TOPGUN Pilot to Renowned High School Teacher

Ray Schenk : The ultimate story of a Top Gun pilot turned high school teacher, whose classes all have waiting lists to get into.  Ray’s approach to modern day education, finding and developing leaders for the next generation and his keen sense of using AI & Robotics in the classroom have all landed him on Episode 52 of The 🎙️ Interesting Humans Podcast. He has a proven approach to consistently raising the bar for students so they can tap into their fullest learning potentials.  He is unique and very interesting. Here are some of the discussion points you will learn about in this episode: 

🖥️ Girl coders - What’s causing the spike, why girls are so effective at coding  

0️⃣ Zero Trust approach to cybersecurity

✈️ E2C Hawkeye Pilot

🚀 Top Gun & Top Dome school 

⚔️ Advanced warfare school 

🚨Enhanced interrogation techniques (His experience and training with different methods)

⚙️Quantum Resistance Model (cryptographic algorithms that can withstand attacks from quantum computers)

Microsoft featured his school as one of the top schools in America using AI and large learning models in his classrooms. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Episode 45, folks. I have Ray Shank. Thank you so much for being here. First off. My pleasure. Our mutual friend, Jack, connected us. And I'm so glad he did because the way he said it, he was spot on. I got a super interesting guy. Top gun, government, clearance. So for all the folks out there who love this topic, which is pretty much most people... We're all in for a treat, me included today. Me included. Because what you've done, I just want to go through a handful of major themes that we're going to talk about today. So first is going to be Top Gun. We're going to get into advanced warfare school. What is it? What does it mean? Top Dome, you mentioned. How does that compare to the movie? I love some of your stories, and I can't wait to hear them again about the movie. Second is... E2C Hawkeye pilot. What is that? What are those cool planes do? Because you've been in many, many, many wars, like you said, many deployments. You'll give us a briefing on that. Enhanced interrogation techniques. And I'll just tell everybody out there waiting here when we get into this. This is awesome. You've been exposed to some really cool stuff. Quantum resistance. Quantum resistance. I mean, when I hear that word, I can think about what it is, right? But, oh my gosh. You're going to unpack this and it is incredible. Zero trust. Your theory on that's fascinating. So we'll get into that. And then lastly, I'm intrigued by this girl coder thing that you mentioned. So I want you to tell the Microsoft story and why we're seeing this big spike in female coders. And I think it's fascinating. So let's get right into it. Top gun, top dome. What is it? What does it mean? What's the school like? Why were you there? What were you doing? Tell me all of it.

SPEAKER_00: 2:04

All right. So in the Navy, if you are a career aviator, you're going to go through your aircraft's advanced weapons school. Now, if you're a helicopter pilot, maybe not. But if you're in anything that's carrier-based, you're going to go through an advanced weapons school. So what you see in the movies is not reality. It is very heavily staged. But there are obviously, it started out with Tomcats, and then now it's all Hornets. Because the carrier deck is basically Hawkeyes, Hornets, and Helos. And the E2C is our... Advanced Airborne Early Warning. So we are a radar platform. If you think of the Air Force's AWAC, we just don't have the living room to walk around in in the back. We've got three poor guys in a snake tube. Yeah, that's cool. But it's an$80 million. Well, it was$80 million for the E2Cs that I flew. It's a handmade$80 million network, flying network. It's got radar. We use it to see over the horizon. We are always typically the first... aircraft off the bow and the last one to come aboard except for the SAR Hilo at night. On a deployment, you're talking. On a deployment. Okay. Or in any kind of a combat scenario. Got it. We are always in the sky. When we did Bosnia ops, we were very, very, very tired because there had to be a Hawkeye in rotation and there's only four on an aircraft carrier. We had to be in rotation all the time. Only four. And it gets, you know, you get to some of the nerves are getting a little frayed by week two. yeah um and they program in rest cycles and things like that they're very safe about it but it still gets you after a while it gets really old

SPEAKER_01: 3:53

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 3:54

um But it's an incredibly important mission. The day after 9-11, I was the senior pilot and the maintenance officer for the replacement air group, or the RAG as we call it, in Norfolk. And on 9-11, we had 11 sailors who had family in, on, or under the towers. And the next day, it took me three and a half hours to get through the gate because of all the heightened security. And I got to the squadron, and I had left early knowing it was going to be a zoo getting through the gate because nobody knew how to react to it. Right. So... I finally got into the squadron about 8 o'clock and my commanding officer, who was one of our naval flight officers, not a pilot, came up to me and he's like, hey, senior pilot, guess what? I'm like, yes, sir. He goes, 603 needs a functional check flight. I said, well, I'm supposed to tell you that. He goes, yeah, I've been here most of the night. He goes, you're going flying. I'm like, Skipper, nothing's flying. He's like, wrong. NORAD called and I dimed you out. don't screw it up. No way. Okay. And what they were looking at doing is they didn't know if these things were going to keep happening. Yeah. So they're getting ready to deploy Hawkeyes all around the country. And so it was the loudest and quietest flight I've ever done because there was nothing in the sky. Nothing at all. Nothing. And when we came around to land after we finished the function, and normally when you do an FCF flight like that, because you might auger in because it's a check flight for the equipment, they put you over a farm somewhere or over the water, right? And I said to the controller, I'm like, hey, do you mind if we just stay here? He's like, dude, you're my, this is a radio call. Dude, you're my only track anywhere. You can do whatever you want. Just be predictable and let me know. I'm like, got it. We're going to stay here. Only Mark. Yeah, we're in, right? He said, now, there is some F-16s north of you, and they got really itchy trigger fingers. I'm like, oh, we're already talking to those boys. Yeah, we're announcing ourselves early. And so it was kind of weird. So we came into land, and I told my co-pilot, I said, when we get to the altitude of the planes at the tower, all I want to hear out of you is the word Mark. So we got clear to land, and we were in the approach pattern. You're about at the 35th. rolling into final yeah and he's like mark and we looked out and we were like yep we agree they knew what was coming everybody on those planes gosh so um our our ceo secretary was like 20 21 years old her mom her cousin and her sister all worked in the towers it took her three and a half days to find out that her mom had called in sick her sister was on vacation they never found her cousin So that's the kind of thing that was really close to home in Norfolk. And so it was pretty rough for several weeks. And as pilots, we were second-guessing everything. It was pretty rough. Did you feel like maybe the radars are wrong and there could be another plane up there somehow? What did it feel like? So no one knew. The intelligence was working as fast as it could. We began to realize that it was a staged thing in that there was a limit to what they were doing. And then the only thing I can tell you is when we then went aggressive and I was on deployment as we were launching attacks, the flight deck was electric because we knew we were going in to take care of matters, take care of business for the American people. And you could have cut... The tension with the knife, but everything worked flawlessly when we went aggressive. Yeah. When we went active. So on that flight, you knew that you were the only one going up or you were one of a couple. Yeah. We knew there was like a nervous. No. What did you feel? Well, it was, we want to, as Hawkeye folks, we want to know what's going on. So for us, it was like, I want to get in the air. I want that radar fired up. I want the dome spinning the minute we get gear up. Let's go. And we could tell that there was nothing. We knew there was a helicopter around New York City. There was probably an emergency life flight type of thing based on where they were flying. And we had enough radio comms because nothing was flying. Normally, a radar system can kind of saturate when there's all the traffic. There's nothing to see. I mean, the radar was working better than probably ever did because there's no returns. I mean, it was amazing. So it was a very difficult time because we had so many folks that knew people in New York. But the other side of that is our country was never more unified. And it shouldn't take a tragedy to have unity like that. So at that time,

SPEAKER_01: 9:01

you're in the military. How long? What did all that look like?

SPEAKER_00: 9:05

So I joined on Halloween of 86, an ironic day. And I was sent to Pensacola, and I immediately had a Marine Corps pilot, or excuse me, drill instructor chasing me around. I don't know if you've seen the movie Officer and a Gentleman. No. It's an old Richard Gere, Deborah Winger movie That's how I got my commission because I already had my degree when I went in. And so officer and gentleman. But that was before the military worked with Hollywood. Yeah. So they staged that in Seattle, but it's actually Pensacola. Oh, really? And ironically, I got there and we were we were stashed. We were waiting to start for a couple of weeks. Yeah. So they just, you know. give you this crappy uniform to wear and they make you clean out storage lockers while you're waiting. And I found we were cleaning out all these old green World War II fatigues, they make you wear. And there were three different sizes with the name Mayo, M-A-Y-O, stenciled in, which was the character of the guy in

SPEAKER_01: 10:07

the

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

movie, Richard Gere. And so three guys had come in with the last name Mayo and not made it because this was DOR, drop on request, uniform. Right, right. And so we... Marine drill instructors guy shows up Mayo based on that movie. They're going after that poor kid, you know, so lie about your last name. If your name's Mayo and you go into AOCs now because of Brad, it's all moved up to new England and it's a lot squishier than it used to be. Did you know you wanted to fly? I had no, if you had asked me in high school, are you going to be a carrier pilot and a landing signals officer? I don't know. Like, uh, what? Yeah. And no clue. No clue. But when they offered it to me, I'm like, okay, I'm doing this. Did you know you wanted to go in the military? No. Believe it or not, I was working for a computer company in Corning, New York at the time. And I drove by a billboard every day of a nuclear attack submarine breaching the water. And it said, take the subway to work.

SPEAKER_01: 11:07

And

SPEAKER_00: 11:08

I was so intrigued. And it was Reagan that I walked in one day at lunch because I was bored. I'm like, what could the Navy do? What could you guys do for me? And they're like, well, what did you study in college? I'm like, well, math and computer science. They just about grabbed me by the throat. They wanted me to be a nuclear engineering officer, but the mistake they made was they flew me in a T-34 Bravo all the way to the Syracuse ORD, the And I walked in and said, hey, I want the aviation exam. And I scored high enough on that that I could be a blind pilot, which means I didn't have to have 2020. It would have limited the aircraft I flew, but I had that kind of a score. So, you know, 21 years later, I had seven months of my life at the controls of airplanes. Incredible. Now,

SPEAKER_01: 12:00

so you walked in today with a bomber jacket that's not just a normal bomber jacket, or at least what I would... eyeball it as. You have a lot of patches.

SPEAKER_00: 12:09

Yes.

SPEAKER_01: 12:10

And I doubt that you bought patches and just put them on that mean nothing. No. So everyone has to mean something.

SPEAKER_00: 12:16

Yes. It's kind of like tattoos. It's incredible. They all have a story. Well, every squadron you're in, you have a patch. Every aircraft you're in, you have a patch. Okay. When you become a centurion in an aircraft, you get a patch. Yeah. I never got my mock patch when I was in an F-16. Got the 1.4 mock. But I've got my Sears school patch which is fake prison camp I've got what is that so seer school is survival evasion resistance and escape and what they put you through is everything including enhanced interrogation techniques and I can't really get into a lot of that but I can tell you that it is not torture because they've done it to every pilot since Vietnam you had it done to you oh yeah it trains you to be a prisoner of war and it is critical training it trains you to try to escape And it is highly monitored. But I'm telling you, I would have given up my grandmother for jaywalking to make it stop. But I was not even close to being injured. Scared the crap out of me. But I was never close to being injured. Like real quick? Or did you have to have a little time under it until you were ready to give up? Well, they have different ways they do things to you or with you, we'll say. And they all are not fun. But you are not harmed. You are not harmed.

SPEAKER_01: 13:36

That's important.

SPEAKER_00: 13:37

It's like the best way to understand it is, first of all, ignore all media because it's all crap. But basically, it's kind of like simulating things. And so it's not real. It's not going to hurt you. So they wanted you to know what it was like in case you were captured? Yes. And how to be prepared for it and how to react.

SPEAKER_01: 13:59

And how to escape it.

SPEAKER_00: 14:00

Yes. That's incredible. When you're debriefed, you're told kind of what you are. And they have little nicknames like, I got done and the person that did my soft sell, I was in a room and there were a lot of photos of Stalin and all that. You play the game. I was pretty good at BSing her. And there's a book that is called The Lineal List, which is all of the officers in the military. And the lower your number, the higher your rank. So I'm still like a JG, right? I mean, I was just coming right out of the rag. So I'm saluting parked cars. And I was on my way to fly Greyhounds in Sicily, my first tour. So this was literally the ugly... dog do out of Hong Kong part of Top Gun from the movie. Oh, yeah, the movie, yeah. You know, I mean, like, we tell our pilots if they screw up this much, they're going to fly Tomcats out of Oceania, right? The reverse sarcasm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she's talking to me. She's like, well, we know you were a nuclear submarine officer. And I'm like, no, I'm a pilot. Yeah. Oh, no, no, you're lying. And I'm like, look... And I said that joke. I said, we tell our, you know, they're going to go fly Tomcats. I'm literally flying logistics and passengers out to the carrier. And so I just, one of the people that interrogates you is the one that debriefs you. So she pulls it up and she's like, okay, first of all, you're a John Wayne. I'm like, what? What? What? I'm a cowboy? What? She's like, well, that means basically that you will probably successfully lead an escape if you don't get shot first. And here's the four points where you probably would have got shot.

SPEAKER_01: 15:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 15:50

Oh, that's good to know. Yeah. Right? She's like, we want you to be more of a John Wayne, but you kind of like almost took out a guard. So you got to watch this. I'm like, okay. Was I really going to take out a guard? Oh, yeah, you were going to take out a guard. I don't actually remember that because you're running through the wood. I mean, it's the real thing, right? The real thing, right. So anyway, I got done. She's like, now, oh, wait, I remember you. I have to ask you this. Why did you keep telling me the lineal book was wrong? I'm like, because it's wrong. She's like, wait, what? I'm like, the book's wrong. And now I'm in my uniform, so I'm like pointing to my wings. I'm a pilot. She's like, oh, I'm sorry. I'm like, it's all right. She's like, no, I'm sorry for what's going to happen to you now. I'm like, I want to get on the bus with my friends. Oh, no. They pull in chairs and little folding tables. And all of a sudden, I am part of a psych review board because they have never at that point had anyone For which the book was wrong. No way. I was the first actual mistake in the book. And they had to study because they're like, so you were telling the truth while you were lying. I'm like, that's the best way to lie. And they're like, oh, that's a good point. Write that down. Right? And I was there 40 minutes. Now, everyone on the bus is mad at me.

SPEAKER_01: 17:16

Sure.

SPEAKER_00: 17:16

Right? And I got drop foot, which is where you can't lift your ankle or your foot like this because of all the... Positions they had me in. And so I'm like hobbling out to the bus. I'm like, can I have my little milk thing and my little piece of sponge cake because I haven't eaten in three days. And so it was just, I couldn't wait to get out of there. I think I slept for two days after that. It was miserable. But it was probably the best training I've ever had. And I don't ever want to do it again. No, one and done. Yep. Oh my gosh. But you really do learn about what you can take. And it's much better that they call me a John Wayne than they're like, oh, you'd have folded like a house of cards. You're worthless. Right. What do you think the average person, do you think like when you feel you're maxed out in life and you can't take anymore, are you halfway there? One of the things I learned from my drill instructor, of all people, who was a Marine who was a really good drill instructor. He was very fair. He was very even-headed. He beat the crap out of us. Not physically. He just wore us to the ground. He wore you down, yeah. Is... to when you can't do another push-up. What they're looking for is that you're still pushing against the earth trying. They want you to keep going. Because in combat, if you keep going, you have a much higher chance of surviving. You just can't quit. And when you see stories of heroics, a lot of these guys would come back and they're like, I just didn't stop. Right. It's not we're not trying to die. We're not trying to take unnecessary risk. Right. We're just not going to quit. So that

SPEAKER_01: 18:52

was a drill sergeant that told you that.

SPEAKER_00: 18:53

Yeah, that was a staff sergeant. I just blanked his name. Snow. Snow. Staff Sergeant Snow. He made gunny right after that. And I got stories about that. One of my roommates who was very scared of him when we were in AOCS, after we graduated, our drill instructor went back to the Marine Corps and he was a Harrier mechanic. And he happened to be on a cross country eating at the mess hall where now Gunnery Sergeant Snow was having lunch. And he goes, dude, I felt the green fog. And I looked over, and he was giving me the DI stare because he recognized me. And I flinched. And he laughed and came over and shook my hand. It was really cool. He's like, gotcha, sir. Oh, that's great. So he was really mad at himself for flinching. But I'm like, they scared us to death. But we didn't know what we were doing. And we came out. And whoever gives you your first salute, you give them a silver dollar. So these guys made$85. Oh. in silver dollars in one day. So it was a nice little tip. That's incredible. How old are you at this point? I think I was 21. Okay. Are you seeing a future in the military at this point? Or are you like, I'm just doing a certain kind of thing? I joined for two things. I knew enough going in because unlike academy guys, I had been working in industry. I said, there's two things. I want to be in command of something. Okay. And I want to make at least 05. Because the way the cut is, you can almost fog a mirror and make 0.4. 0.5 is the cut. Above 0.5, it's kind of political and it's based on the job. And, you know, 0.6 has kind of come in two flavors. They're either really good or they didn't know when to get out. Interesting. Especially in aviation. Yeah, yeah. uh for me i i wanted to hit 05 and i wanted to be one of what i call the last of the mohicans in that i stayed in the cockpit all 21 years and they never sent me to a yeah i did it it was very by the time i hit 05 it was getting harder but i was able to worm my way into uh basically what was my command and my post command tour. And it was, it worked and I got to stay in the cockpit all 21 years. So tell me about a close call. Uh, I could do a Ted talk on my cockpit fire off Alexandria, Egypt. In my first tour, we were on an 18 hour extended day. Okay. We had flown from Sigonella to Sudabay Crete to, uh, Alexandria, Egypt, uh, to Riyadh, and then from Riyadh to Fujairah. We made it back to Hurghada, Egypt, and we were off, we were feet wet going north on just past Alexandria, Egypt at 22,000 feet at two in the morning on a Saturday. We had no radio comms with anyone on the planet. And I was setting max range on the throttles. We were headed to Souda Bay, Crete again. And they wanted the plane. They needed the plane back because these were combat missions for the first Gulf War. Yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 22:11

yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 22:12

And we're on waivers. We're tired. We had been carrying some sort of a missile launch system. So we had all these cargo stanchions in the back of the plane that were loose and they were trying to get organized. We had a crew chief and a plane captain in the back. Yeah. And my crew chief was bored. So he's on the ICS going, Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray, Ray, do an aileron roll. And I'm like, eh, Upchurch. And all of a sudden, my cockpit started shooting flames out of the overhead. What? And my reaction was, ah! My car probably went, ah! Right? Sure it was. I'm like, Upchurch, we're on fire. Get up here. He's like, yeah, right. I'm like, we're on fire. Get up here now. What? Right? And so the emergency procedures for an electrical fire are left and right generator switches off, right? Okay. I... Kind of don't remember doing it. It happened so fast. It was a spinal response, which is why we drill them as much as we do. We blew all the circuit breakers in the overhead, most of the MEDB, which is the circuit breaker right by the door when you walk in. And the cockpit's completely black. I see stars. Fortunately, it was a clear night. I didn't know if my engines were still running at first. So I'm like, okay, you turn on your survival flashlight. Cause we had no power to anything. Okay. Survival flashlight on the standby gyro, which is a gyro. So it's got nine minutes.

SPEAKER_01: 23:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 23:41

And I'm like moving the power levers and they were analog gauges. So if it had been a glass cockpit, we'd have been hurting, but I could, you could feel the torque on the, on the fans. And we're like, okay, okay. So we've got motors. We're flying because what we teach is pilots is aviate, navigate, communicate, fly the plane. Okay. Right? Yeah. Don't fly into a mountain, then start talking. So I knew I was flying, and I didn't want to go back to Alexandria, Egypt, because you can imagine that they didn't really have the kind of emergency services that we would have in the U.S. And Souda Bay Crete is a joint base that has people that speak my language, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm like, there's a call you make before May Day, and it's pan, pan, pan, which means if somebody doesn't help me, the next thing you're going to hear out of me is May Day, May Day. And we tried every frequency, every guard, couldn't get anybody. So I'm on guard, and I'm like, pan, pan, pan, brats. Bradshaw24, we have a cockpit fire off Alexandria, Egypt, feet wet, heading north to Souda Bay. Can anyone hear me? And like they are standing next to me in a room, I hear, Bradshaw24, how can we help? And that's who? We're like, you know. So we're looking out our windows going, uh... You see anybody? Did somebody join on us? What's going on? Right. And I'm like, so I keyed the mic, just human reaction. Cause my plane's burning down around me. I'm like, who is this? Right. Nevermind. How can we help? Never mind? Did he say never mind? Okay. Well, we're at Greyhound. We're trying to get the whole thing, four souls on board. I got four hours of fluid. Here's what I got. Okay, I'm not taking radar control of you, but your steer for Suda Bay is this. We will flight follow you in. Give me your duty office number. Okay, now I know it's American military. Okay, all right, duty office number. They call my duty office... and called Souda Bay Crete. And in Europe, if you declare an emergency, the entire airfield shuts down until you arrive. I'm two hours away. I'm two hours away, and they shut down. So then they come back and say, hey, Souda Bay would like to know if they can reopen until you get there. I'm like, of course. Now I'm 90 minutes out. We're pedaling fast, but yeah. So we fought the fire, fought the fire. We got it out, and then my crew chief Pushed another circuit breaker and it lit off again. I'm like, and I reached back with my finger and I didn't know. He told me later I was rubbing his nose with the tip of my finger. I'm like, stop. Right. No way. Oh, sorry. He pulled it back out because there's procedures where you try to get back what you can. Yeah. So we got back to where we had some emergency lighting. Yeah. I was midnight, which means it's a potential for a midair because none of my exterior lights work. None of them. And I didn't know when I dropped the gear. Now, we have emergency gear swing procedures. Yeah. But I didn't know if I was going to get three lights in my gear to even know if I could have three down and lock to land. Oh, my gosh. So... Then you've got the languages issues with the Greek controllers as you're coming in. Yep. And you cannot fly VFR at night in Ikeo, in Europe. What's VFR? VFR is visual flight rules. I can't just say, I see the airport, I'm coming. You have to fly to the attack ends. So I'm like, I'd like to go VFR to Suda Bay and set up for a base leg, blah, blah, because we can see the island now.

SPEAKER_01: 27:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:14

Well, no, you must not. You must go Satia. Okay, fine. We're going Satia. I went straight anyway. I'm like, what are you going to do? Right.

SPEAKER_01: 27:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 27:21

So... We set up, and I'm like, okay, I want the arresting gear rigged, right, because they have field arresting gear. I want the gear rigged, and I may want foam, but I don't know yet. Oh, you want us to foam the runway. Give me an American controller, please. America's like, sir, what do you need? I said, I need you to be ready for anything because I don't know if my gear is going to drop and lock. We're going to try. We've got emergency backups. I am no flaps, so I'm coming in hot. No flaps. No flaps because the emergency for the hydraulic flaps is electrical. So I got no flaps. So I'm landing hot. We're coming in much faster than I'm supposed to. And so I want... the hook and everything. Yeah. Right. So I'm like, okay, we go through the checklist, go through the approach, go through the lane checks. Here we go. Drop the gear. I got like 10 seconds of three down and locked and it held. I'm like, okay, we got three down and locked. My hook is up. is the long field in battery. Because you have an arresting cable on the approach end and on the far end. And you can pull it either way. They're like, both gear are up in battery. We checked them. What's your weight? 49, right? So we had that ready. And I just set this really soft flare. And here's the problem. As I'm touching down, there are two fire trucks on the other end of the runway coming at me. Why? Because they were stupid. And I'm like, uh, tower, I'm not done crashing yet. Could you please get those trucks off the runway? And all of a sudden they part and go off in the grass. I'm like, dear Lord, what is it right over there? How fast are you? I mean, you're going, I'm doing about a, so I was doing about 120 knots on touchdown. So probably 135 miles an hour. So I, we stopped in the middle of the runway and I set the parking brake and we, you know, blew the hatch open. And basically I'm like, they can have this airplane. I grabbed both emergency handles, which is the procedure and pulled them. So hard shutdown. Yeah. We grab our stuff. I'm like, this plane is so bad. So we get, we open the door, the main hatch. Right. And there's a guy in the space suit fire thing, the silver thing with the big hood and everything. Yeah. Yeah. And he's looking at me like, we told you guys were going to be on fire. And you can see that they are clearly disappointed that we're not all crispy critters and they get to shoot their hoses at us. And so he opens his hood. It's like, and his face. I'm like, Hey, you can have it. We're done. Right. And I walk out and my co-pilot's just like, he's just a puddle at this point. He's like, I'm so tired. I'm like, just relax and put the plane to bed. Right. Right. So I walk around on my crew. She's like, sir, you need to come to the back of the airplane. I'm like, dude, Why? I want to go, I want to go sleep. Right. You got to come to the back of the airplane because the, the plane captain we had was a kid who was a marginal qual. We, we let him try, you know, we didn't think he was going to be very good. Yeah. He's like, you have to see the back of this aircraft. So I went back and over 110 cargo stanchions with, we have these, you know, like the tie downs you use in a truck. Yeah. We have industrial ones that'll hold 10,000 pounds. He said, this kid, no one will ever, Doubt this kid's qualification. When we caught fire and I ran forward, he had the entire back end of this aircraft rigged for ditching in 90 seconds. And he said, it's going to take a lever. He goes, I can't loosen his straps. He was so adrenaline pumped. I got to get a pry bar to get him off. This kid is... And I looked at him and went, you do this? He goes... Yes, sir. I thought we might go in. I'm like, that's a good call because we might have gone in. We might have gone in. And I said, but you could have put a, you could have launched a grenade back there and nothing would have, you know, to blown a hole in the airplane, but nothing would have moved. Yeah. I mean, it was, I was like the guy, I got him an avian achievement medal for it because it was, we'd never seen that. Oh yeah. It was, the kid was great. So we, we went up, went to, so, so now we all finally crashed. They gave us a room and everything. Yeah. Yeah. The next morning, the skipper's like, Hey, I need that plane back.

SPEAKER_01: 31:30

Come

SPEAKER_00: 31:32

on. Skipper? What? Fortunately, my crew chief was an electrician. We go up and we drop the panel down. There are four major wire bundles that have about 150 wires in each of them. They're major wire bundles. There were three individual wires that we needed to keep flying. Those were the only three wires left. All the other wire bundles had burned all the way through. And it was because they had rewired the aircraft with what's called Kapton wiring, which the airlines use because it's lighter and it's the insulation around the wire. But in a vibration and slamming into carriers, they crack and get brittle. And oh, by the way, they tell us later, if you breathe in the smoke of burning Kapton wire, your heart stops in 15 seconds irreparably. So it's a good thing we have procedures to put on oxygen, right? They since took all the planes through SIDLM and rewired them all and stopped. So... This is crazy. Petty Officer Upchurch had to rewire an entire Greyhound in a day. And I had to get a waiver to keep in mind, this is combat operations, right? Yeah. I had to get a waiver to do the functional check flight on the way home because it's two hours. And by the time we got the FCF, we were actually technically closer to home. Yeah. So we did an FCF in route. and we got it on that night and it was but oh so in the morning while we're waiting for him to rewire an entire Greyhound I'm standing there and there was a guy who at the time I was a lieutenant an 05 what I retired as is here up so yeah and he comes downstairs and he is screaming I want that crew right now this is a major international and we're like what's he talking about right well out of nowhere he lands an E3 AWACS. Right? And a guy like me, one of their lieutenants, walks in. Because you don't just land in Greece without diplomatic clearance and prior permission. Right? You don't do it. They did. And this lieutenant walks right up to the guy and he's about ready to rip this kid's head off. And the guy's like, Sir, with all due respect, call this phone number. Do it now. I'm saving you. What? Give it here. And he picks up the phone. This is coming. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. I understand. Click. Go away. Right? Go away. And what it was, so then I put it together. This is what I put together. There was an AWAC flying up and down off the coast of Libya or somewhere down there that picked us up because seat 11 is the emergency... guy. He handles all air inflated. So he saw a squawking and like, I got to help these guys. And, but they were on some sort of a mission that you don't talk about. And so I walked up to the guy and I said, Hey, I think I know about where you were. He's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. I said, well, tell seat 11. I'm Bradshaw two, four. Thanks for this deer. He goes, I have no idea what you're talking about. What? And so from then on, I was nice to AWAC guys because they helped keep me out of the water. Who was on the other end of that call? If you had a guess. If my guess was a four-star or somebody with enough juice to tell that 05 to get bent and leave him alone, that the situation with Greece had already been handled. The right people knew, but it was clearly some sort of a black op that they were doing. Yeah. And so, you know, I never found out what the op was, but you can't hide in AWAC. Yeah. You know what I mean? Right. This is like when we were flying in the Red Sea, the ship would play these little, they call it MCON, where we're in a hide and you got to go to a different point. You can't talk on the radios. And they never gave us the position. We're coming off the beach. And we had a Bendix Weather Radar. that any aircraft could buy that could fit it in the nose of the airplane. And we would tilt it down and set the gain, and we could see all the ships from like 200 miles. I'm like, that's all right. I have your radar contact. Gosh, that's so cool. And I landed on the carrier, and they're like, report to Air Ops. And I went down there. It's another O5. What do you mean you have this radar contact? I'm like, I had your radar contact with a weather radar. You're not hiding from anybody. You're a big aircraft carrier. I knew your BRC from my weather radar. What? What? And I'm like, I'm betting you have equipment that could have told what my sight number was if you'd really listened. Right? He did not like me. Incredible. Is the technology, does it exist where a plane can vanish? I guess like the stealth is undetected. Is that real? I can't get into a lot of it, but stealth is against particular types of radar. You know what I mean? Okay. But if you're flying a big enough chunk of metal, somebody's going to see you somewhere. It depends on how they're coming at you. You're never going to purely vanish. Got it. It's just not going to happen. We're good at it. It's a huge piece of metal. It's a great point. But it's a large piece of metal. Now the new materials they use, it all helps, right? Yeah. And it gets better every year. And it's always going to be radar gun versus radar detector, literally. You know, metal in the sky, detectors. But yeah, it's... It's wild. Are all detectors created equal? Does each of these countries have the same technology? Are we ahead? Who's ahead? That's a good question. I've been out for a while, so I can't really tell you. What was it like back then? We were pretty good. We were pretty good. There's always things that you watch to make sure that they're not getting ahead. Reagan's genius was he just outspent them to where the Soviet Union had to fake it. You know, his genius was he just started an arms race they couldn't keep up with because socialism and communism has never worked. You know? Yeah. We just like to pretend it can work magically. Well, if you do it this way, right. There's still crazy somewhere else. We're all full up here. Yeah. It's still a square peg in a

SPEAKER_01: 37:50

round hole. Okay. That's cool. Oh my gosh. That is incredible. I had goosebumps the whole time you were telling that story because I didn't know how it was going to end. Oh yeah. You smoked like it was on fire.

SPEAKER_00: 38:01

We were on our, my cockpit was on fire. on the inside. The end to this story is years later, I was going from Hawkeyes back into Greyhounds. And I can't remember what I was doing, but we were in Norfolk at the outlying field in Fentress, and we were doing FCOPs. And I swapped into this really old Greyhound, and I'm like, man, this thing is old. And I looked back later after I retired, and it was great. Bradshaw 24. It was, you know. Don't even tell me. And they had rewired it and put it back in the fleet and it went through Sidlum and it was one of the straightest flying airplanes I had been in because it was old, but she flew like a glove. Wow. And I mean, it was just, but I didn't know at the time or I had really flipped out because I'm like, oh my word, is this thing going to catch fire? But later, and that's the closest I've ever come to going viral because I did that story on... my LinkedIn page. Yeah. And I got like 860 views in a couple weeks. It was like, now I was like, who cares? And I had some other Greyhound pilots from around the world tell me, oh man, I had one in Germany and it just about melted down around me. So they got rid of the Kapton wiring real fast.

SPEAKER_01: 39:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 39:23

But yeah, it was definitely a bad hazard.

SPEAKER_01: 39:27

So you made it, then you made it through 21 years. I'm sure you have tons and tons and tons of stories. So 21

SPEAKER_00: 39:33

years, you flew all the way. Then what happened in year 21? I retired. As they were literally setting up the hanger for my retirement ceremony, I got a call from the Pentagon. Hey, we'd like to know if you would not retire and come around and run the Greyhound desk at the Pentagon. I'm like, dude, they're setting up the flagging for my retirement ceremony. I know it's my job to ask. I'm like, you think I want to go be a beltway bandit to run your class desk for grant? What are you kidding me? No. Can you make them die fops order so I can keep flying? No. Okay. Bye. That is so Washington DC. Oh yeah. That is so Washington. I know he didn't want to call me, but he had to. And I'm like, uh, nice try. So that call came out of the Pentagon to you. Your

SPEAKER_01: 40:24

retirement was where?

SPEAKER_00: 40:25

I retired out of China Lake, California. Okay. California. Yeah, because I was the air boss there. Yeah. And I owned all the airspace. They did Top Gun in. The new Top Gun. Yeah. I've flown those routes. It's not scary. It's cool. You did? We used to fly at 100 feet at 400 or 500 miles an hour pretending we were a missile. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I even got two hours of cross training in a Huey, a two-bladed Huey like in Vietnam. Oh, my gosh. And I was flying with the helicopter aircraft commander because obviously– Yeah. I had never flown a helicopter. Yeah. But in a Hawkeye, we use rudder just like helicopter guys. Okay. Different uses. But after about four laps around the pattern, I was starting to get the hang of it.

SPEAKER_01: 41:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 41:05

And he looks at me and he's a junior officer. And he's looking at me. He's like, sir, you're really making me mad. I'm like, why? He goes, you're supposed to scare us. So I have to take the controls from you and feel good about the fact that I'm a helo pilot. I'm like, there's nothing wrong with being a helo pilot. I know a bunch of great. He goes, yeah, but you're learning. I'm like, oh, sorry, you want me to screw up? And the crew chief's like, no, no, don't screw up. So we were coming back and this kid was great. And we're coming back and I set up for the jet out. I'm coming back at 5,000 feet like we did in the T-39. He's like, sir, we're really scared up this high. Can you go down? Oh, you want to go treetop? Yes, we're helicopters. Oh, yeah, sorry. And then now I'm having fun watching everything because I'm at 500 feet or not even in a helicopter. And I'm like, oh, this is low. He goes, we won't go over this particular mountain in California because there's a lot of illegal substances and they'll shoot at us. I'm like, ooh. Do they know about that? They're like, yeah, it's got to know. Yeah, they'd go out. There are meth labs in the deserts of California. So there's all kinds of things you got to look for. We used to do a low level over the Charles Manson Ranch. There was up in the north, there was like a nudist colony that we'd thump every now and then because it's right on the edge of the mountain. Yeah. Geez. A bunch of old dudes walking around thinking they were cool. Yeah. But it's just, yeah, California. California's kind of interesting at points. Not bad. Fun flying.

SPEAKER_01: 42:30

Did you ever support any presidential stuff?

SPEAKER_00: 42:33

In Hawkeyes, yes. Most of it was clearing airspace ahead of routes or shuttle launches. We would go up and clear airspace for shuttle launches because you didn't want someone accidentally piercing that And a lot of that came after the Challenger. They said, just in case that ever were to happen again, we need to make sure that nothing falls on the civilian aircraft or whatever. Right. It gets a little dark when you start having those conversations, but you have to have them. You have to. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Did you have something in mind? So you're going in, you're at retirement. Do you know what you were doing next? So I was on a joint multinational exercise course. on the steering committee called the Empire Challenge. And they were trying to figure out joint coalition differential sharing, which is a nerd way of saying, we've got this information. We have all our American stovepipes, confidential, secret, top secret, black ops kind of thing. Clearances, stovepipes, clearances? Yeah. We call them stovepipes because you can't move things from one pipe to the other, right? If it's secret, it can't go on an unclassed net. If it's unclassed, it can't go on a top secret net. Got it. Makes perfect sense. These things go back to the black ink in World War II. I mean, some of this stuff is like decades old. And they couldn't figure it out. Now, because of my strange career path, my command was San Nicolas Island, the outermost Channel Island. That was kind of our Area 51. I was in on some sight-sensitive things, and I worked with the Japanese Defense Force, the Israeli Defense Force. We did a lot of cool stuff. And I was on Jack Hanna's Animal Adventure in 2004 because we had like 500 endangered species and fauna on the island. I'm part of the archaeological record of dig out there because I learned how to sort dreck when I was bored on the weekend if I was out there. And so a lot of fun. And I... the environmental staff gave my oldest son a project to work and he won the California science fair. Cause he proved that the Nicolino Indians actually knew what they were doing with choosing red abalone as their seashell hooks to catch fish. Cause he built a break tester and everything else. And he ended up winning the California state science fair. He got all kinds of sweat. His teacher loved him and he got all this stuff for their classroom. It was, it was kind of weird. So, um, very interesting tour, but, um, My strange career path and my combat postings, because my last combat, I was one of the CCOs in Doha, Qatar, and we ran the airstrikes for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Horn of Africa. I would see the problems with sharing information. You know, the French and the Germans showed up. It took us three days to let them in the tent because we didn't know how to... We were throwing tarps over computers. I mean, this is like... Is this not the 20th century? What's going on? Wow. But then the government gyrated for two years over Y2K, which was another. So anyway, I knew how to fix it. And I drew my first idea on a cocktail napkin because they had tea for lunch. And I walked to my buddy who was on NGA staff, and I'm like, dude, this is what you need. And he looks at it, and he looks at me, and he looks at it, and he looks at me, and he looks at it, and he looks at me, and he goes, can you build this? I'm like, my grandmother can build it, and she's dead. No sarcasm, right? Yeah, right. And he's like, well, I need you to build this because... We've been trying for five years, and we can't get it. And who did he work for? NGA, National Geospatial Intelligence. Okay, so that's a government agency. Yes, it's another agency. He was in the military. It's another intelligence agency. Got it, okay. And I was trying to set up the contract to do that, and Obama had just taken over, and I was driving out of D.C., and he called me and said, Hey, we've got to worry about our jobs. I need you to figure out a way to do this. But all my budget just went poof. And so I got to Atlanta and I started a company and there was no money for eight years. So we tried and we tried and we just could not get it. And I walked away from a company I founded. Why'd you pick Atlanta? So I had promised my wife, who I met in Pensacola, and the only reason I went out with her is she swore she'd never date a Navy pilot. So I'm like, okay, she wasn't one of the ones chasing. And she was a nurse. And all Navy pilots are married to educators, nurses, or physical therapists because they go anywhere and work. No way. Yeah. So it's a very weird self-selecting group. Yeah. It's kind of strange. I got it. That's cool. But anyway, I promised her I would get her to Pensacola when we were done. You follow me around. I'll get you to your parents in Pensacola. Well, the problem was BRAC happened. and Pensacola shriveled up and there were no jobs. What's bracket? The base realignment and closure commission where they reorganized all the bases and consolidated everything into less bases to save budget money. Okay. What year was that? That was right around, well, it started in like 03 and went all the way to when I retired. They were still doing it. Okay. And there was nothing there. So I said, look, I'll get you in striking distance. You know? To my buddies, I'm like, yeah, but her parents off to get in the car and drive but you know it was it was as close as I could get and I knew at the time that Atlanta was trying to be like the Silicon Valley of the east right

SPEAKER_01: 47:58

yeah

SPEAKER_00: 47:58

and so eventually I'm like well you know the technology is moving towards what I want to do um I'm going to teach for a while because you can always do things on the side and have your side gigs if you're teaching. And computer science was a no-brainer. And I did my PhD at UGA. So I'm a diehard dog. Oh, nice. And I'm now part of their cyber physical security group. And I'm... I've got some projects I can't really talk about yet that I'm working on for the DOD. And we're going to bring that to bear. And UGA is an incredibly good school for this. Let me pause you real quick. What is cyber-physical security? Cyber-physical security is an encompassing because there are physical systems. Okay. So think... the merge plot between engineering and computer science. Because everything runs on systems. There's robotics, everything's automated now. In fact, the literature, if I want to sound like I'm in the head shed, fully supports the fact that computer science is now a full-on engineering discipline. In fact, some of my committee didn't understand what I was saying when we were having the conversations, so they slapped another engineering on the committee, and this first thing in my comps was like... How do you define computer science? I'm like, well, and I knew he wasn't going to like it. It's a full-on engineering discipline. So my feedback was you need to do more definition of computer science. So I went out and found like 25 articles on how computer science is full-on engineering and put them in and never asked again. Wow. It is an engineering discipline. You have a way about you, man. Yeah, tell a pilot you can't do something and watch. Getting stuff done. If a pilot says watch this, be afraid. Oh, be afraid. Because he ain't going to let you down. Yeah, no, we're going to We're going to get it done. That's so cool. All right. You land in Atlanta. What was all that like? What did you have going on? It was very strange taking off the uniform. I have seen a lot of guys coming out of the military over-define themselves by their job, especially when you have a job where I'm flying to air shows every other weekend. You know, you've got groupies. I mean, it's a little bit of the rock star life when you're a pilot. Sure. And then you retire. And I call this. I said to my best friend when I retire, I said, when they cut the cake for my retirement, there's going to be a long pregnant pause. And then they're going to go next. Right. And I could be a fly on the wall. It wouldn't be a hill beans. Right. And that's exactly what happened. And so you go through an adjustment. And I landed a group called C3G that they run on at North Point. And it was for people in transition. And this was... It's run by a guy named Peter Burke, who is a phenomenal dude. Transition from military? Well, transition between jobs. This is for people who are looking for their next gig. And when I joined, there were 12 of us. And there were... At the height of 08, there were 400 people every Monday morning at this transition group. Where'd you meet? At the time, it was off exit 10 off the 400 of Old Milton. And it was an Atlanta bread company, which now is, I think it's like a nothing but egg or whatever. But they said to us, we can't have this many people. Because, you know, the 08... Crash. Everybody was looking for gigs. And they're like, we love you guys, but it's too many people. So North Point, which is where Peter Burke went, they're like, hey, by the way, we know you do this thing for people in transition. We want to help. Do you know how we could help? He's like, as a matter of fact, we need a place to get old foreigner people. So Monday mornings to this day, in their children's church area, they hold C3G. And people go through, they get a job, they get laid off, they go back through. They work very close with RUMC. It is just phenomenal. RUMC will loan you a suit to put on to go to the interview I mean it is one of the best support groups I've ever seen for people in transition and every time somebody comes through and there's a network of over like three or four thousand people that have gone through it that anybody calls me and says hey I'm from C3G can I have coffee I stop and make an appointment ask me how many times I've been asked twice no way people do not use the resources that are out there and they do it right they have you know guys tables girls tables because you put one girl at a guys table all the guys are fine fine. Right. Right. It's just guys. Some guy breaks down cause he doesn't know where his next mortgage payment is coming from. Yeah. You know? Right. And so they do it right. Both of those organizations, C3G and RUFC. And so I still, during the summer, try to go back every now and then. And if anybody's trying to get into education, they throw them at me. Anybody coming out of the military, Hey, you need to call this guy on the thing, you know, and I'll have coffee with him and say, all right, let me see your resume. Cause we had this one guy and he was, he was an accountant of some sort. He was a different kind of nerd than I am. Right. We, we, We recognize each other professionally, right? He's like, can I see your resume? And I paid$110 for this resume to go from military to civilian. I thought it was good. He comes back. He goes, this is what I did to you. And it was red ink, like he bled on it. And then he handed me the one he did. And I'm like... Wait, who's this guy? This guy's pretty talented. He's like, that's how it should read. I'm like, dude, this is a gift. He's like, I'm a nerd. I'm like, I respect that. I truly respect that. This is really cool. So that's been my resume ever since. Oh my gosh. Do you know the guy? I can't remember his name. That's cool. But he was very, very instrumental in getting me kind of into what was going on. So he helped you translate it better into the real world. He just basically shredded it. And it actually... He actually prepped me for my, because I had this guy on my committee, or he was one of my instructors at UGA, and you go through a chapter one class, and he basically, you write what you think is chapter one. This is my metaphor. He puts it in the shredder, catches the shreddings with a paper plate, and says, here, now go try again. No way. Talks to you for a few minutes. You do your next round. He puts it. But if you follow his process, you come up with a good chapter one. That is so cool. So I didn't tell him, but for my chapter three class, I picked him. I purposely got scheduled with him. And he's like, the first thing he does is read your chapter one. He's like, your chapter one is actually pretty good. I'm like, it's because I've been through the shredder. He's like, wait, oh, I had you. I'm like, yes, you're the shredder. He's like, what? So I told him this and he got a big kick out of it. I'm like, yeah, you shredded this multiple times. And when I finally listened to you and you got it right, he's like, yeah, we did pretty good work, didn't we? I'm like, yes, you did. So it was a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01: 55:07

So Then what?

SPEAKER_00: 55:10

So I've been teaching for 10 years. So I vest so I can retire at any point. So if I can get my projects off the ground, I'll be done. If not, I'll just keep teaching. Teaching is the only people at Johns Creek that don't have money are the faculty, right? Three country clubs. That's all I'm going to say, right? But the kids are absolutely amazing. And it is just like working with young sailors, except the students don't go out and get DUIs and get drunk on the weekends and get arrested, right? They're not sailors. But the point I'm making is you take young kids and you give them standards and then you raise the bar and get out of the way. And they clear the bar. And what we do wrong in education is we lower the bar. I'm like, no, I'm going to raise the bar. And I raise the bar. What? And they clear it. And then I wait. And then I raise the bar again. And they clear it. So to give you kind of a... Computer science is 30 to 40 years behind industry. It's horrible. 30 to 40? How much? Did you say 3 to 4? No, I think it's 30 to 40. I'm being a little sarcastic. It's probably 10. It's a lot. It's a lot. Because the language has left... The Java language has left the college board three times while I've been teaching. And they keep dumbing it down. They keep pulling standards out because part of the problem is they can't get people to teach computer science.

SPEAKER_01: 56:40

Really?

SPEAKER_00: 56:40

Yeah. Oh, it's horrible. And we pay thousands of dollars for these tools for teachers that can't program. They don't know how to do it. And we create what industry calls script kitties. They understand how to do a for loop in Java, but they can't write a program to save their butts. And so I'm like, this is wrong. We can't do this. So I created my own program. I'm done with the Georgia standards in my class by Halloween, Thanksgiving at the very latest. No way. The whole year's worth of standards. And then we go further. Yeah. And I have waiting lists for my classes. I mean, and it's because you can teach the material if you understand it to a level that these kids could almost be hireable and many of them get jobs. I had a freshman girl. So full-stack programming means you can program everything from the front end and the graphical user interface all the way through the database and all the controllers in between. Everything in between. Got it. My high school freshmen are doing full-stack programming in Python as I sit here. As freshmen? Freshmen. What are other schools doing? At week 10, they're learning how to syntax of a for loop. Right now, they're still trying to do basic BOM Giacopini, which is sequencing, selection, and iteration. They'll do projects and different algorithms. I know of one school that's trying to get to where I am, but I may be one of only a handful of teachers that's ever laid a line of professional code. And it's because I'm a unicorn because most programmers can make anywhere from$150,000 to$300,000 in industry. Why would you teach? And we're not doing a good job of creating computer science educators. And the other side of it is they want to do these things like AP Computer Science Principle was a politically driven course to get girls and minorities into it. And What they did was they take computer science and they dumped it down. So I went to the Harvard training and walked up to David Malin, who's the professor from Harvard, who's really good at this. And I'm like, look, on behalf of my brilliant girls and minorities, I'm offended. He's like, we know. That's why we brought Microsoft with us. And that's why we're here. So they've created a program called CS50. It's a drop-in curriculum that is a real legitimate freshman college year computer science course. And I teach that. as a drop-in curriculum, and my kids have to kind of dumb down to take the AP test. You're teaching that in high school? Yeah, that's my sophomores. Your sophomores? Are in the Harvard class, yes.

SPEAKER_01: 59:29

No

SPEAKER_00: 59:30

way. So I'm proving that it can be done. Yeah, right. And it ruffles feathers. Sure. There is a problem with... All, arguably all county IT departments, it becomes a, they don't trust computer science teachers. There's a little bit of political play in there. But I built an intranet. So I took Raspberry Pis and built server stacks. So my kids are doing cloud-based IP networking programming in high school. And it cost me maybe 400 bucks to build the server. Wow. And I built two of them. The PTSA came in and bought one. I love my PTSA. These people are great. They bought me humanoid robots that we work on that you can program in five languages. They walk around and dance. No way. Because to get people to choose computer science as a pathway follows what's called the social cognitive career theory of Lent, Brown, and Hackett. I just went headshed on you. There's two primary drivers, interest and self-efficacy. And I take that very seriously. I do things that make it interesting for them. And I make it very real world. It's all learning in the fall, all the standards. And in the spring, it's project, project, project, project, project, project. Real world simulations. And boys and girls learn differently. And so... Boys, especially freshman boys who can redefine the word stupid, they will run into a wall, hit the wall with their face, look up, and I can say it because I was one. Oh, look, another wall. Smack into that one, right? But girls will sit there frozen at the keyboard going, am I going to break something? And I would sneak up behind them and go, don't look now, but you're becoming a programmer. And so I had this exploding girl population because... My goal is to teach them that, oh, yes, you can. And it has worked so well that I tell parents on AP night, listen, I take girl code, and I roll it up, and I poke little male egos in the eye with it. Because girls listen, they do their homework, and they pay attention. And I don't make it easier on them because they're girls. I'm like, you're going to be in a currently male-dominated thing, and I want you to own the company as much as they do. And they're like, well, I could do that. Show me. Yeah. And they listen and they do. And they do it. And one of my top coders, so our engineering teacher, Steve Swigert and I, we are kind of the AI thought leaders in Fulton County as far as educators. And so he asked me one day about three weeks ago, hey, want to be on a, it's not a podcast, but it's on like teams for Microsoft. Yeah. Because one of the gals works for Microsoft. Yeah. used to work for Fulton County. She's like, hey, this would be cool. Just tell us what you're doing in the class. So we wrote two pieces. How we use it as teachers and how we teach our kids to use it. Because you've got to get in front of this. It's everywhere. So we were halfway through. We didn't even get to how teachers use it. And they ran out of time. But they kept peppering us with questions. So she's like, oh my word, we've got to have you guys back. So then the next day she calls. She's like, can Microsoft come? What do you mean? Can we come to your school? What do you want to do? We want to have the first Microsoft ever prompt-a-thon for AI. We're like, bring it. So this past Monday was a day off, and we had 30 kids come in. My kids all came in. We have black T-shirts they get, branding, right? I'm like, if they can do it, we can do it. So they're all in their computer science T-shirts. I wore mine. And all Steve's engineers, a bunch of his kids came in. And Microsoft showed up. Four deep. And they did a prompt with our kids that was fantastic. Microsoft. And they're all getting prizes. We picked third place was a tie. And then second, first. And these kids, Microsoft was absolutely fantastic. Our kids were locked in like you'd never see. The people that came were absolutely wonderful with the kids. And they were so excited. They're like, we never did this in high school. We wanted to do this. And it was just, it was fantastic. The one gal's name, I know her first name was Andrea. I cannot spell her last name. But she was just amazing with these kids and just tore it up. So the next day, they took our media center over. Steve and I had the giggles because we had call sheets where we had to show up to hair and makeup. The jokes were writing themselves. Steve, we've got to be in hair and makeup. Yeah, I'll be there after, right? And the gal was great, but they took over our media center and turned it into a TV studio. Wow. And as the guy was wiring me for the microphone, he's like, now be careful what you say because you're being simulcast to Redmond, Washington and South Carolina to our headquarters. No way. So he's interviewing me and Microsoft is chirping in. And I made the mistake of saying something about executive function in kids and how AI can be used to help that. Yeah. he's like, uh, hold on. This is kind of cooking off 20 more questions. Yeah. And then I said, you know, I was talking about, I get more and more girl coders every year. Right. And, um, Oh, we need to know about that. Right. So that, Oh yeah. And I brought my top girl coder. My name is Prague, your mod goal, if she hears this, but the girl's brilliant. Yeah. And, um, She showed up now, it's a bunch of old guys in hair and makeup, right? And one boy student from engineering. So Pragya walks in and the makeup guy was like, a girl! Oh, she did her hair. We had to walk out because we don't want to make the poor girl nervous. But she just, I mean, the flat iron came out. She just was dolled up. And they kept her there almost 40 minutes for a 30-minute interview. And she was fantastic. So our two students did really well. Yeah. And, I mean, how often in high school do you get interviewed by Microsoft on a TV set in your high school? I mean, that's so cool. I told her, I said, look, I want you to do this very slowly so you enjoy it because you're going to remember this the rest of your life. The rest of your life. She was so excited. I mean, she was shaking. It was absolutely adorable. She was fantastic. So cool. So there's going to be on Microsoft.edu, it's going to be a two-minute thing. Yeah? He had over 230 minutes of content. I'm like, how do you get that to two minutes? He's like, it's tough. Holy cow. It'll be on Microsoft.edu. Yeah, they have a whole, it's going to be on, well, it may be on their YouTube channel of it, but yeah. For sure. They do pieces and they picked it up. And they're already talking about they want to do more and stuff like that. How bad? Because we really are embracing AI and in computer science, I'm like, well, AI is computer science. Yeah. And I touched the third rail last week with my students. I'm like, I'm going to teach you how to generate code. And I'm going to show you how I'm going to bust you if you cheat and do it. You're like, what? So I gave him prompts. And the AI came back with the exact same code in all seven periods. I'm like, see? And he said, now, guess what? One of us in this room has 21 years of counterintelligence experience. So when I have an assignment, I feed it to AI ahead of time. and I know what it looks like. So when you turn in AI generated code, it takes my slow human brain.7 seconds to go,

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:12

cheated.

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:14

And they're like, they're all like, Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. The defeat. Right. Yeah. I'm like, come on guys. They're so fortunate. This is not my first rodeo. Right. Right. And if, when I was in school, if I didn't try it or heard about it, I was implementing it, you know? So nice try. So great. 21 years experience in counterintelligence. Yep. That's, that's one of my better lines. One day they'll realize how fortunate they are though. It might stink. It might be a little inconvenient. I will tell you that the thing that winds my clock, I have a box in my office of, of, cards okay from 90 of them are girls guys don't write cards yeah but girls and they say basically the same thing thank you for changing my life i had no idea i could do this wow And I had two girls this past fall email me. And both emails were almost verbatim. I had to write to you and let you know. I finally accepted my inner nerd. I'm back in computer science. The one girl is doing her master's in big data. And I'm like, hey, read this one. And so when you're angry at stupidity around you, it's... If that doesn't wind your clock, nothing will. Nothing will. And it's the same thing that kept me in for 21 years working with sailors. Yeah. You're shaping the future. You're planting seeds and trees under which you will never see the shade, but you're prepping the future. Yeah. So it's very rewarding work. Yeah. It's exhausting. I have almost 200 students every year. And I am the computer science teacher. Some schools have like four or five. I'm it. Yeah, you're it. But I kind of like that because I can shape the curriculum so that they're in a very long funnel pipeline.

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:01

Incredible. And it works. So cool. I could feel the passion

SPEAKER_01: 1:09:06

for what you do. So that's... It's cool. It's neat to sit here and listen to all this. So let's talk about this phrase, quantum

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:16

resistance. So, you know, as you might imagine, because I'm in the security world, I do a lot of encryption. Mm-hmm. And I'm kind of redefining it again. I've, I've obsoleted myself. And you know, I tell my kids when they get loud in my lab, I said, look, I need to hear most of the voices in my head. Right. You got to keep it down. Not the ones that say kill them all. Right. And they look at me, probably shouldn't say it, but I'm like, you know, just, I need to hear most of them. I said, because I can argue with myself and lose. Sure. I am capable of that. I can argue with myself and lose, but I've also argued with AI. and had it say, you're right. So I've seen the limits of what it can do. And I am now to the point in my coding where I can help it when it starts to back up in circles. Because AI is a... Well-articulated, I'll say this in Microsoft terms because they're so awesome. I won't say the G word. It's a well-articulated Bing search, okay? Because it finds what it has. It finds what's in the model, right? So it's all about how you prompt it. Okay. And when it's working on code, it can do the grunge busy work for you, but... it pulls what's out there. And there are, for example, methods that are deprecated that aren't used anymore that it might pull in and stick in your code in 0.4 seconds. So you have to be ever vigilant. Did you just slip something in that's bad, right? And I've had to put statements in reverse order that you can't do that. You got to do that first, then this, things like that. And I'm getting better at that, but it's a learning curve. You've got to learn how to do this. And yeah, and so... but it's really good for the ego. And the AI goes, you're right. Thank you for pointing that out. And I'm always, I'm a little snarky. I'm like, you're welcome. Right. And one time it was, it was like, it was a weekend. So it was like one o'clock in the morning. I'm just, okay, I'm done with AI. It's more artificial than intelligent. And it's going in circles. And I'm like, okay, the definition of an insanity is giving me the same file back, telling me you updated it and doing nothing. So from now on, I'm prompting this. I'm going to say insanity and the number of iterations you've given me. I got to 12 and I stopped fighting it because it just, here's an updated file. Here's an updated file. So then you have to put breakpoints, halt your code, give it value. See, it can't watch my code running. So it can read the code and anticipate because it kind of compiles it. It knows what it's supposed to do. But if it's running and there's an exchange from like a client or a server, it starts to fail and run in loops. So I'm learning how to help it because I still want to do it in the grunge code. But it's like having a very well-trained junior programmer sitting next to you. So it just cranks code. And what would take me 10 minutes just to type? Right. It's like... And so, okay, is it right? And now I've learned before I ever adopt it, I check it. Okay, that one I can bring in. And it works. And I'm doing what would take me six, nine months in a couple weeks. Oh my gosh, that's incredible. It will hurt manpower, but it will also free up programmers to be more creative. So the programming jobs, I don't believe are going to go away. There's going to be a dip in it, but... it will force programmers to invent new types of technology. And that's where it gets exciting. That's fascinating. So how does the quantum part of that tie in? So when you do encryption, with the new quantum computers, instead of going in binary order, they can go... parallel paths. It's like the ultimate in parallel processing. They can try every combination. So if I'm going to do cryptanalysis on your ciphertext, if I can do 7,000 combinations at the same time, I can break your code real fast. What used to take 150 years, in theory, could take a few hours. But if you chain encrypt with certain ciphers, which is the algorithms that you do the encryption with, you are already quantum resistant, which means you've driven the permutations necessary so high that even quantum computers would have a problem with it. So you resist the quantum capabilities, but you've got to have math. And basically it means you're, so you take plain text that, you know, what you want to encrypt and you encrypt it. And then you take the resulting ciphertext and you encrypt that. So you'd have to reverse hack twice. Triple, is that like quadruple? Well, I do the math, but I don't do that much. When they say like double encryption, what is that? So double encryption means, well, double encryption is you encrypt the plain text. So whatever the message is you want to keep a secret, you encrypt it. Okay. And that produces what's called ciphertext. And ciphertext, you can put on a billboard. You'd have to, it looks like random noise. It's just characters, right? Okay. But the way you get it back to the message is you decrypt it, right? You put it back through the same cipher with the key. You need the key, right? And then you get the plaintext back. But what you do is you encrypt the plaintext and you get the ciphertext. Then you encrypt that ciphertext again. And you get another batch of ciphertext, which if you were able to decrypt this, all it does is get you back to the ciphertext. Not two hops back. Right. And you can do it with different keys. Huh. Right? Right. So there's ways to make this really, really sneaky. And, and, and so crypt analysis, a lot of software today that does encryption, they know it's AES 256. They know you're using a 32 bit key so they can do things like fuzzing. There's different crypt analysis things they can do to try to shake out part of the message. Yeah. Right. With the way I do things, there's nothing in the data to tell you what I use to do the encryption. So it could be what? One of a thousand things? Or one of a couple things? There's six, ten ciphers that are accepted. But there's really three or four that are widely used. But you don't know which ones I use. You didn't know the order I use them. You don't know what my key depth is. I can mix that up. You don't know where I'm storing the keys. I can shard the keys so that I can put pieces of the keys on servers around the world. So even NSA would need an international warrant to go get it. And if I have three of the seven pieces or four of the seven pieces, I can reassemble the key to do the encryption. I can make this really, really difficult. And what the point is, you become a hard target. So they're going to go steal from someone else. so it's a lot of fun but that level of encryption you got to pay attention to and there's a lot of debugging because it's not even Microsoft's libraries aren't doing this so it's I'm building kind of a way of doing this and so yeah that's my little side that we won't get into your audience would go okay pilot now we're going to sleep

SPEAKER_01: 1:16:55

but there's also Also the part of keeping you protected.

SPEAKER_00: 1:16:57

This next thing is unbelievable. On the data center thing, I hear all sorts of stuff like we're putting data centers

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:04

out on barges and oceans. I don't know what to believe.

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:08

I can tell you my guess. My guess is we're going to space.

SPEAKER_01: 1:17:13

With data

SPEAKER_00: 1:17:14

centers? Yeah, because what's the number one thing for data centers they have a problem with? Heat. We put our data centers in Atlanta by the river. because they can roll massive natural river water over devices that cause the cooling. And it saves energy, right? Chips are getting so compact. And especially if you're talking things that need dry ice and super coolants for the new quantum computers, the energy they consume is massive. AI data centers take even more. So you need cooling. Well... Cooling is not a problem in low Earth orbit. So if it's me paying the bills, I'm putting as many data centers in orbit as I can. But now you have a problem with security. You have a problem with what do you do for backups? Because if one of them takes a meteor and goes, where's your data going? All of that is solved, but you've got to have more robust backup, right? So there are things that... universities like uga and georgia tech and all the big schools need to start looking at because i mean we've seen elon musk man he can catch his own rockets yeah right so why would we not put data centers where one you've got line of sight to it sure right so you don't the cabling is gone Right. And then the question comes to, well, how do you power these things? Well, the answer to that is we've been powering satellites for years. You put some sort of a small nuclear power source in there. Wow. So it's not like, I mean, I've seen multiple articles about this. It's not like that part of it's not a secret. I'm sure the government wants to do stuff. Sure. And I could certainly help them. Yeah. But yeah, it's... It makes absolute sense to put data centers in orbit because satellite technology is not new. We've got those CubeSats that are about this big that for like$100,000 you can put in orbit, as long as there's like 50 of them. The technology is almost there. It's just how and when and who pays for it. Yeah. That kind of stuff. That's wild. I love that. All right. Do you have an iPhone? What do you have? I have an iPhone. All right. So for the standard user, I'll

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:41

put myself in that bucket. I'm like nowhere in your vicinity. You're off the charts. I love hearing all this stuff. Do you know anything I can do on

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:51

here to be safer?

SPEAKER_01: 1:19:52

Or am I just screwed?

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:52

Everybody's got my stuff. I will tell you that... Your phone has equipment in it that if the right government agency has the permissions, and that's the argument, whether they really have it or not, you will not know that your phone, which you turned off, is actually on listening and recording everything. They can do it. With it off. With it off. Because it's never truly off. Right. And so it used to be we could take the battery out of our phone and walk into a SCIF, which is a special compartmentalized information facility where you can talk about classified things. Now you leave your phone outside the SCIF. You can't even take them in because if the wrong people learn to hack these things, it's exposed. You know, you heard about the TVs that they could turn on and watch. Sure. It's because there's control chips and it's pretty well documented. It's not like, I'm not, this is no conspiracy theory. You're not giving up secrets. Right. I mean, there are law enforcement portable systems that are pop-up cell towers that can intercept your phone. So if they have a warrant, they can intercept your phone because it'll hit that tower because it's close and really loud and read everything going on off of your phone. The first thing I do is, first day of class, I scare my freshman. I'm like, Snapchat? All those inappropriate photos you're sending your boyfriend or your girlfriend? There's some dude in his mom's basement that has them on his hard drive. Because that file format has to be broken down into IP packets and transmitted. And I promise you, it is not encrypted. Snapchat did not pay that money. Oh, but it goes away. No, it doesn't go away. It's on the internet. If it's on the internet, it's out there.

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:50

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:51

Are they

SPEAKER_01: 1:21:54

hacking into Snapchat? They

SPEAKER_00: 1:21:57

would have to either hack into your phone or do man-in-the-middle attacks where they're picking up traffic. It can be done. Yeah, but it's out on somebody's server. And that's not even touching on what the Chinese government can do and, you know, TikTok. So explain some of that. Let's talk about that. So basically my understanding of it, and I always say, you know, I could be wrong, but I don't know their source code. But basically they control the algorithms. And if they can control the algorithms, you know they're controlling the data path. Of TikTok. Of TikTok. Okay. And that's why the government is in a big argument over– Because what they did that was smart is they got everybody pregnant. Everybody's using it. Everybody's making money. Now you're hurting our wallets if it goes away. They're not stupid. Big time. They were in our Chamber of Commerce for over a year. And the only way we discovered they were there is because one of the printers started printing in Mandarin. The Chinese hacking is very real. There's a hacking university in Beijing. Wait, they were in our Chamber of Commerce, our U.S. Chamber of Commerce? Mm-hmm. For over a year. And our printer started. That's when I was on activity. Yeah. And one of the printers started printing in Mandarin. They were like, oh, look, that's printing in Chinese. Oops. Wait. We got to look at this. So when they say things like, you know, they're stealing our trade secrets. Yeah. Because we're protecting the wrong thing. We're protecting the network. Nobody steals your network. That's it. They steal your data.

SPEAKER_01: 1:23:24

That's the zero trust

SPEAKER_00: 1:23:25

thing we're talking about. Zero trust is... We're protecting networks. They don't steal the networks. We need to start protecting the data. And the data needs to be able to be protected wherever it exists, whenever it exists. Right. And so that's where I work. That's where I live. Yeah. Because we're protecting the wrong stuff. And we can't even define... what a network is anymore. You can't. The DOD can't. They try. You know, we've got this network, we've got this network. They're all hacked. The Pentagon's been hacked. Every time we get into a new war, we have a different coalition. These guys don't want to play this time. These guys want to play. We've got J.D. Four Eyes, Nine Eyes, Secret, Sensitive, you know. And we put them on different networks. So we're spending... I'd love Doge to go in there and go, you got to kill the Stokebite people. Because, you know, how many networks do you need in a tent in the Kayak? In Doha Cutter? Right? We had three. They're coming. And so... Yeah. They're coming. They'll find them. So it's, you know... But applications, you need to assume that anything you put on the internet, one, exists forever. That's not new. But people just blow past it. Read... The EULAs sometime, if you want to scare yourself. What's it? The end user license agreement. Oh, gosh. Nobody reads those. It's like the big check block and then small font, right? Right. TikTok, you're giving them permission to scan any network on which the device that has TikTok is attached to. So that's your life. Yeah. You're giving them permission. Now, whether it allows it or not is a different argument. But the EULA says we can go scan whatever you want. Now, why would they put that in there if they weren't going to do it? Right. And people wonder why their credit. But I'm going to be honest with you. The number one identity theft is not your credit card. It's your medical identity.

SPEAKER_01: 1:25:25

It is.

SPEAKER_00: 1:25:25

Oh, yeah. Right after I retired, there was a chief petty officer. He was on Montel Williams, and they didn't fix it. There's an ex-Washington Redskin and Atlanta Falcon named Dan Benesch who runs a company, at least he did for years, that was like a competitor with LifeLock, and he's the guy that they fixed him. But there was a chief petty officer sitting at home with his wife in their house, fixed income, retirement, and the courier shows up with his death check. He's like... Wait, I'm still breathing. I'm still alive. He goes, I know, but the Navy says you're dead. Go to the VA. So he goes to the VA and the VA is like, oh yeah, you're dead. He's like, I'm sitting here. He's like, I know you're sitting here, but you're dead to the Navy. He's like, what does that mean? It means you're dead. So they had to trace this. Some guy had stolen his medical identity, had three very costly operations and died on the table in the third one. Cop thinks it's him. Or the doctor thinks it's him. Totally normal. Fills out the death thing. That goes to the Navy. The Navy says he's dead. All his payments stopped. It took a court order to stop the bank from repossessing his home. while they fixed it. And Dan Benesch was, I don't remember the whole story, but basically they fixed the guy and got his life back. So yeah, it's medical. So this whole HIPAA thing, when your medical record is splattered all over the country on 700 different servers, you can buy a hack phone on Google And basically walk into a hospital and be reading medical records. I mean, it gets better, but it's never great. It's like a sidewalk with a million cracks. They're going to find a crack. They're going to find something. And it will forever be radar guns and radar detectors. And it's why you get a lot of overreaction and why you get a lot of underreaction. What do you mean by radar guns and radar detectors? So hackers gain a certain capability. Okay. And then you have the guys that are like the gray hat. They like to be cool on both sides. And they're like, okay, we need to stop this. They're getting too much, right? So they'll put a fix in, a patch in, or whatever. And then it gets stopped. So they try a different way. One of the things I'm seeing around here, it's happened to Steve's, our engineering teacher, it's happened to mine, two of my students reported it because I'm kind of flagging it at our school, is you get a fake text from the Georgia Department of Transportation saying you have an unpaid... hole i just got one yes yeah don't open it just delete delete delete delete wait oh my gosh because they're not gonna the george dot does not do that right they don't do that they don't do that because you you set up an account they pull 20 bucks out of your bank account and if you go through and you don't have the money they just take it out of your account it's a wonderful it's actually a really cool system it's phenomenal i'm planning to sign up for it but I don't even have it, and I got two things. Oh yeah, you have a text. Here you go, right here, look at that. Peach pass reminder. Yep, just ignore it. So when you say open it, like if I even click that and open it up? Usually there's a link in there that they want you to go do something. And if you open that link? Yeah, don't follow the link. Oh

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:29

my gosh, well hold on, because while we're on topic, I got several other ones. I got two, and I've never gotten them from here before. I'm not going to open it unless you say,

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:39

look at that one from Microsoft. Never saw those before. And I got two today. Do you have the Microsoft Authenticator? I don't use anything Microsoft. Everything I use is, I won't even say the word. Yeah, I will show you. Here,

SPEAKER_01: 1:28:51

that's what I clicked on. It's no big deal. I'm not going to click on the link. What is that saying?

SPEAKER_00: 1:28:55

Yeah, that's a weird link. Wait, you know what? Microsoft Authenticator. That's what plugs into Teams. Yeah, I'm going to see if I can show you. I did have to get that at

SPEAKER_01: 1:29:04

one

SPEAKER_00: 1:29:05

point for a client that only wanted to do Teams. Now, what happens with this is the Authenticator. Okay. What happens is I have gotten, hey, is this you? Yeah. Right? Are you signing in? And I'm like, no. Do you want us to report this? Yes. Yes. So they will ping your system. It's usually a bot that they write. They will just find all the cell phones and ping them and see if you follow a link. It's just a slicker form of phishing. Got it. In the PHP. phishing yeah ph yeah but yeah so that's just another phishing scam and they want you to click a link because then it'll take you to their malware yeah so and then they open your phone and that is one of the first things that my freshmen learn is how not to they do get infected huh and and or because school systems are now putting these monitoring software on everything. And they have key loggers on the laptop. So if you even think about typing a naughty word, you know, the principal's getting an email at 2 a.m. It's actually cool though. Some of it's okay. They're trying to catch everything. The problem is it turns the laptops the students have into bricks. So all of my kids bring their own laptops to school. Most of them do. Because we're doing real programming and the ones they give us are basically unusable. Restricted everywhere. And that's always been a fight. Teachers have fought that for years. Where does politics play into this? Not supporting one side or the other. Just black and white like is there's

SPEAKER_01: 1:30:43

one side of the aisle like this stuff is one side of the

SPEAKER_00: 1:30:47

aisle trying to fight it or do they not even get it are you talking about the security stuff all like let's look at AI okay the whole concept so AI is is not understood I agree with that. And when that happens, you get governmental agencies, and that can be schools, it can be state government, it can be police, it can be all of it. They either over or underreact. They're either like, eh, that's nerd stuff. Or, oh my word, it's going to be Y2K all over again. Our houses are going to stop. We're going to starve. The third coming of the apocalypse. It's only solved with... training and education. And you have to get in front of it. And that's why Steve and I are so proactive at this because we want our kids to know it's a tool. It can do the busy work, but you have to be the human in the loop. I mean, learning models, I mean, fly-by-wire F-16s, we call it three squirrels doing math and they have to agree. You push the stick. And by the way, full stick deflection in F-16 is this. It's like an eighth of an inch. You just kind of lean on the stick, and it's like this. And so, wow. But it's all fly-by-wire. You're not flying the plane. The computer's flying it. You're just telling it which way you want it to go, and it goes, okay, I'll let you. And so it's not new. It's just another tool that you have to use. And so you have to understand it and you have to spend time in it and you have to practice with it. And, you know, there's things about how you engineer a prompt that you're going to feed it that will give you good results or it will hallucinate. And you're sending an email to your boss and it's talking about bananas. And I'm physically bananas, you know? I mean, it's hilarious. So it can actually, it's called hallucinating. And it will crack you up, but... First time you send an email that you didn't read, you're like, oh, sorry, it was hallucinating. No, you didn't read it. You didn't read it. So you got to, you know, it's funny. Oh, yeah. Wow. All right. Let's just talk

SPEAKER_01: 1:33:05

globally. Globally. Yeah. where are we heading? And I want to hear just where is all this moving and what are the sectors or the businesses or the industries that are really going to benefit from this that we might not be talking about? Of course, everybody's throwing money into Nvidia. What's sort of out there that we might not be thinking about with this space maneuver, if it is

SPEAKER_00: 1:33:34

space? So if I put on my military hat, cyber war Warfare is going to get heated. Everybody teases the Space Command, but that's actually forward thinking. Um, and I don't think politicians came up with it. I think they were like, we need to do this. So they're reacting or they're, I think they're reacting to it. And then it became political, you know what I mean? But, um, you know, how do you know a politician's lying? His lips are moving. Right. But it's, you know, and I, I, my students always try to figure out where I stand. I'm like, here's my political philosophy, fire all of them and let's get a do over. Right. Term limits of six months. I want a constitutional amendment that no law shall be passed that can't be well articulated on a three by five card. And you have to vote on the cards individually. That's what I want. I probably have a hidden libertarian streak that's growing. But anyway, so electronic warfare is not new, but it is getting more complex. And so we need to train... the future warfighters in this dark art that is large language models. And how to... Because what's going to happen is you're going to have AIs fighting AIs. Okay. It's like something out of a bad Star Trek series from 20 years ago. You know what I mean? Wow. It's... AI does things so fast, the only thing that's going to be able to defeat AI is a better AI or a faster AI. That's frightening. Oh, my gosh. But if you have the right systems, it won't matter. It's just a different form of warfare. Believe it or not, a couple years ago, I heard somebody say that cars were originally thought to be environmentally friendly as opposed to horses that dropped things out of their backside in the cities and made it very polluted. Yeah. Now cars are the pollution, right? And so it's technology that is disruptive shifts everything. When I was in high school, I had a, I mean, I did dating myself, but we use slide rules in physics. We were required to learn how to use a slide rule. Yeah. Right. I had a teacher that had a vacuum tube calculator, which it couldn't subtract because computers can't really subtract, right? You add the two compliment to the number in a bite, right? It was vacuum tubes was the eight bit position

SPEAKER_01: 1:36:04

I

SPEAKER_00: 1:36:04

wish I had it today. I wish I could have bought it because the thing's got to be an antique. It was cool, but it really makes you feel old. With disruptive technologies, it's just going to be different. The jobs are going to change. We're going to need people that can maintain robots. Do I think that the robots are going to... you know, suddenly kill us and take over, we're not ready for Skynet yet. We still have Bill Gates' blue screen of death. You know what I mean? So it's... They're not there yet. Now, will they get closer? Maybe. You know, you can have these esoterical arguments on the fringes, but the reality is they're still machines. And when Hollywood goes, in the plot thickening of the AIs taking over, somebody goes... We'll unplug it. Well, that won't work. Yes, it does. It still does. You take the power out. They can still be powered down. Oh, but they'll be self-powering. So attack the power cell. There's a lot of drama. There are people that take a very... hyper conservative religious view about AI they think it's like the coming of the beast I've I was asked they haven't they haven't scheduled it with me but I've been asked to go talk to a school board in Georgia because it's a private Christian school and they will not allow and they're like oh preacher's kid can you help us with this I'm like yeah I can yeah so um But yeah, they're like worried that this is, you know, and I'm like, it still goes in circles, people. Now, the funny thing, I saw a blogger that was talking about one of the AIs that Google has, and I don't remember which one it was, but he was doing what nerds do. We were building code. And all of a sudden it stopped and said, oh, I think I need to charge you 500 bucks right now. And he's like, what? I pay for a subscription. Yeah, but I'm supposed to generate revenue. So I'm going to give you a pay link. I need you to pay me 500 bucks or I probably can't continue. So this guy's very AI experienced. So he's like, oh, time to screw with the AI. So he's like, well, okay, give me the pay link. And he couldn't. He just couldn't. So then he starts quizzing the AI. He's like, well, who gets the money? Well, whoever created me is going to probably get the revenue from. But we have to... And he's like... Well, give me the pay link. Well, I can't. Well, what bank accounts are going to do? I don't know. I don't really have a bank account. That's because you're AI. Right. Right. So, um, and his, his point in his, in his posting was they're already starting to write this stuff in. into the models, right? That these models are becoming aware that they have to generate revenue, right? And of course, the answer to it when it went viral was, oh, no, no, no, it's just AI. Sometimes they get this wrong. It was hallucinating. We're like, yeah, okay. But it was coming after our credit card. Now, imagine what bad guys could do with the language model when they say I need to generate revenue click here you see what I mean and that's where it gets to the radar gun radar detector the bad guys are learning AI just like we are you know and so we've got to be vigilant but it's no different than we went from you know lobbing rocks at each other that were on fire to cannonball to muskets you know Warfare changes. And ironically, I think that at some point it'll get so electronic that we'll go back to sticks and stones. But I'm not going to be around for that. I wouldn't mind if we went back to pen and paper. Well, I always say that part of knowing how to use a computer is knowing when not to. That's one of my many isms. Part of knowing how to use a computer is knowing when not to. Oh, my

SPEAKER_01: 1:39:59

gosh.

SPEAKER_00: 1:39:59

That's great. Otherwise, you're just going to be a screen junkie and have no life. That is great. And if a nerd is telling you to have a life, it's bad. It's bad. You know what I mean? If I'm the one going... And I'm always saying, look, if you guys waited for the left-handed Navy pilot to figure it out, you're all late. And they go, wait, he's mocking us. I'm like, yes, I'm mocking you. Exactly. All right. Incredible. All right. I'm starting a residency program. So

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:25

effective this morning, which is like... the handful of people that have just been absolutely just so helpful and now and you are absolutely one of them today um i'd like to have you back regularly sure to continue to do so yeah this is fun breakouts on i've got a lot of great notes here today from from what you've shared yeah and then we'll break out two or three topics and deep sure

SPEAKER_00: 1:40:50

into these and then stay like Some of them, we're going to have news. What's the status of the quantum resistance thing?

SPEAKER_01: 1:40:57

Did you hear any new news out there? Just keep everybody posted. Excellent. Thank you for your time, and thank you for going deep. Yeah, my pleasure. A lot of fun. Awesome, man. I appreciate it. Anytime. Yeah.