$10B AI Chip Gamble | TSG Ep. 999

Hey, everyone. Happy Friday. You know, is, is open AI cranking up the presses again and printing money?

I, I don't know. It, it's crazy. But, uh, we're gonna discuss it that and more on Textron Gang today, as is our new way of doing it.

We are live, so this is live tv. Anything can happen. Stay tuned.

If you're just one of those people who just wanna say, I saw it when it happened. You may see it when it happened. Let me introduce you to our gang members for this frigid Friday down here in Florida, where I saw a torque at Iguana on the street.

Walking my dog this morning. Uh, I wanna introduce you. Well, he knows from cold, he's in Boulder, my friend Andy Mann.

We have, and I hope I pronounce her name right 'cause I haven't had the pleasure of introducing here before. Barbara Ru Rus Rose. Rose.

Rose, okay. Barbara Rose, Barbara welcome, and Jack Poller, as well as the Dean. Mike Ard.

Also probably called up in New York today. J um, so gang, you know, does Sam Walman just have a little money printer downstairs is, you know, I don't know where all this comes from, and I'm not quite sure how they're gonna power an 850 megawatt or whatever it is, uh, installation. But Mike, what are we doing here?

Well, this deal certainly raised a few eyebrows. Uh, OpenAI is saying that if for $10 billion is gonna have an agreement with Cerebra, that is making a, uh, processor alternative to GPUs that will be used mainly in inference engines. And at the same time, OpenAI is also touting the fact that they're gonna be into robotics and all kinds of things at the network edge that, well, we're gonna require these inference engines.

Now, the part that's raising some eyebrows is it turns out that one of the leading investors in Cerebra is Sam Alman. So some people are starting to say, you know, does this represent some form of double dealing that's going on here? Or what's the case?

And the other side of the coin is people are saying, Hey, you know, open AI is already losing share on the browser side to Google, so where is actually all the revenue for this thing gonna be funded from? And what is the viability of this whole play to begin with, Barbara, what's your take on open ai? Is you kinda look at this company and say, you know, how, how much of this is real and how much of this might be?

Well, I don't know, a mirage. Oh, um, well, I mean, my first reaction to the news was I was glad to see a little bit of competition for Nvidia. Um, you know, my much of my career was at Intel, and I think it's always healthy to, to see some competition in the market.

Um, you know, the dominance that Nvidia has in this space is not necessarily good for the consumer, but, um, I, I'm not not sure about, you know, it where OpenAI is going, um, with this expansion into hardware and robotics and devices and everything, I feel like they might be a little over their skis. Um, you know, my experience is hardware is a lot more complicated than software. You know, you can't just release it on a Tuesday and patch it on a Thursday.

Um, there there's bigger implications if, uh, if there are flaws. Um, and, you know, I'm also curious, as they diversify their business, are they gonna have some of the same problems that Intel had when it tried to diversify? You know, um, Andy Grove used to talk about the creosote Bush metaphor.

Um, the idea that the core business is kind of toxic to everything that tries to grow up around it. Um, and, and so it'll be interesting to see what happens to open AI's core business as they try to expand into these new spaces. You know, I, uh, so Barbara, I, I have almost an opposite reaction.

I could, I understand the hardware piece of it, and I'll explain to you why in a moment. I don't get the financial piece of it, but I don't get any of the financial pieces of the deals he does here. There's always, uh, like a little circle jerk kind of thing going on where, let me, let me, you give me something, I give you the same thing under the table.

And the money never really leaves the bank account, but on our spreadsheets, we did a great big billion, multi-billion dollar deal. You know, Sam sits on the board there, or he's an investor in this company. They're giving him, they're buying $10 billion.

What are they getting back? And are they really buying $10 billion? And where I, I think, was it 750 or 850 megawatts?

Not gigawatts, uh, megawatts. Who, where, where's that sitting? Who's, and where's the energy coming to run those things, you know, on top of the 8 trillion that we're already building on AI data centers.

So that piece of it to me just smells, Taha have it. Let me tell you what does make sense to me, though. Didn't they buy, what's his name?

Johnny from Apple? Johnny, ive, they bought his little startup company on Ives, Johnny Ives, excuse me. Yeah.

They, they acquired the Johnny Ives business about, I don't know, less than a year ago. And, and he was supposedly working on consumer hardware, uh, devices, form factors, uh, that would incorporate I AI and bring it to consumers. And Johnny Ives is a name.

You know, we all have heard and trust can do something like that. But more than that, you know, after watching the news at CES this week, I am more convinced that it than ever, that the greatest use for generative ai, not agen ai, but for generative AI, is gonna be in what we call physical AI or robotics. And it may not just be the humanoid robot ala um, um, uh, what's the name with Darl Haner and, and Harrison Ford Blade Runner.

You know, I'm not just talking about Blade Runner kind of artificial beings. I, I think a lot, there'll be a lot of physical form factors, including maybe the Johnny I stuff where we're gonna communicate with, whether they're digital coworkers, digital assistants, digital slaves. I don't know what you wanna call 'em or, or what have you, or companions, but there's going to be a huge element of that.

Yeah. I mean, from my perspective, you, when you got more money than God, why not flood the zone, right? Cannibalize everything.

Profit is meaningless. Uh, you know, it reminds me of when Starbucks tried to go into Australia. Australia's got a great coffee culture.

Uh, they put four Starbucks on every corner in Sydney and then just waited to see which one survived. Uh, and, and they shut down three. Um, it feels a little bit like that.

This is also not as revolutionary as it maybe sounds the earth. I'm thinking about the tensor chips that Google has, uh, that was in look like 2021 specifically for ML and AI in their Android phones. Um, but I, I agree with Barbara.

I I want some disruption in this space. I want, I don't want monopolistic behaviors from an overriding, uh, provider, like an Nvidia or something. I mean, we could absolutely do with disruption in the personal computing market as well.

I mean, do we really care about the next new iPhone? And it's more megapixels and it's ounces light or whatever, doing much the same thing, but interesting devices that could help me in my car at my work. Uh, maybe it's a ring.

I don't that we're seeing that glasses are a thing. Meta is doing glasses. Google did glasses a long time ago.

I don't know. Throw the, throw your money at everything. Try it all out, see what's happening.

Well, I love the, i the disruption of it, But Andy, it's funny money, they print more money than the Fed. Oh, well, absolutely. I mean, and, and, and this could well be exactly right.

That was very perceptive. And this could well just be a swap deal, right? This is very common in software and, and in tech companies.

You buy mine, I buy yours. We both announce a, a big revenue hit and win, uh, and everyone's happy. We go to pr.

Could very well be a bit of that. Um, look, we said the same things about Uber, about Amazon way back in the day. Ah, look, I don't understand this business model either, but apparently if you throw enough money at it for long enough, you are either gonna win everything or lose everything.

So I guess we'll see whether they're a DTX or whether they're an Uber. So how does the losing scenario play out in your mind? Just to be careful about all this stuff?

Because if it doesn't play out as, as planned, there's a bunch of investors who have thrown billions of dollars into open ai, and they're all, you know, venture capital funds and all kinds of folks, and those people are dependent upon funds that they get from, I don't know, pension funds or wherever else they get. So, you know, is this likely to have a cascading effect here in a way that will result in, you know, the United States government having to come in and bail everybody out at the end of the day? I mean, very possibly from my perspective, yes.

This, it's irrational exuberance. It's exactly what we saw before the last couple of bail bailouts, right? com, uh, we've seen irrational exuberance before.

I think that was Bernanke's statement from the Fed. No, it wasn't. It was Alan Greenspan, Alan Greens, Greenspan.

It was too. So we've seen this before and there's no reason to think it's not more irrational exuberance, quite frankly. I would absolutely, I don't know about whether the US federal government's got an appetite to bail out these companies, but given that they're a lot of them in bed with this administration in various ways, donating to campaigns and, and ballrooms and what have you, maybe there's the quid pro quo there.

com, you mentioned, you know, some of the other Fed bailouts, like oh 8, 0 9 of the, of the mortgage. Basically mortgage has brought us down. Um, there's always something, uh, there's a common thread that runs through them.

Low interest rates. When when money is cheap, near 0%, you, you can flood the market. You can play with funding money because, you know, the VCs are very open to investing.

The PE companies are because the cost of money is near zero. But in today's market, the cost of money is not near zero. It has come down slightly, but with the risk of inflation, unemployment, whether you believe the numbers or not, I'm not going to get into it, but unemployment kind of being there, you know, now you start understanding why this government and this administration is pressuring the Fed to lower one of the reasons why they wanna lower the interest rates, why the tech bros are all lined up saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do that.

Because they wanna be able to flood the market with, with, you know, no cost money kind of deals like this. And, you know, it all starts to make sense now. I see, said the blind man, and it, it, it could very well be that that's part of it.

That's certainly part of it. The other thing is, you know, when there's a gold rush going on, everyone wants to sell, pick and shovels, but other people wanna be, you know, at the riverside doing their thing, looking for the gold. And, and so there, there's that element of it too.

And that's the irrational exuberance. So Alan, let, let's talk a little bit though about the people who are panning for gold, so to speak, rather than selling the picks and the shovels. Uh, and you know, there's one aspect, there's a whole aspect of vaporware here that I think people are glossing over.

One aspect is the lack of power. And you mentioned a little bit that in order for any of these chips that are being designed to be used, we need to invest massively in power systems that take many, many years to bring online. And I think we're go, we're really ahead over our skis over that one.

The other thing is, I'm surprised Barbara didn't bring this up, being an Intel person or former Intel person, is this chip that Cerebros is doing is somewhat magical vaporware. They're building what's called a wafer scale chip, which basically taking your entire 10 inch platter and making that one single chip, rather than cutting up and smaller chips and packaging that. Now that's very black magic type stuff that's extremely hard to do.

And to date, nobody has really done that except for maybe cerebral, right? So this is very much still vaporware. Is this thing actually gonna work in volume to be able to do what they wanna do?

There's a lot of promises here, not a lot of proof. And so I'm really concerned that along with all of the other vaporware we have, we have this piece too. And so, you know, what are we doing celebrating this investment into who knows what?

Yeah. And, and, and as pointed out, you know, inference chips, uh, you know, whether it's Broadcom or, or AWS Tanium or Googles, which I think are made by Broadcom, um, I don't know. It, it just, I, I will tell you this, I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Sam Altman is the biggest pipe piper in tech, and Steve Jobs himself. And, and he has a way of making sure we all see everything they do and, and talk about it and devote cycles to it. You know, Andy Grove at Intel Barber, he was a master at it, but he wasn't the, what's the word?

He wasn't the carnival barker that Steve Jobs was, and certainly not that. Sam Altman. And we'll see how it works out.

But let, let's hop guys, let's hop to our next segment if we can today. Uh, AI agent insecurity. All right, what do we got?

So Google's the latest to talk about AI agents, and they're talking about this time, personal intelligence using AI agents that are all connected to your email and everything else that you can possibly put together. And at the same time, the cybersecurity community has been researching, well, just what happens is when these agents get compromised, and there's at least two of these instances where, uh, app Omni has one example, and Radware has another example where somebody went in and just commandeered there, or at least they proved that you could commandeer this entire agent and it creates a new threat vector. And we haven't figured out how to secure any of this stuff, because basically all you gotta do is put together some sort of malicious problem somewhere, and the AI agent will do what it's told.

Or you can just create your own AI agent and take over the whole thing. But Jack, you wrote about this. What's your assessment of what's going on here?

Well, you know, I wanna take a quick aside to three second aside to say whoever creates these names for these vulnerabilities, I tip my hat to you, maybe give a cup of coffee or a beer. Uh, this latest one is called Body Snatcher, which is a great name for this, right? Applause to you.

Exactly. Uh, body Snatcher is an attack on, um, an AI agent, uh, actually developed by ServiceNow. And ultimately what happens is you can get access to a ServiceNow elevated account through their system, just by using any particular, any user ID that's any email address registered with ServiceNow would get you to an AI agent with elevated privileges, which then allows you to do anything you want within the system.

3 risk on a 10 scale, zero, one to 10 scale. So it's very high risk, gives you access to everything, but ultimately it's really a question of, are we moving too fast? People are deploying agent ai.

So AI in general, and particularly agent AI systems, without going and talking to the security teams and without really understanding what the risks are or testing what they're doing, and this mad dash to get to market without even thinking about security, is really a problem. And what we've seen now that's hit the surface are things that security researchers are finding, saying, Hey, they just released this thing as a security researcher, let me go in and look at this. Well, if the security guys are doing this, we know the bad guys are doing this, but they're not making PR announcements and trying to get press for it.

They're trying to get the actual data and the money. So we gotta believe that this stuff is already happening and people are getting hit, and we don't know about it yet. And it's really scary.

We're opening ourselves up to this huge, uh, problem because not only do people get access to the information, but they can control agents that act autonomously and do things. Uh, so the risk is profile is much worse. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's yet again, a case of, uh, fire, ready, aim. Yes.

You know, torpedo full speed ahead. Damn, the torpedoes. We're going out with these agents.

We'll figure the security out. Don't worry, we'll figure it out. But, and then the other thing is, I read this, you know, Google, Google's gonna let Gemini jump in to get a little bit more of our private inf like Google doesn't have enough private information about any of us, right?

Already. But now we're gonna put it in this AI agent that's probably not fully tested, vetted. It's hardened what could go wrong.

Mm-hmm. Hey, hey, hey, Alan. Do you think that their, uh, their solution is gonna have the beta tag for three years too?

Yeah. Well, no. That may scare people away with security concerns.

I mean, you know, it's, it's just, it, it, it is, you know. But if history is a lesson and history, I believe is a lesson and a guide, it never stopped them before. It's not gonna stop 'em now.

Thanks. I, I, and, and Jack, I love your understatement. I love that you are concerned.

And this is an issue. I tell you, mate, AI sec is a nightmare and agentic is a damn cesspool. Uh, look, it's an appalling state.

Or look, you talk about pictures and shovels you, or the first comes the revolution, then comes the management. Then sometimes later we get police, right? The security is so late to the game in this, it is nuts.

It's so easy to see data loss. PII exposure, IP exposure. Look, execs are plugging strategic plans into open AI systems.

I know they are. Um, ask me how I know not. There's no tracing, right?

There's no audit. It's an absolute nightmare. Um, and these agents, especially prepackaged agents, the the p it's, it's bad enough that I can go into Claude and get it to write some malware for me anyway, but I can go onto some, uh, marketplace and download an a, an AI agent, and I have no idea how to test it, or whether it's full of malware or whether to monitor or anything.

Reminds me of the old VAP marketplace, the Docker store, even the Google Play Store. Uh, at some point they were all cesspools of malware. Um, when you get this open system of swapping and sharing, uh, this is always gonna happen.

We've gotta do better on security, we've gotta do better on governance, compliance audit. Uh, I'm surprised we haven't had some significant news event from leaking through ai. Uh, it's really interesting Jack story, your article, and see these exploits in the wild, um, and see people using Claude to write even more exploits.

I think this is gonna happen more and more until we get a wake up cold. There's an old thing, there's an old saying that says, if you can, uh, imagine it in cybersecurity, somebody's trying it. So Barbara, has any of this given you cause for pause when you think about using AI agents?

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, you know, I think we can all see the risk of the overenthusiastic executive and, and moving too fast and all the security risks associated with that. But at the other end of the spectrum, I talk to companies all the time where they've kind of got their head in the sand and, um, and, and they're maybe even a little bit avoiding ai and, um, but they're overlooking the fact that like anywhere from 55% to upwards of 90%, if you look at the estimates of their employees are using their personal AI tools in their work, they're, they're doing shadow AI that's not sanctioned, that's not, you know, managed by, uh, by IT and security.

And, and that's creating massive exposure that, um, they don't have their arms around because they're not setting a strategy. They're not setting guardrails, they're not looking at the human vulnerabilities that are inherent in this, on top of this new layer of technical vulnerability. Mm-hmm.

It also seems to me they're not conscious of the fact that, you know, if I don't check that user agreement appropriately, and somebody might be using that data to train their next AI model, and then there'll be somebody out there kicking off a prompt that'll just say, you know, well, hey, what is the secret formula for Coca-Cola? And it might be there. Well, and, and speaking of user agreements, I mean, what a joke.

Like I saw in one of the articles, Google's safeguard on their, you know, personal intelligence layer is that users have to opt in to connect everything to Gemini. When was the last time anybody actually read what they were opting into or understood it meaningfully? Uh, you know, like for me, hard pass on this, I opt in on the privacy angle.

Barbara, I absolutely agree with you. This is, uh, I, I I will say though, if you want an AI personal assistant, you gotta give it access to all your stuff. I wonder, look for a lot of people, uh, privacy is dead already anyway.

Um, you know, Alan, you said it. Google already knows all about us. So does Microsoft, so does open ai, you know, Cambridge Analytica, sort of that we, you know, every, every little detail of our lives exists in, in flock cameras every day.

Uh, I wonder if this is just a way of the world that to get the benefits of the personal ai, you just have to admit, look, whatever privacy is dead, uh, give yourself up to the Borg. Turn me on. So, look, I wanna end this one with my best Roger Daltry imitation here.

Speaking of my mic. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. You won't get fooled again.

Let's move to the next one. Mike, what's going on at RSA? All right.

Well, kind of related to this whole security conversation anyway, but there's a new boss at RSA conference and Jen Easterly, who was at the cseg ahead or deputy or chair at some point, um, for the Biden administration, and of course is maybe perceived to be an enemy of the current Trump administration. I don't know if she perceives it that way, but, um, you know, it's kinda interesting to see that these things come full circle and she's likely to take RSA the conference into a whole new era. And I know you have an article about this on Security Boulevard, Alan, but what's your take here?

So, Mike, there you go again, politicizing this. Um, so yeah, so let, let me preface this whole thing by saying that, hey, I've been going to RSA for 25 years, and I, I actually have a great relationship with the folks who run RSA from Hugh Thompson or Linda Gray, Martin and Brita Glade and on down, we partner with RSA for the last 10 years. We put on the DevSecOps event on Monday at the Moscone Center for, I think, Andy, you've probably been there over the 10 years, once or twice at least.

Um, this year, of course, we're doing it on securing, uh, AI native dev, right? Kind of new DevOps. Um, I gotta salute Q Linda Britta and the team.

What a great pick this is. Let me tell you why. Jen Easterly, west Point graduate, west Point graduate something like 20 years in our armed services serving in intelligence operations, frontline combat, right?

This, this is a veteran, a real veteran came in, continued working for the government when, when Chris Krebs was, was fired from CSA for saying that the 2020 election wasn't fixed or whatever, uh, Jen succeeded him as the head of CS a and by all accounts of everyone I've spoken to in the industry, did great work. CSA was really, especially during the Biden administration, CSA became a leading light for a, a, a government private industry partnerships. They had a big, they had a decent budget.

Some will say they didn't spend their budget efficiently. I what government agency spends their gov budget efficiently. But by all accounts, she did a great job there.

New administration came in between doge and political considerations. They have cut ceases part of Homeland Security. They have cut CED to ribbons, Jen and everyone else there was purged.

And I do mean purged to the point where it, it, it makes for serious doubt on our cybersecurity readiness and posture and the way the government and, and private industries working together. Mm-hmm. I don't think that's controversial.

It, it is what it is. She was then appointed or offered a, a chair at West Point to teach. And, you know, when you have a vindictive type of administration that is into retribution, they, they pulled it, they, they rescinded the offer to her chair because of her support.

And, and, and for her coming out and saying, the emperor had no clothes in terms of our cybersecurity posture, But she didn't shrink or crawl under a rock or wait three years or however long it'll take for a new administration for whatever. She continued leaving from the field from front. She kept talking.

She kept speaking, she kept writing. She kept herself at the forefront of this community talking about what our mission is as a community, as an industry, as a market. What, why cyber's important.

At the same time you got RSA, Hugh Thompson and I, I think it's Crosspoint Capital, um, it's in my article if I, if I said the wrong company, I apologize, but it's, Hugh Thompson is the managing partner there. They, they took RSA out as a standalone entity, I don't know, three years ago or so. And they've been on a very clear mission since then that they've really enunciated well.

They wanna be more than the world's biggest security conference. They wanna be a continuous, a 24 by seven worldwide security community. They wanna be the biggest security community in the world.

They want to be the security community in the world. F's a great guy, Linda Britta, they're all great people. I know him a long time, as I said, but they needed a leader, a real leader who's gonna rally the troops, who's going to make this conference into a community.

And I, I couldn't think of a better person than Jen Easterly for a lot. How much pressure will the Trump administration bring to bear as a result of this? Because you could assume that the government officials that used to go to this conference will not be showing up for sure this time.

And they might even extend that out to contractors that do business with the government. I mean, you know, how nasty can this get? Let's go to our man in the beltway, Jack, what do you think?

Uh, well, I think, you know, there's the politics side of it. There's the financial side that government employees aren't traveling as much as they used to and attending conferences. And I think that's an issue.

Uh, in general though, I think this is a great move by R-S-A-I-A. And I agree a hundred percent with you. RSA needed a leader needed to do something to become more than just a yearly conference.

I think we were talking in the intro beforehand was, you know, RSA is more than just once a year in San Francisco right now, if only we move outta San Francisco. And that's another story, right? Uh, but I think that having somebody who can, that is a personality and well known in the community that is, um, not a figurehead and not a just a, a functionary or an executive, but it's actually a leader that says, understands the cyber security community and has a vision for where things should go and how things should progress and bringing cybersecurity to the main front of it.

And I think all of that is very, very good. And, you know, whether this administration or any other political factors come into play or not, I would be willing to bet that generous Lee just pretty much ignores that and just puts our head down and then, and just marches forward full steam ahead with security rather than full steam ahead without security, Which is refreshing. Yes.

A good change of pace. Um, Mike, I think there will be retribution, there will be repercussions, some of which you've outlined, but Hugh Thompson is no fool. And, and either as partners there, I think they're prepared for that.

I, I think, I think the current state of cyber is no government alone can dictate cyber or help us improve cyber. I think we were onto something with csa, which was, it's about a private public partnership, and this administration won't be here forever. Mm-hmm.

I hope to see us get back to a private public partnership, not a tech bro back deal kind of thing that we see with a lot of the AI stuff. Cyber's too important to play politics with it, right? It's, it's, it's critical infrastructure.

Literally. It's protecting our critical infrastructure. And, and if you are willing to gamble with that and, and play politics with that, well, that says something that says something about you.

You, I know. So Barbara, lemme ask you this. Can we take politics outta cybersecurity?

Or is it just, that's just hopeful. Wishful thinking. You can't take politics outta anything these days.

I mean, good luck with that. There's nothing that can't be politicized. Mm-hmm.

Or that is it, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I I sorry to be cynical and jaded, but you know, when, when Alan's here saying something has to be above politics, I, I just, there's nothing above politics anymore. Well, I'm, I'm just being politically correct. I know this is gonna be pol look, but, so look again, I, I'm, I'm involved in RSA, I'm saying that upfront.

You know what? Senior Cser and government cyber officials did not come last year for the first time in a very, very, very, very long time. The administration already decided they would withdrawing from that public private partnership on this, right.

The money for CSA got put into, I guess, masks for ICE people or whatever they use it for. There, there is no, you don't hear about CSA anymore. Other than that, the Department of Justice has been instructed to go after Chris GREs Mm-hmm.

And stuff like this. So let me ask you another question. Will the leadership of cybersecurity move to some sort of international body or some other collective thing?

Well, I think that's what RSAC wants to be, is an international presence. They're talking about at one point, like when I first got involved in RSA, there used to be an RSA Europe that was generally in London. And then there was an RSA APAC that was in Singapore as a matter of fact.

Uh, even a tech shock here. We, we broadcast live from Singapore a few years when they were doing it. I was, I was thinking more about an international alternative to CSA itself, because CSA did a lot of good things.

But you know, they're not, you know, US might not be the only game in town here. Well, there Is, there is the eu, right? The eu, the, the e the EU legislates.

But what the, what's a little different than maybe what we do here in the US is they, they throw stuff out that won't be in effect for two years or three years. And they do try to take in some industry feedback and they'll amend and change and tinkle, you know, tinker with, with the dials. But I don't know if they have Jack, maybe you would know.

Do they have like an equivalent to csa? I don't know. I don't think so.

But you know, I will, I will put my politic hat on and say that the EU regulations also have their share of cybersecurity regulations, have their share of issues, particularly, they're very big into breaking end-to-end encryption because they want to get access to your, Well, they're trying to, they're Trying to, that's, that's that big UK more than the eu, Right? But it's, the EU is also into that. So, you know, unfortunately there is no, uh, utopia, no nirvana available today.

And we do have to make compromises in everything that we do. And cybersecurity is a compromise always. I just wish people would compromise less.

So, Jack, do you think that there are, uh, oaks sitting in countries like, I don't know, China, Russia, Iran, they're having a good laugh at our fence right now. 'cause they're like, you know, could you guys be any more silly about him letting this become too easy? I, I mean, I don't think, I think the part of CISA that sort of disappeared was the public private relationship that, that Alan was talking about.

CISA as an entity within the government is still has a charter to focus on government security. Um, whether they do that well or not, I don't know. But I mean, that, you know, that's still their charter and they're still focused on it.

Uh, I don't think they have budget, right? And so, you know, but the governments, I, you know, we're, we're still, the government operates five years below everybody else in terms of where the i their IT stack is, right? There are still places out there that are using, you know, unpatched old computers from 20 years ago.

So there's, you know, we're still, we we're still not covering the basics regardless of who is leading CISA or what CISA is doing. So I, am I worried about government security? Yes.

Am I worried that you know about this particular administration? Yes. Am I worried about what's, you know, the effect of which particular leader is at cisa?

It doesn't, I don't think it matters because each independent agency runs their own IT system, and almost all of 'em do it horribly, right? Yeah. You know, you know, I, I would take a a marginally different view on that.

Um, you know, I look at where we are as a community in, in SecOps, and there's a vacuum, you know, whether they're paid or not, they're still stripped of people. And their mission to me is now unclear. The administration at the moment does provide some very questionable numbers on things we've seen in the healthcare business.

They've provided some advice that experts in the healthcare industry would reject out of hand. Uh, I wonder at what point do they provide advice in the cybersecurity industry that cybersecurity experts would reject out of hand because they have their own craven desires to promote something else. And so I think with these esteemed government organs no longer being trustable, fudging numbers, lying from the podium, firing qualified professionals, the industry, our industry needs a SecOps leader.

We need independent bodies. We need researchers, advisors, communities. We see this in the healthcare industry and with California grouping with multiple other states to set up their own sort of shadow.

CDCI love this move by RSA because it gives our community some hope that we have independent advisory and research bodies who can actually give us real warnings that we can trust, which frankly, I don't believe from the US government specifically that that exists anymore. Yeah. I Want to borrow Barbara's, uh, skeptical hat and, uh, say, have we ever had a government?

We could trust Alan, but here's the other side of that. Nicole, Jack Nicholson. You know, can we handle the truth?

You know, here's Johnny. Um, right. Let me, let me, let me give you a little good news.

Little good news. In spite of all of this, in spite of all of this, you know, I did, Mitch and I started up our, uh, still cyber podcast, which is based on our still secure after all these years podcasts that we did in 2004. We started that.

And, um, we had on a Lady from YL Ventures, you know, 40% of all the world's VC money dedicated to cyber is invested in Israel this past year. One little country the size of New Jersey got 40% of all the cyber VC money. On top of that, though, over the last month or two, I have seen this is, you know, subjective, not objective, but I have seen six to 10 companies, new cyber companies emerging from stealth with crazy seed rounds.

$50 million, a hundred million dollars seed rounds, not a seed rounds, because I think we're on the precipice of an explosion of, of innovation and new product in cyber, or at least repackaging old stuff better. I don't know. But we, we, we are seeing a lot of new companies, a lot of money getting in here, a lot of fresh ideas, how to defend against AI threats, how to leverage AI against threats, how to develop better code, how to secure our code better AppSec.

So in spite of all that trouble with this government private, you know, what have you, the industry is alive. The industry is ablaze with, with new fresh ideas. One of the things RSA does is their sandbox, their innovation sandbox this year I think they've given now, I don't know, $50 million to the finalists and stuff.

Um, it's a good indication of, of the health of that industry. So there you have it. So you're telling me that thin blue line in cybersecurity is in Tel Aviv?

Is that where it is? Pretty much, yeah. Pretty what today?

It is, it seems. Anyway, I mean, uh, if you want to go watch that, uh, the podcast, that's a video webcast with Mitch and I and the lady from Wild Ventures. Some of the numbers are, are just remarkable.

I mean, they, they really got it going on. Um, anyway, we're about outta time folks. We're about outta time.

Barbara, thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you on. Andy is always good to see you, Jack, I kind of threw you a curve here, pulling in on this, but I appreciate it as always, Mike, what can I say?

Thank you. Thank you for watching. Have a great weekend, everyone.

I love this live stuff. Hey, chime in with comments and stuff. We're trying to monitor.

Monitor them here, bring them in. Uh, we will be at RSA so stay tuned for that. Also, predict was yesterday, but we have it on demand for you today.

You wanna know about cyber. There's a great session with my friend Fernando Montenegro. com.

You could go and watch 'em on demand right now. Until then, though, everyone have a great weekend. Enjoy text Drunk tv and we'll see you on Monday.