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Okay, so that's the question. Can AI legitimately contribute and somehow show us a path to peace in Haiti? Haiti is a mess right now. 90% of the capital is controlled by gangs. 23 different political parties infighting on a potential solution or security solution or plan. You got international interlocutors coming in trying to help, but heretofore have failed. It's been about four years since President Moise was assassinated and now they have no elected government whatsoever that the gangs have been been terrorizing these people for years now. So to even suggest that AI could somehow come in and solve the problem. But given the massive complexity that Haiti is, I'm here to suggest that this might be exactly the kind of thing that we should deploy AI to solve. And so I'm a, an AI expert and a Haiti expert and we've built this P spot. This Haiti P sp is what we're calling it is an application that I'm excited to share with you. And it started to kick out some ideas and concepts and approaches to this piece process that I had not considered and are worthy of our attention and consideration. I'm excited to share with you what we built, our approach and the kinds of ideas and concepts that it's starting to kick out. So that's what we're going to talk about today. I hope you'll stick around for this episode of the Stimpak podcast. Okay, so I want to slow down and talk to you for a second about a book I just read called Genesis. No, not that Genesis, although also a fantastic book. This Genesis, I forget the subtitle. It's something about AI but it's written by two very unexpected authors. Henry Kissinger, who you may recall, he was a world famous diplomat, was Secretary of State back in the 70s, got the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to, to ink the Paris Accords, which is, that's Vietnam, the peace deal around Vietnam, has an amazing career, died in 2023 at the ripe old age of 100 years old. And you know, he's worthy of books to be written about him and, and there have been, but what was noteworthy and unexpected to me is his last book that he, he pens just before he dies is with Eric Schmidt of all people. They actually wrote two books. The first one is less interesting, the second one is fascinating. That's this Genesis book and Eric Schmidt, if you're not familiar, he was the former CEO of Google. And not just any CEO, but during the most critical years of when they were scaling from like a hundred million a year in revenue to like a hundred billion dollars a year in revenue from like 01 to maybe 2011 or something. And then was the executive chairman for years after that. Anyway, huge in tech technology circles, Silicon Valley and around the globe now. And he is one of my favorite AI thinkers at this point. Not because he's any smarter than Elon Musk or Sam Altman and these kind of leading AI thinkers, but he's really fascinating me because of that book. And let me tell you about why or what the book is all about. So the Elon Musk's and the Sam Altman's of the world, they speak a lot about the technology in and of itself, what it can achieve for humanity within the tech space and even healthcare and some other kind of fascinating things. But nobody's talking about what AI can do for government, for policy, for our laws. And that might initially be a little jarring, and it was for me too. But this book, Genesis is heavily about this concept of what AI will do for governing us at first gen. I'm sure you're feeling like I, I was just. There's no way in heck I'm letting AI be in charge of me, right? Or make any decisions about my laws or my policies. But hold on for a second and think about what you're already doing with AI and what most people are already doing. And AI is not very good yet compared to what it will do someday. It will be a super intelligence. The current versions, the, the current flagship models are all at about PhD level right now. And that's good. But it's going to get a lot better, right? They're going to become super intelligences and. But even right now, I'm betting you've already asked ChatGPT or your favorite AI model for health advice or advice on something, right? And just taken it. If we're already beginning to offload our decisions to AI, that's only going to continue. And as soon as I read that in Genesis, I started thinking, I bet they're doing this already in Washington. And so I started researching it and there's already been a study in 2025 done by the National Conference of State Legislatures and they found that 44% of state legislative respondents use generative AI for legislative work already. Right? You think that's going to go down? No, that cat's out of the bag. So that's where we're at in 2025. So. So this quote from, from Henry Kissinger might carry greater weight with you. Here's a quote from the book. An AI governor might Deliver truly unbeatable results. That's Henry Kissinger. So if in fact that AI model is truly delivering unbeatable results in governing us, why wouldn't we let them govern? All right, we don't have to answer that question today, but how could AI contribute right here and now? We don't have super intelligence AI yet, but we do have PhD level intelligence in these AI right now. So how could we leverage that AI to contribute to the peace process right here, now? Good question. I'm, of course interested in peace. We're all interested in peace, especially in Haiti. But it's important for. For us to understand that everyone's interested in peace, right? Even Vladimir Putin is interested in peace after he gets his land. Zelensky's interested in peace after he gets his land back, right? So everybody's interested in peace as long as they get their stuff, right? Whatever they. They're fighting about, right? And, and you and I are the same way. We get in fights with our co workers or our spouses, you know, and I'm interested in peace with my spouse as long as I get that thing that I was bickering about, right? If I get my way or whatever. Same in politics, right? We all want peace. We all, we don't want to fight with the other side of the political aisle. We want a balanced budget as long as the other side of the aisle gives me my demands. And it's the same in Haiti. You've got two sides, and they both want peace, but they want their thing first. The elites want the gangs to relent and, and they want peace as long as they get the corridors opened, as long as the gangs give up their weapons and bullets and go to jail. And the gangs want peace as long as the elites give up their control and they let the gang leaders be politicians and they don't have to give up their guns and they get to keep their lands and charge tolls for people who come through their territories and whatever ridiculous demands they have this month. But both want peace, right? They're just not willing to give up their demands. And so we have compliments. So how do we ever stop this death spiral in the world and specifically in Haiti? Let's take a step back and talk about peace and how it's made. Let's talk a little bit about forgiveness. Want to draw a distinction between forgiving and forgetting. We're often told we need to forgive, and that's critical. But the forgetting part, not so much. I'll give you a quick example. When I was early on in Business. I had a guy who we did a bunch of work for and he stiffed me for $87,000. And that was like a gajillion dollars to me at the time. And it wrecked my business, nearly put us out of business. And so we sued him, but I didn't have any protections in my contracts to. For legal fees. And so it was going to take me about $50,000 in legal fees to get my $87,000 back. And so we end up settling for 17 5. I was super upset about it, but it was the best I can do. Now, did I forgive that guy? As a Christian, Did I let it sit in my heart as bitterness? No. I moved on. I forgive, forgave him, but I did not forget. I didn't go back into business with this guy. I didn't do anything further with this guy. I certainly did not reconcile or rebuild trust with this guy. Right? I didn't have to. I can move on. I could do business with other people. Okay, second story. Slightly more entertaining. And I was a young child, my parents were divorced, I was, I was very much left alone. And so I became a total klepto. I stole everything from like 7 years old to maybe 9 years old. Me and my friends were terrible and would steal just so we could spend it on toys and at the arcades, right? Yes, true story. One time I was at a friend's house and a very sweet little girl down the street and we were playing in her house and watching shows and I ended up in their den and on the shelf they had this big German stein full of silver dollars, right? And of course my eyes lit up. It's like there's no way they're going to miss any of those things. So I pocket a few, I don't know, maybe 15 or something put in my pocket they're jingling around but. And went home, right? And thought nothing of it for 20 some years. Then I'm driving through the old neighborhood as a 30 something year old and I go by that house and I remember, right? It comes back to me and the dude, the dad is out watering the lawn. I was like, I'm gonna have to talk to this guy. I'm gonna have to confess my sins to this dude. And so I, you know, I pulled up my big boy pants and, and rolled down the window and got out of the car and chatted with him for a while. He remembered me. And then eventually I got the courage up to, to tell him what happened. And I thought that he was gonna kind of Laugh it off and let it go and then, you know, I'll give me a break. No, but he did it. He kind of let me fry in it and which is fine. That's up to him. And I told him I was gonna make it up to him. And so I had his address, of course. And so I, I, I bought him a couple hundred bucks at a restaurant nearby and I mailed it to him and a letter and apology and then he replied and forgave me. Then he let me off the hook and he was very kind and gracious about it and our relationship was mended. I had apologized, I had made restitution, and we were essentially reconciled. But I want you to see reconciliation as on a spectrum of trust. Right? Of course he trusted me to not come back to his house and raid his shine of silver dollars again, but I'm guessing had I come back to, to visit. And he invited me in and we sat down in that den on there. I remember there's these two velvet chairs. I'm betting if he ever leaves that room, it's going to be in the back of his head. Right. The odds of Jeff stealing more silver dollars is very low, but not zero. So that would, there would be some risk there because trust needs to be reestablished. So it would need a few solo trips through the den for him to allow me that sort of trust. And then we would truly be reconciled. We'd have that trust built up again. Why do I bring that up? Is because that reconciliation step is not always necessary. It's part of the forgiveness process if you need it to be. I'll give you a more serious example. When I told you my parents were divorced, my mom ended up remarried an abusive man who ended up killing my mother when I was 14 years old. That of course, is, was a horrific experience, truly tragic for the three of us children. And I, of course, did the very difficult work of forgiving that man in my heart. Right. I'm, I'm a hardcore Christian and I believe that the atonement of Jesus Christ is real and that he really has paid for my sins and for that guy's, my stepfather's sins. And so I luckily was able to let go of that bitterness, that three headed monster of anger and grief and seeking justice, right? That demand for justice that, that creates that heavy bitterness burden that can stay with people for a lifetime. Luckily, I had the virtue of applying Christ's atonement to that thing, to not need to settle my score because the score had already been settled. And what a Wonderful gift. However, I did not forget. Meaning he needed to go to jail. Right. He's still a dangerous man. He's proven himself a killer. I saw Erica Kirk's profound proclamation of forgiving Charlie Kirk's killer a couple of weeks ago and of course, was touched by its parallels to my own experience and applauded her in my heart at that moment. But she nor I will forget the actions of that killer and thus do not need to reconcile. Meaning we don't need to build a relationship of trust with these guys, put them in jail or whatever the consequence may be, and I don't need to continue a relationship with them. Well, that may sound ridiculous for me to even mention until you think about the people in Haiti and recognize that their perpetrators, their captors, are in their neighborhoods currently running free. And any potential peace plan is going to need to solve that problem where either these perpetrators get justice and are sent away to prison or some other consequence, or all of. We're going to ask all of these victims to coexist and thus require to reconcile, at least to some degree. I would like to. To think that their Christianity, which is the predominant religion in the area, will. Will give them a chance at forgiving them. But isn't it too much to ask them to reconcile with those captors, those same Haitian terrorists who have been raping and beating and torturing and kidnapping and burning their houses and their businesses, terrorizing these poor victims for years now? That seems pretty horrible to me. And I suppose the elephant in the room is the fact that for those of you not familiar, I was kidnapped as well in Haiti. So have I forgiven my captors? Yeah. Yeah, I've done that work. I've let that bitterness go. I've applied the atoning blood of Christ to that situation. I've had a couple years to do that. But do I want justice for those guys? Yeah, sure. Have I imagined myself confronting these dudes in the Port au Prince National Prison? Yeah, I've been to that prison. It's horrific. It's hard to conceive of a more hellish place on earth than that prison. Do I want those kidnappers in there? And do I want to confront those dudes in there? Yeah, but way more for all of the people who were outside of that cell, who were in the population, who had been terrorized by these guys for years. That's what I want. But how badly do I want it? What's the cost of that justice? Because right now, everybody else who wants justice for these terrorists has the choice of making peace Remember, we want peace as long as we get our stuff. Well, if we don't want all of our stuff, if we reduce our demands, we can have peace now, right? These gangs are willing to make peace as long as they get amnesty and some control and get to keep their guns, they'll stop using them. And I believe they would, at least for a time. And so we can get peace right now if we're willing to forego justice. So do I want justice? Yeah, but I want peace more. I want peace. It is the much more rational thing to want peace now more than justice. Otherwise this current state could go on forever. That might be a depressing thought. And it is. I have good news for you. So what then will determine how much justice these poor victims get? Well, if a, an overwhelming military force comes into Haiti and beats back the gangs, then they get all the justice. If nobody comes to their aid, then they're going to rationally need to do a peace deal with these terrorists and get no justice and be required to do a lot of reconciling. That is yet to be seen. However, I have some good news. There are, in between war or conflict and peace, there are two really important steps. One is ceasefire. You're familiar with this concept. Everybody put down your guns for a minute and let's talk. It's short term, but there's a long term middle called a truce. You know what a truce is? It's where everybody says, okay, we're going to stop the destructive acts of conflict, put our guns down for a long period of time with some sort of agreement in place. It's. It's not reconciling. It's not. I've forgiven you. It's not even. We're going to have a relationship. Think of Ukraine and Russia right now. They could do a ceasefire and then come up with a truce wherein they agree to stop killing each other, they establish a border. That doesn't mean they're going to establish diplomatic relations or trade relations at that point. Right? That can still be. You can still hate each other and have a truce in place that stops the killing. You could do something like that in Haiti also. And that's much more simple to establish. I have a second piece of good news for you. Just a few days ago, the UN Security Council approved what they're calling a gang suppression force. They're estimating up to 5,500 troops internationally will be donated and sent to help this. That dramatically increases these victims likelihood of obtaining some form of justice. And so while the details of that are still forthcoming, the timing of it still forthcoming. We expect be in the next couple of months. We'll start seeing troops flow into Haiti. We'll see. But at some point, a peace deal is going to have to be put together that will establish a ceasefire, fire, and then a truce and then perhaps even some reconciliation on the victim's terms. Okay, so we got our, our good news. We don't necessarily have to do the whole forgiveness reconciliation thing. That might be a choice that Haitians get to make in the very near future. And so what will that ceasefire and truce, what will be the terms of that? And so what can AI do to contribute to that concept? And could it do a better job than humans by themselves? That's the question. That's the point of this video and this, in this software that we've built. So think about for a second how humans would go about this. And I've been in the room for some of these negotiations in the past, so I know a little bit about it. And the people that come to the table and, but they, there's nothing shocking about the process. You probably can imagine what it's like. It's a group of smart, talented, experienced people who, who know the lay of the land. They've probably been in peacemaking processes in other areas of the world, and they understand what it takes to bring people together to do the negotiations. Who are the people that matter, who are the stakeholders, who are the potential spoilers. They establish the playing field to some degree and who has influence, who can actually be trusted to do what they say they can do. Like that whole dynamic kind of starts to come together and it happens over a period of time. And then they decide if there's enough common ground to where a deal could even be made. Right. And, and the experience I had in this maybe a year and a half ago, there was no deal to, to be made. Everybody essentially walked away from the table, which of course was heartbreaking. And so that, that's the human version of that. And so what could AI do to bring value to that process, to do it better than, than humans? Okay, so let's start by talking about what AI is good at, like what it, what it should do, what it does well. And just to be clear, I've been doing this for years. I've been involved in machine learning and massive data analytics in my business for a long time. And I'm thousands of hours into the LLM AI models since those came out a few years ago. And so I'm of course not advocating for just asking ChatGPT, what should we do? So, so let's, let's establish what is what AI is good at. AI is fantastic at analysis. It is consistently benchmarking higher and higher for what they call the needle in a haystack test. So they give AI a massive data set and ask it to recall some minute detail from somewhere in the data set. It's really good at that. So that. That massive data analysis nails that. AI is really good at ideation, right? Coming up with things. Think brainstorming, right? You. I used to run an advertising agency and early in my career we would name things that was one of the services they would ask us to do, and we would come up with thousands of names. And having a creative person in the room who has a hundred bad ideas, but maybe five or 10 of them are something that no one else would possibly come up with, that's a huge value. I've always enjoyed the quote that no man, no matter how intelligent and how experienced, how knowledgeable, can ever come up with a list of things that would not occur to him. Let's get a kick out of that. Of course that's true. But AI can, right? AI can come up with an exhaustive list of something that's really good at coming up with all of the ideas, right? So I can't imagine those naming tasks are still something that agencies do, because AI is so much better at that, right? It's nearly infinitely creative, right? So ideation. AI is really good at neutrality. You can teach it to be biased. You can also teach it to be neutral and totally dispassionate. And so it can be auditable, it can be traceable, it can show you its thinking. There's actually a fascinating thing happening in Albania right now. The Prime Minister declared an AI platform, the finance minister, or they even named it. I forget what it called it. And everybody's getting really upset about that. That's happening like in the last week or so. But there's so much corruption in Albania. The AI would dispassionately award contracts, right? And. And show its thinking for why it awarded that contract to that person. And so AI is good at neutrality if, if built properly, AI is also really good at multivariate factor consideration. That's a large term. So think of what it takes to. To do complex data deals. There's a scene in the movie Phenomenon that I've always enjoyed. If you're not familiar, this John Travolta has this super intelligence power that he gets struck by lightning or something, and in one of the scenes where he's showing his intelligence, he's doing some task, I don't remember what he's doing. And somebody says, hey, how do we do this thing? And he says, well you can just get this. He's like, I don't have that thing. He says, well this person has this, this and this person has this. If this person gives it to this person. And so he, he creates this chain of trades so the first person gets what they're they want. And he says it as though they're fools, like why didn't you think of that multivariate factor combination? But that's a perfect example of what AI does really well, those multi stage combinations, right? And you can see how in a peacemaking many party negotiation, AI would be particularly effective at solving that kind of a challenge. Our brains are really limited to not get too nerdy. The prefrontal cortex is where our, our judgments are made. There's a really cool book called your brain at work and, and it details how we come up with judgments, how we consider one option versus another, how we decide on something, right? You've all had that experience where you go, maybe not all of you, many of you are old enough to have gone to Blockbuster Video and seeing too many videos on the wall and you can't decide, right, which one to get, but give you two or three, you can decide pretty easily. A better illustration is if you've ever felt overwhelmed, right? If you, you couldn't make a decision, maybe there was, it was very complex, right? Like you know, what, what college do I go to or what job should, should I seek or you know, what house should I buy, right? These things can have many contributing factors, right? What relationship should I get into? Who should I marry, who should I date? These things can have 6, 7, 8, 20 different factors that contribute to them. If you try to make those in your head, you're going to fail, you're going to feel overwhelmed, right? If the factors relating to a decision are more than two or three, you're going to have a hard time considering them. That's why we whiteboard things, that's why we write things down on notepads. That's why we do pros and cons list. That's all our effort to get the multi factors out of our brain and processable in small chunks of two or three items. We need that as humans. AI doesn't, right? AI can take all of those factors, chunk them at one time and consider them all and weight them all to an extent. There's some Software methodology. I'll show you later where we chunk that down further to leverage the capabilities of AI. But just rest assured, understanding that AI is way better than us at that multifactor consideration thing. Okay, so now that you know a little bit about what AI is good at and better than humans at, I want to illustrate our methodology and how we leveraged what AI is good at to contribute to this peacemaking process. So our platform started out with all of the actors, we call them actors or stakeholders. So this is everything from the, that gang leaders as a group and as individuals. CARICOM, that's the Caribbean Community countries, the World Bank, U.S. state Department, the Catholic Church leaders. And it was 42 different actors. And that's not an exhaustive list. That was just for this experiment or this iteration. It's not everyone, but it's a lot, right? It's all the major political factions and their leaders within the transitional Presidential Council. And a lot, right? 42 different, different, different actors. And then we analyze what we call the power topology. That's who can do what, who has the most influence, who's got the biggest sticks, who's got the biggest carrots, how do they coalesce or what are their coalitions, right? What do they agree on, what's their Venn diagram of interest, who wants what, who wants it more? And we quantify all those things. They're not just qualitative, but quantifiable. And so you might be thinking, how do you, how do you put numbers around that? Well, you establish a rubric. So I mean you've seen this when you fill out tests, right? I'm extremely satisfied. Satisfied, neutral, not satisfied. That's a rubric that creates a numerical value, right? And we do that across all of these factors to establish this power topology so you can get a real lay of the land and understand the game board. So that's PASS one actors and an actors analysis. And so, and so that first pass yielded about 156 bilateral relationships and then a bunch of coalitions and their dynamics and their, their collective veto power and their collective contribution power. And all of that power topology is what we refer to it as. So the next phase was all about establishing the instrument. So what could be utilized or deployed to achieve peace? What could be offered to the gangs that would still achieve justice in, they call it a DDR package, a demobilization, disarmament and re integration program. So that, that becomes a package and what instruments can be in that package and within a, a spectrum of acceptability and what's what budgets are associated with those things. So it was about 180 instruments that have proven effective around the world throughout history that were just grandfathered into this one. We also let the AI be a little creative and establish 20 or 30 novel instruments that it could all bring to the also bring to the table. None of them really made it very far in the analysis set. But, but we're interesting now. You've got a big actor set and a coalition set. Now the AI takes all these instruments and analyzes which will fit what fit the game board and are usable and could be successful. And every instrument was matched and cross applied. So this matrix kind of comes together with a pairing of instruments that work well with particular actors and coalitions and what they desire. And so you can see how this is moving forward and eventually it becomes a peace plan, a set of truce items that could or could not be accepted by all of the actors that matter. Right. And the likelihood that they would be accepted by each actor and whether or not if somebody wanted to veto a particular instrument, did they have the authority to veto that one or did they have the authority to pay for it? All those considerations come through the system and eventually at the other end, after some, gosh, hundreds of thousands of words of analysis, it's, it's volumes of books big, full of analysis and consideration and reconsideration. It kicks out the other end, it's short list. And I won't go through them in detail, but I will provide a link so that you guys can check it out. It was, it was cool that the model itself wanted to show to you and I what it had done. And so it built a website where you can go through and see its work. Right. And I'll post that for you to check out and go through. And I'll tell you, it was when we started to build this piece bot, it was really an exercise in hope that AI could contribute something to this space. And I'll tell you, it's pretty compelling work. It's not perfect and it's your classic garbage in, garbage out mechanism. There's, there's not up to the minute intelligence fed into the system, meaning there's always fascinating things that come out during these closed door meetings. I know what the gang leaders want because I've seen them in the, in the WhatsApp threads and my system will go out into the, the news, the RSS feeds and I'll read all the latest news and, and it'll put that into our intelligence system, but it's not putting in the things that are said behind closed doors. And I know that the key players have all sorts of interests and motivations that we don't know about. And so my system knows what it read, but it doesn't know what's behind closed doors. I've fed my own intelligence into it in addition to that, but that's not exhaustive. Right. I'm not in every closed door meeting. Certainly there are some brilliant people at the U.S. state Department and within the Haitian government that are doing great. And caricom, they're doing great work that know things that I don't. And if those things were fed into the system, you'd get a different output. But the things that it's outputting right now, the recommendations, the instrument sets, the peace plan structures that it's kicking out that you're welcome to, to go and explore, are fascinating and are worthy of consideration. I can say that as an expert in Haiti that they're worthy consideration. I'm not a peace process expert. I'm excited to get feedback on that from those of you in the audience who are. But I'm excited for the contribution that AI can give to this peace process. It's a fascinating thing and an exciting time. And the thing I'm most excited about is once that gang suppression force hits the ground, in hopefully a matter of months, we will have all the pieces in place to where we can get a deal done and get justice for these victims that have been enduring unspeakable atrocities for years now at the hands of these gang terrorists. And I'm deeply hopeful that finally we'll be able to celebrate a peace deal in Haiti. That's my prayer. I hope it's yours too. See you guys next time.