Karissa Breen [00:00:12]:
Welcome to KB On the Go. Over the course of the week, I’m coming to you with the updates from the AUKUS Advanced Technology dialogue in collaboration with 2020 Partners. Our first event kicked off at Pier 1 in sunny Sydney before traveling over to the capital of Australia, Canberra, where the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, more commonly known as ASPE, hosted us in their offices. Stay tuned for the inside track from some of the up and coming technology companies, as well as some you already know. KBI Media brings you all of the highlights. But for now, to set the scene, you’ll first be hearing from founding partner, Greg Sim, who will share a little bit more about 2020 Partners and what their vision is all about. Joining me now in person is a founding partner from 2020 Partners, Greg Sims. So, Greg, tell me more about 2020 Partners.

Greg Sim [00:01:09]:
Well, thanks, Karissa. Well, 2020 Partners is a it’s basically a private network of senior security operational people. It was founded well, 2020 is a giveaway in the name, but the people that I was lucky enough to meet over many years being involved in cyber, some of them I got together with at the end of 19, during 2020, and suggested that between us, we knew a lot more people globally, global global allies, obviously, very much AUKUS focused, but other allies as well, other countries, and how we could maybe formulate it more, not formalize it, and there was a reason for that. We took on 1 or 2 different iterations of what the network could look like, but what we’ve ended up with is something very unique. And its uniqueness comes in the fact that the network has has is is autonomous. It’s no commercial connection to any individual or any entity. It’s not even a non for profit. So, basically, given that unique side to it, we’re able to collect people that are very senior former people, some very senior current people, because current people generally current, what I mean is they’re already in either government, federal government, law enforcement, even private sector.

Greg Sim [00:02:22]:
They either have ethics issues or they’re they’re not allowed to be part of any organisation. So this organisation is not an organisation, it’s a it’s just a network of people. So it gives them the ability to be part of the network without giving anybody any conflict. And what does that mean at the end? Well, what it means is that we have a collective power, and I always said from day 1 in starting this network is if we can harness the collective, these types of people are not seniority in a collective entity, then we can do things. We can move the needle. You know, any one individual, doesn’t matter who they are, it’s very difficult to move things. With this network, we can’t.

Karissa Breen [00:03:02]:
So when you say you want people to do things, what do you want people to do?

Greg Sim [00:03:06]:
Well, the the balance of the network is very important. So we have a mixture of people that come from former in intelligence backgrounds, come intelligence backgrounds, government entities, military, private sector, and those types of people, we’ve mixed between those operational people and also those practitioners. So we have a lot of, CSOs, CSOs, CIOs, and and actually will one of our objectives going forward, in my opinion, will be to attract some global CEOs, because with the the dynamics of the world, as we all know, and and the extreme polarization that pretty much most countries, have, it’s more important that geo everything from geopolitics to cyber and digital. It’s all it’s all mixed together now, you know, everything is digital. Digital is cyber, so our ability to bring these people together as a collective are to discuss things, you know, and we, as you know, Karissa, we don’t do events for the sake of them. We’re not an event company, but it’s a great way to bring these people together who normally might not be able to discuss things. They can just discuss things under a policy level most times, but being able to meet their old friends, new friends, let’s say, and talk about talk about issues that are really relevant to our allies and our allied countries is very, very important.

Karissa Breen [00:04:30]:
So a couple of other things as well, Greg. Why do you believe this network is needed from your perspective?

Greg Sim [00:04:36]:
Because nothing like it really exists. There’s pockets of it. You know, you go to, say, Washington, there’s always little pockets of networks and, for different things. Nothing’s really done what we’ve done on more of a global allied scale, you know, meaning that, you know, even under AUKUS, I mean, of course, we’re very much AUKUS focused, but we we have our colleagues in Singapore and Japan, in France, in Germany, and and and about to be in Spain. So I think when you can take different attributes of how people see security and not just operational people, but people, for instance, in geopolitics, then I’d we think that we’ve got a far better grasp on how to move the needle than pretty much any entity because, as I said, most entities are really locally focused. You’ll have them in Australia, of course. Those entities that can do that, but we’re able to kinda call it raising the bar. We really raise the bar on things by the type of people that we have.

Karissa Breen [00:05:34]:
And And

Karissa Breen [00:05:34]:
that’s interesting because that leads me to my next question. There are these pockets of these things that exist. However, I think in my experience of talking to people in the industry would be these these groups, these other entities that exist, and this is me generally speaking, is that they say, but what’s their affinity to the space? And I think by from what I can gather, 2020 partner network has a very extensive cadre, high caliber, strong pedigree of people, which I think is the difference. Would you agree with that?

Greg Sim [00:06:04]:
Yeah. I I I totally agree. It’s it’s really about the caliber of people because, you know, if you think about when when you have the type of people that we’ve got, and you know quite a few of them now, Chrissa, if you can harness that brainpower alone and that experience, I mean, it’s it’s incredible that you can start to think the application of that could be utilized. I mean, if you if you could capture what we have in the network and say an AI engine, can imagine the type of output that you could that you could probably achieve from it, it’d be be quite I mean, it would be incredible. And and, of course, the other thing I’ve not mentioned is it’s also important when you create a network like this that there’s a balance. We can’t have too many one and not enough for the other, and our technology partners, and we call them partners, are very, very important. They they’re great supporters of the network, and, of course, we have our own policy within the network that the technologies that become our partners are those that already that come from within the network, so they’re already known to the network, or the senior people in the network because a lot of the senior people are are advisors on different companies and they see things and, and and and the second one is that they’re already operation within 1 or more of our allied infrastructures. So that gives a high level of validation, and I like to use the words validation by association.

Greg Sim [00:07:26]:
Because when you have a cadre of people that we have and you have the type of brainpower and and these technologies, it really is a big validation for everybody. It’s self validating. And I kinda like to say that we’re trying to level the playing field, so anyone that comes into one of our gatherings, whether it’s a drinks, etcetera, or event, we want to make sure everyone’s on a level playing field. There’s nobody higher than anybody else. For instance and even even with the technologies, as as you know, we we have a no sell rule. And that’s important, very important, because when you have the practitioners, especially those that consume technology, there’s just there’s an awful lot of technology around. There’s an awful lot of of snake oil in a lot of these technologies. So for them to they that everybody’s tired of being sold to, everybody’s trying to sell something, but they don’t want to miss out on anything.

Greg Sim [00:08:23]:
They want to know if there’s something there that can really help my organization, my government entity, or whether it’s intelligence, whether it’s defensive, offensive. They want to know especially because it comes from within our network, so it has that high level of validation. We’re not discounting anything. We’re not discounting innovation, of course. I’ve always come from an innovative background, but I think that innovation to us needs to reach a certain level before we’re gonna say these and and and so we we do keep that balance for them, and our our technology our technology partners, they enjoy it because they get to be associated in these environments and are able to talk about their subject matter, their expertise, their threat intelligence. And so we’re being asked a lot actually by governments, law enforcement entities to actually help them and and bring together nothing to do with Selim, but been able to come and do briefings for them, for instance. So we’ll take some technologies out there. Specifically, we’d like more information around an issue, you know, whether it’s, you know, identity, mobility is always a big one.

Greg Sim [00:09:33]:
You know, big data transfer or we we we’ve just got such a great reach in to find these great technologies.

Karissa Breen [00:09:43]:
Joining me now in person is Patty McGuinness, a former UK deputy national security adviser, intelligence security and resilience, and is the current senior advisor at Brunswick Group. And today, we’re talking about what it means to be Quantum Ready. So, Patty, thanks for joining and welcome.

Paddy McGuinness [00:10:00]:
KB, thanks for having me.

Karissa Breen [00:10:02]:
Okay. So before we talk about Quantum, I wanna perhaps your title is quite a long title. And I want I wanna talk a little bit more about your pedigree and your experience first to really set the scene because I don’t wanna skim over that because it’s quite important and it holds a lot of weight behind it. So I’d love to talk to you about that first.

Paddy McGuinness [00:10:22]:
Great. Well, it it is a bit of a mouthful of that, and I’ve left government service behind me. I’ve been out of government service 6 years now. But when I was in government service, I led on national resilience to the United Kingdom, which meant the National Cybersecurity Programme, Crisis Response, and also responsibility for the National Risk Register, and the way in which the the United Kingdom thought about risk and how it would mitigate and respond and recover. And I’ve come out into business. And when I talk to business audiences, I say, you’ll be focused on that fancy title with intelligence, security, and resilience, and you’ll be excited by that. But actually, some of the most interesting insights I’ve got, I’ve got by being an adviser to business in recent years, seeing them deal with misconfigurations, changes in technology, cyber event, geopolitical pressures. And actually, that’s fresher than the work I did in government even though I draw on my government experience.

Karissa Breen [00:11:18]:
What did you like about working in government?

Paddy McGuinness [00:11:20]:
Well, there’s mission. There’s a really strong sense of mission. I mean, I was the last man before the prime minister, first David Cameron, Theresa May on the things that most affect the UK and the UK’s population. And I wasn’t allowed not to have a plan or a response. I had to have something that the system could do. So there’s a real sense of mission in that.

Karissa Breen [00:11:39]:
Do you think that and I know this is this is me just purely talking to you. I mean, curious. I’m driven by a mission. Would you say perhaps people out there or perhaps people that are maybe in the private sector aren’t driven by emission as such as people in the on the public sector, would you say?

Paddy McGuinness [00:11:53]:
I think it’s slightly different. I think, look, as individuals, so many people you find are fair minded and want to help others. So that’s a, you know, common motivation and behavior we see in our society. You see it when there’s some catastrophic event, and you see people reaching out for others as a train crashed, and people helping each other. And it’s a feature of Britishness, but it’s a feature of Australianness too, that we help each other. We help strangers. That’s actually a really interesting indicator. So I think that’s a motivation everybody has or many people have.

Paddy McGuinness [00:12:25]:
And then for business, no, I think there’s a strong sense of mission in business and that you often hear, you know, the value statement of businesses, but you often see it lived out that, you know, they they want to deliver the thing they say they’re gonna deliver. And they have to work hard to do it, and they have to strive to do it, particularly in the the areas we’ve been talking around in technology and making the contribution to national resilience or national defense, which is what we’ve been talking about the last few days together.

Karissa Breen [00:12:50]:
So now I wanna sort of flick over and talk about quantum. What is quantum? Now I ask you that question because when I go and speak to people out there in the market, I get various answers. Maybe distill it down. What does that mean to you when I ask you that question?

Paddy McGuinness [00:13:05]:
If I’m not an expert on quantum computing, quantum engineering, cubits, all of that, I’m not. I’ve been to I’ve had privileged access to people who are and to the corporations who are making the greatest progress in this area. That ability to compute at greater scale and speed than current supercomputers by an enormous stretch is clearly gonna be transformational, and we’re seeing so many interesting effects even now with the scale of compute we can bring to bear. But this is exponentially different. And my focus when I think about quantum is less about its delivery, because I’m not involved in that. I haven’t invested in that personally, nor do I work for companies that do that. But what I am seeing is a gradual step change in the approach that businesses have and governments have to the eventual arrival of quantum computing. And we’re already seeing reports or reports recently from China of some relatively low level encryption being broken by supposedly quantum compute.

Paddy McGuinness [00:14:16]:
I’m not sure that’s quite right, but it was reported that way. And that’s probably a harbinger of more that’s to come. And whether it’s to come in 10 years’ time, 5 years’ time, 15 years’ time, I think it’s hard to predict. And we’ve just had the experience, haven’t we, of artificial intelligence being something that we all talked about and was being researched and lots of people were working on. And then a sudden burst where it was commercialized. What about, you know, 2022 going 23 with OpenAI and all of that, and then all of the others on the products that have come out. And the world has changed because of it, or feels changed because of it. We’re at the beginning of now, an AI age where it’s actually gonna be delivered.

Paddy McGuinness [00:14:55]:
And I think quantum is going to come that way. And so the bit I’ve been focusing on is how do you get ready for that? And that might be get ready for it, you know, in 5 or 10, as I say, but it’s something that current business leaders need to be thinking about.

Karissa Breen [00:15:09]:
So we’ve had like if I go back, have the dark ages, stone ages, digital age, AI age. Do you think now we’re gonna get into a quantum age?

Paddy McGuinness [00:15:16]:
I think well, quantum is just much, much faster compute. Much, much, much faster and larger compute. That’s what that is. And in if you crudely break up what’s delivering for us at the moment, you’ve got the quality of the data and the availability of the data. You’ve got the ability to compute, and you’ve got an algorithmic application applied to that with, you know, AI. With quantum, that middle section I talked about there, compute, is just going to be so significantly altered. Now, of course, it’s not it’s not gonna be altered overnight just as we’re seeing. You can see people now talking about AI, and they’re saying, well, it’s not doing as much as people said it was doing.

Paddy McGuinness [00:15:54]:
The answer is, we’re in the very, very early days of this, and it’s societal effect. You know, give it time. And it’s of course, it’s not gonna come in in every aspect of life immediately. And I think the same is true in quantum. What one of the basic things I learned when in government service is that governments, when they describe what they want in terms of defensive security in the technology space to business, are describing, usually reflecting things either they know they can do or they know an adversary can do. And so we’ve recently had we’ve got a couple of things coming through. We’ve recently had I mean, last year I suppose now, or earlier this year I’ve lost track. Directions from the United States federal government, from CSUN, the United States federal government, and I think a presidential executive order on a requirement of federal institutions to do an audit of their cryptological holdings.

Paddy McGuinness [00:16:47]:
So there we are, federal bodies in the United States having to understand the way in which they use encryption. And the focus of that was trying to get them to be absolutely up to date in their use of encryption. And the reason for that is that the US can clearly see the beginning of real quantum or quasi quantum, almost quantum capability, which means that data which has been encrypted with older encryption is likely to become unencrypted and available when quantum compute or quasi compute is applied to it. So that’s what they’re trying to protect against. And it’s been quite interesting in the sessions that we’ve been doing in recent days together, KB, that when people have talked about quantum, CISOs have said of of major organizations have said, oh, yeah. Really that’s that’s a an encryption upgrade issue, getting ready for that. In fact, it’s scrubbing over in the first instance, it’s scrubbing over what data there is, how it’s encrypted, and arguably where it’s held. And that’s somewhere I’ve been focusing really.

Paddy McGuinness [00:17:52]:
How do you get ready in encryption space, so that as quantum comes in, you’ve got the time, frankly, to respond to the way in which it develops. And if you’re using out of date TLS 1, you know, uncertified encryption within your networks, and if you if you don’t really understand what’s happened to the encrypted data that you’ve moved and where it’s gone and where it’s held, ultimately, then you’re vulnerable, frankly.

Karissa Breen [00:18:19]:
So do you think from your experience, people are getting ready? I mean, you spoke about the US example, but what about allied countries? Do you think they’re getting ready?

Paddy McGuinness [00:18:25]:
No. I don’t think so at all. So I’ve been doing some work and cards on the table. It’s a company in which I have an interest, but I’m doing some work with a company called Venari Security, which is analogous to and was present prior to the emergence of Sandbox AI from Google. Now, Sandbox AI is looking to resolve this cryptologic audit. What’s happening in your network with encryption question, and various security very much does that too. And when we’ve been given by institutions, chunks encrypted data which are moving in their networks, they think it’s encrypted. We found a whole range of things.

Paddy McGuinness [00:19:01]:
We found a common feature which is TLS 1 encryption, not TLS 2. Okay. Fine. We found encryption without out of date certificates, which means it’s just simply no longer reliable. But also we’ve seen really interesting phenomena, like encrypted traffic going to unexpected delivery addresses, and then because it’s been distorted and taken away for a purpose, for instance, whole lot of it going to Moscow, quite interesting. Then we’ve also seen often that the header of a data flow will be encrypted. But behind that, even of, PII data or financial sensitive data, but the body of the data being moved proves not to be encrypted. But when it goes past your sensors, you say that’s encrypted, we saw the header.

Paddy McGuinness [00:19:48]:
So what that means is if you then apply to the networks on which that kind of traffic is moving about, well, first of all, you’re gonna be able to see the data which hasn’t been encrypted, which everyone believes is encrypted. But then secondly, you’re gonna be able to break out the, uncertified and t l s one stuff. And frankly, that’s just commonplace. So we’re beginning to see a drive towards cryptological audits. We see it in the US. I think it’ll be a feature of Dora. If you think about it, many many organizations have got in the rag indicated data they provide to their audit and risk committee, and through their audit and risk committee to their board, encryption will be a hygiene factor. They’ll say, oh, yes, we encrypt it end to end encrypted.

Paddy McGuinness [00:20:32]:
There’ll be all of that language. And they’ll have programs where they’re introducing that. Fine. That’ll be, you know, it’ll be made something that’s amber green or red amber. Fine. But also, when we look down our supply chain with this new European regulation that’s coming in in January, which is about operational resilience, Dora, we’ll be looking down supply chain. And many people will be saying, I’m confident in the movement of data to and from and through my supply chain because it is encrypted. But then that asks the question, what does that mean it’s encrypted? If we do an audit of that encryption, what does that look like? You know, are you actually just extending risk? You’re accepting data believing that, sending data or receiving data is safe because it’s encrypted, but actually the encryption is not fit for purpose given the time frame within which it can be broken out.

Paddy McGuinness [00:21:20]:
So that’s quite an interesting issue that I think we’re actually going to develop.

Karissa Breen [00:21:24]:
So you’re going back to my question around you you and you mentioned and so you’ve answered it by saying, no. We’re not really getting there. But do you think that Australia and UK and friends will start to become ready? What does that look like in your in your books?

Paddy McGuinness [00:21:37]:
Well, I think that looks like either general regulation or more likely individual regulators requiring of their sectors best practice, which will then spread everywhere. And also, of course, you’ll have the big providers from the cloud providers and others will begin to also offer and apply these techniques. When they surprise some bugs, they have come out of Google, and you know, Vinari is growing very nicely in partnership. And I think that will be turbocharged that kind of growth.

Karissa Breen [00:22:09]:
So when you said general regulation before, I mean, even if you okay. Let’s focus on AI for a moment just to draw a parallel. People struggling then with that because they don’t know what they don’t know, and they’re trying to come up with something. There’s no blueprint. Do you think there’s gonna be some struggles to try to regulate quantum as well?

Paddy McGuinness [00:22:26]:
I’m so I am I am focused very much on the cybersecurity consequence of the arrival of cybersecurity and what I’m talking about today. So that’s where I’m focused. And if one thinks about the cybersecurity consequence of artificial intelligence, there are kind of 2 or 3 on there. But one of them is, which is prevalent for many CISOs, is that AI platforms have become shadow IT. That within your network, people want to make use of AI tools. Maybe you don’t provide them. Maybe you’ve got Copilot or something else, but you probably don’t have, nor should you have, free and open use of just general publicly available AI platforms. But but your staff will be putting queries into those.

Paddy McGuinness [00:23:08]:
You just have to have rules in place and controls in place such that they aren’t putting privileged information into those. But your the possibility that you’re gonna prevent your staff from making use of AI tools as they become prominent and ultimately depended upon for the production of a whole range of products, which are then used in the workforce, particularly text based products, is just improbable. So so that’s one. And then there’s a whole thing about I know we focus on the way in which AI enables higher grade social engineering, deep fakes, all of that stuff, and much more carefully crafted phishing attacks, smashing, phishing, all of that, which I think is really interesting phenomenon to look at. Of course, we don’t talk about so much about the way in which AI is resolving some really significant cybersecurity issues that have been of concern for a while. So if one looks at the application layer, I think the way in which the development of applications has been improved so markedly by the availability of AI tools in the writing of the applications, not from the publicly available Internet, but from, you know, closed LLMs by used by, application developers of various kinds. And I’ve got some specific examples. That that’s transformational.

Paddy McGuinness [00:24:24]:
There was a time when we said, gosh, the application there is incredibly vulnerable. Now increasingly, it’s tightening and improving the security. It’s removing a category of security risk. So in AI, I think it’s kind of a mixed picture. I think it’s early days to say where we go with quantum per se and the way in which that’s regulated. Supercomputers aren’t regulated. Why would quantum be regulated?

Karissa Breen [00:24:46]:
Do you think as well so when I interview a lot of people and I’m going to a lot of these conferences, what I often hear is people say, oh, oh, it’s the government’s problem. You need regulation. Do you feel sometimes or sorry. More importantly, do you is this perception, especially industry, sort of just go, what’s the government’s problem? There’s a problem in industry or more broadly the government industry, but it’s government’s problem. I often hear that from a lot of industry people as well, that the government’s gotta regulate. The government’s gotta do something. Why is that the case from your experience of working in government, or is it because they just don’t have an answer so that we’ll just flick it back over the fence to government to solve?

Paddy McGuinness [00:25:17]:
Well, there are a couple of things. I think I’ll say that. I mean, the the first one is that changes in compute which undermine your security arrangements around data you’ve been given in trust are your issue. So, you know, so if you hold if you hold a low a low whole load of data health care data or other PII data that you hold, and currently you rely on encryption of a certain level to protect it, and then there’s a change in the nature of the compute that means that it’s no longer protected. That’s your problem. That’s not government problem. You know, you took the data and trust. And if you aren’t thinking about how you deal with that, then they’re the problem.

Paddy McGuinness [00:25:57]:
Some of that may be about cleaning up your data holdings incidentally or being more restrictive about where your data flows and is held. So that’s your that’s your issue. You learn very quickly, in business that there are very limited areas where you can actually transfer responsibility to government. This morning, we’ve been in a session together talking about the way in which advanced persistent threat, APT attacks are dealt with. My experience in my commercial practice, so not in government, in my commercial practice where occasionally, I don’t want to exaggerate, but occasionally, a client comes to us, they’re having a cyber event, and it becomes evident that the actor in their network is an advanced persistent threat, is a state actor. Sometimes, when you take that to a national cyber authority, they’ll they’ll engage really closely and be interested. Often, if the nature of the technique used is unique, and they want to make sure it isn’t systemic and isn’t being used elsewhere. But actually, APG attacks are ubiquitous.

Paddy McGuinness [00:26:57]:
So very quickly government says, thanks very much. But then they kinda stop, and then you need to go sort it out yourself. They don’t take responsibility for cleaning up your networks. They don’t take responsibility for your operational resilience. That’s your business with the APT in your network, not theirs. So any I always get very worried if I get brought into a board or a leadership group in a large by any company, but I tend to work with larger listed and and probably owned companies. And they where if they ever say, oh, yeah. Well, the government will help us with that, you know, because that’s just not the case.

Paddy McGuinness [00:27:31]:
Government doesn’t have the capacity. It’s got its own things to do. It can’t be cleaning up your networks because an APT’s got or you’ve got ransomware attacks and all of that. People are slightly naive about what government’s going to do for them.

Karissa Breen [00:27:41]:
And that’s what that’s why I wanna ask you that question because often in my interviews, I’ve off I’ve heard that as a response to things. And and as I said, maybe the assumption is they don’t have an answer, so was this gonna make someone else’s problem?

Paddy McGuinness [00:27:52]:
No. That’s right. I mean, I they don’t have an answer.

Karissa Breen [00:27:54]:
So So where do you think we move forward from this? In terms of quantum, and I know you don’t have all the answers, you don’t have a crystal ball, but obviously, you’ve with your knowledge and your experience.

Paddy McGuinness [00:28:03]:
Yeah. But it’s doable, isn’t it? It’s doable. If you say to buy yourself breathing spaces is what may be another significant technology. I don’t wanna use words like transformational or variation, and all those other things. Anyway, we’ve had, you know, Moore’s law. We’ve had extraordinary growth in, you know, the holding of data and the processing of data, and it climbs and climbs and climbs. And there’s all that stuff like, you know, people saying, you know, there’s more data generated in the last 3 years in all of human history and all that stuff. You know, all of those lines, 4 of which may or may not be true.

Paddy McGuinness [00:28:31]:
I’m not sure. I haven’t got a way of measuring it personally. So quantum is quite significant. But to buy yourself headroom, you just want to understand, you want to model what the reasonable worst case scenario of the arrival of quantum looks like, and then make sure that you’ve mitigated with the tools that are available now. And the key point is that tools are available now. And frankly, it’s not fundamentally different from implementing, you know, solutions to spam or solutions to commodity malware attacks or or it’s just another thing that you need to do within your networks.

Karissa Breen [00:29:07]:
Are you excited about the future with quantum of everything that’s happening? What are your thoughts on that?

Paddy McGuinness [00:29:10]:
I’m excited by the acceleration it could be. I’m also I’m also very concerned by a failure for joined up public policy. I was recently in Ireland. I do I do work with a wonderful think tank in Ireland called the Azure Forum, which is a strategic studies think tank, which is a bit strange in a neutral country. But Ireland finds it hard to be neutral now because whilst geographically, it’s moderately interesting being, you know, facing the Atlantic and with cables going ashore and whatnot and the Russian threat in the North Atlantic. But if you begin to overlay on that, the holdings and processing of data in Europe and the world, Ireland is an enormously significant country because of the way in which with its tax arrangements and with its workforce and its kind of openness with planning. Hollow data centers are still up there. And now loads of Europe and others data is being processed in in Irish data center.

Paddy McGuinness [00:30:04]:
But there is no more energy in Ireland, so there aren’t gonna be any more data centers, really. Licenses aren’t being issued now because you can’t get an energy connection. And there’s a lot of talk about renewables providing perhaps an increase in energy, and that doesn’t look very probable. And it does feel to me as if there’s a fundamental there’s gonna be a fundamental difference between them that have the energy to compute at scale and them that don’t. And I think the European Union, possibly the United Kingdom, probably the United Kingdom won’t. And possibly Australia won’t. And what’s what the thing which is hard for me to really fully get my head around is when we sit in a room with folk who are working AI futures all the time, and you and I were in a room like that on Friday last, they say, there’s a really interesting thing. When you have scale and speed of compute scale of data, when you have that going on and you apply and you’re you’re running AI algorithms, that’s when you get unpredicted effects that are sometimes really significant, and they’re quite difficult to track.

Paddy McGuinness [00:31:11]:
How they happen, but they’re quite interesting what they do. Now if that remains true and and so that if you process more data at greater speed, you get more of those effects. That kind of innovation is gonna be going on in the United States and China. It’s not gonna be going on in the European Union and elsewhere because they’re only gonna be the energy. Because only they’re going nuclear. Only they are going nuclear. And that’s you can see already. It’s not, you know, it’s not happenstance that AWS and Microsoft and Google are all saying.

Paddy McGuinness [00:31:41]:
I’m not just saying they’re doing. I mean, I’m I’m involved in a company that’s a private equity fund that’s invested in X Energy. X Energy have been chosen by Amazon Web Services to be their small modular reactor of choice, and there are gonna be a set of them built alongside daters in the United States and, you know, in the next decade. And that’s gonna be the difference, I think, between really having sovereignty in the outer state space and not.

Karissa Breen [00:32:09]:
Joining me now in person is Toby Jones, founder from TJC. And today, we’re discussing the convergence between government and industry. So, Toby, thanks for joining, and welcome.

Toby Jones [00:32:18]:
Hey. It’s great to be back with UKB. We just had a great couple of days with like minded people thinking about the implications of government and industry working together for collective national security and defense.

Karissa Breen [00:32:28]:
Okay. So, you know, you and I have had a couple of chats over the last few days. And one of my observation is that government people don’t really know industry people. Now I’m asking you because obviously you’re seeing things and you’ve worked in, you know, multiple sort of pockets. But for me, I’ve come from the industry and that was just one of the key things that I’ve seen over the last few days. All these government people talking to me, government doesn’t seem that there’s a lot of industry contact. So I’m just curious to know from your perspective, what’s going on there?

Toby Jones [00:32:56]:
Well, to start with, you need to think about, I think, some shared values in terms of what we all want to achieve. We all want to sustain the impact and value of the work we do, whether that’s through the products and services that we develop and deliver for our businesses or whether it’s for the public services, which, are critical to the well-being of our economy, our citizens, frankly, our families and friends around us. So we’re motivated by similar things. We need to be successful in the work we do, but we also have some very fundamental differences. Public sector is accountable for value for public money, taxation, and results and transparency and fairness, and creating the right playing field for us all to thrive in as businesses. Now, actually, good businesses work in very similar ways. But those differences in terms of where our accountabilities lie mean that we see the world in slightly different ways. And now I think we are starting to see a real convergence towards much more collaborative in fact, I don’t think you I don’t even think collaborative does justice.

Toby Jones [00:33:57]:
Much more collective work on shared problems, and that’s to be really welcomed.

Karissa Breen [00:34:01]:
It appears that there’s this shared problem. However, it feels that someone is trying to own it, but then of course, what I’ve seen in the terms of government agencies or bodies or starting up these little think tanks, not really getting attraction. And the reason why I say that to give context would be kind of feels a lot of these government folks perhaps lack in operationalizing and commercializing something. Do you have any insight on that?

Toby Jones [00:34:28]:
Yeah. Absolutely. And, of course, that goes to the heart of some of the differences between how we operate and and what we have to achieve. Often, you know, public service public servants will be operating with a well understood institution with a well understood set of services. And it may be some of those institutions or services haven’t changed or updated significantly for some time. They’re operating because they need to deliver consistency. They need to deliver value, and they need to do it in an understood and transparent way. Businesses, much more creative, constantly innovating to be ahead of competition, to find new ways of teaming, to enter new markets.

Toby Jones [00:35:02]:
That creates a very different type of dynamic from what you might see in public service. But having said that, when you take a step back and look at the ultimate things that really matter for our society, that’s our collective security together, whether that be from a defense or counterterrorism or homeland security point of view, whether it be about our national defense or our international cooperation. We need all of those things to work too, both of which we share interests in between the private sector and public sector. And that’s where I think we’re beginning to see a realization that we have to come together to make more of what we have together because we’re in this together. So we’re seeing public servants and, private sector businesses and their staff and teams and experts coming together to share over those bigger problems and to find ways of using industry smart products and services in a really effective and pacy way and pull those through to delivery and to public service. So that’s starting to be a shared endeavor together for those bigger goals.

Karissa Breen [00:35:57]:
Okay. So the couple of things in there that I want to ask you about. One thing is, yes, we can go and have all these amazing chats. However, I’m a very rubber to the road sort of person. What I’ve often found is people having these nice conversations and lovely dinners and coffees, and then nothing happens after it just evaporates. What would you say with your experience and things that you’ve done and you’re doing to ensure that there’s that stamina there to ensure that the wheels keep turning? Because again, as we know, it’s someone saying, well, I’m going to start exercising and lose £20 and then all of a sudden, you know, it gets to week 2 and they’re over it. How do we avoid the the over it feeling?

Toby Jones [00:36:33]:
Yeah. And, maybe if we can extend that metaphor a little bit further later on, how do we stop the weight coming back on again and us returning to existing behaviors? So let’s talk about why it is we get together to have these discussions in the first place, like the advanced technology dialogue that we’ve just been part of. That’s about sharing experiences, leveling expectations. Now, I think, most importantly, frankly, creating some commitments to each other about how we’re going to behave or what we’re going to think when we leave the room. Now, of course, that’s not think. We’ve got many influences around what happens when we leave the room, when we finish those conversations. But if we don’t have those conversations to set out each other’s perspectives and needs and to get as far as we can to a common view about what we’re pledging to do when we leave the room. For example, finding ways of bringing more private capital into innovation and new technology for public service, or finding ways to be more transparent about the problem book within public services, within defense, within national security, or finding ways to connect businesses together to be able to team to deliver a better result for the public sector and public citizens.

Toby Jones [00:37:35]:
Maybe realizing that there’s a government role or a public sector role in helping organizations, particularly smaller organizations, team together and recognize how they can perform more strongly, more sustainably together. If we don’t have those conversations in the first place, then we’re not making the commitments that we need to carry through into day to day jobs afterwards. And frankly, I think in day to day work, it can be hard to find the space to actually figure out what we need to be able to do to collaborate across sectors. So I think sometimes the amount of talking is very important. Then to what we do about it, we need to see that through. And you asked about my experience. Well, we’re here in in Canberra, and we’ve been in Canberra and Sydney and Melbourne, working with colleagues in Australia for the last year because we’re super excited about some experiences we’ve had in the UK that we will offer up to Australian public service, to Australian SMEs and startups as a way of creating practical spaces to bring together services, products, businesses, bring those together and team to deliver results and impact solutions for those big public service outcomes in security, defense, law enforcement, justice, health, and so on. The platform in the UK is known as ACE.

Toby Jones [00:38:40]:
It’s sponsored by government, but it’s a partnership between the public sector and private sector. So it becomes a real vector, a real place, a real organization, real people working day to day on big, naughty problems to see through those pledges that we make to each other when we talk about how we’re going to work together in the future.

Beth Sanner [00:38:56]:
So what I’m hearing from

Karissa Breen [00:38:56]:
what you’re saying is, again, we need to have these conversations, but it’s more what do we do once we leave the room? So it’s like the conversation exists to understand where where everyone’s at. What do I know? What do I don’t know? Where are the gaps? Then deciding this is how we fill the gap. Have you often seen, though, in your experience, Toby, with people saying, okay, this is we have identified the gap, but then after we leave the room, nothing then happens. There’s no follow on. There’s no movement, moving of the needle. What would you say now with your experience in your pedigree of doing this in the United Kingdom that people can sort of learn from that? How do we ensure that we do learn these lovely, nice things? But again, we are moving the needle in the right direction.

Toby Jones [00:39:35]:
So persistence. I mean, that’s back to that point of how do we make sure that we don’t put the weight back on again afterwards once we’ve done all this good work to get us to a better place than really in the first place. Well, part of that is being able to to continue the conversations or if you will, the mutual holding to account. So being able to beat with, talk about, and show the data about what progress is being made or not in the delivery of public services is really important. So, for example, data and information about SME engagements, about rate of contract award, about return business, data and information about the timescales that it takes to be able to award contracts and see those through into fruition and delivery, the proportion and value of funding which goes from public service to SMEs and academic institutions or startups, engagement with the private equity sector, whether that be venture capital or much later on elsewhere. These are all tangible measures where we need to see as much transparency as possible between sectors to be able to ask ourselves, are the environments we’re now creating, are the ways of working we’re starting to put together and and deliver in order that people can put their solutions into public service in a partnership between the public sector and private sector? Is it really working? So data and transparency is really important. And to your question, what can we do if it’s not working? Well, it’s like everything else in life. You have to return to the arguments, hold to account whether it be we’re getting the right engagements across communities within the private sector or academia or the public sector and diagnose and act on proactively.

Toby Jones [00:41:02]:
I’d like to say occupy the space to a little aphorism we use as a team to be able to keep pressing on and keep trying to fight the good fight and make the difference. But having that data, I mean, it’s unarguable in terms of progress you’re making. And to give you an example, since I talked about data, in the UK, the platform, a, is the accelerated capability environment, has received across more than 500 assignments within the public sector over the last 7 years across many of those domains I mentioned earlier on a very broad range of public services has received more than £250,000,000 worth of funding for several 100 of these assignments, And 3 quarters of that funding has gone to SME startups and academic institutions, not for just research, not for proof of concepts, for being able to pull through new technology into public service. That’s a phenomenal result, and it’s illustratable not just by the way that we hear SMEs, startups, founders, technologists, and public servants talk about what they’ve experienced in a qualitative way. It’s evidenced by the data of how much funding has, been channeled through that supply chain.

Karissa Breen [00:42:08]:
What do you think people don’t get about government in terms of industry folks?

Toby Jones [00:42:14]:
Now that’s interesting. And I’m I’m speaking as someone who spent about half my career in the public sector in the UK. I’ve worked for agencies and government departments. I’m a technologist, a community scientist, and I think that brings some interesting dynamics to your ability to your space in the room, play your part in the team. You know, sometimes I think in the public sector, scientists and technologists can be somewhat subjugated in their right to be able to express or influence or exhibit leadership because it’s a specialist career. On the other hand, actually, it’s quite possible if you occupy the space and make your points to be able to bring your expertise from a science technology point to view. So I spent about half my career fighting good fights in the public sector from a science and technology point of view, working as a researcher, working as a design authority, working as a systems engineer, working on national executive as a national executive in big, nasty, thorny national delivery programs that are sort of 1,000,000,000 of sterling. So that, you know, that’s a public sector sort of experience.

Toby Jones [00:43:09]:
I’m gonna draw on that in a second. Equally, I’ve worked in the private sector. I’ve worked in multinational technical consultancy. I formed my own startup, TJC, in the UK, and that’s that’s growing in the way that we’re delighted with. I’ve worked as a freelancer. So I can draw on that sort of experiences when I say what I’m about to say. And I think that one thing that really it’s difficult to express, it’s the democratic accountability that comes with being a public servant. You people have heard certainly in the UK of civil service values, and I’m sure exactly the same exists.

Toby Jones [00:43:40]:
I know it does here in Australia for the Australian public service. There are set of standards and behaviors that really are about every single thing that you date do day to day. It’s not a secondary thought. It’s a primary thought in how you approach every problem. That’s about fairness and value to for money and impartiality and, in impartiality, advice to ministers in a similar vein. And it’s about that loyalty and confidentiality in terms of what you do and the way you explore problems. Those matters ultimately roll up into your accountability for public results. That’s so visible.

Toby Jones [00:44:11]:
And it’s such a privilege to work as a public servant, but it’s so visible and so consequential for our society. That dynamic leads to a set of behaviors institutionally that make you feel, I think, when you work in the public service different. It makes you feel that accountability every single day. And if you make the wrong decision, in other words, if you make the wrong decision, you’re trying to be entrepreneurial in the public service. That could be quite challenging because risk is a really significant factor. But not the sort of risk you see every day in businesses managed very well. The risk of failing to deliver public service or the risk of exposing some confidence in policy development or the risk of, more importantly, perhaps creating an unfair playing field for businesses or others to excel in. So the consequences of those risks affect multiple organizations and multiple people every day.

Toby Jones [00:44:58]:
And I think that kind of dynamic when combined with public service values changes what it feels like to be a public servant. I think introducing new leadership into public service that can can empower individuals, maybe overcome some of the more conventional inertia of institutions in public service and bring to life, let’s say, some more entrepreneurial behaviors in how risk is managed, how leadership is expressed, how change happens from a public service point of view. That’s a real opportunity for public service. And frankly, I’ve seen that, for example, in the UK, and I’m not speaking about Australia here. I’m not changing the Australian public service, but certainly for a UK point of view. That investment in public servants to understand contemporary leadership and the dynamics around how to be an entrepreneurial leader, that’s worked really well to affect change in public service in the UK. And I think, you know, that can go down well anywhere.

Karissa Breen [00:45:47]:
Case a couple of interesting points you made there as in failing, you know, people don’t want to fail at public service. They fail all the time, though. And then you often see the memes online, trolling that exists, the money that was blown on something. And we did this whole project means blew 100,000,000. Now we’re going to scrap it and start again. That infuriates in the industry because one, they know how hard it is to make that money. 2, they got to get the money from somewhere. And 3, the observation that I’ve heard working in industry and for people is that there’s all of swanning around.

Karissa Breen [00:46:16]:
There’s a lot of going to nice dinners and doing all this stuff and then delivering nothing. So I would say that there’s this assumption, and you can correct me, is that government people don’t really do anything. Would you agree that however, going back to the start of the interview and the convergence, perhaps government people are not very good at explaining what they’re doing. Perhaps they are doing all these things. I would say that from an industry perspective, people are struggling to see that.

Toby Jones [00:46:40]:
So firstly, I’m going to say, since you advised me up to say so, I don’t agree that public servants are doing nothing. I don’t agree at all with that. I can understand that frustration can lead to, misunderstandings about day to day activities of different organizations. And I’m sure, you know, you can look at this in multiple directions and say and I’ve I’ve heard and we’ve all heard, if you’re a public servant, where you’re working with in the public service, sometimes you can hear, you know, quite simplified views of what perhaps they think motivates businesses. And I know that’s incorrect too. So I think there can be misunderstandings. And that goes to a point about communication, and that is where we’re seeing a lot of changes. Just one area we’re seeing a lot of change where there is really quite significant communication on a day to day basis happening between public servants, business founders, technologists, and others.

Toby Jones [00:47:26]:
You know, that’s something we need to keep perpetuating and growing, keeping those channels of communication more and more open and knowing that it’s safe to be able to have conversations like that without becoming partial or unfair in what might happen later on in terms of acquisition or procurement and so on. So challenges of communication, number 1, are important. But actually, I’d let me go back to your point about, you know, whether defending and developing public services and value for money really works well with that special accountability of public servants, given what we have witnessed globally. It’s not unique to any one nation in terms of value and delivery. And and, you know, I think you use the phrase of, you know, the the risk of wasted money. And and clearly, we can all read reports and headlines that are very, very important and taken very seriously when it comes to what happens on big change programs, big investments from, say, a public sector point of view when those deliver late or they sometimes don’t even deliver at all to the satisfaction of frontline and and the taxpayer. Well, you know, in those circumstances, for me, that’s where we point out the opportunity of of a little bit more bravery in entrepreneurial leadership and that change in leadership, which I think can enhance the ability of the public sector to wield its insights and its authority and its accountabilities to deliver good public outcomes even better. Because if we have a generation of leaders that begin to understand because their experience is how to navigate risk a little bit differently, how to collaborate in a way that gets the most from private sector businesses, from those that, you know, invest their capital and have capital provided in a different form from the public sector.

Toby Jones [00:48:54]:
So we see an alignment and understanding of the dynamics of business organizations, public sector organizations, and a different way of managing or sharing risk. In fact, obviously, managing risk, but sharing risk between those sectors. That’s where a new breed of leadership in the public sector can really change, I think, what we can deliver in the future stepwise, problem solving together, solution finding, solution delivering together between the sectors. That’s not a dream. That happens today. It happens in quite a number of hubs and organizations where there has been a choice to use procurement regulations, whether they be common procurement regulate Commonwealth procurement regulations here or Quebec in the UK are public procurement regulations. A little bit differently, still compliant. But where we seek partnerships, where we seek acquisition methodologies that are about innovation and then build incrementally towards solutions so we can steer and manage risk as we go.

Toby Jones [00:49:45]:
So important to emerging technologies or with this ambiguity and requirement. To do that requires a really different type of model from the transactional relationship that we’ve seen in the past. And I do believe that public servants are increasingly seizing the opportunity to express themselves professionally and to be able to work in that way that’s much more collaborative and partnering. I think we just need to see much more encouragement of that. So when it works, as it does often, magnifying the success, sharing the good stories. I mean, we’re here to share our experience in the UK. I realize, you know, clearly, Australian needs and dynamics of society is very different to the UK in terms of, you know, what’s needed to make solutions work for societal and economic impact. But nonetheless, some meta things that have worked in the UK about public service and private sector working, I very strongly believe, will work very well here, in Australia.

Toby Jones [00:50:33]:
So we can point at the success of this new generation, new style of leadership that we’ve seen in the UK that I see emerging in Australia and ask ourselves, shouldn’t we magnify the success more rather than obsessing about where things have gone wrong in decades gone by? We’ve learnt from that. We should be doing more of what works well now.

Karissa Breen [00:50:48]:
So what I’m hearing from what you’re saying is the reason why people have this perception that people don’t do anything, in inverted commas, is never good at communicating it. And when you’re in a private business, what do we always hear about? Earnings, they did this, they did that, they created a partnership, they’ve hired this person. Is it a media thing that perhaps people like myself that are in trade media are not talking so much about it? Is it that to your point earlier that they need to take a different approach in leadership and being more open about the things that they’re doing? So do you think there is that gap that does need to be filled from your experience?

Toby Jones [00:51:21]:
I think there’s I think there’s an opportunity. I certainly think there’s an opportunity in my experience to tell even more about the struggles and challenges and needs and successes of what’s happening within the public sector. There are lots of really powerful stories, that are learning points, that are successes, that are collaborations, that are partnerships that have worked effectively. There are new products or services that have been delivered and developed. They’re not really celebrated enough in terms of a national platform with perspective. But let me just draw some parallels. So you talked about is it a media thing in the private sector? If we think about what’s in part right. What fundamentally, from a private sector point of view, you know, provides the basic resource, the very basic resource for a private sector organization to work.

Toby Jones [00:52:10]:
That’s about its capital. It’s either work capital or its investment capital. And that comes from shareholders or it comes from a strategy which might be not profit related but still provides for capital on the balance sheet. And so when it comes to the sort of excitement around reporting and telling the story, that’s about being able to explain to people who own the capital or who influence the capital businesses survive on, what’s going on, what the successes are, what the future looks like to maintain the confidence in that capital being available, being utilizable, being ready to put into that business or product as opposed to some other business, service, or product. And so being able to tell the story to the from a point of view the most fundamental resources is really important. If you look at the public sector, the dynamics are slightly different. Now one level you might say, well, the fundamental resource there is ultimately the taxpayers money, and so the story needs to be told to taxpayers. And I get that.

Toby Jones [00:53:04]:
But if you think about the day to day behaviors, the fundamental accountabilities, are ministerial accountabilities. And so the storytelling, the explanations, the narrative, the detail on a day to day basis frequently always makes it up to ministers and ministerial accountability, and the pathways that provide for that accountability. So the narrative and communication and storytelling, which is most fundamental on a day to day basis, to the operation of the public sector works in that way. And there’s super transparency and super information is shared. I mean, that’s something that public back to public sector values, public servants pride themselves on. Is there a their ability to be able to provide situational awareness, honesty, and a complete picture to ministers. And so in a similar sort of way, if you see what I mean, they are really sharing their information. But I think like in all things, you would take a step back and say, what is it that we’re trying to achieve in this way of working that I’ve said can be so powerful.

Toby Jones [00:53:56]:
This collaboration between sectors. And that means starts to suggest that actually to be successful in public service, it’s not just about your capital and responsibility and, you know, authority derived from ministers and your need to communicate with them. It’s also about your ability to be partnering across sectors, working with private sector bodies, working with academic institution, working with non governmental organizations. And that might suggest that, therefore, the communication to those sectors and organizations really could do with a shot in the arm. And perhaps that’s something to reflect on in terms of an opportunity for the future.

Karissa Breen [00:54:31]:
Joining me now in person is Beth Sena, former deputy director for Mission Integration, ODNI, director, geopolitics and strategy, international capital strategies. And today, we’re discussing the gray zone. So, Beth, thanks for joining and welcome.

Beth Sanner [00:54:45]:
Thanks so much for having me.

Karissa Breen [00:54:47]:
So tell us, what is the gray zone?

Beth Sanner [00:54:49]:
So one of the things that I think is a big challenge for us right now is that, you know, we think about war. We think about war in terms of, wow, is nuclear war possible? And we’re thinking about that more than ever. We have active wars, more wars this year than we’ve had in history, in the post world war 2 history. And yet really the war that is facing us or at least attacks that are facing us, are things that we don’t think about that much, but are really present in our everyday lives. Cyber attacks are the things that come to mind. But really what the gray zone is, and some people call this hybrid warfare, it is the space, this gray space between bullets flying and peace. And these are now becoming, and we can talk about what those mean, but they affect real citizens across the world in places where you don’t really think we’re at war.

Karissa Breen [00:55:52]:
So the piece of literature that you sent me earlier in, ahead of this interview, and at the start of it, it sort of mentions it’s obviously written by yourself and it’s been I’ve been asking whether they believe we’re at war, and most of the audience had voted yes.

Beth Sanner [00:56:06]:
Yeah. I mean, most of the audience in the beginning doesn’t vote yes, but at the end, when I go through what gray zone attacks are, and this is everything from cyber attacks by nation states burrowing into our critical infrastructure, either to do nefarious things now, but to prepare for the potential of disruption prior to war or in the beginning of a war. GPS spoofing that

Karissa Breen [00:56:35]:
we have

Beth Sanner [00:56:35]:
aircrafts in many parts of the world where GPS is being disrupted. We’ve had many arson attacks. We’ve had plans of attacks against the Paris Olympics. We’ve had a very advanced plot by the Russians to assassinate the CEO of Europe’s biggest defense company, Rheinmetall. And we’ve had 2 DHL packages explode in warehouses with the understanding from the Polish intelligence service that these were from the Russian intelligence service, the GRU, and that the plan that they were working on or testing was potentially to put these on DHL flights on the way to North America. And we just had an experience in the last 2 days of a DHL flight going down outside the Lithuanian capital Vilnius. No idea whether that’s pilot error or some other mechanical problem or in a worst case, maybe one of these packages exploding too soon to tell. We’ve also had telecommunications cables cut.

Beth Sanner [00:57:51]:
It looks by sabotage and the Baltic connector, gas pipeline in the Baltic Sea also being destroyed and it took 6 months to put it back online after a Chinese vessel took it out by dragging its anchor across. So there’s just so much of this going on and we have a lot of vulnerability in our spaces And yet, we haven’t really come to terms with the most important thing here is that this looks like lots of things. It looks like individual lots of things. But in fact, it’s one concerted campaign by an adversary and multiple adversaries to disrupt our societies and polarize our societies and to make us weaker.

Karissa Breen [00:58:41]:
And the other thing I’m reading as well, which the operative verb would be polarization. So it says perhaps these include the culture wars and polarization of our country, meaning the United States. So do you think because of what’s happening in the US at the moment, that’s why people are sort of starting with the yes. But when you’re going through it, they’re sort of getting more to the no because of how the US is sort of situated at the moment of one end of the spectrum to the next. Is that sort of based on what I’m reading?

Beth Sanner [00:59:07]:
These attacks on our society are happening in every country, not just the United States. You know, one of Russia’s main goals in this kind of campaign is to diminish European support for the war for Ukraine and supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia. And it’s also to divide Europe from the United States as well as divide our societies from within. And, you know, it’s very easy to see that these kinds of different disinformation campaigns that we’re seeing also China use to diminish opposition to things that they don’t like or to encourage things that they do. For example, on August, one of the things we’ve been talking about together this week is, you know, AUKUS is certainly not a favorite of the of the Chinese. They don’t like alliances that are working against China. And there’s a real risk that that China is directly engaged in kind of diminishing societal support for AUKUS.

Karissa Breen [01:00:12]:
And would you say as well, based again what I what I’ve been reading and what you’ve been saying, Beth, over the last few days is having that division with Europe, like you just mentioned, that’s it’s gonna weaken the position then. Is that sort of, like, they they go by doing that, weaken the position with the US and then the allied countries then as well?

Beth Sanner [01:00:29]:
Yeah. I think that the only way that China, that Russia, you know, that North Korea, Iran, other, you know, adversaries can win is really by making us divided and weaker and smaller because they can’t. If we actually are combined together, we are stronger. One data point today that one of our colleagues at ASPE pointed out was that, you know, in terms of innovation research, for example, that if, you just take the US versus China and you count up the number of patents in all of these core technologies, advanced technologies, China’s doing more. It’s leading in these ways than the United States. But if you took the United States and you added in Australia and the UK, and what these three countries are doing together, we would actually be dominating collectively what China is doing. And so you know I think that we need to see ourselves internally, each of our countries and then collectively together as allies that that our strength is by combining the best of each of us into a stronger whole. And I think that that’s one of the most energizing things that I’ve gotten out of this week being here and talking about AUKUS pillar 2 and all the technology collaboration and synchronization that we are really beginning to do together and how that is the way that we’re going to ensure that we we stay competitive.

Karissa Breen [01:02:13]:
So you mentioned before, Beth, having that collective so all gets Australia, UK, US could be essentially stronger than China. Do you think we’ll ever get to that point where we we are stronger than then? And I know it’s it it does take a while for those those three countries to be aligned. So intention’s there. But do you think we’re able to pull off in terms of the execution in your experience?

Beth Sanner [01:02:33]:
Well, you know, I think it depends on what we’re talking about. You know, China is definitely a peer competitor, a near peer competitor and in some technologies has achieved its goals of dominating the global market in in some of its targeted key areas of of technologies. For example, electric vehicles and solar panels. Right? And so we have to focus on the things that matter the most to us that we see as being absolutely core to our competitiveness and the strength of our societies going forward in this modern world we live in. And that means that, you know, no kidding, we have to be great at quantum. We have to be great at AI. Luckily at AI, we’re dominating in the most important aspects of that, not in everything, but we have to keep our edge. And, you know, personally, I think that keeping our edge means investing in ourselves, in our people, in our workforces, in our educational systems, that we get stronger, not just by trying to wall ourselves off or or keep China down, but our strength will be in continuing to grow ourselves and invest in ourselves.

Beth Sanner [01:03:54]:
And by doing that collectively, we bring a lot more capital and, you know, and diverse perspectives and, and collaborative and, and like cooperative niches, you know, where each of us have strengths and we can, we can make the most of those. So I think it is possible, but we actually have to decide collectively that we want to do this and that we trust each other and we’re gonna break down our barriers in order to be successful. And I I see very positive signs in that.

Karissa Breen [01:04:24]:
So do you have any thoughts, Beth, towards the whole government plus private sector strategy for gray zone sort of attacks? Is there any

Beth Sanner [01:04:29]:
Yeah. Well, I think that we have to understand that the private sector is generally the place where all of these attacks are happening or most of these attacks are happening. I mean, some are happening, you know, against arms manufacturers, but those arms manufacturers, you know, those warehouses, that CEO, that’s private sector. And so we have to understand in government and the private sector that the that the private sector is the entity are the entities that are on the x here. And it’s the government’s responsibility to help them share threat information and support the private sector by collaborating much more from the beginning, talking about strategic threats and tactical threats and creating mechanisms where we can have that continuous dialogue and not figure out, you know, well, wow, where’s the phone number when I need it right now, I’m in crisis. So I think we lack mechanisms where we can have that ongoing dialogue in the right spaces with enough of the right people. Right now, they’re a little bit too stovepiped and, you know, it’s the favorites that that are, you know, the cool kids that are, you know, in the conversations, but there’s a lot more in our private sectors that need to be brought in. So today, the last few days, and in Sydney before, you know, we had a great mix of public private sector, and I think that this has been a really wonderful aspect of this visit.

Karissa Breen [01:05:59]:
So as you before, support the private sectors as in the government, there’s a couple of comments that I’ve heard over the last few days that some of the government speaks in high level theories rather than practicality. And coming from industry myself, that’s something that I often hear from from industry around government speaking more and high level theories rather than practicality. What do you think needs to change there in your experience?

Beth Sanner [01:06:20]:
I think that we need to, you know, figure out ways of getting to the nitty gritty. And that means that we have to have trusted relationships and we have to have trusted mechanisms, including like, you know, a way of communicating electronically that is in a trusted space that’s like not a day late and a dollar short. And I think oftentimes the conversation that government has with the private sector is often, you know, really high level. It’s not specific. It is 3 weeks later, and that doesn’t happen all the time. It depends on what sector you’re in, but we have to figure out how we can do that. And we have to figure out how industry trusts and should trust the government more by maybe figuring out who those interlocutors are, that it’s different than the regulators. Maybe the people you’re having a threat conversation with are different than the people that are regulating you so we can improve that that level of trust.

Beth Sanner [01:07:26]:
But, yeah, there’s work to be done. And personally, I think the work always should be done on a pilot basis, on a on a specific action plan and area. You have to prove that you can do it and start small instead of starting like humongous and and then being overwhelmed.

Karissa Breen [01:07:46]:
So anything we go from here? I know that we’ve sent last few days in Sydney and Canberra. We’re coming sort of now towards the end of our August advanced dialogue with 2020 partners. But what are your sort of thoughts moving forward? Obviously, there’s a new administration in the US. Do you have any I know you don’t have a crystal ball. You don’t have all the answers, but I’m just curious to know with your pedigree and any insights you can share moving forward.

Beth Sanner [01:08:07]:
Well, I think that, you know, we’ve we’ve just had a a lot of change. We’re in the midst of the US change, and it is going to take some time for the new team in the United States to be appointed in the new year and to get to work. I think that, you know, in in some ways, the good news is that the Trump administration was ready for this transition and they’ve made a lot of preparations. And then I think that the dialogue is really about how what that has happened in during this last 4 years, that there’s a lot of it that’s good. And it’s not all about starting over from scratch. And so being able to explain both from our partner country, as well as from inside our bureaucracies, that there is so much bipartisan agreement about the problems that we’re facing, the challenges we’re facing in our industrial base, the challenges that we’re facing with our adversary landscape, the challenges we’re facing with our bureaucracies and the difficulties with acquisition and procurement, and that there’s been some head start. And I hope that the Trump administration will pick up the things that make sense to them in that space in all of those challenges and move forward from there and not not just reinvent or or throw throw away the baby with the bathwater. And I think that they will.

Karissa Breen [01:09:42]:
And you said before starting from scratch, do you think there’s this assumption that when a new sort of administration takes over, it like, it has to start again. Like, they’ve gotta reinvent the wheel. Like, it’s not continuous. Where does that stem from?

Beth Sanner [01:09:54]:
Look. Every new leader, anyone who served in the military, let’s say you went, you served in Afghanistan and there was a rotation every 9 months of a commander. I never knew a commander who walked in, who didn’t want to change the way that the goals or make a stamp on that unit and that assignment. President Trump came into the last administration and said that NAFTA was the worst trade deal that he ever saw. And then he renegotiated it and it had some improvements, but it kept a lot of what was foundationally great about that agreement. And so I think it’s absolutely possible that things might get stuck with a different label, but that there will be a lot of continuity of the good stuff that is foundational.

Karissa Breen [01:10:51]:
So, Beth, do you have any sort of closing comments or final thoughts you’d like to be their audience with today?

Beth Sanner [01:10:55]:
I’m just so grateful to have been here with 2020 partners, with you, with so many just smart, terrific members of this team to meet with and some new Australian friends and and to to reunite with some old ones. It’s always just so inspirational. I wish you weren’t so far away, but it’s a great time. And I’m looking forward to coming back again and having an even better discussion that will be more focused and take us to the next level each time.

Karissa Breen [01:11:31]:
And there you have it. This is KB on the go. Stay tuned for more.