Morgan Wright: The Growing Importance Of Cybersecurity
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Well, welcome to the Jason in the House podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. You're going to like this. I say that all the time, but I only bring on guests that I'm really excited to chat with. And we have Morgan Wright. He's coming on and you can learn more about Morgan Wright at morganwright.us. But he is a cybersecurity expert. And boy, if you look at the world and what's going on in our world,

whoo, tumultuous place. But how many things do you know of that don't gravitate back to, I don't know, cyber? The world has really changed. And I like to tell this story about our son, Max. Max was, when he was a little kid, I remember he came running around the corner. Now, keep in mind, he's like a practicing attorney now. He's like really successful and grown up and

has kids and we have grandkids, but he came running around the corner. He's like five years old. And he said, mom, dad, look at this. Look at this great big CD. And it was a record. He had never seen a record. And you think about the transformation that's happened over the course of time, right? We have

Now, if you talk about CDs, there's no kid around who's, you know, in their teens or whatever, even knows what a CD is, let alone a cassette tape, let alone a eight track tape. And that's how far I go back. Like the technology just continues to change at this incredibly rapid pace.

And the world's always changing and it becomes dangerous. It becomes better. It becomes more convenient. Technology's great, but when it, when it works, but it also creates these nefarious conduits for a criminal element or a devious actor to want to manipulate you or tap into you and your resources that you hadn't known about.

Now, quite frankly, I have a book coming up in next week. We're going to talk a little bit about that because it's coming out June 30th and July 1st, ain't there, that first week of July. And this is part of what we're talking about because data is just so omnipresent in our lives. Anyway, we're going to talk to Morgan Wright. We're going to talk about the

The problems, the challenges, how cyber is being used in warfare, how it's being used in identity theft, how it's being used against our senior citizens, how it's being used against young people who are creating trails that

Years from now, they maybe don't want necessarily to be there. It's just there's a lot out there that we're going to get into. And I haven't chatted with Morgan, but he's got a great background. He's been on Fox before, and he's certainly on my radar. And that's why I'm interested to talk to him about what you can do, what's going on, and the realities of what's happening.

And I think that's going to be a worthy discussion. I want to talk about the news. And then, of course, we're going to highlight the stupid because there is always somebody doing something stupid somewhere. And boy, we got a good one. There's two of them today. And it's really, really you're going to love them. So let's talk about the news. A lot of action going on in the Middle East here.

For a long time, we have said it is in the world's interest, it is particularly in the interest of the United States of America, that Iran never, ever, ever,

achieve a nuclear weapon because they are the biggest proliferator of terrorism in the world. They have through their proxies, Hezbollah in the Lebanon area, Hamas out there on the Gaza Strip, the Houthis down there, if you look down in Yemen primarily, and then if you look at Syria and what happened there in the past, these are all places where Iranians have put their money into

and their assets and their technology to use against not just Israel, but also against the United States in our interests. We've had bombings and attacks on our people and our military. You've seen what's going on on October 7th and the attack on Israel where they lost more than a thousand people. People were raped, they were killed, they were dismembered. Horrific things in one of the most grievous attacks ever.

And at some point, you got to just believe Iran that they want to destroy and literally annihilate the United States of America and Israel. Now, what's the surest way to do that? A nuclear bomb where you could kill literally in one fell swoop tens of thousands of people and make it uninhabitable. And so...

This is not a war that we're asking for, that we want to necessarily participate in. And as I record this, as soon as I record it, it's going to change because the world is moving minute by minute. Fortunately, my opinion, we have a steady hand in Donald Trump. Donald Trump has been crystal clear about where the red lines are.

Unlike, quite frankly, President Obama, when he said to the Syrians, hey, you can't use chemical weapons. Then there was evidence they're using chemical weapons and there was no consequence. And this particular consequence, they had a 60 days. They got to day 61. It hadn't happened. They hadn't tried to negotiate it out. The president, President Trump, was very clear about this.

While the United States did not participate in the original attacks there on Iran by the Israelis, who have been absolutely unbelievable in their creativity and their ability to execute things. Think about the Pagers. Remember when the Pagers and the mobile phones all blew up on this terrorist network? And then if you look at what they did in this going after the nuclear sites and leadership efforts,

They're in Iran. Absolutely amazing. Setting up a drone camp, allegedly, right outside the base of Tehran to be able to launch these drones. Absolutely unbelievable. And now the president out there saying that Iran has totally lost any air capabilities.

that between the United States and Israel, they have total and complete control. One issue that I would be fascinated to know more about is the Navy. It's not much of a Navy, but it's there and it's a nuisance. And it is capable of launching a lot of things that could kill a lot of people. Years ago, years ago, while I was in Congress, I spent time out on the USS Eisenhower.

And when I was out there, you had regular patrol boats. These would be, think of them like small motorboats that would come in on the cruisers and that whole fleet. And you just don't know what their intention was. And while they would fire warning shots and yell at them in their own language saying, don't come any closer, they would constantly test us and pepper us out.

And you never quite knew what was going to happen. And not while I was on board, but they'd fire weapons into the water close by, shoot over their heads to try to say, hey, back off. But that's some dangerous things. But

I got to tell you, you got to have a steady hand. We do have that in President Trump. And boy, this is going to be the biggest story for a little bit. Now, second one, we've talked a lot about this on the podcast, is reconciliation. That's coming to a head. Trying to get that done before the 1st of July. Senate has made a number of alterations to it. Tried to solidify some of the tax cuts even stronger. Cut some more of the spending. All good things, but

It'll be fascinating because the president has his hands full. He's got to worry about the international affairs and a military that needs to react on a moment's notice in a volatile situation with somebody in Iran who is fighting, and they are fighting back hard. And then the second part of that is the reconciliation program because, boy, if you don't pass reconciliation and make those tax cuts permanent,

Each family, each person is going to see like thousands of dollars in increase in taxes, which is not what we need. Last thing I want to mention here is that a few days ago, kind of didn't get the news that it should. But the Democratic Senator Bob Menendez had to report to prison. Now, he's serving an 11 year term. It'll be interesting to see how long he actually is in prison.

But he was convicted on these gold bars and cash bribery, got an 11-year prison term. Now, keep in mind, this was the chairman of foreign relations, chairman there in the United States Senate. Didn't get nearly the – you go to the average person, they have no idea. But literally taking gold bars and cash in a bribery scheme, convicted of it, convicted –

Now going to prison. He's reported to prison. He should serve all 11 years. That never seems to happen. But that really is sort of a big deal because, you know what, that is so wrong. And to be a sitting United States senator, boy, it's just...

it's just really out of control that they that that would happen all right now it's time to bring on the stupid because you know what there's always somebody doing something stupid somewhere all right this is a special kind of stupid the more i read it the more i kind of felt sorry for this person but at the same time oh my goodness all right this comes to us from the hill.com here's the headline which you gotta just love

Michigan woman makes PB&J during virtual court session and the judge, not quite so happy. So this happens evidently in Detroit where a mother, this is where I start to think, okay, I know this is stupid. I know you should know better, but aye, aye, aye. Fox 2 and CBS Detroit News say,

are also reporting on this, that this person, Aja, I think is how you pronounce her name, Outerbridge, appeared before the judge. It was a misdemeanor. And it was allegedly having an open alcohol container filled

as a passenger in a car. She wasn't driving. That's a good thing, but still an open alcohol container can't be doing that. So asked to go to court. Um, and she, this is what she told the judge because evidently she was very late.

And so she got a little confused. She thought it started at 1 p.m. And then she realized it actually started at 9 a.m. So she logged into Zoom and ended up in a waiting room for more than two hours. And so she put on a robe, like not a dress, but a robe.

Not the judge's robe, but she put on a robe. Okay. So she's sitting in there and then finally somebody comes on and the judge says, these are not exact quotes. Why are you late? What's going on? And she said, well, and why aren't you properly dressed? And she said, well, I do have clothes on under the robe. So she takes the robe off, shows that she's got a t-shirt on.

And then she proceeds to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which the judge did not take very well. So she's late for the hearing. She's wearing a robe and she's making a PB&J. But here's where I start to think, OK, I feel for this woman.

She said that her daughter's sick, and so she had to take care of her daughter. Her daughter was hungry. She wanted to get focused. She knew if she gave her PB&J that her daughter would not be interrupting them. But the judge didn't take all this quite well. Oh, my gosh. She said she needed a mommy day. But when you have multiple court dates, you're wearing a robe, serving up PB&J, you're four hours late, allegedly, for this court hearing.

Things didn't go too well. That is the stupid. And that is what happened in Detroit. These judges get to see a little bit of everything. All right, let's move on because I really am excited about bringing on our next guest. And I want to make sure that we...

We, there's so many things, there's so many avenues, so many places that we can really go with this. But I really do think it's important to talk about this and have people understand and not be naive about what's going on in the world. So let's, let's bring on Morgan Wright. So Morgan Wright, thanks. Thanks for joining us on the Jason in the house podcast.

Hey, what an honor, man. We've met a few times in the green room and I followed your career. So I'm very honored that you had me on. People need to understand what a green room is because it's kind of funny. It's like there's a room at a TV station where you can gather and guests go before it's time to go on set or get makeup. And that's for whatever reason, they call it the green room. And, um,

I've always thought, I wonder if people even know what the word green room is. But yes, it's not actually green. People say, oh, is it because they always paint them green? Like, no, that's not green. But yes, it is.

But I'm glad to have you on, Morgan. Sorry, I didn't mean to get sidetracked in the first minute, but I'm really glad to chat with you because the world is a tumultuous place and so much of our world has changed to cyber. And oh my goodness, technology is great, as I was saying earlier, when it works and if it's being used for nefarious purposes, that's where I get worried about it.

You know, a lot of things have changed. In fact, you kind of want to set the stage. You know, I do a briefing and it actually started with a war game exercise I did back in 2013 out at the National Defense University. We said...

I was a group of people and I went off on my own and said, OK, how would Russia invade Ukraine? Right. And gamed it out, actually. And so you look at, you know, when they did invade them, a lot of things came to pass. But it got me thinking. So, Jason, one of the big things that has changed is after World War Two, we had what we called the first offset of war. And it was nuclear weapons. Only the United States had nuclear weapons. The Russians got them in 49. But it took till 1960 till they got parity.

Then they had the Warsaw Pact. We had NATO. And then Russia could invade a NATO country. It would take us a long time to get NATO forces together. So we had to say, what do we have? Well, we have technological capability, superiority. So we created the second offset of war, which was called look deep, shoot deep. We could get their forces as they were coming in. They might get the initial forces in, but we would get all follow-on forces. So I asked this question. I say, so what's the third offset of war?

A lot of people scratch their heads. Jason, the third offset of war, at least what I believe in talking to a lot of people smarter than me, it's AI. And if you see what's going on in Ukraine right now, you see what's going on with Israel, you see what's going on around the world with China, AI will be the game changer for the next world war or conflict that we're seeing. So yeah, technology has changed from being not a domain of war to now it's the fifth domain of war, sea, air, land, space, and cyberspace.

So explain when we say AI, artificial intelligence, I think people are starting to be familiarized that it's not just Google. You know, there's no Google. Some you go to something like chat, GPT or grok. I happen to personally like grok, you know, and I get a much more comprehensive understanding.

answer. It has the ability to understand in a much deeper way rather than just referencing some other article. But in the terms or the atmosphere of war, explain what you mean by AI and what it could do and where are we at today and where is it going?

So, you know, just kind of break it down. AI is dumb out of the box. It has to be trained. So that's where you get a lot of the machine learning. And so it has to be trained. What is a cat, right? You and I could look at a cat. We can figure it out, right? But AI has to be trained. But once it gets to that point, it can reason things quicker, faster, better than humans. And I'm like you, I'm a big fan of Grok. I use that almost exclusively, but besides very little chat GPT, some perplexity. But it can do reasoning. So what it can do is it can take...

It can hold things in its mind that the humans would not be able to hold at any one time. We could get to there eventually, but it gets there much faster. And it can do things that we're not capable of doing. The only thing it doesn't have are the cognitive capabilities of human. Our ability to think and reason still surpass AI. But when they get to what they call AGI, artificial general intelligence, that's where you get like the Space Odyssey 2000, the HAL thing.

uh, 8,000, uh, which by the way, how was, uh, how 9,000, I'm sorry, how was a, uh, kind of a joke, but how stands for actually we'd go one letter forward. It stands for IBM. So, you know, machines, could they take over the world? That's what people are worried about, but AI has done so much. It can advance what we learned about medicine, by the way, I, AI can now do a lot more about modeling nuclear explosions or what's the effect of a GBU 57 dropping on the four door, um,

nuclear facility, what kind of things might we see? AI could help us reason that and get to an answer quicker, faster, better. So, but it serves us in our lives. It serves us, it does a lot of things. But as with anything, it's a tool. We have to be good at using the tool, putting boundaries on the tool and understanding when does it exceed, you know, say,

parameters and how to properly use it. That's the biggest thing, you know, coming from your background, Jason, it's not the technology, it's how do we create policy and governance around the use of the technology? Well, and that's the scary part, right? Because I can tell you, you got 535 members in the House and Senate. There are maybe, I don't know, three that actually have enough of a background to ask intelligent questions about

And so the idea that we're going to put some guardrails on this thing and be smart, I, I worry that Congress is going to do what it typically does, which is be reactionary and not proactive. It won't necessarily be able to, uh, to do what it should to do ahead of time. But let's go back to the, to war and how AI it, what it can do and not do. Um,

Because one thing is in gathering intelligence, being smarter, but...

I also worry about like deep fakes and, you know, I see that as bearing a crossover of the world of politics and war. The ability to communicate in mass to people. I mean, Elon Musk has Starlink, which can open up like it did in Iran just recently by making Starlink available so that the masses can gather information. But it can also be used to

Not saying the tool, the start link, but I'm saying the content that goes behind that. I just worry that it manipulates large numbers of people with these deep fakes. You know, Jason, that's an excellent point because

If you think about Operation Overlord, D-Day, Normandy, there was a lot of deception involved. And it doesn't have to work forever. It just has to work long enough to fool the enemy. But in this day of hyperscaled everything, right? So what's the role of AI? Well, there's some concerns about AI, and it's how our adversaries use it – China, Russia, North Korea, Iran –

You get these things called lethal autonomous weapon systems, the ability for it to make decisions quicker, faster, but not necessarily better. That's why DOD has a policy that says, look, we're going to keep things – we're still going to keep a human in the loop on the decision-making because you don't want to automate the decision automatically.

blowing up something just because you can blow up something doesn't mean you should. There may be a political reason or another reason why you hold off on doing it. So we see things like that. But my concern is, is when they start turning loose autonomous drones that are seek and destroy, that have no human intervention. That's where I think we're going to run into a huge problem is when this thing is not regulated, when it's unleashed.

and you'd have somebody going down the street, which would be a valid target, a military age male with a weapon, as opposed to an old man carrying a stick, how do we know that AI is going to be able to differentiate? I don't think we can get to that point yet. You're listening to Jason in the House. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Morgan Wright right after this.

Well, that's scary because I like to think that the United States has more of a moral and righteous compass. But you start talking about some of these other nefarious...

Whether they be proxy groups or just outright terrorist organizations like, you know, like Iran or the Houthis or Hezbollah, if they could implement an AI tool to say, you know, take out any airplane, you know, that kind of thing, that gets to be pretty scary. Yeah.

You know, I'll go back to something that actually happened. I think it was in October of 23 in Slovakia. It was the case where they believed that an election was thrown because of a deep fake audio. And it's not so much that the deep fake audio was totally effective. But what Russia did and Russia was behind this is that their preferred candidate was losing to the other candidate that was more Western aligned, aligned with the EU and stuff.

But what they took advantage of was Facebook's policies that said, look, we'll remove a video that appears to have been doctored. But they had no policy around audio. And in Slovakia, there's a 40, I think a 48 or 72 hour quiet window. You can't do any campaigning. You can't do anything. So this audio came out that made the other candidate silent.

look bad about, hey, we're going to throw the election, we're going to do this, wasn't able to respond to it. So does AI have impact? Yeah. And imagine what would happen is if a video went out purporting to show, you know, the president saying, hey, yeah, let's bomb Iran, you know, Reagan's joke, but let's bomb Iran, let's drop the GBU-57 and let's do it now.

Before you could determine that that was not a true video, Iran may respond with something we don't want them to, chemical, biological, maybe a proxy group, like you say, unleashing something. How do we authenticate these things that are coming out? And that's the huge problem with deepfake is they will fool – the bar has been raised, right? We used to be able to sniff these things out. Well, the bar has been raised where it gets harder and harder to sniff these things out until it's too late. Right.

I mean, it truly is. Like you see some things and you just think, really? Like if even just that pause of,

All right, I got to decipher whether or not that's true. Right. In the context of an election, it becomes nefarious. And, you know, you hope that people are smart enough to figure it out. But in mass, you know, it's so easy to push send to how many millions of emails or put it out there on one of the big social media platforms and you're toast. But in the context of war and whatnot, I...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk a little bit about China here because it's not all necessarily about war, right? There is kinetic action on some things, but there's a lot of interaction that is an attack on the American people, whether it's going after their financial institutions or trying to –

I mean, these are not new topics, but they're more and more convincing the more and more you're involved and engaged. Yeah, you know, what China's done is they're taking the long view of stuff. Obviously, at some point, we know there's going to be conflict between them and Taiwan, and they know that we have an agreement with Taiwan in terms of defense. But one of our critical bases, Jason, is Guam. And so there are these threat actors tied to China called Salt Typhoon, Volt Typhoon,

Everybody has to have a stage name, apparently. And so they have these threat actors. Well, one of the things they've done is they've gotten into the critical infrastructure in Guam, into the power, into the water, into the communications. That is so huge. I mean, a couple of years ago, I was up in New York City, myself, General Tata and General Kellogg. We're up there with Martha McCallum. We're talking about war. And one of the things that concerned me was if somebody got into our systems just that way,

We've seen now the effect of hypersonic missiles. They travel six to eight times the speed of sound. Defending against those is tough. If we ever wanted to react against those and all we had was just even a momentary blackout of communications or of our common operating picture that we couldn't see the battlefield, that's

Man, that has significant consequences. So what China's doing is that they're cataloging these vulnerabilities. They're not exploiting them yet, but they're cataloging them. But at a time and a place of their choosing, should conflict arise, they're going to go after significant things – power, water, communication, banking, finance.

look what's going on in Iran right now. They can create chaos in the civilian sector by simply shutting down the money supply. The ATMs don't work. The banks have been wiped out, especially some tied to the IRGC. So there are huge things you can do when the population believes

that something is happening. And that's the effect that cyber can do. It's not sexy like SEAL Team 6, you know, parachuting in or Delta, you know, coming in, kicking your door down. But it has, give me one guy with the keyboard versus one guy with the tank, and I'll take one guy with the keyboard every day of the week because of the damage they can do globally. Yeah, you know, I do worry about an electronic magnetic pulse, right? How do you live your life in this country without electricity? I mean, that would be really...

There would be a lot of people who would perish under that scenario if it went on for a long period of time. So the EMP stuff is something that's, I think, been underreported on because of the impact it can have. But you're right. There's a theory of war that says if you want to bring a nation to its knees, you go after two things. You go after power and water.

Remember when the ransomware gang called the Dark Side Ransomware attacked Colonial Pipeline and it shut down oil supplies on the East Coast for like a week? We didn't miss. We didn't lose a single drop of oil. Not a single drop of oil was sucked out of their pipeline and taken anywhere else. But the perception that we were going to lose power and energy, people reacted in a certain way. They were filling up.

plastic bags. They were hoarding toilet paper again. Why do we even need to hoard toilet paper even with COVID? But people get into these things. So no, ransomware is a geopolitical tool as well as malicious software. A lot of these things, when you look at what Russia did with NotPetya, the ransomware attack that was only supposed to hit Ukraine, but it jumped containment and it hit Maersk and everything else, the most damaging cyber attack in history. I think it's

north of 11 or 12 billion dollars now. I mean, there are real world consequences. You take out the power grid, you take out water. You can go a long time without power, but it's very tough to go a long time without water. Explain to me how water is affected or like you think of cyber, you don't think of water.

But I guess it's the transfer of water, right? The cleaning of the water. Explain that to me a little bit deeper. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a lot of these things. People can go out on the interwebs and find all the stories about from Florida to New York about even Iran being in one of the dams and trying to shut off the water.

But there's a lot of chemicals that it takes to treat water to make it drinkable. And if you mix those things incorrectly, it becomes lethal in a lot of these areas or it can damage the water supply. So a lot of the stuff now has gone to – one of my roles is I'm a senior fellow at the Center for Digital Government. We deal with all 50 states. We're dealing with a lot of these states. Water is one of the big issues because –

they don't have the workforce that they used to have. You've got the graying out. Look, I've got gray hair. I know folks can't see this, but I got gray hair, right? A lot of the old folks are retiring, but there's not enough people coming in. So they've had to figure out they've got to do work more remotely. So a lot of these things now are automated. There's a lot of technology that is facing the internet that should not be. That's controlling the mixing of chemicals, turning on and off water.

So, yeah, there's a huge vulnerability in that. It's like the power grid, right? There's no centralized system. There's no central power grid. There's no central water supply. So it's kind of one kind of protection. But the problem is what happens – you saw what happened in L.A. when they didn't have water where they needed it for the fires, right?

I mean, imagine an adversary maliciously attacking one of our reservoirs and releasing all the water. And it creates not only damage and stuff downstream, but then you have a wildfire at the same time that's been started by proxy, by actors. It sounds like something out of movies, but it's not. This stuff really happens. And now you've got no water to fight the fire that has been started by other people. Yeah.

Well, and look, one of the big hearings that I did when I was chairman of the Oversight Committee was,

Detroit in Detroit in Flint Michigan the water supply had the over yeah they didn't mix the chemicals right they had switched from I think it's called the Detroit River to the Flint River something like I can't remember the names of the bodies of water but they got the mixture in the compound wrong and people were contaminated over you know a good part of time and

And the water was coming up brown. It was just horrific. And that was just human error. But you're right. So many of these systems are now automated and tested and

Again, it's part of this EMP threat that I think is so real. And let's talk about space here for a moment. I've mentioned a few times on this podcast previously that Donald Trump does not get enough credit for creating the Space Force. Now, I remember when this was first created,

People are like, wait, why? Like, what? And the left, the liberals and Democrats just started mocking the president. I mean, they came up with these Hollywood TV shows and stuff that were just like, oh, the Space Force. Like, it was some dorky thing, but...

Having seen enough, at least during my time in Congress, there's a war going on in space right now. Yep. And people don't realize it because you can't take a selfie with it. You can't see it. You don't hear it. But, boy, you could feel its effects if you were to understand and see. And I think...

To his credit, that's where President Trump used his political capital to stand up a group of people that were experts in this and to understand that, yeah, without satellites, without GPS, without our ability to protect ourselves with the big golden dome that he's going to be building, we're vulnerable. And he doesn't get enough credit for that.

So it goes back to the discussion we were having earlier when I was talking about the domains of war, sea, air, land, space, cyberspace. So what do we have for sea? We have the Navy. I mean you've got the Marines, which Marines say we're not part of the Navy, but they are being a former Army guy, right? But you've got Army and Air Force, right? So sea, air, land, what do we have for space? We have no combatant command. We have no branch of the military that is dedicated to a domain of war. So I think it's smart that you create a military –

that is for that domain of war. The same thing is that now it's been working its way through Congress. It's been up and down, but creating a separate cyberspace force because to recruit for cyberspace, it's different than recruiting for a warfighter, you know, a tip of the spear guy, right? And so people say, well, we have Cyber Command. We've got an SAC.

Yeah, guys, but that's a hodgepodge. That's bringing people together. You've got to have a unified fighting element just the same way the Marines are structured, the Army is structured, the Navy is structured. So I think it's a natural evolution, and I think it's something that should have happened sooner. But when you take a look at now at some of the missiles that Iran is firing that are being intercepted not only by Israel but by our army – it's called THAAD. I think it's Terminal High Altitude Defense –

We're now intercepting missiles in space before they can start their downward trajectory. So if space – and then – but you've got China. China always does the same. Well, we don't want to weaponize space at the same time they're weaponizing space. Yeah. Putting lasers in space. But I mean space is going to be another battlefield. The next war – I think it was Albert Einstein said, I don't know what World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks. Yeah.

You know, we're getting to that point to where many of these things are going to have an impact on – look, an EMP burst in taking out GPS locations, satellites. China's already doing that. They're jamming that thing. We rely on GPS for precision bombing, putting bombs and bullets and troops on targets. So there's a lot of things happening in space that affect our everyday lives. People may not know it, but you get out in your car and you drive somewhere and you punch in the address. You're relying on GPS to do that. Yeah.

Yeah. And our ag sector, you know, if you go look at what John Deere's doing, you're starting to see autonomous, you know, John Deere machines out there picking crops, spraying crops, you know, everything.

It's unbelievable how important they are. I remember visiting with Jim Bridenstine. He was the NASA administrator. He did one of our podcasts previously, and he talked a lot about the ag sector and how important NASA is to the agriculture of our country and all the control mechanisms and everything. Look, our ability to communicate and just talk to each other, communication.

It's all tied together, but so much of that bounces up off outer space and back down. It's truly amazing. I was asked spontaneously by Sean Hannity a couple weeks ago about Elon Musk. This is as he was kind of departing his doge role. And I said, I actually think the biggest...

of Elon Musk, yeah, Doge will be really important, but his ability to put the United States back at the forefront of our time and space is

that there is this war going on and that we have to be able to protect ourselves. And play offense and defense is probably his greatest legacy because without SpaceX and what they're doing, we would be helpless. We would not be able to get up in space. Obama had pretty much dismantled that, scuttling the shuttle program. And we were literally reliant upon the Russians to get up to the space station and to be able to launch satellites.

One of my good friends is the director of governmental relations for Starlink and SpaceX for Elon. And I've had discussions with her before about some of this stuff. And, you know, you think about it. A lot of people made fun of him when he said, we want to eliminate two trillion dollars. Oh, you can't do that.

You know what? If you only shot for the moon, you'd end up somewhere in between and fail, right? So when Elon says we want to occupy Mars, he's literally taking moon shots. He's taking planet shots. And so the ability to do what he's – think about this. I remember as a kid, and I date myself here, but I remember when we landed on the moon, you watch the Apollo aircraft take off. It splashes back down into the ocean. Everything that was not reusable except the space capsule, and that took a lot of work to make it reusable. Right.

But now we've got rockets that land themselves on barges in the ocean. He can now turn around and put that rocket back into space in two hours, whatever it is, three hours. I mean, he just had an idea which said, hey, why can't rockets land themselves? And SpaceX was born from that. So I think the impact – and I think his contribution to SpaceX and to cyberspace and to the space as a domain of war, Space Force –

We haven't we will not know for another decade the importance of everything we're doing now, how it's going to play out. But we will when threats like China arise and they start getting bigger, if Russia reconstitutes itself and whatever the next threat will be, maybe North Korea. If you don't think space is important, just wait. Yeah, it's it is truly remarkable. All right. Let's transition a little bit and talk about what can average people do to protect themselves? Because

Every time you turn around, you know, again, new technology, new technology, AI is like people are starting to figure that out. But, you know, you're kind of worried about the trail that you're leaving. If you ask Rock a question, is that going to be public knowledge? Is somebody going to go out there and gather all that information and embarrass you by putting all that information out there? I don't know. It's just it's just a different world. So how did what's the average person to do to protect themselves? Yeah.

Well, quick pro tip on Grok. There's a private mode on there, so you can flip it on, and it will not remember anything. It'll give you your answer, and then everything that you've written, and it won't store it, and it disappears. So if people are worried, just don't do anything bad. Look, I tell people, look, we're not storming the beaches at Normandy here, right? Nobody dies because you didn't click a link in 30 seconds. So I was out at a bank a couple months ago doing a keynote speech about small businesses, big business to hackers, scammers, and thieves. And

And everything's about manipulation, influence, and deceit. It's about getting you to do things that you would not normally do. That's the definition of social engineering, getting you to take an action you believe is trusted, which is otherwise not. So what can normal people do? Slow down. Don't click on every link that comes along. Look at things and say, why is this being sent to me? Don't click on the link. If you're worried about it, go to the real source. If you're Bank of America or Capital One, go to the bank site.

Don't use the link that's provided. Right. I would tell people to use strong passwords, but there's ways to do it. I do a thing called I have a thing called free password course dot com. I don't even I don't care. I don't make money. I don't charge anything for it. But it's really a way to how to set and remember strong passwords. But there's passphrases. But that's the other thing you've got to do. And the other thing, too, is, for goodness sakes, encrypt everything in motion, encrypt everything at rest.

but use multi-factor or two-factor authentication. In other words, get one of those apps like Authy or Authenticator. And if it's got a secondary factor that you can use, use it. That will keep...

The 95 to 98% of the potential damage that could be done to you, done. But the biggest thing I can tell people is be skeptical. This is not your mother's internet. It's not your father's internet. It's not like when we got started. But scammers are still scammers. Thieves are still thieves. They're going to try and figure out a way to separate you from your money. Well, quick stat here, Jason, and this will make sense.

When you look at the internet scams that are reported, romance scams are the only the 10th most reported, but they're number two for total dollar loss. Why? Because these bad actors have figured out how to use influence, deceit, manipulation to get people to keep giving them money. There's a series on Netflix right now. I think about it like three episodes.

But that is one of the biggest ways people lose money is they get these bad actors get you to doubt your doubt and then take action. So stay off the dodgy web pages. But the biggest thing you can do is just slow down, take a breath. And remember, nobody dies because you don't click a link. And there's not a Nigerian prince that's got $10 million waiting to give it to you. Never met anybody that got rich off the Internet by clicking a link.

Yeah, no, good point. And sometimes they go smaller, right? I've had one that's been pestering me for like $200 and I'm just thinking...

Yeah, it's just nonstop and it doesn't make sense. And it's a weird, I look at the URL and I'm thinking that's weird. And it's just like, I can't get rid of it, but it's kind of entertaining to see what they try to do to get you to click on it. But anyway, you're listening to Jason in the house. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Let's talk about kids for a moment here because they're growing up in a world where everything's documented. And

You know, personally, one of the privacy policy prescriptions I wish was out there in mass is the right to be forgotten. And I know it was being pursued in Europe, but it just seems to me that when you enter into a contract with, say, Google, and you're going to trade away some of your privacy by giving them access to your personal information, which why just despise Google, right?

as a business model. But when you do that, you should be able to get out of this contract at some point. I mean, why do you have to sign away your life, literally for life, and give them this information that they can use in perpetuity when there's no consideration on the backside if you want to terminate the relationship? There is a very famous saying in Silicon Valley, it says, when it's free, then you're the product.

And so what they productize is your personal information, right? Identity information. And so that original case you were talking about, Jason, actually originated out of Germany. It was a man saying, hey, I want to have the right to be forgotten. I don't want them to store my information forever.

forever. But let me tell you what's going to upset Google's business model. It's things like chat GPT and grok search as a, I think as a industry is about to die or be significantly impacted by grok. But let's talk about kids for a second. Um,

There is a friend of mine retired from CIA, was chief of counterintelligence, and I had the misfortune of speaking before him because he blew me away. We were at the same conference. It was amazing what he talked about. And they talked about what they used to do back then about the ability to get fake passports and do stuff. You can't do that anymore, in fact. Yeah.

In CIA, if you want to be one of their case officers, if you want to work covertly under diplomatic cover anymore, it's true name, what they call operating in true name. It is so difficult to create a false identity anymore. So people need to realize with your children, and this is why it's so important to train them about this.

don't give them smart devices until I would say 16. You know, they found these villages in Ireland where they just banned cell phones for kids and smartphones till they're 16. Test scores improved. I've got a set of neighbors at where I live, Jason, great neighbors. They are out there with their kids all the time. No electronics. These

Kids are getting sunshine, fresh air, you know, having fun out there. That's one of the biggest things you can do to stimulate the mind. But when they're on there, the other thing they're learning are bad habits. You know, they're not learning the same kind of safety. You would no more give a kid the keys to your Lamborghini when they're 13 and never had a driving – driver's lessons than you should be giving them a smart device and say, just go get on the internet. And don't annoy me. Just go do that. Parents have to be actively involved. You know, you've got to be actively involved in this. Right.

kids now are finding out that their identities have been stolen and compromised. A friend of mine, his kid went to apply for college, found out he had a mortgage in his name in California, you know, already at age 17. Congratulations. Yeah. Already building your credit score. Woo-hoo. There you go. No, look, I've had mine stolen a couple of times and it was a pain to go through it, but you had to do it. And I'm like, wait, what? I did what? Wait, what? And

Somebody was actually filing taxes saying that I was... Anyway, using my social security number, it was creating all kinds of problems. But anyway, it's just fascinating. The world is changing so fast. And I think you're right. Just using some common sense, some basic, like nobody's going to die if you don't click this link right now, like the urgency that usually comes with these scams.

But people have to be careful. And I think, yeah, parents, it's a new world. I got grandkids and they know how to hook on and dial me up on FaceTime, which I love because it's so great, right? Even though they're here in Utah and I'm in Utah, they'll still just... I know if I hear this certain ring on my phone that it's one of my grandkids trying to get a hold of me because...

Even though they're super young, they know how to click their mom's phone to click. And it's fun, you know, but it also can be nefarious. And that's the danger here. Or you could be the mom or dad that wake up one day and find out you got 50 boxes of stuff from Amazon because your kid got a hold of your phone. We had a neighbor. We had a neighbor who did this. We had a neighbor who figured out how to get into his mom's. I don't know if I'm supposed to be telling this story, but it's pretty funny. So he knows how to get into mom's.

Amazon account and he starts ordering all these Xboxes. And so it wasn't until finally one of the neighbors called up the parents and said, you know, we really like, it was very generous of you, but we just don't need an Xbox. We don't want our kids to have an Xbox. And this kid wanted to play Xbox with his buddy, but at his buddy's house. And so he bought all these Xboxes and these games and the parents didn't even know that

And he was meeting the Amazon guy out front, and the parents didn't know until the other parents said, you know, that's a little bit of a generous gift. Anyway, it was pretty funny, but yikes, it does happen, and it happens probably more frequently than we know. You've got to keep an eye on things. No kidding. No kidding. Morgan Wright. We can learn a little bit more about you, right, at MorganWright.com.

Dot U.S. Right. Dot U.S. And I'm on Twitter and stuff. I'm not big out there right now, but you'll catch me on Fox, you know, Fox Business every now and then. We'll be talking about stuff. But we're also launching one quick plug. I just we're DOJ funded, but I'm the founder and CEO now of a new capability called the National Center for Open and Unsolved Cases. So our goal is to connect the dots, collect the dots, solve every case.

And so that's we're working on our third DOJ grant to get that done. So that's that's the other thing that occupies my time. That cyber is a big part of because now with the Internet, every case has an equal chance of being solved. The Internet has no concept of distance. If you've got information on a case, we're going to be able to help you connect to that case and help solve it.

That's great. That's great. Good. I'm glad the DOJ is involved in that. That's really neat. Morgan, we have to ask you a few personal questions because we ask everybody these. Far away. And they're very illuminating. So first concert you attended? 1978, the Doobie Brothers, Fort Hays State University in Kansas. Yeah, baby. There you go. What was your high school mascot?

The Chapman Fighting Irish, which is one reason why I'm a Notre Dame fan and did my graduate work at Notre Dame. So go Irish. Oh, very good. Now, the big question. This is probably the most important question, which is pineapple on pizza, yes or no?

That is a mortal sin that I hope the new Pope Leo will put an end to this. Never. It should never be allowed to be on pizza. The audience loves this. The judges approve of this answer and you got them all right. So those were the most important ones. Morgan Wright, we really do appreciate joining us on the podcast today and Jason in the house.

Good answer. Pineapple on pizza should never, ever happen. Never. Not on my watch, pal. Great stuff. Thank you so much for joining us. Really do appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for listening. Podcasts really are good, right? You can go a little deeper and get into some issues, some more. I mean, I could have talked to Morgan for a long time, but, uh, cause I'm fascinated by this. I hope it's helpful. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you join us next week. And I also hope that you will write this podcast and,

You can subscribe to it. And also, I want to remind people you can listen ad-free with a Fox News Podcast Plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Again, thanks for listening to the Jason and the House podcast. I would encourage you to go over to Fox News Podcast.

podcast, plural, foxnewspodcast.com. You can see a lot of my colleagues. They got some good podcasts out there. But again, rate it, review it, subscribe to it. Be back with us next week and scroll through all the ones we've done before because we got a lot of good ones out there. I'm Jason Chaffetz. This has been Jason in the House.

It's Will Kane Country. Watch it live at noon Eastern Monday through Thursday at Fox News dot com or on the Fox News YouTube channel. And don't miss the show. Listen and follow the podcast five days a week at Fox News podcasts dot com or wherever you download your favorite podcasts.