It is the Best of Times, It is the Worst of Times | Shimmy Says Ep. 26

Hey everyone, it's Shimmy. Thanks for joining me for another Shimmy says, you know, I apologize. I was on my way home from being on the West coast all weekend.

I wasn't able to do my usual Thursday live, shimmy says, but I felt what I wanted to say this week was important enough that I'm doing it here on Friday. And, um, let me just state from the outset, what I'm talking about today is actually taken off of a, an article I put up this morning on Techstrong. It, this is a very personal one for me, and I hope you'll bear with me as I, 'cause I'll probably struggle to get through it to tell you the truth.

But I, I, I do want to get through it. And I think it's important. I think it's important for all of us to take to heart.

You know, yesterday was the 24th anniversary of nine 11, and you know, for a lot of you people out there, if you weren't alive a lot, and I realize a lot of you weren't alive for 9 11 0 1. And so, you know, it's about what you heard about in history books or saw on tv, or what you parents or friends, relatives have told you. But for those of us who were alive, for those of us who were part of it, who were unfortunately touched by it, it is, it is a defining moment in our history, in our lives for my family, probably a little more personal than for a lot of you folks out there.

You know, my wife lost her oldest sister on nine 11 in the Towers. And for the last 23 years, this being the 24th anniversary for the last 23 years, her, her sister, the rest of the family, they go up to nine 11 ground zero to ground zero every year on nine 11. And they watch the, the procession and the dignitary speak, and it, and it's become both a, a celebration and grieving of what was lost.

And, you know, so nine 11 will always is a scarf from my family. And, and for many families out here, we're not the only ones, obviously. And as I said earlier, for all of us who were alive and lived through that, it was a defining moment.

We always know where you were when, when the towers fell. Um, but here's an interesting thing about 9 11 9 on nine 12, this country came together. Like it hasn't come together in my lifetime.

I, I grew up a child of the sixties and seventies, the Vietnam War, the poverty, civil rights movement. We were never really totally together. Let's say though, I think they're in the eighties and nineties, things did, definitely got better.

But nine 11 brought this country together. I I bet, like nothing has since maybe Pearl Harbor as a country. We, and I wrote it.

I, it, it's written in my article. My, I put a lot into this article. And, um, you know, we, we, we came together like no time.

You know, uh, we were one nation indivisible in grief and in purpose. You know, George Bush, George W. Bush, the la you know, the second bush, you know, he was very eloquent and he was very inspirational during those times, and God bless him for it.

But it really brought the company together. Unfortunately, it didn't last very long as, as we've come to find out. And while my wife Bonnie was on her way to New York City on, uh, on Wednesday to be there for Thursday, I'm, I'm out in Napa Valley at the Jfr Swamp Up conference.

And all of a sudden the breaking news is, and my, my phone's blowing up with very different news, right? First of all, another yet another shooting at a high school, a school in Colorado, three dead, you know, chil parents losing children, family shattered. And then of course, the shooting of Charlie Kirk out at college in Utah of all places.

Now, I'm not here to get into the politics of Charlie Kirk or empathy or anything else. I don't really care what Charlie Kirk's politics were for this. The thing about it, there was, there was a, these tragedies that we lived through before Charlie Kirk, it was the Minnesota State legislature woman and her husband who were brutally murdered, brutally murdered because of their views.

How many school shootings do we have? And we just think of them as, yep, just another school shooting thoughts and prayers and like, we can't do anything about it. They pile, they pile on top of one another.

And instead of pulling us together, like nine 11 did as one country with one purpose, with one humanity, we're all humans. Instead, these horrific attacks and violence, it pulls us apart. It makes us more de divisive as others.

You know, as I wrote in my article, we don't share collective grief. We litigate sorrow like partisans keeping score. And that's not what it's about.

It's not that your loss is better than or bigger than my loss or my loss is better than your loss, right? Some, some tragedy spark nationwide mourning, while others barely register. An old man, Pelosi's husband gets beaten with a hammer.

People laugh about it. What, what's funny about that? Right?

And, and so I'm not here blaming one side or the other because really, at the end of the day, this isn't about blame. It's about where is the humanity? Where is, regardless of what side you're on, and and where's the humanity?

And, and let me just say, I, I, this whole thing calls me to look at my own views. 'cause I'm guilty as much as the next one. Like, what about it?

What about, what about, what about, but at the end of the day, it's not, what about, it's not about what about it's about what divides us versus what unites us and, and who we let divide us. Now, at the same time, all this was going on, I'm out in Napa Valley spending three days with my friends at Jfr, as well as folks from Nvidia and ServiceNow and Sonar and so many other companies. I don't know, three, 400 people out there.

And you know what, we're just talking about ai. We're talking about building better software, more secure software, allowing us to do things that we seem fantasm only just a few years ago, you know, people from around the globe with a share from around the globe come together with a shared purpose of building tools, solving problems, imagining a better tomorrow. And you know what?

Nobody cared. Who voted for who, what bathroom someone used or how someone, what pronouns they used or whatever. It was really just all about the tech.

And you wanna know what, that's what originally attracted me to technology. It's 'cause in technology, it, I really believed it was a meritocracy. It's about how good can you code?

What great ideas can you come up with? Everybody in tech got into tech because we think that tech is really cool, and in some way, the technology we work on changes the world. It makes the world better.

E every entrepreneur, startup, entrepreneur I know feels that way. And most of the people in tech I know feel that way. It's that spirit that I've always had pride in around tech.

It's that spirit. Um, but contrasting that with, with the reality of what we see, it, it, it, it just, it blows me away, right? Is it human nature that we just divide into tribes?

Are we just truly still a tribal animal, slightly better than, than the apes and, and it's always us versus them. So I, I started really thinking about this, right? I started really thinking about this in terms of ai.

You know, and there's an irony here. The irony is we're trying to make AI more human. We want ar ai to act more like humans.

We want AI to act with empathy. We want AI to act with human-like intelligence. Well, while we're training AI to do that, we ourselves don't act like that.

Maybe there's a lesson. Maybe we should, instead of making AI more human-like, try to make ourselves more human-like, try to take those, make it as a mirror. Because in some ways there are things that technology and AI did, does that are Much more that we need to emulate.

We need to make decisions not based upon whether you're red or blue. We need to make decisions that are for the common good. We need to have more empathy.

We need to have more humanity. Instead of trying to make AI more human, let's make ourselves more human. Um, so where, where do we go from here?

You know, I really feel, and I, and it was brought home to me while I was out at, uh, swamp up. We're on the precipice of, of just amazing things. When you look at what AI's doing, what you look at what the internet and everything is already, you know, technology's already brought and quantum coming on.

We are, we can, we could solve some of our greatest problems that have plagued us forever, right? We could, uh, we could bring opportunity health and dig dignity. We could change so many things, but only if we don't kill ourselves first.

Because our technology is not gonna stop a bullet. It's not gonna comfort a grieving parent who lost a child. It's not gonna parent an orphan child who lost their parent.

It can't rebuild trust that's been shattered by hate and violence. We have to do that. But instead, we treat life like a zero sum game.

Whoever dies with the most marbles wins. But that's not life. Life's not a contest.

The great thing about technology, the great thing about the industrial revolution was that instead of just giving people smaller slices of a, of a one size pie, we've been able to grow the pie. And that's what we need to do. We need to grow the pie bigger so that everyone has a slice, that everyone has dignity, that everyone can live with.

This, we have to look at our technology not as just tools, but as a mirror that reflect the best of us, not the worst of us. Our collaboration, our creativity. What if AI's pursuit of empathy taught us to rediscover our own empathy?

What if Quantum's process of parallel processing reminded us that multiple truths, multiple lives, multiple futures, can't coexist exist? So my, my, my call out to you is this, let this week and the craziness of this week in these past few, few months in the world we're living in right now, let this serve as another nine 11 moment, a bookend to say, you know, at the end of the day, we're human. We shouldn't celebrate someone getting killed or shot violently like that.

We shouldn't, um, let us realize we have more in common as humans than the lines that divide us. I'm not saying technology alone will heal all our wounds, but it can be a bridge. It can give us an opportunity to live longer, healthier lives.

And ironically, technology can remind us what it means to be truly human. So I, I want to get to my end in here. So let me just end up with this, right?

And I'm speaking now for all of us at Textron, not just myself. Violence is never the answer. It wasn't the answer today.

It wasn't the answer yesterday. It won't be the answer tomorrow. It's never gonna be the answer.

As I said earlier, most of us are in the tech space because we believe technology can make the world better. And that's just not, not just the tagline, it's a responsibility. We in the tech space have the opportunity to lead and make this world better.

I believe it. It's our job. And if we can do that, um, as I wrote in my story, maybe the best of times can outweigh the worst peace.

That's it for Shimmy today. Shimmy says.