Techstrong Gang – May 2, 2025

TGIF. Everyone. It's Textron gang.

Happy Friday. We're happy that you're here. Question for you.

Has Elon left the building? You're watching. Textron Gang.

Welcome back to Textron Gang, everyone. Happy Friday. Lisa Martin here holding me on the fort.

Trying to do my best. Alan Shimmel impression, I'm joined by my gang members today. We We need a sign guys.

Like a gang sign. A gang Sign. Yeah, I know.

No tattoos. As long as it's not the Tesla symbol. We're no, God.

Yes. Exactly. How about the Tesla International?

Not sign T. There you go. Sorry, Elon.

Do not Enter. Sorry, El. We're gonna be talking about that.

Yeah, that's Mitchell. Ashley joins us. Not in Colorado.

No guitars behind you. But I've heard a lot of guitar stories since we've gotten to finally meet in person. I've had several people come and say, where's the guitars?

Yes. You know, so it's kind of my brand now, I guess it Is your brand VP practicing of DevOps at Futurum. And I wanna pull my best, Alan.

Hi. Atop his Perch. Oh boy.

Here we go again. Top Of the Golden Gate Bridge where he surveys everything going on in Silicon Valley, and he's been digging into everything this week in cybersecurity. RSA, John Swartz.

Oh, Hey. Thanks Elise. That was, that was, that was actually, I would venture to say that was better than when a, I think Don, I think you've raised the bar for Yeah, I don't tell Alan though.

We don't want him to see this secret secret. So speaking about High Perch last night I went to this reception at the Salesforce Tower, which I hadn't were high perch before. And it's about the 62nd, 65th floor.

Mm-hmm. It's incredible. I bet.

Incredible dominant signs and and views of the Bay Area. But anyway, it's good to be here. And I, it, you know, I wanna say it's great to meet you in person, even though we live close to one another.

You too. It's good to see Michigan as always. And T first time we've met in person.

First Time we've met. Yes. Yeah.

Awesome. And they're both taller than they appear on tv guys, I gotta tell you. I was through that.

Yeah. It's, uh, and it's also, I wanna thank the AV guys. These guys like travel all over the country.

Men job, Paul, the whole team here, They make it look so easy. Make, that's Because they're running on lollipops. They're giving out lollipops here at RA and they're living on sugar.

Yes. I understand. They love clutter on top of the desk too.

That's real favorite in their, Andy. Gotta be handsy. And I gotta do a shout, shout out to Jody, who is our Jody Onside person organizing a lot of the events.

You can't do this without things that we do early in the week. Exactly. She's my wife too.

But, you know, that's super. Keeps the gear's running as well. Yeah.

So, Gary, yeah. Was, we've had such a cool week and I wanna hear, because you were, you were literally at top of, per yesterday. So I want to see and hear everything that you've been seeing at RSA this week.

There's so much news. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So many surveys. Okay. Uh, Mitch, we're gonna be talking about MCP servers.

This was a new term for me. I wanna understand what's going on here. And will this lead to faster AI deployment?

I mean, can I, AI deployment get faster? Well, it's interesting. MMCP, which is mon model context protocol.

There you go. Talk about that over dinner, right? Yep.

It, it, it basically filled a, a big need, which is how do LLMs and agents talk to other resources, data systems, applications, APIs, et cetera. How do you, how do you have a standardized way of doing that? And it was actually was developed by anthropic.

They donated the code, open source, everybody took it and ran with it. 'cause it filled a very specific need. It's got a little bit of security to, you know, authenticate and then talked IT systems.

Um, and so all we hear about is MCP services. Yeah. This company, that company, everybody's come out with an an MCP server.

It's almost not quite like AI inside, but sort of with ai, we also have a way to get the access to this data. So security. So here's what I've been looking for at the show, is that's all good.

How are we securing this stuff? Who's stepping up to do something about security with ai? And not just AI itself, but access to all the resources, right.

That you use. Right. And so Salt Security came out with, Hey, we have a, we have a, uh, an app now that will monitor a product that will monitor MCP servers and what they're doing, what they're talking to.

Log some of that telemetry and actually share it with other vendors. Right. I'm not quite sure how that gets shared, but, um, to kinda help all of us understand what's going on.

'cause the, one of the first rules of security is, well, what are we securing? How do we know what, what it is we're trying to either protect or prevent against or prevent from attack? And, uh, so I think it's a good idea.

I'm glad to see somebody stepping up. And there's been some other announcements too. Cisco made a nice announcement about donating an LLM that they created around security actions and analysis.

So that's, you know, some good progress, but it's been, there's a lot more to go. I, you know, we've got a lot of room to grow. So, you know, it's like a common thread.

I did a, like all of us did a number of interviews this week. MCP came up at least four times as the biggest concern or potential threats. It was a recurring theme from, I think, Forcepoint, Palo Alto Networks.

And it kind of underscored where we see things going and where we see the biggest, like in terms of ranking threats is, is MCP the, like the, the number, number one with the bullet or so to speak? Are there other things that you came across that were of, of, of raised concern, especially as we heard into ai? Well, MCP got a lot of attention and needed a lot of traction fast.

I mean, it's only been out I think about maybe 60 days. It's not like Wow. Something that's been development for, you know, months or years.

Yeah. Yeah. It would tell you how big of a need there was for agents in L lms Sure.

To talk to other data. Um, and there is some security built into it, but there's also the other side of it of, well, how do you know what it's talking to? And how do you know that the data that it's using from that other system, it's now an attack vector.

Of course. Right. We can, we can will and is getting attacked.

The other part of it that's a little bit, you know, good and bad about MCP is, it's not like it's one universal thing that you've talked to, and it'll talk to everything else. What it really is, is a server with protocols that are tuned specifically to that vendor service. So if I want to talk to Amazon and what it's doing, I have an Amazon or set of Amazon MPC service.

Okay. If I wanna talk to, to Google and its services E everybody has their own. So literally an application or an agent could have dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of MPC servers sitting out there that's talking to, of course, all this need to be maintained.

Yeah. They all have vulnerabilities need to be updated and upgraded. And so it, it, it adds a lot.

It solves a problem, but it adds potentially a lot more complexity to it. So it's not the end solution, which that's fine. You, you know, one step at a time.

But it, it, I'm glad this is what people are saying. It's what Happened. This No, it was, it was interesting because I, I wasn't familiar with it.

And, and, and it is this, this, this overriding concern or obsession with data security and silos mm-hmm. And the communication, especially with AI agents and how they're gonna work within organizations. It's all kind of a touch and go process, I guess.

And they're learning Yep. As they move along. I mean, things will be broken and they'll be fixed.

And we talked about, I remember it was how you mentioned it, like the Bolton approach versus Built in. Yes. Oh, yeah.

That was also a major theme that kept coming up. But You bring up the, the, the fact that you're hearing concerns about MP Mitch, what is, if an MCP server is compromised, what's different? What, what could be exfiltrated?

So it, it's, it is, it's a gateway into what's happening inside an A agent or LLM. Okay. So it's, it's like you making a phone call, but not really.

It's not at and t you're talking to. It's some hacker Right. On the other side of the phone line.

Um, this uses the same protocol, something called restful interfaces, which looks like a URL. It's a very common and very standard, easy to use for developers. So it's, that's the nice thing.

It's easy to, to develop, but what sits in front of that to protect you. Right. Is there an application firewall is what we use to protect apps in those kind of situations.

What do you do to protect your MP MCP servers? It's not really built into the, the protocol itself. So it's the, the other kind of wild card factor about AI is you hear about prompt injection.

Yes. In other words, people, we talked about sending data and actually it's a prompt or something that can, uh, bypass, prompt or modify prompts or inject prompts. Uh, and we live in a world now where AI can actually create its own prompts as well.

So there's a recursive reasoning effect to AI in the model itself. It also, you could tell ai, write a prompt for me to do the following. So someone could inject something, compromise an NPC server and say, that's very nice.

Here's a set of things that will pass, help bypass your security guardrails in the, in the LLM. Now get me access to things that I shouldn't have access to. So it, it's such a kind of new front.

It's, you know, not proven about how to secure all these different attack vectors. So I'm glad people are like, concerned about it. Yeah.

Yeah. It is also, I'm wondering, is conceivable that we're gonna see other acronyms or other types of technology along the lines of MCP coming along where there's gonna be a, a rush of, uh, insecurity in terms of, uh mm-hmm. Probably feelings among, among the people within companies.

It's like, oh, this, this is, can add a, a dizzying amount of, um, ability, but it also can come at a cost. I mean, that's always been the case with technology though, right? Yes.

Yeah. There's always what it can do and what it unintentionally might do. Right.

And how much design use butt, how much design security into it upfront. Right. And so isn't that table Sticks these days?

It, it, it is, but also there's also extended is beyond what we intended. Sure. Or scenarios, or you can't account for everything either.

Yeah. Right. And so it's an open protocol.

Um, you know, anthropic didn't like copyright it or protect it. It's all under, uh, I forget which I think it's MIT license. So you can do what you want with it.

The spec was very well written, which helps make it widely adopted. It'll evolve too. Now, will it bifurcate and become 25 different variations of that?

Yeah. Or will it kind of, the industry fall together and say, let's kind of keep this in the general direction. There's no standard body over it.

Okay. Or open source project over it, this guiding and directing it. So you could have a bit of wild, wild west.

Maybe we already there. That's Kind of the unsettling thing to me, is like piggybacking off of the Christie Nome as I was thinking about that. Right, right.

The, the diminished status of csa. And while at the same time that's happening, we're we're, we're putting ourselves on an island, and then at the same time that's happening, we've got all these new things like MCP coming along that could potentially muddy the waters and make things more d it's just a, it's kind of a, it's, it's a kind of a toxic stew of some sort that, that would raise alarms, I would think. Well, Just, everything moves fast.

And so Yes. You know, so there's also agent to agent a two, a protocol, which was introduced by Cisco and some other companies aligned Yeah. With it, which is now at an agent level.

How do we discover what capabilities agents have? How do you talk to them? How do you secure a connection to, to both, um, invoke things that other agents or create subtask agents, things like that.

So it, there's more things that are gonna come along to your point. Yeah. There was also a, uh, I was talking to somebody who, who's doing a lot of work with Microsoft, and they, they're mentioning is Microsoft's starting to talk more about the super agent concept.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So you have the overriding agent that runs the other agents.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting. They're almost taking the place of a, of the human, so to speak. So that adds like another layer of uncertainty.

I can't help think about if you ever seen the ro ro the show Robot Wars on cable TV where mm-hmm. The, the, they, they control 'em, but the robots, you know, one shoots fired, another's got a saw blade, and they try to Yeah. They try to take out one other pots.

Right. Okay. Okay.

It's kind of, kind of the environment headed to is agents fight with each other. I mean, that Could seem like, could happen. Right.

This, the agents arguing over what's best for a project. Yes. Right.

I mean, as they could become more, more reasoning in, in their abilities. See, star Wars had the Clone Wars. Well, we have the agentic war.

The, The agent wars. Yes. Agentic War.

Well, One of the themes Oh, wow. One of the themes this week is that this just the speed with which everything is happening. Mm-hmm.

I mean, this injection of fuel that chat GPT brought on the scene Yeah. Just Over two years ago. Yeah.

Really? Yeah. November two years ago, It was just Like, it wasn't even on lexicon of everybody, Every company has to have an AI story.

What's your AI story? We don't know. Uh, if you don't have one, make one up.

I know, I know of major companies that have done that. I have friends who work. These companies tell me that's, we talked about something.

Tell me, they say they make it up as they, they're going on. Because if they don't, they're screwed. Yes.

Right. Well, customers are expecting it. What are you doing with ai?

Yeah. How are, how are you infusing AI into your technologies? It's gonna help my business create value.

So it's this expectation from a sales and marketing perspective, but it's also, you can kind of spot, and especially from your perch, where there's hollowness to an AI story. But I do wonder if we, if we look at, I always think, you know, technology is inherently neutral, so it can be used for good. Mm-hmm.

It can be used for bad, and that will probably never change. Mm-hmm. The acceleration in the speed, you know, the, the cyber landscape changing and being spread and so many more vectors and, uh, technology trying to stay up with laws and things like that.

But if we look at MCP from a positive perspective, um, what are some real world examples that you can see where this will maybe be an accelerator of, uh, good agentic ai. Mm-hmm. Well, it, it, everything in AI works on context, right?

All the reasoning models. They have their logic and their algorithms and, and parameters of weights of how things are reasoned. Um, but what it needs is context.

It knows about what it's been trained on, but in an application, usually have something else that you're Yeah. Trying to apply that to. Not just a prompt to say, Hey, what, create an outline for my next article or my next white paper.

It's, here's information I need. I need data from that in order to take the next step in what this reasoning model's gonna do. So that can be anything from, well, to book an airline ticket.

Yeah. Right. And you talk to things to find out what all the different possibilities are.

And then take into where's your profile, your past travel history. Okay. Now I can see what your patterns are, what you like.

Well, that's, things not built into the models. You've gotta bring that data into the agent or into the application that's gonna apply that. Okay.

So it, it's kind of, you know, when I, when I ran it, what I would tell my team there, don't worry about shadow it, because everyone will come to it at some point for either security, single sign on or data or other applications. 'cause they, they'll, they'll work with us. It's not, it won't live in the in ether forever.

We'll get to work with folks. And that's true for AI applications too. It needs data, but it needs more than just generally available data.

It's gonna have to be specific to a use case, application, business problem, app, et cetera. Yeah. Well, one thing is for sure, guys, this the speed with which things are changing.

Never a dull moment here on Textron game. We're gonna leave it here. We're gonna come back talking about security, ransomware, clean rooms, disaster recovery.

Some news from Commvault will be back after a short break. We're back on text on gang talking, security, ransomware, disaster recovery and clean rooms. Mitch Commvault added factory settings capability to clean room recovery service.

They also talked about and, and aligns with CrowdStrike. What's going on here? Clean rooms.

What's the latest? Well, clean rooms means lots of things. Could be a chip, fab, clean room, right?

Or it could be a clean room where you reverse engineer something without, uh, without violating IP protection. If you're writing software, in this case, it's giving you a, a clean, secure, uh, isolated environment in the case of ransomware. Right?

So when, whenever you're attacked, you're not only looking at what was attacked, but were other thing that compromised as part of it. Maybe data wasn't stole from systems, but, you know, keystroke logging or other things drove you. Horses might have been embedded in applications and servers that weren't even part you didn't think were part of what we're attacked in this case.

How do we get that all cleaned up so that it can be back to full operational scale when you, one of the one methods of recovering in their disaster recovery is to go to an offsite facility or a virtual facility, and that's where you do business. It's kinda the equivalent of that, of, alright, if I need to get back to a known good, that's my clean room. And that's what Commvault has done, is we'll create your, your cloud and your infrastructure environment for you.

It's ready to go. It's not sitting in a warehouse somewhere in, you know, north of San Francisco. It's, it's virtual.

It's set up Yeah. In the cloud, ready to go with your configuration, your infrastructure, so you virtually could switch things over and now operate in that environment. So it's Crosstrek and a be they're providing with incident response services.

Is that, how does that play into this, this s into what Commvault's doing? So, it, it's interesting. I was in a, in a session the other day and, and I said to, to one of the vendors, you know, it's not about prevention.

It's more about response. We used to used to worry just about defense. Yeah.

I think to protect it well enough, right. That something might happen, but we've got things well protected now. Everything we have to assume eventually will get compromised.

Yeah. So it's almost like, you know, you, you could play basketball at ball, but just shooting hoops. But you gotta have defense too.

You gotta have both. Mm-hmm. And so the response part of it is not all of us are expert at the forensics and understanding what really happened.

And we have the human element. It's like, you know, this is a system Mitch managed, and he may be a little self-conscious or a lot about what they're gonna find out if he made a mistake or something. Or, or maybe we just don't know all the latest approaches and attacks and attack vectors and, oh, it's not just the data that they compromised or have access, but they, they distracted the backups and the backup of the backups.

And so you use firms like CrowdStrike and there are many others who will do this incident response to do both the investigation, but also to get you to a place where you're back to a known good. You can start operating. 'cause the worst thing you could do, maybe the worst is, okay, we had a, we had an incident, ransomware, something happened.

Okay, good. We think we're all right. Stop operating here.

We, we sort of contained it, but you didn't really, and now you're even in a worse condition. 'cause you really weren't at a place you could start operating securely. So, you Know, the, so, so you say a lot of interesting things, Mitch.

Oh, one that I pay you to say that. No, no, that's true. No, it's really, I can uch for him.

Pay him. Well, he's right. Oh, both are very fine.

I'll take the payroll. But you said we kind of reached this arrow where we went from, we know we can't prevent everything to, we have to respond. When did that, when did that happen?

Or like, when did we reach that age and what was there some, was there an event that triggered that? I just, 'cause I always assume that, oh, we're gonna try to go into these press conferences. We're gonna try to stop this and it'll never happen.

It's, it's, which is a little bit unrealistic. It is. Rather than, we'll try to stop as much as we can, but in the event it does happen, here's our response.

There wasn't like a, a seminal event of this milestone occurred in, you know, like a log four J or something that Okay. Brought this to our attention. I think it's, it's a kind of the slow water boy, you know, warming up in the frog scenario mm-hmm.

Of eventually we, we all realized that look more and more every day we're hearing about data breaches and attacks that are successful. And it happens to everybody. You know, it's, it's the big largest banks to the smallest, you know, mom and pop store, whatever.

We don't hear about those. But at some point, I think all of us realize like, look, there is no way to prevent this there. No.

Right. Not a hundred percent. It's not If it's, It's not, if it's when it's, it's or when did it already already Happen?

Yeah. And how often and what's it gonna cost us? Exactly.

Yeah. So at some point you kind of say, alright, we gotta stop thinking one way of this is the only way to, let's put in an a response process. Yeah.

Incident response process. And, and just assume it's going to happen. 'cause we don't want it to, we're gonna do our best to prevent it.

But when it does, the worst thing we could then do is not be ready for it. Right. And say, you know, who do we call?

Well, Gus Ghostbusters isn't available. Who do we call next? Right.

Well, I, as a CU customer, I like the idea of at least being told that this happened. I mean, b before these companies required to report breaches, I remember going to a conference in Phoenix for LifeLock, and it was, um, Kevin Mitnick was at this. Mm-hmm.

This conference, it was, it was a, it was a confab and it was behind closed doors. And there were a number of, ah, God if I, maybe I should, well, Walmart was one of the company, I'll mention it. Walmart was one of the companies.

There were some other major retailers. These, at this time, they were not required to report, but they were saying, how do we, we know we've been, we've been had mm-hmm. Um, what do we do if this, if this leaks out, how do we, how do we manage this crisis?

Right. And they were looking for consulting from Mitnick and some other folks. I was just a fly on the wall.

They just let me watch it. But, um, this is like a real concern. And they were acknowledging Target was another one.

They were acknowledging all sorts of problems. And this is free. So now every other day it seems, oh yeah, I get some a oh Postcard Every day.

Something in the mail happens All The time. Like, here's your, here you've been compromised if you'd like to, or you've potentially been compromised. Yes.

Though, yes. Yes. It's been, you've been compromised, you've potentially been compromised.

We have your data, but we haven't compromised you yet. Yeah. You know, there's all kinds of scenarios.

I'd love to know that. Yeah. And, and you know, how, how far does it go, you know, before you know it.

Well, There's so many people that do pay it. Right. Even though the Oh, too Many pay the ran Thing does crazy.

Right. Um, I, I was thinking of, there's, was it Zscaler, one of these companies does a quarterly report and, and companies are just like paying 25 grand Yeah. For almost Say like, 50% of companies held for ransom, paid the ransom 50.

Even though professionals will tell you don't do it. But a ransomware is a household word. Now.

I think a couple years ago I saw a stat, and I'm sure it's changed. I don't exactly know what the current number is, but like, a ransomware attack happens once every 11 seconds. And I'm sure that time number is just gonna go down.

Mm-hmm. So that response plan is not, uh, a nice to have. Oh yeah.

It's not. 'cause no one is safe. Right.

That's the reality. Mm-hmm. Well, ultimately security, like everything else is a business decision.

It's like, how much insurance do you buy? Yep. Yeah.

Under a situation where something has happened, you know, you see it on the, the cop shows on tv, they say, don't pay the ransom to get your kid back from the kidnappers. But people do it. Right.

Because outta fear, I'm not gonna risk it. And, and there's, there's a financial business decision of what does it cost to pay the 250 K to what they're asking for versus what we're gonna have to go through. Right.

And what's interesting is, when you talk to people that do this for a living, you know, the question is, well, are they gonna, are they gonna give us back our data or not do anything? If we pay it, they're just gonna do it anyway. It's gonna Perpetuate.

Right. But actually, so it's a business for the, for the bad guys too. Oh yeah.

They're ransomware. They're like, they don't wanna mess with you. They just want the money and move on.

You look All these like basic, like, like ransomware or malware, and you think of ai, we're talking about accelerating and, and, and creating even a faster pace in tech does that here of, it broadens the speed of attacks. It broadens the variety. That absolute versatility of what they do.

And They're using AI too. I had somebody, somebody say, I think it was at a Cisco event. No, it wasn't at Cisco.

Anyway, they, they made the comment of, by the way, we're worried about AI taking our jobs, AI's taking the, the bad guys' jobs. That's true. That, that's a good point.

That's a good point. So maybe there is a good point. No, I'm, Yeah.

It's affecting us all. Let's put it that way. It's changing the game.

I, I will say though, a lot of the theme, another theme that I've heard at RSA this week is there's a lot of, a lot of software companies who are really working to make organizations proactive. Mm-hmm. Aware of the security risks and the vulnerabilities so they can be proactive.

Um, there's a lot of also thematically fighting fire with fire fighting AI with ai. Mm-hmm. I don't think we have a choice.

It's just going to accelerate. There'll be more vectors, more applications, more software, more data. Yeah.

Nobody wants less data. Slower and less apps. Well, it's, and to your point, it's not a matter of if it's when it's, or if it's, yeah.

It's, it's happening. Right. Yes.

You know, AI is part of the, Or to your point, did it already happen? Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Are we aware of This? They're using ai.

We have to use ai. We do. My my point is, especially around securing ai, is we've gone through this sort of succession of when the cloud came up, security kind of put the kibosh and said, look, you don't wanna put our, protect our data there.

It's not secure yet. It took a couple of years, two, three years before everybody was, not everybody, but you saw to be more comfortable moving things to the Yeah. All right.

It's secure enough. Then Covid happened and everyone learned that, well, you know what? We can make security and business decisions and technology decisions in hours and days.

'cause we had to. Yeah. Right.

So we don't have to go through that set up roadblocks until we finally give in. 'cause security will allow us to do it. Businesses are making, making big bets on ai, a rum group.

Um, some of our analysts, uh, Diane and, and Nick, Nick, patients from our analysts did a survey around, uh, CIOs and all, but also CEOs. Mm-hmm. It was like close to 50% have already, this has been a few months ago now.

Yeah. Already initiating AI projects Yes. Pilots in their organization.

And it's one of those, it's kind of like setting off for the new world. Like, we're gonna fund, you know, whichever explorer to go find the new world. We don't know what we're gonna find there yet, but we know if we don't do it, somebody else's Discover, somebody else will be Discover, discover it.

Right. And so meanwhile, That's a we talking Yes. Us us getting on the ship, you know, we were like, okay, we gotta figure This out.

They don't have a choice. They have to book their passage. We Gotta, This Everyone has have, and we're gonna put ourselves the best we are, and we're gonna partner with the right people to get there.

And, and we'll discover the things that are gonna help us and things we have to fight off on the way it is. Yes. Exactly.

Speaking of journeys, cyber resilience, we talk about that. Every company talks about cyber resilience. It's not a destination, it's a process.

Is what Commonwealth's doing, for example. How do you see that positively impacting a customer's si journey mm-hmm. To actually becoming cyber resilient?

Or can is that reality? Can an organization actually become resilient? Yeah.

The idea behind this is a great topic for Krista case on our, on our team analyst, on our team resilience. The way I think about it is resilience is being able to respond. You can plan for a lot of things, but what, how do you plan for the unexpected?

Right? And especially as you design systems, there's, here's everything we can do to keep it up and keep it running. So we'll minimize any effect of someone attacking or being com be us getting compromised.

Then resilience takes that a step further of how do we stay up even when we don't know what those attacks Right. Were gonna be, and what might have happened so we can degrade, maybe degrade service, but not shut down the business. Yeah.

Right. And so things like what Commvault has done, things like ai, right? Um, redirecting traffic or responding to, you know, building a, a kind of a self-healing kind of application or a network, something that can respond to events that happen, not just prevent them from happening and then giving us data about what happens so we can fix it.

And In a weird way, CrowdStrike showed us how you can respond to something and then retain and actually enhance your brand name in a weird way. You know, despite this major breach they had. Oh, yeah.

The way they handled it. And, and the, the, the full transparency, especially from George Kurtz. Yes.

I mean, that, that to me is kind of significant in a, in a sense that they're involved in this announcement because their credibility, it's weird in a weird way. It actually was enhanced after to that. I think so too.

And it is like in a brilliant way, the way they handled that. You mentioned the word transparent, right? And that's what, especially in the age of security and AI organizations have to be transparent.

There has to be accountability. And they took it. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And it was also agree exactly with what you said. It was also something could have happened to many other companies too.

Right. And it was, that was a m milestone event to Recognize that, yeah. Oh, yes, we need more resilient systems.

And, and Delta had a much different response than Other element Read my mind. I was gonna say, without throwing stones or Cassie says, yeah, Microsoft and Delta, Microsoft just went mum, which is what they always do. Delta Went on defense.

Yes. That was a Ed Baston, the ceo O the CEO E at the Olympics. He banks so much on that company and its technology use.

He's keynoted, CES and pushed that so hard. So for him, it was a black eye in a sense. Yeah.

But for Mike, Microsoft, and again, I, I, I won't, well, I'll I'll say it. They, when these types of things happen, they put their head down and act as if nothing happens. Uh, they do that and, uh, cannot not do that.

I, yeah. In that instance, I think they did. But It's interesting.

It, it also highlighted like, Hmm, what do you do in a situation where you can't get to a device to physically change it, reset it, take something off of the device, be able to get it booted up. And it helped me expose me to, to some technology that Intel has that actually they can, uh, with their chip sets, they actually can get access to the hardware without the operating system booting up. Okay.

Where you could securely remotely get access to enough to a network that's active, uh, Nick on the device, and also to the, to the data, and be able to modify the OS or take a file off of the file system, do things to apply a patch essentially. So it will now it will boot up. So the blue screen of death isn't actually the final resting place of your device until someone comes to rescue.

That's good to know. You can do it remotely. And, and, uh, it was a really compelling 'cause there were companies that had that technology in place, and it's like, I did not know that.

It makes a lot of this good to know that Got that capability. I think one thing's for sure, guys, we could talk about security, ransomware, clean rooms, Dr. There'll never be a dull moment.

It's never gonna go away. We're gonna end this here, but it's never gonna go away. It's a flywheel.

And we just gotta hope that we can get ahead of the bad guys. I think my, my message would be we're at a much different place than we might've been five or six years ago. Oh, pre covid.

Yes. Where it's not Nirvana. Not everybody's out of their silos, but people security's at the table now to be able to talk about AI and how to secure it.

Yeah. Um, they're talking business to the business Business Interest. Right.

Not just threats and fuds. Right. Right.

They're, they're, they're understanding there's gotta be business value and impact in a positive way. Absolutely. Not just insurance that we're buying.

Right. Something bad happening. Right.

That's what the board wants to know. So We're, we're at a place yes. Where that can, we can do productively move forward on security initiatives and make much more progress faster.

I believe That's a mic drop moment. Mitch security's at the table. We're gonna take a short break and come right back talking about where's Elon going?

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Contact us today and tell your story to the, the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. We're back on Textron Gang. There's an interesting story in the journal about Tesla potentially replacing Elon Musk.

John, from your perch, what do, what do you know, um, what do you, what do you say? Hey, Nothing surprises me about Elon Musk. He is an attention monger.

He is a brilliant, uh, scientist, but he is also a borderline psychopath. And, and, and I think here's what's going on. I think based on what the journal reported, the board of Tesla was considering replacing him in March.

And I think that's significant because he, it was probably at his lo e and there've been many with him, lo e in terms of his handling of, of Doge. It was Tesla's stock was being eviscerated. Oh.

Hammered. Hammered. At least 40% at least you're alone.

At least 50%. Uh, people were not buying Tesla cars. They were moving, moving away from them.

There are bumper stickers here in the Bay Area. There are Teslas everywhere. But I've seen bumper stickers that say, I bought this before Elon took over Doge.

Yep. Right. People are apologetic.

The company knows this. They're gonna get, they're getting killed in the markets Reputation problem major. But it's also financial implication.

Yes. And it's a political issue too. And it's, he's just tainted the brand.

Now, the, the story indicated that they thought about it, he's probably gonna hang on. But I think with them, the fact that they were thinking about this around the time they're after the first quarter results, they're looking, they're processing the first quarter results. Uh, and they're thinking about getting rid of him now that he has decided that he's gonna step away from Doge.

Mm-hmm. He got the message. I think they sent a very strong message to him, who, he steps away from the business.

He steps away from the government business Right. To, to focus more on, on Tesla. He's been making that point repeatedly that it will be his, his number one priority.

I think that was kind of to save that position, because I, I, he's one of those people I think, who he cannot let his hands off of every anything. He's a micromanages everything. Right.

He doesn't sleep. So it'll be interesting. I, I, I think the fact that he's weaning off Doge and that maybe it, it also depends on how Tesla performs, right?

I mean, the quarterly results are coming out. Uh, there were some yesterday with Meta and Snap that indicate Meta did well, snap did not do well. Um, but that's not unusual.

But people are looking closely at these companies and how they perform. Um, Apple's coming out next week, and that's going to be a major market mover, but Tesla's another major market mover. Mm-hmm.

And I think he has become such a distraction to that company. Like he was at OpenAI for a while, and that he's been at SpaceX. It was inevitable with him.

He just wears out his welcome. He does wherever he goes, including the go. He's very polarizing.

I, this story even made the roll. I'm looking at Rolling Stone. The story even made Rolling Stone.

Yeah. He's, he's a household world word, but he is very polarizing, You know, and I, I, I almost, so I grew up here. My dad was into the tech industry.

So I grew up in this industry. And I, I've said this before, but I just really admired this industry up until the last few years. And how we discovered things.

We, there was a genuine joy and interest in science and learning. Yeah. And I think now it's gotten too big.

It's gotten, there's too much money involved. Like people like Musk. I mean, I will give him credit, incredible ideas and innovation.

True. He's one of the true innovators. But it's also the corruption of the idea the power has gone to, to people's heads.

These are like nations that they run. And I've, I I've experienced such a backlash among the people who not just live here, but the people within the industry feel the same way. And they almost kind of wanna separate themselves.

I mean, I hope we move back to a different era, but for now, in the next couple years, conceivably, I think we're gonna be in this, this oligarch, oligarchy or bro culture that I just find so off-put and offensive. Um, I've said my piece. I just feel better about saying that.

But I, I know, b***h, I don't know how you feel, or you, Lisa, but, Well, I guess I would weigh in this way. You know, you have respect for someone like a Steve Jobs, even though there are, you know, can be crass and treat people roughly. Yeah.

Um, you can have respect for an Elon Musk who persevered and got SpaceX to a point where we can deliver Yes. Vehicles to space Yeah. And people safely.

And you have a great deal of respect for the ingenuity and entrepreneurship. Yes. Correct.

Yeah. You know what the, the just chutzpah stick with it that most of us will, would never have. I mean, it's, and yes.

You know, I've heard people say Elon truly is one of those people, the smartest person in the room when you go in. And it's very clear. And, uh, and I even, I worked for someone who was, who is themselves a very egotistical maniac, and they thought he was, you know, over the top.

So that kind of, I think he's at the, the top of the pinnacle there. Yeah. Yeah.

The lineage is very interesting to me because years and years ago when I worked at USA today, we would interview jobs a lot. And he was his best friend, or he claims his best friend was Larry Ellison. And, and, and Jobs was, you know, the master marketer Ellison, despite, you know, what people might think about him, really new technology mm-hmm.

And was a visionary in his own way. Mm-hmm. And there's, it Jobs was reluctant to, to let anyone know who he was.

He was almost kinda like a, a, a Charles Foster Kane. Everybody wanted to know what his rosebud was. Mm-hmm.

And, and we were always trying, and I always tried, he always shut us down in interviews. Mm. Like, I tried so many different ways to, to learn things about him.

And he'd always be on points, but he would sometimes let things slip. It kind of moved from him to Ellison. And I think Ellison is kind of like the mid-range between where jobs was and where Musk is.

Al Ellison wanted to buy the Warriors. He offered more money than anyone else. I talked to him about that.

He did. Okay. And Joe Lako eventually got the team offering less.

He wanted to, his idea, he wanted to have an NFL team called the LA Stars, and he talked to the NFL about that. I remember he mentioned this, he did America's Cup. Yes.

But he wanted to be bigger. He wanted to be like Ted Turner or one of those figures. And I think Musk, in a sense, is kind of in that area.

And the irony is that when I used to write about Musk at the beginning, apple used to give us a lot of grief at the paper. Hmm. Because they would, they felt threatened by him.

They would say, we are the innovators. Mm-hmm. He's, he's a charlatan.

And it's like, well, he's both, you know, you can be both. Yeah. Um, but it, it was, they considered him a threat.

And I said, he took the man, he ran with it. Now perhaps maybe he burns out or somebody else picks a mantle. Maybe it's Altman.

I don't know. Yeah. Well, you know, it's, it, it, so I said nice things about Musk.

There's also, you know, everything, every strength is a weakness taken too far. Right? Absolutely.

And, and this is a perfect example of someone believing they can do more than what they can actually do. Yeah. And within a realm of what a, uh, a tech leader, uh, can do, and the things they, they really can control.

It's the, it's a domain that they create. It's a world that they create of businesses or businesses and ecosystems of people that they work with. Yeah.

They can do a lot of things. Trump's the same way Jobs is the same way. Ellison, all, all, all the titans of today.

Right. Well, That's what that, that's, that was the thing about jobs. So he was the first guy to really successfully run two companies at the same time.

So he was doing Apple and Pixar. Yep. And that consequently Musk is running, you know, multiple companies.

Right. Jack Dorsey tried to do it with Square or Block and, and what was in Twitter. And it was, it doesn't, it didn't work as well.

Yeah. Um, so in, in a sense, Musk has kind of taken that in, in like everything he does. It's like, it is an exaggerator.

It's amplified. It is amplified. I, I agree with a lot of what you said, Mitch, in terms of respecting the ingenuity, the creativity, the innovation, the confidence to believe we can do this.

Um, I also think there needs to be a balance that we just don't see mm-hmm. Of transparency, of accountability. Mm-hmm.

Of honesty, uh, and knowing it, it's the Kenny Rogers song, no One to Fold Him. And I just get the sense he doesn't wanna fold him. Well, I think, you know, there's also the maniacal part of it of Yes.

Believing too much. Yeah. You can, so, so Musk has gone from this domain of what he can control to the public sector.

Yes. And when you stand up like a different beast, dumb ass and, and hold a chainsaw Oh yeah. And you impact people's lives.

Yeah. And you say stupid crass things that show you are so far from understanding what most people's lives are like. Oh, Yeah.

To be honest with you, I think Musk has been played the fool and he's the, you know, there's the tip of the spear idea. You know, who the, who the, uh, explorers and the settlers are, whether it's the New world or the Western frontier. Explorers have the arrows in the front or the spears in the front.

Right. 'cause those are the people who take all the barbs. And that's what, that's what Trump, that's why Trump let him flail out here.

Yeah. And just do stupid dumb things and, and be this maniacal egotistical going way over what he way saying things that we know aren't True. He was, he was totally taking advantage of, he uses a vessel To be his own Trump version of his own politician.

And you know what? He went too far. And, and people said, look, not only do I not like what you're doing, not only do I not like you, not do I not like you as a brand.

I don't like your products. I'm gonna, there's gonna be a backlash. Yeah.

This is happening with Amazon in a certain sense with book sales. Um, the irony I thinking about Jobs, jobs forced out of Apple by Yeah. After his power struggle with Scully, and he finally had to come back after years in the wilderness.

Well, they begged so It could Happen. You didn't come back. They, They, him, they bought him back.

Right. Because they, they bought, next you Will buy next you will buy my car. You know, remember how long he held out and I'm not gonna be CEO and I'll be temporary.

And he was extremely strategic about it. Right. He was very wise.

I mean, he Right. He played his game to get to a point where when he did come back, he wasn't the enemy anymore. Right, right, Right.

Do you think though, that we, you mentioned Tesla stock down 40%, at least this year we're in Yeah, I've lost track. We're in May now. Does Musk have to go for Tesla to regain the financial Success?

Yeah, he can. I mean, he can stick, he can stick around. Maybe if they, they have a muted version, which I dunno if it's possible, but I think he's so closely aligned with the, the company and I, and I, and you know, again, we talk about boycotts of products, especially tech products.

How many Boycots have there been about meta against Meta that never went anywhere. Everyone swore they were never gonna use again. They don't use it as much as they used to for Facebook in particular.

Uh, the X one that happened to Musk, it's happened to Musk before I, I all but quit on X and I, I see a significant drop in its usage. So that, that did work. Oh, absolutely.

Blue Sky is benefiting, Blue Sky is benefiting. Um, so in a sense it's happening with Tesla. Maybe he might be, uh, the exception because there've always been these high-minded protests, which I have participated in some of them, and I eventually go back to the service.

Yeah. I don't quit altogether, but I quit altogether for the most part with X. Um, I don't post anything on it anymore.

Rarely. Uh, but I think with, with, yeah, with Tesla, it's gonna be hard though because with the tariffs Yeah. And the competition from the Chinese automakers, I mean, he's in a really precarious position that he put himself in.

And again, he's exactly, that history repeats itself again and again and again with Trump, where he uses people, squeezes them dry, tosses them aside, no consequences whatsoever for, to him. And he'll do this to, to Bezos. He already is doing it to him already.

He's done it to Zuckerberg. Yeah. Uh, he's doing it to Tim Cook.

Look what Apple's gonna move their, uh, production, they're trying to move their production from China to India for iPhone. Yeah. Because they can't afford that anymore.

They're, and they're ramping it up. Poor Tim Cook. I mean, he's pro promised $500 billion in spending in the US production.

I mean, which is never gonna happen. Yeah. It's, I don't think they can do it even if they wanted to.

So, and again, it's another, so the tech guys, the tech leaders, all their bodies have been left. They've been badly bruised, and, uh, maybe he moves on to the, maybe he moves on to Alman or to somebody else to take advantage of. Well, I think, I think it's, it's everybody.

Right? Whoever is in service to what Trump wants. Yeah.

While they're in service to what Trump Wants while they're in service works, while they're in alignment. But we're, they're in a domain. All of all of the tech leaders are in a domain of, they don't control everything anymore.

Right. They don't, they don't just influence Con Congress with dollars and all of those kind of things. It's in service of a person who can five minutes from now change or five seconds from now change.

Mm-hmm. You're in, you're in good, you're in bad, you're not doing what I like. So it's different.

It's also A guy who doesn't even use a computer or doesn't know how to use one. Well, I mean, he thought his son was a genius for being able to turn a computer on and off. He actually said this.

He doesn't know. I, I don't, I'm convinced he Doesn't get this. The guy who that G used was a really cool world word when he discovered it.

That's, you know, that's another, yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah.

I, you know, when speaking of branding, you got a brand problem. When people take your, your, uh, moniker off your, off your vehicle and you put somebody else's, you know, that is Audi happening a lot here, Toyota or whatever, like the, and they actually kinda look like other cars. They actually, They look like Prius.

You realize, say that my wife just bought a Prius. It looks like pri Tesla So much. I Will say we're here, we are in Silicon Valley.

I don't know what's more in right now on the streets of San Francisco. Waymo's, driverless Waymo's or Teslas. I have only seen, and I've been paying attention for weeks now, one Tesla with the Elon sticker.

Only one. Wow. Yeah.

There's nothing, I think in Silicon Valley, people don't, I think they care. They, they're great, but they don't care for their Yes. I think they're great to make a statement.

And, you know, It's gonna be an interesting test case. The Robo Taxii, which we've heard about ad nauseum for years. Yeah.

Supposedly they are going to start a pilot service in Austin in a few months. Tesla. Tesla taxi.

Yeah. And like summer. Summer or so.

It'd be interesting to see how that fares. Yeah. Yeah.

Out In never dual moment in Colorado. You know, there's a lot of, Hmm. Don't see a, don't see a moniker, a logo on that car.

You know what that is. Yeah, Absolutely. Yeah.

Well, I think one thing is for sure, we can always talk about cybersecurity AI and many topics on Textron Gang. Elon's just one of them for Mitchell, Ashley, John Schwartz, you're watching, watching Textron gang. Happy Friday everyone.

Stick around. We have tons of great content coming at you as you well know on Techstrong tv. We wish you a great weekend, and we'll be back on Monday.

Thank you, Lisa Martin. Thank you, Lisa. You're welcome.