EP 190: "The Chainsaw Is Already on the Legal Ladder" with Quentin Solt, AI, Futurist & Senior Lawyer, Strategic Advisor on Legal Tech & AI Ethics and Compliance

EP 190: The Chainsaw Is Already on the Legal Ladder with Quentin Solt

“Who has more experience, the internet or a single individual lawyer?”

That question tells you almost everything you need to know about this extraordinary conversation with lawyer, investor and provocative thinker Quentin Salt.

Quentin doesn't believe AI is simply going to make lawyers more efficient. His prediction is considerably more disruptive:

“We are heading to the extinction of lawyers as we know them.”

And his metaphor for what is already happening inside the profession is unforgettable. Young lawyers are using AI to automate the repetitive work traditionally performed at the bottom of the legal ladder. They have climbed up, reached back down and started cutting away those rungs themselves — without necessarily noticing that the rungs above them may be disappearing too.

But this episode quickly becomes about far more than lawyers.

Quentin and Yoyo explore what happens when expertise becomes available as a utility; whether AI could have a legitimate role in dispensing justice; what happens to education when traditional professional careers begin disappearing; and why technological progress forces us to reconsider the relationship between work, wealth, purpose and human value.

There is also a fascinating tension at the heart of the conversation. Quentin can envisage AI making decisions faster and potentially more consistently than humans, yet argues that justice must retain something profoundly human: grace. An AI system can preserve an extraordinary record of our past, but Quentin warns that such a record risks showing what we have been rather than what we may become.

From AI judges and disappearing professions to universal income, human nature, identity assurance and the future of biometrics, this is one of those Security Circle conversations that refuses to stay neatly inside one subject.

The chainsaw isn't coming.

Quentin's argument is that it's already on the ladder.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/quentin-solt/

Security Circle ⭕️  is an IFPOD production for IFPO the International Foundation of Protection Officers

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

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Speaker 2 0:36

Hi, I'm Yolanda And welcome to the Security Circle Podcast, produced in association with IFPO, the International Foundation for Protection Officers. This podcast is all about connection, bringing you closer to the greatest minds, boldest thinkers, trailblazers, and change makers across the security industry. Whether you are here to grow your network, spark new ideas, or simply feel more connected to the world of protection and risk, you are in the right place wherever you are listening from. Thank you for being a part of the Security Circle journey..

Yoyo 1:12

quentin Salt, thank you so much for joining us on the Security Circle podcast. Folk will be thinking, "Who's this fellow?" Quentin, you're a non-practicing solicitor, but there's a little bit more about you. Tell us a little bit about your career background and how you got to what you're doing today.

Quentin 1:29

Okay, thank you, Yoyo. That's, that's a long conversation. I started as a solicitor in the late '80s. I joined, um, a firm in 1990. Uh, and was very lucky that I was the only guy who failed to set back when we start- when my insolvency team was headhunted. So I was invited to go and become the insolvency team at the city law firm. Loved it, grew a great practice, and then went to my senior partner saying, "Actually, I want to go back to doing what I really want to do, which is corporate finance." And he said, "What do you wanna do?" And I said, "Corporate finance." And we went through a little dance, and then I realized what he was asking. And I had a friend who worked at McKinsey, and he told me about this intra-web, intra-not, intra-something thing. Sounded really exciting. I said, "That's what I wanna do." Uh, and so this, allowed me to go off and set up the first technology firm in the city with... centered around the corporate finance aspect rather than through the, the commercial team. And that's where I started. I, uh, had a fabulous time there, then retired in 2002, 2000... Yeah, it was 2002. Uh, and, uh, wasn't quite sure what I was gonna do, but I set up a new fund which we quoted on the s- junior market on the stock exchange. Uh, and that did tolerably well. Didn't take all my time. One of my erstwhile clients came and said could I work for him? I said, "No," 'cause I had, uh, restrictive covenants, and he persuaded the firm to let me off those covenants. Uh, and from there on, I just carried on as a non-practicing solicitor. Had an absolute ball working with, uh, early-stage tech businesses, some of which you'll heard, have heard of. You've probably come across Shazam and others like Crisp Thinking, uh, which did just as well but were under the radar. Uh, and I've had an absolutely fabulous time. Then about, I don't know, two, three years ago, I sold one of my big investments. So I'd invested in an AI company in the late '90s, uh, and we exited that earlier this year. Uh, and I knew that that was coming up, so two or three years ago, I sort of changed my direction slightly. And I was sitting in a men's breakfast at church, and was talking about where we were going, and my fear for society. And, uh, they all stood and nodded, uh, and, or sat and nodded and, yes, all very sagely. And then one of them actually looked up at me and said, "Quentin, I have no idea what you're talking about." He was on the main board of one of the large, uh, publicly quoted companies in, in the UK. Uh, and I told him, this was just before ChatGPT came out, and I said what I saw about AI, and there was a flicker of recognition. He said, "Ah, you mean machine learning." And I said, "Yep, that too. Uh, but I'm concerned it's going to cause huge social unrest and disruption to society." And he didn't get it. And then I spent a little bit of time, we went for some quite long walks together and he understood where I was going, uh, and started to embrace it. Uh, and of course, one of the things which I've learnt is we all say, "Not us." And Dr. Richard Susskind is the guy who came up with this, or is he Professor Richard Susskind. Uh, he came up with the lawyers all saying, "Yeah, yeah, technology's great, but not us. We'll not be threatened by that." Um, and he was in exactly the same mode. And I said, "You know what?" And this was the interesting thing, when I said to him... I tried to put it in his context, and every time there was an objection. You know, most of the work is, you know, the really clever stuff gets done over the water cooler or in the coffee room. And I said, "Have you come across these new Meta spectacles, which have got cameras built in?" And, uh, he'd heard of them. Said, "Just imagine you gave a pair to your granny." He said, "Why would I do that?" I said, "Don't know why you'd do it, but imagine you did, and she goes and knits for half an hour, and it watches her. It's gonna learn how to knit. Now, you give 1,000 sets of those Meta glasses to a load of grannies, and they knit for a month, Meta knows how to knit better than anybody else." And I realized that I was communicating something which was brand new to him. And then I went into how that puts all the knitters out of, uh, employment, potentially. Of course it doesn't, 'cause that was totally non-threatening to him, but we could then transfer it into his business. And that's where I see the social unrest coming, because I can see we're going to hollow out what I call Middle England. Uh, and I'm a lawyer, and the first line of attack is, I think, or the next line is lawyers, 'cause we've already had some which we've not seen or we don't notice. Uh, so that then got me, uh, thinking. I wrote a book, I took it to a publisher and he said, "Quentin, you've got to be somebody." And I looked in the mirror, I said, "I am somebody." He said, "No, no, no, you've gotta be somebody. Go onto social media." So I launched into LinkedIn, had a really interesting month or two doing my social awareness, but of course I got sucked in to the thing which I really feel I know about and where I have authority, which is the law. So I've spent the last 18 months on LinkedIn explaining why Harvey and LawGora are built on sand, and are a Trojan horse, and are overvalued. Now, I take these things to polar extremes, uh, but that's what I've been arguing, and looking at the future of the lawyer is something I've been exploring. Uh, and my publisher said, "That's great, and you've got 5,000 really important people following you now, but they're not gonna buy your book." So he put me onto Instagram, and that, Yoyo, is where you and I met, 'cause you saw this middle-aged, balding, posh-speaking white bloke, probably walking down the middle of the city- it's kinda different. So I think... Does that bring up to- to speed? Oh,

Yoyo 7:23

so much so. I just thought, "Who is this guy? Like, what's he talking about?" And you were, you were talking about lawyering and, AI, and there was another I- Instagram... I mean, I, I would definitely recommend anyone follow you, Quentin Saltes. Uh, you should be easy to find 'cause there's not many Quentins out there. But you were talking also about the, the infrastructural setup for failure as the student loan system that was introduced in the UK, and I don't know how this premise compares with other, you know, like nations, certainly in Europe or, or in the United States even, where we have a large number of listeners. But to put students and then, you know, y- employees into perpetual debt, you just simplified it with your very straightforward, get to the point, communication. I think you found a niche.

Quentin 8:16

Thank you. The student loan, as it's called, really, really upsets me. It is a tax, and it is probably the most regressive tax I've ever encountered. And I came across this, 'cause you know I said I'd sold this business, and I thought, "Thank goodness, I can now pay off my s- my daughter's student loan." And then I started doing the sums. And I've written a long piece in Substack which explains my thinking. But I get to the conclusion of why on earth would I pay it off? She's got a tax which is going to be effectively 9, 10% of her income over £35,000. Her debt is over £60,000. It makes much more fiscal sense for her to have the cash if she wants to buy a house and put it down as a deposit. Uh, and until then she can earn interest off it, and it sort of covers the cost of the, the tax. Um, oh dear, poor you. And then the other piece which I found really distressing, uh, was that, uh, it was designed to be a, a tax on the premium for having a, a, a degree. Do you remember when they sold it to us they said, "You, you pay this premium for having an education." By 2029 if you're working full time on the minimum wage and you went to university, you're paying the student tax. That cannot be right. Uh, and by the way, by my sums, my daughter would have to earn £75,000 a year from now until, uh, she's 50-something in order to, for it to pay us to pay off her student debt. Um, so you can feel I... You can hear I'm really passionate about it. Um-

Yoyo 10:04

It's a trap, isn't it, Quentin? It's

Quentin 10:06

a total trap. Uh, and it's also disincentivizing people from going to university, and we are now... For years I've been saying, "I wish people would do apprenticeships. I wish people didn't feel the need to go to tertiary education." It was a political decision to say everybody needs to have tertiary education. Actually, as AI is taking away the jobs and we're seeing the entry level jobs being washed away, how many young people have I had contact me via my Instagram, and I'm talking dozens, saying, "What do I do?" Uh, and I've engaged with quite a few of them and had lovely conversations, but the s- the noise pattern is the same. There are no jobs for me having now qualified. I can go and do something which is low paid. We're going to find the whole of society is being hollowed out. The jobs you and I do on a keyboard are the first ones to be replaced. They're the ones which for a bizarre reason we value most highly. And these people are being thrown away. So why I... You asked me should we have tertiary education, it's because it's the one thing that makes us human. It's the one thing which ultimately will re- continue to add value, give us purpose. But we're gonna go through a lull when people will say, "There's no point, it's too expensive." Uh, a bit like the public transport system, we ought to be saying everybody gets it because it contributes to society. It's not a cost to us, it is a net contribution, and as a society, we're far too shortsighted about this and, and so many other things.

Yoyo 11:43

Talking about cost versus net contribution-

Quentin 11:46

Mm

Yoyo 11:47

I can't remember the name of the gentleman, but he was on BBC's Newsnight program recently this week, and he talked explicitly to AI and the potential of job losses, and then he said, "This is just gonna be kind of like a self-fulfilling prophecy. You know, if you get rid of enough human capital in your businesses, then who's gonna buy the commodity you're selling if they don't have the money?"

Quentin 12:12

You- you've come, you've absolutely come to the point, and a large part of what I say is we must be concerned about the kings and serfs argument. Mm. Uh, that is, we go back in time. Life and history are pendulums. We swing from extreme to extreme. Uh, and we used to have it where the kings owned everything and the serfs worked on the land. We're likely to go back to that, I'm afraid. Uh, now, I think policymakers can help us here, and there are a number of things that I would be, uh, advocating we explore. Uh, for example, uh, in my book, uh, I talk about a universal income which is funded by, uh, a transaction tax. I don't hold with taxing tokens, which is the big talk, but that's one of the states where they generate the tokens. Uh, I don't hold with, uh, taxing things which are done by AI, because eventually what is done by AI will be indistinguishable from what is done. It will be a tool which everybody uses, and it will do the work. So there's no point trying to do that, uh, i-i-in my view. I think the transaction tax is a slice of every transaction, and it goes to the government to support a welfare system, which is a very simple, everybody gets a universal income. I don't even go with universal basic income, because I don't know how much it'll be. Uh, and then people will still work, and we have a progressive income tax system. Honestly, how many of us need more than £150,000 a year? And start taxing that, and then have taxes for captive capital, and nobody needs over a finite amount. Whether that finite amount is 10 million, 100 million or 350 million, I don't know, but there is an amount at which we are chasing money for the sake of money rather than actually wanting or needing the money. A-and that brings me to another argument, if I may. Yep. So an interesting thought is, why do we work? Two reasons. One, we need purpose, and it is ourself... Uh, it, it has for years, for centuries, been our identity. You know, for millennia we lived without work as such. We survived, and we're gonna come back to that, I suspect. But for our society, work is what defines us, so purpose. The other reason we work is I need to live, so I need to work to live, and I earn money. The trouble is that we're all driven by fear. I'm a Christian, and I believe that the nadir of success is love, and when you really live in love, whatever that might mean, you have a ful-ful-fulfilled life I can't define love in the way that I wish I could, but I can define its antithesis, which is fear. Uh, and most things, greed, hate, unforgiveness, all come from fear. So we ask, why do we work? We work initially because we want to earn money so that we can subs- substantiate a sustainable life that we're comfortable and has a meaning. But very quickly, we s- we achieve that level, and yet we continue to work because we have conditioned ourselves to seeing the creation of wealth as the hallmark of success. We're also scared that we won't have sufficient for tomorrow, so if we put it away in the bank today, when tomorrow comes, we've got enough for a rainy day. And this comes out of a sense of scarcity, of there being insufficient, so we're always saving and storing and doing for tomorrow. Actually, with AI, we have the promise of abundance. We go through an awful lot of pain, but eventually I believe that there will be enough for everybody, and when we see that and we can live in that way, then we will have a much better society. But by gum, we've got a lot of pain to go through. So that's not what you expect a lawyer to say-

Yoyo 16:42

you're, you're profound. I'm sitting here like my heart is racing going, "Where do I go from here?"

Quentin 16:47

Because

Yoyo 16:48

e- even in Star Trek, you know, and my listeners will know I refer to that quite a lot, they always talk about, oh, you know, we evolved out of money being the sole source of driving everybody's, you know, purpose and living in a cashless income and... But what Gene Roddenberry doesn't do is explain how that works, and no one's been able to really explain any other solutions, have they, outside the capitalist system, the socialist system, the fascist system. Why is that? I'd l- I'd love to tap in while I can. Why is it so hard to find something to help us evolve out of these greed states that we seem to be perpetually in?

Quentin 17:29

Human nature.

Yoyo 17:30

Ugh, we're so fallible.

Quentin 17:33

We're, yeah, we are fallible. Uh, I r- remember years and years ago I read a book called Freakonomics-

Yoyo 17:39

Okay, got it which you may have heard of Malcolm Gladwell.

Quentin 17:41

Yeah. It was a brilliant book.

Yoyo 17:43

Yeah.

Quentin 17:44

And in there, somewhere towards the end, there's this... I c- I can't remember quite how he posed it, but it was saying, "Mate, you're earning $80,000. I'm gonna give you the choice. Do you want to earn 10% more than your neighbors or earn $120,000? By the way, everyone in your community earns $80,000." And the response was, "I want to earn 10% more than my neighbor." And I have to... No, I hope I remember that correctly. It's a long time since I read the book Yeah Uh, but I think that's informed an awful lot of my thinking. it is the human nature to want to do better. That-

Yoyo 18:22

I had this, debate with my family when I was very young, probably in secondary school, and, it was the conversation around socialism and communism. Like you give everybody £1,000 a week, for example. You know, some of those people are gonna turn that £1,000 into £2,000 in a couple of weeks, and some of them will squander all their money on alcohol and drugs. So the whole setup in terms of human contribution is so fallible that does giving £1,000 to somebody who's just gonna spend it on, you know, drugs and alcohol, for example, to look at two extremes, is that something that's right even, you know? But then- Well, I just- what's the alternative? We see it on the streets, don't we?

Quentin 19:08

So let's again just go through that. Um, first is your sup- presupposition that the first person who was given £1,000 doubled it to £2,000 had done really well. I'm just gonna challenge that, okay? Just

Yoyo 19:21

putting it there. Fair. Fair point.

Quentin 19:21

Okay. Second, you have, uh, identified the problem, which is addiction And you talked about alcohol, you talked about drugs. You could have talked about coercive control. You could have talked about pornography. Lots of bad traits. I'll say to you, what is it that's underlying those traits? What is it that's driving those behaviors? And my estimation is that it is, um, trauma. It is what has happened to them, and fear of what might happen. Why do people get addictions? It is because they are scared of something. Yeah. They are afraid. And our society sets you up to fail, and we get onto virtuous circles, and we get onto spin-downs of decline. And once you're on the spin-down, that's where you go. So yes, people will make bad choices, but I was sitting in a pub the other day, and there on the wall was this wonderful sign saying, um, "Bad choices make good stories."

Yoyo 20:24

Yes, they do. And, and they make good authors as well.

Quentin 20:27

Yeah. S- so somebody who's never made a bad choice, they're not gonna have a great story. No. No. And life is about stories. So, uh, I haven't answered your question, but I hope I've given enough for you to go, "Okay, there's something else to think about here." I will say that if you empirically look at the results of, uh, when you give universal, or you give an income to people, you give them cash, uh, it has, on the whole, been successful. I know that, um... Oh, the, the, ah, leader of, uh, sort of the CEO of OpenAI, my memory for names is dreadful- Yep uh, has recently, uh, come out, Altman, uh, has recently come out, uh, less in favor of universal income that he, than he was.

Yoyo 21:17

But

Quentin 21:19

I- What's his argument for that? I, I haven't got my head around it fully Uh, but I've heard that that's what he's saying, so I, I need to go dig it up. Uh, but I wonder whether Sam Altman is actually playing a little bit of political tag when he play, plays that card. E- Elon Musk, who I know gets a very bad press, but I look back at him on a big scale and say, the guy's autistic, the guy is brilliant, he commands enormous loyalty from the people he works for, and he does some mad things, but actually I think his heart's in the right place. Uh, and he's a big universal income... And he's not universal basic income either. We, uh, I'd love to say we came to the same place. I'm sure he got there before me, he's so much brighter. Uh, but he's, he is banging that drum as well.

Yoyo 22:06

Part of my brain is thinking, why are these billionaires suggesting we should all be on universal income? There seems to be a bit of a dichotomy there without looking at the, the real theory behind, you know, the reasoning behind why that's gonna work. It's very, it's very, it's very easy, isn't it, for somebody with inordinate amounts of money to turn around and say, "Yeah, everyone should be on a basic income."

Quentin 22:29

Well, so, again, two points. Uh, the first is you've answered your own question by starting by saying, "Are we gonna do kings and serfs?" Yes. Yeah. So you've answered that. Why, why are they saying it? They want people to be able to continue buying their product. Mm. Uh, and the second, there was a, uh, an implication that they're saying everybody should be on basic income. They're not saying that. No. They're saying, at least some of them are saying, everybody should be on sufficient income. They... Again, it's human nature. I don't want to do somebody else down, I want to do better than them, and that change in l- in focus, that change in lens changes everything Because I'm not trying to do the other p- when I'm doing a deal, I'm not trying to do the other party down, I'm trying to lift myself up, in, in legal parlance. You know, there are counterparties, and I don't... Actually, I would really like you to still be there next year, 'cause by the time I've invested all that bit, that effort and intellectual energy in doing a deal with you- Yeah I want you to still be there.

Yoyo 23:33

Yeah. But

Quentin 23:33

I wanna do the best deal I can do.

Yoyo 23:35

So- Because that's how they insulate the business for s- long-term sustainability, is they have to know where their future customer's coming from.

Quentin 23:42

Yeah. That's... You've got it. And the better quality of life we have, the more future customer there'll be for them. And frankly, these guys don't care anymore. As I s- started by saying, you tax somebody when they've got enough, whether that's 100 million, 150 million, or 330 million or, or whatever that number is. After that, I call... That static capital, we should be leveraging it, we should be making it work, and you don't need it. You don't need that sit- sitting in a bank account, even for a rainy day.

Yoyo 24:17

Yeah, because if your universal income is guaranteed, it's 100% you're... What you've said is right. I had a... During COVID actually, my friend and I, who, who's, I consider quite a bright man, to be honest, inc- incredibly bright. But when he started talking to me about universal income, I kind of don't think I was really in a position to hear, but I was curious to encourage him to continue talking and continue talking and challenge with questions. Um, and, and, and I can see principally why it works, I just think the transition to get there to that good state is gonna be quite painful. Because, like, look at my mindset, I was judging on, you know, extremes of addiction without realizing that 20 years into living in a universal income state, that fear won't exist, the deprivation won't exist, the, the, the comfortability will be there, the stability will be there. And so, you know, I, I, I, I didn't think properly at the time, and I think that's a, a, an interesting evolution in terms of my thinking about it. Um, what, what... Uh, I lost... I don't know. I lost my train of thought there, 'cause I went down a little... COVID. So what I learned about COVID in terms of societal impact, apart from the obvious that we all saw, was that it brought out the givers and the takers very easily. You know, there were a lot of people who, you know, imagine universal income again, there are always gonna be people that share their wealth and give and, and people that take. But it... We saw that in COVID when people were just so willing to just do things for the better good and help their communities out, work together. Do we always need to have a crisis, Quentin, to see the very good side of people and the very bad side of people?

Quentin 26:04

So crises will bring out the, the good, won't they? I'm gonna t- tell you about our Christmas. Yeah. I've got three girls, and, uh, my eldest is the best person ever to give a present to. I think I could give her a used teabag- and she would still say, "That, that's exciting. And oh, it's just the right color, and it's really useful, and it's, you know, exactly what I wanted and I never knew." And she'll work out why I gave it to her and play it back to me, and it'll be entirely genuine, and it is fabulous. My youngest might actually give the teabag because she, or when she was a child, younger, 'cause she had nothing else, but she loved to give And I think that giving is as rewarding as receiving, often more rewarding. Particularly when you get that sort of ebullient, "Amazing, that's fabulous!" But when you understand the impact of giving, you want to give. And the giving without anybody knowing you've given gives you yet another aspect. Um, and I don't think we need a crisis, I think we need a self-awa- self-awareness, and we need to be able to have authority to say, "Actually, I'm going to do this because it is better." Mm.

Yoyo 27:34

I've got to ask you about where you see the future of law. Consider now, like, whether you're a tenant or a landlord, or you have your own business, you can literally use your language learning model of choice. There are plenty out there that are, you know, very good at what they do. Most people know I use ChatGPT quite a lot. I've called, my ChatGPT Hardcore, that's our relationship. He gives me hardcore advice. And I don't ask for bells and whistles or pink and fluffy. Give it to me straight, don't hallucinate. That's what I say. But we can all be our own lawyer now, can't we, in terms of what information is accessible to the everyday person. Quentin, is this threatening the way people learn law now and practice law now? And are people able to be more independent in their own execution of legal services?

Quentin 28:27

The legal profession is

Yoyo 28:30

moribund. Go on.

Quentin 28:30

Simple. Uh, we are heading to the extinction of lawyers as we know them. Mm-hmm. Uh, and you have articulated it really well. Uh, what will happen, we, we're gonna go through two paradigms. Uh, the first is that we will understand that the corpus... If you look at what a lawyer does, there are two layers of, uh, of things they do. One is they advise on the law, the other is they bring judgment to the legal transactional process. Uh, I can now, in a large language model, absorb the entire corpus of English law, European law, US law, whatever you want. It's all out there, public domain. Uh, and if I could only tap into Thomson Reuters or Westlaw, I've got all the template and precedent as well. Uh, there's a huge amount made of how important those are. I'm sorry, that's just rubbish. 99% of legal transactional work, and I talk from a corporate finance legal commercial perspective, it may be the same for family law, it may be the same for immigration, it may be the same for criminal. I'm not talking about that. I'm gonna talk about just the area I know about. 99% of that is- Contractual arrangements, and those do not need cutting edge knowledge of precedent. So let's just put that there. Uh, it's... That legal advice you can get through a, uh, a large language model, and Claude has come out doing it. We have seen that, uh, OpenAI and Microsoft are both setting up their legal marketplaces. Uh, I believe that xAI is actually developing something behind the curtains. Uh, certainly I can see no reason, other reason why they would've been, or SpaceX would've been, uh, recruiting quite as many lawyers as it has. Uh, it certainly doesn't need them for its own, uh, legal advice, so I suspect it's, uh, sucking them dry of, of information. Uh, and so the first mode of defense for the legal firm is the advising on the law. That's gone. Probably already gone. So what you're now doing is finding that, uh, people will buy the lawyer because of inertia. When I sold my business earlier this year, we instructed lawyers, uh, and that was because that's what you do, and I needed a safety blanket, and I wanted the insurance policy. Uh, the other element that they do is they bring their judgment to bear. Of course, I'll say what is judgment? Uh, and it's experience. And who has more experience, the internet or a single individual lawyer? Well, perhaps in a particular domain the lawyer does, but that's just for now, and it's... As we do more and more transactions, the, uh, technology will absorb more and it'll learn more. Uh, which... O- one of the most extraordinary conversations I had yesterday was with one of the startup companies I've funded. Uh, they were talking about a report that they got out and they said, "You know, Quentin, every time we put this same information in, we get a slightly different report out." And I said, "Yeah, and?" And they said, "Yeah, but we give them the same information and we get a different report. It says something a bit different." It's learning. And well, I said to them, "Is the thrust a bit different? Is the outcome, the, the advice, what you're gonna work on different?" He said, "No, no, no, it's exactly the same. Always gives me the same result. It's just the narrative and the way it presents it is different, and it feels as though it's given different weight to different things." I said, "Okay, so I'm gonna give you an answer now. I'm gonna give you another answer tomorrow. Do you expect me to give you verbatim the same answer tomorrow?" And he said, "No." So, so you know, the... what we expect from the technology output and what we expect from the human output, we're expecting the technology to be dumb. Of course, I can put a deterministic level on top of all this, and we can put... pump it out the way you want it to be, but that's actually missing the point. Uh, and so coming back to the point, and I'm sorry I strayed off it, I believe that the large language models will be sold as legal advice direct to the point of consumer. And I actually say it'll be sold as a utility- Yeah alongside, uh, H- we can already see it with HR advice. DAS insurers have commoditized, uh, HR, and there are a plethora of firms out there, some spin outs from law firms, you'll be familiar with these, and they offer HR advice. Some of it is really pants, but they've got the insurance, and they've got the, um, the brand, and they've got the client. That is going to just be hoovered up, because you will buy it as a commodity from, uh, Claude. And as soon as you say that, you then say, "Actually, what legal advice can't we do in exactly that way?" So that's your first paradigm, when it shifts from the legal, uh, going to your lawyer to doing it on your own. You will for some time still want the expert who can help you negotiate the final terms. The problem for the lawyer is the lawyer has been there and is able to help you with that because he was there from the start. He was being paid as the project manager. He was being paid to produce the documentation. And, uh, I use the analogy of a, a dinner where you have the host being the client and the guest being the counterparty, and the lawyer comes in as the caterer, the very high class caterer. And he starts with the hors d'oeuvre, and that's a bit like the MOU or the heads of terms. He understands, and he will get everybody going. He sits there and he listens and he chats, and it's all, you know... everybody's doing what they do, and he's just listening, observing and occasionally helping out. And if somebody needs some more water, he goes and fills their glass, or if they need another bread roll, he gives it to them. But he's facilitating the entire meal. Uh, and his staff come in with the white gloves and the silver service, and they serve it all, and it all runs very smoothly. And then at the end, he gives the after dinner speech, and the after dinner speech is just on because he's been there all the way through. He knows what, uh, the parties are thinking, what they're saying. He understands their little foibles. And in the context of negotiation, he knows the point to give and the point he shouldn't give. He knows the... what's important to his clients, and so he facilitates it all The trouble is that he's not been invited to the party. They work... Instead of having the, uh, the, the law firm come and make the meal and cook a five-star design a meal, they've gone down to Sainsbury's or to Food or whatever it is, and they've bought a meal. They've put it in the microwave, or they've put it in the oven. They've pulled it out themselves. They've served it at the table themselves, and then they say, "Oh, yeah, we'd love to have somebody come in and talk to us after dinner." Who's the best person to do it? Turns out probably not somebody who's had any legal training. Law school does nothing for you to get you there. Now, some lawyers will survive for quite a long time because they've got the contacts, they've got the knowledge. Mm. But eventually you don't need the lawyer, and I say that it's a bit like when you go to a pharmacist. The pharmacists are still called chemists, yeah? They do no chemistry. No. You'll still go to a lawyer, and they'll do no law. They're doing the, the bits which are necessary to help you to close that transaction. So that's the first paradigm shift. You buy your law as a utility from a token provider, and if you look at what I've written on Substack, if you follow me on, uh, LinkedIn, you'll see I've done a lot of destruction. My... Somebody the other day read it and said, "You've done a systematic destruction of Harvey and Ligori." I don't know. That was certainly not what I set out to do. What I set out to do was to say what I see. Uh, and the natural endpoint for me is that these businesses actually have gone in, and they are Trojan horses. The law firms have paid For the ability to share their knowledge, and they shared it two ways. One, whilst Harvey and Ligori of course get no micro detail at all, it's all secure, GDPR lock, all of that, they've happily shared all the macro stuff, and the value of that is so much greater than the law firms ex- e- expected. And the other thing they've done is to share with their clients. They were sufficiently arrogant to say, "We're going to save a percentage of our time and still charge the clients the same amount." The clients aren't stupid. The clients knew what was going on, and they said, "No, no, no, use AI and charge us less." Well, turns out that lawyers aren't very good at using AI yet, so they're not getting the savings they should get s- should get, and the clients are saying, "Uh, we can do this ourselves."

Yoyo 38:05

As I was listening, I'm thinking, "Where are the American politicians gonna come from if there are no more law students going through?" I think we're already worried about the future of politicians, to be honest with you. Um- Well,

Quentin 38:18

there's quite a big debate whether we'd be better off being managed by AI, but that's a different debate. Well- But actually- Well,

Yoyo 38:23

yeah, then we're going back into- What you've just- Gene Roddenberry's territory, aren't we?

Quentin 38:26

What you've just said brings us full circle to where we started. Yeah. That's why I want tertiary education. It's because we need people who have the right education to be able to add value to community and society. So people ask me, "Oh, we've got this real problem. All the low ladder rungs are being removed from the law firms. Who's gonna be the next generation of lawyers?" My response, wrong question. We don't need a next generation of lawyer. What's happening is the young people who have grown up with the technology have said, "What I was doing as a junior was so pedestrian. It was so much grunt work. I can automate it." And they've climbed up the ladder, bent down behind them, got the chainsaw out, and started cutting out the rungs. Yeah. Poor fellas aren't bo- bothering looking up 'cause guess what's happening above them, the rungs above them are being cut. Mm-hmm. And now you're left with these behemoth law firms and, hey, welcome, uh, to the Taylor Wessing merger. Huge law firm, massive pyramid, and these, that huge middle layer, simply not gonna be needed. All those juniors, the whole pyramid is going to implode, and the historic law firm, the legacy law firm, has so much garbage in it. It's going to, it's going to disappear under its own weight. That's my contention. Others disagree, and others have a lot of good reasons for disagreeing.

Yoyo 40:02

Well, I want to bring up the word interpretation because we know that the essence of a lawyer, in the legal profession, is about the interpretation of the law, and it's that that usually people struggle with because of the way that legalese is, is written, right? So, so is AI going to be good at interpreting how the law should be applied?

Quentin 40:24

Yes.

Yoyo 40:24

Right.

Quentin 40:26

There is an assumption in what you say that humans are good at doing this

Yoyo 40:32

I watch a lot of legal dramas, everything from LA Law in the '80s right through to, you know, The Good Wife, uh, in, in the noughties, and I love these legal dramas. Now I'm thinking, "Oh, my gosh, what's the future of legal dramas if this AI gonna be doing it all? There's gonna be no humans." And then I started to think, "Quentin, what happens when we apply AI judgment to lower level criminal offenses, summary offenses?" Say, for example, in the UK in the criminal system, they go through a, a t-t-t-t-t, you know, yep, it's that, and, and all of a sudden we can process criminal activity a lot quicker and focus on where the real, um, time needs to be spent on, on the, on the criminal justice system in, in the courts.

Quentin 41:21

Yoyo, you are s- Thank you. You've just given me the launchpad, and- but this is just so... It's almost embarrassing, but the first thing I put out on Substack was exactly this argument. It was why we should have AI in the courtroom, and I've done another one for Lord Devlin's Lamp, and I'm actually writing another article at the moment which I'm finessing. I'm hoping... I've got a KC who I hope will help me to, to, to make sure I've got th- it right. Uh, but in essence, we should have our summary justice by AI. We have such a huge problem in this country, and I suspect many other countries have the same problem of slow justice and uncertain justice. The certainty and speed is what matters. Uh,, And the other thing I will say, and I put an Instagram out on this earlier of the week, in the week, is that it's really important that we should allow our AI to have grace The person who is hurt most by not forgiving is the person who does not forgive, and we often don't see that. Our law has baked into it a whole load of elements, including, uh, the sentence which expires and the idea that after a period you are forgiven what you have done or you've served your time. We spend... the danger I see of AI is that it keeps a, a blockchain-type ledger audit trail of our history, and that shows what we have been, not what we may become. And the other element of this is that we look at justice as a way of penalizing some- somebody for doing something wrong, which of course we may want to do. But what we should really be doing is saying, "Why did they do it wrong? What is the underlying," to use the expression we used before, "underlying trauma? What is it that caused them to need, to feel the need to steal, to feel the need to riot, to feel the need to hit somebody else? What was it that caused them to want to do what we as society say is wrong?" And by the way, there's another piece in there. Yeah What we as society say is wrong is, and right, moves. Uh, and societally, we for years, uh, uh, apartheid was accepted in many societies. Mm. Uh, and in the justice system, we need always to be able to refer back to an appeal to a human who has that grace. Without that, we'd never have seen the Brown case in the States where suddenly Black people are, were given freedom or laws were changed. We wouldn't have had habeas corpus. Uh, there's an awful lot of stuff where the law is evolving. As it happens, I believe that AI monitoring these fire hoses of social media will probably be able to get us a better finger on the pulse than the rather elderly lawyer who sits in the courtroom. But that doesn't derogate from the need for humanity. So my fear of putting AI is not AI, it's the prompted instruction set we give it. But over time it will even itself out. But essentially, most low-level crime involves two things. One, applying the law, which should be dead simple, and two, understanding the facts. And frankly, I will trust AI to get to the facts faster and with more reliability than, uh, I, I will trust a human.

Yoyo 45:14

But let's go deeper, not just reliability, the universality of, distinctive, judgment, right? Mm. So therefore, why would... You know, and, and yes, there's a background and a backstory to everybody's criminal activity, but there's also a kind of weighting in terms of what was the weighting on motive, what was the weighting on intent, what was the weighting on circumstances, lifestyle, financial. There are lots of different ways that the individual could be classified, against the crime that they're facing legal judgment for. But there's also gonna be a universality in terms of the judgment passed, the sentence passed. It could be more fairer because the... you've got something that's not human making the decision. Whereas, look, we know at the moment, don't we, we've got a big system in the UK where people are now starting to question judgments handed down by judges, and quite rightly. Yeah. Because I think we, we know the case that, that we're referring to But, you know, I'd love to see AI being trialed in summary court, which is the not past six months, you know, hand downs for sentencing. You know, the, these small, you know, everyday, I'd like to see AI monitoring the way sentencing is being given and having a more fairer... But also, I'm a huge fan, Quentin, of having one England police force, not segmented police forces. One England justice judicial system, one England way of sharing, you know, intelligence with all the agency partners that contribute into the legal system. And I, I just see the simplification we're just begging to have, and AI can bring us that.

Quentin 46:55

Yoyo, with your history in, as a detective in the police force, I have absolutely no locus to, to say anything against that, what you're saying. But I will say it resonates and I- Absolutely, on first glance, agree with what you say. There's nothing there from which I would want to, to, to differ. Yeah. Uh, there is a judge in Luton who has a, uh... I think he has quite a lot of c- claims against aircraft when they lose baggage, and he says he's got a flowchart, and he follows it every time, and he'd love to be able to systematize it. It's not even AI, it would just be an algorithm. Mm. And he says, "We could dispense justice so much faster- Yeah but I'm not allowed to." Yeah. So, and it's one of the things I talk about in my book, why do we not make this stuff really simple?

Yoyo 47:55

In fact, we're looking at AI in healthcare, and I, I cannot but draw a parallel in terms of the fact that there are gonna be certain things that AI will be very good at looking at and detecting and examining, like scans for example, and that the recent test results are already showing great results in terms of having the human in the middle, uh, you know, reviewing scans, and the statistics are already looking very good. But I don't... There is this kind of candidness, isn't there, about, uh, is the medical doctor you're gonna have in six years time gonna have learned medical medicine through AI, through ChatGPT? Uh, ugh. And then is ChatGPT going to be able to dispense, significant... I sa- I uploaded the scans of... I'm fostering a cat at the moment with a broken hip, and I uploaded the scans to ChatGPT and I said, "Take a look at this and tell me, you know, what's the kind of healing prognosis? What can I do to support him?" You know, what, and ChatGPT just gave me a whole diagnosis on, it could see the fracture, could see where it was in his body. And, and, and I'm thinking, are we going down another route here in terms of medical diagnosis? And I know you can't talk to that 'cause you're not a doctor, but we can't help but assume as humans.

Quentin 49:16

So again, let me feedback- 'cause it, it's quite an interesting one. My daughter is studying medicine.

Yoyo 49:22

Right.

Quentin 49:22

And when she started four years ago, uh, I thought, "Oh, great, I'll tell her what's coming." And on a weekly basis I found all the AI in medicine and sent it to her She's really kind, and she's very responsive, and I got nothing back. And after a month or so, 'cause I'm quite thick-skinned, I realized that this was not doing it, and I realized that what I was doing was scaring her, and what she needed was a route plan to, to move forward. So I started thinking about this, what's she gonna do? And of course, it's not gonna s- move at the speed at which I think it's going to move. By now, the AI's quite capable of reading all this kind of thing, yet we still have more radiologists than ever we need, and we have a shortage. Uh, and this is the lull before the storm. We're going through exactly the same with law. So in the legal marketplace, everybody's saying, "Look at how much profit we're making. Look at how many more... uh, how much more work we've got." And I'm saying, "Yep, that's the, the lull." Other people are gearing up to use AI, so they will want lawyers to help them, and you haven't yet implemented AI, so you're still having to do it manually What's coming, of course, is they will have implemented the AI, so they won't need you so much, and you'll have implemented AI, so you won't be needed. So, so in the medical profession, what I've done, this is now coming to your point, is that I've understood that my daughter will be a a doctor. She'll be extremely good doctor. And she will continue to have skills of interface which technology won't have for a long time. And for a long time I've said, actually, in the medical world, what will happen is we'll have what... The equivalent of a doula, a patient champion. If you go in to see the doctor, you will not hear what they say for two reasons. One, you're in a state of shock. It's a different environment. It's a bit like going to, an airport. It's a different environment and it's tiring. Being in a hospital or being in a doctor's surgery is of itself sapping. And then they're talking a different language, and they may put it in really simple language, but it's still a different language. And then you're... It's talking about you directly. So what you really want is a human who can sit alongside you and say, "Here, here. What they said was-"

Yoyo 51:38

Right. Both myself and my friend recently went to the hospital, for something, for scans and tests, for example. Nothing scary, nothing big. And, we've got this beautiful NHS app, which is wonderful, but what it does is when it gives you all the test results, you can't understand w- what it's saying. So we literally put those results and ChatGPT explains it in basic language, "Oh, that's why this is normal. That's why this is abnormal." This... But, but ultimate- And it gives you not a scary, because you t- you... Don't forget, I think the quality of information you get from language learning models is about the quality of the prompt you ask it. Mm-hmm. And I've always said you are the creator in terms of ChatGPT. Think of it as a world library, and instead of you going to a library and reading all that information, it's basically just putting it there. But you are the creator, you creating a prompt. And so it was literally able to translate both, because she said, "Why can't the doctor just speak to me?" She's 74. "Why can't she just speak to me in normal language so I understand? I've come out and, like, my brain is screwed because I don't know what she's saying." You know?

Quentin 52:43

So I've got this little device-

Yoyo 52:45

Yes

Quentin 52:46

called the Pocket. I don't know if you've come across that?

Yoyo 52:48

No. And

Quentin 52:49

when you go into a meeting, it's got an incredibly good microphone on it. It can h-... And obviously you have to say to people, "I'm gonna record this."

Yoyo 52:58

Yes.

Quentin 52:58

But it then takes, the notes. It creates, um, natively a, a flowchart tree diagram showing how the, uh, how the conversation went and what different limits were, and it'll... it puts it into a large language model. So you... And it comes up with a to-do list. It tells you what you said you'd do during the call or at, on the meeting so that you have that conversation, uh, the problems. It's sort of like, it takes minutes for you. It, it's amazing. Uh, and when I go to my doctors now or my opticians, uh, I s- or the dentist, if they're going to talk to me, I say, "Do you mind if I just turn this on?" And then I do exactly what you do. I say, "What did this mean?" We... I don't know if you saw the Dispatches program on Channel 4 last year where they... it's worth taking a look at, and they had people go and use AI for various things, and one of the use cases was a doctor. Uh, and another was a lawyer, and they had Garfield against, you know, Garfield the debt collection AI first law firm. And the comment which stuck with me from that was the, the, the thing was rigged and it was stupid, and you had a junior lawyer against Garfield, and the lawyer who judged them said, "Oh, well, I rather like the way this junior lawyer has presented the argument." And then you discover that she was the principal of that junior lawyer who learnt to do what she wanted her to do. So, but she said, "I'll, I'll, I'll tie them. They, they both win." Yeah. The client said every time, "I'll go to Ch- uh, to Garfield now." It was quick, it gave me the result. I didn't have to waste time on niceties. It was just a process, and it was cheap. It was 100 quid versus 1,300, I think. And it did it within 20 minutes, not two weeks. Yeah. Uh, and, and that's the answer. Now, for law... Sorry, for medicine, I've also convinced myself that my daughter is in a really privileged position as she goes through medical school. She's one of the last four or five generations who will be taught medicine the way that we expect to be taught. And it's exactly what you said. As you go in, in 20 years' time and meet the new junior lawyer, sorry, junior doctor, have they actually, have they been trained? Odds are they've been trained to understand what the AI is telling them. Yeah. And you remember Y2K? Yes. And all the long-haired, uh, '70 hippy type came out of retirement 'cause they knew how COBOL worked. They knew what Fortran was. They made sure that thing worked. So my daughter is going to be in exactly that same position- Yes as we get to the next iteration of the medical, um- technology, they'll discover stuff which isn't quite right, and they'll need a human who's been trained to come in and say, "Ah."

Yoyo 55:54

Yeah. "It's

Quentin 55:55

missed this little bit." Maybe, maybe not. But that's the story I tell myself.

Yoyo 55:59

I can't believe you said COBOL then, because at the time, 1999, I was in IT recruitment as one of the early careers I dabbled in, and I was constantly looking for COBOL, CICS and DB2 specialists. Not being quite as a blast to the past. Mm-hmm. Um, look, I've got to ask you about finger vein. All right? Oh, yeah. Um, because we're gonna learn something here. In fact, I learned something just prior to pressing the record button. Quentin, why is finger vein the future of biometrics?

Quentin 56:32

Um, so let me first explain. Finger vein is, uh, w- I'm on the board of a company called, uh, Finger, or has a business called Fingo. Uh, and we are all about identity assurance. Uh, and this is... I think we have to start with identity as the foundational problem in commercial transactions. Yep, absolutely. Every contract, every payment, every access decision res- rests on that one question, "Is this person the person who say, who they say they are?" Yep. And, uh, one of your recent discussions has been with, uh, Paul Donga from NatWest. Mm. And he talked about AI being smarter than companies are ready for, and that applies directly to identity assurance. It's, uh, banks are deploying AI faster, uh, than their authentication infrastructure can support it, and that's exactly the gap that w- we're looking to, um, to fill. And then I think it was in a really recent episode, uh, you were talking to Becky Holmes. Yes. And she was talking about there being a scam for everyone. Mm. And fraud is everywhere because authentication is weak. And I'm saying that's true because most authentication systems are built on things that can be faked. Yeah. So when I call my b- bank up, they do a voice trace They might ask for a password. They may have photo... On my banking app, I have to move because they've worked out that if it's a static image, that can be spoofed. Wow. Clever. So, yeah. Uh, but finger vein re- removes the impersonation opportunity at source. Okay. So it's really important. Uh, and the finger vein is categorically different.

Yoyo 58:22

What is it?

Quentin 58:23

So... What is it? In your finger, you have veins

Yoyo 58:27

running through them. Everyone's, everyone's looking at their finger right now. You know that, don't you? So if you're driving, people, don't do it.

Quentin 58:33

Yeah. Wait, imagine what a finger looks like. Inside there you've got veins, and the veins have hemoglobin running through them. And we have licensed from Hitachi what we call the finger vein authentication engine, and this allows us to uniquely identify you. The key point here is your fingerprint is kind of unique. It isn't, of course. Uh, and, uh, the... There is always room for argument that the fingerprint is not unique. Yeah. The finger vein is much more unique. Let me give you it in s- number terms. Yeah. The risk of a false acceptance rate, which we call a FAR, uh, in, uh, the typical Apple Touch ID is 1 in 50,000. And that sounds pretty good. But if you now see, and it's been, been known for over 20 years, that if I, in a high-res ph- uh, photograph, hold my fingers up and say, "Here," you can actually grab my finger vein from that. Sorry, my fingerprint from that.

Yoyo 59:42

Yeah, that's just come out, hasn't it?

Quentin 59:43

Well, it's come out again, but it was there 2014. I can- Oh, okay if you look on BBC, there it was. It's, it's not new, it's just become relevant, and that's all ab- this is why finger vein is relevant, and that's why I've been there for 10 years, because it's coming to its time now. So, uh, and the other thing is, I'm here happily sipping on my cup of coffee. Happy is the person who trusts the Lord. Someone- paid for it.

Yoyo 1:00:09

Love that mug. So-

Quentin 1:00:12

I,

Yoyo 1:00:12

I've got a F1, lights out and away we go.

Quentin 1:00:16

Nice one.

Yoyo 1:00:17

Very nice. Brilliant.

Quentin 1:00:19

Yeah. So, with that mug, I'm leaving a fingerprint. Yeah. And you as a detective will know that you can peel a fingerprint off- Yeah you can replicate it. So all I'm saying is that it's not that secure. Yeah. Uh, the Apple Face ID, actually quite a lot more secure. Mm. You're probably up to 1 in a million. Combine the two and you get something quite nice. Yeah. Um, the Hitachi finger vein, as a standalone, 1 in 15 million. Wow. The way we deploy it, 1 in

Yoyo 1:00:56

a trillion. Whoa. What is the way- So 10 to minus 12. That's a- So I have to ask you, what, what is the way you're deploying it that turns it from 1 in 15 million to 1 in a trillion?

Quentin 1:01:01

So we can have two factors, uh, and we can do vector controls. So for example, uh, again, uniquely, we can match on cloud, where most, uh, biometrics match on device. So you think about your phone, you hold your phone up, you put your finger on it, and it matches you. But I can't do that on your phone because I'm not registered on your phone. Yeah. If this had the finger vein authentication on it, you could pick up any device, I've identified yourself, and it becomes a dumb client terminal to your device. Yeah? So that's the, uh... And just because I know where you are, gives me a hugely higher level of confidence of that it is you. So you are, live in your hometown, and if I see your finger vein being authenticated in that j- uh, area, great. If it pops up and you're suddenly shopping in Japan- I'm going to ask you And you can also set it so you have two-factor. You can say, "Yep, I'm happy to do this, but I want to ha- get a, a note on my phone saying it's me." So you can double-check it yourself. You also get a complete audit trail on what you're doing, because everything you do belongs to you. Yeah. And we've segregated this, so the way the data is held, nobody owns your, has a, a match of your finger vein. So there is no database to, to raid because it doesn't exist. What we do is we match the pattern. So it's a, it's a different level of challenge for AI to, to chase this, uh, and to... Fingerprint- prints and faces are external characteristics. They can be photographed, they can be replicated, they can be lifted, they can be generated by AI. Finger veins are an internal biological structure. They require a live blood flow. They require a physical presence. It's not something you can emulate. Uh, so we can provide liveness detection, anti-spoofing, resistance photography. We, we are a wall of defense against AI-generated synthetic attacks. Uh, and it's kind of the next paradigm. Uh, and I think I'd say as AI gets better at faking the outside of a person, the inside becomes more important.

Yoyo 1:03:30

Yes, and when quantum computing becomes very relevant, and all of the encryption and decryption sophistication that we've put in place for absolutely everything will be compromisable, because quantum computing will just be able to see through any code, uh, all of a sudden, that internalization of biometric data is gonna become even more significant. Maybe that's the solution, that in the- Yeah way we all get our universal payments, uh, is through our finger vein. Well,

Quentin 1:04:00

interesting you mention that. Quite a lot of interest from people making universal payments around the globe- Yeah uh, because of all the, um, uh, uh, the fraud. Yeah. And- You might ask me, "Quentin, you're the only one out there." And shoe shops s- you know, when there's a need, lots of shoe shops popped up because there was a, a, a market demand, "Are we the only people who've thought of this?" And I'd say, "Absolutely not." And you'll remember the Orb from, uh, Worldcom... Uh, a- a- a- a- a- Worldcoin, sorry. And I'll say that Sam Altman has backed that, and that's a really significant signal. Uh, the Orb scans irises. I'll say that the iris is an external characteristic, and it can be captured optically. Yeah. Though it shares same, some of the same vulnerabilities as facial recognition. Facial recognition, huge anti-privacy or the privacy crew are absolutely against that- Yeah uh, for really good reasons. And the Orb also has a really expensive dedicated piece of hardware, ours is pence by the time you're creating it at volume. Mm-hmm. Uh, and itself gives rise to a really big privacy concern for me, because the iris scans are centralized by a cryptocurrency company in a single repository. And so of course it's attracting scrutiny. We have the internal biology, we have the live blood flow, no central biometric database. Uh, and I think I'm satisfied that Worldcoin proves the demand, Fingo gives the answer that it leaves open. So I'm, you know, I'm, I'm really confident that this is the next big thing. Uh, and I'm wondering, may, may I take you through a use case? 'Cause it- Yes, please do helps explain where we're coming from.

Yoyo 1:06:03

Help us to understand.

Quentin 1:06:04

The, there are loads and loads of, uh- different applications, but there's one which I can talk about because we're not under NDA on this. Yeah. Okay. And it's the cruise ship environment. Okay. Uh, and it's the perfect environment for us because you've got a captive population of several thousand people in a closed environment. Mm-hmm. You've got really high-value press- processing over multiple days, no cash, uh, and, uh, it's international waters so you've got all the jurisdictional complexity of anti-money laundering and financial crime regulation, which we can address. Multiple nationality passengers, and you've got all the, uh, KYC requirements which need to be addressed, and we provide a single closed loop environment. So every passenger is involved, e- enrolled at embarkation, uh, so unlike open retail, there's a natural and uncontested en- enrollment moment. Uh, the cruise ship is an environment where you might rationally attempt to use another passenger's account. The finger vein stops that. You've got a level of certainty that no card or, or wristband solution could ever achieve. Uh, the, uh, uh, Financial Action Task Force and the UK Proceeds of Crime Act require the cruise liner as a financial institution or payment processor to verify the identity, uh, of, of, of the people on board and to monitor their transactions. The, the, the cruise liner is effectively operating as a financial services- business. And we support that compliance obligation right the way through, so it makes the argument to regulators really, really simple. Yeah. Uh, the enrollment at Gateway means you enroll once, and you get a totally frictionless experience as a passenger. Wherever you go on board, you pay with your finger. There's no wristbands, no cards, no pins, nothing to remember. It's a genuinely commercial differentiator. And you can be in your swimming shorts on deck and still buy yourself a glass of wine if that's what you want, because you're carrying your token with you. We've had our, um, payment providers have created a new category for us because we... They used to be payment, uh, person present, payment card, person not present, and now we've got payment card not present, person present. Kind of a different role again. Uh, and we allow access control. So if you are going into somebody's cabin, we can be pretty sure that you're entitled to go in. And if you're not entitled to go in, then we probably won't let you in, but at least we have an audit of where you were. So if something wrong happens, if somebody becomes ill. Uh, we can also, as it happens, it was originally invented as a medical device, so there's a whole load of medical data which can be collected with consent of the individual. All of this is consent-driven. So I have insisted in the way that we build the infrastructure, that the consumer owns their own data. This was before GDPR and the right to be forgotten came up, but that was baked into what we've built. So the consumer can always say, "I don't want my data to be remembered." They also own it, so they could download it and upload it to another environment. It's their data. They can choose how they use it. It's really, really important. Uh, so that's the, uh, the background to this.

Yoyo 1:09:42

That's ticking a lot of boxes. How scalable is it, Quentin, in terms of- Oh- One of the only, uh, restrictions in great, modern, sophisticated technology being deployed is cost, right? And so if the devices, for example, that have to go on all the doors are, like, super expensive, it just rules it out. Yeah. The, the essence is gonna be making the, the end points affordable so that it can be mass- massly distributed.

Quentin 1:10:12

So that's one of the great things here. The, uh- Uh, device cost can be extremely low. Uh, and at sufficient volumes, we are talking a very few dollars, if that. Uh, and in the context of these businesses, that's totally affordable. Yeah. Uh, it's, you know, certainly it's cheaper than, uh, the card, putting your card in, so you may need to retrofit or to new-fit as you go- Yeah but it's, it, the, the device cost is, is not a killer. Um, the amount of data we actually need to trans- to pass between device and cloud is very small, so the overhead for the, um, the processing is, is low, and the cost of communication is low. Uh, and scalability, how big a back end do you want to stick on it?

Yoyo 1:11:07

I, I just, you know, I, I think it's got a great deal of scope, um, to be honest with you, especially, especially for airports, you know- Yeah where you've got mass transition of people moving through f- air, flights, you know- Totally you know, it, it, banking, I think it's got. Quentin, I have to say, I should imagine some people will probably reach out to you to find out more. We only bring the very best guests onto the Security Circle podcast, more than thought leadership, the future of biometrics. Quentin Salt, thank you so much for joining us on the Security Circle podcast.

Quentin 1:11:39

My great pleasure. Thank you. It's been fun.