And I think that's the, that's the answer is a short term.

Can you make a lot of money scamming a lot of people using ai? Sure. Absolutely.

But is, is that a long term strategy? Is that a reliable strategy? Is like I don't, no.

That, that's just, we won't, we won't put up with it and, and, um, humans have a tendency to, to not want to put up with that. And I think that's, that's kind of the positive thing that drives me. My, my optimistic outlook for the future is w we eventually will just not stand for it, right?

We, we drive back towards the center, right? As I tried to describe this whole in inevitability curve concept, you know, the, you know, the best I can say about the bumpers, you know, the, the sides of, of like the future is it's full, full, uh, full of a lot of, we don't want, you know, folks just don't, like, we don't, you know, and it's not a specific thing, it's that we get closer and closer and more often in the spaces where there's just, you know, we can't tell what's going on the, the disinformation world today. Right.

This is not a partisan issue. Right. You know, you and I both have plenty of friends on all sides of this, you know, political spectrums.

Everybody's sick of it. Nobody wants to live in a world, but really can't tell what's what's real or not. So the, the, the driver to go back to the center, you know, is building on that side, nothing's driving us farther in that direction as far as, you know, large, you know, demographics and social tendencies, right.

We're the, the tension is pushing us away from that. Yeah, I think so. I think so.

At the end, there are individuals who, who clearly want to continue to create confusion because you can create a power base out of that, right? You can, but, but it doesn't last. Those things don't last that, that we, we, I think we're seeing a trajectory already where our, our fear about certain shifts in, in our culture, they're, they're, they've reached kind of their zenith.

I think there's, we've gotten to a point where I think people are pretty sick of the, um, this chaos business. Right. Alright, with that, thank you Bill.

Thank you everyone for coming along for another mile Ride. We'll see you again.