Exploring Quantum Economics & AI Politics | TSG Ep. 955

Hey, everyone, good and bad at the same time. It's quantum economics. You're watching Textron Gang.

Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday. Welcome back to Textron Gang.

It's right, it's hump day. We are, i, it, it sometimes it amazes me once you get into that kind of wind tunnel or that, you know, down the stretch towards the holidays, it just seems like time accelerates, right? So here we are.

It's, it's the, the 29th. We have Halloween this weekend. Always a fun time.

I don't know what you guys are planning to dress up on or do for Halloween, but it's great. Halloween was always big to me as a kid, but I must say it's become a, a much bigger holiday than the last 10, 15 years maybe, right? I think it's not just for kids in candy anymore, right?

It's, it's, uh, it's really become a celebration. Um, anyway, but we've got a lot more to do before Halloween, including a great text on gang show today. Let me introduce you to our Wednesday panel members, and I feel like this is our normal Wednesday panel.

This has become rather locked in stability in the gang. Uh, of course we've got Chris Blask, Kate Scarcella, Dan O'Brien, Mike Vizard, welcome gang members. It's good to see you.

I know some of you have toothpicks holding your eyes open, having stayed up late for a Dodgers game the night before, or Dodgers Blue Jays game. Excuse me. Um, appreciate you all getting on here.

So, I wanted to first talk today, I, I kind of hinted at about quantum economics, right? And, and you could, we could really see the drum beat, you know, the drum, the drums beating here towards Q deck towards quantum becoming more real. We're seeing it a a steady flow, not only in kind of tech, uh, media, but even in the mainstream media.

And, and usually, you know, where there's smoke is fire. You can smoke and fire, smoke, no fire, fire, no smoke. All of those at the same time in a quantum future.

But, um, you know, a recent announcement came out. Now, the US government in talks to take stakes in quantum computing startups. Mike, you could probably guess how I where I lay on this, but I'm gonna throw it out at you to kick us off.

So, there's a report in the Wall Street Journal talking about how the US government is at least talking about $10 million stakes. And I think that there's four or five of these startups. And what's interesting about all this from my perspective is, you know, we see that Google and IBM and, uh, all kinds of folks are investing heavily in quantum computing.

So I'm not quite clear why the US government feels the need to invest in a couple of startups. And Alan, I'm gonna toss that back to you. But is this, you know, maybe just putting a thumb on the scale in a way that's not good, or are we setting the stage for something bigger?

Like, I don't know, the nationalization of quantum computing. So let me try to be fair, fair and balanced here. Okay?

There's nothing of manner with investing in quantum technology. We, if we deem it a strategic imperative here in the us, we should invest in it. We should.

However, the way that it's been, if we're gonna do it the way we took stakes in Intel and, and have invested in some of the AI stuff, it's totally wrong because we can have a, a tech bro oligarchy. And that's my fear, is that the people who the, this, this particular administration are gonna invest in are gonna have to take an oath of loyalty. They're gonna have to be part of the, of the old gang, of the tech bro oligarchy.

And that is wrong. You wanna do this right? Do it the way the rest of the world does it set up a sovereign fund with real principles of who we invest in, why we invest in them, what our goals are, right?

It, this is not, this is not like a brand new playbook. And you go out and you pick, you pick the companies that are going to, that you think are gonna be winners, and you think you're gonna help your national interest. There are plenty of countries that do this well with a sovereign fund.

Instead, my fear, this is gonna be run like a slush fund by MAGA to reward their, their followers and punish their perceived adversaries. And that I don't want my tax dollars going for that. You're right.

I'd rather let Google and IBM and A MD and, and the rest do their thing. It's a shame that we can't act like adults and reasonable people and do this the right way, because it is that important. It is that important where the, the, the, the progress is coming faster and faster.

You can feel the momentum building here. Let's not fritter it away over at like everything else lately that we do. We'll talk more about it, I think in the third, uh, session today.

The third, uh, uh, section today politicizing our strategic interest. And that's a problem. I'll throw it out to the rest of the game.

Dan, what's your take here? Because, um, you know, under the heading of fair and balance, let's see if there's another point of view. Listen, that, I think it's a complicated topic.

Alan said earlier, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire, you know, I'll throw another saying out there, right? You know, things happen slowly then all at once. Um, you know, putting the politics aside for a second, clearly there's a lot of progress happening watching computing, right?

Um, you know, it's the age old argument, exactly how far we are away from, you know, real useful quantum computing. But it seems to be getting closer and closer. Quantum is very much one of those problems, one of those challenges where it's really a convergence of technologies problem.

And when you, you know, when everything kind of ties itself right across hardware, software, you know, cooling, you know, the cryogenics, all the things that need to, you know, intense engineering that needs to come together to make this thing real. It does feel like we're getting closer and closer. Um, I, you know, I I think, uh, you know, back to maybe more a little bit of the politics side of this.

This is a game changing technology. You know, to the degree we think AI is a game changer, technology quantum is even more so a game changer. Techno technology, right?

You know, the ability to discover things that were previously undiscoverable, you know, massive opportunity to disrupt a number of different industries. I think this really gets into a question of, you know, and this is a big question that we gotta figure out whether we actually wanna tackle or not, but where does the defense industry begin and the technology industry end and vice versa, right? Defense and tech are increasingly getting closer and closer, blurrier and blurrier.

And listen, the amount of money we're talking about being vested in this quantum compute computing companies, it's kind of a joke, right? If you consider it as part of, you know, what we spend on defense overall, I mean, it's truly a drop in the bucket, right? Um, I think it's a little bit interesting the way they're doing it because listen, the US government's a massive investor in the technology industry.

And when I say that, I mean as a customer, right? They, they decide winners and losers in industries based on where they put federal contracts and, you know, the entire tech industry benefits, you know, from a lot of that. Typically that's the way they would do it.

You know, they're being a little bit more direct with the investment and taking more of an ownership stake versus really helping to, you know, propel certain companies and, you know, help that progress along on what could be, you know, um, a majorly important, you know, strategic, uh, you know, technology advantage for the United States versus its, you know, versus its enemies, you know, at a, at a global level. Um, I think the reason they're doing it this Way, competitors stand competitors, were signing the treaties this week. Supposedly they're not enemies fair, Maybe not enemies too strong.

Uh, but, you know, I I think this administration to some degree measures itself daily in the performance of the stock market, right? And I think that's where, you know, the, the politics are blending a little bit on how they're investing and what they're really after. I think a lot of this is really trying to make sure that we shore up a really important industry in a potentially massively disruptive competitive technology out there.

Uh, but, you know, the way they're doing it also feels like it's a little bit of, you know, getting into the, you know, stock, stock market side of things and really trying to drive a, a, a few companies forward. Chris, to Dan's point, are we in danger of creating something that starts to feel and smell like the technology industrial complex? And do we need to kind of bring Eisenhower back?

Yeah, I mean this, this, you know, tickles my, uh, my libertarian bones right around the turn of the century, you know, I was, I was deep in it and ran, bill Redpath was the, was the chair of the American libertarian party. And we had a long conversation right when I was moving outta that phase of my political life, where, where at the end of it, I just love it, right? 'cause he said, I, I think as a former libertarian, you know, he said, look, I know we need social programs.

I just hate freeloaders, right? And, and I get that. So I get that entirely.

And I think this is one of these times where, you know, I'll just agree with, with Alan in, in your basic arc as, as an American, as a capitalist, free speech, democracy, all these wonderful things, libertarian ideals, um, I'm happy to let you know those ideas compete and I think they compete better for nation states. When you know, you, you take more of the approach that you're framing Alan, right? You know, it's like, let the market actually work itself out, right?

That stuff actually does work. You start putting politics in it and somebody else won't, and it'll be better, faster, cheaper, and they'll get the lead and that will determine itself, right? So it's less worth, I think, arguing about it on moment by moment basis.

You, that's sort of, when it's hold my coffee, it's like, really? You wanna go down that path? Alright.

You look around, it's like, who isn't? I'll be talking with these folks over here. And when you find the error of your ways and, and, and look, you know, it, it is a complicated world.

And to be fair, I could be wrong at any one of these things. Sometimes it's the right time to do the wrong thing. Um, but, you know, it is, it is hard to avoid the nested jokes in a quantum topic because you guys have already used several of them.

But, you know, this may be several things at once, but to me, you know, this, this makes, you know, uh, on my teenage days reading Anne Rand, you know, sound like a, like an object lesson. It is, it is, it is. And and Dan, to your point, you're right, it's 10 million bucks.

That's, that's chump change in today's, in today's marketplace. So they're not doing it because that money by in and of, by itself, is gonna hoist for the optics. It's the, yeah.

They're trying to create, what they're doing is they're, they're, they're anointing their chosen ones. And if they're chosen ones happen to be people who swear fey to the administration or to a particular political movement. Well, that smacks, that smacks of, of, of oligarchy and fascism and, and all of the bad things.

We don't want to be, right. If you have, if they set up a fund and said, Hey, we're gonna run a, a contest and we're gonna have a, a, a panel of blue ribbon VCs, a panel of blue ribbon scientists, a panel of experts who are gonna pick the next generation of quantum leadership, and the prize is a $10 million investment from the US government, man, I'd, I'd sign on for that today. I think that's the kind of things that we used to do.

We we could do that Good. Not not handing it out to, you know, my, my, my loyal supporters as a thank you. But let me, let me get away from the politics for a second.

I, I just did an interview this morning with the CTO of Cloudera, come over in Europe. He's had some serious positions in quantum, actually, for the eu. And he said something to me that I think we need to remember when you look like, let's say the previous three or four stages, if you will, of the industrial revolution, there was always sort of one key technology that, you know, was, was the catalyst for an industrial revolutionary age.

The steam engine, for instance, right? Brought about a, a huge change, an industrial revolution. The internet brought about another stage of the industrial revolution.

And one could argue that shortly thereafter, not long thereafter, the cell phone right, has, has ushered in another era. He said, how lucky are we? How lucky are we that we have ai, quantum and robotics all converging and, and playing off each other potentially here at the same time?

At the same time. Then you throw in some of the other nanotechnology space, some of the other things that we've got going on right now. And man, what, what an exciting time to be alive.

What an ex what a, I mean, you know, you talk about the new front. So I'm, I I, I was born in 1960 and I grew up in the seventies, but we kind of idolized the sixties, you know, the, and the whole Kennedy thing was the new frontier. What a, what an exciting new frontier to, to live at this convergence point where we have three, at least three technologists coming together.

Each one of them can kick off its own industrial revolution, right? This, this is, this is an amazing time for mankind, for humanity. I don't want to use the word mankind 'cause it doesn't take, it sounds too male deep.

I wanna pull Kate in here for a second. Um, Kate, let's imagine if you would, that you're working for a company in the quantum computing space, and you wake up one morning to discover that the United States is investing $10 million each in five different companies that are competitors of yours. What's kinda your reaction?

You know, what's your kind of, you know, thought process as you kind of wake up one morning and go, Hey, United States government is betting against me. 0, I think it's, it's extremely important. I don't know why we are rewriting the way that we have succeeded in the United States.

And from your point of view, if the, if the United States government was putting money into my competitors, I would be really worried. Meaning that, um, I think the, the playground changed on me and I wouldn't be able to get the ball to play basketball with the other folks, you know? And so if you can't play, you know, even though I have really good technology, I would be really concerned.

And, and I hate that, that we don't let, um, companies fail if they should fail and let the good ones succeed. And we are playing with things that we, the government doesn't understand. We are barely getting our hands around this, and we're in the IT industry.

So we're expecting government to jump in and play in an area that, you know, they, they really don't understand. Hmm. I wouldn't be so happy.

Agreed. Agreed. You know, I, and, and then I, well, I I do wanna just close out positively here, right?

Google, uh, their willow chip, they made some announcements this past week. Uh, you know, progress is happening, right? Yeah.

That I-B-M-A-M-D thing is pretty impressive too. Yes, It is. Yes it is.

So it, it, it is exciting. Future is hybrid future, right? I mean, I think that that's the, the thing you're seeing stack up here, right?

You've got new quantum algorithms happening, you know, with Google, you've got, you know, quantum algorithms being able to run on kind of classical hardware being demonstrated by IBM and, and A and D. So, you know, all the progress is adding up. I think it just means we're getting closer and closer.

And if I could just add one thing real quick. I was watching, um, Mary Erdos from JP Morgan Chase, uh, this morning on, on, on Bloomberg News. And what was fascinating to me was she, she said that, um, she wants somebody with curiosity.

That's what she wants today. Like when she hires a person, she doesn't care so much about talent. It's, she wants somebody coming who's curious and with questions.

And that's where I think we are today. I, I agree with that, Kate. I, I think that is, I, I want people, if I've gotta tell you to use AI or to see what quantum can do for you, or what physical and robot, you know, robotics can help us with.

I don't want you working for me. I want people who can't wait to sink their teeth into new stuff like that. And, and, um, we'll see, we'll see what happens.

Anyway, we're over time on this one. We need to take a break. Let's come back and talk about Qualcomm and Qualcomm ai.

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And it might take a little while for that to find its way in the marketplace, but Dan, wall Street went crazy and everybody decided that this was the greatest thing of the weekend. I don't know, what's your take on it? 'cause I'm of two mixed minds.

One is, well, I'm happy to see another supplier. And the second part of it though, is I feel like this was a pre-announcement that goes under the heading of, as soon as I get off this couch, I'm gonna kick some ass. Well said Mike.

Uh, yeah, no, I think the market reaction was positive. You know, it's certainly, you know, enabling kind of a narrative here from Qualcomm in terms of their exposure, you know, to this massive AI infrastructure build out. Um, you know, listen, I I think it's gonna to be a few years before we see, you know, just how impactful it is to them.

They've got a, you know, a nice interesting roadmap that they've laid out there. There's some interesting differentiated bits, you know, particularly around, you know, low power use of low power memory versus side bandwidth memory. Um, you know, clearly I, I think a sign of kind of the maturing AI landscape in a lot of ways, and that, you know, they do seem to be focused on, you know, kind of specific use cases.

Um, you know, as, as things really kind of get optimized as we scale out, you know, they seem to be really coming at it that way. Um, and now it's two different kind of generations of systems. Interestingly, this was not just a chip announcement, this was a full rack scale system, right?

So, you know, seeing that, you know, that trend is really kind of stuck in the market, and that's the way that people are coming at it. Um, you know, I, I think this is a, this is a long term game for Qualcomm, right? I mean, do I think this is gonna be a massive needle mover on their revenue in the very short term?

No. Uh, but I think, you know, they're announcing their intent. They're building an ecosystem.

Uh, they're targeting a specific part of kind of the inference, you know, use case. Um, Qualcomm's always done really well on, you know, the edge on mobile. Um, you know, they're really the dominant player in that space.

And as you know, as AI gets closer out to the edge, and, you know, we see more and more of these use cases scale where, you know, large models, consumer ai, you know, out there, you know, on device. Um, you know, I think it's a really, you know, interesting play for that. Um, you gotta remember too, you know, if this is a long-term play for Qualcomm, you know, six G is what, five years away?

Um, you know, think about wireless data centers. You know, they, they've got an interesting angle to play from a long-term perspective that, you know, nobody else has. You think about the amount of cabling and, uh, needed in a data center.

There's an enormous amount of expense there. Um, and I think, you know, Qualcomm has some disruptive technologies in their technologies arsenal that, you know, could really give them an interesting long-term play as the market matures here. Um, but, you know, clearly the stock market loves the narrative, loves the angle.

Um, but, you know, we'll, we'll see kind of how impactful it is from a revenue perspective over the years to come. So, look, I, I commend Qualcomm for doing this, right? Because I think, you know, there are two kinds of people in the world, two kind two kinds of companies in the world.

There's one set that looks at it and says, wow, Nvidia is an 8,000 pound gorilla. They have years of a headstart, it seems, in, in this AI chip race. And why even bother, right?

Why even bother with let's find something complimentary to them, or, you know, work with them. And then there's the other kind of people who say, you know what? I'm gonna chip away at that stone, and I realize they have a, a dominant position today, but it, it isn't always gonna be that way.

And if I don't, if I don't start now, it'll, oh, I'll never get there. You gotta start somewhere. And, and you know what?

You look at a MD versus Intel in the PC wars of the, of the nineties and two thousands. It, it was the same kind of thing. It was, you know, kind of shoveling sand against the tide a little bit at some times it seemed.

But their day came too. Their days come too, and Qualcomm and everyone else getting into this AI chip, including a MD, right? Look, a M D's had some great success recently in this AI chip business.

So, you know, we need to foster competition. Competition is good. It'll keep Nvidia on their toes, right?

And, and keep them trying to maintain their lead. Um, like Dan, like you said, six G, you know, when and if it becomes real and how well it's implemented could be something that tips the scales into, into the Qualcomm favor because of their expertise there. Competition, you know, going back to what we spoke about in the last segment, competition is good.

It, it, that is kind of the American way. We don't want monopolies or, or government, you know, mandated winners and losers. Competition's a great thing.

I I applaud Qualcomm for doing it, and I, I'm not surprised the street has as well, Dan, when do people kind of design products around chips? And I'm asking the question because if I ever look over at Nvidia, you know, they all tell me about like, Blackwell is coming, and they were, gave me like a year, year and a half lead time on it, and then we all sat around and waited to see if they could actually do it. Qualcomm will be probably the same thing, but am I designing something three years out on the premise that Qualcomm will have a chip that I'm gonna use?

Or do I design something that kind of assumes that there is some chip from somebody that I'll use when it's available, but I don't really know for sure who's got what when? Yeah, I think the relationship between the leading chip makers, and let's be honest, there's a handful of meaningful chip makers in the world. There's a handful of meaningful OEMs and ODMs in the world, and the engineering relationships between those companies are incredibly tight, right?

I mean, they're sharing three to five year roadmaps with some level of specificity, um, and five to 10 year roadmaps that have, you know, probably a little bit of a higher level of abstraction, right? So, you know, this, this is not a world in which, you know, you don't know what's going to be available for you. Um, you're, you're looking at these roadmaps, you're talking to all the suppliers, and you know, you're reeling all using all that information to design what you're making, you know, as, as somebody who uses chips as an input to, you know, solve their larger good or service that they produce.

So, you know, I, I think there's a, you know, pretty strong telegraph signals being sent by everybody within the industry on kind of what's to come. Um, you know, like I said, I, I think Qualcomm's got an interesting play here from a long-term perspective near term. I think it's more of a narrative shift unless you'll s less something you'll see in the actual results.

But, you know, this is a massive market with an incredibly large tam. You know, if they can find a few use cases where, you know, they can pick off 10%, 20% of the market, I mean, that's billions and billions. Hundreds of billions of dollars, right?

Um, you know, we've talked a lot about, you know, how Qualcomm excels really in mobile on the edge. Uh, you know, I can't help but think of the world of physical ai, you know, they're a big player in that space as well. Um, and as we launch all of these, you know, autonomous physical AI driven robotic devices out into the world, they're gonna need connectivity that will likely, you know, come through a cellular connection where Qualcomm's dominant and that could easily go back to a server farm where, you know, they're running AI inference on these massive Qualcomm racks, right?

So, you know, I, I think we, we can, we could easy to be skeptical, uh, given, you know, they're entering the market a little bit late relative to some of their com established competitors. Uh, but, you know, this is a, a company that has really led the mobile and internet revolution in a big way from a network perspective. Um, and I would not call 'em out.

Mm-hmm. Great. Chris, you're building out AI apps.

How much of this factors into your thinking as you start to build out a project? And are you, you know, are you planning a year from now from a certain amount of capability being available and then we'll be severely disappointed if it's not, or are you just going with what, you know? I think it's, I, I, I've mentioned on this show, the show a number of times, you know, that, that this show itself is one of my little metrics, you know, because every week we come back and talk about these things, and I can go back to March and March, April, may, particularly, we Yeah.

And Dan, you know, you and Dan, and, and, uh, and, and I, so it's on that same path. I, I think that on this side, yeah, the hardware compute base thing will continue to go as we discussed, right. You know?

Right. You know, earlier this year we were still thinking, I'm gonna have this not just one GPU, I'll have a million GPUs and I'll take every single thing I do and go all the way to the top and come back down. And that doesn't make any sense.

You know, and through the year, we've gone more into the, at the chip level and, and all these different deals that's, you know, that workload is spreading out. We've talked about how an LLM, what we horribly call artificial intelligence, an LLM as a semantic tool in a workflow embedded in things is different than a chat, you know, LLM that you're talking to. And, you know, and we're just working through what this even means.

So all of this, you know, you know, almost everybody on the screen here is more expert than I am to say at this particular point. These individual moves are right or wrong, but they're all going in that direction, right? That this is, yeah.

If Alan, you said earlier, this is, this is one of these times, it's fascinating, all of quantum, the last segment, you know, that's happening. And we've all been seeing that company and coming, and that's happening now. Oh, AI's coming.

And we saw that coming, and that's happening now. Oh, and by the way, it's semantics systems hold mine, beer. That's the next segment.

We'll talk about that. And, and, and, you know, and turns out we built trillions of chips and put 'em everywhere, and most of 'em really aren't doing anything. But now we can be smart enough to actually make them all work, the ones that are already there, much less the ones we're building next.

So I don't expect to be disappointed at all. I think our ability to tap the hardware is limitless. I don't know.

Mm-hmm. Alan, do you think that the CEO of Qualcomm will be making a trip to Mar-a-Lago to bend the knee looking for a little extra cash to fund this? What do you say?

You know, it's not the cash, it's, it's, you know, this is kind of like, uh, Don Vito going to visit Don Cheche to get permission for genco olive oil. Right? It's not the cash, it's the blessing, if you will, of, of, excuse me, maybe being part of this AI factory building buzz or, or what have you, you right.

Being one of the anointed one. It goes back to what I said before about the investments in, in quantum. We should have the US government anointing our winners and losers, especially based on who bends the knee not right?

One of the principles of America, of America and the American way of life is the guy who comes up with the better mousetrap wins that, right? We the best and the brightest, not, not the weakest and the most kiss butts. And so, I hope not to tell you the truth.

I I don't think they need to. I, I think, look, Qualcomm is a, is a qua, no pun intended. Qualcomm's a quality company, right?

They've built an amazing business. We haven't even mentioned, no one's mentioned, look, the snap, the success they've had with snapdragons on PCs, right? And what it's done to the price points for PCs go, I don't know how many of you go shop for laptops anymore, but man, I think There's some inherent go government support though, Alan, right?

Like, I don't see a future in which, you know, we have Huawei towers going up as the six G Buildouts, Qualcomm will have, These are markets where there's one to two players, you know, kind of on, on each side of the geopolitical geopolitical divide. Um, and they're inherently gonna get the backing of, you know, not only the us but lot of large western governments. I mean, you, you don't want a monopoly either, though, right there, you want competition, Right?

But to be fair, and to Dan's point, do we have a choice but to not fund these companies because we are up against nation states like China that are funding all kinds of stuff on their side. Oh, Come on. That sounds like red scare b******t, honestly.

You know what I mean? Well, We've got one fab, right? We've got one memory company as a nation, right?

You know, across all the critical layers of the stack, there's one to two winners, right? Well, if you talk to classic VCs there, there's always three winners. You need three, right?

For the market. You need three. And, and if we are in, in company, you know, this was my thing with Intel.

I'm not against funding intel and keeping Intel viable. If, if it proves that it can be viable, if you will, not that it's propped. I mean, you go back to what Ronald Reagan said about tariffs and stuff like that, you know, and I hope if no offense to my Canadian friend there, but if you go back to what Ronald Reagan said about tariffs, he said one of the, the weaknesses of it is it art.

It creates an artificial market where the companies are being propped up because they're not truly competing, right? We need a strong Qualcomm to compete on the world stage. I mean, I, I look at the two vectors, right?

We can compete on performance and we can compete on economics, right? Right. I think on some of these critical technologies, they'll kind of be okay losing on the economics as long as you win on the performance.

I, by the way, I, I don't believe in the three company rule. There's actually just two winners in a third company that hasn't figured out they lost already. Well, that, well, most markets there's more than three companies.

And that, that's the key, right? And the, there's the, you know, that's why in the Olympics you got your gold, silver, bronze, and then everyone else. Uh, for sure.

I just think on the, the markets where, you know, the barrier to entry is so high and the amount of investment needed is so high, that that tends to gravitate more towards winner take all, um, you know, kind of a healthy competitive environment, right? You've seen that at Hyperscale Cloud. You've seen that in semiconductor fab.

You've seen that. Now, you know, in AI models, you know, anything where, you know, you're measuring the investment in hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, defense sector no different, um, seems to, seems to gravitate more towards that oligopoly model. So a couple of things there.

Let's take the hyperscale cloud. That's exactly what IWS, Microsoft Google three, right? And I-B-M-I-B-M had a coffee.

Well, well, but you know what, to be fair, there's the top three in everyone else, Or Oracle's never a player, I would say. And then if I look, Oracle's a player too. Top three in everyone else.

Take, take another, uh, one that you mentioned there, Dan and I, my brain's blanking on me. Uh, ai, you've got OpenAI, you've got anthropic, maybe perplexity, right? Or or another, uh, uh, Elon, uh, grok, right?

You have at least three players there. Well, and meta, you've got, you got at least three players And the entire open source community. But, well, That, that's a whole nother story.

Yeah. We always used to say we would, we would be competing against other, yeah, the other had a Huge block. Well, competing against a spreadsheet.

But I, I think it, it's, it's good because I think having competition hastens and Fosters bringing out the best in people, healthy competitive, right? Not, not weighted or anybody putting thumbs on scales. Intel was driven by A-M-D-A-M-D may have always come in second, but they drove Intel to stay one step ahead.

Absolutely. It's the same thing of play here. It's what makes, it's, it's the market.

That's what makes the market the market, right? You, if you, if you are not pushing as hard as you can, someone else is, man, and they're right on your heels. And that's what keeps us moving.

That's what keeps us moving, right? No matter if you are the leader in your space, you're, you know, you could, you're always kinda looking over your shoulder a little bit saying, Hey, who's coming up fast? And if there's no one coming up fast, I think it's just human nature to kind of take your foot off the pedal a little bit.

Anyway, hey, we're over time on this one, and we've got a, it's still another segment to go. So let's take a break here on the gang. We're gonna come back and talk about the politics of ai.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back. And we're talking about this, uh, position that, uh, super PAC has taken, that's led by Mark Andreessen and his folks in the Silicon Valley area.

And basically, they came out and said that they were gonna support political candidates from Republicans or Democrats as long as they were pro ai and not all for regulating ai, which probably might eliminate a lot of Democrats anyway, but it was interesting to see a, are they trying to kind of pull back and establish some mutual ground? And that immediately got a response from the White House, where basically White House said, how dare you slap us in the face after we did all these wonderful things for you. Chris, what's your take?

What's going on here? I haven't heard better news in a long, long time, right? So I've been predicting this sort of response from this administration at this, at about this time.

And in general, as we discussed in previous segments, you know, organizations with this sort of sort of view would probably not like this sort of thing, which is a positive indicator that we're getting to the point where it's a real threat to narrative, uh, malicious narrative influence operators, right? So as, as, as Alan, you know, I, you know, uh, uh, back in 2008, I spend a whole year, you know, thinking about this and with the Obama campaign in leadership of the Rapid Response team. And it was interesting.

I was con I was the conservative in that group, right? It was a funny time in politics. And, uh, and Steve Bannon started from what I know, two weeks, two months before I got involved with that.

And it stayed on that path. And Valerie Groff and Putin in, in Russia and, and these other, you know, uh, full, full-time malicious narrative threat actors who made livings out of that have been dominating the landscape since. And the entire posit and premise of civic AI and attestation systems and, you know, everything I've been working on, not, not just in, in this space, in cybersecurity, technically, everything the quiet wire is about now in the civic ai, uh, open source project is on the premise that at a certain point to our, our conversations in the, in the show about the economics of competition and so forth, it's, it works in the short term to just flood the zone.

You know? Uh, we'll, we'll keep it Russian for the moment. Valerie Grass, ma the Grass ma of doctrine, since 2012, Putin has built his entire national strategy on that.

And it's about the ability to use bullhorns to dominate all public narrative forever. What's happening with a number of things, a, you know, being driven by AI in multiple ways is that that's not going to be viable for much longer. So I take this administration making exactly this pushback exactly right now as the most definitive proof that those of us in the narrative sovereignty nor narrative integrity, um, uh, move, you know, world are correct.

That these systems of mass narrative domination are like dinosaurs at the end of their era. They're, they're, they're the large corporation with 30 years in the space when the startup comes in, that turns a lot faster and, and brings 'em down. Yeah.

This, this is, I think, the strongest indication. We're at the end of this mind numbingly tiring era of narrative bullhorn all over the world, right? It just doesn't work that well anymore.

Chris, to quote Michael Corleone godfather, part one, now who's being naive? Kate? Oh, Why, why, why?

Why are they so offensive? Why is a, is a voice like this, and I'm trying to keep it out of, you know, this, out of, you know, personal politics. But if I'm correct, if this, if this narrative voice, this, this US administration is not a sincere narrative partner, why else would they be pushing back against this right now than the fact that there's concern?

Well, I, I, that the power are At prep, 'cause fascists are gonna fas or whatever the word is. But, but here's the real deal. When you combine that stance with deciding who I'm going to invest in and anoint as my chosen ones while I'm in power, that's where stuff goes south.

I don't know if that's the right word. That's where stuff goes bad. Well, You mean the green capital, you know, in this economics is money, or, or, or money is, is speech in a way.

I don't wanna get into that whole thing, but in the same sort of way, you know, again, we, as we said in the last segment, I like libertarianism. I may seem like a socialist in today environment, but I'm a capitalist libertarian, freedom of speech, narrative, integrity, fanatic. And I'm that way for a reason.

I think there's competitive advantages, and I think certain actors on the global stage that I'm not in favor of, are making moves defensively that show they're weak, that their approach so far. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

But, And others, if they don't do it right, others will. I, I hope so, Mike, to your point, I don't think it's necessarily just Democrats who are looking to regulate ai. I, I think, I think that shows that, to Chris's point, you've been sucked into the narrative, right?

Because I remember someone who runs X starting a lawsuit that wanted to regulate ai, and I remember the people who signed the a hundred people who signed the pledges about let's stopping ai. I don't think that was necessarily a Republican or Democrat thing either. So let, let's not put people into camps based upon the, the propaganda that comes out of, you know, our out, out of our political machines, right?

Well, and we're, you know, we've actually called this se segment politics and we're talking, so we'll, we'll, let's run the gamut on it. You know, I don't, I, to be clear, I'm not picking, I'm not picking on any one particular political party or structure. I'm kind of fed up with all of them, you know, kind of commonly, I think perhaps for, uh, uh, more nuanced reasons.

I think the liberal, uh, international order has spawned liberal, you know, literally called liberals, sometimes, sometimes the opposite. Australia, what are you thinking? Um, but anyways, all these, what we would see as Western liberal, uh, political parties are inefficient at best, terrible, at worst.

Well, democracy, a lot of the criticisms Are wrong, inefficient, Many of regulating this. I, you know, this is, again, I I should be arguing with the Republicans. I should be a Republican again right now because this is where my libertarian Republican free market, you know, uh, uh, economics, bones just tingle.

It's like, you can't regulate this. This is like regulating speech. Forget it.

Yeah. And if you see this as a threat, then you're not in, in favor of free markets, free speech economics, and, and you'll get run over by those Who are, but here's the thing, we're missing the irony here, guys. This is an ironic moment here.

You've got Mark Andreessen, who during the last election cycle really came out hard, right? In supporting this administration, in supporting the candidacy of Trump, right? They, he put big money and put his money where his mouth is, and put his mouth where maybe, where it shouldn't have gone in, in supporting Trump versus Kamala, or, you know, in supporting the hard, right?

He's now recognizing that it's not a question of what political label you have on whether you are wearing a red tie or blue tie. He wants to back people who are going to further his own business ambitions, which is the way it's supposed to be. That's America.

That's America. I support people who are gonna help me. Am I selfish?

Yeah, but that's America, that's what it's supposed to be. I Think the problem of Alan, right? I mean, I, I think part of what they're trying to do here is kind of ask that famous question of, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should, right?

You're, you're right, Dan, we Actually societal impacts of achieving a GI, right? You know, we probably have it, you know, I'm not sure we could, um, crispy v has No, no, Dan, I agree with you. I agree with you there, but, you know, we don't have the will to regulate that today, I don't think is is is the issue.

No. And, uh, you can't judge the intention good and honestly, because of what you were saying, which is, you know, because there's an inherent kind of economic interest alignment behind it. I think we're kind of missing the point of what is a pretty good question of, you know, do, do we actually wanna do this?

Right? We're kind of driving very, very hard to it without having a lot of the hard conversations about what it really means. But, but look, again, look at the history of mankind.

When have we ever, and this, I'm sorry, Chris, let me just finish this, This, this is where I, I specifically say libertarian because you, I always, you know, to be clear, the libertarian party, libertarian ideals and ran, it's all very simplistic and naive. However, right? There are principles in there, and I fundamentally believe them, and this is a perfect example, where we're running down a path that's, that's testing that belief.

They are, we're like, well, maybe not this time, maybe we'll, actually, and I'm just looking at this and I have my same concerns. I think I, I think, well, we will be, okay, let me deliver that message. If I'm right, we'll be fine.

But we're finding ourselves saying, well, we fundamentally believe in, but not in this case. It's like, well, I think we should, but When have, we don't think Ever not, but at your point, Dan, I don't think we have a choice. We're going down this path anyways.

Exactly. Dan, that's my point. I don't disagree.

Just because we, I think that's, you know, just because we can, doesn't mean we should. We're not, that's what supposedly separates us from animals, right? But when have we not?

Because at the end of the day, humans are animals. And that's my fear. Or I think this goes to what we talked about last week with the valley.

It's getting a little out of touch and kind of pursuing its own interest apart from the rest of the country. And the rest of the country's gonna take notice. And do not be surprised when you start spending billions of dollars on making sure that there's no regulation for ai, that you wake up one morning and there's gonna be regulations for ai.

'cause everybody's gonna be paying attention to the conversation and conclude the Opposite. But to Dan's point, maybe it's a good thing. I don't know.

Yeah, Just think a lot of the paths where AI could take us ultimately start to get into the territory of kinda redefining what it means to be human right. And, you know, I don't think the everyday person has really put much thought into that. No.

Well, we haven't. And, and not, not to this counter based concerns, but yo, because these, this is existential in the extreme. Um, it is just that I, and, and the people I've been spending a lot of time with this year have been thinking about this an awful lot.

And I think, I think, again, I think, Alan, you're right, this is happening anyway. There's no stopping it, right? And if we don't, they, you know, and my, my, my kids can pick on me for even saying that I'm old.

I get to, but it's, it, it will work out because the, the downsides are so extreme that we don't want to go there. We won't go that way, but we have to go through it like we do with everything else. And again, this is the American Libertarian, just seriously individualistic approach.

Open your eyes, pay attention. This is where we're going. You know, the storm is coming, you know, this is, you know, the entire world is Jamaica this morning, right?

So the storm's here, deal with it. Heart's out to the people in Jamaica. Let's end it on that.

Guys, I, I gotta run Kate, Chris, Dan, Mike, thank you for joining. Thank you for watching us. I hope you've enjoyed the discussion.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on this, right? People vote with their voices and their, their keyboards and everything else. So don't be afraid to, to, you know, log in and, and speak out on this.

I think it's important to all of us. Uh, hope you enjoy Text Drunk TV immediately following this. Of course, we'll have another fresh gang tomorrow for Thursday.

But until then, this is Alan Shimel. On behalf of Textron Gang, have a great day everyone.