Journalism and Content – The Inevitability Curve EP9

This is Textron tv. Hello, my name is Chris Blas. I'm going to be your host yet again for an Inevitability Curve episode where we take some current topic and look over it, uh, look at it over periods of time, spans of time, could be very long periods of time.

The conversation will determine. So today we're gonna be joined by Deb Radcliffe that I've known for quite some time. Hey, Deb, how are you?

Good. How are you, Chris? I'm loving life.

There's hurricanes and all sorts of things, but, uh, there's always a vo on battle fleet coming to destroy the earth, you know, so why not? Did Your planes get through the hurricane? Okay.

I haven't checked my Facebook yet. I Lost Starling connection last night. Um, I, I'm, there's obviously some damage.

You know, it may just be, uh, the power system on one boat, Sam Clemons, you know, got wet, so the AC power is down, but, uh, I'm sure they're fine. I'm gonna have a friend fly over, uh, with a drone on Saturday when the winds come down and we'll assess things and go from there. So these is the solar powered boats.

I've been sailing up and down the Florida coast as Deon to away. Yeah, and you're, and they're remote to you right now, so you have to do remote management of them. That's right.

I'm a thousand miles away in Ontario, Canada, you know, so I'm logging in through my apps and devices to control cameras and water cannons to keep some of the, uh, the bird population down and do other things. But now I can't do any of that. But it's All, if you aren't Facebook friends with Chris, you miss all this stuff.

He has videos of the water cannon going after the birds and stuff. It's fun. Well, it's, it, Instagram is more public.

I think. You know, it's, it is funny how we use social media these days, right? Which is, you know, getting us to our topic, right?

The, the, you know, my expectations of mainly on Facebook is effectively may as well just, you know, post it, you know, on, on, on Twitter. You know, I may as well be just, just be public, however, right? There is the friends posting then, and then there's room turn public on and saying, no, really I am saying this, and, you know, so be it, God, right?

So we developed these sort of levels, right? Yeah. But before, so before I get into all that, right, as, as we're talking about in the Green Room, you and I met somewhere back in the nineties, you know, I think when you first started doing this stuff, and I was doing firewall stuff, and the path you have taken is, is investigative journalism, cyber crime, all, you know, fiction narrative.

You know, talking about how we, how we put all this stuff together from a perspective that is now fairly common, but has developed entirely under your, your purview. So it's been a hell of a hat. Yep.

How's that been? Well, in 1995 when I was working on a book about Kevin Mitnick, my eyes got opened, and then in 96 I started telling magazines like, bite that they needed information to get out to their readers because this was gonna be a juicy, scary situation, and that their readers weren't ready for it. That the corporate America wasn't ready for it, that government wasn't ready for it, and neither were the poor consumers that we were leading to the web like sheet to the slaughter at the time, and then blaming them for getting hacked.

And so it's always been my mission to sort of blend all three of those constituents together as I do my reporting. Uh, you and I were talking before we went live about how I felt back then, I was the only one shouting in the wilderness that this was coming and this was here, and we needed to deal with it with legislation, with better security controls. I remember when Cisco adopted its first firewall, I think it was through acquisition, was it Accent Technologies?

Or who did they acquire when they came up with the Cisco Picks Firewall way back then? That was kind of the interesting backstory behind that. That was Network Translation Incorporated, you know, was, you know, to this day great friend Richard Clark.

Um, and oh, I'm, I'm gonna go into hell for this. I've forgotten, uh, his name, but, you know, there's a guy that was at the same time that I was out there in the world, you know, thinking about firewall things. And, and this is, you really leads me to down this whole inevitability curve thing, right?

Because the network address translation, you know, those whole 1 92 8 thing? Oh yeah. Na um, I had this idea for, uh, a firewall and we, my boss in our little company had said, okay, let's do this in 19 92, 91, 9 2, and we're go running along and somebody said, Hey, there's no not enough, uh, IP addresses on the internet.

And I lost my mind a little bit because he was right. I'd never really thought about it. And I ran to my boss's office and said, oh, no, no, maybe this whole thing is a bad idea.

And he didn't blink an eye. And he says, John Sup. He said, I found that anytime there's enough of a need, you know, a technical solution is, is just found.

And within 15 minutes, uh, Andrew Flynn's and El Elma Al Gundi and I at a whiteboard came up with network address translation. And the point of the story here is this, John Mays, so did John Mays and Richard Clark, 'cause he was consulting and setting people up with internet addresses, uh, internet connections. And every time he did it, their IP address, we a mass.

And he thought, you know, this is a thing. So he came up with the same table mechanism that we came up with. And at the same time, another group who wrote the actual RFC, uh, Tony something or, or whatnot, did the same thing.

So it was just time. Right. Wow.

Fun to be there at the, I Forgot, I forgot how hands-on you were back then. It's a, it is been a strange world. But NTI was the picks firewall, actually, I had that Was it?

Okay. At Cheese Dogs at an internet world conference back when it was like 80 people or whatever. Uh, not quite that small with John.

And, uh, he had the, he had the pics, the private internet, uh, exchange. And I had the Border wear firewall if that was a firewall, and he wasn't. So, uh, after that he was right.

And then we competed in the, in the market for a while, and I ended up at Cisco running his old, old, uh, uh, firewall. But that was the time to pave the world with firewalls, right? It went from, you know, it was, uh, it was supposed to be the end of life to the end of 98.

John Chambers and the executive staff had actually issued the end of life. Uh, and, uh, uh, myself and Adam Wal and a, a bunch of folks kept alive through the winter of 98, 99. And, and the rest was, uh, that path.

But, okay, so what I got confused with was Accent Technologies was one of the first intrusion detection companies, and I'm not sure if they're the one that got acquired by Cisco Wheel Group, got acquired from Austin, Texas Wheel Group. Wheel Group, okay. And when I interviewed the wheel group, they didn't even have a quote unquote product.

And they were telling me about a virtual first ever. What they suspected was a mob hit on, uh, a patient in a hospital. And they were, the nurse was about to go to court because they were gonna blame her, but somehow they found through their intrusion detection, someone had gone and changed a record in the computer right before the nurse administered the medicine that killed the patient.

I was never able to go public with that, because that was all told to me off the record. And sometimes I don't know how much to believe, but it was one of the founders of the wheel group. I remember having, I think we were in Texas having a meal together, and he was telling me this story, and I was just going, God, why can't I report on this?

You know? And so that was way back before anybody had a name for intrusion detection, except for maybe Becky Base over at the NSA, Right? Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.

Uh, you know, and then, and then, you know, I can tell you, I have to really try to control the squirrel instinct of, you know, hitting this conversation. 'cause we can take this everywhere, right? And this Exactly.

So that, that story right there, you know, that's literally the murder mystery sort of thing you associate with crime and novels and the kind of things, you know, you're, you're, you're doing now. And it, there's always that boundary between, you know, let's say for a second to investigative journalism, um, and, and narrative fiction, right? Yes.

And line between the two, right? Yep. Yep.

And that one would've made a great, like Hollywood movie, even back then. The, uh, narrative fiction. You know, Richard Clark has taken the same path that I've taken.

He published his first fiction book long before I did. And, uh, it was more of a sort of a single case, you know, legal case. And, and, uh, I remember getting on his case 'cause he sort of skipped over the romance scenes.

And I said, you, you're pretty shy about that. And he says, I don't care. I'm gonna write it the way I'm gonna write it.

But I really liked his book, his first book, and I haven't read his other books yet. But that wasn't something I was ready to do yet. That was years before I put my series out.

But the culmination of all of our experiences, right, Chris, and as a journalist, my people have always been the hackers. They, law enforcement and federal agencies came later when they finally caught up. But in the beginning it was just the hackers.

And some of them acted tougher than they were. Some of them were a little scary, but most of them were very helpful. They helped me get on the internet for the first time ever.

Um, I had to pay long distance for a point presence way back then. I don't know if you remember those days, dial up modems, and then after that, you know, they were the ones who were sounding the alarms. Going to my first devcon was extremely eye-opening.

Um, and just moving forward. So the hackers are the good guys in my cyber thriller series. 'cause they're the ones that who, who wanna fight this corporation that's taking over the world through human chip implants.

And they're the ones who end up helping the NSA avert a cyber war. And people say, does this stuff really happen? Yes, it really happens.

NSA brings in hackers all the time. You know, they need 'em for certain things. They bring 'em in.

Some of them end up hiring in with the NSA, you know, so it's, it's, all of it was based on technical fact, historical fact possibilities that could be done with today's tech. And I wrote that because I wanted people to understand what people like Chris Blas and others do in the hands-on environments that they're in trying to stave off sta this tidal wave of cyber threats. Well, and you, as, as I think about this conversation we're having, this is, uh, I think probably, maybe, maybe my favorite episode to date on this topic because, you know, you and I shared this, this experience, right?

And I, I, you know, now, now we're both here, right? And back in your, in your first days, you know, you, you as well, we're all sort of young folks. I speak for myself.

I'm like, I don't know, like how I got here. I was in my thirties. I'm not gonna say how old I am now, but you can extrapolate, right?

And, and, uh, and you know, I, I remember being so, you know, sort of well suggesting things getting slapped down for him that today, you know, you know, as, as you say, you know, the, the, the, our peers and our folks, you know, Fred Cohen, um, who coined the term computer virus in his PhD thesis right? In the late eighties. And you mentioned Kevin Mitnick, right?

You know, uh, these are the names. Back in the earliest days before I got into cybersecurity, these are the names you'd heard, you'd see the, the, the thing on national news about this thing. You know, that was when, you know Fred and Kevin were both, you know, the folks everybody was talking about.

And then there was the I Love You Virus, one of my favorites sort of referencing. That's so, and I remember, I'm like, why is Bernstein young sending me a note that says, I love you? Right?

Well, you know, and I immediately realized there was something wrong, but it was the first virus I ever received. But Yeah, I I, it was Weird. I think it was the I Love You virus, but I may be saying this one wrong because there's, there's, there was one reaction, real virus, but this one was the, uh, it was an email that said, Hey, tell all your friends, there's this virus Oh, called I Love You virus, and if you'd open the, uh, email, it'll delete your hard drive.

Right? And then all the, what the internet was, it was all text back in those days. They used net news groups, email and so forth.

And that just got enough. People just said, oh, I better do the right thing and post this to all my news groups. And then everybody else replied to say, stop posting this to all the news groups.

And it literally took down the internet, you know, all over the world. It Did. And I had like a dozen emails that morning and every single subject line in capital letters, I love you.

And I was like, gosh, this is just weird. So it was my first like, time I'd ever been emailed a virus before, you know? And of course I didn't click anything or do anything as, like you said, everything was really rudimentary back then.

But, But, but, but, but the, the point of this, you know, particularly in this, in this conversation is there was no virus. The whole joke, you know, is there was no virus. The virus was the email, right?

Oh, okay. It was getting people sending emails back and forth, right? And then, and for those, you know, folks who weren't there, so It was more of a do a de BDOs type thing or a spam, Right?

And this, and I'm sitting there and in Mississauga, the Ontario, Canada, you know, this little internet company before we came up with a firewall idea, and, you know, trying not to work, of course, and waste my time on Usenet like, uh, like the kids do these days. And the, and I just couldn't help chime me in and saying, 'cause everybody was saying, you know, stop sharing this email. It's not a real virus.

It's a hoax. It's a hoax. It's not a real virus, it's a hoax.

It's not a virus. And I just couldn't help myself. And I had to say, actually, I think it is a virus.

It's like a Wetware virus, which started this whole other argument thread that went back and forth and consumed more of the remaining last bit of bandwidth on earth. But it, but it was, uh, you know, and everybody, you know, shouted me down. Right.

You know, my my point though is I was just this young guy, and I don't know what I'm talking about, and I felt pretty sure about it, but all the authoritative figure and it, you know, academia and so forth, jumping all over me. And I now, I, you know, I do a podcast with Fred, you know, we've had a radio show together. We, you know, the last 10 15 Fred Cohen.

Fred Cohen. Yeah, we do. We're yeah.

Talking all the time. We're recording episode, another episode of that podcast tomorrow. And I guess, so I've got to, to, to, you know, live and have my career long enough to go and ask the guy that coined the term, right?

Was that a virus or was I wrong or was that a mimetic virus? Somebody wrote code And what did they say? Fred's absolutely, it's a virus.

Yeah, we long, that's what I thought. Okay. Yes.

And it's, and it's, it's proven to, to both our topic here and to kinda the world that, you know, we're talked, you know, we've been talking about the, the past, you know, how we got to this point, right? And now we're at this point where things like that, this concept of a virus, everybody knows what a virus is. Today's not 1991 anymore.

But we're approaching, I think, a common understanding of what misinformation, mental viruses people are trying to write. Oh, yeah. It goes into your head and makes you do things like forward this email to your friends, just like in 1991 or whenever that was, right?

Yeah. Except, yeah, except 5, 7, 10 years ago. Most, you know, your, your friends and family don't really understand that idea.

But I think just like computer viruses, the misinformation, disinformation, information, integrity, you know, we wanna give it a positive, uh, uh, term is something we've all gotten our heads now. Right? So where do you think we've gotten to with all that, you know, several decades of you and I and various other folks trying to get information and security into the popular culture, Into the minds of the common man?

Yeah. So I think that there's a lot more awareness. Um, she right, the non geek, right?

Yes, That's right. But the normal people, But Right. Um, there's a lot more awareness.

Uh, so my Breaking Backbones hacker Trilogy book has been at many, um, book reading groups. And one of the biggest ones, I was at a regional session with a bunch of retired ladies. And when I stood in front of them, they asked me to read a section from the book.

And then we did question and answers. They were very sophisticated in the questions they were asking about, I got this on my mobile device, this is what I did to get back at them. And I'm like, well, that's really smart.

I'm actually gonna use that trick that you just taught me. 79-year-old lady, you know. So it was very nice to see the level of awareness has extremely improved since way back then.

I remember, uh, about 10 years into my career, when everybody started getting mobile phones, the, I was at a bank, at my bank, and there was this young girl pregnant with her young boyfriend, and they were e you could tell they had emancipated, they were on their own. They weren't 18 yet. And the girl comes in with her phone at this was heartbreaking.

She said, she started saying, and she was in line, she didn't wanna wait in line 'cause she was in trouble. And she said, I just gave this man money because they said I needed to, blah, blah, blah. And she's waving her phone and she goes, now they want more money and I don't have any more money.

What do I do? And the whole line, and all the tellers got silent. And I was in the front of the line and I turned and I said, honey, you've been hosed.

Like, you're in trouble. You've got your money stolen. And she goes, what?

And she starts crying. And I said, please step in front of me. Go up and talk to a manager right now and see what they can do to help you.

And that was my eye-opening moment about handheld devices and how we had the first level of us got educated. 'cause I came from a general assignment newspaper background. That's why I am for the every man out there on in the cyberspace.

I didn't come from a geek background. So I remember thinking, okay, so wave one was email and computers, and then laptops, wave two was handheld devices. She had never had a computer, she had never had a laptop.

But now she had this smartphone in her hand and she was getting scammed off the phone. So, fast forward 15, 20 years later, however long it's been since cell phones got into the hands of everybody. And I think that the level of sophistication is gone.

You know, we understand that bad things come in text. We understand that, uh, you know, people are trying to scam us on social media. What we're not understanding is we still believe what we read on social media like nudes.

And that's the misinformation part that's happening. Now, that's the part that's really scary. I, as a journalist, you as a, a journalist and an analyst and a thought leader, I have to sort through stuff that I see.

And if it's that hard for me, and we've got deep fakes and everything else coming down the road, we've got elections, we've got misinformation, social media is now the big bugaboo in terms of misinformation. And how do we set filters? How do we create an ease, an easier environment for these people to either sort through, or should we just unplug?

Because did you read these Neil Stevenson's book 70 EAPs? Oh yeah. Okay.

Do you remember how the space colony basically killed themselves off because of misinformation on social media? I love, uh, Stevenson and you, my, my first bit of journalism was a article in the, uh, index news in the 12th grade, uh, uh, high school news newspaper where I did a review of THX 1138. And my summary there was, this has nothing to do with futurism.

This is commentary on current social issues. And I love Stevenson, but you know, he does the same sort of thing, right? So I'm, I'm hoping, and that's my whole, so whole point of this whole inevitability curve thing.

And it, I is that 5,000 years from now, we'll probably have figured this out, even if the moon calls Apart 5,000, we need to figure out, But 87 for inside joke for the Neil Stevenson fans. But, But this is, yeah, I think that's, I think this speaks a lot to where we are right now. Right.

And, and again, your background is, is a fascinating one on top of it because you've both done this, you know, transition across the, what we now call content creation. We used to call writing. Uh, oh Yeah.

There's so much content out there now. But, uh, you know, but, but in cybersecurity and privacy and cyber crime and all these other related topics, right? Mm-hmm.

And I, I find in the information integrity space, you know, I, I think that really is the issue. You know, we ca we see disinformation campaigns and influence campaigns of, you know, malicious actors and so forth. But it's really not all of those negative things.

It's, it's, it's about information integrity, right? We've got, you and I both know that the actual ability of the, you know, public, private, commercial, technical community to deliver the integrity you think you're actually getting from information. Uh, we're not there yet.

See how it never was. So now, now, I mean, My free LinkedIn repo Want to change things by, you know, issuing a certain amount of b******t that's actually possible for now, but it's not likely to be possible forever. And in part because of what, you know, we're just talking about that.

I think everybody, all of my friends, I had shout out to a life, another lifelong friend, bud Houston, best guy on earth. I've known his son Tre since he was born. He is, you know, now a, a military retired mil military veteran.

Great guy. Great. I say great kid because I'm 60 years old, but whatever.

Right? And he's, you know, exactly the kind of guy, you know, very patriotic, you know, very energetic. He always has been believe it or he is this tall, holy cow.

But, uh, you know, and, and so he is absolutely not an idiot, right? But, you know, he is, thank God, you know, in some of the same social media that I am, instead of retreating and saying this, I've had the opportunity to counter a little bit and say, all right, you, what you're seeing, I don't think is what you think it's, and connect him with other friends. Why John Baumgartner, you know, John and, uh, uh, who Oh yeah, He's been posting about he and his damage in Asheville, Right?

And he's, the, this is, you know, for anybody who doesn't know John Baumgartner, you should, 'cause he's a, a, uh, a retired military combat veteran, you know, wonderful guy, peer, you know, peer end pillar and icon of the information security community as reputable source. I mean, seriously, if you get want any more better than Joan, you're not kidding. It lives in Nashville.

His tree was hit by an 80 foot oak tree. He is been organizing his community and he understands emergence response, right? So, yep.

And he's been sharing those, his capabilities with his community, Right? And his experience with the rest of us. You know, and to, to our point of our, our, our thread here, I think that sort of thing works, right?

I think we need better technical things and maybe some regulations, God help us, or, you know, laws or whatnot on how information is is handled. But I think most of it is a, a public understanding. You know, we need to evolve past this.

Maybe a generational kind of thing. I think Trey's generation is in a better position than ours, perhaps, right? To really understand.

I challenge that assumption a little bit, Chris, because we are sharing understanding. We fact check, we put stuff out there and people still wanna believe what they want to believe. Well, I, I, I, my caveat, you know, to what I just said, it was today, right?

I think in 10, 20 and 30, 40 years, you know, well, that this generation now is, you know, living through it from, you know, my kids' age. You know, the 20 something, 30 something, you know, um, Much more exposure than we had when we were kids. We had no exposure to any of this.

You know, my kids grew up with one computer in the living room, and now they all have their phones and everything. Parents have to deal with that. So everybody's getting exposed and from a very young age now, and what does that mean?

Sometimes I think we are part of a large video game that we put ourselves in that's very realistic. And when we die, we go back to whatever it was we came from. And then we have a virtual world within the virtual world happening now.

And it, you start looking at this like when you're looking at a hundred different mirrors, and you see all the images of the images of the images, and that's what it's feeling like to me right now. You Know, it it, and it really does, right? It's really common, you know, and it's easy to feel that way, and you can see us expressing it through popular culture more, you know, um, mor not Morty, Rick and Morty, right.

You know, and that the, the multiple, there's so many different parallel universes. Doesn't matter what anybody does in any one of them, or simulation. I like that one.

Right. You know, we're living inside of simulation, inside of simulation, inside of simulation. And, uh, and I think, you know, so, and looking, you know, just try to, you know, get this at, at the end of this and looking forward, right?

I think we posit this. I do think, you know, the generations coming out, the millennials and so on and, uh, around them, um, will over time, I think there were kind of the answer to, you know, this information integrity thing, in part because as we were saying, I think so too. They were literally, you know, you and I have had to learn this, you know, we came from a world where seriously, the amount of information, when you say three channels of television, you don't understand.

Right? I remember those days. Right.

And that's too, you know, you know, that antennas and tinfoil and, but we really do have a, you know, a a cohort of folks who are coming along who are quite bright or quite educated, quite connected, you know, maybe as a, as a gestalt group, a little confused today, but give them 10 years, another 10 years in another 10 years, and tell me we haven't worked our way through this. I agree. I, I might be working on a book about seasoned expert advice from our top security pros, the icons in the industry.

It's may or may not happen, but if I do, I think that what we need to do is we need a two-way dialogue from the old folks down and from the young folks up, because I know young folks are much more open with their use of technology than I am. I am, I'm shy. I'm not shy, but I'm careful what I adopt, what I don't do, TikTok, I don't, you know, I use Instagram, but not TikTok.

And I, there are places I stay away from because I know that they're not controlled by the US or, you know, other reasons. And the rest of the kids, the younger people just don't care where their platforms are gonna be. Their platforms are gonna be their platforms.

And so I look at that as they are going to be teaching us eventually because they've got the background and the savvy that maybe some of us don't have. Yeah. I think with three kids in my, in their twenties or spanning that decade, I am biased.

You know, that's my, uh, that's my bias statement. I, I, I just agree. And it was just not to say I know what it is exactly what that future is gonna look like, right.

But I, I see, you know, that certainly the ability, you know, we are gonna have the ability to have a good future, you know, 10 years and 20 years and 30 years and 40 years and 50 years from now, you know, more. I won't be here then, but yeah, I, I, I won't either, right? I know young folks who will and, and, and heck with some medicine, you know, as I always try to look at that one, it's like, look, I'm not planning on benef, you know, being the one, the first one to benefit from, or sending, you know, techno uh, technology or medicine and whatnot.

But I won't be surprised if at any point in my life, you know, it seems more and more clear that someone my age is gonna live, be really old like this. If you're lucky enough to live to 120, anyways, you're 60 now, we're talking 60 years from now. You might be, you know, a good candidate for some of the, you know, genetic or God knows what, uh, medical changes happen in the next 60 years.

So that, you know, none of us need to count on this to, because my point here, but you know, we're in that realm, right? So my kids, you know, the generation after them, generation after them, you know, there are people walking around right now that I have an interest in seeing the future for and thinking about this, right? And on this through that, every time I've seen angst and, you know, uh, uh, all, all my life, right?

We we're gonna run out of food, we're gonna nuke ourselves to death, yada, yada, yada. Uh, haven't so far. It's Amazing.

We haven't yet, right? It's amazing. We haven't yet.

No, I, I frankly don't think we're going to. Right. You know, I don't think Kim, Jon yield's gonna launch a thing because he likes his caviar and schnapps, and he is spoiled little brat.

But, uh, and you go spoiled A big Brat. Yes. But, uh, Well, so, but yeah, back to the future, like where we're going in the future, I see some of that where the younger people are gonna come up the ranks and come up with new solutions and new ways of utilizing technology and then screening my whole career, I feel like I've been a, can I use a bad word here?

Oh, Absolutely. Is brought on me on the internet. My whole career has been to be a s**t screen.

And there is a lot of information coming at security leaders that needs to be filtered before it gets to them. Uh, because every vendor in the book thinks that they have the silver bullet. And my whole job has been to be say, yeah, no.

So you fix this little problem over here, but there is these 10,000 problems over here that you're missing. And so no way are you gonna be the silver bullet. It's also asking the hard questions.

Were you at the Cisco event when, I don't know, 20 years ago, I raised my hand and I said, excuse me, Mr. Cisco people, it seems to me like we should change internet protocol. We should change ip, or we should get rid of it all together.

I got laughed out of the room, and now we have IPV six, but even that isn't good enough. We're still on technology that was created in the eighties, and it's open and says, hello, here I am, I'm sending out my bacon. Hello.

I'm here. Come hack me. You know?

And that's the way I've always seen ip. And so the whole thing about Cisco laughing me out in the room, and then 20 years later we've got IP V six, it just, those are the hard questions. No one really stops to ask.

No one really stops to, maybe we do need to tear it out and start over or start over and then tear it out with some, you know, once we have something better, you know? But those are the big questions too, I think we need to be looking at in the future. I, I think, uh, you know, this, this, this is, this conversation has led to an interesting point, right?

Because I think that you, if I can be really honest about the, the short term future, the next 20, you know, 20, 30 years on these topics, um, it could go either way. You know, it's, it's tending to look pretty ugly. You're right.

There's so many legacy issues that it will take a lot of redoing. Um, but in that same, uh, era, you know, this whole cohort of, you know, what, you and I can call kids these days, you know, we're gonna get to our age and they'll come up with all sorts of amazing things. So I think we'll get out of that midterm, you know, that, uh, that, uh, that we can see really, you know, see close enough from here to, to, you know, do things about it.

Um, I hope the smart people don't get egos though, like Elon Musk has. And I think that we need smart people helping, but not trying to become gods. And I find in, in technical technical industry, there's so much ego.

And as a female in the industry who has to interview a lot of men, I'm very good at petting their little egos to get the information I need. But, you know, come on, this is a huge problem, and we're all a team and we should all be working together. And there should be no gods of tech out there, and there should be no billion bazillionaires in tech out there.

And I hope that the younger generation is able to collaborate and, you know, not push up these icons like Elon and let them be the deciding factor of everything, you know? Well, I, I think if I look in inside my, my home, my kids, I think, uh, I think we're in good shape. So we'll have to, we'll have to see, well, Deb, unfortunately, we have tabs, the allocated time bucket again, and, And we just barely scratch the surface, Right?

That's kind of the whole, the whole point. You know, and I, I'll, you know, I'll end the last thought on my own on this and you can have yours, but, uh, I think that's the most fascinating thing about the near and far future. We're all, you obsessed with AI right now, and Ai, AI's doing a lot of things, but the thing we're really good about is doing a few Right.

You know, you know, we all know the Yes, the, the old truism about, you know, Biden's actually seeing a very small part of what I think I'm seeing my eyes aren't really biologically capable of grabbing, you know, uh, the definition of a camera. I think it'll always be the case, right? We had to, we have 35 minutes, you know, we we're not, you know, made outta silicon.

You, and that's where we find our art. Correct. Well, I just wanna plug my book, the Cyber thriller series to Breaking Backbones, hacker, trilogy.

Just look it up on Amazon or anywhere you buy books and give me good reviews, please. I need to play the algorithm game, speaking of social media and algorithms and everything else. So it's a constant hustle, uh, to get people to buy these books, but they buy them and they love them.

And so I've got all five star reviews and some people who read them are technical, some are not, uh, some think they're too technical. Some things they need to be more technical. It was the balance I was trying to get all along throughout all three books.

So hopefully you'll enjoy the story. 'cause it does start with a drone more and a kamikaze drone in book one and takes off from there. And when you read 'em, you'll know that I actually wrote them for Netflix.

And I do have a producer. Uh, we haven't been able to get it off the ground yet, but we're still working on that. Well, I, I thoroughly endorse all those and, and give the book on Amazon, Kindle those normal places, or, and I will have a link Well everywhere and we will put a link.

Let's definitely put a link in the abstract. Got it. I'll send that to you.

Awesome. Alright. Thank You.

Thanks everybody. Thanks Chris. Wonderful to see you from Hawaii, right?

I usually ask that From Maui. Yes, from Maui. God bless the internet.

All right. See you folks.