Is like waiting for a tree to grow for shade
My father didn’t say much. But one thing he said more than once stuck.
He said the graveyards are full of people who were almost ready.
I think about that when I watch organizations dance around the AI governance question. Nodding at the right conferences. Forwarding the right articles. Scheduling the right meetings. Almost ready. Getting close. Just need a little more time to think it through.
The hole doesn’t wait.
I am not a patient man by nature. I have learned patience the hard way — the way most people do, by losing something because I moved too slow. But I have never confused patience with waiting. They are not the same thing.
Patience is deliberate. You are watching, measuring, holding your position for the right moment.
Waiting is just fear with better manners.
What I see in most organizations right now is waiting. Dressed up as strategy. Framed as due diligence. Sold internally as responsible caution.
Meanwhile Georgia just passed three AI governance bills. Washington passed five. Twenty states have active legislation moving right now. The law did not send a calendar invite. It just showed up.
Here is what nobody in the governance conversation wants to say.
Most organizations are going to adopt an AI standard the hard way. Not because they chose to. Because something went wrong and the choice got made for them — in a hearing room, in a courtroom, in a headline nobody saw coming on a Tuesday morning.
I have seen it in every industry I have ever watched closely. The standard gets adopted. The only question is whether you wrote it or whether somebody wrote it for you after the fact.
After the fact is the expensive version. It is also the humiliating one.
The Faust Baseline was not built for the organization still making up its mind.
It was built for the one that already knows.
You know who you are. You have been sitting in those meetings. You have been reading those bills. You have been watching the stories pile up — the fabricated quotes, the denied insurance claims, the children talking to machines with no guardrails — and thinking, we are not ready for this and nobody here is moving fast enough.
That is not paranoia. That is pattern recognition. And it is correct.
The door is open. The framework is built, tested, documented, and operational. It was running before most organizations finished their first internal AI policy draft.
You do not need to be convinced you have a problem. You already know.
What you need is someone who built the answer before the question became a crisis.
That is what this is.
The graveyards are full of people who were almost ready.
Don’t be almost ready.
“A Working AI Firewall Framework”
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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