AI Regulation: Innovation’s Hidden Accelerator

00:00:01 Mark Smith
Welcome to the ecosystem show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximising the value of your software estate. You don't expect you to agree with everything, challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in. It's Showtime. Welcome back to the ecosystem show. We are on the air. The three of us all over the world, me in New Zealand. And Hernando, where are you guys?

00:00:29 Ana Welch
We're in the US, we are doing our yeah, we are doing our.

00:00:31 Mark Smith
Yes.

00:00:37 Ana Welch
Stage stage. I don't know our normal period in Provincetown, MA. I mean, and just moms home. And Andrew ran away from us.

00:00:42 Mark Smith
Nice.

00:00:49 Andrew Welch
I am in. I am in the Cloud lighthouse Boston Office, which is a bit of a misnomer because it's actually about a 90 minute voyage across the Bay to Boston, but it's as close as we get. So and we have a podcast recording room here in this office, which is excellent. So here I sit.

00:01:02 Mark Smith
Nice, nice. Looking very cool. Andrew, I think it's been. Some time since you've been on the podcast, in fact, you went to the air for good event, which is interesting and becoming a topic discussion. I'm talking with a company in Australia at the moment and they were involved in. The AI for. Good as well, and it seemed like a phenomenal event. Where was it? And can you tell? It's about, you know what? What was it about?

00:01:34 Andrew Welch
Yeah. Yeah. So so. The the the short answer is that in July, earlier in July I attended, I represented the Centre for trustworthy AI and Microsoft and Cloud Lighthouse, but but the centre was top of mind. For me, at the AI for good global summit in Geneva, Switzerland, this. Is that's the name of of what is the United Nations Conference on Artificial Intelligence? And it happens every year, every summer, actually. Interestingly, has been going on since before the generative AI wave. So, so long before kind of the the current rapid evolution of the technology. And of course the market. Around around that technology, but it's just grown exponentially in the last several years, there were about 15,000 people at this at this event in in Switzerland. This year, it's the so the event is sponsored by the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, which is the global governance body that plays a big role in global cooperation and governance around telecommunications issues. So you know, a good example is that. When a company or a country wants to put. A satellite into orbit. Earth. There's coordination that goes into that right that you know around will these satellites collide with one another? Will their spectrum at a particular place orbiting the Earth interfere with other, you know, with other the work of other satellites? So they do far more than than just artificial intelligence and and the, you know, the. The global governance and policymaking around AI. But it's a huge it's a huge. Event and it it actually is linked with a parallel event called the World Summit on the Information Society, which goes to United Nations and kind of global coordination around communication and information technology and and and what's what's available in various. Regions of the world so really great event.

00:03:47 Mark Smith
So when when Andrew said he was at this event, I did not believe that he was actually going. And then I saw on the UN website this, you know, photo taken and here we go front and centre representing lo and behold there there he is and And and by the way, this this article here very interesting if you you should take a look at it and how you contribute to a big UN initiative here. But there is no denying it front and centre in the photo. So well done Andrew.

00:04:21 Andrew Welch
So one thing about this, if you if you bring the the photo back there, Mark, just as a little a little aside. So this panel that this panel that Jason Slater from UNIDO Jason is the fellow on the very end in the corner in the Gray shirt who sort of looking back down the row of us in the in the front.

00:04:43 Mark Smith
Ohh this guy.

00:04:43 Andrew Welch
Jason. That's me. Yep. Yep. Jason's a great guy and a very, very smart, very good thinker around this kind of technology. He comes from the United Nations Industrial Development Office. So something that he's working on is building the building, the.

00:04:44 Ana Welch
Right.

00:05:04 Andrew Welch
AI industrial capacity in regions and nations around the world. That's his priority. So. So in any case, Jason asked me to to come to come join him on this panel, but the way the timing worked, it was right before I was flying out. So I showed up to this panel and like I've got like, assistant under secretaries, you know, Under Secretary Generals of of of the United Nations sitting there in suits. And I'm wearing my jeans. And my linen shirt and everything like I'm about to clear out of there. But but no one commented. And it it all seemed well received. So yeah, it was. It was a great.

00:05:43 Ana Welch
Good.

00:05:44 Mark Smith
What was the? Thing that kind of stuck in your mind because I know this was a last minute decision for us to to represent at this event. And it it was a big event, right? It wasn't tiny by any stretch.

00:05:56 Andrew Welch
15,000 people, not just 15,000 people, so it was big in terms of the number of people there, but it was also big in terms of the. Representation there. So, so folks who were there included, you know, heads of State, the President of Estonia, who is himself a I I don't know exactly what his discipline is, but I believe he's a PhD, I mean. The President of Estonia, outside of maybe the President of Romania, might be the single smartest head of state in the world, so you know, there were Heads of State there, Verner Vogels, who is the chief technology officer of Amazon. He was present at this. There was a an address. Us by a fellow named Yashua Bengio, who is a computer scientist at a university in Canada. The name of the university escapes me, but this man is apparently the most the most cited in terms of other academic work. Citing his work, he is the most cited scientist in the world. Of any discipline of any scientific discipline. So. So you. Know it was not only. Big in terms of the. Quantity and the volume. Of people, but I think it was also big in terms of the, the, the minds and the thinkers and the, you know, the policymakers that it that it attracts so just just. You know, a few shout. Outs if a few shout outs I think. A guy named a fellow named John Gibson who I I really enjoyed spending time with. There, John is one of the senior partners at the world's third largest law firm, DLA Piper. They are doing phenomenal work both in using artificial intelligence in the practice of law, but also thinking from a legal perspective about how law needs to be applied to the practice of artificial. Intelligence and he gave a little talk at the speakers. Welcome reception on the first night and he he got up there and he said that, you know, for the first time really ever. Technologists and lawyers need one another, and they need one another at the beginning, and he and I kind of, you know, locked eyes from across the room and probably chatted 10 or 15 times over the next three days because, you know, this is exactly the message that we've been advocating so strongly at the Centre for trustworthy AI. And it's, you know, it's great. It's great to see someone so senior. That this massive global law firm thinking, thinking the same way. So you know John and his. Team were there. I spent some time chatting with with with some folks from Deloitte, the consulting firm including the the chairman of their board. Globally. They have some, I think really they're they're doing some very good thinking around. I mean, everyone is everyone is is sort of pollinating. These ideas, but I do think that we're now reaching a stage where we're starting to see concrete things coming out of, you know, this question of what does, what is required in order to make AI trustworthy? Yeah.

00:09:11 Mark Smith
Yeah, so so interesting is that I was on a podcast a couple of weeks. You know, and this whole thing between law and tech coming together. Is massively being influenced by the EU AI act. That and and a lot of the working and stuff that they've done around it is that you cannot have one without the other.

00:09:27 Andrew Welch
Yes.

00:09:33 Mark Smith
A A law firm can't just go in and ignore the tech, and tech companies can't just go in and ignore the legal ramifications. And I think at the moment in my observations of of the tech companies I've been talking with. It's not that they're annoying it, ignoring it. They're not even aware that they need to be aware of it.

00:09:55 Ana Welch
I feel like it's a bit like when companies who made wheels came together with companies who made luggage, and then we have luggage on wheels, kind of like that, you know, product nobody thought we ever needed or wanted it or you market it, but. After it happened, everybody's like, naturally, obviously.

00:10:19 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

00:10:22 Andrew Welch
Yeah, and and I and I think. That I mean. Listen, so. So you you you mentioned and. And by the way you mentioned the the UAI Act, I I spent time at the at the the summit with. With some some folks who have really been leaders in shaping in shaping that within the, the, the EU Parliament and the the European Commission in, in in Brussels, so, so they were well represented here. I I do think that there's some tiers of companies and we. We should get back to it at some point. Some of maybe the the big picture, global implications of what's. Happening in in. AI as technologists, I think sometimes we get really buried in what a particular organization is or isn't doing. But we can we can come back to that in a moment. But I do think that one of my observations is that that different companies, different technology. Companies are kind of driving in different lanes when it comes to the ethics and the law and the regulatory and the trustworthiness of of artificial intelligence, I think. That, you know, Microsoft is, is among the the the very, very best. I think Microsoft is is an exemplar relative to other technology companies when it comes to how seriously they take this. You then have have some others that definitely not looking at you. Makers of grok that I'm I'm looking at you, makers of grok that don't seem to have. Any sort of? Appreciation for for the the ethics or the the responsible you know the the trustworthy implications. AI and then you have all of these, you know, technology partners and implementers and consulting firms that, you know, many, many, many of them just they I think are just clueless. It's not the result of a deliberate decision. I think it's. Yeah.

00:12:18 Ana Welch
How much of that do you think is just the hype? Of people who. Pretend or say that all regulation doesn't matter, or regulations going to hinder innovation when it comes to actually building on a product or using AI teams and putting something out there. How many of these organizations do you think actually do it without? Even thinking whether they they they abide by the rules or not, how many of them actually take the chance of being sued and put out of business?

00:12:52 Mark Smith
I I think. That's that's interesting because I just. Or it a I don't know it was on some social media, might have been next. Which said what? The implication because it's August, right? So I think the rules kick in on the UAI act, right? The the penalty, you know.

00:13:08 Andrew Welch
Yes Second, the correct they they progressively kick in over a period of three years, but the 2nd of August was a was a milestone. I believe it was the.

00:13:16 Ana Welch
Yeah, yeah. That's right.
 
00:13:17 Mark Smith
2nd So yeah, so they gave is it the 7% penalty of your revenue, the worst case, it's all it's basically it was. But they did it and they took a range of companies like Meta. Alpha alphabet, blah blah blah smaller companies as well, and justice put the dollar figures up about what it means if they breach. As in and this is some serious money that's at stake, but I want to end on what you just said then about. Sometimes I feel. That. People take a negative bent on regulation. It's going to stifle innovation, right is the is the kind of.

00:13:58 Ana Welch
That's the banner, right? It's gonna stifle innovation like in Europe is stopping progress.

00:13:59 Mark Smith
Yeah. But here's the crazy thing I. Think one of the. Most incredible inventions of our time has been electricity.

00:14:12 Ana Welch
Correct.

00:14:12 Mark Smith
And electricity and the innovation that's come off the back of electricity has been phenomenal, but it is highly regulated because. It can kill you. Right, you plug a fork into that socket and hold on to it. Good luck in surviving and someone put a brilliant RCD on your switchboard. That said shirt someone's about to die. Let's cut the power to the circuit because of regulation. That's in that industry, just not. Anybody can go and do wiring and stuff. They've gotta be.

00:14:42 Mark Smith
Formally going through a 10,000 hour training program. To be able to, yeah. You know, legally wire your house, your, your business, etcetera and so. I think that. Regulation is not a dirty word. It enables innovation, but it. Means that less people. Die through the enablement of the innovation.

00:15:02 Ana Welch
Exactly, exactly. And then you have and then you have, I think last time we were talking, mark about the the Super developers, right? Like like we were saying, people who make billion like 1010 millions a year because they can do. Development and product ownership and ideation. And. Do you think that those dudes are gonna risk their job to putting out their a product? That is not regulated. Yeah, and and and I also think that there's a, there's a in addition to safety, right, there's a there are there are ways that regulation can and and maybe look at the, the the opposite argument here, but there are ways that regulation. Can actually, you know, accelerate, accelerate production, accelerate productivity, accelerate innovation, right. So you know the.

00:16:07 Ana Welch
Yeah. Gives you a process, right? You know what? To do well. It it it, it also means it also means that you don't have you know.

00:16:15 Andrew Welch
It you start to have. Organizations land on standards that can be common, right? So you, you you start to have organizations that I don't think this was the result of a regulatory decision, but you start to have you know all of the manufacturers of screws. Yeah. They start to make screws that either have a Phillips head or a Flathead, yeah. That you can use any screwdriver so you know. There there's, I think that there's. There is. There's an opportunity there. Either the market will correct itself in you know, some will certainly argue that the market will correct itself into a standards based approach and then some will, you know, point to Apple and the infamous and horrible lightning cable is saying, you know that that the market didn't correct itself without a little bit of.

00:17:03 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah.

00:17:05 Andrew Welch
Without a bit of regulation. So I yeah, yeah, I, I, I I see the the regulatory argue. Was cutting both ways purely from an economic and a what's best for the industry perspective? Setting aside what's best for the world?

00:17:18 Ana Welch
So did you see how a lot of that being talked about at the air for good to talk to us about some innovations that you've never seen before and you had to be there to see it kind of?

00:17:31 Andrew Welch
Well, so, so I don't I don't necessarily know if I I don't necessarily know if I can think of anything like innovations that you would have had to be there to see, but I can certainly comment on, I can share some thoughts on. Topics you know, topics that were that were talked about, right. So there's lots of there. There's lots of talk and and and I'll start in generalities here. There's lots of talk about how. How the success or failure of AI is not purely a technical concern to a very significant degree. It's a cultural concern, and both cultural within the macro society, but also cultural within organizations like does the workplace culture have the wherewithal? To be able to seize, you know, to to seize upon this right. And then do societies right do do however you want to slice that. Do nations, states, regions, you know? Do they have the do they have the expertise but also the infrastructure capacity which can come in many different forms, right? It can come in terms of energy production, it can come in terms of connectivity. It can come in terms of computing power. There's so many different. Of this, but does a particular. Or a slice of the world have the wherewithal to be able to the capacity to be able to keep up and and get ahead. There's a there's a a statistic that I haven't verified this, but it was discussed in several instances that at the summit where.

00:19:12 Andrew Welch
90% according to the statistics, something like 90% of the world's artificial intelligence capacity. Is controlled by two countries. Ultimately, right now it might be resident in another country. Probably a good example of this right is the work that you know Microsoft is doing. And I think that you have some, I I know some people who disagree with me on this, but I think Microsoft is doing an admirable job of detaching. Compute power that is based in Europe. They call this the the sovereign. You know, the European sovereign clouds, right? Detaching that from control of the United States. But at the end of the day, Microsoft's parent company is an American company, right? So 90% of. Of the ultimate ownership of AI capacity is resident in either the United States or China, which is, you know, a significant problem for everyone except for the United States and China. And I think a really significant problem for the likes of the European Union or Japan or Australia. Some of these very, very modern, heavily very modern, very sophisticated, economically and technologically sophisticated wealthy countries that in some ways important ways don't necessarily control their own destiny when it comes to. The capacity to generate artificial intelligence compute.

00:20:40 Mark Smith
Yeah. It's super interesting. We're on this. Wave of such an incredible technological change and. I think reimagining of work. That is happening around the world. And I am struggling. If you like to reconcile it. With the amount of increase in wars, famines and even climate related, things like we've seen one of the bigger the 4th largest earthquake on the off the coast of Russia in the last week or so, yeah, tsunami warnings, etcetera. One things I do I start my day with because for some time. I have struggled with the increasing amount of in our lives that is coming from everywhere, so much so actually just little book plug here. It's it's called calling and it's a calling. The art of skepticism and a data-driven world and it's. Written by a data scientist published in 2020 and you read this and the case studies. The first two chapters are just case studies. That when you. Read them. You're like I've heard of this. I've seen this in the social media, etcetera. I mean, goes back to Bill Clinton and how he used phrases around his indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky, for example. And how people and particular media companies, et cetera, how they say something? Knowing that what they're saying sounds truthful. But they're saying it to lead you in a direction that is not truthful.

00:22:22 Andrew Welch 
Yeah, yeah.

00:22:22 Mark Smith
And what blows me away is that that was all pre Gen. AI, right? And everything I'm reading. I'm just like ohh my gosh, you add AI into the mix and what it can do around understanding and individual and therefore. Creating a conversation and I'm talking about, of course, the AI is not gonna intelligently do that. What it's gonna be, but it's powerful people that fund. The systems that will enable that to become a reality and like overnight, we've seen the dropping of things are open sourcing of of models from our open AI. They're straight away. Microsoft announces them within 12 hours of their availability. Azure as a service you consume and all of. A sudden you're. Providing models where people can turn the guard rails off, and I mean this has been around for some time, right? You've been able to download and and run locally. Hardware is able to run these things and much more efficiently. You know you can get higher spec.

00:23:20 Ana Welch
Now you have help, you just go to another module and ask it how to do it. That's it. It's not like and also like looking back at this at this conference, this is a for good. Like widely held by the by the UN, so clearly these organizations who want the good of the people are feeling I don't want to say threatened, but definitely affected by exactly what you're saying, Mike, like I had today, I had a a workshop. And somebody was saying. Did you try to do like to generate some scripts you know with Python And GBT 4 to achieve this level of data processing and the other part didn't say yes or no, but they kind of they. They alluded to the fact that they don't necessarily have the skill in the team or that you know they need to bring other people in to actually to actually do these things. And the person who has the question he's like ohh wait. Like I can just ask. The AI you. Like write 70% of your stuff for you. It's not. You're absolutely right. More and more of these things are are are being made open source and if you are an entity then probably you are going to look at regulation and if you're if you're not, if you're just a dude. What? What are you actually gonna do in your parents garage?

00:24:52 Mark Smith
Well, this is what you know. Is that we're making incredibly powerful tools. Available to people that. Are potentially bad actors and where they needed a group of bad actors to come together to do something in the past. Their potential now to run as a Lone Ranger, so to speak, and your your counter buddy is AI or any number of AI's to support whatever you want to do, Mustafa. Talks about. The with gene splicing, you know and and all the the developments that were made with CRISPR and and and the technology now to do this, you can buy a $10,000 machine that you could run. In your garage. To do this, and with the aid of AI start coming up with pathogens, for example.

00:25:50 Ana Welch
Exactly.

00:25:51 Mark Smith
That are hyper resistant, that are hyper Pantages.

00:25:54 Ana Welch
Right. Playing with mRNA, right?

00:25:57 Mark Smith
Yeah, this is.

00:25:57 Ana Welch
Crazy.

00:25:58 Mark Smith
It it's just nuts and so right? But he even says in his book when he and he presented this to executives, to universities, he goes, you know, what people do when they hear this type of thing. They put their hands over their ears, not let the, you know, you know, literally. But they don't want to know. They don't want to. And so this is I'm kind of like.

00:26:19 Mark Smith
I'm so pro.  AI and the advantages and then I'm going. But hang on, we gotta really maintain the the balance here because let's say even like the job displacement thing. And for me, I don't see a job displacement because I am riding this wave. But how many people are in our society that aren't even aware that there's a wave? They have no access to the technology and so all of a sudden they're gonna be displaced by something they didn't even know really existed. Maybe outside, that they might even listen to news.

00:26:54 Andrew Welch
You know, we were talking about this before we we hit record, but so I've been working on this on this article that I think, you know bring in for saying I think the article will probably be out and published prior to the podcast. So we can put a a link in the show notes but so. So the article. Looking back up that in in 1986, Paul Simon published an album called Graceland and and Just as an aside, you can argue with me. Everyone can argue with me. I it is my favorite and I think the best album of my lifetime, but. Neither here nor. There. But in Graceland, the first track. Is a song called The Boy and the Bubble or Boy in? The bubble and. So I the working title of my article, I've lifted it from the from the song, so the working title is. These are the days of miracle and wonder. This is the long distance call and the reason that I love this song for this moment is you know, if you go listen to it and I'll I'll I'll read you some of the lyrics. Here in a moment. But what Paul Simon does in this song is he he he juxtaposes the technological advancement of the time. And remember this was 1986. He juxtaposes the technological advancement of the time with some of the problems in the world of the time problems of of of terrorism, problems, of the concentration of wealth problems. If some of this might sound very familiar, right, we haven't exactly solved a lot of these problems. So you go look at that. And so so the the refrain of the song is these are the days of miracle and wonder. This is the long distance call. The way the camera follows us in slow mode. The way we look to us. The way we look to a distant constellation that's dying in the corner of the sky, these are the days of miracle and wonder. And don't cry, baby. Don't cry. And then there's one verse that I I like a lot at the at the end I I can't really explain one of his last verses is it's a turn around. Jump shot. It's everybody. Jumpstart. It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts. Medicine is magical and magical. Is art. Think of the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon heart. And I believe these are the days of lasers in the jungle, lasers in the jungle somewhere staccato signals of constant information, a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires and baby, these are the days of miracle and wonder. And what I'm doing? In the article you go read it for yourself. Is I'm trying to. Explore some of these ways that. You know, maybe in. Some cases apocalyptic, but but in some cases otherwise. Just earth shattering in ways that we may not. We may come to regret, right? And this is the unchecked use of AI. I mean, Simon wasn't writing about artificial intelligence, but he might as well have if.

00:29:50 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:29:58 Andrew Welch
You go listen to the song.

00:29:58 Mark Smith
Ohh my gosh. I you know when? You read it out. I was just like. You know, was he a seer? Did he did he sing his future because you couldn't get the accuracy is just phenomenal in describing the time we're in at the moment I feel.

00:30:16 Andrew Welch
Yeah. Well, and and and some of the. Some of the ways that and and some of this is inspired by, you know, the conversations that that I was having at at the AI for good summit and some of them, you know, other things that I've been observing so. So you know, maybe on the on the more benign side, but still I think really pretty Earth shattering but certainly no one is going to I mean not certainly but I you know this is not life or death but you know something I thought about for a long time and this is something that Juan Lavista Faris at Microsoft who leads. The the Microsoft AI for good lab and he's the chief data scientist there. He's been talking about and thinking about. The prevalence of English as the lingua franca of the of of the Internet, right? So and my statistics might be a bit off here, but they're gonna be fundamentally correct. 50% of the Internet is written in English. Alright. The next most common language on the Internet.

00:31:14 Mark Smith
Wow.

00:31:18 Andrew Welch
Is Spanish and that's 6. Hello. Percent of the Internet. So. So you you start to stack that up and what you quickly see right, I mean where are these large language models trained? Well, they're trained on the corpus of knowledge that is available for them to consume on the Internet where 50% is in English and the next largest. Wow.

00:31:37 Mark Smith
Not yet.

00:31:41 Andrew Welch
Language is Spanish at 6% so. You know, as you start to snowball that right, you get OK, well, what does that do when as synthetic knowledge becomes more prevalent? Right. So where AI where future models are actually being trained on content that previous models have created and. Then what does that in turn do? Can we? How does that introduce bias that is not malicious? It's not malevolent bias, but it is bias that is transmitted. The bias, the cultural bias of ideas that are most commonly communicated. In English, OK, simply because these are the. These are the the cultural ideas, kind of the the I I hate to call it this, but the you know what I think some might refer to as the Western philosophical tradition.

00:32:28 Mark Smith
Yeah.

00:32:40 Andrew Welch
And and how do we root? How do we deal with? How do we deal with, you know, trustworthy and responsible AI from a biased perspective, when you have that so baked in to to the language that these models, these large, the, the middle elves, right that that. What these these models are using but. Yeah. And what do we see over time? And I don't think we have data points for. This but what? Do we see over time this does to the to the dominance of the global language, which I think you know is pretty indisputably English at this point, but what does that? How does that accelerate that dominance while also accelerating? The demise. Of some smaller yet beautiful and and certainly culturally significant culturally significant languages. And I think that that's a really. And again I decided I would start with something that isn't likely to kill a lot of people, but we could. We could get darker from, we could get darker from here for sure. Yeah.

00:33:44 Mark Smith
It's funny what you say about bias there. Because, you know, I've been writing the book and. I would take my chapter on conclusion and get AI to review it. And the identification of bias in my writing so you know, an example of like turning a blind eye, it can seem pretty benign. It's an idiom, right? Yet in it is biasness.

00:34:05 Andrew Welch
Yeah. Yeah.

00:34:12 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah, right. And and I couldn't, you know, falling on deaf ears is another common one. Crippled by fear. You know, there's there's so many stuff that you know, that's a lame excuse. I just ran a few because I was just like and. What I found very interesting is that I I try to be. Hard on myself in in using bias speech and deliberate. It's kind of like your filters change the more you become aware of things and how so easy it is to creep into our life. Well, we we don't even know, you know and and how that that use of language and therefore the training of models et cetera that you're.

00:34:55 Andrew Welch
So. What I really want to encourage people because I know that there is a there's a a a furious debate, particularly in the United States. But I think that a form of this debate happens elsewhere. But there's a furious debate right now about that. You know what, what has been branded as DEI diversity, Equity and inclusion. And to me, this is.

00:35:15 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:35:16 Andrew Welch
Actually not at the core. I'm not. This is not ADEI. This is not a diversity, equity and inclusion issue. This is not. A I mean it it is to some extent A fairness issue, but I think that there is a there's a a root issue here that I think I'm. I'm gonna say maybe naively shouldn't be political, right. But I'm sure someone could make it political. But that's really about how people communicate with one another and how people understand.

00:35:37 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah.

00:35:45 Andrew Welch
One another. So and this is not something that simply goes on between speakers of different languages, right there are, you know, Anna.

00:35:54 Andrew Welch
And I have have. Anna, as a native Romanian speaker who's who's exceptional. A good in, you know, if an exceptionally good English speaker, but you know two people of different native tongues have to understand, have to come to understand one in one another, particularly in the ways that you language speakers communicate and the idioms that they use and the subtleties that they use that really can't be taught. In the textbook. Yeah. And I you know what I'm thinking right now is is when I was, when I was younger, I spent about 10 years growing up in growing up in in West. Virginia, which is kind of part of the American Appalachian region, which borders on the South. Anyway, I I don't remember who this was or where in my past, but there was a phrase that that, that an adult used, there was something to the effect of Lord willing and the Creek don't rise which what that means is if everything works out the way we hope it will.

00:36:55 Andrew Welch
Yep. I'll see you soon, or or we'll be able to do whatever.

00:36:56 Mark Smith
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:36:59 Andrew Welch
Might be, but if you were to just say to a non-native, if you were to say to most native English speakers, use the phrase Lord willing and the Creek don't rise even in native English, speaker would have to sit and think to themselves what what what possibly mean.

00:37:16 Mark Smith
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And thing passed down from centuries as part of a lexicon.

00:37:20 Mark Smith
Yeah. Hi, Andrew. It's been great talking to you as always.  Join us next time. Hopefully we'll be back next week. We'll all.

00:37:30 Andrew Welch
Be well, thanks, guys. See you. Satchel.

00:37:33 Mark Smith
Thanks for tuning into the ecosystem show. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought provoking and maybe you had a laugh or two. Remember your feedback and challenges. Help us all. Grow, so don't hesitate to share your perspective. Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software. State until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and creating value. See you on the next episode.