On this episode of Redefining Cybersecurity, former CEO of Cisco and current CEO of JC2 Ventures, John Chambers, speaks with host Sean Martin about the intersection of cybersecurity and risk with AI, as well as the state of enterprise budgets for cybersecurity. They discuss internal innovation and the role of education and innovation hubs in the industry.
Guest: John Chambers, Founder and CEO at JC2 Ventures [@JC2Ventures]
On Linkedin | https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnchambersjc/
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Host: Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/sean-martin
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Episode Notes
On this episode of Redefining Cybersecurity, John Chambers - former CEO of Cisco and current CEO of JC2 Ventures - speaks with host Sean Martin about the intersection of cybersecurity and risk with AI, the state of enterprise budgets for cybersecurity, innovation in the tech industry, and the need for education and innovation hubs. Chambers warns that companies need a well-thought-out plan when it comes to AI strategies and cybersecurity strategies, emphasizing that those without plans may experience difficulties raising funds and suffer from stock declines. He notes the complexities arising from cybersecurity attacks, specifically those leveraging AI, and highlights the importance of getting ahead of the issue. Chambers also talks about the need for companies to evolve and emphasizes the importance of innovation.
Later in the conversation, Chambers and Martin shift to the need for education and innovation hubs, discussing how these hubs are shifting from being limited to only the coasts. They discuss how the industry playbook is similar to previous movements in cloud and internet technology, but the speed of change and disruption has evolved. Chambers highlights the changes occurring in West Virginia and notes the emergence of a new crop of cybersecurity professionals entering the field.
The episode concludes with Chambers emphasizing the need for a change in education to achieve long-term success in the industry, with a focus on sharing knowledge and innovation throughout the country. Overall, the episode provides listeners with insights on the future of cybersecurity and innovation, the importance of having a well-planned strategy for both fields, and the need for education and innovation hubs to achieve success.
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Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording as errors may exist. At this time we provide it “as it is” and we hope it can be useful for our audience.
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And hello everybody, you're very welcome to a new episode of Redefining Cybersecurity here on ITSP Magazine, where we talk about all things cyber to help businesses not only protect the revenue, but hopefully safely generate revenue as well. And that means looking at people process technology and doing things slightly differently than maybe we did them yesterday. And I'm thrilled today to have a guest on we've had on before Mr. John Chambers. It's good to have you on the show again. Sean, it's a pleasure to be with you. You wanted me to say a couple words about background. As a part of your viewers will know, I was chairman and CEO of Cisco and leadership there for almost 25 years and acquired 180 companies. And we normally led as the number one and number two product and all 18 of the major product areas we went into. Right spot, right time and a real joy. And then in the last seven years, I've been CEO of JC2 Ventures and not a typical venture startup company, but more of a strategic partner with startups and focused on key evolution of startups and innovation around the world with being chairman of the US India Strategic Partnership Forum and in France, the strategic partner and global ambassador for high tech appointed by President Macron. I love it and so much in there we could talk about as well. I have a gazillion questions, but let's kick it off. So what I wanted to do and this was initially, I mean, we spoke three years ago around RSA conference 2019. And I remember it quite well, how great a conversation it was. And we have the opportunity again here to maybe touch on some things that you've seen. I mean, three years is a long time and a lot has changed, but your view of kind of the state of the cybersecurity, I'll call it space. I don't want to call it market necessarily. You can include the market aspects of it, but just where do you see things sitting at the moment? Gotcha. I think it's something that's moving with tremendous speed, which Sean is no surprise to you on that. I was looking at the two participants that we had together in 2019 and it was Mike Fong on the Secure Phones, which is going very well and Vijay from PinDrop about cybersecurity and voice authentication and what will be, in my opinion, voice single sign-on. What's going on in the industry? We go in waves, Sean. About the time that I think we really get it and we realize that cybersecurity has to be in the top three objectives for any company, for any board, for any CEO, people get it there and then things get quiet for a while and we get distracted. RSA conference this year, it was fascinating in that there were several changes I hadn't expected. I expected enterprise budgets to be up probably 10 to 12% on average. They're actually going to be flat is what we're seeing so far. Now my startups are fortunate for whatever reason, we're in different spaces within cybersecurity. Out of the nine that I have, we've been very fortunate so far, they're growing between 40 and 300% year over year. Either they're about to get hit by a wave or they were fortunate enough to get into categories within cybersecurity that are still growing very well and strategic to a company's future. What surprised me also was that in a number of the interviews at RSA and the keynotes, people said, John, not much has changed versus a year or two ago and that's kind of was the message that came out. I was surprised by that and I took a fun contrarian view saying that everything has changed. If you watch the speed of change in cybersecurity, we all understood a couple of years ago that 500 billion devices connected to the internet going way beyond that would give tremendous power to this digital world, digital people, digital companies, digital countries. But with that also the exposure would go up dramatically. And as you saw complexity and the ransomware attacks and the deep fakes, but you also begin to see AI come onto the scene. I thought this year's session would be much more exciting, and pardon the word explosive, in terms of people saying, well, we got to move faster and everything is changing. It didn't come across as much as I expected on that. My view is the exact reverse. I think cybersecurity must be on the top agenda. You got to spend money on it. You've got to put time on it. You just got to know when you put money into it, will you get the results back? And if you're putting money into it, what are the likelihoods that you reduce your risk in a given category? So I think you'll see a series of companies that really talk about cyber to risk assessment and how to use AI to analyze what it is and how do you adjust within it. And then you'll see a series of companies that begin to look at deep fakes and how do you spot a deep fake within that. Somebody like Pindrop that you talked with before, I think we'll be able to do that remarkably easy even if it's only one or two words, they'll be able to pick it up in terms of the approach. And that gets kind of fascinating. But in hindsight, John, that should be easy to project. In the human voice, even though you and I don't hear it with our ear and my southern accent tends to be hard to emulate, we're remarkably simple on people being able to do deep fakes and surprises. What actually occurs is in a single second, our voice has 8,000 different samples. In five seconds, it's 40,000. So you can spot a deep fake remarkably quickly. You can spot somebody who pieced together a number of my videos and then said, here's what I said, or I was transferring $25 to someone and somebody puts in their $25,000. You can pick that up and it's not going to be that difficult to use. My view is that the Internet of Things will be interfaced to by voice and that it's very probable that voice will become the single sign-on capability as we move forward. Contrary to what you're seeing in the market. So I could not be more excited about the intersection of cybersecurity and risk with AI. And I think that we missed an opportunity this year at RSA to really expand on that and get that message across. And it's interesting because I know a few of the sessions that we had touched on those two things, specifically risk and AI. And I feel I didn't have a chance to go to all the keynotes and all the sessions, but I feel that those were the two themes, I think, that came out of it. So at least from my perspective, which excited me, I'm all about risk. You can move things left and actually define an environment that's less exposed from the beginning and easier to manage from the beginning. You're not wasting a bunch of time and not leaving a bunch of negative opportunity on the table to be exploited. And I think AI was another area that I think, maybe in the vendor hall, I don't know if maybe less in the sessions, I'm not sure, but AI seemed to be top of mind. And I did a session on AI in SecOps, for example. So I don't know if there's any more to say on that because what I wanted to... Well, you know, if I could interject, John, I think we can take it to the different level. I think a lot of what I saw going on was people talking about AI in theory and AI that they thought about in the last six months on it and how does it tie to cybersecurity. Most of my cybersecurity companies started on AI three years ago, six years ago, and their products are ready to roll, ready to announce M&As happening in a fast pace, et cetera. And I think the ability to catch the movement to the cloud, to make it easy to use, to get the chief security officers and CIOs to say, this isn't silo type approach to markets, it goes across them is huge. And I think each of these really leading edge cybersecurity companies will have a XYZ company, IT quickly, and how do they use it differently? You'll be able to say, for example, and I'll use safe technology as an example, safe securities, what their CEOs, SACET, will be able to demonstrate very simply is by showing online applications, you can ask using AI, tell me about my cyber risk versus other companies. And based on the data that that technology is gathering, they're going to be able to say on a scale of one to five, what do you have? Then they're going to be able to say, where are your exposures? Simple question like that. And they're going to say, here's where your exposures are. And then you're going to say, which area should I plug based on my priorities? They're going to be able to give you that answer. Then they're going to be able to say, out of the risk profile you see in the data, who are the five or 10 people that are most likely to bring risk to the situation? And they're going to be able to tell you that. And so I did not see the simplicity on quantification of risk, the understanding of how AI plays together and how quick this is going to move. Most of my cybersecurity companies are not only using AI as a key component part, they're changing even faster now than just six months ago. And so I think it was a missed opportunity to really get that across, at least in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah. Well, one can argue, maybe I don't know if you don't mind getting a little deep here, but I think over the past three, four or five years, there was a lot of machine learning language in the vendor space and some leaning into the AI early on. And certainly in the most recent couple of years, AI was a topic for sure. And maybe this is what I'm looking for you to maybe help me understand if I have this correct or not, and for our audience to understand as well. So I think the chat GPT came out three and four, roughly around the beginning of the year before RSA, right? November, yeah. Yeah. So in the last year, beginning of the year before RSA conference. And my expectation or understanding, limited as it might be, is that the natural language model and the large language model kind of changed the way. You mentioned the word simply, simplified. So I think this is where I want your advice or your perspective. Did companies build machine learning enabled, AI enabled systems that had rules and capabilities to analyze data and present it in a certain way? And the big change in the last six months has been the way we present it to be more natural to leverage large amounts of data to present it in ways that that's easier to absorb from a human? Well, first of all, your questions are not naive at all. They're really well thought out. And secondly, what you're asking about is natural trends within technology. The natural trends is we always get too excited. Then about the time we think it's not going to work, it does cross the chasm. And then depending on how hot the technology is, it goes up exponentially. I think there have been three big bets in the industry that will absolutely change forever technology and how it's viewed. The first was the internet, and I was honored to be a part of that. The second was the cloud and supplied a lot of the technology to the cloud players, including with my startups on that. And then the third will be AI. And I've been saying that for six years. And much like the internet, the early applications, most people didn't know how to apply. They picked the wrong applications. They were one off. They were proof of concept without proof of value and scale and payback. The area for AI that was the hottest and is absolutely front and center with most technology companies is customer service. And when you see customer service, you can make 10,000, 25,000 agents not only really productive, more productive, and each one performing like your startup performer, but you also make when you call into a credit card call center, instead of it being such a painful experience where, Sean, tell me your in-laws, mothers, maiden names, date of birth. Can you repeat again? When was the last time you were here? Do you have any open issues, et cetera? And you go through this painful process, they can make that very effective. So that was probably the first major application of AI at scale. It's like the internet at scale. My first major application sounds simple today, entering orders online. Second one's fascinating enough, doing a virtual close of the financials and how you could see where you are at any point in time. But you had to translate technology, moving zeros and ones around in the internet to here's the business outcome. Better financial result, dramatically better productivity, and it transformed the way we live, learn, play, and focus entirely. So you're going to see this same thing with AI. It will go in segments and the same thing with cybersecurity, except the intersection of the two gives you a very positive on protection, but it also gives you a very negative on the complexity of attacks. You think they're complex today. You haven't even scratched the surface of what's going to occur with AI being leveraged. So it's like most technologies, the majority of implications, all of them are good, but there'll be some that we use this for bad, and we've got to get ahead of the game, especially in cybersecurity for those that misuse it, whether it's people that do ransomware, whether it's rogue nation states, whether it's bringing down electrical grids, stealing your data, et cetera. And the complexity that can be done with AI on both sides are something I think we're just starting to get our arms around. Put a different way. If a company a year from now at a major investor conference, be it a public company or one that's trying to raise money, if they don't have a very good AI strategy, well thought out with the changes that occurred and a very good cybersecurity strategy, I think their stock are going to get tanked, and I think they're going to have trouble raising money. We'll see if that's accurate or not. But Sean, as you know, I have a lot of weaknesses, including I butchered the English language. My wife's a speech therapist. She calls me her only failure. But on getting market transitions right, whether it's the role the internet plays in changing your life, whether it's cloud, whether voice will be free and the role that played in service provider, there are only two types of companies, those that have been hacked and those that don't know they've been hacked. That was 2015 World Economic Forum on it. And calling ahead of time the COVID implications and the birth of AI as a major change, that's where my strengths are. So if everybody agrees with what I'm sharing with you, first, I'm not an interesting guest. And secondly, I'm not taking enough risk, but I want to make them uncomfortable. Push the envelope. And that's why I love having you on the show and love chatting with you. I want to talk to you about. You're staying, you said staying ahead, playing ahead. And I wanna get into maybe some of the innovation. Was it Cisco you said 100 acquisitions? 180. 180, there we go, you almost doubled that. I don't know how many we did at Symantec. You did a lot of them. We did a lot of them. Probably not that many. I think it was over 100, because I can say it now, we looked at maybe buying you many, many years ago, because I liked your leadership, I liked your focus on security and the balance on it. But it was just too big of a company for us to acquire. It was a big, big bite. In my role, I was fortunate to do, to actually create a lot of stuff from scratch. One of the only teams that wasn't acquired and was actually building things from zeros and ones all the way up, and primarily in the SIEM security management space. And the reason I bring that up is, there's a lot of startups. And there are a lot of big companies making investments in the things that you've mentioned. How do you see things playing out in the, build it here, if it's not built here, it's not good enough. We need to consolidate, we need to figure out how to achieve bigger business outcomes, as you mentioned earlier, by bringing pieces and parts together. How does all that kind of play out over the next couple of years, do you think? Some of it is very similar to each of the prior movements we saw on the internet and cloud. And some of it is dramatically different, especially around speed of change. So, we rewrote the textbooks at Cisco that innovation wasn't just about doing it yourself internally, which is what almost all companies did at that time in the early 90s. It was about doing it yourself, acquiring, and strategically partnering. Very few companies in multiple industries would disagree with that today. So, the playbook is similar. If you're one of the first three or five product areas that you really have leadership in, you have a chance of doing it internally. If you're the number 25 player into this category, thinking you're going to be in the top three to five, which are the only ones that are really relevant long-term, you're being unrealistic. Secondly- I'm going to pause you there. You just create your own category, right? And you're number one. Well, only if the industry experts and customers agree with the category. I haven't changed. I'm customer-driven. I do whatever my customers tell me on it. But today, what has changed is that speed of the movement and how quickly you either get leadership or you get left behind. And there are going to be a lot of companies left behind with AI and with cybersecurity implementing AI. Established startups, et cetera. So, it's one you better disrupt or you're going to get disrupted. And you're going to see categories of groups completely disrupted almost no matter what they do in terms of the direction. So, doing it yourself is still important to have internal innovation. Historically, the bigger the companies get, the more they struggle with internal innovation. They have the not-invented-here syndrome, but the penalties on that, if you don't get there quickly, somebody else is going to disrupt you. And we saw that, for example, with OpenAI, with Microsoft versus Google. How quickly that changed the whole philosophy about how quickly a established player could be disrupted by just one acquisition of a fascinating startup. And you saw follow on with a different play out of Meta with what they did in terms of exposing a lot of their capabilities open. Open into the marketplace. So, the speed of change is different. Acquisitions have also changed. Companies are going to do them earlier. If you had asked me for a startup that was only been around for four years, should they be acquiring in five years? I would say no, because they don't have the management team in place. They haven't got their customer set as well in place. You want to focus, focus, focus on your key product category ever. And if you do do acquisitions, they should be as close to your current major hubs, business-wise, so they incorporate into your culture, et cetera. That playbook's gone. I now believe that you move very rapidly, in part because of the technology we're using today with video and capabilities that Cisco and Zoom and Google and Microsoft and others have brought. You can do acquisitions remotely because people have gotten used to it. And that's a culture we're in. And you see the small acquisitions acquiring, companies acquiring much earlier in their cycle. So I have companies that are only $7 million in run rates and they're making major acquisitions on it. I mean, major acquisitions. And I think the probabilities on them being successful are good, but that market changed, both the speed requirement and otherwise. But as a basic premise, internal innovation, build by a partner, you're in acquiring and partnering, is that what innovation is about? That is still very much there. And I think leaders in the industry would do all three. So I'm going to go back in time again a little bit here. And I'm going to tie this to leadership and operations on the same concept of accelerated journeys here. Oh, I like this. I knew where you were going. I'd forgotten how much fun it was to interview with you. I think I know where you're going. And I agree. We'll see if we land in the same place. License model, subscription models, and the sales and even the marketing and development life cycles had to change to meet those new requirements. And there were the new model and approach. One thing to do it from a technology and pure licensing perspective. Another thing to actually succeed from a leadership and broad operational perspective here. So you just described some things where a lot is accelerating on the tech space, even acquiring tech to achieve the outcomes you want. Do you find that the leadership teams have the ability to accelerate along with the market driving them? And then to build teams that can do it as well? The answer is usually not and very hard, but in the sequence you raised them, my engineering teams always used to tease me. They would say, John, you still do. You're in strategy and vision, which is high strengths. That's for amateurs. Operations and execution is for us real professionals. And it really requires both and your ability to do both. And most CEOs are not good at both. And most startup companies are not good at both either. The companies who evolve into that, who evolve their leadership, re-innovate themselves, will over both to today, but also more importantly over the next decade, be those that lead. And so your ability to do that effectively becomes very, very important. That is a blended version of that. Now, your second part of the question was? Oh boy. Yeah, so I guess the leadership part of it, but then there's a lot of change accelerated in operationally as well. Ah, okay. And I look back at, you might have, you switch from a hardware device to software or enterprise license to subscription. Oh, I got it, got it. The answer is- Doesn't mean your sales team can automatically sell, right? I agree. Anytime you make fundamental change that is new in the market, it takes a while to do it and to really get it through. The premise, the cloud movement, what did that take? A decade is still going on in a major way. The ability to purchase as a service is still going on and I'll use network as a service. No one's ever done that really well. And we'll see if one of my startups with Pankaj Patel now, N-I-L-E, pardon my Southern accent, does that well, but that's one of the key premises. Now, interestingly enough, as they do that, they build in security and ease of use from the very beginning, as opposed to taking video and trying to make it easy to use after the fact, or doing networking equipment and then say, what's the security that I put on it? So ease of use, security integrated with the innovation, I think is the future on that. And companies that do it well will have to evolve into that at a speed that is my common, really what's changed most is the pace of change. I love it. And I wanna turn to the team part of it here. Before we start a recording, you were sharing a few bits of info about your area, West Virginia. And the change in innovation and change of doing good things there, not just from a tech perspective, but also in the universities. And so I wanna latch onto that last bit. Maybe you can share some of the stats you shared with me before we started recording about West Virginia. But I wanna end with your thoughts on, and I'm gonna pause for one second, because when I was at RSA years ago, I could not walk for five minutes and I would always run into somebody I knew. This year, now, Grant, I spent probably 90% of the time in Broadcast Alley, but I saw very few people that I knew, not less people, but fewer people that I knew, which told me or suggests to me that there's a new guard coming in, a new set of folks coming in that didn't have to learn on the job necessarily. They may have come from universities and other trade programs to enter the field. So what I'm leading to is, ultimately, kind of the shift and change in education and the shift in, not just the last time we talked about the two coasts having the innovation hubs, but the sharing the wealth of education and knowledge and innovation around the country. So I counted, I think there are 12 questions there. And I'll try to get as many of them as I can on it. I can re-summarize if you like. No, I got it. The first and most important is there's a tug of war between is technology for economic return and for shareholders, or is technology good for society? And the majority of Americans do not believe technology is good for society, in part because of what we've done in the technology industry over the last decade, which has been at times disappointing. So there's a tug of war of is this an and. It's both good economically and it's also very good for society. In the internet era in the 90s and early 2000s, 90% of America felt it was both good for society and good for our country. Today, less than 50% of America thinks technology is good for them and for the country. So you have challenges going on that didn't exist before. If we do our innovation, which is where almost all jobs occur and startups getting bigger, only in a Silicon Valley, an Austin, Texas, a New York, a Atlanta, Georgia, maybe a Miami, you leave behind 45 of the 50 states. You have to make innovation something that goes across the country and across the world. But I'll come to the world in a second. And Steve Case is doing that with many of his programs, et cetera. I'm doing it specifically in West Virginia. West Virginia when I grew up, coal miners, mining center of the world, 250,000 coal miners, 6,000 chemical engineers. It was the Silicon Valley of the whole chemical industry, FMC, DuPont, Carbide there. But because we didn't change, we got left behind. West Virginia six years ago is probably number 45 through 50 in almost every economic category. And with a focus about how groups that have never worked together, Democrats, Republicans, the two universities in the state, the ability to do start-ups and learning from IITs in India and Station F in France about the uniquenesses of it, outlining a vision to attract people in this state and say how do you set up your regulations and your taxes to do that effectively. And with dreaming that what people thought could never be done, in just five years we've moved from the very back end of the categories, we are number three in the nation on start-ups. We grew our start-ups last year at 90%. That includes pizza places, builders, tech companies, et cetera. The university, which had no technology start-ups five years ago, had 41 there at West Virginia University as an example. And the nation average is only 27, number three in just five years. We used to have a real serious problem with unemployment. Today the unemployment is the lowest it's ever been since records were kept in West Virginia. We have 60,000 job openings we cannot fill. We had trouble attracting any big projects into the state. And if we were lucky, we might get a billion-dollar project by a multinational to come in once every decade or two. In the last two years, we have six. Everything from Virgin Hyperloop to Berkshire Hathaway Energy to LG Electronics out of Korea to Forum Energy, Bill Gates program, et cetera, and we've got six more in the pipeline. And so you see a state that's reinventing itself, including its education, not educating people in silos, but the business school there, they do basically AI, cybersecurity, supply chain, big data, et cetera, and they bring it together with the engineering teams, et cetera, make entrepreneurship a key part of the education. So you can change, and if West Virginia can do it in just five years, other states, in fact, all states can do it. I'm doing a similar thing before in France where I'm honored to be President Macron's global ambassador for technology. And in India, he's head of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum with Modi on his digitization of his country. And India will be the number one country for the next decade on GDP growth, per capita increase in income, a standard living increase, and inclusiveness across 28 states, which is challenging, but it's because they have a digitization program to do it. So I think it will be inclusive. In fact, I'd argue if it's not inclusive, both on gender and all factors, geography and age, we're going to leave behind people and I think people will have social unrest. So am I a dreamer? I don't think so in terms of I believe in dreams coming true. I think we need to dream bigger and I think we're going to have a different sense of urgency much faster. I mean, it's incredible. And thank you for sharing all those bits with us. I want to, yeah, I'm thinking about the dreaming thing. Yes, we've forgotten. We've had to give it our back for 12 years with free money and great economy, and we thought it was us executing that was the reason things were successful. We didn't dream big enough. And we also realized that the key part of dreams, to your point earlier, is about not just strategy and vision, it's about operation and execution and doing it in ways that haven't been done before and catching these new technologies at the right time to do them. So let's pull on that. We're coming up toward the end here. So I want to use this opportunity to dream with you a bit. Okay. Because, I mean, let's face it. There's always a point during the conversation where we talked, and we did it here today, we talked about the risks and the negative impact that technology brings. So with a view for the future, and you can go broad tech or hone in on cyber, do both. Okay. What, how can we dream differently to achieve what we want? Well, you saw in your prior roles and still see it today that if all you do is apply technology and keep doing what you're already doing, you get very little advantage from it. A little bit of productivity, a little bit of improvement. You've got to disrupt in a much larger way and not have incremental change, but abrupt change to be able to go after these. And so if you think about how you become a digital company, a digital state, a digital country, and if you think about how you do it in an inclusive fashion, you've got to think about it in a disruptive type of approach and what you're going to do differently that hasn't been done, enabled by new technology. And that's where I got so excited 30 years ago about the internet, I saw it. Everybody that was buying our product when it came to Cisco was buying it, it was the techies buying it, and universities and government research. And I said, no, this is going to change. It's going to change our aspect of our lives. Turned out to be very, very accurate in how it occurred. AI is going to do it again. And while it has many downsides that we've got to deal with, it will create more jobs by far than it destroys, as every major technology has always done throughout the last four decades. It will, however, disrupt a lot of companies and people. And this is where you've got to have the courage to change. And everybody likes change until it affects them. So I would challenge the group that let's realize this is the world we live in now. My parents were doctors. They taught me to deal with the world the way it is, not the way, Sean, we wanted it to be. And then we've got to have the courage to disrupt. And I think it's up for grabs. There is no entitlement to Silicon Valley or to the U.S. in leadership here. But if we execute right, you'll see those countries, those geographies around the world that rethink about innovation differently and think about disruption differently, leading to a more sustainable world. And I think that's what we're going to be doing for the next several decades. That would be kind of the way I'd answer that question. I love it. And I'm just thinking, dreaming big, we communicate differently now, right? We connect with each other differently now. Yes, we do. We explore new places in space because of technology. And it's not just because we bought a piece of equipment and threw some software on it, right? Maybe one final point to your thought on this. Are there any dreams too big or too small? I've had the opportunity to have a number of people in my lives that were major mentors, that I learned a lot from, coaches, some were older than me, some were younger than me. But a couple that really come to mind are Henry Kissinger. That taught me an awful lot about diplomacy and how things evolved and very, very good friend. And another one was Shimon Perez, who passed away several years ago, that I knew very well for 17 years. And he really got after me about, John, you dream too small. And I thought I was dreaming huge. And people were telling me my bad dreams are too big. And he said, no, there's no room in this world for small dreams. You've got to think big dreams and you need to dream bigger. He wrote a book on that. So I actually think we've got to dream bigger. And small dreams for an individual are nice for what they want if you want incremental change. But if you're an individual who really wants to change dramatically, you've got to dream a little bit bigger and you've got to be willing to fail, Sean. Success almost never comes without getting knocked on your back. And Jack Welch, the CEO leader, the generation in front of me, taught me early on. He said, John, you're never going to be a good leader or a great leader until you have a near-death experience and the same thing is true for your company. You are a product more of your setbacks than you are actually your successes. So as we dream, you've got to be willing to do better.