Big Tech’s Trump Payoffs, SpaceX vs Telecom Giants, AI Search Disruption

Hey everyone. Happy Monday and welcome to Techstrong Gang. I'm here, but I'm not here.

I'm actually on my way to Vegas today. But this isn't some quantum kind of exercise where I'm in two places at once. I'm actually in Techstrong Studios, but I'm wrapping this up, and I'll be heading over to the airport, where I'll be flying out to Vegas to visit about 20,000 or so of my friends in cyber for Hacker Summer Camp, as we call it.

And actually, I think Tech BSides open-- Not Tech BSides. Security BSides open today. And, well, training from Black Hat's already underway.

I'm seeing a lot of LinkedIn and Boomer book pictures of my friends arriving at Vegas, where it's a cool 112 degrees. Yeah. But I'll be reporting from Black Hat later.

Let's get busy on what we have for today's Monday event of Techstrong Gang. We've got a final four panel here of my friend Tom Hollingsworth, our friend Liz Saffron. See what I did there, Mike?

Our friend, my friend, friend of ours. I see. Friend of mine.

I see that. And then our chief content officer in his Al Capone hideaway up in the Adirondacks, Mike Zott. Hi, Mike.

All right. Welcome, gang. How are you today?

We're good. I'm good. For Monday, we're doing okay.

Could be worse. So, Mike, what do you got on the docket for today? Well, more truth is stranger than fiction, but there's some reports out of "The Journal" that was detailing a lot of the relationships between the big tech companies and donations to the Trump administration.

And the article, at least the one in "The Journal," was suggesting perhaps there was a little quid quo pro going on there. I don't know, that may shock you and heavens to Betsy, but it also comes at a time when the federal government is setting aside federal lands for AI data centers, and I just wonder how that all came about. And then finally, Truth Social, Trump's social media platform, is making available data early on his tweets through an API.

So if you subscribe to this, and you happen to be an investor, you can see what the president might move or not move a stock before anybody else does. Seems a little suspicious to me as well. But Liz, as you look at all of this, what's your take on what's going on here?

Because it seems like, at the very least, there's an appearance of some issues here that people might be concerned about. Yeah. You think?

Well, all these collectively kind of give me a stomach ache, but there's a lot to unpack. I'm just going in order here with the big tech, starting with big tech. We've seen this going on since his inauguration this time.

So I feel like he's really just squeezing at the big tech apple, and it just shows how much big tech needs him. And I don't know. Like I said, this just annoys me, so I'm trying to clear out what's actually in my head- Better you than me, Liz ...

also out of my mouth, okay? So that's what the hesitancy is. I think that across the board, there's the tech bro thing, and then there's the land grab in New York, our home state.

And then there's the API thing, which I think is the most creative, if not the most blatantly, potentially illegal one. But altogether, I just feel like when is there going to be pushback? When is he going to know that it goes too far?

Right? And that's sort of a collective thing. 8 billion slush fund in order to have his nomination move forward.

So I feel like we need more of that across all of these fronts. And I'm just wondering, who's going to do it? Let's ask our resident lawyer about will there be pushback in any of this, and what might that look like?

Because I would assume that there's lawsuits coming, but what do I know? Is this a question for Tom? No.

It's not for me. I'm certainly not the lawyer, so it's not for me. So, Liz, I admire your restraint.

I curse a lot, so I really have- I know ... to pull my role. Yeah.

But let's call this what it really is. It is the most blatant corruption, cronyism that this country has seen, I think since Andrew Jackson's Teapot Dome affair in the 1820s or something, right? It may be even worse than that.

How this man doesn't wind up in an orange suit to match his orange makeup is beyond me. But from a legal point of view, why we aren't seeing more action legally is because the Supreme Court, which he packed the last time, thanks to Mitch, is he alive, McConnell, letting him do that, right, has given him blanket immunity while he's in office. So none of these things can be prosecuted, absent high crimes and misdemeanors, which would mean the Congress would have to get off their a*s to do something.

Mm-hmm. And they're not in any shape to do that. So with this Supreme Court blanket immunity, nothing can be done until he leaves office.

While he's president, he's basically been given blanket immunity. But- Now, that That's prosecuting him, impeaching him, going after him for this criminality. In terms of stopping what's going on here, the corruption, the bribery, and everything else, again, it's up to Congress or on an individual basis.

You gave the data center on the federal lands to these people. There's not much local people can do. It's federal land.

But they can protest the transmission lines, the water usage, and all these other things, right? Assuming it's not interstate commerce, because then it's reserved to the federal. But let's be honest, what's enabling this whole thing is the founders had an amazing system of checks and balances set up with the three branches all having their own individual seats of power.

And what we see here is basically Congress abdicating its duties to be that check and balance. And the judiciary tries every once in a while, Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett flip over with the three liberals to form a five-four majority. But I think Sam Alito, Clarence Thomas, if they're both still conscious somewhere, they approve everything and anything this president would do, along with Brett Kavanaugh for the most part.

So you got those three, and then Coney Barrett and Roberts are the two swings, if you will, and they're not exactly democratic socialists either. And so this is the revolting predicament we find ourselves in here. It's no different than our friends in Russia under Putin or Iraqi citizens under Saddam Hussein.

We're in good company. Wait. To be fair to Andrew Jackson, the Teapot Dome scandal was Warren Harding, 1920.

Oh, excuse me. Wrong one. But no, Andrew Jackson did have another scandal, and I don't remember the name of it.

He has a lot on his hands. But Tom, do you want to weigh in here? And I guess the question I would have is, at some point, and it may come sooner than later because there may even be congressional hearings depending on who controls Congress, are there going to be some difficult questions asked?

Maybe the president is immune, but not everybody else is immune. It's just going to be a guy in front of Congress doing this for three or four hours because one of the things that I think that we're having a hard time with is holding these people accountable because they've created a method of doing this that effectively makes it insulated, right? "Well, I didn't bribe anybody.

" Or something along those lines. To Alan's point, though, we are starting to see the waves reverberating through things. " And that resonates up because now people are starting to see maybe these things aren't so popular.

But there has to be a way to tie something so hideous to someone that we need to get rid of. So my proposal, and I think that I can actually pull this off if you give me about 10 minutes on X, is that we put his name on the side of all the data centers. Because that will appeal to his vanity and his narcissism, and it will remind everybody why those data centers showed up in the first place.

And just like everything else that has his name on it, people are going to just be violently opposed to all of it, and hopefully that will motivate them to go and put the kinds of people in in the third leg of this stool to start having these investigations, to make people answer these questions in front of a camera under oath so that they know that there's accountability because this is the same kind of thing that we see throughout all of the systems, because somebody brought this up. I was reading an article this morning. We seem to have one of these about every 10 to 15 to 20 years, right?

There's a massive crash, there's a massive bubble, and it's because when people look around and say, "Oh, well, everybody else is making a lot of money. " That kind of mentality leads to the crash. Whereas it's unpopular to say it, but what if we lived within our means as a government?

What if we said instead of doing all of this stuff and spending all of this money and doing all of these things, we actually lived like we had a budget. I know it's weird, right? Because when's the last time we passed a budget?

But that is the kind of thing that we need to do. And if you want to give money to these reelection campaigns, to these political action committees, if you really want to get things done why don't you give money to the government? Oh, wait, I know, because that's taxes, and you hate those too.

We don't pay taxes. Yeah. But Tom, one little wrinkle.

So yes, if it's state or local-owned property that the data centers are built on, well, then you can get the local government and you have greater control at that local level. Mm-hmm. This new trick they're saying is, "Nah, we're preempting local.

" And you know the feds own about half of the land west of the Mississippi, right? Huge tracts of the West are federal land. And so that's where they're putting these data centers, and that preempts local.

Now, as I said, the transmission lines maybe, the water, they still have to cross over into federal land. But if they're crossing state lines, it becomes interstate commerce, which again, preempts local. Let me just mention, though.

Last week or the week before, Mike, I did the first part in a Techstrong investigative series on lobbying and money in the data center build-out. And that first part focused squarely on the federal side. Right?

One bill, Congress actually got off their a*s and passed one bill around data centers, and I forgot what the number was, $22 or $40 million was spent by the lobbyists in trying to influence that bill. And the AI guys playing off against themselves even, right? That they're falling over themselves.

My next installment should be out, I think, by tomorrow, and that focuses on what Tom's talking about, the local scene. The problem is- But I will say... Okay, go ahead.

Finish the thought Let me just finish. The problem on the local scene is most of these data centers are being approved and building is starting before the local people even know who it is, what it is, and when it is. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I heard about that somewhere where it was just really underground. But I will say that locally, even if it is federal land, I think from a grassroots level, because people really don't like this, that that could be, I don't know if it'll be an effective stop, but it can be a stop, right? Because people will protest, people will oust their local leaders, and that will put people who way down the food chain out of a job, and that might make them nervous enough to take some action to actually represent their constituents.

Maybe. The second thing is with the Trump API thing, is the SEC in the Supreme Court's pocket? Couldn't they actually affect that if there's an insider trading angle?

No, the SEC is in Trump's pocket. He fired everyone, appointed his own SEC. But you want to know the truth, Mike, you said something that was wrong about that.

You said the people who get the API will be the first to know what the president is doing. No, I think he tips his family and friends first, then the people who are on Trump Media. Look, if- Who do you think built the API for?

Exactly. Yeah. If they ever do, and I've seen reports on this, if they ever do a real investigation of the insider trading, one day I'm a big Anthropic fan, the next day I'm not.

And then match the trades, stock trades, to these announcements. People need to go to jail for this. Hey, you know, the cool thing is- People have gone to jail for a hell of a lot less ...

the cool thing is we have all these data centers running AI, so we can run that analysis. Yeah. If they let you.

This is like a Silkwood thing already. Mm-hmm. Remember that movie?

Meryl Streep? I do. So at the end of the day, is this going to be an anomaly or do you think the next president's just going to wind up doing the same thing and- I think about this all the time.

You know what we need? We need a Teddy Roosevelt, not a Franklin Roosevelt, a Teddy Roosevelt, the great reformer who's going to come in here and clean up corruption, bring in good government, right? But I think people got to have their stomachs full of it first before they're going to do that.

And how does this work, too? I mentioned Congress, but let's be real. These guys are all trading on stocks, on insider information- Yeah ...

themselves. So who's going to call what kettle black, right? Unless something happens.

Yeah. Some- They got to outlaw it. Look, I would make it that if you're serving in the federal government, like it used to be, you've got to put your stuff in a blind trust, you're not involved in trading.

Yeah. Now, mind you, I got no issues with we need data centers. I just don't want it to be done in a back room somewhere with four people smoking cigars in a real estate deal with no consideration of the local people.

The worst one is the Louisiana one. Read my article coming out. Or it's not an article, it's a special report off an article.

Mm-hmm. I've got unbelievable sources to the point where I had to go right to the governor of Louisiana for a Freedom of Information Act to try to get to the actual records. Well, it turns out you must be a resident of the state of Louisiana in order to have access to that.

Right. So I know we have to move on, but I just have one last thought, just based on, I don't know, Tom or Mike, whether you said it, but if you can't get the shot callers in the federal government, like just the way Trump had Michael Cohen as his fixer and he ended up going to jail and he didn't like it, who is vulnerable? And could those people be targeted, and then that's how you start shaking the tree.

I'm just trying to figure out a way to try and stop it. Yeah, but who's going to? What, you think the Department of Justice is going to sue any of these people?

The problem is there's no- They're prosecuting Comey ... fed at the trough here, right? There's no like- No, there's no bottom.

There's no bottom. Mm-hmm. There's no bottom.

We've seen this. Mm-hmm. But let's go call Fauci in and see what he says.

Oh, he's pleading the Fifth. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Let's move on because I'm going on a plane, Mike. I don't want to be aggravated.

Me? No. Well, I think Tom has it right.

Everybody will be going to Congress to plead the Fifth, and we'll just watch the parade every day. All right. But let's shift the gear.

We are now talking about satellites and communications, and Tom loves this topic, but we have Starlink is trying to expand its services, and Amazon is applying for licenses to deliver some services in the future. So is this the new battle in telecom? Is this where this is going to be fought, or is this some sort of sideshow over a satellite phone that hardly anybody's going to use?

I think that they're really trying to make this a big deal, right? Elon wants to leverage the advantage that he has in Starlink, but one of the problems that Starlink has is that it's still very much bound to those antennas, right? Even the smallest Starlink antenna is probably about the size of an iPad, and I use it for hotspot connectivity effectively.

What he wants is the ability for me to use my phone directly with a satellite, and T-Mobile has that capability right now through Starlink. But on the flip side, Amazon is buying Globalstar, and if you've never heard of the term Globalstar, if you have an iPhone, I want you to turn off the cellular function and walk outside, and you know where it says SOS satellite? That's what Globalstar has been providing for Apple for the last what, four years, five years?

Something like that. But it's been phased in in approaches, right? So originally, it was for emergency communications only, and then they started adding more and more apps.

Where the battleground is starting, and it's not just between Timu Lex Luthor and Timu Tony Stark, is they want to be able to have direct device communications, and we've seen that the FCC is slowly starting to try to open that up. They're auctioning off more spectrum bands. They're approving satellite-to-Bluetooth connectivity.

But there's some challenges, and one of the biggest challenges is that you need spectrum in certain bands in order to be able to reach down on Earth to talk directly to a device. Globalstar is a good example of this. They are really good at some wideband communications, which is why it works really well in the backcountry, but it does not work really well in the city.

It's because those bands can't penetrate buildings. But where the real problem is going to come is that the FCC is about to auction off a huge spectrum band, but they put some requirements on it because they want it to go to someone who's going to provide this connectivity, and they have specifically blocked Starlink from bidding on that band right now as the rules stand, because they aren't providing the kinds of assurances that the FCC wants. But that band doesn't go up for auction until next summer.

So the question then becomes, can our friends over at SpaceX AI convince the government to lift those restrictions or modify them? Because we've already seen that with Elon and Starlink, where he was trying to convince people that Starlink satellite would satisfy broadband connectivity requirements so that he can get into that juicy broadband grant program that would allow people, instead of building fiber build-outs or aerial Wi-Fi towers, to use his Starlink constellation instead. Mm-hmm.

I like this story a lot because, as you might see, I'm up in the Adirondacks, and my problem with the Adirondacks right now is I can't really go more than six feet from my house because I can't get a connection to anything. So I'm hoping maybe someday this satellite stuff will be more real, but right now, apparently Verizon works up here, but not T-Mobile, so I don't know. Well, that's the other thing.

Well, you know- Go ahead. The one thing I did want to bring up here is that Amazon's making a smarter play in this whole deal because Globalstar actually already has an exemption from the FCC to use their satellite connectivity network as effectively backup communications in the L and S bands, which means if they wanted to operate that as its own network, they're already licensed to do it. Starlink isn't.

That's why they have to partner with T-Mobile in order to offer that service right now. But one of the things that I've heard some people rumbling about is, oh, well, SpaceX can get around that by just buying a carrier, right? They could buy T-Mobile.

They could buy AT&T. They don't want to do that because if you buy AT&T, you've not only bought their service, but you've bought every one of their towers. You've bought all of their legacy architecture that you are now going to have to spend real money to upgrade, not monopoly money.

And that is a boat anchor that he doesn't want to have to deal with. He would rather go his own way to do that. But I don't know that SpaceX can satisfy the requirements like Globalstar did to be able to be a primary provider of those services.

Because ultimately, what Elon wants is to be able to provide for all devices himself with no money going to any partners. Of course. Doesn't every oligarch?

But let's look at this. You got SpaceX stock. It had a heck of an opening, didn't it?

And then it quickly fell to Earth like a bad satellite, and it continues to fall. Elon has to do something here. The first great white hope was to put data centers up in space.

But the more people look at that, the more sort of half ridiculous it is. I know Steven was here last week commenting about some new research he found about how they might be able to cool them down. So you got that.

Number two, you've got another oligarch, Jeff Bezos, chomping at the bit to justify this, what's it called, Big Blue or whatever his rocket company is. Blue Origin, yeah. Blue Origin.

To launch more satellites and to create a network that competes with Elon, right? In the meantime, Tom, all of that legacy infrastructure, we still don't have real 5G. We still don't have real 5G, and now we're talking about 6G, right?

In great parts of the world. And Mike, to your Adirondack point, the great electric build-out didn't come to the Adirondacks either till much, much later, during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt team, that's Franklin now, not Teddy. Franklin, they passed a law, or they created the Rural Electric act or something that allowed people up that way to form co-ops.

And build out their own utilities. A similar thing with the phone system, the wired line phones. So that's the problem, but that is one of the advantages of satellite, is it can go to the rural areas.

But as Tom says, it really doesn't play well in dense building areas. And I don't know if it ever becomes your direct phone connection, not without a lot more infrastructure. I think that's ultimately the goal, is that they want to build out enough infrastructure where it stops being a backup system and starts becoming the primary connectivity.

Because I remember watching- Well, if we could just build a Dyson sphere around the sun, suck all of its energy up, and then beam it back here into these space-borne data centers, and then have a thing of satellites. Yeah. Look, I want to be a Kardashev Type II civilization as much as anybody else does, but we're not there yet.

No. And not even SpaceX's lofty valuation gets us there. I don't know how lofty it's going to be if he doesn't get this stuff working.

But also, do we want- Go ahead ... do we want our AI overlords to own yet another essential business? I just feel like it- What makes you think they don't right now?

Well, they are trying to displace some incumbents, and even if from an innovation perspective, there's a case for that, right? That they're doing something better. I don't know.

I just feel like it's just too much. Remember that AT&T and Verizon were the last century's AI overlords. I guess.

I'll tell you what does make me sad, though, when it comes back to the Adirondacks is one of the joys of being up here is the night sky. You can go out and check out the stars. And now, if I go out, there are just satellites, one after the other, traveling by overhead, and it's kind of messing up the whole vibe.

Yeah. Mike, I think you better- What if they start tracking you? stop smoking or whatever they're giving you up there.

Yeah. That you're seeing satellites one after the other like that. You are.

It's pretty funny. You see one, and then you can count to about maybe 20 minutes, and then there'll be another one coming by. Really?

They're watching you, Mike. They're watching you. I guess so.

Yeah. Maybe. Okay.

Okay. If you say so there. I don't know.

I haven't seen them, but look, what do I know? Anyway, let's move on to chapter three today, and we'll leave Elon and his satellites for the moment. What else we got, Mike?

Well, you have a post up on Digital CxO talking about what it means to be forward-looking, forward-leaning, and specifically as it deals with the analyst community and maybe everybody else in general. But, do we need to think differently about how we analyze this industry? What are you trying to get at?

Well, there's a lot of things wrapped up in there. Let me unpeel it a little bit, and then I want to throw it to Tom, because he's a real-life forward analyst. Mm-hmm.

So forward. Everybody's talking about forward because technology's like the NFL. It's a copycat league.

And Palantir's done pretty well financially, and a lot of people say one of their secrets to the sauce is the forward-placed engineer. Right? Forward-placed engineer.

Forward deployed, yeah. Forward-deployed engineer. Some people call it a sales engineer.

We used to do have those. But anyway, a lot of people are looking at that model as the model now. There's two things you get from Palantir.

Forward-deployed engineer, and don't give them your alpha, whatever your alpha is. Now, Daniel Newman kind of real instinctually, and it's what makes Daniel Daniel, said, "I'm looking at that, but I'm also looking at what's going on in the AI world. " And came up with this idea of Futurum Forward and the forward analyst.

Which says that, "Hey, let's face it. The game has changed. People don't want to pay an analyst to tell them what happened last year.

" Any of my AIs can gather data and write me a nice analysis. I want a trusted advisor who's going to help me make decisions. All of these things.

And Daniel's tagged that the forward analyst, and at Futurum, that's what our analysts are moving to, forward analyst. I take it one step further and say, what about media? We've got similar things going on here.

Google is a parasite. It's broken the covenant with the open web by not giving out clicks and just sucking our data. It's not just them, it's the social media- No ...

companies now are aggregating stories and putting them up on the feeds. Yeah. Right.

It's changed. The game has changed the same way the analyst game has changed. And so we need forward journalists, Mike.

We need forward editors. We need forward video hosts here. We've got to reestablish relationships with our end users.

We've got to remember who our customers are, who our sponsors are, and we have to deal with them as a trusted source. And so it's not just an analyst, it's not just a writer, it's not just an engineer. I think we are entering the age of the forward organization.

And this is something I've spent a lot of time talking to Daniel with. I think, and it's not just in the analyst and media business. I think you're going to see this ripple through enterprises left and right.

I can't help but wonder, I go back in time, pre-web, and think about when we had print publications, and Liz, you were there. Yeah. And all the print publications had their own conferences, largely because they wanted to prove their audiences, and that they existed, and they were a thing.

And then the internet came along, and everybody chased banner ads, and all the conferences business kind of stagnated a little bit. It's still out there. But, I wonder if, Liz, if you think all this is going to converge again, where it's going to be media and conferences and some research and all this is going to be a thing we used to call community back in the day.

Yeah. Well, I'll speak more to the media side because I'm a little bit more familiar with that. But I will say I read somewhere before, just that I'm going to talk about media, then I'm going to talk about analysts for a second before I talk about media.

But Gartner Group, I'm trying to remember, I think I saw this on LinkedIn, has been losing money or losing- Their stock's down about 65%. Yes. But also it's because their sign-ups are going down.

And I just, for a client, was vetting a different analyst firm that was like a new Gartner with the same business model that frankly was pretty expensive. And I just thought that's an old school play that's already not working for them, so why are they doing that? But with the media, I actually think that community and conferences are making a comeback, especially because after COVID, it wasn't just like the just Google, it was that humans wanted to congregate and come together.

And so look at Black Hat. There's Black Hat and Bsides and DEF CON. It's all happening at one, and it's like the same big thing, but with little communities within the bigger community.

So I think that that's a way if, to your point about it's all about the customer or the end user, who are you serving and what do they want? If there can be a business model that can be a little bit more boutique, where a business can keep running and maybe charge a little bit more and be more customer focused, then maybe that could work. But I do think that people are hungry for community.

I'll speak for myself. I've been a consultant working at home forever. I really miss being around other people.

And I see it, I don't think I'm the only one who feels that way. The whole work from home thing has gotten a little bit played. So for analysts, I don't know.

I'll defer to you, but I think there's- Tom ... definitely an appetite. Tom, you're a forward analyst.

How's it working for you? So far everything's going well because working with folks like Mitch Ashley and Fernando Montenegro and the rest of the Futurum team, we figured out where the value really is. We live in a world now, like you said, where AI can tell us just about anything we want when we feed it the data.

That is not in and of itself valuable. What's valuable is, to Liz's point, that communication, that connection that you have with other people. It's not just about walking in and delivering a report.

It's asking the questions. It's understanding direction and vision and things like that. Because yes, traditional analysts and AI that is replacing them is really good at taking a mountain of data and telling you what it says.

And it's the prediction aspect of it, the forward-looking part, so to speak, where it starts failing. Because systems like AI really are bounded by imagination. Like they can't really think outside of the set of parameters.

I was actually quite literally asking something this morning to give me an analysis of this, and it gave me an analysis. " That's not something that a person has to deal with. A person can have conversations with your executive team, but also with your technical teams and see where some of the challenges are and be able to provide you with ideas for how to overcome them.

And that's, again, thinking outside of the little black box that's AI. And if you don't have that, if all you have is a system that reinforces that, yes, you made a good decision, and you're going to continue to keep making decisions, and I'm going to continue to validate the decisions that you made, you're creating a feedback loop that'll eventually lead to nothing because you'll never stop thinking in the old way that people aren't doing anymore. So I would like the people watching this to also think about their role in this exercise, because I'm doing this for a long time, and I've met many a CIO who goes shopping for opinions that match ones they already have.

Yeah. Basically, all they're looking for is for somebody to sign off who's a third party on something they want to do. That's not the best use of these resources.

" And it has to be- Well, are you- ... a secret conversation. Are you talking about the tech scene now or about just society in general?

The tech scene. Okay. CIOs are notorious- Because no one lives in their own echo chambers in the US or anywhere else, right?

No. But- Of course ... CIOs are notorious for shopping for research that matches what they already want to do.

Does that make sense? I agree. So Tom, you were saying that AI could analyze what it says, but you said you need the people to figure out what it means.

Is that what the whole forward deploy thing is in a nutshell? Yeah. Not only what it means, but how it can apply to other use cases that are not specifically related to whatever you said the analysis was.

So it's like I can tell you what color a jewel is. I can tell you how hard a jewel is. But can I tell you would it look good with this gold or that gold?

Would I tell you that it would look better as an earring instead of a necklace? There is a creativity aspect to it, something that is difficult to replicate, right? How many times have we heard AI art sucks because while it looks like art, it doesn't have any soul to it?

And I feel like maybe that's really what the Ford-deployed analyst aspect of it is. And that also bleeds into the media type of things. We're people.

We have that kind of mentality that we want to learn more. We want to connect with people. We want to make things better.

And AI is just doing what you tell it to. It is slightly better autocomplete. Look, I think for me, and I'm trying to remember what story I wrote this kind of line into it, but basically the essence here is we've got to go where the models can't.

Right? The models, they get better every rev. They get more intelligent every rev.

But I think what Tom's trying to say is they lack the spark of creativity. They still need, at this point anyway, a human to provide that spark, to provide that creativity. And what the AI finds is what the AI finds, but what a human is going to tell you, Liz, is going to be very different than what a human's going to tell Tom because the human recognizes you're Liz, you're Tom, you have two different needs.

The AI serves up an answer for everyone at some level because there isn't that creativity, there isn't that spark. What do you think, Mike? I think this is all for the best, and I think ultimately this is where we need to go, not just as an analyst issue, but as a society issue, to your earlier point.

I just wish people would kind of wrap their heads around it faster because frankly, I see a lot of people still relying on AI like it's a crutch, right? They're basically using it to reason through some sort of question and answer without adding anything of their own experience around that or any of their own thoughts around it. It's just becoming too much of a magic eight ball.

They shake it, and they hope that there's some answer in there that sounds good to them. Well, also, you lose your own discernment, right? If you're using AI like a Google and you're not doing the critical thinking piece, then you're going to lose the muscle of critical thinking.

So analysts and media that could step in and role model, you know what I mean? Humanized critical thinking, I hope there will be a business model there because people at some point will be hungry for that. Mm-hmm.

So I don't think you just drop AI. Again, doing the research for my book, right? I think we mentioned it maybe last week on here.

The Industrial Revolution that was set up by steam engines, you had a central steam engine in a factory, and it was connected by pulleys and belts to all of these different stations in the factory. One engine. When electricity first came out, the natural reaction was to replace that one engine with an electric engine.

So now you didn't have to make steam to make the pulleys and belts go. You had an electric engine that did it, but you really didn't see that big, you had sort of very incremental increase. It wasn't until people like Henry Ford came along and got rid of the central engine and started putting engines directly where the work was being done, that all of a sudden you saw a 40, 60, 80% increase in productivity because the factory was designed for the technology.

Right now, we're still using AI in very much a human-designed factory. Mm-hmm. When we have the AI-designed factory that's optimized for AI and machine speed, and then set aside what the human does with that, how we use it, I think that's when you're going to see the real productivity gains kick in.

Doing AI just to do what you're doing now faster, I mean, it's not terrible, but it's not really the best use. I think it's more about the iterative nature of the interaction with the AI, right? Because historically, if I got a report from an analyst, I could ask the analyst a couple of questions, and they might get back to me in three months.

They might not. Mm-hmm. But I think with AI, one of the things that I like about it is that if I ask it something, I can ask the follow-up question immediately, and I can get some sort of iteration going where I can tease something out.

And for that, we used to have to have a human show up in the room to do that. Now, the human can add on top of that and maybe help with the reasoning and think through some of those issues earlier. " Well, there's more things you can think of upfront now with AI, and you can build that into the system, I think.

I think so, too. You know what I think, though? I think we're about out of time.

Mm-hmm. Listen, I've got to head to the airport and head out to Vegas, where it's a dry 112 or whatever. But Tom, I'm sorry.

I thought at first for a while there you were coming. I'm sorry I'm going to miss you. I'll have a cool drink for you while I'm there.

Liz, I assume you're not heading out either this year? Nope, not this year. So I won't see you out there.

We'll see you out on here, but both of you, thank you for being here. Mike, thank you as always in your continuing trek to the Adirondacks. Mm-hmm.

Maybe you could put up one of those cell towers. They make it look like a pine tree. No one will notice.

I'm sure somebody has one up here. I just got to plug in. Yep.

But most of all, thank you for watching today on techstrong® gang. It's been a great show. A lot of interesting things.

AI continues to divide us, unite us, and amaze us all at the same time. And I'm sure we'll be talking more about it. As usual, we'll be here all week, Monday to Friday, at noon Eastern Time, live.

And if you want to catch these on demand, you always can. tv, on the techstrong® TV YouTube channel, and the techstrong® TV OTT channel available on Amazon Fire Stick, Roku, Apple, iOS, and Android. Just about any screen you like to watch this on.

We've got a lot of techstrong® TV coming your way, as always, on our techstrong® network. Tom, we've got any tech-- I know I ask Steve this every week, but Tech Field Days, what's the next one? It's going to be Cloud Field Day, which is going to be towards the end of September.

com has all of the details. And trust me, starting mid-September through October and into early November, it's going to be one right after the other. So buckle up, set your calendars, because you're going to get a lot of content headed your way.

You know what they say, wake me up when September comes. Yep. All right.

Until then, everyone, hey, I'll be in Vegas all week. Check out what I'll be writing, filming, saying, doing. We'll try to make Black Hat come to you if you can't be at Black Hat.

But until then, this is Alan Shimel, and we're out.