Techstrong Gang – October 9, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. I'm not in Florida, so don't worry about me.

We've got a great show lined up. I I can't wait to talk about armies of AI agents. As far as the eye can see, we've got news about the cloud and a bunch more.

You're watching Text on Gang. Good morning everyone. Happy Wednesday at Talent Shimel for Techstrong.

You know, first of all, let me say I am in not quite sunny. It's actually pretty foggy, San Diego, California, so don't worry about me and Hurricane Milton, though. Truth be told, our tech strong headquarters is strategically placed on the East Coast at Boca Raton.

And, uh, we're hoping that this storm, uh, will be missing us all down there. Uh, unfortunately, our friends in neighbors in Tampa and on the west coast of Florida look like they're gonna take a wallop and then it's gonna be end across the peninsula and probably wreak havoc from Orlando all the way down to St. Lucie County, I believe is the last thing I've seen.

So, um, you know, for everyone in, in the storm's path, I, if you were told to evacuate, I hope you did. And I, I pray everyone is safe and dry and doing their thing and boats don't get ruined and, but my boat is put away as well, so not to worry there. Anyway, beyond weather news, we've got a great lineup of Textron Gang to go over today and we've got a great group of people to do it.

Uh, it's funny, three of us were from Florida till recently, though. One, one has, uh, flew, flown the coop well, and one has gone north for, I guess for winter, for summer White. Yeah.

But hasn't phoned South Korea yet. Speaking of flying north and South, he's our resident Canadian cybersecurity expert, my friend Chris Bla. Hey, Chris.

Good to see you. Good to see you Alan, and, and officially not Canadian. You know, I'm a, I'm a yank who's lived here back and forth over the years and, you know, keeping an eye on my solar powered boats, you know, north of Cape Canada.

I'm expecting things to go horribly bad with them, but things are things I hope everybody else is, is, is safe. Yeah, well, you know, the problem with that solar panel stuff, they only work when the sun's out. Thank No Man.

And apparently they're ugly too. Well, they, but we know they may cause cancer. I don't know.

Um, so moving over to the Raleigh Carolina area where our friend Hope Lynch joins us today. It's always great to have hope in from Raleigh. Hope this, this storm isn't really, had I supposed to impact you guys up there this time, right?

It's not supposed to have any impact at all. The last two have, but it's just a lot of wind and rain for me, so I've been very fortunate. Good, I'm glad to hear that.

All right. And then moving, continuing north all the way up to baseball town. Is Aaron Judge going to be judged?

He's just not a postseason player, huh? Mike? No, he gets you to the dance, but he won't bring me home.

Well, it's early yet. He could still warm up, but our chief content offers So Mike Ard. All right.

And it is a gorgeous day up here in New York, so if you do need a place to flee, come on up. Absolutely. Um, just what we would need, all those folks who migrated down from New York here get their first taste of a hurricane and head the heck back up.

Who knows? Anyway, let, let's talk a little bit about what we've got going on today. Our first, uh, our first block is about AI agents as far as the eye can see an agent for everything and every one.

Mike, why don't you kick us off there? Yeah. SAP has kind of taken a, at the very least, is at the forefront of this conversation now because they had a tech ed conference yesterday.

And, um, they were basically highlighting that they're gonna put AI agents in every workflow you can imagine. Everything from, uh, resolving conflicts over bills to, uh, managing your entire accounting workflow process. And there's gonna be all these different AI agents and they're part of a larger trend.

We've seen, uh, folks at Salesforce talk about something similar and there's gonna be these AI agents embedded in just about everything we do. And there's also a story up on Techstrong AI talking about how within the next two years, we may all have our own personal AI agents for everything and every task that we do. And, um, a lot of us are multitasking.

So we do things more than just one particular job at our company. So we might have four or five agents that we are gonna have to master and orchestrate. But it's also worth noting these AI agents are listening to everything we do.

So there's maybe a downside to all of this, but Alan, I know you've been kind of looking forward to what I might call the next phase of generative ai, where we have all these agents that can automate all these tasks. And, uh, what's your outlook on all of this? I know you're enthusiastic about the productivity side of this thing, but any thoughts on how we're gonna manage all this?

Well, the obvious answer is you'll have an agent to manage your agents. Why not? Um, you know, but when we talk about agentic AI like this, I, I, it is the logical conclusion.

I I, so I I I see there's two ways this can go. Do you have one Uber Smart Master agent that can do all of these different tasks for you? And, and quite frankly, the, the scope of tasks that agents will be able, that AI will be able to work with, probably precludes you from having one master agent not any type soon, maybe sometime out in the future.

More realistically, is you will have specific agents for specific tasks, right? And, and think about the tasks that we do on a daily basis, both work and personal related, right? Think about all the different tasks we do, and, and I, I think that is the future.

You know, now are they, but the human mind works differently, right? So does the human mind think of all of those different agents as just different aspects of the same personality, right? Am I gonna name every one of my agents Samuel?

'cause I don't want to say a word that'll kick off anyone's boxes at hole over here. Um, so I have, you know, Samuel that does that, a different Samuel, it's just a different facet of Samuel, if you will, even though it's a different agent. Or do I have to remember what my agent, you know, what a, what's the agent's name, if you will, for each, because I don't envision us typing to every one of our agents, right?

We're gonna talk to these agents from a communication point of view. And it, it's a great thing for people who have no friends, all of a sudden you'll have a whole bunch of friends, right? But, and they're probably having agents for that too, right?

To help lonely people. Oh, They already exist. The Lonely Hearts Club agents.

Um, they, They already exist. They For sure exist. They do.

You talk, They do. As if you, uh, know one is is there something you wanna Share? I I, I read so many things about ai, and there are, um, one that is older, that has seen a little bit of resurgence now though, it's called Wobo, W-O-E-B-O-T.

And if you don't want to pay for psychotherapy or anything like that, you talk to Wobo and Wobo helps you through it. But now, um, if you just want someone to talk to, they have the ones that are very conversational. They'll have a chat with you about anything.

You can talk to chat GPT about your day, literally back and forth in a conversation. So I think to your point though, I think having named agents, someone could have five different friends with five different personalities that are agents or, um, it's all going through the same funnel, and it's just taking on tasks. But I do think structurally the way they work, they right now still do need to be separate, because effectively they're rules based, just like we've used business rules for years and years, right?

The more rules you add, the worse result you get and the harder it is to fix and maintain. So for now, I think there has to be partitioning. Well, and I'll, I'll take that one because that, that leads right down to security and Privacy Road, right?

You know, I look at all this, and I, you know, the time to process rules, you just said that the more rules you have, we know you, you know, the divorce it gets. However, we have this complex world, you know, that needs a lot of rules, and we want rules on my information who's touching, and I wanna know when they're touching and so forth. But we don't have the structure for it.

Uh, but without those in the near foreseeable future, you know, now two years, three, five years, you know, we have to develop these capabilities to have the visibility into the rules we already have. And so you start getting this feedback loop where if I use AI to watch those rules for me, you know, tell me what rules apply to me in this context that you, my, you know, my, my AI assistant George or, or whatever knows my context and can pull out the policy and say, Hey, you don't wanna do this right now because you are taking a risk. You don't want to, at that point, perhaps more rules is fine, you know, we just can't have to read them all ourselves.

So, Chris, let me follow up on that. What if somebody Jackson and takes over my agent and in effect creates a double agent, But, but again, nothing new un under the sun, right? You know, can, can I impersonate you in what context?

You know, what are the consequences? Well, you're a safe deposit box in your credit cards and so on and so forth. So, I, I, you know, I learned to just take that as the standard sort of security question, right?

You know, if you, how much do you care? How important is it to you to protect this thing? You know, I can give you security to that, but not beyond that level, right?

Is a nation state wanting to take over your agent? Yeah, well check your underwear drawer for microphones. You know, that's not your biggest problem.

Well, then, then I would also wanna know, and maybe Alan, you can have some insights into this, but who owns what agent? And I'm asking the question because there'll be an agent in all the software that belongs to the company that I work for. But, um, we all, all have our own personal agents, and in some regards, my personal agent may become a quote unquote secret agent that I'm using to, uh, to advance my own particular tasks and agenda.

And when I quit, me and my secret agent are gonna go with mija. Well, well, does your agent have Miranda rights? I mean, quite seriously.

You know, uh, if, if you, and by the way, what you guys were just talking me about security and double agents, I had like visions of Jack Webb, I dragged that tape. Mm-Hmm. You've been charged with section 4, 4, 4, 6 of the penal code, impersonating an agent.

Um, but I mean, think about this. I don't know. They suspect you of doing something heinously child porn or something, and they, and your agent has the goods, right?

Your agent, your agent knows where you've been and what you did, and, and, and, you know, did it with you. Um, can I subpoena that agent? Do I have, do I, as law enforcement, I, I guess it's law enforcement, I'm gonna have the right to subpoena your agent.

Like I would be able to subpoena anything on your computer or notebooks and so forth. What about if I'm your employer, and I suspect you're giving out secrets to a competitor, or you're not working when you said you would work a, can, I, can I have access to your personal agent to show that, you know, you and your agent were, were in psychotherapy that, uh, that time or whatever. I mean, who, who actually has access to your agent beyond you or, or work or, you know, why should it be any different than the way big tech is?

Now, if you use an agent to, to peruse X Twitter, and Elon is sucking that off to, to help votes for a particular candidate, does Elon have the right to, to have access to your agent even though it may be an agent specifically for Twitter? Well, look how you have answered that question today. You know, and this is, this is where I see inflections and things.

We are all pushed up against the wall of frustration in answering a question like that at all. You know, what, right? Do I have to my anything?

Actually, you know, driving down the bloody road? I don't know. Did I just drive into a, a county?

We have no visibility into the policy that, that surround us already. And then, you know, if you're asking, can we keep going in that direction further? No.

So, and this again, why I think we will see the development of the push for, and the deployment of, you know, structures that allow us to have better ideas of how we answer that bloody question. Because if we can't answer it now, throw an AI on, you know, an AI agent, that, that has all our secrets on top of it, and it goes to 11 and the knob doesn't go to 11. So we have to bank away from it, and we won't, Your Honor, I don't know anything about what that agent did.

It all did it by itself. And by the way, it ate my kids homework too. Well, so, but, but seriously.

Now that's another, you know, legally speaking, that's another defense here. You programmed your agent, but it acts semi, semi-autonomous. Like now it goes out and does something harmful, destructive, illegal.

But it's not necessarily what you programmed it to do, or it's not what you intended it to do, but it did it. Nevertheless, are you liable? Are you liable for that?

You know, if your kid does something right? Parents have gone to jail for their kids killing people. Yeah, it did.

Well, in, in the world as we have it, you, I mean, we all know this. We have, we watch the TV shows about it. It's very entertaining where teams of lawyers and interns and so forth will pour through the legal, you know, legal canon trying to put pieces together.

Now, imagine you had an AI that would do that for you, and you didn't have to spend $730,000 on lawyers, and it will do it in 12 seconds. And I can answer those sort of questions. Well, well, that's the promise of it.

I, I'll give you the other promise of it. What was it called? Wo Robot.

Robot, yes. Alright. You, You give that robot like some psychiatry and psychiatrists backgrounds, what makes you think it's not a better therapist than a person is?

And you don't, you don't bill your medical insurance on that either. Yeah. But can you be a Bartender too?

Goes in and get your robot records, right? Yeah, no, I, a bar a bartend is Easy. Well, anybody who's ever lived in a small town knows this.

I mean, you know, security and privacy are relative, you know, like anything else, we can hype them up. But you live in a small town and you walk out in the backyard and your slippers on a Sunday, everybody knows about it before you get inside, right? So if someone really wants to figure out, you know, where you're shopping or what therapist you're talking to, there are easier ways to do that today.

The benefit In a big city, everybody knows about it too. It's just nobody cares. That's right.

Exactly. Visible and invisible at the same time. Yeah.

Mm-Hmm. I thought we were gonna break out into a John Cougar Belly Camp song there for a second. Little Pink Houses baby.

Uh, but look, this is the future. And, you know, not just to stray, and we have stray a little off the path as usual, but, you know, from a work perspective, from business software pers perspective, I think we're already seeing the armies of agents being deployed, right? You've, you've got your Salesforce agents and you've got your Slacks, and you've got your, your Google AI and your chat GPTs.

And you know, we, we we're already deploying multiple agents and your co-pilots if you're a developer, right? And I mean, think about how many di I mean, I don't think it'll be unusual for tech workers to have a half a dozen different agents within the next year and a half, two years. Here's what I know for certain, my agents won't be able to beat up your agents.

Yes. Well, Rock and stock and robot, Which I was just gonna say, what, what will that mean for, for all of that? Um, well, it's really gonna be interesting, right?

As we continue along this path of magenta ai and, and you know, it's gonna be, it, there's so much promise, but you know, Chris, to take the security side of it as you always do with that promise comes a lot of potential for abuse and bad things as well. So we'll see how it plays out. Let's take a break here on Text on Gang, and we're going to come back and talk a little cloud.

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And as promised, we're talking about cloud because well, feeling like a paradox every time I turn around somebody says that something is not so good, and then somebody else says the opposite says it's great. And it's starting to feel like maybe two things can be true at once here, and it's an unusual set of circumstances. But some folks are saying, we're repatriating workloads because we're concerned about security.

Other people are moving workloads into the cloud because they are concerned about security. Other folks think that they're doing a great job managing the cloud, but then they admit they have no visibility into the cloud. Um, you know, I hope what's going on here?

Because it seems like every time I turn around in the cloud, we're 10 years into this and everybody's still kind of in their own little private Idaho somewhere. Yeah. I, I think all the things you said amazingly enough are still true because every organization is at a, a different place.

There are some who, even though it has been 10 years, are just getting started, are just dipping their toes in and figuring out what they can do in the cloud. And then there are others who have had the experience and they feel, you know, they've already, uh, been through, you know, the cycle of it. And they're saying, well, you know, cloud was good, but now I wanna go back on-prem.

Um, one of the things I think that contributes though to this disparity in perspective is it is so complicated. Uh, there are so many tools, uh, how you can deploy is complicated. Uh, once you figure out, uh, you know, you have legacy infrastructure, you have new infrastructure, you wanna refactor everything you want managed costs, the complexity is just so high that I think it will be impossible to get a single view.

That view is always gonna change. Yeah, I, I don't disagree, you know, but isn't that the way of, of life, right? We move from simple to complexity.

Mm-hmm. Chaos. Mm-Hmm.

Um, Mm-Hmm. Except for, for cloud. It just saves to continually become a bit more complex.

I, I think some of these organizations are also on a different part of the flywheel at different times as well. 'cause I may have stuck a workload up in the cloud initially, but then the characteristics change and suddenly I've discovered that this thing costs more to run in the cloud than I thought. And I wanna move it back to an on-premise environment.

And I think that's happening as well. I think all lot of folks are also, back in the covid days cloud was the all in game in town. So I threw everything in the cloud, and now I'm kind of looking at it for a minute and saying, some of this stuff maybe doesn't really belong there in the first place.

So, uh, I guess are we getting smarter about all this in some ways? Is there is the optimistic side of this thing than as we appreciate all the nuances we are figuring it out. I think that is absolutely true.

Um, you know, one of the things I love to point at often is Kubernetes, because the, the timeline for Kubernetes continues. But anytime you have a conversation, everyone's like, wow, Kubernetes still so complicated. And there are still vendors spinning up trying to make it simpler, trying to make it easier to manage.

But it's not stopping any organizations that want to use Kubernetes from going there. So they are accepting, I would say, the risk they're accept accepting that it's something that's really complex and hard to figure out. And, um, not as many though, accepting that you're, you really need to train your teams to be able to manage these things.

I think that is still one of the sticking points that we have to help organizations get through this and manage the complexity well, is a lot of teams are learning on their own. They are learning sort of in an ad hoc fashion. I think if there could be more consistent training, maybe the curve would come down a bit.

I've got a perfect, exa a perfect solution for this. Yeah. AI agents to help manage Kubernetes.

Hey, but you know, I'm gonna tell you, I made an a, i, I am I am working on my Google, let me make sure none of my devices are firing off, uh, certified cloud architect. I'm, I made a, I made a GPT and then a little agent that is learning and quizzing me and asking me questions. So I'm not paying anybody for training.

So, And that's a great example of it. If you could do that, why can't it manage cobe as well? I, I, exactly.

One of the things that does come out in the survey results is there's a lot of reliance on managed services. And a lot of folks here are leaning up on, uh, third parties to manage a lot of this stuff. And I can't help but wonder, maybe Alan, if we're getting to the point where a lot of organizations are going, I don't wanna manage the infrastructure anymore, I just wanna build the software.

Well, that was the whole idea behind the cloud, right? And you, you, quite frankly, it's not just the cloud, it's security too. I mean, this was, look, I remember going to the board, it's still secure 2006, maybe 2007 saying, Hey, here's my take.

There's a handful of companies in the world that can do their own security soup to nuts, barely the right. The rest of us need help. And not just selling me more software managed services, managed security services were the way to go.

I felt the same thing about cloud, right? Unless you're truly gonna be an expert on the nuances of AWS and you're gonna hire an entire AWS specialty team. And then when someone says, oh, you know, but I put that stuff on Azure, and then you're gonna go out and hire out a, um, an Azure specialty team.

And until someone said, yeah, but the Cobe stuff is so much better in GCP and now you know you're gonna go higher unless you're gonna do agents for all these things, which maybe makes it a little more affordable. You, you, there's, it's very hard to have that expertise in-house. Chris, I see you wanna say something?

Yeah, I like to, you know, Mike, you had an article about this. We're, you know, looking at the background for this conversation, and I, I like the, the spread spectrum sort of nature of the, the numbers in there, right? Because it a a, an actual healthy adoption curve, you know, for something fundamental is this, and you said 10 years and, uh, um, Alan, you mentioned longer than that.

I'm thinking, you know, we could say cloud or this is 20, 25, 30 years old, right? And a, a curve like that doesn't go straight up. It goes up and wobbles, you know, because you get this enthusiasm wave, it's like, you know, managed service, I'll keep the hardware, but you manage it for me.

You know, that spikes up and it gets to the point where I say, okay, the service is good, but I don't actually have good power here. Or, you know, I'm keeping this rack below water level, you know, and or whatever, right? So, okay, so I've moved the hardware to your, your, your facility.

Now it's just managed service or was it cloud? But anyways, you know, this, this is, you know, I dare I say inevitable, right? You know, we're not going to be all running our own IET systems.

Every shirt company on earth shouldn't have to have someone who knows the in intricacies of Excel spreadsheets, much less, you know, IP network. I think a big part of the problem is, is we just take that legacy mindset and apply it to the cloud and we, including the processes and everything that goes with it. And nobody that's right.

And that doesn't work. That's there from day one. The shift in lifts or lift and shift, right?

And, and cloud washing. But let me, let me say something. My, and I, this is my gut.

I don't really have a lot of objective numbers though. I've seen them and we've discussed them over the weeks and months here at Techron Deck. I think the whole cloud re reparation thing, re reparation, whatever, taking stuff off the, the cloud and moving it, You know, that, think that Harry, think it's Canada.

Yeah, I think it's a bit, right? I think it's a bit of a red Harry. I, I think, I think, yeah, there's always some small percentage of people who do that.

It's like the people who migrate to the US and then go back to their original, uh, country of origin. Well, no, they never go back to, well, you know, we just, but we, we don't mind that, Chris. 'cause you know, I, I think all of the anti-immigration folks in the US kind of have designs on conquering Canada still anyway.

Um, But well, they should. I, I digress. But no, seriously, for every, I'm gonna say this, for every piece of workload on the cloud that gets moved back, I bet you there are 10 workloads that get moved up.

So, or 20 or a hundred. I mean, I think it's a really big number. I think at this stage, there are certain things that we've decided we're not gonna put in the cloud stuff our mainframes do, right?

We, you're probably not moving that to cloud, um, stuff where we have regulatory or compliance issues and the cloud doesn't have a good enough, uh, solution for us on that. Other than that, everything's fair game. And the idea of saying it's too expensive, that's a pendulum.

You are gonna swing it back and then go figure out what it cost to liquid, cool your data set, and to run those GPUs, assuming you could find them and buy them and the electricity and, and the 24 7 and everything else, and next year you're back in the cloud. So, you know, I, I think you're gonna come to an equilibrium, but it's not moving down off the cloud. And I think that that's my 2 cents on this.

Call me wrong. I think you're Spot on. I think you're spot on on it.

I just think that it's gonna become a lot more fluid as it becomes hopefully easier to move workloads around. And there won't be such a heavy lift as it has been in the past, and it won't require a small army of consultants every time I wanna move something. And we'll get to that level of, uh, balance between the yin and the yang here.

One word for you, Mike. Agents. Agents, agents.

They'll make you make your life easy. All right? Let's take a, a break here on text, on gang, and, you know, get out your smallest violences in the world.

Those poor cybersecurity insurance companies or being inundated with claims. Woes me, woes me. Maybe we could send them to robot.

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Alright folks, as Alan mentioned, there are reports out there showing that the cybersecurity insurance folks are paying off more claims, or at least they're getting hit with more claims. I'm not sure they're exactly paying them off and to what degree, but there's an argument that says that these insurance companies are providing something of a virtuous cycle. They require people who invest more in security to qualify for the insurance policy these days after getting pummeled initially, um, Chris, what's your take on what's going on here?

Are the cybersecurity insurance companies a force for good or something else? So about 10 or 12 years ago, I spent a lot of time involved in this topic and, uh, it, I found it was a lot of fun to, to say among my peers that I think in the end, cyber insurance fixes everything, right? And a good, good way to start an argument.

And about that same time, you know, the premise, you know, the, the coming conversation I met one of the Lloyd's of London folks, I mean, Lloyd's is actually a, a club, a group of individuals who are extremely wealthy that back all this. And I I, I said, I gotta ask you, because I've, this is what I've been saying to, to, to my friends, is that right now is, again, this is 10, 12 years ago, cyber insurance, you guys are like off track 3:00 AM off strip 3:00 AM Las Vegas drunk betting, right? And he laughed and, and, and, uh, and said, yeah, and I said, and at some point, this has to get onto the strip.

This has to get predictable and forecastable and I have to be able to put an act actuarial table around this. And honestly, I thought we might have probably been farther along by now, but make no mistake, you know, the, the, the historic many century long process of providing insurance will get worked out. So to wrap back to your, to your point, yeah, they're starting to, the losses are big enough.

We're gonna, they're starting to say, you know, actually we need to fire a door, A door that stops fires, you know, that has proven to stop fires and not a firewall, which is an electronic device to do certain things in the boundary of a theoretical network, right? So this is gonna drive towards practicality driven by huge economic interests. So down to the details, we'll see, you know, year to year and so forth.

But you watch this over decades, and this will all be a requirement, you know, both to understand as the insurer what risk I'm taking and as the insurer to do the things I'm told. Well, as, as I started off with probably the least sympathetic industry in the world, those poor insurance companies. That being said, what we've seen with cyber insurance is a transition away from traditional insurance companies.

You know, the Lloyd's of London model, uh, when I look, I remember back in still secure Mitchell and I and a, my friend Raj, we wanted to offer a million dollar policy to anyone who was the victim of a breach from, and they used a still secure product. And we were gonna put so many, you know, so much language around it that it would never, we would, it would never actually have to pay probably. But we couldn't find a, an, uh, an insurance company back then to take that.

The only one that was really offering a lot of cyber back then was Aon. And, and it wasn't worth the paper was written on, frankly. But what we have seen over the last 5, 6, 7 years is the rise of a cybersecurity specific insurance industry.

And I'm, I'm at a loss. I've interviewed what, a couple of the leaving players in there. Um, I don't remember their names right now.

I'll have to go back. But the deal is, you know what they became Bufort, tea Justice carrying that big stick, right? They, in some ways, they had a bigger stick than the government even had because they said, we're not gonna insure you unless we do an audit and we make sure you are using intrusion prevention at endpoint and you have security policies in place, and you check your third party suppliers and you, you, you know, you do regular scanning and dynamic scanning.

And they became the, the CISOs boss, right? And hey, if you want our insurance, this is what you are gonna have to do. And so they single-handedly were responsible for uplifting a lot of the insurance, uh, a lot of the cyber profiles or a lot of these companies who wanted to get insurance.

Now, there was an evil dark side to it as there always is with insurance, because then you found out, so now you were the victim of a breach. You were the victim of a, uh, of a ransomware attack. And my God, the CEO saying, I don't care what you have to do, get us back online today, pay those bastards the money, let's go.

And the insurance and dis agent or the insurance company said, wait a second, under paragraph four, subparagraph three, line 22, you gave up your right to pay the ransomware. You gave up your right to make that decision. That's our decision.

And we know this gang, right? Chris, you, you're nodding your head, you know how this this goes, Wait, wait, wait for all those people under 30, I have to clarify a reference that Alan made to a movie that's called Walking Tall. You should check it out sometime.

I know a lot of you might. The original who was seventies, well Tell you to communicate. Go ahead Chris.

I I'll place all of the responsibility for this one on my community, right? And this is, you know, I, I use this topic particularly as a wake up call as often as I can because it's easy for us in cybersecurity to get a little, you know, angry and slugged because people aren't doing what they need to. But we have to be able to say to insurers, here's how you quantify risk.

And does anybody in my industry wanna stand up right now and say, we've got a good solid, repeatable, agreed, you know, way to do that today because we don't, right? And, and we're, we have to be somewhere around the crux of the apostrophe where the, and I guess that's why we're talking about this today, you know, and you can build up this business, you know, the traditional insurance are still there. You're right about the niche insurance because that's a, again, that, that's, that is a, well, maybe not falling down drunk yet, but you're still off, off strip 3:00 AM betting, you know, starting a company like that, because I can see it making money.

It's also a huge risk. We have to be able to define what the risk is and the cybersecurity community will, you know, at some point, you know, but we need, you know, sooner the better focus on how we fill in all the dots so that someone who knows nothing about this, like works at, I don't know, insurance can, you know, put math around what the risk is. Can we take this to the next logical step?

And I'm gonna ask hope this, it's like, so why stop with cybersecurity insurance? Shouldn't we just have it? Insurance application goes down.

Um, you know, I, I'm losing revenue and I might as well just take this to the nth degree. And you know, see a cybersecurity is just a, a way station on, on, on a larger journey here. You know, I I, I think about that in the way that at, at least in the US you have health insurance, dental, insurance, and vision.

And you say it's all part of the same body, right? Why can't it just be one? It it, it would seem that that should make sense.

And I see that it would make a lot of sense because, uh, these systems are connected, but then it is, um, you have a physical data center, right? There's a fire, it explodes something. Now you're, you're gonna file a claim against that.

Is that on the same policy as you have for your cybersecurity insurance? Maybe yes. Because maybe there was something in that data center that was critical to how you were managing your security and, um, you know, the, the underwriter would hate to see it, but maybe, you know, you didn't have everything as redundant as you should have.

But I think, I think over time it makes sense for it to be all in one, maybe a, you know, a policy with a writer or something. But I think right now it is still separate because, um, honestly, ransomware, I think ransomware is the thing that makes it stay separate for the moment. Because there is, um, there's no standard payout.

I saw something a few weeks ago where certain cities, or even maybe it's, um, at a federal level, but they are starting to say, you know, we want to put limitations of about 70 5K on the maximum that you can pay out. And maybe in some cases for bidding payouts, uh, outright, if that became real, it would be easier for this to be standardized and rolled into one policy. Guys, I, I gotta call time out.

Are we forgetting who we're talking about here? This isn't, this isn't some shiny, some knighted shiny white armor. There's the god insurance industry.

Oh, they're out for the most, they'll make money by not paying your claims. Mm-Hmm. Okay, so do we really want to turn over our businesses, whether my it, whether I have an IT outage or a cybersecurity or the bathroom is working in the office to some insurance adjuster who I'm gonna have to call and wait 20 minutes to get a person online.

And he was say, very sorry, that's a, there, there's gonna be an AI agent for that. Yeah, there'll be an AI agent. AI agent that AI agent's job is not to pay, right?

And we're gonna have a Jo g Grisham novel, right? I want to call the agent to the stand. And why didn't you pay?

Isn't it a fact that you didn't pay every claim that was filed? Come on, these, these are not nice people. Well, But, but yeah.

You know, we all know today, you, you have no idea what you're insured for. I don't care who you are. You know, if you really read every word of every policy that applies to you, good on you.

You know, but you haven't studied them. You don't know the sub clause. You don't know the legal background.

You, you take the, what we were talking about earlier, give everyone an AI agent so we can have visibility into what our insurance even is right before we go to The doctor. I think make it up as they go. Look, let me bring this full circle 'cause we have to end our show shortly anyway, let's come back to the weather in Florida and our insurance down here.

It's a frigging joke, right? You can't get hurricane wind insurance down in Florida. The only place to get it from is from the state funded one called Citizens.

And you could make your policy for whatever you want, but when you read the fine print, they're only on the hook to pay what they can afford to outta their pool. So you may insure your house for a million bucks, but if they just don't have the money in their thing and they only have 200 K to give you, well, they're only gonna give you 200 K, right? These are insurance companies.

They're not your friend. If you've, uh, go watch some John Grisham movies or read some John Grisham books, they're not your friends. And I, for one, am not gonna turn over the, the success of my business or, or prop up the potential failure based upon some whimsical insurance company, whether they've got an agent or not.

It's just un-American, American. I'm gonna do a little animal house, boy, walk out here. Like, like you need a, and I'm not gonna stand for that anyway, Remy speed Guys, I've gotta get busy out here in San Diego.

I'm here for the Qualys event for those of you who, and we'll be streaming live. Actually, you won't see it till tomorrow. QSC live.

Uh, actually it will be on tomorrow because we, of course, you know, for those, I'll let you in a quick little secret. We do tape these the day before. So by the time you watch this, we will be streaming live shortly after from Qualys.

So check that out. Um, we also have folks out at, at Glass Atlassian in Barcelona. We have a video crew and Mitch Ashley's out there.

So stay tuned for some Atlassian coverage. And, uh, we've got other folks from our Futurum team out in Seattle, as well as in London. So we'll have lots of coverage in addition to our tech strong regular tech, strong TV coverage.

But for now, hey Chris, I hope the boats are okay. I know it'll all work out. Will be, but thank you.

I'm sure it will. Um, hope. Thank goodness this one's not heading to you, my friend.

Oh, I'm very glad North Carolina Has had. I'm sure you are. You guys have had your fair share, Mike.

Good luck to them. Yankees. There you go, man.

You know, serious. I'm thinking it can happen. Well, I'm looking at Padre's Dodgers tickets tonight.

They're crazy expensive. Like ridiculous, expensive. But we'll see.

I'm gonna wait till the last minute and see what they got. Anyway, though for now, you've just watched another texture and gang. I'm Alan Shival.

We're out.