Peter Singer informs your OODA loop with lessons for leaders from "Burn-In"

Informing your decisions with intelligence analysis and insight. Brought to you by the team@ooda loop.com welcome to the Oodacast with Peter Singer. Hello, Peter.

Hi. Great to join you.

Yeah, thanks. And I'm especially excited to have this discussion with you because your book is being released now. The latest, Burn in, which is a fantastic techno thriller. I want to make sure that I say the genre right, because this book is so many things. It's a great detective story, it's a fantastic thriller, it's a great human drama, and it's got a bit of sci fi in it because it's just a little bit into the future. What do you call the genre, Peter?

So we're playing with the concept of useful fiction. And as you hit there, it's this combination of different things. The title itself, Burn in, sort of illustrates it. Burn in is a term that some people with a science or engineering background may be familiar with. A burn in is when you deliberately push a new technology to the breaking point in order to learn from it. So to make a joke relevant to a great old movie, when you turn the new speakers to 11 to see how long you can play it before they break, or a new watch, how deep can you dive in it? That's what a burn in is. And so in the book, Burn in it is, as you note, it's a techno thriller, but it's also a work of nonfiction. So it's a story that is set in Washington, D.C. around a little over a decade out. We follow an FBI agent on a hunt for a new kind of terrorist. And relevant to the audience here, a terrorist who's going after all of the new vulnerabilities in IoT and is able to therefore carry out the kinds of attacks that we've mostly not yet seen. But it's a way of sharing years of nonfiction research. So baked into this story are over 300 explanations and projections, with the footnote of where the real research came from to document that it's drawn from reality. So it might be micro details. When a delivery drone with six rotors flies overhead, there's a footnote to show, hey, that's not what I dreamed up. Here's Amazon's patent for it. Or it might be a concept helping people understand what algorithmic bias is, or automation, job projections. And then you have that play through a scene, or you have it play through a character and then as the footnote to the report on it. Or it might be revealing a certain kind of vulnerability. So when a certain kind of hack happens, a Breach of a certain critical infrastructure network. Or it might be a certain new kind of crime, cyber crime. Not to steal information, but to carry out an act of arson. Footnote to either where someone showed that off, that they could do it in a vulnerability scan study, or maybe the kind of conversations that you and I and people in this group would often have over beers where they talk about, okay, you know, we set up this new network. Oh, man, this could really happen. And we worked with someone who dealt with the Washington, D.C. water system and the nightmare stories. And so then we carry those across. So the way to think about it, you know, I said useful fiction. It's fiction. It's hopefully entertaining, but useful. And it carries over that research. Another way of thinking about it is I'm a parent. It's like sneaking the fruit and veggies into the morning smoothie. You get the good stuff, but you don't realize that you're getting it. Hopefully you're enjoying it.

Well, I like the way you put that because frankly, in that analogy, if you don't have the smoothie, it isn't enjoyable. And in this particular case, if you don't have a great story, it's not as enjoyable. And this is a good story. You have characters that are believable.

They're just a little bit in the.

Future, but they're human beings and they have struggles. And frankly, one of the things I love about it is you have a hero who's thinking and creating creative. She's not perfect. She's got some stuff in her past that maybe all of us do. Who knows? But there are other characters there who I really identify with and empathize with and worry about because, you know, who knows what's in our future? But there's a lot of indications that there's going to be a lot of stresses and pressure on the economy and on employment. And the way you wrote about it was so real because you're writing about human beings. And in many cases, I found myself saying, what if that was me? And it very well could be me.

Yeah. One, I appreciate that. And two, it hits one of the I, I think challenges of this approach. But also what hopefully delivers in the end for the reader is that it'd be very easy. And a lot of us read books or see TV shows and movies where they just kind of wave their hands at whatever the problem that either the good guy or the bad guy faces, the good guy pulls out their MacGuffin device and defeats it, or, oh, we need to hack the network clickety Clack, we're in that sort of thing. And no, you know, our rule is no vaporware. Everything has to be drawn from the real world, whether it is the real world settings and, you know, people have been to dc, some of them will be quite familiar to them. Some of them may give you a new look at it. Other ones may give you an insight to places that a lot of people can't go to. So it's, you know, even down to the details of what the carpet is like at the White House Situation Room. Well, that's what the carpet really is like. But in turn, the characters experience when you go in there and you notice the carpet or you notice that your feet squeak on the floors. And actually where the National Security Council is, it might be micro details, but it also hits these macro things that you talk about. And we try and show that through these characters. So whether it's the main character and, you know, we don't want to plot spoil too much, but she's thinking like the rest of us. And it might be her awareness of the benefits, but also the bad side, the certain vulnerabilities of certain technologies. A good example would be information overload that a lot of people in the security world deal with. We get all this, this data coming at us, but at a certain point it can overwhelm you and often at the worst possible times. And she's having that kind of dialogue in her head. It's not just easy. It might be the bad guy is thinking, the bad guy is identifying, what are those vulnerabilities, those real world vulnerabilities that are out there? And how am I going to exploit them? And how am I going to exploit them in ways that are designed to have maximum effect, including how, you know, the best attackers may be hitting psychological effects. So. But one of the other things, as you notice that we tried to not have it be, you know, the sneering bad guy who pulls his mustache or whatever, he has a ideology that a lot of people might agree with, they might kind of nod their head at, and that raises something. And then we also try and pepper it in with some of the other characters there. One is the spouse of our main character. He is a lawyer, a contract lawyer who has seen his job be automated. And now he, and relevant to a lot of stuff going on around us, is doing remote work on a contract side, kind of the Uber or Amazon Turker model for software programmers. And a lot of us have been thrown into that model quite recently. And what we play with is what is the effect of that on not just him, but his marriage, how he sees himself as a dad, how he thinks about politics, what is losing one kind of job and then being thrown into remote work, not having the certainty of a full income. What does that do? A lot of people are going through that too. It is one of those trends that we're going to see a lot more of. And then the final character is Tams. And Tams is basically where robots, where Siri and Alexa are going to be 10, 15 years from now, again drawn from the real world. And one of the things that we try and play with very different than the normal science fiction narrative is, okay, how are people really gonna relate to those systems? It's not a classic sci fi story of sorry, this I will plot spoil. It's not another the machine wises up and then rises up kill all humans. No, it's about what will happen with these systems as they advance and how does it affect us, how do we relate to them? And one of the fun things is that, you know, at the end of the day, it's. It's a technology, it's a machine. And yet the characters who are even telling themselves it's a machine find themselves putting their own emotions relating to it, which is, oh, by the way, what a lot of us do. Yeah. And when my Siri, Alexa, etc. Doesn't give me the exact answer that I want when I'm asking about whatever, what's the weather today? Or directions, I get angry at it in a way that I don't get angry at my toaster when it doesn't toast my bagel perfectly. I get angry at the speaking machine. And to reflecting nonfiction. I did a book in the past looking at robotic systems in war. And US soldiers would do things like, for example, give funerals to their bombots. One of them, actually, its robotic system got stuck in the mud and he ran out under heavy machine gun fire to rescue. Rescue his robot. And this was a robot that was non intelligent, non autonomous, couldn't speak, but he felt a certain kinship. It's a true story, a real thing. And so we go. Okay, well, if that's the way it looked like in, you know, that story was 2006. What's it going to look like in 2026? Right, right.

Fascinating. So many things I want to keep talking to you about. One is, I don't even know if you realize this, but you're writing things that are so prescient. You did not predict COVID 19, but you were all over It. And one thing I noticed early on is one of the characters worried about the stuff on his hands and wanted to wash it. And I thought, we're all wanting to wash our hands right now. And again, I don't want to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, you know, again, spoiler. It's not a pandemic story, so people can escapist and enjoy it, but there are moments in it that I think have resonated, you know, whether it's for me or for others. As you note, it might be a moment like that. Another moment is when there is a disaster that hits Washington D.C. i will plot spoil here for people that want to know whether could it be real or not. Google 1936 Washington D.C. flood and you will see the scale of what is possible in the real world that we have put in certain critical infrastructure since to prevent. But we've begun to automate that critical infrastructure, the control systems for it. And anyone with their cyber hat goes. But so as that's playing out, the main character quickly does the, oh, crap, you know what emergency supplies we have. And then, oh, they're good for me. But we haven't updated them since we had kids and my daughter, we've got all these refried beans and my daughter hates refried beans. A lot of us kind of went through, through this recently where we might have had our emergency supplies, but it wasn't sort of to what we thought we would need. But more broadly, I think the book is particularly relevant to the world that we will have coming out of all this. And by that I mean all of these trends of automation, AI, Internet of things, they were obviously all in place before this, but all the data tends to show that they're going to be massively accelerated by the pandemic and how we're going to operate, post it. When we get through all this. Think about it this way. We have entire generations that have been thrown into a level of remote work, but also for kids, remote learning at a scale that many people thought would never be possible. We have other sectors where people imagined it would be possible, but not in this timeline. For example, telemedicine got to the level that people thought we would be about 10 years from now, like that, in a couple of weeks. Think about the level of use of AI for surveillance and big data tracking. In some ways, it's at levels people thought would not happen in the US forever. In others, again, it accelerates. Think about drug delivery, food delivery. Exactly. You know, and one of the. The opening scene of the book has it's set outside Union Station and a little detail in the background is a futuristic seeming delivery bot that's going down the sidewalk. And then we have the footnote to show, and here's the real version of it that's being prototyped. That very system is now delivering groceries in Washington, dc. So again, timeline move forward. But the issue here, particularly for those that care about security, is that all the political, social, legal and cybersecurity questions, debates, dilemmas that we would have spent years working our way through, and it might be an overall issue of who, how do you regulate face recognition technology to. It might be a micro version that we're seeing a lot of people experience of. Did I check for all the cybersecurity vulnerabilities? All that got set aside, we pushed it out there. And in the aftermath, we're going to have to work out a lot of these issues because one thing that we can guarantee is that we're not going back 100% the way that we were before, whether it's in the use of AI, whether it's in the IoT, whether. Whether it's certain jobs that have been set up to be remote or automated. And so that's where I think the book is most relevant, is it really speaks to the world that we're going to have coming out of this and the issues that we got to solve.

Well, I have to agree, because we were already, these trends were already in place towards more automation, disruption of the workforce due to automation and robotics. And you articulate that very well in the book. And now because of the pandemic, so much that's being accelerated and there's so many other questions I want to ask you.

Can I add one thing? One thing that is our challenge is that not just the detail of pandemic, is that every so often there'll be a scenario in the book that actually comes true, not because of us. And on one hand it validates the research, but it's also kind of scary. We, you know, micro plot spoil, literally. This week there was news in Israel of a water treatment system attack. And we're like, yeah. And, you know, and it points to the value of baking this stuff in, but also hopefully it makes it a little bit more scary because, oh, this is something that can happen in the real world and we better fix it.

Yeah. And after reading it, I've seen, I track the security news and technology news daily because we publish every day at CTO Vision. So I look at a broad spectrum of news almost every day since I'VE read this book, I've seen something that says, yes, moving us along that path that Peter wrote about. For example, biometrics. I think you do a great job of anticipating the very near future of some biometrics. And you also tip your hat to the fact that for every new kind of security capability, there's going to be some new creative way to get around it. And it's amazing. Just the other day I saw 3D printers being used to print fingerprints and I thought, okay, that's not exactly what Peter wrote about, but it's moving us in that direction.

Yeah. And that I think points to how we need to approach all this in the real world, but also putting your fiction storytelling hat on. To me, what makes a better, more entertaining story is that when you. So let's take the real world side. Too much of the way that we talk about new technologies is at these, you know, ends of the polls. It's either this is my new widget that's going to solve everything and no problems will ever happen with it. And then the flip side at the other perspective is, you know, the tech lash, it's all horrible. And my own take on it is that technology is a tool. And particularly in this new wave of technology, for the most part they have relatively low barriers to entry. So whether we're talking about AI, to robotics, to Internet of things, whatever, it's going to be woven into all our lives. It will be available to the good guys and the bad guys. It will be applied into face recognition as we explore in the book. Yes, there's the police use of it, but oh, by the way, it will be deployed at restaurants. And we're already starting to see this. That also means the back and forth of the good guy, bad guy. I'm going to use the tool. I'm going to try and find the vulnerability in the tool. I'm going to react to you trying to do that. And the back and forth in some situations will be of the highest level of technology. How do we apply AI and big data to this? And other times it might be some low tech workaround. And again, this is true whether you're talking about, you know, a classic cyber security breaching a network or trying to fool face recognition technology. It might be. There's certain ways of putting block. It's basically looks like the way an old school jester would do it. Blocks of white and black on your face, it throws it off. It's a little bit akin to the World War I dazzle camouflage that the old warships Would have kind of splotchy that throws face recognition for a loop. But then there's also makeup that's non visible to the human eye, that has microbeads that throws it off. So I just went into this in a way that is drawn from the real world. And we'll see people doing this also actual bad guys and then just jesters, you know, pranksters, teenagers, fashion statement versions of it. A lot like how Doc Martens were. Doc Martens shoes were once worn by, you know, basically people that were originally it was for police and rioters. And then it became cool fashion, punk rock. And then, you know, just teenagers are wearing them. We'll have the same playing out with kind of, you know, how to defeat AI. But what I'm getting at here is this back and forth to me is we need to pay attention to that in our security use. We need to pay attention to it. It allows you to have a lot of fun in fiction. But one of the other things that we play with that I also think that we should be aware of is how even if there's not this adversarial back and forth oftentimes in the technology world, we have a certain vision, a certain hope for a technology. We push it out there and we don't actually consider that maybe our solution, our utopian vision could actually be a little bit dystopian to someone else from a different perspective. And you see that a lot. It may be the ways that people talk about using face recognition or big data tracking to micro versions. One of the toys that the daughter plays with in the story drawn from the real world kind of feels a little bit creepy, but it's the plant. And so that's another by. In fiction, you can give different perspectives. You know, how does it look from the parent, how does it look from the kid, how does it look from the company? How does it look from the legal side? And that allows you to go back to that idea of useful fiction. You can be entertained, but maybe it proves to be useful too.

Yeah, Peter, I want to ask some thoughts about this because I agree with you. It's so useful. And just for context, I think the last three or four books you've produced have been entertaining, fast, great reads, but also informative of policymakers. I guess one of the biggest was Ghost Fleet. That was a novel, it was a thriller, it was a great story. But you see everybody in the Pentagon reading it, talking about it, putting it on their recommended reading list. And I think it opened people's eyes to the fact that we need to keep thinking about our defense strategies and how we approach things at a major scale of war. And I have a feeling the same kind of thing's going to happen here. And then also, I guess your last book was like war. And that also was an eye opener and not just for military or intel guys, but for your average human who wants to understand what is this that we're dealing with right now? Because it may be that we're not in a declared war, but if the bad guy wins, what does it matter what you call it? But the point I wanted to make there was those past books really informed decision makers and help shape policy and have a feeling this one will also. People in law enforcement should read it. Of course, the intelligence community, the national security establishment, but business leaders who want to think through what the future workforce will be like, or average citizens who might want to think about what's my future career path going to be, or parents that might want to encourage their children to self educate in a certain way. So that's my opinion and would love your thoughts on that.

Oh man, I mean, that's awesome that you reacted that way because that's very much the hope of it. As you mentioned, Ghost Fleet was a book. The project started back in roughly 2012, it came out in 2015. And it was a novel, but it was informed by the real world. And one of the things that it particularly pointed to on the real world side was all the issues of supply chain vulnerability. So it was a story about a future war. But it pointed out if you have vulnerabilities in your supply chain, it's not just about your network being breached that all the way back can cause major consequences. Obviously that's become a much bigger issue since More. And then the broader theme of US China, competition and conflict obviously is, has grown since. And we were, you know, we were amazed, pleased, honored. You know, I'm kind of struggling for what the right phrasing of it by the reaction and hopefully be sort of similar to this for some people. Ghostfleet, it was, you know, it was a great summer read. I read it by the pool for other people. We had an admiral told us about a meeting in the Situation room inside the Pentagon where he yawned and then the other admiral sitting beside him said, why are you yawning? He said, I stayed up last night reading this book. Kept me up. And that's how he helped sell the book to the admiral beside him. In particular, what they talked about was, oh well, could it happen? And then they look into supply chain Vulnerabilities and certain network breaches, yes, that could happen, or yes, actually China does have this system. And that then led to actual real world policy changes. We got to brief the book everywhere from the White House to the Pentagon to CIA, you name it. And that potential of a book to have policy impact drove us further to lean into that model with Burn In. Because as you note it, the trends that are happening matter to all of us. They matter whether you work in the national security side of government or you work in business or frankly, you're a parent. AI is akin to the steam engine computer. It will affect us all. It will affect us all in direct ways and even more so in these ripple effects outwards. And yet there's a gap in everything from us understanding that overall issue coming at us to understanding itself. And I like to illustrate this with hard numeric data and an anecdote. The hard numeric data is when you look at everything from the US military strategy says AI is our future. So does, by the way, the Chinese one, to Fortune 500 companies, over 60% of them. Their strategy documents talk about AI as the key to their future. Same for startups. We see it applied everywhere from the Googles of the world to McDonald's recently bought an AI startup as we talked about it hits every realm from restaurants to medicine, you name it. And yet they did a survey of business leaders and only 17% of them said they even had a familiarity with AI. And that doesn't mean I need to know how to program. It means literally I just kind of understand the basics of it. So we've got that gap there. We all know it's important, we say it's important to our enterprise, and yet we don't get it. And then the anecdote is, the Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin said that AI is not on his, quote, radar screen because it's not AI and automation because it's not going to be an issue for, quote, 50 to 100 years, end quote, from now. It's already an issue right now, let alone it's not 50 to 100 years out. And so it's important again, it affects us all. But I know not everyone's going to read an academic wonk paper on everything from what's a neural net to hey, what are some of the ethical issues and legal issues of AI? But they might just read a novel and enjoy it and not realize that, oh, this scene where the FBI agent tried to find the terrorist in a crowd at a train station, I actually just learned about algorithmic bias without actually reading a white paper on algorithmic bias. Right. That's the idea behind it. And hopefully from that, it can have an effect on better informing, whether it's the policymaker or someone who's working in a business.

Yeah, I think that's a great idea, and it will be a great outcome because this has been a continual struggle. I tell you, I've seen this before. Think back to Department of Homeland Security director who very proudly proclaimed that she doesn't read email, and yet her organization is supposed to be helping make contributions to cybersecurity. And we will see this again in the future. I just know it. I think informing policymakers with this kind of info is a good way to do it. It's like a guerrilla tactic.

Yeah. Well, there's two parts to that. The first is the. The Luddites who proudly say, I don't do X. My personal experience with that was a senior cyber security leader, so they were leading agency efforts on cybersecurity. And they talked about how they couldn't get the numbers on their VCR to stop flashing. And I was like, hold it, you still have a vcr? We got that problem first. But. So there's one, there's that. But then the other is, what about when they're informed by not grounded, real fiction. So I used to host a podcast in cybersecurity relevant to those of us joining me here. This is about three, four years back. And we would interview leaders from business, military, congress, and every episode, the last question we would ask them, what's your favorite depiction of cybersecurity in pop culture? And people would name all sorts of things, and it was fascinating. The one that got the most was Sneakers. Great movie, and so yay. But we had certain people that would say things like Die Hard 4. And, you know, I love my Die Hard movies, but that's not a good place to look to say that's what informed me and enjoyed on cyber security. Right. Because it's not that grounded. And that's where we hope to have a slight difference, is that, you know, people, if they're drawing from it, they'll also. Oh, by the way, Be drawing from. There's that footnote underneath to show, actually someone already did this kind of breach, so it's realistic. Or actually, this is where the studies show that X will happen. So that they're not pulling from something that's fictional that's so beyond the pale that it. That it pushes the policy in the wrong direction.

Yeah. You know, there was also A part in your book where I'll speak obtusely so not to spoil anything where something couldn't be hacked or penetrated. And I was like, yeah, the defenders have a chance.

Yeah, that sometimes happens, especially when it's.

A well thought out system that leverages great technology that's available today. You can build very resilient systems. And I'm glad you wove that into your book a bit. So love to ask a couple other questions.

Sure, fire away.

One is alright. So we talked about informing policymakers and that's great. But what about me, or what about the average parent out there or grandparent or, you know, uncle or aunt that wants to mentor the coming generation? What would you advise? That we encourage our youth today to study, to prepare themselves for the future. I asked a friend just the other day if she thought we should invest more time and energy into the computer science or the arts. And as for your book, I'd like to be the guy who programs TAMS and is the person contributing in that way. We have to have those technical experts. But what do you think? What do we tell our kids about the future and how to prepare for it?

Yeah. So I think the key in all of this is going to be balance, multidisciplinary. And look, you know, the people who work in cybersecurity right now can attest to that, that yes, there is a need for programming skills, but you need a team, whether it's on the defense or the offense, that if you're trying to defend a bank or go after a bank, if there's some criminal listening to this, you need someone who not only understands the network, but someone who understands the market or understands psychology, et cetera. So we already see that playing out right now, blended expertise. So I would say moving forward, there's a couple of things. One is that across the US we are obviously behind where we need to be in STEM education. And this is an issue for everything from the future of jobs to our future competitiveness against adversary states like China. We know we're behind the eight ball and that needs to be raised at everything from the grade school level. You know, most schools, sorry, many other nations, just as they require a foreign language skill set, they require the ability to program. Same thing ought to be required here all the way up to how our government is recruiting and drawing people in. There's some new legislation that I'm really supportive of that is creating a scholarship where the. Right now the proposal is just for Defense Department. I hope it hits for the other agencies where they will pay for. It's a little bit like ROTC but for STEM education. So if you major in this, we'll pay for your college. And then you come work at the Defense Department not as a soldier, but as a civilian. And you work three years for us and then you get one final year for industry. And it's a way of drawing people in with a certain skill set. I love ideas like that. However, it cannot just be. We don't want to have only people who are good at STEM programming. The second is we need to match our skills training for what will be the jobs of the future. And there is a mismatch here whether it's high end to low end. A low end example of it is there is a job retraining program in Indiana right now for factory workers who've been put out of work by robots, by automation and they are training them to be truck drivers. We're setting them up for a fall. Right. And what I'm getting at here is there are certain skill sets that will robots, AI is not going to take all jobs. It's going to heighten the need for human intelligence, emotional intelligence, et cetera. So you want to have that skill set, that training going on. Another issue that hits a prior book, the Licor book on social media weaponization, which we've seen target our democracy, but it also targets us in marketing. It's been a huge issue also in unfortunately helping to accelerate the spread of coronavirus. All this massive amount of misinformation disinformation online. And so the nations that do really well at it have digital literacy programs. So it's not merely how do I have good password policy, it's how do I navigate online to discern what is real or not. All those sorts of things. They bake that in the final. So these are some of the things that we need in our system, hopefully. The book points to how if we don't have that, we're going to enter a world where at a national level we will see major problems. But you will also see it, you know, you asked for the parent, the grandparent, how it might hit inside your home. What will it be like for the person that's trained? What will be like for the person who doesn't understand the forces going on around them? How's it going to change the way that you vote to how's it going to change what you think about buying or not to? How's it changed the way that you parent? And that's also what I hope people is that basically that it, the book gives, you know, hope people enjoy it. I hope particularly that it's escapist, given everything that's going on. But also I hope it gives them something to chew on afterwards that they think about, you know, whether it's, hey, should I sign up for this service or system or not? Or to how my kids doing that. What is it gonna look like five, ten years from now?

Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's very great context. It really is. And for me, reading the book kind of underscored that. If I'm advising a young person today, I'm going to say I would strongly encourage you to pursue a technical field, but at the same time master an instrument or learn to paint and master painting and inspire that creativity side and your ability to create and innovate. That's what one of the lessons I took from your book. In the future, we're going to need people that can master both the science and the art.

And oh, by the way, they'll be a lot happier too, but they'll also be better at their job. I mean, you know, to take us out of this, this field. I remember I did a prior book on robotics and the people that were doing, if you went to the universities, the programs working on robotics was not just the mechanical engineers, it was the biologist who understood the way that insects worked or the person that understood this is how a cheetah leg works. And so the point was that it was having that mix back and forth. And oh, by the way, the people who could care nothing about robotics and only cared about cheetahs, well, the ones that were doing the best research on cheetahs were the ones that understood mechanics or that were weaving in AI and big data to their studies of be mating or whatever. To me, it's that using lots of different disciplines, bringing it all together, those are the ones that thrive. That appears to be the same in business, right? You are not going to be a good cto, ciso, CEO if you only understand technology or if you only understand security. You're going to be pulling in and making, pulling in from lots of different fields, managing people from lots of different fields, and making decisions of relevance to it. And, you know, that's actually one of the other things that we tried to achieve with this book, is that when people do talk about the issues of AI and robotics, they tend to come at it from one angle. You know, either here's how it works or here's what it means for the future of jobs, or here's what it means for the ethics of war. Here's what it means for policing. And by putting it in a scenario, you get to pull in these different perspectives, which is how it is. Oh, by the way, in the real world. And that's one of the other things that we tried to approach with the book.

Cool. And Peter, now that you mentioned that, I want to ask one more question if you have time, and that is, I love having your brain engaged on all these topics and you contribute broadly. You speak at conferences, you write a lot of things, you interact in person. You were also involved with this Solarium Commission, weren't you?

Yeah, we actually had a fun experience to say, we, August Cole and I, who is the co author. So the opening of the report is actually an example of this useful fiction. So, you know, the Solarium Report is a massive report and has so many recommendations in it and good recommendations, ones that the nation would be much more secure if we followed. But a particular challenge for it is how does it avoid not having what played out for so many other commission reports. You think of what played out for all the different commissions warning about terrorism prior to 911 and the report gets put up on a shelf and it wasn't implemented. And so one thing that we did with the commission is that we wrote a preface that was different than your normal kind of preface. It was an example of this useful fiction. It was a story, a scenario set in the future, but pulled from real world research. And the recommendations of the report, so grounded reality. And it is written from the perspective of a congressional staffer in the wake of something bad that's happened. And basically they're lamenting that they didn't put into place the recommendations of all these past commission reports. And the idea of it is to try and drop the reader into a world that makes their brain but also their emotions engage. I better listen to what I'm about to read here. I don't want what is happening to this character just like me to happen to me in reality. And so it's again, it points to the value of this combination of research and narrative. We've done this kind of exercise with everything from US military to corporations. This was a first for, for Congress and it was hopefully it aids the cause, but also it was just a really remarkable experience. And this combination of a US government document and basically science fiction, it's a first for science fiction, it's a first for Congress to come together. So it was a lot of fun and hopefully will help have an impact.

Cool. Hey, speaking of a lot of fun, this was fantastic. Peter, I really appreciate your time and the context and the vision that you're giving us of the future so we can take action about it and shape it in the best possible way. So thanks for coming on. I appreciate it.

Thank you for all your kind words about the book and also everything that you do to keep your audience informed and engaged. And to everybody else out there, just stay well.

All right, great.

Thanks Peter.

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