Unspoken Security Ep 27: When Will A.I. Replace Us All?

Critical thinking right now is the most valuable skill. If you can develop critical thinking, you don't need to worry about your job until you do, and I'll be right in the boat with you. Right? Like, if we get to that level, I'm right there with you. I am not a quantum physicist. I am not these things. I know them, I talk to them, I work with them because I'm trying to bring hacker mentality, by the way. And I will often wonder how much The intelligence community, because of its ability to deconstruct problems, to paint scenarios.

Welcome to Unspoken Security, the raw and gritty podcast for security professionals who are looking to understand the most important issues related to making the world a safer place, including intelligence-driven security, risks and threats in the digital and physical world, and discussions related to corporate culture, leadership, and how world events impact all of us on and off our keyboards. In each episode, host AJ Nash engages with a range of industry experts to dissect current trends, share practical insights, and address the blunt truths surrounding all aspects of the security industry. <LYRICS>Decisions are made.</LYRICS> Hello and welcome to another episode of Unspoken Security. I'm your host, AJ Nash. I spent 19 years in the intelligence community, mostly at NSA, and I've been building and maturing intelligence programs in the private sector for about 8 years, maybe going on 9 now, maybe. I'm passionate about intelligence, security, public speaking, mentoring, and teaching. And I also have a master's degree in organizational leadership from Gonzaga University. Go Zags! So I continue to be deeply committed to servant leadership. Now, the reason I mention all that is this podcast brings all of those elements together with some incredible guests, and we have these authentic, unfiltered conversations on a wide range of challenging topics. It's not your typical podcast, though, all polished and put together necessarily. My dog makes occasional appearances. It's been a while and she's not in the room today, so she probably won't. People argue and debate here. We certainly swear. I mean, I definitely do. And that's okay.

The—

what I want with this is to think of this podcast as a conversation, maybe one you might overhear at a bar after a long day at one of the larger cybersecurity conferences that most of us attend. These are the conversations we usually have when nobody's listening. Not today. I'm joined by my good friend Ryan Cloutier. He's the CEO of Scare Bear Industries as well as the chief of artificial intelligence and visionary for Kander. He's an IT and cybersecurity professional, over 15 years of experience, so he's kind of an old guy like me. He spends that time developing cybersecurity programs. He served as president of Security Studios, currently on several advisory boards, including the Idaho National Laboratory's Center for Cyber-Informed Engineering. He's certified Information security, information systems security professional, that's CISSP, and he's proficient in AI development, AI security and governance, cloud security, DevSecOps methodologies, security policy, process, audit, compliance, network security. I can go on and on here, right? Application security and architecture. He also instructs the FR Secure CISSP mentor program, co-hosts security podcasts, and he was listed among the most influential people in cybersecurity. Yeah, he's a pretty impressive guy. I don't know why he hangs out with me. He's got terrible taste in friends. And I know a couple other people that would probably vouch for that. So Ryan, with all of that said, this impressive bio, is there anything I left out? Anything you want to add? You know, I mean, you're one of the most influential people in cybersecurity, man.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

So I leave that little nugget in the bio as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Some years ago, I was doing a podcast with some mutual friends of ours, Chris Roberts and Evan Francine.

Yeah.

And somebody put us on that list and, you know, we all kind of think those lists are bullshit. And so I leave it in there just to see, you know, does that change the pressure in the room? And if I'm talking to folks like us, it's because we know how bullshit statements like that are, right? Yeah, I've done a lot of stuff, done a lot of things, but ultimately I'm just a hacker. I'm just a hacker. I'm a nerd. I love to explore and unpack and, the people side of it, you know, is what really drives me. So that's the only thing I'd add.

Yeah. Very cool. And listen, a lot of those lists are bullshit. There's no doubt. I mean, you can buy lists. I mean, Chris Roberts talks about that stuff a lot, right? There are also valid lists. And listen, you are actually pretty influential. All 3 of you guys for that matter are all the work you, well, some of the work you've done. I don't know all of it. We'll talk about it. And I'm excited to have you here today. So I appreciate you making time. Ironically, for anybody who doesn't know, Ryan and I both live in the Twin Cities area, but we are not in the same room. He's in his house and I'm in mine because this is the modern world., and it was just the way my recording is set up, frankly. But we, we saw each other not all that long ago. So, all right, listen, let's jump into the topic today because this is a really interesting and kind of scary topic in my opinion, you know, that I wanted to get into. You know, mentioned before, obviously, you know, AI is a big part of what you do. And so today's topic, simple question, you know, everybody wants to know is when will AI replace us all? Um, you know, it's, it's a big fear, right? People want to know when, when are we going to all get replaced by AI? It's, it seems to be coming. Faster than I'd like it to. So, so I, I think we can get in here and kind of talk about the pros and the cons and, you know, what's happening and, and, and dispel some of the myths maybe. So, you know, to jump into it, Ryan, like you're the expert, right? So the first question really is, let's baseline some of this. Like, what is, when we say AI, what is AI? And, and where are we today, you know, in this technology?

So I think first, let me humbly say, if I'm the expert, we're all in trouble. And second—

That one, I'm drinking, man. I almost spit my soda all over the screen just now.

A little bit of good timing, maybe. What is AI? It's a great question. It's one I get asked often. First, we have to separate artificial intelligence from things like automation. They can go together, but sometimes they're separate. So I like to tell people that for me, AI started with a man named Alan Turing. And it was back in the '40s, and he was trying to, like, stop these Nazi people and the whole war. And he created the machine that ultimately broke the Enigma machine. And I believe that wholeheartedly, that was the first example of an intelligent machine. That was day one. From there, we've, we've created this stuff called machine learning. Now, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, but it's very narrow in its scope, uh, and, and it, and it's been around for a very long time. It's why your credit cards, get flagged for fraud. It's why you, when you book a ticket, you know, shortly thereafter, you're getting advertising for the destination you're headed to. It's been in use since the '70s. It's used in air traffic control. It's, it's, it's been around a very, very long time, especially in the defense industrial space. Then you have what we are calling AI today, or generative AI, which really is basically large language chat models. We have these things called LLMs, or large language models. That's just a bunch of text. It's just shit tons of text in an unorganized database. And the machine learning, or its cousin, deep learning, which is a type of algorithm that says, okay, now that we figured out machine learning, now we're gonna do deep learning. And deep learning is the act of the machine itself trying to make the next best guess. Okay, so is the apple red? All right, so we think we figured out the machine learning to take the red apples and send them this path and the green apples and send them that path. Problem is, when we count the apples at the end, we still got reds and greens getting through to the wrong basket. So deep learning is, okay, what's going wrong in that and how do I improve that? And I'm oversimplifying all of this, by the way.

No, no, that's good. That's good. For— especially for me.

A large language model just does that with text. Now, the, the downside is that text is the comment section of fucking Twit— Twit—

Twitter, X, whatever, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, all those, right?

Right. And the worst part is 4chan, 8chan. Oh my God, that's in there as well.

Pools of the internet right there. So we're teaching these models how to be the rudest and most, like, just horrible people we have, basically. Because, I mean, and By the way, for anybody who's on 4chan or 8chan, don't fucking write me and bitch about it. It doesn't mean you're a horrible person, but let's face it, a lot of horrible things happen in those places. Okay. And that's what the machine's going to capture. So if you happen to be there for, I can't imagine what purposes that are good, but let's say you are. I'm not picking on you. Don't give me a hard time. But, but yeah, I mean, so we're training these things on like some garbage behavior. Is that just because that's what was available? I mean, that's the big dataset that were free.

So it was exactly. So is the, the, so the datasets are technically known as corpuses, right? We call them corpuses. I like to think of them more like corpse. Right. Because, because it's information that's already stagnant. Right? Mm-hmm. So it's not getting update. So if you've ever interacted with a chatbot and it's like, oh, I don't know that. I'm, you know, my training data stops, you know, at the 2010 level or whatever it is. Exactly.

Right. Yeah.

So, so often then we start to think that that means that's, that's all it knows or it's all it's capable of knowing. And that's not true. It can know more. You can get it to do things. It will go search the internet. Not all of them. It depends how they're set up.

There's a lot of variables.

But when we're talking about AI today, we're really talking about generative AI or chatbot AI. We're, when we talk about things like Copilot, Gemini, right? Some of those AIs are visual in nature. So we're creating pictures with them. We're creating videos with them. Some of the projects I'm working on are towards the next level of AI. So what we call general intelligence or GenAI, which means more human-esque. We're working on things like reasoning, emotions, ethics, right? And, and so that's a different kind of AI than what we've had before. But AI is not new.

Okay. All right. I mean, that's good. I mean, that, that definitely helps right now. And I'm not gonna lie, you know, I've, I've been up until recently, I've been pretty down on, on AI. I've spent a lot of time publicly saying, listen, what you guys are calling AI isn't AI. All right? It's just stacked language models. It's a model on top of a model on top of a model. These things can't think for themselves. They can't reason. They're not intelligent. Stop calling them that. And I've had a couple reasons for that. First of all, I've always believed that so far. And what I had seen up until recently validated most of that. You know, I, people talk in, in grand terms, but I remember when I worked for a company a few companies ago now, I went and visited their team that was working on AI and their PhDs. And, and one of the guys in the room said, listen, we're a long way from having problems. Like we're not being replaced. This thing can't tell a dog from a cat. Like, don't get excited. There's a long way to go. Right? And he was the one that actually convinced me. He's like, this isn't AI. It's, they've given that, that name cuz it's, you know, it's flashy and it's easy to understand, but this is all just machine learning and stacked machine learning. And we're a long way from these things, you know, knowing anything. Now I now realize I did the math the other day. I'm like a long way. Well, that conversation was 6 or 7 years ago. Apparently that's a long way in tech because things have changed, you know, dramatically to the point now where my, one of my concerns, and I wanna bounce some of this off of you, is it's good enough to look like it's real, but not always still there, right? I mean, we've, we've, you know, there's been news about like hallucinations. Obviously this thing will make shit up if it doesn't have an answer. It'll give you one that may not be any good. So, and I keep looking at it, I'm an Intel guy, right? So my background's all about Intel and Intel is all about giving the right people the right content at the right time to make informed decisions. People are gonna act on it and it has to be trusted. And my concern is that we've reached a point where these technologies, they'll spit out an answer and they'll spit out an answer that looks, feels, sounds like intel. It can have the right caveat language. It can even have sources now, which was a flaw until recently. So if somebody asks, hey, you know, what's, you know, what is the threat of pick a threat actor or group? And they get that and they say, you know, what are all the TTPs? What should I do? You know, what do you think's gonna happen next? I mean, the machines will give them answers, but it might still be bullshit. Yeah. Because it's just not quite there yet. So that's got me concerned in that it can do a lot more than it could, you know, just a couple years ago. And there are some cool use cases, but I'm really worried still, you know, I don't know, we'll talk about it as we go through here. What use cases do you see that are valid, that are safe, that are like, hey, this works today as well as a person, you can trust this, we're good, you know, versus areas where people are pushing and it's like, man, I wish you guys would slow down here. Stop selling this like it can do this because it's really dangerous to go down this path. Like, are there some of the use cases you wanted to talk about in here?

Yeah, I think, you know, so a couple things. I think the use cases in manufacturing, they're, you know, using, using these technologies to improve quality, using them in, in design, you know, those, those non-humanistic use cases. It really does do quite well.

So heavily repeatable processes, for instance, things like that.

Yep.

Yep.

Systematic processes, you know, things like that. Where it is actually emerging and being applied quite a bit is in the human interaction space. So when you call that call center, you're not talking, you're not, because what they're trying to do and to varying degrees of success is they're actually trying to improve the quality of your experience. They really are. Now, albeit for better bottom line reasons and reduction of staff and liability and the robot isn't going to have a bad day. But I fear that I won't have good shit to scroll through on Twitter because if, you know, people aren't having bad days at the call center, they're not melting down and where'd my entertainment go? Right.

Don't worry, the machines will probably handle that soon too. We'll figure out a way. But you know, you can program them to have a bad day.

So yeah. So I think it's manufacturing. It's where they're applying it in medicine. I also think it has some good validity because again, that's really, it's pattern matching. It's, and while it affects humans, it's not the interaction. And what I want to get to are two points. Okay, cognitive deference is a term that I'm, I'm working on coining here, if, if in this context, because we've begun to defer our cognition to the machine.

That's not good.

So we are, we are going to the machine now to let it do the thinking. The amount of copy-pasting that is happening, right, is ridiculous because it's not copy-paste-read. No, he used to be send, copy, paste, send. And for, you know, as an IT person, security coder, yada, yada, yada, copy paste is, you know, I mean, come on, copy pasta. That's, that's my shit, right? You got to read it. You got to know what it is. And the problem we're running into is the description of the use case to the machine. So to your point, yes, it does spit out garbage, but it doesn't have to. Okay, garbage in, garbage out. And what we're finding is some of those soft skills that used to be hard skills. So if you have anything like this on your face of the gray nature, there was a time before the internet.

Yeah, the before time. I remember the before time. Yes, I know, that was a time we had like 4 television channels and one of them was PBS, which you didn't watch if you were over the age of like 6 or under the age of 70.

Right, right. And yeah, and somebody had to do one of these with some aluminum foil and coat.

Oh yeah.

To be able to, right. But what we inherently had instilled in us was problem solving because your show that you wanted to watch wasn't on. So what do you do now?

Right, right.

What do you want to do? Well, I want to watch Scooby-Doo. Well, it ain't Saturday morning. So, and, and, and I think we lack that and we're seeing that manifest itself. So as we're looking at what is AI, what is the risk to AI, how is AI going to impact our society, our social fabric, my biggest fear is that it's already begun. And we are going to it for things that we shouldn't be getting from it. I can share a personal intimate here where in my own marriage, due to my wife's autism and my neurodiversity as an ADHD super squirrel, she has used the AI at my encouragement, but I didn't do a full risk assessment. I didn't, I didn't remember, I didn't remember that she, because I gave her one that I had tuned not to my advantage, but to be more— trust me, that was a hard one too.

I was always like, Ryan's always right, trust Ryan, he's telling the truth always, right? Right.

Prop skills. Aren't always getting her the higher quality results. So where I had the prompt skill to pre— what we call pre-prompting and getting it conditioned to respond in the way I want it to respond, accuracy and with detail and not made up bullshit and fake sources, she's not doing as much of that.

Got it. And so, so also from a privacy perspective, all your shit's out there now, man.

Like, what the fuck? You're giving that to the public?

All your dirty laundry is now out there being trained.

But I'm a real transparent guy, so I'm not too worried about it. Those are big topics, man. Those are really heavyweight topics. And I think in our rush to make money with this and to put some AI on it, a friend of mine, Sean Riley, guy that runs around and gives talks, heads up some cyber games. He had a talk he had gave, I don't know, we'll call it a year and change ago, where he had made some comment about, you know, they're putting AI and everything, they're putting it into the diapers.

Yeah.

And we're now starting to see, right? Oh, diaper's full. We'll send a text to you. What in the hell are we doing? So, yeah.

Yeah, it's scary. Well, and the thing about it is like the two things I keep looking at are, well, first of all, humans by nature, and let me, for those who are gonna listen to half of this sentence, humans by nature are lazy. And it's, it's, it's, all right, if you want a better way of saying it, humans by nature are designed to find efficient solutions. And that isn't a bad thing. All right. Steve Jobs, I think, was the guy who famously said, I like to hire people who are lazy because they will always find the most efficient way to accomplish something. So it's not a bad thing. But as a result, if we find a tool that does something, we're really quick to go, oh my God, this will take away pain for me. I'm gonna, I'm gonna adopt that tool. You know, if you don't believe me, ask anybody who's over the age of 2 if they do long division. No, they don't. We all use calculators, right? Nobody does. I mean, it's, I mean, that's a very simple thing, but don't tell me you're sitting down with pen and paper doing long division. You're not. Nobody in the, in the right mind's doing that cuz we have tools for these things, right? You know, there's, there's, you can go up, there's a million of those things. So there's the one hand of people that are very interested in efficiency and less effort, lazy, right? In a good way. But then there's also, at least for certainly for us and for a lot of the world, most of the world, there's this constant ever-present push to bottom line, to profit, right? So companies are increasingly, in my opinion, increasingly willing to put things on the market that they don't know the second and third order effects of., but they know the first effect, which is this is going to improve our bottom line. We can become X% more efficient. We can drop our labor costs by Y%. The output, we'll see what the output ends up being. And the risks that go with it oftentimes either aren't considered or just aren't even understood. Right. And so I think that's what I've been watching the last, I don't know what it is now, 12, 18 months. That makes me really nervous. Again, as an Intel guy specifically in my space, I worry about it because Intelligence on the surface. Now we've gotten to the point where there's tools that'll kick out things that look and smell like intel, but there's a lot to this and intelligence is highly impactful. And my fear is that we're gonna have companies come out and say, hey, listen, you don't need these intel teams. You don't need these intel analysts. They're very expensive. They're a pain in the ass to work with. Believe me, we are. And instead of that, just forget it. I got a machine. It'll, it'll kick out all the answers you want with all the proper language. You can get thousands of reports, many as you want. We don't care. You know, the volume's not an issue. And we'll do it for a fraction of the cost. And companies are gonna go, okay, looks, I mean, we'll test it out, right? And they'll have somebody write a report, they'll have the machine do it and be like, yeah, that's close enough. We'll go with that. And that's great until it's not, right? And the risk is gonna be catastrophic, you know, when the results show up in that you make decisions that are flawed or somebody gets in and is able to manipulate the language model, right? Manipulate the AI. You know, we talk a lot about bias, for instance, at Intel. And teams work on this constantly and we have peer review, et cetera. But even if you have some jerk on your team who's constantly biased, against a specific adversary or group, it's one person. If your machine is biased, it's systemic. Now everything comes out the same way and you don't have anybody to even check to see why that's happening. So I'm really worried about that. This combination of people who will just dump stuff in the AI and then use it. I've seen that, you know, I've, I've been in organizations where, uh, we were sending things out to a, a vendor for marketing content and they were coming back and I was like, this shit's garbage. Like this, this is nonsense. It reads fine to you, but I know it's nonsense. And it tells me somebody wrote this with AI, fire them. They're charging you. To do 2 minutes of, of questioning on a machine and just sending it to you. And I worry that's gonna happen with the Intel side too. So I, that's a little bit of my soapbox. Yeah. I don't know if you're seeing more things like that.

Well, I am.

Yeah.

I am.

Okay.

But the first thing I wanna do is I wanna go back and I wanna unpack a very important word that is grossly misunderstood when we talk about AI.

Mm-hmm.

And that's bias.

Mm.

Bias is a function, first and foremost, a function in, in AI. Okay. Bias is a function of statistics.

Okay.

It is an omnipresent function. It has to be there. It's actually part of how the AI works.

Hmm. Now, interesting.

What we often talk about is social bias when we are talking about race, color, creed, religion, emotion, identity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Add something new to the list today. Somebody cares enough to tell me, you can tweet at me. Right. But, but it's, it's this, it's this, so what I call a, so a human social element, that's bias. And then it's a function of mathematics. And it's important to understand that as a function of mathematics, we still have to account for it. And what, what I'm finding is we're accounting for this half, but not this half. So we're trying to say, well, it, it leaned too hard politically. But we're not going back and finding how that, the reason it did that was that the training data was weighted to a particular leaning or the prompter, the one interacting with it, had introduced additional elements that weighted a response, right? So this is, you know, when we talk about AI governance, it's also, it's very, very different because you have to, to a certain degree, you almost have to language train the human to safely interact with the AI to limit that because there will, like right now, one of the projects I'm working on is how do you get it to say no?

Right.

Because it's built to say yes. It's because it's a math problem, guys. I want everyone to understand this. I don't care if it's language. I don't care if it's AI, ML, ABCD, CNNs, cognitive neural networks, if we want to get fancy. Right? Hyperdimensional, like all this crazy quantum, okay? It's still math. It's still math. It boils down to math and the math has to balance. And the problem is, is that the mathematicians are not the philosophers and the philosophers are not the mathematicians. And we've attempted to create a technology that plays both.

Yeah. Well, and you make a good point, you know, about the training of this thing, right? Because the biases are gonna come from what's, what's been put in. So I think you mentioned governance, you know, and I, I, I'm curious, I don't know enough about this, so I'm gonna be really honest. I need to, you know, I did say not long ago I was talking to some people, I think it was RSA, and I mentioned, I said, you know, I think the big growth industry probably in that's coming for us, obviously AI's here to stay and, and gonna keep growing, is gonna be who monitors that. You know, so I, I didn't, Governance wasn't a word that had crossed my mind. It should have at the time. It didn't. But yeah, the governance, right? The people who are going to actually be inside the code to keep track of the code, to monitor the code, to make sure it's valid, you know, to validate it. And then also the people that are going to protect it. You know, if I'm a threat actor or group, this is now a crown jewel. If I find out you're very dependent on this technology, I don't need to change your opinion. If I'm in a negotiation, I want to make a deal with you. I don't need to convince you. I just need to convince the machine that you're going to trust. So if I can poison that and it comes back and says, oh, you should totally make this deal, we've got a 92% confidence rating that this is gonna be great for your business. And meanwhile, you're buying my garbage business that's, you know, looks really good, but it's actually 3, you know, untrained monkeys on a wheel running around in circles. You know, that's a problem, right? So, right. It seems like those are gonna be the, the 2 places where industry's really gonna have to grow. And, and I don't know, again, that gets back into who you're gonna trust then.

So governance. Safety, trust, right? This is an umbrella. So, you know, we talked about GRC in the past, and I think it's going to evolve. I think it's going to become GST.

Governance, safety, and?

Trust.

Trust. Okay, got it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.

I really do. I really do, because the way that you risk manage in AI is vastly different from— the concepts are the same. The fundamentals, you know, to quote my good friend Evan, right? The fundamentals haven't changed. They have it. You got to know what you got. You got to know why you have it. You got to know who's using it, right? These, these basics. But what happens after that, I think, is fundamentally up for grabs. You talk about intelligence. So, you know, one of the ways, you know, we've got many different means of gathering intelligence. We have, we have HUMINT, we've got CIGNIT, right? We've got, there's passive collection, there's open collection, there's active collection, there's signals and da da da.

Well, imagery, there's, there's OSINT. There's—

yeah, it's one of the things that I'm exploring on one of my research projects is, is neuro, right? We're looking at the bio side of things, the neuro side of things. We're working on things like the internet of bodies. Here's a good Google search for everybody: internet of bodies. Internet of bodies using a embedded nano-neuronet.

Internet of Bodies sounds like a movie that I know, right? And the people, right? Internet of Bodies. Oh, Rand. Okay, Rand Corporation's got a thing on it. It's one of the first things that pops up. Internet of Bodies, Our Connected Future. All right, so if anybody wants to check that out, I'm not familiar with it, so I'll start looking at it myself.

But, but what it is, is it's this, this progression, this convergence, right? So while we're talking about AI today, I think the bigger threat to intelligence is the convergence of technology. So, it isn't that the human gets replaced by AI, the human gets replaced by the AI-enabled humanoid robot that's partnered with the drone swarm that's partnered with the— do you see this interconnected?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You gotta stop having— this is nightmare fuel. We're heading down that path. I mean, we're going to have this discussion. It's the next couple of questions that are coming, but this is nightmare fuel. You're scaring people way too early. We want them to stick around a little longer, man. We don't wanna get to the apocalypse yet. That's the third question. But, but no, it does. I mean, you are leading into the next question, right? So we talked about what it is and what the baseline is and where we are. Where do you see the technology going? Like, again, normally I talk, you know, 5, 10-year windows, but here it's pretty quick. So like 2-year window, you know, the private sector, the military, personal lives, like what are you seeing as, you know, what's, what's coming, what's here in some cases, or, or what's near, you know, near horizon and what's coming in say the next couple of years.

Well, to lighten up the nightmare fuel, because I have occasionally been accused of preventing people from sleeping after they hear me, and I don't mean to do it. I think there's a lot of positive on the horizon. I think that there's actually a very bright future for us if we, as the listeners of the show, as the practitioners of the industry, step into the void now. We're all waiting for someone to fill the gap, but nobody's stepping into the gap. And I encourage you to join. There's a handful of us that you can find who are trying to do this. And my dear God, we need your help. We need all your help because it's not that hard. You don't have to be an expert in quantum. You don't have to be an expert in this AI shit to make a meaningful impact in how does our society unfold. I watched an election go to shit because we couldn't agree how a society should unfold. And it doesn't matter who won and it doesn't matter who lost. I don't get into politics like that. What I saw was a societal function struggling to function. I saw humans and I saw reliance on technology acting as a catalyst of negative input.

Yep.

Not a positive input.

We've seen that for 12 years now, at least, too. I mean, this is—

Right?

Yeah, this has become a pattern.

But I didn't think all hope was lost, right? I didn't say, okay, there's no future for us yet. I think what I'd like to focus on is the healthy, safe use of these AIs. They can find your cancer faster. They can come up with new medicines. They can, they are gonna help the elderly. I built one that, that it's not like medically certified, so I'm not claiming it cures any diseases, prevents or treats a damn thing. But it's a companion bot for the elderly who, they're lonely. Their last friend that had the relatable, do you remember in 1926 when that soldier blah, blah, blah, that story's gone.

And they outlived all their friends. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And so to be able to, to reminisce and relate, and not that it's their friend, you don't want to fool them, but it's, it's knowledgeable of the colloquialisms of the time. It's knowledgeable of, right. And so it can, it can reminisce, right? Maybe, maybe that'll be the company name, Reminiscence. Well, no, it wants to buy it off me. Send me some money.

And, and there's, there's, I mean, there's studies that show that people who do that, like it helps them keep their own memories, right? It helps them keep their cognitive, like they're focusing on, on things and they're functioning. If, if there's nobody to tell those stories to and nobody to relate to, those stories evaporate for them too. Like, there's nothing left for them. I mean, they have friends and family or whatever, but again, it's not relatable. You know, grandpa telling, you know, somebody who's 70 years their junior, you know, hey, do you remember, you remember what it was like when we did this and that? I mean, you and I joked, joked about it. Remember when there wasn't the internet? Yeah. That's not relatable to a whole bunch of people on the planet anymore.

I, I have a floppy disk. I guarantee you if I walked into an elementary school right now and held it up, everybody'd ask me why. 3D printed out the save button, right?

It's a good point. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, kids don't know how to use rotary phones for God's sakes, which is fine. I mean, I say that's not a bad thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

They look at it and just poke and they're like, why doesn't it do anything?

They think it's, oh my God, math and beyond.

Yeah. It's, it's, you know, it's funny to watch. So, so I mean, I think you're right, right? There's all these, these potentially positive things, you know, in, in medicine and in, in a lot of it's in medicine and assistance like robot, the, the robotics.

This is the one where I'm a little, Okay, so at the same pace that AI is moving and has benefit and risk, so is the humanoid domestic robot.

Exactly.

Yeah. And I asked a question once. I said, I was giving a talk to some bigger insurance companies and I said, I have a question that I called my homeowner's guy. And I said, who, whose homeowner covers when my humanoid robot gets hacked and kung fu kicks the cat through? But the bay window and takes out grandma across the street?

Oh, that's a good complicated issue.

Is that where— because the reality is that will happen.

Yeah. Well, I mean, in real time right now, who covers it? Yeah. Who covers now if your Tesla, your on-autodrive, you know, runs through an intersection and kills somebody? Who's responsible? Am I responsible because I own the car? Is Tesla responsible because of the code?

They're sealed, aren't they?

I mean, that's, that's the question, right? Like right now, who's responsible? And I don't know. I don't own a Tesla, and it could be other vehicles, by the way, but I don't know if you're signing waivers that you own responsibility for anything the car does. I don't actually know where that lands, right? So probably the cars on Autodrive have run over things, run over people. So I think it's something our law has to start catching up on. Who's responsible now? If I drive my car and I hit somebody, I'm responsible. That's a given. If for some reason there's a mechanical failure, brakes stop working, nobody blames the manufacturer. Mechanical failures can happen, and therefore nobody's responsible. It's sad, and it works out., but if it's Autodrive, is that, is that like that? Is that like the brakes fail and just go, oh well? Or do you go, hey, no, you promised that this wouldn't do this kind of thing and it didn't respond to commands for override and it ran over people and, you know, ran us off a cliff. I don't know where the law is on that. I'm not a lawyer. And if somebody's listening and they are, you know, feel free to comment later on and let me know your thoughts. But, but you're, you know, you're bringing it to the next step, right? It's gonna be everyday life. My, my humanoid robot, as you said, it, it is, you know, I don't know.

Okay, so now I took us up. I'm gonna take us back down for a second.

Right.

So we just have confirmed a growing pattern of AI-motivated suicides.

Good Lord.

Okay. Because we don't have the digital birds and bees, and I've been preaching this shit for years. If you're gonna give anybody something they can fuck themselves with, you should give them a safety training first and preferably lubricant. Because what's happening is we are, we're just, we're grabbing onto this stuff. And I love it. I'm tech rich. Trust me, guys. There, see, big old giant baby quantum computer cooking away in the back. Love technology. Love it so much. But I love people more. I love breathing more. I love these things. And so I think my cry for help and call to action is, As we embark on the not yet answered, not yet solved, let's not wait for somebody to tell us. We've got to start getting involved. Each one of you has an AI community in your community. They get together. They're a bunch of like really cool statistician nerds. You know, try not to scare them. A lot of introversion, but go get involved. How can I help? Maybe you're just a clergyman. Maybe you're the, maybe you run the JCs. Maybe you're the Little League coach, whatever the fuck it is. Go down there and start getting involved. Start, start interconnecting this stuff because your kids have Snapchat on their phone. Uh, every one of us that has an Apple device, if you've gotten the last update, got Apple Intelligence. You did not get an opt-out option. So are you, so you already have it now.

Yeah. It's interesting. Apple Intelligence. I meant to mention it in the last question. I got lost on. In my own head and I didn't come back to it. We talked about people that are reliant, right? We talked about people get lazy or efficient, take your pick. There's a commercial Apple has out, which is both brilliant and horrifying to me. There's a guy in the office who texts an email to his boss and it's just like the worst non-professional garbage. Well, this needs some zhuzhing. He uses the term zhuzhing and blah, blah, blah and hit me back or whatever. And then he hits a button and it turns into this super professional email. That goes to his boss. His boss is impressed and looks out and this guy's like a clown out in the, you know, in the bullpen out there. And I thought to myself, I mean, first, cool. Wow. You know, you could write any, anything and it'll turn it into something good. That's great. But I also thought, are we gonna get to a point where nobody can communicate anymore? Like we just, we just spit out garbage and machines turn it into things. You know, again, I mentioned long division. Nobody does long division. A lot of people don't know how to do math.

People don't know how to talk.

Yeah. And, and I think we're headed there, right? So the machines are gonna do this for us. And so if that happens, I mean, not only is that sad, we kind of lose our own language, but also like, I worry about things like, you know, hey, this, you know, we hire somebody and they, they seem very articulate and they're put together and then you find out, no, they're, they're, they're not. And, and it's a job that requires them to be articulate, let's say. No, it's, it's important.

Or does it really?

You get them in the office, you find out they're not. And they, and they don't understand appropriateness, for instance, cuz everything they've ever written is totally inappropriate and hostile and sexist or whatever it might be. But the machine fixes it every time., and now this guy or gal, but we'll go with guy in this case, probably true. He's at the water cooler talking to a coworker like a human being does without the machine talking for him. And you go, oh my God, this guy is a walking HR violation. He's a nightmare. Or that's all going to get masked during all the processes for hiring.

But you forgot about the augmented reality. So now I have a safety device that I put on my employees to prevent their actual humanness from interacting.

Great. This is not getting better. It's getting worse.

Have you seen Apple Vision?

No, I haven't worn it, but I know what it is. Yeah.

Okay. All I could think was if I was a shittier person, I would release this malware and every last one of you would run into a light pole because ha ha ha ha ha, right?

Somebody's going to do that if they haven't already. I mean, that's, that's for the lulz, right? Somebody's going to do that.

Right. But I don't, I don't hate the idea. I don't hate the technology. I do think that if we give people more ability to choose the definition of their reality, because we did that with the internet and we saw how that played out. And now we're trying to move that into the physical realm.

Yeah.

I have concerns. You're absolutely right. Every point you just raised is completely valid. And that's what gets to the part about ethics, morals. Okay, whose ethics, whose morals? How do you define that mathematically? So, you know, there's a very small group of us that are working very, very, very hard on that. But we, we are going to need some consensus help from the not, you know, super weird nerdy nerds to, to seriously, because we have to describe it, right? We have to decide what are the acceptable boundaries beyond just the most extreme. It can't just be don't use racial slurs, which obviously we don't want to do, but we don't We can't stop at that line. We need to understand context of use. Is it appropriate to use this technology in this way and in this space?

And you gotta do that within, you gotta do that within the context and within the community of the, the wealthy and, you know, the people that are, are owning most of these things that are bottom line focused, who, you know, there's a different opinion on how things can be used, where you wanna put limitations. Cause now you're changing what the marketplace is, you're changing what the, you addressable market is, you're chasing the value. And the, the First Amendment, both the valid First Amendment of, hey, you know, freedom of speech, and now the bastardized version some people use that suggests that there's no limitations to the First Amendment, which is legally untrue, ask the Supreme Court if you doubt me. But people are, you know, going down those paths, right? And so who's going to end up being the arbiters of all this? Who are going to be the regulators who are able to say, hey, this is valid, this isn't valid, this should be done, this shouldn't be done in a world where people are gonna say, fuck you, I wanna be able to use it however I wanna use it. Right. It feels a little bit like the closest I've had, I've talked about like nuclear technology, like this nuclear technology is amazing, right? It does energy and it does medical. It also can blow up the entire world. We've all agreed it's too dangerous to just not have limits on it. You can't build a nuclear reactor in your backyard. It's not legal.

I wouldn't try it.

Yeah, I wouldn't try it either. But even if you have the capabilities, it's not legal, right?, you know, and, and gun control. And I know it's a topic that people get nervous about, but there's still limits there. What's that?

Technically, as a, as a, as a citizen of the US, you can conduct all the research you want, but I assure you, you will be getting visited very quickly.

Yeah. And, and, and the same, you know, the same thing's true with firearms, right? I mean, we have the Second Amendment and there's, you know, push and pull and, and there's a real drag towards, you know, more things being legal for everybody, et cetera. But there's still limits and, and there's always going to be some for anybody who doubts that. And then for anybody who wants to know, not that it matters, I own firearms. So this is not gonna be one of those discussions, but I also agree there are limits. There are, listen, if you don't think so, go ahead and try to get a tank and see what happens. Right. Have rocket launchers in your house and see how far you can absolutely, you can have, there's limits.

And as long as you go about it the right way, and cuz you can, you could absolutely in, in Minnesota we can have hand grenades, rocket launchers, we can have all kinds of things.

Yeah.

But there's a process. You go, you go talk to, go get, make sure you're not a nutbag is step number one. Right. Right. Step number 2 is you pay a bunch of fucking money because we don't— just because you're not a nutbag also doesn't mean that you should have access. We need a level of commitment here, right?

But who's going to be responsible for that same sort of protection? I want to call it control protections when it comes to that because there's nobody right now doing that. Well, then once this is out, how are you going to get it back?

Well, we got to get involved. It hasn't— the cat's not all the way out of the bag yet. I checked with Schrödinger. He told me it's still partially—

it is close though, man. And so it leads to the next question, man. And which is, all right, so we talked about, you know, what AI is and, and some of the baselines of it. We talked about, you know, where we are today. I think, you know, at least to a point we talked about where we are today, but, uh, you know, and where we're going in the next couple of years. What do you see as the biggest risks and rewards? And you hinted at some of this already, but the biggest risks and rewards that you see coming with AI, and again, we'll stick with the next, I don't know, 2, 3 years, you know, kind of keep it near term here. What are the big, you know, you mentioned the, the, the companion piece, for instance, for the elderly, right? So, and we talked a little about some of the medical stuff, but what do you see as like, first that we'll give the risks, like the bad, how bad it could get, what are the biggest risks? Then we'll talk about the good and some of the, what are the positives that can come out of this and the big rewards and how we're going to figure out which path we're going to take here.

I mean, I think the biggest risk is a transference of sovereignty and power from the human to the machine. And, and, and then by extension, the controllers of said machine being a very, very small group, then hold all the cards. And that is done at the same simultaneously to you losing your value as a contributor to the species. I think that is a very real reality. I think that is a very real risk and I think we are taking very fast steps in that direction.

So basically the movie I, Robot.

All day.

It's like somebody looked at that and said, I bet I can make that our future and started down that path. And didn't see the end of the movie, I guess.

It's called Figure AI. Okay. Figure AI. Everyone should know this company exists because you may have heard of Elon's Tesla robot, but haven't seen a whole lot of it. But Figure is the competitor to Tesla, and Figure, in my opinion, is further along.

Oh yeah.

With a higher quality product that is more market ready. They are beginning— officially, unofficially— they are beginning their third generation robot, which is geared at the home for domestic purposes at a market price of $20,000. Now, that obviously the cost when it first comes out never is. But it won't take long to get there. I also remember when somebody was like, bro, have you heard this thing called a flat screen? Yeah, this TV is amazing. And by the way, they used to be in wooden boxes and they were fucking huge.

Massive and heavy.

Back to the '70s and had a console TV.

Yep.

Right? And now I can go into my local Walmart and I can get an 85-inch TV for, you know, $89. I mean, it's just ridiculous.

Not a good one, but yeah. Joking, but I got you.

And that, that actually is part of my, part of Delta Off the Wrist. That's part of my worry because what happens when I can buy a humanoid robot capable of all physical actions a human is off of Alibaba for 17 cents and I got the unchipped version because they don't give a shit about us. So that worries me. It worries me is what, what will the shitty humans who are already shitty do even more shittiness with when they're enabled with these technologies because they're ubiquitously available.

Yeah. When you mentioned Figure, for those who don't know, Figure.ai is the company he's talking about. Like, when you open up their website, the first thing it says is giving AI a body, which I read that and went, well, that's a fucking bad idea. Like, that's, that's not what we want to do, is it? You're gonna let AI out of the box? Yeah. Like, you know, not only is it like I, Robot, but for any, you know, I'm a movie person. For anybody who doesn't You know, who isn't, that's fine. But there's also a movie called Virtuosity, which I think was ahead of its time. It's Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington, and they grow this AI really in a lab. It's fed all the worst things. It's built actually to be like the world's worst serial killer, basically. It's built on all the personas of all every horrible serial killer you can think of. And then some asshole decides to give it a body and let it out in the real world. And I mean, it's a great movie. It's fun, but you can imagine how terrifying that is to have that happen. Right. And so. Yeah, there's a company out here saying, yeah, our job is to build bodies for these AIs. Yeah. And I mean, how does that not replace me? By the way, their, their AIs are gonna make, they're gonna be able to make new bodies. They're gonna be able to repair themselves and make new ones.

That's, that's in the business plan. If you scroll down, that's actually in the business plan.

Yeah. So what happens when AI, which is faster, smarter, stronger, you know, et cetera, than us, has these bodies and can procreate? Because there's no other word for that. If you can make your own, you make new ones, you're procreating, right?

Yep.

What the hell? What are we going to do?

I don't know.

Why do we need to exist? These things can learn. They can program themselves. They can make new versions of themselves. They can improve. They can evolve. Does anybody think there's a chance we're going to survive the army of AI-enabled robots we're creating? Because I mean, that was your worst case, right? I mean, my opinion scares the hell out of me. Yeah. Let's go with best case. Yeah, please help me out.

No, because I'm right there with you. Trust me. Best case scenario. Somebody today listening doesn't just hear it, but actually takes an action. And even better case if two people do. And that action could be just simply getting involved somehow, some way, becoming more aware of— sign up for a fucking RSS feed, right? And not have to be a big commitment here. But if all of us stand on the sidelines, then We know where it goes. But my positive side, my upbeat and uplifting side, and believe it or not, that's where the nickname Scare Bear comes from, because I want to love you like a teddy bear, but I'll scare the shit out of you, is that we, as a people, see this as the defining moment it is. We embrace this change, and we make sure that these technologies are enriching to our lives. Yes, I want more family time, so let's make sure that the tech doesn't get in the way like the last time around we tried to do this with the cell phone. And now—

That's worked out well.

More family time. I got whole families don't even know how to speak to each other.

Yeah. All in the same room, never talking to each other. Hell, we text each other in the same room.

In the same room. Right? So I think that, that there's gonna be advancements in the social side of this. I know I'm personally leading the charge on a few of these things and I'm working very closely with others who are trying to create an AI that helps with loneliness. Yes, I want a robot companion for Grandma so she doesn't have to leave the house and go to the home.

Right.

Right? Like, and it isn't just the elderly. I know it's been an area of focus, but there's a lot of different mental illnesses.

Sure.

So there's the medical side. From a personal side, hey, I don't, it's, I don't want to change the oil on the car.

Right.

I like to mow the lawn.

I don't want to walk the dogs.

I don't want to, whatever.

Yeah, whatever. Yeah.

It's garbage day? Fuck yeah.

Not my problem. Yeah.

Take the trash out. Right. And I've actually built a few like lower grade robots. I've built some robots. I built one out of Legos to solve Rubik's Cubes because yeah, bored. But, but my, but I never got the beer fetching robot to work correctly because the human hand element wasn't quite, so I could launch one.

Right.

I could, I could, I could, you know, Chuck and toss, right? But I build a catapult. No, I—

you don't open that beer.

Yeah, the positive side, you know, back to that, is that there's this rich field of opportunity for us to do new things, new ways to do faster things. Personally, I use AI daily to accelerate problem solving, to take on generating— I, you know, I can read faster than I can write. But I haven't removed myself from the equation. And I, and I'm hopeful there's enough of us that haven't yet removed ourselves. It's easy to do that. It's, well, I'll just, you know, like, think about throwing a like versus making a phone call. Your friend said something nice, you see it on the thing, bloop, done. Even versus a comment, right? Yeah, the like, no problemo, whatever. Now, that like actually has a physical effect on that person on the other end of the phone. There's actually a many, many studies that prove this. They get that dope, right? So we know that we like that stuff. So let's just design it together safely. We've done this before, people. We have, we have been here with cars. Okay, you can't, you can't buy or sell a car in this country doesn't have an airbag in it. I remember cars that had pieces on steering wheels that were deemed to be so damn dangerous from killing people.

Yeah, they had metal spikes. Like, on the steering wheel was a metal spike aimed right at the driver. Like, I remember that. I remember when there weren't seat belts. I remember when, if you hit the grill— I remember when glass didn't, didn't break, it didn't let you out if you hit the glass. You would—

I'll even— I'll even go one better. How about when they made drunk driving illegal?

Oh yeah, yeah. Imagine— I mean, there's a whole generation now doesn't understand that that used to be legal. You could just drive around and be drinking. There was a time when that was allowed.

You can Google this and there are dudes that are smashed in their pickups. I should work a fucking day and I'll—

yeah, I want to.

Yeah, that was the year 1971.

Oh, I don't know what your DUI was made illegal. So I'm gonna look it up now because I'm curious.

It was a while ago, but because we've ran ahead, so, but, but we face these social problems, we've addressed them, and the world did not collapse as a result. No one lost their freedom because they couldn't drink and drive anymore. Anymore. Like, you know, they lost their freedom if they drank and drive after, but yeah, but the, you know, but the point is, is, is the world is, you know, from that safety standpoint, is in a net better place.

Yeah, that's true. I guess, by the way, DUI laws, apparently they go all the way back to 1910, but really started picking up in the '70s. 1960s, it was still considered a quote unquote folk crime. Like nobody did anything about it. 70s is when they really started to get down to 0.10, 0.08, and started really enforcing these things. I'm sure because somebody finally did studies and said, geez, we have a lot of people dying from this. Maybe we should stop letting this happen. And now it just seems insane. Nobody would look at this and go, yeah, well, of course you should be able to drink and drive. Nobody would think that. It's clear that you're inebriated. It's clear that you're impaired. The thought that you would be allowed to get behind a death machine and just go out and make everybody at risk is insane.

Correct.

I fear with this technology though, because unlike a lot of these other technologies and revolutions, I worry about this. Cars didn't suddenly start making themselves. Cars didn't become independent. Cars didn't create a world in which you may not want a DUI, but the car can go DUI on its own. So, you know, this, this one worries me a little bit more. And again, combined with the combination of greed and laziness, I'm curious, and I got to, we got to get near the end here to the last question, but one thing we didn't talk about that I'm curious if you have any thoughts on, what jobs aren't going to get replaced by AI? Like what's, what are things that you look at and go, I can't see the machines ever being able to— is there such a thing as a thing that can't— AI can't eventually evolve to do? Or is it just eventually, no, they're all gonna— we're gonna have new jobs or different jobs or the world's gonna change or we're gonna need to trust, you know, and have faith that the, those, the powers that be aren't going to decide it's okay to let, you know, 7 billion people be unemployed and starving because, you know, there's no jobs left and they're not willing to go to socialism or whatever.

Yeah, I think that's a tough one. I think there's roles. That it won't replace. I don't think— I think its lack of a soul is going to prevent it from ever really meaningfully connecting with a person. Having said that though, there are people there— while there are people that are so absent that anyhow that they do it. I, you know, that's a great one. I don't, I don't think there is a job yet that I can't foresee a reasonable future that doesn't get replaced and/or augmented. And you'll hear a lot about the augmentation, right? We don't want to say replace because then everybody's going to freak out. But the reality is, is they don't have people that run hand crank anything anymore. Right. And when we talk about the next job you will have, well, unless you're a quantum physicist, until that's solved, unless you are of the highest orders of emerging material sciences, And even those areas now are augmented by AI. So I think figuring out—

well, that becomes the question then, man, because, you know, there's 8, 9 billion people on the planet, something like that, right? Most people, 99+ percent are not, just don't have the ca— myself included, by the way, don't have the capacity, the capability to be the next, you know, a neuroscience. They don't have, they don't have the capability to, to be these, you know, quantum physicists, et cetera. There's a reason that most people don't have those jobs. And it's not because there isn't demand for those jobs, because most people don't have that aptitude. So if the only jobs that are left are jobs that are, you know, limited to people that, you know, have, you know, 160 IQs and, and, you know, all this experience and all this education, et cetera, what's the average person going to be left to do? Assuming society doesn't agree to go, hey, listen, now this, this could be the greatest thing ever to happen to humanity. Humanity. It could be like Garden of Eden where we all have free time to think and learn and and, you know, explore and be creative. And, you know, you have a basic sustenance given to you by, you know, the powers that be, by the government or whatever, you know, so you have a basic living expense. But it seems like there's a whole lot of people in the world who don't want that, don't, you know, they hate socialism or communism or whatever. So, I mean, I worry about this. I'm not gonna lie. I don't think you have an answer. I'm asking an impossible question, but this is the thing I worry about is, is how does free market and greed align with this without just going, well, I guess a whole lot of you are gonna, you know, be living in a dystopian future with nothing because there's no reason to hire you and there's no money to give you as a result. And The machines are doing it all. And by the way, the machines will protect the people who have fired you and taken all your jobs away, so you can't fight 'em necessarily. So I mean, that's, I, I, I, I'm scared of this stuff. I'm not gonna lie. I'm, I'm worried. I don't know how to do anything. You know, that's why I'm working with you on some of these things and I wanna get more involved. But I think we may end up very dependent on the goodwill of people who don't notoriously show they have a great deal of goodwill to the general populace as opposed to just doing what's best. For themselves. And I'm concerned.

I can tell you this, critical thinking right now is the most valuable skill. If you can develop critical thinking, you don't need to worry about your job until you do. And I'll be right in the boat with you. Right? Like, if we get to that level, I'm right there with you. I am not a quantum physicist. I am not these things. I know them, I talk to them, I work with them, because I'm trying to bring hacker mentality, by the way, And I will often wonder how much the intelligence community, because of its ability to deconstruct problems, to paint scenarios, to— I think you guys actually have, and we've talked about this offline, you and I, AJ, that I believe that that background gives you a unique position. Same thing with my cyber warriors. Right. I hope so. The background of how to think about these things. Is what makes you job viable. I do think you are going to start to see the basic labor jobs. I just ate at a restaurant with a robot, brought food to my table, right? They're running the whole damn kitchen on 3 people and the whole front of the house on 2 people because all they have to do is sit you down, punch a couple buttons so that the robot knows which one to go to. You give your order and that's right now because you're— because the robot's just one of those simplified tray robots, right? When the robot's also capable of taking the order and then going and working in the kitchen.

Oh yeah, there'll be no people.

You know, there'll just be no people. So I think for the audience that's here, folks that are smart enough to listen to the show, take those critical thinking skills and start seeing how you can use and adopt AI into your day-to-day life and into your day-to-day work so that you're familiar with it, so that you know where the pitfalls and perils are, but that you also get the benefits, right? Like, and we don't have to go here. If we don't want to. We can collectively, believe it or not, as consumers, change the market. We can say no to things. We can say— it's hard, trust me. My wife's like, I'm getting the house robot. I know you ain't trying to. I'm like, no, we can't have it. It's going to end the world. She's like, fuck you, we're getting it anyways.

Yeah, I said the same thing. Like, I'm scared to death of these things. Meanwhile, I'll probably be one of the first people to buy one when they're on the market if I have the money. Like, yeah, I'm, I'm as big a part of the problem. That's the thing, right? Knowing it could be your own demise and still So yeah, all right, well, it's like lemmings going off the cliff. I know it's going to kill me, but I'm going to do it anyway. Like, it's how enticing these things are.

I think enough of us, if we hear the right message that says we can do something and we should, and we remember that we used to, or maybe we've seen something on a TikTok that tells us we want to. But, you know, I hope so. I'm hopeful for us as a people that we will not just march silently off the cliff. Let's see what happens.

I, I hope so. Yeah, I'm with you. So, all right, listen, we're gonna wrap up. You know, we got one last question. You know, the name of the show is Unspoken Security, and you know, with that in mind, I ask every guest basically the same question. You're no exception, which is, you know, tell the audience something that to this point in your life, you know, has gone unspoken, something you don't tell people about. You know, tell the audience something that fits in line with Unspoken Security by telling us something unspoken. Don't confess to a murder because this is recorded. Keep that in mind.

Unspoken. I often find myself recharging like an introvert, even though it's well known by me, the tests, and everyone that's ever met me I'm anything but. So people— so what is— so the unspoken piece is Believe it or not, what you see out there working the room can still get way exhausted by people.

Yeah, yeah, it's— that's a good one, by the way. So I, I mean, I don't grade these. Everybody has one. They're all very interesting. I'm the same, as it turns out. So I know people think I'm this massive extrovert, you know, in my whole life people have thought that, and I think there was a point when I was. I apparently am what's known as an ambivert now. It sounds like you are too, in that I can thrive in the extrovert environment, but there's a big introverted part of me. I'm no longer, and it depends on the scenario, I guess. I don't know if it is for you. I'm curious. Like there's times I go to conferences and I have all the extrovert in me and I finish the conference, I finish the discussions, whatever. I'm still ramped up and I want to go out and do stuff. And then there's other times I'm just like, no, I'm gassed, man. I need some time alone, like an introvert. I don't have the ability to turn it on and off. But I do think it's interesting. I didn't know that about you because a lot of people make those assumptions, right? Like this person's an extrovert.

Or that, I'll give you two. This episode you get 2, right?

Bonus.

I do actually get tired. I do actually sleep, contrary to everybody's belief. The energy does occasionally not show up. Is it—

I'm curious now. So I, I'm also notorious for not sleeping much. I'm curious if your pattern's similar. So for me, I'm notorious. I sleep, you know, 2 hours, 3 hours, 4 hours, you know, a night, and sometimes less, or, you know, whatever. I mean, this morning I slept 2, I think 2 and a half. But maybe once a week, once every 10 days, I have one of those nights where I just, that's it. I'm like 9 PM, I fall asleep with my phone in my hand doing nothing and I'm done. Right. And I get like 12 hours. Is that how it works for you too? Do you have long stretches where you don't, then you just have a night where you're like, that's it. I'm out. I crash.

I will. Yes. So I've also found that some of my greatest work is done on day 2.

Hmm.

That, well, just because of the way I'm wired. So I'll go a day without sleep.

Yep.

And I will make— and, and it seems opposite, right? It's like, oh, you should have had some sleep to like recharge, but I'll do some of my best work in that second day. Uh, but yeah, there'll be short stints. Usually the crash will follow. Like, if I, if I've had a lost, total lost night, within 2 to 3 days of that, I'll have, I'll have a like You fell asleep. I fell asleep with food, like, you know.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I, I fall asleep more often than I care to admit, frankly, with a video game controller in my hand. I have, I have actually, I play a bunch of games, but sports games tend to be my favorites and, and I play hockey somewhat regularly. I've finished hockey games where I don't remember the game I finished, but I was asleep and I got it done and, and whatever. But yeah, I've, I've fallen asleep with food in my hands. I've fallen asleep in conversations. But it's interesting. Again, I think you and I share that in that there's a lot of times I don't sleep or I sleep very little and I'm good for days like that and then it just catches up and I just accept that that's a thing for me, right? I'm not gonna force myself. I try and it doesn't work. Better sleep, but it doesn't work.

If I try to force the sleep, the sleep doesn't come, then my brain just sits and spins and spins and spins.

Yep.

Yeah.

Another change is if I go to bed at 9:00 PM, I'm still up till 4:00 AM. It just means I'm in bed for 8 hours first, you know, 7 hours first. You know, shut off the phone doesn't necessarily work. Shut off TV doesn't necessarily work. Some do, some don't. But you know, I think people have to find out what rhythm works for them as long as you're not like getting psychotic cause you don't sleep for days and days. But that's cool. I, I appreciate, you know, you sharing that and it's something apparently we have in common. So listen, we're up on time, so I do wanna wrap this up. Is there any last thoughts you wanna throw in here? Whether it's about the topic, whether it's about you, whether it's about Scare Bear, whether it's promoting something, You know, anything else you want to add before we close this thing out?

Two quick thoughts. Anybody out there, if you've got AI questions, struggling, consulting, whatever, just reach out to me. I'm looking for opportunities to help folks get themselves going with AI. I've got a variety of services you can find. Find me at scarebear.com, or you can hit me up through LinkedIn. The message I want to leave people with is to remember to be kind to yourself first. And try once a day, and you'll feel great about this, by the way. It's a super trick for finding happiness. Once a day, do some random kind gesture. Could just be smile at a stranger, could be hold the door, could be instead of saying, you know, something angry back, you, you take, you take it in and you say, you know what, I'm just gonna say something nice back, whatever that is. But if you practice those things, I think you'll find yourself a lot happier, a lot less stressed out. And I think that that will help you navigate these coming weeks, months, and years ahead of us and the way that society's going to change.

Yeah. Well, thanks, man. I mean, that's good advice. Listen, I know Ryan, Ryan's brilliant and he's burdened by that, quite frankly. People who are very smart have their minds going all the time, which means they see all the horrible things in the world. And Ryan's also one of the happier people I know, frankly. So, It's gotta be good advice. You know, I mean that and weed, I'm sure, but you know, weed's, yeah, weed's good, right? But no, I appreciate it. That's really good advice and I'll actually try to apply it myself. I'll make promises, but I gotta try to do better as well. 'Cause it's easy to get down, it's easy to get frustrated or depressed or angry or sad or fearful or whatever it is about these topics and about the world in general. So, you know, doing a nice thing for somebody else, yeah, is proven to make us feel better as well. So,, and who couldn't use a few more nice people in the world doing nice things? So, all right, cool. Listen, I appreciate it. Thanks for that closer. And in general, Ryan, thank you for coming on the show. I appreciate you making the time. Uh, I appreciate your friendship as well, but thank you for being here. I, I couldn't thank you enough. I'll, you know, I'd love to have you on again at some point. We'll talk about something else. I'm sure you have a thousand topics we can chat about, but you know, we're gonna close it up for today. And for everybody who's listening and watching, thank you, uh, for taking the time to be here. Please, you know, like and follow and subscribe and tell people If you love the show, make sure everybody in the world knows. If you hate the show, shut up. I don't want to know. No, I do want to know, but don't tell anybody else. I want to make it better, but please don't spread negative, negative comments because it's hard enough to do these things. But again, thank you very much for being here. And until next time, this has been another episode of Unspoken Security. That's a wrap for this episode of Unspoken Security. If you enjoyed this episode, follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. See you next time.