Techstrong Gang – May 28, 2025

Hey everyone. You know that big, beautiful bill may wind up governing how we use ai. You're watching Textron.

Hi everyone, it's Alan Hummel. Welcome back. Happy Wednesday to you.

Um, I have to apologize, I'm a little under the weather. It was a tough weekend. I had a, some kind of thing going on, but we're here and we are moving forward.

I hope your, uh, Memorial Day weekend, if you celebrated it in the US anyway, was good. And, uh, we've got a full lineup here today. Let me introduce you quickly to our gang members and we'll jump right into it.

First of all, uh, he's from Fu Invisible Impact, or he's principal analyst and co-founder, uh, and our friend Guy, guy Curry Guy. How are you? Good, good.

Joining y'all from Austin, Texas. Good to see you back home. Speaking of home, he's the man from the north now wi with, with official, uh, uh, with official duties as well, but he's our cybersecurity expert.

Chris Bla. Hey Chris, how are you? Love, Thanks for having, uh, being on.

And then finally he's up in the Bronx, loving this winning streak. The Yankees seemed to be on there, getting their mojo going. He's our chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey, Mike, how's it going? And it, it's going great and of course it's not enough to win and he, everybody else has to lose. So, so far so good.

Yeah, but who would've thought a guy named Yarborough and a guy named Warren were gonna be two of our top pitchers? I would've thought. Man, minor league system.

All, all this time, Alan, I thought your voice was gone 'cause you were screaming for the Knicks. Yeah, Yeah, I wish it was, but no, I, it was a tough weekend for me. Um, I'll see a note for the, uh, Texas Stars, uh, the a HL hockey team here based in Austin, Texas that just advanced to the semis in the, uh, for the cup, whose name I don't even know in hockey.

Very cool. Very cool. Very cool.

Alright, let's jump into it, Mike. So we've got this big, beautiful bill winding its way through Congress. Of course, the Senate has got their senate, bunch of senators have their knives and forts out ready to chop up this bill.

Um, or maybe add more to it. You're right. What do we, we got?

So the deal though is that tapped into this big, beautiful bill that covers a million different things is a provision that says that, um, states will be banned from having their own AI regulations for 10 years, which by the time I got around to regulating anything would mean that it was pretty much moot at that point. It seems like, uh, a, a power grab on the part of the federal government with the aid of, uh, some folks in the House of Representatives. We'll see what the Senate has to say about this and whether it makes it through.

But, um, you know, on the one hand, Alan might make sense for us to have a national AI strategy, but on the other hand, this is just enshrining into law that we won't have an AI strategy. What's the point? You know, look, there's so much nonsense and crap packed into this bill that I almost wanna say this AI piece of it is small potatoes compared to some of the other fascists that gender that's in there.

And if we didn't, if we had a normal administration that plays by the rules and norms of society and humanity, it may not be a bad idea, but when you have an administration that is out for their own personal wealth accumulation, right? And you've got what, what we've seen going on here with self-dealing and, you know, violations of the emo moments clause and so forth. I am hesitant to put anything into the, solely into the hands of our federal government.

Um, you know, I didn't see anything in the constitution about AI rights, but you know, clearly in the Constitution, anything not taken by the federal is reserved to the states. I it'll be interesting to see if the Senate swallows this, because, you know, it's not just that all states and local administrations are forbidden from having any regulation or any policy at all. It's also that they're socking away hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, hundreds for AI over these next couple years.

Now, is that money gonna wind up in the Trump family, uh, library on the Qatari plane that he's getting? Is it gonna end up in the UAE AI center or some other country that agrees to have a Trump building? Let's face it.

This whole thing is, I mean, how we, I I'm speechless right? In, in another time, in another place I'd welcome a coherent AI strategy. But this is not a coherent AI strategy.

This is everybody be quiet and let the, let the Pigs feed at the trial. So, guy, you're in Texas and are they gonna sign off on this? Because let me pause it this way.

Let's say four years from now, there's another election and somebody else is in charge of the White House, and now they got a six year run of AI policy that they can go with. And the states have no say regardless of what color they are, right? Or both?

Well, um, so I have two thoughts about this off the bat. First of all, I agree with Alan. Let's put policy and square scare quotes.

Um, if there's a policy behind these, these kinds of proposals and, and you know, a lot of the, the big beautiful B-B-B-B-B-B-B-B bill, um, that policy is, uh, allowed, you know, uh, for, you can call it grift, bribery, corruption, whatever you want to call it. Just, just enable that, um, concentrate, concentrate, uh, decision making, um, you know, among individuals, uh, whose personal loyalty to each other dictates whether they get to feed at the trough, as you say. So that's my, that's my first thought.

That's not really a policy. There's no policy here. My, my main thought, my main reaction was that this reminds me a lot of, uh, autoregulation, um, where there was no, you know, there never has been any, um, ban on states having their own regulations.

So effectively, California, which Dely turned blue and it's now pretty, pretty, you know, democratic and democratically run, um, dictates a whole lot of the, uh, compliance that automotive manufacturers, uh, adhere to. Um, simply because it's such a big market that carving out California alone for, for example, emission standards doesn't make sense. So they just apply emission standards everywhere.

So I felt like this was just a preemptive strike against something like that, where there might be no AI regulation at all, uh, on a federal level. But, um, just as the state of Texas and I think Florida and some other states, um, banned TikTok on their own or whatever the, I don't remember the details of that. Um, they wanna avoid they being, you know, the grifters and the federal government want to avoid, um, states doing anything.

And then why do they wanna do that? Um, well, um, I think between AI and crypto, um, the, you know, so-called oligarchs or, you know, the, the billionaires with free money to spend on whatever, um, have essentially worked what they can to buy off central decision making in the us um, federally. And, uh, they have been making a lot of arguments and they're doing in the UK as well, um, that AI should not be regulated in any way at all and should not have to pay for the copyrighted material that it, it uses to get trained and all those sorts of things.

So it's kind of the old story new again. Um, I almost feel like we're going back to the days of the Roman Republic here in the US at least temporarily, I don't think Empire guy, not the Roman Republic, the empire. Well, okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Uh, potato, potato, we can discuss, uh, that later. And your point being, my point, which is it's not what you know, it's who you know. Um, it's not what you've been entrusted with, it's what you can get away with.

So this is another example of that. I really think it's like the automotive and the emission standards. They just don't want states to, especially big states, to, um, uh, have any influence at all so that nobody can have any influence.

Well, Chris, Chris, around the world, these centralized authority typically has this, right? Anyway. I mean, it's kinda unique to the United States and, um, in Canada for instance, if it's not in the Constitution, it's assumed to be the responsibility of the federal government here in the United States.

It's the opposite. If it's not in the Constitution, it's assumed to be the responsibility of the states, but I think every other country is much more like Canada. So our, you know, are our friends around the globe probably wondering what the heck we're debating here.

Yeah. So there's a classic, uh, Disney floating around, you know, the IT space probably even, you know, it keeps getting into, you know, shooting yourself in the, in the foot with, in different programming languages. Well, I think most people are familiar with that one, you know, and so forth.

And this, this, to me, seems exactly the same. Like this is miracle shooting itself in the foot, you know, because as you sent Alan, again, I can, you know, I can understand this, um, at the federal level, you know, for, because this is, you know, highly evolving space and, and critical and ex existential threat economically and all sorts of other ways. How when I, you know, one of the great things that the states has always had going for us is the 50 experiments, you know, state's rights, you know, let's try a bunch of different things all at the same time.

We don't agree, move through it fast. It's been one of the things keeping America with the head of the pack, you know, uh, some somebody else's comments. You just, just structurally technically you, um, competitively, you know, to say that we are going to stop, you know, one of our big advantages, we're gonna stop states from acting like Muslim states and have them act like Canadian Russians or Chinese provinces, you know, that they've just, you know, subsumed in those wall and we will compete.

It is, this is not you. I'm throwing things away. You know, mission made those fault being strongly, um, in the most important evolving area, that's still okay.

Yeah. Does this renting actively somehow turn off to be a good idea? Unless that's physically possible.

Um, we'll see. Alan, do you think that this is tucked into this big, beautiful bill in the hopes that no one's gonna notice? I I think there's, as I said earlier, this is small potatoes to what's tucked into this big beautiful bill.

You know, look, and now to be fair, the Republicans don't have a monopoly on this kind of nonsense. You, you know, it's always, these bills always get packed in with, with pork barrel and all kinds of stuff. But I've seen reports of some of the things that are tucked into this bill, and it's enough to make your toes curl.

I mean, it's just another step toward, towards an authoritarian government. And quite frankly, I, I don't blame the executive. He is what he is, but I do blame the yellow belly people in Congress who are gonna sit down and lay, lay down here and, and let this happen to our country.

You know, I'm sorry if that's a little too partisan for you, but that's pretty much how I feel. We don't know that that will happen yet. We, we know that, um, well, we Know the House of Representatives, The house of, yeah, it's going to the Senate now.

Um, it seems to me to do my own political analysis, it seems to me extremely likely that it will pass in some form. Um, I, I wonder if they'll hit their deadline. They, they also have the very important matter of going on vacation to consider.

And I rather wonder if, um, certain, you know, it, it takes, I think it would take four Republicans or something like that to, to, it's a little confusing, you know? Um, 'cause normally they'd have to pass filibuster. They'd have to make certain changes in order for not to, who knows?

It's a little confusing. Also, one gets the feeling that, uh, you know, another norm will break, or if it's a norm rule, whatever will break at some point. I just think that they're gonna do anything they can to pass it.

Um, and they won't change it too much, and it will pass, pass with dispatch, because otherwise they'll have nothing to say that they did, essentially. And if they're don't pass it now, then they start pass, they pass it closer to election season and it's gonna be, um, a, a black mark on them. So I do think you're probably right, Alan, but we, it's not for certain yet.

The Senate might make some changes For the better. Alan does goes, does this go to the Supreme Court as a test of just where the line is between what the federal government is allowed to do and what states control? I mean, who said The Well, I, I don't believe so.

I think if the federal government legislates it, it preempts state legislation. This is, you know, it's not a state's right issue. This is Congress abdicating its responsibility to be an equal, an equal branch of government here, and putting a check and balance on the executive branch.

There's another aspect of this bill, though we haven't discussed, and I think it's also important, is that this bill, clearly FLA favors big tech. So you're gonna have the same old, same old. You're gonna have the meta Google, apple, whatever, the Max seven, right?

Tri, you know, riding triumphant here. But this real, you know, in, in a, a new thing like the, like ai, you would hope to see a million flowers sprouting a million new growth trees sprouting to harness this new advantage and look at different ways of doing it to compete. Instead, we'll look for the competition to come from China, maybe Europe, right?

Because we're not encouraging with this bill, we're not encouraging growth at a grassroots level. This, you know, if you don't have enough money to, to Greece, El Duchess palm, you don't get to play in this game. And that, And it's even worse.

It's even worse because, um, the Supreme Court looks ready to, um, to overturn about 90 years of, of precedent, um, some point soon. Um, the, the, I think the case is called Hubble, I'm not sure. Um, FDR area, ERA case where, uh, the Supreme Court ruled that the president can't willfully fire.

So members or leaders of so-called independent agencies, board, board members. Um, and it looks very cl that looks very close to being overturned, which means that, uh, among other things, the president could fire the commissioners at the FTC. So if, if, if the commissioners at the FTC serve at the will of a president, um, who, I mean, what does the FTC do?

Uh, among many other things, the FTC allows companies to, to get licenses and allows companies, especially in the case of disputes, to continue trading, continue doing commerce. And one of those could be Apple, and it happened that's not given a plane or a, or, or, or a boat or a, you know, several solid gold iPhones or whatever lately, um, the president could say to the heads of the Federal Trade Commission, uh, I want you to sanction start procedures to sanction ensue apple, which then Apple would've to deal with. Or I want you to delic app for export, or whatever it might be.

And the, if, if they can be fired at any time by the president asking that, then they're more likely to go along. If they don't, they'll be fired and someone who will go along be put in their place. So it's about to get worse.

Um, if, if that does go in that direction, all we can hope for is to slow it down long enough, um, to put more proper checks and balances in, in its place. This is all part of a piece, which is this unitary executive theory, but also the essential authoritarian theory, which is that people want strong men. Usually it's men, strong men, um, in charge, because that makes everything and everybody stronger.

I don't, I don't, uh, believe in that at all, but I think that's a general belief. So ultimately we're gonna see more AI executives doing photo ops in Mar-a-Lago standing next to the president while they drop, no, while they drop off large bags of cash in the back room. Is that where we're going?

Yeah. I told you like the Star Trek episode where they built a society based upon the Al Capone book. That's, that's where we're going.

That's where we're going. All right, let's take a break here while I packed my bags. Um, we could come back.

Let's talk about something maybe not as politically contentious. You're watching text Trump Gang. Hey, folks, we're back.

I'm not sure this is gonna be less contentious, but it probably won't be as political. How's that? But Java has turned 30, and I don't know, guy thinking back in the time when Java first came on the scene, I don't think I thought about it as kind of this language we were gonna live with forever.

But here we are. I mean, there's more programming languages than ever, but seems like everybody's still using pretty much Java. Everybody is using Java, at least in the enterprise.

Uh, I mean, um, I suppose there are good parallels with cobol, which originated in the mainframe area and mainframe era, and continues to be used in mainframes to this day. But I think better, I, I would, I would raise that, you know, by, uh, uh, you know, by one, which is that, uh, Java, thanks to the Java compilers and Java virtual machine is much more portable. It's scalable, it has security capabilities, it's resilient Java, the language.

I wouldn't, you know, I, I don't care for personally, I'm not really into c or or c derive languages at all. That's just my personal preference. Um, and the theory of, um, of, you know, writing in a particular language is not the point here.

It's the platform. That's the point. The Java virtual machine, I mean, so Mike, I'm also maybe just barely old enough to remember when the Java virtual machine originated as a way to run Java applications on your desktop.

I mean, that was the whole idea was to gain, um, uh, interactivity with portable apps that, um, you could find at a website or somewhere else and just run on your desktop. Um, it morphed, I mean, morph as needs. The, the whole thing got sort of revolutionized, um, with a recognition that, um, you could put agents into servers or full blown applications into servers using the Java virtual machine is almost like a pre, um, a a primitive, extremely primitive, uh, uh, predecessor to the container.

Um, so I celebrate Java's anniversary personally. Um, I don't care what language you are programming in, but I do care about mobility, portability and scalability and all sorts of things. And I also care about not wasting time on trying to, uh, recode or refactor or re whatever on applications that run perfectly well.

And I think that there are many, many homegrown applications or, or OpenShift based applications or what have you, using Java, the Java virtual machine. There's no there there, in other words. Um, but Java has its detractors.

And I think mostly that has to do with it not being cloud native on its own. It's being sort of old and legacy. Uh, to me, the, the, the main critique, uh, or the critiques boil down to vibes, which is go is cooler, rust is cooler, um, that's old fashioned, you know, that kind of thing.

Um, I think if there's a talent issue involved, um, that could be something. net programmers out there. If it's boring, that's not necessarily a bad thing for it.

And for the enterprise, I always appreciate those mainframe modernization conversations where it's basically, let's replace a 50-year-old language with a 30-year-old language. 'cause that's gonna make a huge amount of difference. But Chris, Well, hey, listen, listen, VMs run on mainframes via, uh, Java VMs run on mainframes, and those Java applications can port over to mainframes.

But yeah, go ahead With, with a little work in, in about a six to nine months worth of effort. Um, Chris, there are one big criticism, Java my mind is the security aspect of this. And it's a language that is 30 years old and it is prone to have a lot of security flaws in it.

And there is an argument for moving to things like rust that are fundamentally more secure. It's harder probably to program in rust, especially you're known Java at 30 years, but do you think maybe there's a time and place where our security concerns will finally maybe push us to think about a different language? Maybe we're Touched on a couple of the, the factors thing, right?

You know, if it is harder to do something in the new whatever place gonna go with, then, you know, does that make it less secure? Intrinsically? And I'm not saying in a, in a talk show like this, you're not gonna answer that.

You actually have to think through these things really clearly to give you an actual answer. At least the fact that guy, he went there with mainframes. Because as, as I think about this topic, I loved, you know, in the, in the teens working with Unisys and realizing that mainframes are still out there, the ent entire global economy is being run by code that was written by Grace Hopper, you know, before you know, the dumb road time and it's running on mainframes that are really just intel, you know, merged clusters of Intel servers, um, running emulation software, you know, that's nesting all this, you know, 700 year old code.

The actually works just fine. And I think that's when you get into security, you know, these obvious answers just aren't the, you know, let's go to the new thing. It is actually more secure.

Will that make us more secure? Maybe not. So, it, it's a fascinating topic, but every time this comes up, you know, there's a newer better Foster.

And I can sit here and say, looking at just that component, yes, that is a more secure way to do things. Now, if you actually replace that in the real world and replaces that depends, you know, people, humans, processes, you know, economics, it bloody depends. Will we be here for the 50th anniversary of Java?

What do you say? Yeah, If we be 50 twos still flying. So we'll gonna say that.

So, uh, I think one of the real concerns and criticisms about Java is, is Oracle's ownership of it. Um, I think that that's, I mean, there's, what is it, open, open, JDK or whatever. There's, there are some, there are some open source alternatives.

Um, as with all open source, open source, uh, you know, um, you gotta think DIY at the same time that it tends to be complex. Um, even if you have, uh, a service provider or somebody you're paying to make it less complex for you, there's this, you know, um, uh, uh, fly-by-night aspect to doing, you know, an open version of Java. So, um, your best bet is to pay the licensing fees to Oracle and continue that way.

And that is probably not a great thing for the industry as a whole. Um, I'm not sure why Oracle has an open sourced Java. Well, I could tell you why it's not Who it's, I I think it's a, some business decision to do that.

But, uh, you, you Tell us why. Yeah, they got the open source piece of it that my sequel, so, so here's my take on this row from day one. Almost Java's been the, the language everyone hates or loves to hate.

It was always, you know, the promise of it. And, you know, when it first came out, it was sun. And, and for many of us of a certain age, sun represented what was good in computing, right?

They, they, they were supporters of open source. They did have cutting edge technology, they moved the needle and they seemed that it was a good company. Um, but even back then, the idea of the right, right.

Ones run everywhere, and this was gonna be the new thing that replaces everything. There were always, you know, doubters out there when, when, when it got sold to Oracle, the tide really turned against it, even though it kept being popular, even though how much? So 70, 70, 80% enterprises have it.

In what way does, does that mean? Is that indicating that a tide turning against it? Well, The, the, the tide of public opinion, it was old, it was slow, it was insecure, it wasn't open source.

Oracle's an evil empire. You can't trust them with it. You know, are they updating it?

Uh, you know, the, and, and all the new ones, as you mentioned, there were always, I don't wanna call 'em ankle biters, they were more than ankle biters. There was a DA definite type of people that were anti Java for many different reasons. But here we are at 30 years old guy.

As you say, 70 to 8% of organizations still use it in some form or another in some capacity. And it, Mike, to your point, in 50 years, they still will too. And Oracle, yes, they have an open source that they're not good stewards of open source.

You know, this is the same thing with MySQL and why we have such a strong Postgres community. They're not, you know, stewards of open source projects that, I'm sorry to say, um, but they do keep it current, right? They do update it and, uh, you know, Java's dead long lived Java.

Yeah, I would say the pace of innovation and Java's accelerated in the last two years or so. And a lot of that has to do with the open source contributors to that effort and Oracle itself. But if you look at what they're doing, um, a lot of what they're doing essentially is barring the better ideas from other programming languages and moving 'em into Java faster, which is fine.

We've seen that model before. It's kind of similar to what kind of what Microsoft does with Windows. And for a certain class of customers, that works just fine.

But to me, the biggest issue is just simply inertia. I don't think, you know, for all the developers who say that they will write in other programming languages, they all have a favorite. And I think every CIO knows that it's easier for them to go find a Java developer than it is any other developer.

And then the whole thing just starts to self perpetuate. 'cause now the only people I'm hiring are Java developers, so we keep using Java. Yeah, I think that's right.

I think that a lot of times, um, including on this show, we, we, we, I almost feel like it's a part of the developer culture, um, which is, uh, you know, a builder culture. And so when we see that's the main way I've always explained how many languages there are out there and how many new ones keep popping up, whether derivatives or brand new ones. It's almost like, um, you know, a certain, you know, a a certain mindset says this language isn't quite doing everything I want it to do.

It could be just as simple as, uh, memory allocations, or it could have to do with no mobility or whatever it is. Something sort of more under the hood rather than the syntax of the language. And so they just, they, instead of writing the code using what they have, they create a new language.

You know? Um, and uh, Python was one of the greatest examples. The best Python was just, it was sort of a basic successor.

It was just easy, um, an easy to, to learn and use language suitable in multiple environments. And then somehow, uh, uh, almost by chance it became the language for AI development. Why not?

But you can use any language that suits you. I happen to love Pearl. Um, I think it's elegant and cool and uh, it gives me a thrill to use it.

I really think it's the platform. That's the question. The Java platform, um, I'm not familiar with if there are ways to write, uh, write in other languages for the Java platform.

The Java platform is where the security vulnerabilities are, but the, the Java platform is also where this nice integration with various kinds of enterprise infrastructure and in and enterprise platforms makes it scalable, reliable, you know, that sort of thing. So long-lived, Java, Java is dead long-lived. Java, You know, it's funny in the age of ai, I was talking to somebody this weekend and I said, you know, how's your job changed?

And he said, well, I'm not actually writing more code. I'm reading more code. And the code is written by the machine, but he has to understand how the code was created by the machine.

But, um, I don't know if AI will result in us adopting the other programming languages because it might become easier or if the barrier to taking on something different drops. But certainly in the nature of being a developer and, and a Java developer is gonna change Like every developer. Yeah, I agree.

Absolutely. Alright, let's take a break. We'll come back and discuss our third block today.

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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 gonna have a little chat about, whoa. Post quantum cryptography and encryption.

Uh, there's a report out from our friends over at Digi Cert, and depending on your perspective, the glass is either half full or half empty. But they noted that only 5% of folks are currently using quantum safe encryption. But we don't know when Q day is coming, which is when quantum computers might actually break the encryptions.

We have, but a lot of people feel like it's gonna be sooner than later. Chris, is this one of these kind of slow moving crisis that we can see coming and yet we won't do anything about it till it gets here because we're just too busy? Oh, I don't know that that, uh, that that, but uh, you know, privacy, security.

Yeah. And typically privacy and sequencing is not tied. Right.

You know, one of the things that, you know, one of the, one of the ways security people like explaining this to, uh, to, to normal humans is, uh, is talking about blame fault and so forth. Like this is a, uh, a fenced little needle felted, uh, um, Pegasus, my youngest child Terry, made for me. And I can use this.

I can get through any bang fault in on earth. All I need is time. I can until the middle is gone.

I've going through, um, all this encryption we've been using, we talked about this another episode a month or two ago on, on that show. All this encryption we've been using since the dawn of time gives you a certain amount of time to keep your secrets. That's it.

You can build pyramids, you can build chambers when it just increases the amount of time to get it. So on this, yeah, quantum encryption is coming, quantum computing is coming, which will blow away all the encryption on all the data that's already encrypted out there. So if you have no data that's encrypted the old ways, you need to assume now that, as you say, when we get to QA, you know, shortly after that, all of that's going to be and build your response and security around that, right?

You know, I know what people are meaning by, you know, quantum proof, you know, encryption that you could use today, and that's a good storm. But to be flare, that will not keep your secret secret forever. It will keep them secret longer.

So this is, I mean, I don't wanna, you know, downplay this, this is a big change. People really need to think about this, but it's not new. You know, you know, we, we flaw is by thinking that since we encrypted and since we put in a bank funnel, it is safe forever.

It is not, you know, secrecy is on a, is on a timeframe. Always. You have to think about that in advance or get ready to be surprised at times like this.

Oh guy, do we need to change the tenor of the conversation around this? 'cause I think it's too technical maybe. And maybe we need to go back to business leaders and say, Hey, you know, people are hoarding your encrypted data out there and they're gonna expose it to the world in the next, I don't know, three to five years, shall we say.

Um, and then, you know, the, do business people get more concerned then because they're, they're assuming that encrypted data is gonna be secure forever? No, they don't get more concerned. Uh, I, how long have we been having this conversation?

You know, the thing that has a low probability of happening, I would say 1% probability is a high probability. Let's go with 1% per year. Um, shoot, I could kick that can for a while.

There's, this is only gonna happen to me once every a hundred years. Why do I need to worry about this? Um, and we keep hoping or thinking that some big breach or some big problem shared data or some, I mean, possibly if a com a a company of sufficient size goes completely under as a result of a breach, that might be enough of a warning sign.

But otherwise, I don't know if the, if the, if the average human mind and, and by I average to bad, I don't know how to put this, the typical human mind, I dunno. If the typical human mind is able to process just this simple, I don't even wanna call it nuance. Chris's perspective is perfect, which is to say, um, it's not really weather you can be breach.

It's how long it will take. That's really sim frankly, that is simple. But the mind, the human mind does not tend to work that way.

The human mind works with it is either safe or it is unsafe. And, uh, when an expert is providing, you know, a little bit of color on the safe, but yeah, it's safe in the sense that it would take 10 years instead of take one year or take 10 seconds or whatever it is that I, I don't think business leaders in general, some do, but I think for the most part, they don't think that way. I don't think decisions are made that way.

I think that is the fundamental problem security. Um, which is, that is a perpetual fight, um, that you should measure in terms of, you know, a scale, not in terms of a is or is not. And that's just too difficult to gr when what you want to do is make your next bonus and have a happier Christmas.

You Know what? I think that's an actual business value to, well, you're saying guy, you know, just thinking this through, right? Because we, you know, maybe it's just those of us who've done security for a long, long time get this feeling.

But like, you know, I see it and as a business person myself, you know, I'm an executive and I make business decisions. And if I have this idea and say, okay, I can lock this away forever and move on, it leaves, leads me to a certain path. If I say, alright, I can lock this down for a while and my competitors are gonna find out and they're gonna get it, and I had to be planning for that in advance, it keeps me agile.

I'm always moving forward. I'm not gonna see any laurels. So, and again, I feel very strongly about both these things.

Um, so maybe I'm downplaying I, you know, as somebody who releases a lot of people about security, you always take us whatever you wanna do, that's what you wanna do and that's fine and I'll help you help you do that. But I think it's, it's, it's more than just a security risk. I think it's a, it's a business risk.

If you think your business is gonna be stable, your world's gonna stable, be stable because you can keep them things as they are for a long time, you're probably just wrong. So, you know, I, I followed this since nist along with industry participation, came out with the first quantum proof algorithms for digital certificates, et cetera. I think there's a very simple explanation for this.

Most people don't believe Q days coming anytime soon. A lesson we've learned in security, and I've learned this over 30 years, is it's just in time security. No one wants to be taking security precautions prematurely, number one.

Number two, I think this problem will take care of itself because what's going on in our world is that certificates are, are being set to expire much more, uh, frequently. You know, like you don't buy a certificate and it's good for five years. As a matter of fact, Google is trying to make it that I believe every certificate needs to be renewed every 90 days.

And when, you know, the fact of the matter is these certificates, there's, there's three or four companies that control 99% of the digital certificates out there, DigiCert's one of them, what they already are building in the quantum proof algorithms into their newer digital certificates. So when you upgrade to a new certificate, you get the quantum proof algorithm with it. So I, I think this is a great way to, to this survey is a great way for us to cover it in the media and make people aware that Q Day is coming, but this is no Y 2K.

And I say that with all seriousness, um, you know, but this is no Y 2K and I, I think it's a, a, a, uh, situation that'll be resolved. I should mention that DigiCert has an upcoming Quantum Readiness day as they did last year. And, um, I am a judge for their best use of quantum, uh, hackathon type of thing that they do.

So I, you know, I am, I guess conflicted or at least I'm disclosing that's the way it is in the collection there, right? If I say and put it out in the open, I'm allowed to take money and everything. So I'm letting everyone know.

And Mike, Mike, what, what, what do you, what do you, even you you've been writing and you and I have been writing and discussing this, you know, for a long time, 25 years, whatever it is, and it, you know, it's, it's, it, it seems to me, uh, that, um, you know, back in the day, um, we were seeing that was before a lot of the themes we see these days around like the human side of security and what, uh, you know, social engineering, that sort of, so those terms came along, but back then, more or less in the beginning it was, I mean, it's the same as today. I don't really see any difference. There's discussion out there, there's security vendors trying to raise the salience of the danger.

They're making their sales and they're making money. But the general culture is one of wait and react. And I don't, I just do not see that having changed at all.

I'm not, I think that there's two other factors at play here. One is, so if you're talking about, you know, three year window, maybe five, the probability that you're gonna upgrade your IT infrastructure to something that has these algorithms built into it. So it's crypto safe is pretty good.

So I think, you know, there'll be a lot of folks upgrading infrastructure and moving applications, and I think the building of applications and the replacement of legacy applications will accelerate in the age of ai. So they'll, I'm not saying all these apps will go away, but I, I'm saying that the level of risk might be smaller because the pace of modernization is gonna be faster. So, but I don't think that has anything to do with security as much as better security is a byproduct of those two events, would you call it?

Well, I, you know, since I went into applied philosophy with my last comment, you know, let me take this one to 11, because I think the very idea that you're gonna, you know, keep things secret forever, it leads to bad business processes, right? You know, and if you, you know, call me a boy scout, if you will, there was one. Um, if you as a business and a person, whatever function we're talking about, you operate with the idea that people aren't gonna find out whatever you're doing, say, we'll find out.

It gets harder to justify the idea that no, don't tell anybody. We'll, we'll keep this amongst us. Um, because that has worked for all of human history.

It works, you know, the people who take advantage of things, criminals and dictators and so forth, manage to keep secrets long enough. If you accept the idea that, that you can yes, manage your privacy and you can keep, you know, you know, your competitive advantages, you know, behind the veil long enough to do whatever you want, but it will all come out. It kind of just logically works.

A lot of potentially corrupting influences outta business processes. And again, you may be able to capitalize sometimes on corrupt processes and usually, you know, get the, the golden ring, but it's not a good plan. It's not repeatable, it's not consistent.

So I think that the very idea, and I think in, in the digital age, you know, maybe we're just, we're we're calling out this historical, uh, flaw because we have business people saying, alright, you're the security people. It's only how to be perfectly secure forever. It's like, you gotta keep a secret forever.

You cannot stop trying to, it's bad for you. There's a lot of people already using various messaging apps out there to have meetings they probably should not have because they're thinking that it's secure. So I'm looking forward to if Q date does come, there's gonna be a lot of disclosures of things that we thought were one way four or five years ago that it turns out are not.

So, and maybe, you know, it'll affect business leaders, but it will most certainly affect government leaders when, you know, things that they thought that were state secrets are now being readily shared on the front page of your whatever favorite is. Yeah. And I do wanna make one stupid prediction, which is that, uh, there will be several effects of Q Day that we have that we can't even see right now.

That, uh, even, even doing white hat work or something that is just escaping us dangers or possibly benefits that I think there's something very unpredictable about such a huge change in, in security. However, however much we are anticipating it now, and the breaking to be easy, quick breaking of keys, there's gonna be other effects and side effects. We, we have no idea.

And, and the awesome thing about AI is the amount of time it will take to sort through all that data we've decrypted will be, you know, now measured in minutes too. So There's a classic, uh, novel out there that that plays really moment. This, I sort of wonder, I always wonder about this, a shockwave writer by John Bruin.

You know, I did stand on Zanzibar along with their, uh, books that were a lot more popular, but shockwave writer is exactly what, yeah, you, what happens if all those secrets become public all at once? Maybe that's not a bad day. We may find out.

Hi guys, I, we need to pull a plug on this one. I'm sorry we're out our time, but excellent conversation, Chris. We're looking forward to hearing more about hearing more about what you're up to maybe next time, guy, as always, it's a pleasure to see you.

Mike, go Yankees. Thank you everyone for tuning in today. Stay tuned for the rest of our Textron TV schedule.

Until next time, Ms. Allen Shimel for Textron Gang.