E140 - Dr. Keeper Sharkey, Founder, and CEO, ODE, L3C, Data Scientist, Expert in Quantum Computing
41:45
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
quantum, quantum computing, ai, people, cybersecurity, privacy, data, organizations, qubit, problems, ieee, protect, create, classical computing, feel, industry, systems, talking, future, understand
SPEAKERS
Debbie Reynolds, Dr. Keeper Sharkey
Debbie Reynolds 00:00
Personal views and opinions expressed by our podcast guests are their own and are not legal advice or official statements by their organizations. Hello, my name is Debbie Reynolds; they call me "The Data Diva". This is "The Data Diva" Talks Privacy podcast, where we discuss Data Privacy issues with industry leaders around the world with information that businesses need to know now. I have a special guest on the show, Dr. Keeper Sharkey. She has had many accolades. I have had the pleasure of collaborating with her, but I'll tell you a few. First of all, she is the founder and director of Ode L3C. She has been named one of the 40 under 40 in Cybersecurity for 2023 for the top Cyber News magazine. She is a leader and author. She is an expert and quantum industry advisor to things like InfraGard. Also a Ph.D. in Quantum Chemical Physics from the University of Arizona. So welcome.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 01:16
Thank you, I'm glad to be here.
Debbie Reynolds 01:18
That's a mouthful. We got to know each other because we collaborated with IEEE on a project related to connected systems. You're the co-chair of a quantum computing group, I'm the chair of the data and human flow. So the human touchy-feely part of the project that's what I'm part of, but I wanted to get you on the program. You and I have had great chats, whether it be within the group or one on one, and you're fascinating.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 01:59
Thank you.
Debbie Reynolds 01:59
You're incredibly smart. My mind was blown. The first time I ever heard you speak, I wanted to have you on the show for a long time. Because I feel like quantum is an area that people hear about. They don't know what it is, why it's important. And I think I'd love for you to talk about that. But before we start, tell me about your trajectory in your career and why you're interested in quantum and cyber.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 02:31
Sure, so I did not start out in cyber or data. My early career was as a chemist mixing chemicals on the lab bench. I've always been fascinated by chemistry, I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada. And that's where the Nevada Test Site is for the atomic bomb. So there was a lot of history there. And as a child, I was just genuinely curious in, you know, quantum as a weapon. Growing up, when I was in elementary school, we would have practice for fire drills, we would have to test the practice for if there ever was an atomic bomb that went off, and we'd have to get under our desks and do this whole thing. So I was always just genuinely curious about what quantum was. And, you know, when I was in high school, I picked up a book by Linus Pauling, who was one of the fathers of quantum chemistry. And I tried to read the pages when I was a teenager, but it was super difficult. So when I became a chemist in college, I realized that mathematics was very important to my career, and understanding the math behind chemistry would be valuable. And so, I became a double major in math and chemistry. And one day, it just clicked; I just understood all of a sudden what quantum was all about. And it wasn't scary anymore to me. And I decided to join a research group at the University of Arizona. I was there in that research group for a couple of years as an undergraduate, where I published six papers as an undergrad in a two-year time period. And then, those papers allowed me to get a specialized degree from the University of Arizona called chemical physics. And I was one of the first students to join the chemical physics program due to my interests. I went on to publish another 20 papers when I was in graduate school on quantum chemistry, which is basically unheard of for most graduate students; you know, they're lucky to get one or two, maybe in grad school. So I came away with a robust publication record. My citation record as of today is over 400. So my work is definitely getting visibility. And then, I taught high school chemistry, where I was able to inspire young kids to learn about quantum and go into industry. And I got a job as a data scientist at a company working in insurance and finance. And we were all about sequential marketing programs at that job. And there's all this information about PII, I had to learn about all of a sudden and Data Privacy, and how to protect the customers, but yet use that information to target them in marketing schemes. And in that job, I tried to introduce quantum concepts, and it was working. At that time, I realized that the National Quantum Initiative was getting underway. This was in 2018. And it was signed by President Trump at the time. And so the National Quantum Initiative was all about funding startups and projects and all sorts of concepts in quantum; this was the first time quantum had been identified in the US government as a priority in the history of the US government. And so, I quit my job as a data scientist and made my startup company Ode L3C, and L3C is particular towards being a social benefit. So we like to educate it out. So we spent time writing a book on quantum chemistry, Quantum Chemistry and Computing for the curious, illustrated with Python code. And a lot of the things that are being done to optimize chemistry problems are also applied to other kinds of problems that we use, like transportation, optimizing the supply chain, and things like that. So a lot of the methods are translatable from industry to industry. And in about 2019, I went to Quantum.Tech Congress, it was the first conference of its kind where quantum technologies came together, it was funded by the Five Eyes nations. And we met at the British consulate's office in Boston, and then it was a grand old time. And there, I met with a lot of security folks. And there's issues in security, when it comes to encryption and RSA and public key distribution and things like that. So I started to learn about what the problems were and the threats that quantum computing was presenting. So the idea is that in quantum computing, we have an exponential scale of computational power. And if you have an exponential scale of computational power, potentially, you can break your encryption keys. Okay. And so, I spent a lot of time studying this stuff and realized that there's a lot of holes in the industry; I wrote some interesting white papers in 2022 that led to me being invited to DAFITC, the Department of the Air Force Information Technology Conference, to talk about quantum to the Air Force. And as a result of that, I was named 40 Under 40 in cybersecurity by the Capitol Tech University Top Cyber News magazine, which was an honor. And so there's been a very interesting career shift for me in cyber. So now, I've been working with some top encryptionists, on coming up with new methods to enhance encryption so that they can be put into the standards like National Institute of Standards and Technology. And then, I joined the IEEE in the same kind of time period within the last year, and the IEEE group is all about creating evidence to make standards for the community. And so I'm gathering the evidence in that group to build up the case for needing to create standards for cybersecurity in next-generation connectivity systems.
Debbie Reynolds 09:12
Wow, that's tremendous. Thank you for that background. So, for the audience, for people who don't understand, they have heard quantum computing thrown around a lot. So tell me a little bit, and explain for people who may not fully understand what quantum computing is. What is the danger? What's the threat?
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 09:38
So quantum computing leverages quantum mechanics of various chemical systems. There are different types of hardware that are being developed anywhere from ion traps. So basically, you use lasers and magnetic fields to trap ions as qubits, or we have superconductivity that we can leverage, there are these various platforms for understanding what the idea of a qubit is. So the idea of a qubit is pretty simple. It's basically stating that some chemistry can be in the state of one or zero, which is the basis for most computations either a one or zero. But we use a principle of quantum mechanics called superposition, where the qubit can be in either one or zero at the same time. So there's some computational flexibility there. And as we grow in the number of qubits, we scale exponentially the computational power. And right now, classical computing doesn't have the ability to scale exponentially. So classical computing has always been limited in that. And as a result, we have a hard time being able to do computations; we're limited in the way we represent neural networks, or artificial intelligence, although we are gaining a lot of advantages. Now, quantum computing is supposed to offer leverage in that scenario, which also has a negative impact when it comes to solving a cryptographic key, being able to identify when a key is or a password. So it's going to become easier and easier to hack into systems, and our passwords are going to have to get more complicated to the point where humans cannot create their own passwords anymore or remember a password. So they're going to have to have password managers, and I'm sure most of us have been moving towardstoward that anyway. So that's the fear behind quantum computing is that it has the capability to one day be able to solve all of these problems. And then, so the issue right now with bad actors is that they're stealing data. They're stealing all of our data now, with the hopes of in the future, they'll have the capability of being able to hack that, and then understand our data. And so it's not as secure as we think it is. Because if they can steal it now and hack it, and understand it at a later date, then they have an advantage over us.
Debbie Reynolds 12:19
Right. And I guess you correct me if I'm wrong on this, but one way that I think about quantum computing versus classical computing, you give a computer a task to do it tries to churn through that problem, almost like in a linear process where quantum computing, it could be running simultaneously many different scenarios to actually do computing. So it doesn't take as long so it creates more inertia, I guess, more speed in computing, is that right?
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 12:58
Yeah, so it's not just about the speed. So there's two things going on here. It's the speed, but it's also the computational space. So it's about how much it can process at the same time. So yes, it's twofold. And I wouldn't say that it's one or the other; it's kind of both at the same time. And being able to get that computational speedup is very valuable in solving major problems, which is what we want to be able to do to enhance humanity. But when these kinds of technologies fall into bad actors hands, it can also create a negative impact that we need to also be aware of and be planning for. And just make sure that we're making the right steps to protect ourselves against those kinds of kinds of things.
Debbie Reynolds 13:47
Absolutely. The White House, I think, at the end of 2022, put out an edict of some sort to say that they wanted certain agencies within the government to review software that they're using or systems that they're using to try to make sure that they are quantum-ready, knowing that quanttum capabilities are coming online, and they want to guard against that. Also, one interesting thing about this is that they put a roadmap in place about certain agencies having to do things by a certain date, and they're trying to keep that rolling. But I think one of the impacts that it will have is on the companies that build software, I think they're going to have to do a better job of explaining how they address quantum computing and how they guard against cryptography that may be broken by quantum computing.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 14:54
Yes, so there's a lot that has to happen here, and this is going to have to be an all-hands-on-deck kind of approach from multiple people in the industry. And there is a group out there called Quantum Economic Development Consortium, which is a conglomerate of quantum startups or even big organizations, Fortune 500. And we all come together to be able to address these issues. It's partially funded by NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology. And we are addressing these actively in this organization where we're setting the framework to be able to come up with information for companies that are doing the development so that they can ready themselves against this threat of the future. And we do have active efforts that are helping these organizations not just create new hardware but also software. And I would say that's also kind of what we're doing in the IEEE; we're trying to create the evidence to show that standards need to be set in place so that organizations who are doing the software development have someplace to go and they don't have to reinvent the wheel. But we do need multiple people thinking about this, multiple organizations learning and developing and coming up with new ideas, and being willing to share those ideas to protect everybody in the future.
Debbie Reynolds 16:16
You know, I'll give a plug to a paper that we collaborated on. It is the IEEE industry connections reports on cybersecurity for next-generation connectivity systems, rethinking digital architecture to safeguard the next generation of cybersecurity breaches. So I have that on my profile. That's on your profile as well. If anyone wants to grab that paper, it's pretty cool. It's 34 pages. So it's not like a really hard read. But it's pretty good in terms of the guidance and information that we're trying to disseminate for people. I want your thoughts about cybersecurity and being proactive. So I feel like companies in the past have thought that cybersecurity is like the fire department. So you have a fire department down the street, you don't think about it, you have a fire, and then you call, hey, my house is on fire. But in order to solve these complex issues that we have with technology, companies need to be thinking proactively; all companies need to be thinking about cyber proactively; it shouldn't be just like, oh my God, this broke, or this bad thing happened because we see companies going out of business as a result of things like breaches and problems like that. So how do you communicate with people? How do you get the message across to people that cybersecurity isn't like a fire department, reactive thing, it has to be more of a proactive thing, especially in the quantum area.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 17:55
Well, I would say that it shouldn't be something that each organization should have to take on all by themselves. So I think there needs to be more of a network around what cybersecurity really is. So that, you know, organizations who think that they don't have a budget to have the security department is just a fire department that they call when they need help, right? But it's more of a way to collaborate with other organizations and bring in help before they need it to see what other organizations are going through. If we don't have that networking in place, it's going to be very hard for an organization to see the need or to think that they can also become experts at that as well. And I experienced that in my prior job in data science; it wasn't a problem until it was a problem. And I had to work actively with the cyber team to even get new technology to help me in my job, but they didn't see the need, why would need it in the first place? And so there's always this back and forth with the team. And so they're always, I would say, less active because the efforts that they have to put in to protect themselves are far greater than just letting the problem happen and fixing it later. So it's hard to make that argument for a lot of organizations. So there needs to be better networking for companies. And the information needs to be put out publicly, I think, as a public benefit, so that they can actually have their organization stay safe and not go out of business due to these breaches. The breaches can be really interesting, from hacking subway systems and finances and shutting subways down, and people can't commute or go to work all of a sudden because the subway doesn't work anymore. This was an incident in San Francisco a few years ago. I just thought it was absolutely astonishing. So it doesn't just affect organization; it can affect people, everyday people, and how does the everyday person care about cyber breaches is really important and most of the time, people don't want to know about the news or watch the news, and they just want to go home and cuddle with their kiddies or their dog and go play sports or something. And they don't want to have to think about tomorrow; they might not be able to get to work because of some sort of security breach. So that's the problem; it's getting the common public aware of the problems as well, not just the companies that it's affecting.
Debbie Reynolds 20:26
Yeah, I agree with that. There definitely needs to be more data sharing and more public-private partnerships, because we all have data, and we all have data that we want to protect. I want your thoughts about privacy. So your cybersecurity, I'm in the privacy realm, but we work together. And I feel like privacy and cybersecurity have a symbiotic relationship, but tell me your perspective on where we are in privacy or how you found privacy in terms of collaborating with people.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 21:04
So I think privacy is a really big deal. And I think that it can be defined in a few different ways for different people and their viewpoints. And I think that it's also a generational definition. So I think that sometimes people might have an idea about what should be private and younger kids might say, oh, I don't see why that's a big deal. So I think there's a lot of miscommunications about what privacy is actually within the industry. And then, in terms of what privacy means for me, I think that I should be able to use social media platforms and be able to communicate with my friends and community about myself personally and not feel like it's going to be taken to a third party group that's going to use it, somehow to leverage something against me, or use it to target me in some kind of ad campaign or whatever. Because now I just feel like anytime I use my phone to Google something, right? So like, if I say I'm looking for a new gadget or a widget of some kind, the next thing I know, it's being advertised and targeted to my husband on his phone. So it's the most bizarre thing, and I think that's not a world of privacy. And, you know, I want to feel like my children are protected. I have a kid in elementary school. And the school wants to be able to have a social media site, so the parents can see what's going on. And we can share with the grandparents and all sorts of stuff, but they have to say, is it okay for me to post a picture of your child, right? And I want to move away from a world where we can't be safe, where we can communicate with our friends and family, and we have a platform to share photos. I love that idea. But also do it in a way that's safe to where people don't have a way to target me or my kid in child exploitation, right, or bad scenarios, and that happens. That's definitely happening. It can be used against us. That's scary. That's very scary.
Debbie Reynolds 23:24
Yeah, I agree; I think because we all have data and we all move through the world and have digital touchpoints, we're concerned about what organizations are bad actors or whomever what they can do with the data that we have, even stuff that we don't think is important. So you have a phone in your pocket, and you walk to the coffee shop, like somebody somewhere wants to buy that information, even though you may not know why they want it. I was talking to my niece, who thinks I'm a nerd and has for many years. But we had gone on a trip to New York, and she went to a privacy event with me; somehow, she talked to Heidi Sass, a friend of mine in Washington, and somehow me talking to her didn't really get through to her but Heidi did in terms of her own personal data, and I look over to them and her arms are flailing, she's like oh my God, I can't believe it. So now, like every little thing, it's because she's like, my face was scanned in Canada at the airport, you know since I was going, oh my information. So I feel like when people have more of a personal feeling or a personal story about privacy, it really helps them professionally, or in different ways because they can say instead of it being like a faraway problem and something that you can relate to with your personal life.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 24:58
Yeah, and somebody who shouldn't be able to use the dark web and find out my address and my phone number, and where I live. And that kind of thing is really scary. So one thing I have been working on is with the InfraGuard, which is a public-private partnership with the FBI. And I've been serving on a cross-sector council for digital exhaust. And so basically, that digital exhaust is all about how to eliminate the data that you're putting out there when you sign up for these programs. And I oftentimes, my kid in elementary school will say, hey, can I play on your phone for a little while, and he'll start downloading games, and God only knows what he's agreeing to. And no, I don't know. And you have to read all of these documents. And you basically have to become a lawyer nowadays to understand how your data is being used. And if you don't have a good friend, like Heidi Saas, to help you get through this, it can be traumatizing to have to read all this legal jargon. So I think one thing in moving forward, at least for our community protecting America, is to be able to teach legal concepts to kids in high school, have them understand what these kinds of documents look like, what is standard, what's going on in the government. And it should be a high school requirement at this point so that when they go out into the real world, they understand better what it is that they're signing up for. I mean, I think it should be a part of education now at this point because if we're going to have these devices that basically force us into all of these agreements, we should be educated in how to do that if this is going to be a standard way of moving forward in our communities.
Debbie Reynolds 26:45
Absolutely. I guess I'll give a shout-out to a mutual friend of ours, James W. He is part of InfraGuard as well with the FBI, and he puts out a newsletter that is phenomenal. It's called Smoke Signals. He's also a barbecuer, so he relates that cybersecurity or barbecue, but he has really helpful information that you put out that can be used not only in your professional life but also your privacy in your private life. Because we have families, we have parents and kids; we want to be able to share information about how they can protect themselves as well. So definitely check that out. That newsletter is phenomenal.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 27:30
Yes, I love Smoke Signals. And James is great. He serves on the digital exhaust council with me as the FBI partner. So basically, he and his team are the ones who have put together the digital exhaust, and we just released 4.0. And we're doing some training out there. And a lot of the time, we just are trying to find ways to communicate to the public how to move forward and how to protect themselves, and what to do. And it can feel like a daunting task. So James says the best way to stay healthy is to do five things a day to help you, don't do it all at once. But just do five things that can help you move forward, you know, bite it off in little tiny chunks. And before you know it, six months later, you're done with going through the exercise of getting your digital life cleaned up and and having that digital exhaust taken care of. But when you're busy running a business or taking care of kids, it's hard to find that kind of time to clean this up. And I think that these organizations that are wanting us to use our platform should take more responsibility for doing it for us, I shouldn't have to work for them. And I feel like we as individuals are all working for them to protect ourselves, and they should be protecting us. It should be their responsibility.
Debbie Reynolds 28:49
I want your thoughts on AI. So as we can see I think in the news cycle, the media picks up a theme that they want to talk about a lot at a certain time. So everyone's going crazy gaga about AI, and I think it's going to last for a while, mostly because now it's not just something that business people use, it's something, especially with things like ChatGPT and public access, a lot of language models, it creates more interests in that topic. I just want to know from you. How does AI complicate things that are happening in quantum?
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 29:33
Well, okay, AI is complicated to begin with, let alone having that layer of quantum added on top of that. So AI has the ability to fool everyone, right? It has the ability to create these deep fakes, and we're moving into a world where if we can monitor AI and its usage, then we're gonna have a serious problem on our hands, because we're not going to know which end is up anymore and our reality is going to change very fast. And I've never really been a big fan of AI as it stands in the sense that it can be used as a weapon. And that's basically what's happening, I think it should be used for good. And if you add the layer of being able to make AI more powerful with quantum, that it's only going to become a weapon faster; it's going to become a weapon more seriously. And I think that tools like ChatGPT are fabulous if you can use it to streamline your work. You know, the other day, I had it help me write a letter to somebody, right? And what normally would take me hours and maybe days of thinking and contemplating and rewriting and everything, it was done in like a matter of 20 minutes and going back and forth with it and say, oh, change this paragraph, you know, be nicer changes, you know. And so I think it can be used for good and it can be used to help us. But AI is just another tool. It's not something to be afraid of unless we don't keep it safe. And we have it turned into a weapon. I mean, it's just as simple as that.
Debbie Reynolds 31:17
Yeah, yeah. One thing that concerns me, and I want your thoughts is I feel like people with classical computing and the stuff that we're accustomed to, like Web 2.0, right now, we're not doing a great job of protecting ourselves or being educated about how to protect ourselves now. So now, we're moving into an area with more people using AI tools and more computational capability that's on deck, I'm concerned about the technology getting exponentially more complex. And I feel it's almost like, I wish we had a better foundation so that people can build on that, but I feel like we're going 90 miles an hour towards the future in a way that I don't feel like people are ready for.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 32:13
I would agree with that, people aren't ready for it, they haven't been educated in it. And there's been so much progress made to where it's gonna be hard to catch people up on the reality of what AI is. And there's a lot of futuristic stuff out there, you know, Netflix put shows out all the time, or Hollywood or whatever, where they try to make it amenable to the common public, but you'll always see it be used as a weapon in these shows, right? It's always used in a negative connotation, right, and wethat's what we need to protect ourselves from. So a lot of the times, I think it is good that we make people aware of the bad side of things so that they can have the inspiration, can learn about what it is in the first place. And then use it to protect ourselves. But in terms of AI growing exponentially, it will. But I can say that when it comes to AI tools like ChatGPT, it can't solve math problems; it's not going to be able to solve a math problem, at least not now. And I don't see that anytime in the near future, it's not going to be able to take a derivative, it's not going to be able to calculate, do calculus and integrals, and unless it undertakes that language model, and it starts to interpret how it can do the mathematics. I see that very far in the future. It is being used to write code right now, ChatGPT. But that's based on the way people have written code prior. And so if our codes haven't really been developed and optimized well to protect ourselves, it's only going to create more bad code, more code that's not secure, more code that doesn't really make things move forward. So it's only going to be as good as the best language models we have and the learning from that. So if we're not good ourselves, it's only going to learn the bad side of what it is that we've created, right? It's not good. More of a bad habit, right? It's going to learn the bad habits, I don't think it's going to create the good from bad because I think artificial intelligence doesn't have that capability of being able to really; I don't think that it has the artificial intelligence that people think it does. It's not going to be able to do the mathematics; it's not going to be to do all of these things. And it's only going to learn, and so ChatGPT all the time gives out incorrect information, and it says, well, you can tell it that wasn't correct. And so it will learn that it wasn't correct. And so, we have to correct ChatGPT based on our language, learn the language models, and get yourself into mathematics. I think that math isn't as scary as people make it out to be.
Debbie Reynolds 35:04
That's good advice, AI is going to evolve, regardless of whether we want to use it or not. I'm telling people they need to learn how to, if they're using language models, either now or we're seeing companies putting capabilities within apps or applications that we use every day. So getting used to talking to those models or figuring out how to get work done, I think, is really, really cool. Tell us a little bit on this about some of the dangers. Not only AI and quantum computing, but someone I know said that we're living now in a post-reality world where it will be hard for us to tell the difference between what's real and what's fake. And so, that has privacy implications as well. But what are your thoughts on it?
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 35:59
Yeah, absolutely. We're definitely to that point where we won't know what's real and what's fake. And that's terrifying when you're raising children. And you're thinking, at least I used to know what was real. When I was growing up, and my kid might not know what's real. And the reality can be, I mean, the psychological effects of that on our children are going to be I don't even know how to process that as a mother. Like, that's terrifying, right? And yeah, I was watching a YouTube show with my kid the other day, and they were telling him that, you know, there's a jungle hole on the North Pole. I was like, what? That's insanity. You're okay, there's no jungle at the North Pole, and then I have to try to correct him in the show, and that's not even AI. That's just a YouTube show, like, okay. But yeah, not knowing if a celebrity is really talking, or if a government official is not really talking, and then, what, if there's an emergency that goes out, and we don't know if the emergency is real or not. And in terms of warfare, that's a huge deal. Like, that's a big deal.
Debbie Reynolds 37:20
Right? Yeah. So true. So true. Well, if it were the world, according to you, Dr. Sharkey, what would be your wish for privacy, cybersecurity, and quantum, regardless of what it is around the world, so whether that be technology, legal, or human behavior, what are your thoughts?
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 37:42
I just wish we all could get along and be nice and play friendly and not have problems with one another. But I guess that's a dream that isn't going to come to fruition anytime soon. I was just watching a show on politics the other day about US versus an adversarial country. And it was like listening to married couples, the married couple that can't get along. And they're like, totally looking at the world in two different ways. And you're just like, one of these has to be real, and maybe a little bit of both, but it's like, they use their own language against each other. And it's wait, why? Why can't we just agree to agree or, agree disagree or move on about our happy, merry way and not hurt each other? And so that comes down to the same old our data shouldn't be used against us; we should be able to retain our privacy. You know, legally, we should understand, are these legal contracts we're getting into when we sign up for things better? And the fine print, it shouldn't have to be a full-time job to protect yourself.
Debbie Reynolds 39:02
That's great. I agree with that. 1,000%. One thing that you were talking about, which is polarization, I think that's definitely true, but part of that, I think, is polarization gets eyeballs. So like I've told people, like, if you're on a reality show, I don't know about you. I've never seen women throw drinks on each other or pull each other's hair, but that's our TV all the time. They wouldn't want to do a reality show about me because I'm going to Costco, right? That's super boring. I think part of that is a lot of these social media are these outlets. They want to get more eyeballs on stuff, and sometimes that creates them pushing things that are maybe more fringe or on the edge.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 39:49
Yeah. So the more polarizing something becomes, I think, the more ability for it to make change for the future. It becomes apparent. And so, I think that if it's not a polarizing topic, nobody's gonna want to do anything about it. But that also doesn't mean that we have to go into it with hate. And just because something is polarizing doesn't mean that there has to be a negative side to that. It can polarize; you can disagree all along. But at the same time, we should be able to just come together and do it in a way where we respect each other. And that we make progress on how to push progress forward and not just be stagnant. And I think the stagnation is what really leads to the dissonance and then the acting out because progress isn't being made at that point.
Debbie Reynolds 40:48
Yeah, that's a great point. Wow. Well, you always give me stuff to think about. So thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate it. And I love your work. As you know, I love to follow the things that you do. You're just so smart. And so very kind, very sweet, very welcoming.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 41:09
Thank you, Debbie. I appreciate that. That's what I want for the future. And hopefully, we'll get there.
Debbie Reynolds 41:15
Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, and we'll talk soon.
Dr. Keeper Sharkey 41:20
All right. Sounds great. Thank you.
Debbie Reynolds 41:22
All right. Bye.
