Navigating the Future of AI, Cybersecurity, Global Tech Trends & more with Dr. Darren Lucifer

today this company 10% of what we put and they are getting better result because they are they are using the new up-to-dated technology with a relatively small team I can compete against large corporations like I've never been able to before have built a lot of things that honestly disappears quickly I remember a time when things needed 3 years to disappear as Tech I can leverage generative Ai and robotic process automation together for a new startup that's starting in generative AI or in cyber security what advice you will give them if they start in 2025 welcome to theim Spotlight today we are with a very accomplished scientist engineer and as well speaker I was impressed by the level of um project Dr Darren Lucifer so welcome Dr Darren to our Spotlight and I will start by letting you introduce yourself and tell us a summary of your very accomplished life oh man summary of my life it's it's I've actually thought about that recently because I recently had open heart surgery so I did a lot of retrospection on my life I would say first and foremost I am a husband to a incredible wife and second a father to 10 children and that's a lot of kids I'll have three more that are launching soon they're going to be uh during college and and getting ready to move on as far as my career goes I'm a software engineer by trade I've been an executive I enjoy working with large teams I enjoy really what I do today which is I come into organizations and help them understand where they currently are both in people and organizational structures in their processes and then in the technology and how to leverage all those together to make uh their world uh more effective and efficient in what they're doing and I love it I love coming in and helping organizations and seeing change as it goes in and I just recently started following Sam Sam and I careers are going backwards he started an Academia I'm starting to teach I just started teaching vanderbelt uh University as an online Professor which I'm enjoying quite a bit actually so that's me in a nutshell amazing an accomplished Professor an accomplished software enger who has 10 kids how was it for you tell me that's amazing I love that the the 10 kids part is an interesting thing it's a blended family my wife and I are married uh 13 years this year I had six kids she had four and we Blended them together and um it was crazy it was mass chaos at the beginning it was and so much so that we thought other people should benefit from this so my wife and I have a podcast where we talk about blending the families and how to find happiness and joy in mass chaos and sometimes down bad things happen sometimes and finding a way out of that so we talk about that yeah it's crazy and now that there are all leaving the house I found that parenting adults is even harder I would have a very particular question because that's my let's call it pain today I used to travel all the time with my wife and we used for a while having one kids okay so continue traveling together now we have three it's impossible so how you are dealing with that because when you have a lot of kids absenting from the house for a conference or something seems heavy right my wife has been on several of these trips with me and we use that as our Escape that was our way of keeping the flame alive between my wife and I is getting away from the kids and pretending and we're actually really good at this we pretend like it's just her in the world and it's awesome we we don't call home and check on the kids CU we've left them with someone that we trust right we don't even care about our bills that we have we just completely disconnect from our old life and we're just having fun wherever we are in the world and it's wonderful that's a great advice let me go and use the flame kids family to transition to our era the era of generative AI to the era of open let's call it book we are living in a century with everything is open everybody knows everything about everyone and you have a very great topic maybe to educate our listeners about and I will be precise here how generative AI is amplifying the threat of cyber security what's your take on that oh this is a big one in fact it's a big problem that a lot of organizations have to know deal with because just as we can use generative AI to help us write a better email which that's probably the number one thing that is being used for today cyber criminals and hackers are using generative AI to up their skills uh dramatically and quickly and even getting gen to write code for them and and permutations of code very quickly so what this means is that hackers can move a lot faster than they ever have before with which means all the white hats out there the guys preventing uh your cesos and your cyber security Engineers they have to leverage generative AI as well in order to keep up and the attack vectors are massive um um and generative AI has even opened up new attack vectors we're seeing people attacking gen Ai and getting information out of generative AI that they weren't able to get before so we're seeing new types of attacks that are tailored and socially tailored to specific individuals I've had on my show embracing digital transformation a couple people that all they do is ransomware remediation and fascinating story they said that all the ransomware attacks that we're seeing with large organizations are first social media and personal attacks against Executives they learn everything they can about an individual and then they go after their family they go after them and then they say we will destroy you unless you pay this much and we've now captured all your data in your company and they know very intimate things about your family so it's a little scary it's a lot scary a lot scary out there I meet a lot of startup on my show and in my life and most of them when I ask them about cyber security because honestly it's a big background thinking for me it's scary as you said and most of them they tell me we are always using the cloud so Google of this world Amazon Microsoft all our data is there so we are safe well I I love this question because it's something I run into when I talk to companies as well and Google Amazon Oracle Microsoft all the big boys they do have a security model and each one is a little bit different but out of the box it only provides a minimal level of security you have to understand those security models and leverage them and use them appropriately for example if I encrypt all of my data in an Amazon S3 container that's great but if I store all my keys in open text in the same Cloud you just circumvented all that encryption that you did I've seen this happen before right or if you're writing your numbers down your passwords down on the back of your laptop under a sticker on the back of your laptop do you think that someone can't look those up we're seeing this a lot end points into your data like a laptop or industrial Control Systems if they have access to that data are they trusted have you established a zero trust type of architecture to help you with those things so just having those in the cloud and security doesn't mean that you're Totally Secure if someone come into my Google Drive or one drive and they hack it they took all the data encrypted right around some attack I cannot just call Microsoft I tell them hey delete everything and get the the it's very difficult because first off you have no idea how long ago they infiltrated you you have no idea you can get a backup how far back are you going to go if you go back just a week maybe they've already put something in there in one drive that will let them back in again and that's very common so you've got to go back it takes a lot of forensics to understand when you were infiltrated and how far back you need to go and then how much data are you going to lose so it's important that we understand cyber security and hiring a professional to do this especially for small companies is probably more cost effective than going and trying to just figure it out yourself so the same way the criminal will get more sophisticated using AI the other side what about protector are they getting smarter using or they waiting the catastrophe to happen they absolutely are so it's a nuclear arms race it's a mutual destruction it is an arms race between um the black hats and the white hats using generative Ai and every once in a while you get a really great advance in either side and then the other side kind of evens up so it is important that you are keeping your tools current and also your patches current in these in these uh systems because they are always changing and this is critical that it's a continual thing that you do if you're sitting on a box that's been updated in 3 or 4 years you are vulnerable absolutely the thing is that you've got to learn gen it is a game Cher especially in cyber security for small companies what's your advice what's the best non-expensive practice that they need to do probably the best thing you can do is go look at the N standards for cyber security there's great um learning that can go on there and if you adhere to uh the standards you're about 90% there there's more to do but if you've done none of those things you can at least see where you sit as far as cyber security sanitation and things like that but number one teach your people in your organization about fishing attacks fishing attacks are the number one successful way that uh cyber criminals get into your infrastructure which is amazing it's it goes back to human so number number one training and if you look at the N standards on cyber security it's a lot about training and audit it's not a lot about tools as much as is about process and cultural change right so having that security first concept is probably your number one thing let me go back to Future Humanity we have an expert in cyber security quantum computers what will happen add quantum computer to the mix what's your take the idea is that quantum computer can break encryption and it can the encryption that we've been using for the last 20 or 30 years and it's not instantaneous but pretty close because the way that quantum computers can operate in multiple States at the same time it means that if I've got a encryption algorithm that uses a five 512-bit key all I need is a quantum computer with 512 cubits and I can break your encryption pretty quick upping that to a th000 or 2,000 characters in your encryption key will help some but as the quantum computers become faster or larger they'll be able to break those as well so there are standards out there new encryption techniques that are quantum resilient I'm not going to say Quantum safe completely because they have to be tested thoroughly by quantum computers which we do have some out there and then we are running some tests against them but these new lattice-based encryption algorithms are actually much more difficult for quantum computers to tackle not only because of their complexity because they were built around protection against Quantum Computing so the adoption of these lattice-based algorithms is going to be critical now the problem that we have with them is they're very time consuming to encrypt and decrypt data but companies like Intel and AMD and Qualcomm are starting to build these algorithms in ships which means the speed will increase the amount of time it takes to encrypt and decrypt will get down to where it is today which is less than 1% looking at this you will have to reencrypt if I had a quantum computer and I was a nation state I would not let other people know I had it why because now I can unlock a whole bunch of data that's sitting out there that I've been collecting for years and don't kid yourself nation states have been collecting data for years even encrypted data because once they turn that quantum computer on they can decrypt all that data so any new secrets that you have or old secrets that you have that have been out there and exposed and maybe you were infiltrated in your like well it's no big deal it is a deal it is Once you turn those quantum computers on they'll be able to decrypt those so it is a game Cher luckily we're ahead of the curve with encryption and decryption technology so they does affect crypto as well and Bitcoin and the other cryptocurrencies and crypto networks are starting to look at these new encryption algorithms and so those can be injected in into those networks and we can be much more safe but there's lots of different techniques that people are using to hide they Shard data and have different encryption keys and they use security through Opus oh you got to find my bits first well that only protects you for so long until they find all the bits these new algorithms are much better Quantum resilient which means we think they're going to do a good job against quantum computers I'm hacking them you you mentioned cryptocurrency where is cryptocurrency stand in all that mix quantum computers generative AI will their value as crypto they are protected by the secret of how we generate them right how this will be impacted in your opinion by the advancement of generative Ai and potential and advancement in well I think generative AI doesn't have nearly as much impact on the crypto networks as much as Quantum does because the crypto networks and the whole concept behind distributed secure ledgers is that they're encrypted so if we change the encryption algorithms to more Quantum resilience algorithms then they'll be protected so I think we okay I still see generative AI as being leveraged by hackers for social social engineering hacks to get people to give up their keys or to store these in nefarious places so I mean that's goes into normal hacking I want your take on a particular topic that is in the news these days deep seek and how with much lower investment new startup are catching with the big boys that's called them okay what do you think the future of that weird competition weird era what do you think about well this is really interesting because um just did a podcast with Dr Doug Schmidt it actually came out on um January 3rd and we talked about this specifically the bar has been lowered for entry so startups now can compete with large companies because they can be nimble and normally the barriers to entry are very large and large corporations can do a lot of things because they have a lot of workers to do it but with generative AI I can leverage generative Ai and robotic process automation together to mimic a lot of workers whether it's a sales team a customer support or programmers content generation there whole bunch of things that can happen so with a relatively small team I can compete against large uh corporations like I've never been able to before and some of the problems that we have in large organizations is the bureaucracies and the processes that they've established slow them down um be and and on purpose because they are risk averse primarily they need to control things so this really gives startups the ability to move quick and to move much faster than large organizations can we're seeing this in a little microcosm in the media world and we're seeing the disintegration of of network TV and YouTube channels are starting to take off like crazy with you know just like you and I sit with two guys in a camera amazing coach generative AI in our case in our Channel just month to month the quality of editing is improving so much just by incorporating Technologies it's really scary from the level of investment I'm also an investor and I start becoming very scary because an investment I made 3 years ago in a company today I have competition for this company that put like 10% of what we put and they are getting better result because they are they are using the new up-to-dated technology we have built a lot of things that honestly disappeared quickly I remember a time when things needed three years to disappear as Tech and now it needs a month so what's your take on this where are we going especially you with big companies it's it's it's very disruptive what's going on here and it reminds me of the innovators dilemma by Clayton and fascinating because something from the side can disrupt the whole industry and displace of longlasting organizations and like you said before it used to take years for those organizations to you know slowly disintegrate now it's so much faster so what does that mean when you've got an idea you've got to productize it and get it into Market quicker than you ever have before and capitalize on it as as quickly as you can um if you don't someone else will and in the past large companies could just outspend you right with platforms like social media and we've seen things go viral you can capture that lightning in a bottle and boom all of a sudden you're Off to the Races and you actually made become uh larger than you want to overnight and these large corporations are still sitting there going let's sit in the boardroom and talk about it on what we're going to do I think someone that understands this very well is Elon Musk because he understands you have to move quick to change Industries you have to move quick and I think he sees that and he knows that we've got to talk to the creators and not the bureaucrats because the creators are the ones that are going to succeed moving forward that's how I see it talking about iton mask let's go a little bit to the new era we are talking about crazy things like restructuring government introducing AI everywhere Mega even JGA investment do you think that the United States of America with all bureaucracy is ready to move that fast I think I the only country that is and it's because of the American Spirit this is where I think things are are interesting that you can't quite put your finger on it but in America there's this Spirit of innovation there's a spirit that I can be and become whoever I want it's not the same anywhere else like it is here and that Spirit of innovation the spirit of manifest destiny that was mentioned in Trump's inauguration on moving beyond where we're currently at is not just a land grab it is a um intellectual grab it is a knowledge grab and if you look America Fosters Innovation everyone tries to figure out how to do better and it's in our culture sure our government has a lot of bureaucracy I think that's going to change I think it has to change but overall the people of America is what America is not its government and the people of America are innovators they're creators and look at all the wonderful things that we've created here in America it's astounding no one can do what we can do here do you think the role of America need also to lead the humanity toward the new era or just America First America only well you lead from the front you don't lead from the side or the back everyone still wants to send all their top people to America America uh for higher education um why is it because we have better teachers no it's because the culture here is a culture of innovation and advancement and you can become whoever you want to here in this country I agree with you 100% but I have also a take on this and the my take is by love I love America I think whatever you said it's true and it's the only place that is honestly the first candidate with Excellence to take a Humanity to the next civilization level but I still have worries and I will take your opinion on that it's about people who tells you yes but by empowering this Agent of Change like Elon Musk Trump you could shake the Society and also put in je other values like democracy like individual rights privacy what's the balance in your opinion those are guard rails that we have that we still need which is is really interesting it says I need privacy there is no constitutional right to privacy never was never will be some states have that and things like that I go back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution which it's the pursuit of happiness that's what it is all these other things are distractors and they're fear ridden we can move forward fast and with caution and and and that's totally doable so you do need both and there needs to be a balance but I tend to want my foot on the accelerator more than on the breaks I'm a change agent I'm out there trying to make change and like I said those that don't change don't innovate Left Behind look at Xerox Xerox one of the most Innovative companies in the world what are they known for copy machines but they're the ones that created smartphones they're the ones that created the mouse window op trading systems another great example is Kodak Kodak had a digital camera right out there with everyone else at the beginning but they weren't able to capitalize on it because they kind of tinkle tinkered with Innovation but they put the brakes on and the gas at the same time so us as a nation we are innovators we need to be Unleashed on our Innovation with a break we still need a break but we're seeing things that when we get guard rails that we can accept we can do incredible things we can change the world and and we continue to do it people tells me listen it on Mas come up with Tesla Chinese electric car now is much much better open Ai and they come up with ch GPT and now deep seek is much better so yes America is innovating Chinese are copying and improving the copies so they tell you Chinese will kill our capability to innovate it's just the opposite if I have no competition I don't in innovate are there really competition or copier that have no investment in in Innovation but investment in better copy because it's it's cheaper once Q open a ey thank you Elon Mas for Tesla now we can improve a little bit and you know you know we saw the same problem in the 70s with Japanese Japanese copied of our electronic stuff um and they were pros at it and they were great at optimizing processes and are the Japanese known for the semiconductor industry today no no with cultures all over the world every culture has something unique about them that is their superpower none of them have what America has as far as Innovation we continue to innovate we continue to be on the bleeding edge we continue to drive everything forward others will follow we want them to follow why because it's going to make it better so when they say oh China's going to catch up to us if we stop they will but we won't stop I love you this wisdom you are someone who got involved in a lot of project with a lot of countries at very high level so let me ask you what are the Nations that in your opinion have the most Visions in terms of progress Innovative project beside the US I would say Arabia right now is they are pushing the boundaries on innovation right now and and it's wonderful they're bringing in top talent from all over the world to do it and the reason they can is because they have a lot of money and they're trying to diversify what they're doing and they've got a great vision so they've got a Visionary and that's important that Visionary is important so Saudi Arabia is one I would also uh put on the list Taiwan always on the front end of things I would also include Korea in that list as well but they may be coming stagnant I'm not sure but one of the things we have to be cautious of is we have to be cautious of becoming complacent and I think America has become a little bit complacent and so that's why I love Visionaries that are pushing the boundaries trying to get us to think beyond what we're comfortable with because when we do we get new Industries or the revitalization of new Industries like the space industry with Elon and SpaceX or or the automotive industry with uh electric cars everyone was like going electric cars too expensive to build too too many problems Elon changed the game there so we're we're seeing that if you look at the Automation and Manufacturing you're seeing huge leaps forward in that by some Visionaries that are out there pushing the boundaries that's what we need so when someone or a company or a country becomes complacent and sits back and just collects that's when they can be over over I have a dream myself and I will share your huge experience in dealing with all this kind of project it's a chance and an honor for me to have you in the spotlight and ask you do you think an alliance between Elon Musk Saudi Arabia and of course the United States of America is possible and will that be something good for a Humanity I think it I think overall collaboration is good and cooperation is good as well the geopolitical aspects of that I can't touch just I'm not well-versed enough in it I'm a technologist we are talking about technology here we're not going into deep politics I'm talking about technological collaboration I like it when you get smart people in a room together and battle out discussions um battle out how to solve problems I love elon's way of open sourcing his patents I think that's wonderful um because it it gets people starting to solve problems that before they were saying now that's too hard you know so yes I think collaboration is key moving forward but you need a little bit of competition in there as well right otherwise you're in an echo and everyone's pointing in the same direction we need people that that are willing to Against The Grain to try new things out and new technologies out I will link two things we discussed about today in um a segment we spoke about cyber security now we are telling me open source patent isn't that somehow contradictory how we keep ourselves safe and we open source our patent and our code well you know it's fascinating because I just interviewed the VP of Open Source and developer services at Intel and I asked him the same question I said Intel is incredible they've got 20,000 software engineers and they don't sell software they open source everything and I said well how is this and he goes it's open source and the whole concept about open source is a conundrum for economists because an economist would say that individuals are there for themselves so what is the motivator for open source for a corporation well the motivator is to rise the industry as a whole and increase technical Acumen as a whole across all the industry which actually increases the ability to do more with less resources so the model shifted in the '90s from selling software to now is selling support for software and almost everyone has some kind of an open-source model there are some exceptions and it's going to come back to bite them and that is NVIDIA they have a closed system and their licensing costs are outrageous and it thwarting Innovation so there are alternatives that people are starting to move in droves to that are more open- source which now gets people out of these closed systems so you would think that open- Source collaboration would be hey I'm going to lose my intellectual property all it does is raise the game and increases even more valuable intellectual property and in the end it's going to benefit society as a whole and has the high-tech Community suffered from open source I don't think so no but also in the past I have seen that the big contrast between Bill Gates and Linux who one was putting the system for profit windows and one put the system open source Linux look where they are right now so it's scary sometimes if you think too much for others the others are not thinking of you I I think lennus is perfectly with where he's at he is it's not about the person it's about the comparison between for-profit and open source but also look at what Microsoft has adopted they've adopted a highly open- Source strategy right because the cost that they have had in keeping their software moving forward has become too large so now they're relying on the open source Community to help and I asked this question of aroon on my show I said what motivates software Engineers to do this and he goes it's a really strange thing software Engineers want to be part of something bigger they want to contribute to society not just make money and that is an interesting concept right that's why open source is so successful is the individual contributors that are doing it they're they may be getting paid their company to do it but they can make a whole lot more possibly if they went off on their own and developed software and sold it but that's not what's interesting to them what's interesting to them is solving problems and helping Society I think it's an glass on on these people I agree with you and what about cyber security in this case is it safer to have open source open patent there there's been a lot of done on this from Carnegie melan and MIT and open-source software tends to be more secure than closed software because there's a lot of eyes looking at it and there's a lot of eyes looking at it from very different perspectives of the world some of the best software engineers in the world are in the Eastern block countries um which is incredible right and can I hire all those people well I could set up shop there and do that but if I open source it culturally they have always been able to get through things with very few resources so they become very good at finding holes and gaps in systems some of the best hackers in the world Estonia po Ukraine m mova Russia these are some of the best hackers in the world come from their area Iran another great hacking community and Korea so can I hire people from all over there sure I could or I can open source it and these people are looking at your code they want to use your code they want it secure they're going to make changes it flies in the face of business because I went to business school and business school was how how do I make money and the open source concept is completely flying in the face of everything I learned at business school it just doesn't make sense but it works it works very well please give advice for a new startup that's starting in generative AI or in cyber security what advice you will give them if they start in 2025 continuous learning because things are changing so quick get your product out fast and early and get people using it but continuous change if you're not making updates to your product weekly maybe even daily you're falling behind that's how it is right now it it's this constant Innovation and it may be that your uh product does not hit a million downloads maybe it only hits a 100,000 and you're helping organizations with your product you've got to tailor it to specific Industries that's the way you'll succeed [Music]