Risk and Opportunity in the Modern Age with Will Hurd

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All right, I'm Matt DeVoe, the CEO of OODA, and you're on the Oodacast. And today we're talking with Congressman Will Hurd. Will, welcome.

Hey, buddy. It's always a pleasure to be on and be with you in your basement.

Thank you. Yes. No Scotch, but we'll have a good conversation to go with it. Hey, so, you know, we'd like to cover with folks, you know, obviously you've experienced a lot in your lifetime. Could you give us kind of the Will Hurd origin story? You know, college through public service into the private sector, and then back into service to our government and citizens?

Sure. It's funny how the stuff that I do, especially on technology right now, all got started, actually. When I was in high school, I had an internship at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and that's the largest private research institute in the United States of America. And what sophomore Will Hurd, what technical skills I had, other than being able to type 70 words a minute? I don't remember. But I got latched up with a woman who was a leader in robotics, fell in love with those things, and that's where I decided to do computer science in high school and take those classes. And I ultimately decided to go to Texas A and M in order to study computer science. And my freshman year, in the end of my freshman year in college, and I've never really been outside of Texas, and I saw a sign in the engineering building in Aggieland that said, take two journalism classes in Mexico City for $425. I had $450 in my bank account. So I go to Mexico and fell in love. Being in the culture, learning about things, you know, I had only read about in books. It blew me away. And I added International Studies as a minor. And the first class I took in International Studies, I had a guest lecturer, this dude named Jim Olson, who is this former CIA badass who was in the last job he had was the Associate Deputy Director of Operations for Counterintelligence, ran all the CI for the agency, was involved in catching Aldrich Ames. And he told these amazing stories about then what we would call the D.O. the Director of Operations. Now we call it the National Clandestine Service. And I was like, I go to his office the next day, literally knock on his door, and was like, tell me more. And so that began my interest in the CIA. Bob Gates was the interim head of the Bush School at Texas A and M who further pushed me towards the directorate of Operations. And when I graduated at 22, went into the agency and I did two years in training. And you know, I always joke I used, you know, at the super secret CIA training facility called the Farm. Now it's on Google Maps, you know, in two years India, two years Pakistan, two years New York, year and a half in Afghanistan.

And.

In addition to being a case officer and collecting intelligence on threats, our homeland, recruiting spies, stealing secrets, I had to brief members of Congress and I was pretty shocked by the caliber of elected officials that I met. I probably briefed 200 Rs, Ds, men, women, all 50 states. And I had this experience in Afghanistan where a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence didn't know the difference between Islam, Sunni and Shia. And so I had friends that ran races and decided to leave a job I was good at to run for Congress. This was in 09 and I ran and lost to run off by 700 votes. But I don't have that story to tell anymore. Then joined a boutique consulting firm called Crumpton Group. Then got connected with high speed, low drag, cutting edge cybersecurity company called Fusion X, helped that articulate and debonair CEO helped build that organization and then ran for office again and took it. So that's kind of how I got to where I am. And I've worked on a lot of technology issues partly because my experience with you in Fusion X, I was able to run a subcommittee as a freshman in Congress on technology. And you know, those, those, those real world private sector experiences rounded me out with a, with a basic technical background and why, you know, a lot of, of what I've done in Congress has been around technology.

Excellent. Well, I think the 09 election is the only one I'll ever say that I'm glad that you lost because it gave us the opportunity to work together those years and, and travel the world, you know, El Salvador and Turkey and places like that. So it was good times.

We've spent Valentine' at some fancy restaurant.

Hey, I do want to rewind a little bit while you're at Texas A and M. There is a kind of community crisis and you were in a leadership role there. Can you speak to that? And kind of things that you learned at an early age, being put on the national stage in helping a community through what was a choice for the community.

So I was student body president at A and M my last year in school and I got involved in campus politics as a first Freshman. Because when I was touring A and M as a senior in high school, one of the guys I met was like, one of the great ways to get involved is work on a student body president campaign. I worked with this guy named Carl Baggett who's like, still a close, close friend. I was talking to him this morning, literally. And we won. And I was involved in our student union, which did programming and such. And I actually ended up running for student body president because I got pissed off by something. It's like a theme in my life. It's like I get pissed off by something and I go and try to do something about it. And we had bonfire at A and M. Bonfire was our burning desire to beat the hell out of tu. That's a derogatory term that we use for the University of Texas. And it's a pile of logs that we cut down by hand, build into a almost 10 ton structure, pour jet fuel all over it and light it up the night before the game, right? And one night In November, about 2:32 in the morning, the structure collapsed and there was kids on the structure and ended up 12 Aggies died from that event. About 30 were injured. It was at that point in 1999, the worst tragedy on any university campus. And I was intimately involved in dealing with the response, right? The first thing you show up. And I've been in some pretty nasty places since my time at am, but when I think of a crisis, the first thing that goes back to my mind is driving up in my, you know, 1995 Kia Sofia to the location where this was and just seeing the carnage and the craziness that was there. And you know, these were a lot of young folks that have never dealt with this kind of loss of life. They hear their friends screaming under all these logs and their first instinct is to rush in and start pulling logs away, right? But you have an instable structure that you're going to increase the instability if you're doing that. And the students had a hard time understanding that, don't do that yet. And so one of my first responsibilities was out there was calming everybody down, being like, get ready. When the emergency responders need us, you know, to go pick something up, then we go, right? So, you know, it was how you deal with loss, right? It's when you're that young and you're away from your parents, this is when cell phones, you know, a lot of people had cell phones, but the infrastructure wasn't very good. And so crisis, you know, crisis communications, how you communicate in A time. This is actually one of the first times when I really stopped watching cable news because I remember I'm involved in all the meetings talking about what was happening. And then people on cable news were talking about things that had absolutely nothing to do with what happens. And that began some of my early frustration with some of the way these events get portrayed. So it was experience I always wish I didn't have because that means 12 lives would still be around. But I learned a lot about how you operate in a crisis, how you need to grieve. And also for me, it's an example of if those 12 kids were still alive, what would they be doing right now? Right. And it's something that's pushed me to make sure I take advantage of every opportunity that comes my way. Because there's some that don't have that opportunity or chance.

That's great. What about interacting with other officials? And obviously we're involved with folks at the state and even the national level. Were there any, anything that resonated with you where you're like, well, that was good leadership or this person was helpful even in that kind of national political arena?

You know, at the time, George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, Rick Perry was the lieutenant governor. And George H.W. bush was still very intimately involved in campus life at Texas A and M because that's where his presidential museum and library is located. And one of the things that I think George W. Bush was great at was just comforting people, right? It was just going, putting a hand on a shoulder or giving someone of a hug or just saying, you know, we feel your pain. His ability to do that and make people feel comfortable with what they were dealing with in that moment was something that I haven't seen many people be able to do such a thing. I also think at the time our coach was RC Slocum, right? RC Slocum is kind of this fabled coach in Aggieland. And you had some of our star players, they came out and showed support. So it was that example of sometimes you just need to show solidarity with other people and that goes a long way. And you saw that with those individuals. And then I look at Ray Bowen, who was the president of Texas A and M at the time, letting a 21. I think I was only 21 at the time, a 21 year old kid, basically be the spokesperson during this crisis that had the entire national focus. But I had an ability to articulate the importance of the tradition and try to talk about what we call the spirit of Aggieland. There he had the willingness to let a young kid handle some of those responsibilities.

That's great. I mean, I hear a couple of different messages there. The first is the empathy, which I think President Bush carried forward around other national events, including 9, 11, and the other, being able to, I don't want to say, share the spotlight, but give a voice to others. Right. To not try and not try and consolidate the voice around an event like that into just one person or one college administration, but to let the students have a voice as well. Right. Seems like it was important. So you go ahead and we have to look.

You have to. There's grieving individually and there's grieving together. Right. And that's an important part of the. It's a cathartic moment. Right. And then also while you're grieving, you need something to cheer because the football game went on. And honestly, it was probably the craziest moment where everybody was so excited because we won at the last minute, was like, I want to say it was like a Hail Mary pass. And it was just after, after all feeling all this terror and sadness and heartbreak, to have a moment where we could, like, forget it and remember, you know, it was a really strange. It was a really strange experience going through that. But that cycle is important, and people deal with it individually, but you also deal with it in groups, and you have to think through that in any moment of crisis.

Excellent. So you enter into the CIA, what year, what time frame?

So I drove my 2000 Toyota 4Runner from San Antonio, Texas to Washington, D.C. the day of the USS Cole IT explosion. I remember being at a gas station just back in the day when, like, gas station had little TVs in front of them. I remember pumping gas and seeing, you know, what was going on in Yemen and being like, man, I'm getting ready to join the CIA. I wonder if I'm going to know anything about what actually happened three, four months, three, four weeks later, my I'm on the Yemen account in the CIA. And then like three weeks after that, I'm in freaking Sana', a, Yemen, you know, for a couple weeks, you know, supporting the station and the FBI with what they were doing in the country. So that was. I always remember that. So my beginning of my career was around the USS Cole. And then I left. My last day in the agency was off August 18, 2009. And unfortunately, a few weeks after that was the bombing in coast that ultimately killed Jennifer Matthews and a number of CIA officers. So I look at. Those are the two major events that bookend my time in the CIA.

Yeah, early in your career. Another catalyst, obviously, was September 11th. Can you kind of highlight, you know, what happens? Young CIA guy and the operations directorate, September 11th happens. You know, what happens from there.

So, because I come straight out of university, out of undergraduate school, we go through a little bit longer program than what's called the Clandestine Service trainees. And so I basically have. I had about a year, a little bit over a year, year and a half more training than other folks because I was so. I was, you know, almost 10 to 15 to 20 years younger than most of my other colleagues. And so what I was working on the Venezuela account at the time, and I was actually preparing to go to Venezuela. And I'm in a training course. And we. And I always have to remember, like, because I was working Yemen almost through the entire summer of 2001, I remember the feeling that many people had in the building, like, something's going to happen, right? Something's going to happen. People would sleep in their cars because they were like, we got to figure out what's going on. Like, there was this nervousness in the building. And all of us that had worked on those issues, we knew bin Laden, we knew Al Qaeda. This is a group that we were following prior to 1998, when you had the attacks in Africa. And so in this training class, you know, you hear that the one building got hit, and we're watching it live on cnn and we see the second plane come, right? And all of us knew, right then, this is Al Qaeda, this is terrorism. And so the class was dismissed. And where it was, it was hard to get back to my home in D.C. in D.C. proper. So I had to like, run, walk, couple of, couple of miles to get there. And that night at 4:00 in the morning, I got a phone call from an old boss that said, hey, report at 0600 in the basement of the new headquarters building at the CIA Langley. And I said, you know, yes, boss. And I became like the fourth, fifth employee of ctcso, the Counterterrorism Center, Special Operations Division. This was the. The division that was prosecuting and overseeing the war in Afghanistan. And so being involved in that and basically doing whatever was necessary to help people out was my responsibility to see that, but seeing what was likely probably the most effective intelligence military operation in our history. I always have to remind people, when Kandahar fell in December of 2001, right, that's, you know, 75% of Al Qaeda leadership was killed. All the Taliban was pushed out of the country, there were only 400Americans on the ground, 300 Special Forces, 100 CIA. Oh, the world's greatest air force, you know, ever. Right. But that was the invasion. Right. Was such a small footprint. And I think part of that was the preparation that we all did back in, back in Langley in those early months.

So there's a key thematic there I wanted to touch upon. You mentioned being in the CIA prior to September 11th. The sense of urgency. I was running the Terrorism Research center at the same time. Obviously we were writing all these proposals into the government and they were being turned away. You have the infamous briefing at the White House with George Tenet, Kofer Black and Rich Blee, kind of giving that imminent sense of warning, we're going to be hit. It could be on American soil. Now that we're almost two decades later. Do you think that we're any better as a nation at ingesting and kind of acting on that sense of warning that's coming from the intelligence community? Regardless of who's the president at the time? Do you think that just as an intelligence and national security function, are we better now than we were back then?

I absolutely think we are. Right. And I would say what I refer to as horizontal sharing. Right. Sharing of intelligence amongst other federal entities. It improved drastically from 01, from 01111 happened to 09 when I left. And it's even improved since. Since I've left. Right. Some of those silos have been, have been broken down and the, and the kinds of co op on the ground Right. In the field. That level of cooperation has always been great. The problem usually occurred when you got back to Washington D.C. and you see those headquarters elements, whether it's from CIA or FBI, working closely together, the CIA and Special Forces have always worked tightly. I think that's probably the closest working relationship within the federal government. So I've seen it improve dramatically. I actually think one of the concerns that we deal with now is this notion of a lone wolf attack. And the only way you deal with that is what I call improving vertical sharing. And that's the federal government with local law enforcement. And you can use so many examples. I always use the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. That guy that committed those murders cased like five or six locations. The way everybody, you know, the attack cycle is the same. It's been the same since the first attack happened thousands of years ago. And so you're gonna disrupt stuff when people are casing it somewhere in that attack cycle. And so how do we improve that little tidbit of information on someone that you don't have a dossier on and get that information to the right hands. I think that is the next area of intelligence sharing with, where we have to improve in order to be better. Now, some of our skills in the national intelligence apparatus has atrophied, and it comes to, like, great power competition. We've gotten good and improved going after an individual cell within terrorism, but answering those big macro questions. Plans and intentions of Vladimir Putin, plans and intentions of the senior politburo within the Communist, the Chinese Communist Party. We got a lot of areas of improvement there. And how do you do this in an environment where the US Is competitive advantage in information in all domains. Right. Land, air, land, sea, air, space and cyberspace, when our competitive advantage is decreasing. And so these are some of the issues that we have to be thinking of. And, and then how do we. I think when it comes to, like, cyber intelligence, we have to be sharing quicker and better and faster. Right. I think we can't think of that the same way as intelligence. We get on the plans and intentions of a senior leader. So those are some areas that we need to improve. But the silos and the problems that we saw in 2001, I haven't seen many of those. And now I serve on HPSI on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. And this is always something that I'm focused on because those intelligence failures have been something that I've been around during those times.

Excellent. So one thing you already touched upon with regards to lessons during that kind of 10 years in the CIA is that leaders have an obligation to understand those things that they're leading. You talk about being disappointed with the visit in Afghanistan. Are there any kind of things that you learned as a leader coming out of that decade in the CIA? It would be good to share with the audience.

Well, you have to make decisions with imperfect information. Right. You're never going to have a total picture, and so you have to be comfortable with that. And then you have to think, what is that threshold that, you know where you. Where there is a no, there's a go or no go. Right. And are you getting enough perspectives? Like, the thing that always concerned me is I'm always worried about groupthink. And I don't want somebody agreeing with me just because they want to agree with the boss. Right. I want to make sure there's people that are always challenging and always questioning information. And I think that's valuable to make sure you're getting a full perspective. I would say the CIA is great because we have some amazing databases, we collect information on everyone and we do the small stuff. Well, every time. Right. Like if you're going out to doing a surveillance detection route, you know, you're not, you can't. And you've done this hundreds, if not thousands of times, you're going to put the same level of attention to that surveillance detection route the thousandth time you did it as you did the first time. Right. And that's the same when it comes to, you know, what you also learned in the intel world. What is said is just one part of the puzzle. Who said it? How'd they have access to it? Right. What was their motivations when they were sharing it? And so you think more about those, you think as much about those questions as what was actually said. And so those are lessons that I've taken to my time in Congress when I'm evaluating proposals or when I'm on HPSI trying to evaluate and do civilian oversight of our, of our intelligence.

Excellent. I love that thematic of, you know, acting on imperfect information. That was a major theme of mine. The stuff I was writing around COVID 19 was that I felt like people didn't want to make decisions because it was, let's just wait another day, let's wait another day. And you have to take action on the information that you have at some point, even if it is imperfect. So.

Absolutely. But you also, when you go back and do a review, Right. And look, I'm on a piece of legislation that we should have a 911 style review of what happened with COVID 19. But I want it run by experts, not by politicians. Right. I would say most people, and I have the book here somewhere, the 911 Commission Report. You know, most people can't remember who the two CO leads of the 911 Commission Report were. Right. Which I think is a good thing because what we know about the document, we know the things that came out of the document. And so I think it's important to look back whether we know when, why, how do we do better. But you also can't second guess because you have to remember these decisions were being made with imperfect information. And it was a snapshot in time. And so now, you know, it's real easy for politicians of all stripes to try to shoot at the decisions that were made. But you gotta make it within the context of what information was known at the time.

I agree, yeah, wholeheartedly. So transition out of the CIA. We won't talk about losing in your first congressional run. And then you get Looped up with us on the cybersecurity domain. What resonates with you from the time you spent working on cybersecurity issues around decision making and information and just kind of managing risk in general?

Well, I think I had a bias when I came out of the government that the, any the people that work in the CIA, that work at nsa, work at FBI, you know, those, the smartest people, the best technical capabilities. And one of the things I learned working with you in Fusion X is the capabilities of people outside the government is probably better than it is inside the government. Right. And that the threats that it changed my perspective from what a target or a target of an intelligence operation is like. Why would an attacker want to go after a credit rating agency? Why would an attacker want to go off somebody who. Go after somebody who makes a FOB that does authentication? These were things that when I was in the CIA, I would not have thought of as real hard targets or things that people would go after. That perspective change being out in the private sector and then also seeing the threats that the private sector has to deal with. And that led me to come to the same conclusion that Keith Alexander, the former head of the nsa, always says it's when it comes to cybersecurity, if the government thinks they can defend themselves by themselves or the private sector can defend themselves by themselves, that's the equivalent of the French thinking the Maginot Line is going to defend them from the Germans. Right. And there should be this level of cooperation, not just on sharing information, but in operational collaboration as well. And, and seeing that capabilities within the private sector was pretty excellent. And also just the discipline of some of our good American companies was fascinating.

Do you think there's more we should be doing on that collaboration with the private and public sector, not just the intelligence sharing, but on the tracking of threats?

Yeah, look, absolutely. And I think it's different in a normal state versus a crisis state. Right. And so information, you still gotta have information sharing in both of those states. Right. But do you have an agreement of what is going to happen when we are in a crisis? Right. When a major bank is dealing with a cyber attack in the moment, when do you want the FBI to be involved or Homeland Security providing information, like thinking through some of those questions early on is important. I also think when you can go back and collecting intelligence on cyber threats, I still think we have a long way to go to improve our intelligence collection posture. And what we should be doing is relying on the private sector to help us draft those requirements. Right. So the financial services industry have a better idea where the next set of malware that the Russians are developing, what they're going to attack. Right. And so let's turn those assumptions by the private sector into collection priorities for the intelligence community to go out and do what only the intelligence community can do, collect on nation state actors. Right. And so you get that. And honestly, turning private sector assumptions into intelligence requirements is not hard. Tasking those out to core collectors to do what like I used to do, not really that difficult either. But once you get the information, sharing it back to the private sector has always been the sticky wicket, as they say in South Asia. And part of that is still this archaic understanding of intelligence when it comes to cyber intelligence. Cyber intelligence is, perishes quicker than traditional intelligence, which means we got to share it faster. And so I think that's one area. And you have the ISACs, the Information Sharing and Analysis Centers or ISAOS organizations, some of them was called. You have the special one that's in the financial services sector. I think financial services is probably the top when it comes to the level of cooperation with the federal government. Utilities probably second. Right. But we do have a long way to go. And what I tell people now, what is the cyber equivalent of COVID 19? Everybody would always kind of discount a fire sale, right? Fire sale can't happen. There's too much redundancy, we're too sophisticated. But also, nobody thought that everybody said it's not possible for a virus to bring the entire global economy to a standstill. And so are we thinking through those issues when it comes to how transportation, financial services and utilities interact? And I know in some of those circles you operate in, Matt, those conversations are happening, but at the government level it's not necessarily the case. And how do we focus on that kind of state so that we're prepared?

What type of adversaries do you worry about the most in the cyber domain?

Look, for me, it's still going to be nation states, right? They have the, they have the resources, they have the training, they have the willingness, they have the capability.

And.

My probably as equal of a concern as pure cyber.

Right?

Pure ones and zero cyber attacks hacks is disinformation and how disinformation is being used as a broader tool of foreign policy by our adversaries. Seeing the Chinese, the Russians and the Iranians coordinate messaging and disinformation, you know, it's scary seeing how the Chinese are trying to put out themes to erode confidence by our European allies in the United States of who is could be better to help you through this, China or the United States? The Chinese are using this as an opportunity to, to supercharge their effort to surpass the United States as a sole superpower by 2049. So disinformation, sometimes people want to lump that in with cybersecurity because it happens on a computer or device. And I get that it's not a pure cyber issue, but when it comes to how nation states do that, we saw this week the Iranians were messing with the water systems in Israel. You also saw the Chinese were doing something against a utility space as well. It's an aggression that we're seeing escalate. And the problem is when you draw, what are the red lines when it comes to cybersecurity. And this is the age old debate, because if you establish a red line, I could be able to get one pixel away from that red line and I'm not violating it. Right. And so anyways, I'm babbling a little here, Matt, but these are some of the concerns that I try to bring and make sure we're thinking through, you know, how. Look, I think a broader other issue is this issue of data. Right. There's nothing I agree with Vladimir Putin on, but when he said whoever masters AI is going to master the world, I think there's some truth to that. And whoever masters data is going to win. And we know when a country like China doesn't care about civil liberties, we're going to have to be developing systems that rely on less data because we're never going to be able to get as much data as the Chinese do. And how are we adapting these systems and who is going to get mastery of these issues in this area the quickest? And I think that's going to drive great power competition in the future. And that means literally one player, the Chinese. And so those future technologies, it's not Future anymore. It's here. 5G, AI and Quantum. I always put those three together because they're interrelated. And how do we make sure that we're leading on that and not letting all of our secrets being stolen on that. So yeah, there's a lot of things to be concerned about.

Yeah. So you spoke to kind of the concerns around AI data integrity associated with that. The data that you have access to, obviously in a more democratic society is going to be limited. What about on the quantum computing front? I mean, what are your thoughts there or concerns around that as not only an opportunity but also a risk?

Look, it absolutely is a risk. And I think, you know, I still. I still. I still. I got to. I got to get rid of this because. Not even laugh. I'm like, thinking of Quantum is like Schrodinger's cat, right? You know, it's like a bit can be a 1, a 0, both, and neither are all the above at the same time. Like, that's still like a philosophical issue, but the one that when I explain to people that don't understand quantum, I always say the ability to break encryption, right? And what does that mean? Why is. Why are the Russians and the Chinese saving and sucking ciphertext out of the air? Because they know they're going to be able to decrypt it at some point. And so the race on encryption, I think, is important. Quantum communications is an area where the ability that gives us to have secure communications, but also potentially get away from things like gps, which could be impacted if you're close to a device. All those broader concerns. But who gets there first, right? Like, what is the Y2Q right? Who achieves Quantum first? Because there's no second place. And are we doing enough to coordinate between the private sector, the public labs, government, like the executive branch, doing research to make sure we're moving forward on this? And a former colleague of mine retired last cycle, Lamar Smith, had a quantum initiative where you have an entity within the White House that is driving policy across the entire government to make sure we're leading and achieving in Quantum.

Yeah, I think that's an important thing that you recognized, right, is that in this age, we now have to condition folks to recognize that secrets that are encrypted have a shelf life, right? So it becomes a matter of what is the shelf life? Is this something that needs to be protected for the next 30 years or something that needs to be protected for the next 30 months? And that's where quantum encryption is going to come into play.

And defending your data, right? Like, you're not just defending your data from someone stealing it, you're defending it from someone trying to manipulate it to screw up your algorithm. I still think it's crazy that in iRobot, I remember the first time I read IROBOT from Isaac Asimov. It was like I was waiting for the Will Smith character, you know? But you're like, he just. He figured out that the corruption of the training data is what's going to screw up the whole system. And I don't think enough people are thinking about. Not enough people think about how you protect your data from theft, but how do you protect your data from manipulation to drive an outcome that we don't want. And would we be able to see that when that outcome comes, is that bad outcome because of bad data? Right. And so that's where data analytics and informatics and all that kind of stuff is equally important as pure kind of cybersecurity. Because how we protect data and understand data is critically important as well.

Yeah. We have to remember on the AI front, a lot of the machine learning is not explained. So that becomes an issue in of itself. You don't understand if it made decisions based on bad data. And if you question the integrity of the outcome of the algorithm, you basically are at a revert to zero type stage. Right. There's no incremental recovery back if you don't have the explanation as to how the algorithm got there.

And this matters. Right. Because right now, Robin Kelly is a Democrat from Illinois. She and I have done so much together when it comes to technology. We're working with the Bipartisan Policy center on trying to draft like a national strategy in artificial intelligence. There's a lot of documents out there. I think this administration has done a good job of focusing on AI and moving it along. Started with the previous administration. And one of the things that you're always, you know, you're having to get into a debate on is if Company A is. Bank A uses Acme Co's algorithm to decide whether or not somebody gets a loan. And you find out that of the hundred people that have applied for loans, 50 were white and 50 were black and only the 50 white people got loans. You know, why is that? And at what point should those decisions be explained and should that Acme. Who's responsible? The bank? Acme Company. At what point should Acme Co have provided insights on this is how people are going to be impacted by this. These are some of the policy decisions that are being made that are going to impact innovation. And I think it's simple. We have plenty of laws already on the books to protect civil rights and civil liberties. Those laws apply to algorithms, period. And so guess what? When you're developing these things, they're gonna.

Have to follow the law.

And so you start with that. And that law and that regulatory environment is decided by a diverse set of people in the financial sector. It's fec. Right. Some fcc, some ftc. In healthcare, it's hhs. Right. And so you're not going to have one Bureau of Artificial Intelligence, but all the existing regulatory entities can they understand and regulate artificial intelligence and machine learning the same way you do human Activity and behavior now. Shocker. Newsflash. We don't have enough people in those positions to be able to do that. And so how do you get them up to that point? These are some of the policy impacts of the technology.

Excellent. I love that we talk innovation all day. I got just a couple more threads that I want to pull on with you. The first is you have a lot of organizations right now that are finding themselves having to lead and make decisions in what is a crisis situation. What advice would you provide to them or what guidance would you provide to business owners and others that are trying to adapt to kind of a new norm in this COVID 19 environment?

First off, let's think about our mindset. We're trying to get through the five phases of pandemics, right? And the last phase is recovery. I think when you talk about recovery, to me, recovery means we're gonna go back to a place that we had previously been. I want to think about advancement. How do we come out of this better?

Right.

And so a lot of that is going to be how do you have the digital infrastructure to do things right that you weren't doing before because you got to do stuff, stuff with less income? How do you make sure people are clear on how you're making decisions based on health outcomes? Because there is some. There is some uncertainty around that. I'm here in Texas. Some parts of our economy have opened up and I've been to some restaurants and to see what it's like. And there's a lot of people that are out and wanting to experience that again. But how are those businesses making those health decisions? And it's a state from when we're flattening the curve to virus to vaccine. Excuse me. And then post vaccine. Right. Is kind of. And how long those periods are going to last? I don't know. Some of the best guess is vaccine in nine to 12 months. The good thing is the people that believe they're on to a vaccine are already thinking about mass production. So you won't see, you shouldn't see too much of a lag time from having a vaccine to being able to get it out to people. But communicating how you're making these health decisions, I think is one of the things that businesses need to do because your customers are going to be happy with it. But also strict enforcement. If you're running a store shop, all your employees should have mask on. They don't have mask on. That's going to erode trust in the clientele. That's coming to suit you making sure that your employees are able to have access to testing? That depends on a lot of different factors. And Congress is trying to improve that. But yeah, that's what I'm learning the government, what our capabilities are, the fact that we've moved swiftly and done four pieces of legislation in a bipartisan way to try to deal with this crisis. There'll be some more. We're gonna have some coming up that's gonna be purely partisan, but I think we'll maybe have one or two more bills that help state and locals in a bipartisan way. So that's kind of my perspective from dealing with this every single day.

And be waryful of how adversaries might take advantage of the current environment as well. Right. We're doing things that we've never done before. Unprecedented from a, from a budgetary perspective. Also introduces a little bit of vulnerability that we need to be thinking about as well.

Look, for sure, not only is it the Chinese believe that whoever gets the virus, the vaccine first is going to have a first mover advantage. So we've seen them going, you know, stealing an IP theft around those companies that are working on this. My concern, I haven't seen and been exposed yet of them trying to manipulate anything to hurt tests, you know, so they can get a first mover advantage early on in the crisis, saying things weren't as bad as they were in order to try to get additional PPE and things that they knew were going to be, you know, a global glut. Right. And then some of the misinformation around that. So, you know, this is an opportunity. You know, I always go back to the target breach. Right. Target breach was through one of the contractors that did the H VAC systems. All, you know, every almost. If you have more than two computers, I think you're potential target. And in this moment where things there's so much concern and we're moving swiftly, we gotta make sure that we're following good digital hygiene because this is going to be taken advantage of.

So you talked about not being a cable news fan and I appreciate you being a OODA Loop reader, but what books have you been reading recently?

You know, so what I'm like looking at, you know, stuff that's here on my table. Right. You know, I've actually been reading some fiction. I read this the literary I just finished two nights ago was the Great Zoo of China. Really. It's a fascinating story about how China finds dragons and they make them into a zoo. But there's also a geopolitical Element of that Sanger's book, the Perfect Weapon. Right, that's one that I recently finished. There's one by David Rode In Deep, I think is the title. I'm pulling up my audible and Kindle here to look through some of the ones that I'm looking at that I'm reading. Actually my to do list is the machine platform crowd. And then also I finished, I was reading the biography of Frederick Douglass. So I'm all over, I'm all over the place, man. I'm all over.

We share that. I know you recently went through a sci fi spin as well. Are you excited that we're gonna have a Snow Crash movie or TV series?

All right, look, yes, the answer is yes. It's like, it's so one of the reasons I've gone back to my older sci fi is because they were thinking through some issues that we're actually dealing with now. What's the Netflix show? Kovacs.

Yeah. Altered Carbon.

Altered Carbon. Right. Season one I thought was amazing. And some of the concepts of transfer of wealth and that they, that they introduce in that it's, it's a really, it's a, it makes you, it makes you think. And so, so, so that's what I appreciate about going back through and, and reading some of that old school, old school sci fi.

It is amazing. Right. When you think about Snow Crash, I use this example. I mean we, we thrive in the future on software development and high speed pizza delivery. And that is kind of where we are right now with regards to COVID19 right now delivering goods and services to people's homes and then the high end information dense type jobs are the ones that are still around. And then it makes you question, well, how do we retain that kind of economy in the middle and not get stuck. And also some of the things around allegiances to corporations over governments and some of the actions where you saw companies like Facebook taking very good care of their people very early on, setting up community grant programs, things of that sort. I mean there's a lot of, a lot of insights you can derive from that 20 plus year old science fiction that can be applied today.

No, look, absolutely. And this great Zoo of China book, what's fascinating there is the whole point is that the Chinese recognize that one of the Americans competitive advantage is our soft power and that it's our brands, it's our culture, it's our music. And we sometimes forget about that when it comes to national security and our power. And I would say the last number of years we have forgotten that and not leveraging that soft power. So that book made me rethink through how can we do that and focus on not just hard power, but those other things that have helped us be the greatest nation on the planet.

Excellent. Well, I know your schedule is very busy, so I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today. This is a great conversation.

Hey buddy. Anytime, anytime. It's always good to see you, buddy.

Thanks.

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