Are AI Agents Killing SaaS? Economic Shock and the CISA Crisis | TSG Ep. 1027

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. It's hump day.

Or maybe we should call it the day after. The, uh, well, let's not go there. Um, welcome to another great texture and gang, we got so much good stuff to talk about today.

We've got a great gang. Let me introduce you to our gang members for today. We have, it looks like he's back home.

Jack Parler out in Colorado, Andy Mann, Terry Robinson in her new non brick wall background. Uh, our, our fellow in the Valley, John Swartz, and the man in the High Castle, Mike Ard gang. Welcome.

It's another Wednesday here in AI world. Um, and there's no lack of AI information for us to talk about. Mike.

It's been a bit of a, an APO app apocalypse or apocalypse. We've had the security apocalypse. I don't know what's going on.

There's some irrational AI exuberance in the water these days, but it kind of started out first with, um, a lot of folks surmising. That's something like open claw would lead to the destruction of all the SaaS applications and they wouldn't need them anymore. Then it went over to cybersecurity where, uh, philanthropic put out a report saying that they are able to find vulnerabilities using ai.

And suddenly everybody on Wall Street said, well, that means we all need any cybersecurity tools or apps. And Jack wrote a story about what a crazy idea that is, but then it got better. Andro put out a story saying that they have a playbook now for reverse engineering COBOL code.

Well, they, and so, too does everybody else, but apparently nobody else reads anybody else's blog post because what happened is the stock market went crazy and IBM took a pounding and, and all this came to pass. And yesterday Anthropic finally got around to saying, well, you know, we just think we're here to help all these other existing tools and some rational thoughts started to prevail. But Jack, let's start with you.

What's going on here? It kind of feels to me like there's a lot of folks on Wall Street that don't understand how tech works suddenly making, uh, some suppositions about the future. I think we could substitute a lot of folks to just about everybody who has simply lost their lunch and their mind over this.

I just don't get it. This is now AI is truly revolutionary in terms of workforce productivity, but that doesn't mean it's the end of the world. And, you know, I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, uh, from a general statement, and then Anthropic announced, uh, Claude Code Security, which does dynamic application security testing.

It's one of the two forms of code testing. We also talk about static application security testing and the market and people in general started talking about the SaaS apocalypse, which is unpronounceable, and that this was gonna be the death of both SaaS companies and AI companies in general. And I wrote that they're really missing the boat, you know?

Right? If we look at attacker behavior, attackers attack companies in one of two ways. They either, uh, uncover a code vulnerability or they use, uh, stolen credentials or social engineering to get access through user ID and password or some other form of user id.

So the cloud code, uh, that cloud code security addresses only one half of this. It really just addresses finding code, uh, bugs that attackers go into. And it doesn't address any form of, uh, social engineering attacks or access attacks or people, you know, using the exact same password across every single account they've ever created for the past 25 years.

And it is not the death of cybersecurity companies in general. It may impact the few companies that do code testing, but that, you know, one of the two of the companies that, uh, uh, took very big, uh, um, stock market hits were, uh, cyber, were, uh, um, identity companies, right? And they have nothing to do with this.

They solve a completely different problem. So I think the market right now is in the era of, uh, you know, Alan Greenspan, and you brought this up, Mike, sort of reverse irrational exuberance is all of a sudden now they have a rational in un exuberance or, uh, irrational, uh, dispassionate. Uh, you know, they view every single PR about AI as going to possibly impact every company they've ever invested in and that they need to pull out.

And I just don't understand that behavior. It's just not true. And if they spent 10 minutes getting past the PR and actually understanding what was announced and what its impact really was, they'd have a completely different attitude.

They'd be buying into these other cybersecurity companies rather than, uh, selling 'em. Andy, you ready to check that mainframe? Come on.

Yeah, look, I mean, this is a really interesting one to me. I look at this, yeah, I've done mainframe modernization for half of my life. Um, I actually started modernizing mainframes back in 1986, uh, and I'm still doing it.

Uh, it's so true that the, you know, I think what you wrote in the article, there was absolutely spot on mainframe modernization. The least of it is rewriting the code. Um, I know in the article you called out, uh, the, some of the ideas around the, the physical differences of the mainframe platform, for example.

Um, people don't use mainframes just 'cause they like them because they, you know, wanna hug a mainframe. You know, what is, what is it? It's Wednesday.

So it's hug a mainframe day, I guess. Um, people use mainframes because they work, they do things uniquely. Their throughput is amazingly fast.

You know, when you talk about, uh, x percentage of the world, 95%, I think of the world's ATM transactions in the article. I think sites going through mainframe, it's because that platform manages that level of concurrent volume because of its physical architecture. A lot of people are forgetting about this in the world of cloud and SaaS, where you don't even see the computer anymore.

You just think there's this magical service on the other end of your telephone. But mainframes exist for reasons. Cobalt exists for reasons, and just converting the code is not even close to mainframe modernization.

No, Alan, is there a big AI agent out there? Shorten the market, what's going on? Got one word for you.

Algorithms. This is all about the algorithms, my friends, right? The market, the population in general have become sheep and lemmings to the algorithms.

And we are being manipulated like a Stradivarius in the hands of a virtuoso, right? I'm, I'm, my shimmy says tomorrow is gonna be on about this. It's why we can't have nice things.

It's the algorithms and the people manipulating and the forces manipulating them. But I, I wanna talk a little bit about this deeper. Number one, when we say what cloud security is a threat to it's AppSec app.

Now, AppSec has been the apple's eye of security for the last, I don't know, 8, 9, 10 years, right? That's where the action was. If it wasn't about AppSec, it didn't mean anything in security.

We had seemed to have forgotten about endpoints and all of that good stuff. And this is definitely a, a threat to AppSec, but it's also an opportunity for AppSec. And, and you know, when you look at AppSec companies like Palo Alto and check marks and um, uh, uh, contrast security and, and all the AppSec plays, uh, oh.

Chris Weiss, false company with a VI, Veracode, you know, all all of these AppSec companies. But here's what you gotta remember. And it, it's gonna spread beyond absec and it's about the whole SaaS apocalypse open AI is not going to get a trillion dollar valuation, and Thro isn't going to get a 600 billion or $800 billion valuation selling us $20 a month subscriptions to use the chatbot.

If, if these companies are gonna justify the valuations and the money they're raising, they could charge more than $20 a month. And they're trying. But there's a long way from there to temporary right to, to hit, to hit money.

You like that, Mike? I did. I appreciate.

Okay. Um, there's a long way for them to get into the black. What they need to do is take their core, their ai, LLM and their AI model, and take over existing business silos, AppSec, SaaS, observability, um, I'm just talking tech.

It doesn't necessarily even have to be tech, but I think that's what gets Wall Street's jolly up, right? And gets 'em all excited, is that these AI companies can morph into any company. They're the ultimate Mr.

Smith from, from the Matrix, right? Today they look like Mr. Smith, but tomorrow it, they may look like Terry and, and they're taking over, you know what I mean?

And they're taking over security and next they're taking over mainframes. And what are they taking over after that medicine law, any, any job on a screen. And it, it's not, so they're not content, the the claws and, and, and tropics and open eyes of the world, they're not content just giving us chatbots to use in our jobs for them to justify valuations and, and return.

They need to take over industries. That's the truth. And we, we could, we could dance around that pin right on the head of that pin.

But that's the truth. And, and so I think we're gonna see more and more and more of these things. Yeah.

So are the players in that, in and those industries, should they, what should they do? Where should they Well, I'm glad you asked Terry for a small fee. I am open, no, I'm here.

Here's the deal. At some level, they, they, they're on the heroine of using this AI to, to make believe their current and their hip and their, you know, they got the latest, greatest stuff. Palo Alto has AI check marks, has ai, every one of these AppSec companies have ai, but it's just a thin veneer with one of these LLMs underneath it.

And so it's a Trojan horse. So they gotta make the decision. Did they go cold Turkey and build their own independent thing that is truly different through and through, or, or hope that the lion doesn't eat their zebra today, but their day's coming?

I think what we've seen so far with AI is like, there's a tendency where people are like, well, I have ai, so therefore I can do any job. And we found out that that's not true. What we are finding out is that people who have expertise in certain areas do better with AI because they know how to most out of it.

And I think that's gonna play through this entire conversation. I think I'm not gonna go out and just hire somebody with an AI tool. They'll rewrite COBOL code.

I'm gonna go find somebody who's an expert in transformation, who's doing it faster because they have AI and hopefully charging me less. Andy, am I crazy? No, no, you are not crazy.

Well, you are crazy, but not about this. Um, look, it, you are absolutely right. It's about augmentation.

And by the way, this is a little bit like Dunning Kruger meets a Mara's law, right? It's, it's like, I don't know enough to know that this is wrong, but I see this thing and I'm gonna overestimate its impact, right? Uh, and so I think it's, it really is.

And, and just by the way, shameless plug for all of you, uh, this is why we need trade media. By the way you say Wall Street doesn't understand Aaron's tweet. Yeah, It's can, can I, can I, that's something I, I, I gotta get this off my chest.

This bugs the s**t out of me. I, I, I, I, I gotta be blunt, John Waits. Go tell us how you really feel.

Uh, This, this angers me because I was thrust into this for a while when I worked at Barron's. This whole idea that Wall Street fundamentally does not understand tech, just like Congress does, it, it overreacts to everything. So when I worked at Barron's, it was a day of absolutes.

One day, oh my God, the market is cratering because this report just came out. The stocks are down, tick, tick, tick. Next day, oh, well, something was reissued in, in our case, it philanthropic comes out with this announcement that they're gonna be working with some of the companies they are allegedly killing.

And then there's a rebound story, and it's just, you're back to where you started. And you know what my fear is? We're gonna be going through this a hell of a lot more in the next several months.

And it's gonna be, it's just gonna be overwhelming. And it's a lot of annoying fear, mon, I apologize, Andy, I give the four back to you. I Just, not at all.

You actually just said what I needed to say, GA sorry. A, as, as, as a, as a part-time blogger, I don't face what you all do. Uh, but it must be so frustrating to see the, you, you, you understand these things.

You write about these things, and the next day, the stock market or Apol politician or somewhere in the media gets it completely wrong. Um, now look, But that's been going on our entire careers, though. I'm gonna say.

Yeah, that's true. I'm just glad to know that this old girl has some life left in her, maybe, um, this way. But I remember back in the day, and I'm gonna say that was in the eighties and early nineties, having to handhold a lot of the mainstream press who didn't understand these things.

Like, especially the Wall Street coverage and, and whatever, and, and actually having to like, feed them information on, uh, uh, you know, tech advances and how that might impact business. There was a, and I feel like we're kind of back to that now. You know, I, unlike John, I might not ever get tired of pointing out the fact that Wall Street analysts and media people are idiots because, well, you know, I've been enjoying it for many years now, and I, Well, I was on both, I, I was on both sides.

Uh, true confession. I went from, uh, the trades, like the member CMP and back in the day. Then I went into the, then I went to a Mac book, which is called Mac Week.

And then I went into the mainstream and I was kind of appalled because of the generalization and stereotypes that would go on. There was no depth or substance. So when somebody like Mike, or to me, to a lesser degree, would talk to these executives, they would say, oh, wow, you actually are, have a kind of a nuanced understanding of this.

And, and it was, it was appalling. And I think it's just, it's just only gonna get worse with the AI cycle. Now.

Now what, what what's further appalling is the number of tech execs who also know better, who are now making grandiose statements that are driven with two, what, one of two purposes. Either they want more money from investors to invest in their company, or they want the stock price to go up on some sort of half-ass statement that they're gonna make. 'cause they know no one's gonna ask them very hard questions, Mike.

Those are, Those are the same thing, right? Those are the exact same thing. And I think it goes back to what Alan said very early on.

I wanted to address two things Alan said. One is, um, this concept that, you know, the, the code security apps asset companies are in trouble here. And some of them are, and some of them aren't.

And the key here is that I think a lot of people, particularly Wall Street doesn't get, is when you're in the trenches with these companies, and I talk to a lot of these companies on a daily basis and advise them as an analyst, the big challenge is finding and building tools that work the way the users want them to work. People want the tools to work for them, not, they don't wanna work for the tools. And what happens in application security all the time is the security team is, gets pitched a tool, they buy a tool and they hand it off to developers and say, this is the tool you wanna use.

And the developers say, no, flip away. That doesn't even come close to how we work with it. It doesn't fit in our CSCD pipelines.

It just won't work for how we do things. What makes Cloud code security very interesting, is they built it with developers in mind because they are developers and they built it how they use it. And CLO code works in a very interesting way.

The developers do work and do think about things. So that makes it very interesting. But it's not necessarily a threat.

It's an opportunity. And being a long time startup guy and talking to and working with a lot of startups, people should look at this as inspiration and an opportunity much more than it is a threat. Now, the other thing that Alan said that I thought was very interesting is you started off your rant, Alan, and I'll call it a rant because I agree with you a hundred percent, and I'm ranting as well, is that all of this appear, appears to me to be market manipulation.

And I'm wondering how much of this was, and I can't remember if it was Alan or you, Mike, that used the term short sellers. And I think I'm wondering how much of this is being driven by people who are shorting these companies and are driving the stock down to take advantage of it. And that's what Scares anything else.

That is, that is definitely part of, that's part of the story right now. Definitely When Alan talks about the algorithm, I believe that's what he is out about. Yes, It really is.

The, the, the issue with the algorithms though is we all mentioned this word algorithm. Half the people who use the word don't know what a damn algorithm is, to be fair. But none of us Put your AI for it, Right?

But none of us, but none of us truly like, you know, I, I've been watching this Paradise season two thing going on, right? It's a great show. If you haven't watched it, none of us really know who's pulling the levers behind there.

What the real, you know, how, who, who really has the dial control on those algorithms, right? Is it the tech pros? Is it, is it Zuck, Elon, the guy from Google, not Tim Cook, not Tim Cook.

Might, might, might be a guy I grew up. No. Who has a financial newsletter that he just pumps, right?

Or is it the guy, right, who's hawing stocks, you know, with Jordan Fer and, and, and doing that? Or, or is it the government or is it our government's enemies? Whoever's controlling these algorithms controls the world.

It's like spice and dune. But hey, we're 20 minutes in here, we got a boogie. Um, so we'll, we'll move from sand worms and algorithms to AI doomsday scenarios.

Mike, what do we got here? Well, it just keeps getting better and better. So now there's another report talking about how, well, if all this AI stuff comes to pass as it's supposed to, all these folks are gonna lose their jobs.

Especially, well, high income, white collar jobs that are no longer gonna exist. And maybe we'll get some new jobs out of all this, but the report kind of points out that there'll probably be something of a gap. And this too led to sun sell offs on Wall Street.

'cause suddenly everybody woke up one morning and said, my God, no one's gonna have any money to buy something. John, I know you covered this, but please explain. This is like de Yeah, sorry Mike.

This is like deja vu. And I mean it's, we, we were mentioning in the previous block short sellers, in this case, I'm beginning to think some of these market research companies, they want to create a viral report. Well, uh, Rinni researcher did, they had this thing called the, the Global Intelligence Crisis report.

And here's the thesis. What if AI doesn't fail but succeeds so spectacularly, it breaks the American economy. So that's basically the thesis, right?

And so they came out with this report, and I'm, I'm looking at, there were more than 25 million views of this thing. It went viral, so to speak, in terms of coverage. And they introduced this idea, it's introduced, at least to me, of the dose GDP.

So the economic economic output that looks robust on paper, but fails to circulate in the real world. And one of the examples is a single GPU cluster in North Dakota is generating output that was previously achieved by 10,000 Manhattan office orders. So there's this idea that we're gonna get, undergo this violent rotation, and it's going to recap it throughout the economy.

And again, this, I kind of file this under the same category as the previous, previous topic. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of anxiety, there's a huge upside. But I think we're kind of letting the narrative spiral outta control.

And I'll just leave it up to y'all, y'all. Hey, hey, John. I, I, I, and we, we talked about this LA last week or the week before.

'cause I wrote down the poem About this. Yeah, we did. But I just have one thought in mind.

Did any of anybody ever think to themselves, maybe those 10,000 office workers were really working effectively about an hour or two a day and we're just yeah. Sending money outta companies for no good, right? Because there was welfare type jobs.

You know, they, they, they're, they're doing nothing in getting money. Maybe that's why one GP is able to produce what they're doing, and maybe that's actually fat in the business that we need to get rid of, right? But this, this constant, and I, you know, I called them chicken littles in my previous article.

This, this constant refrain that we have that that AI is taking jobs, discounts both the creativity of humans, the adaptability of humans, and the fact that it may take some jobs, but it'll create other jobs. And we've seen this time and time and time again, I wrote about this, Alan wrote about this. Ironically, we didn't talk to each other, but we used the same examples of the printing press, right?

The computer, the industrial revolution, the steam engine. We've had major revolutions that absolutely changed the force of labor. I think people lack a knowledge of history and an understanding in, before the Civil War in the United States, in the 1860s, 90 to 95% of the, the global population in the, the world was, had exactly one occupation.

And they were subsistence farmers whose only job it was, was to grow or kill enough food to feed themselves so they could live right between the end of the Civil War and 1920, we had a complete reversal that were only 5% or less in the United States or farmers, and the rest of the people are gainfully employed doing other things, right? If we're going to use ai, maybe office workers will go do other things, create new products, create new ideas. This constant chicken Little that the world is coming to an end is just, sorry, I'm, I'm, I'm up to curious.

I think that I, I think that that idea or that notion come from people who have absolutely no idea what's gonna happen. So they're just throwing out these, I they're throwing out these notions and I mean, we've gone through this as you and Alan have ridden multiple times. People adapt, the economy adapts, we move in directions.

It's never been bigger. GDPs grow and this is gonna happen again on a, maybe a larger scale, and it's gonna be create more, uh, tumult for people and for industries. But in the end, we, yeah, the chicken little idea is, is being adopted by a lot of people who don't like change.

They're terrified of anything that comes along that might change their job. Yeah. So that's, I think that's a big part of the issue right there.

I mean, and you say people lack knowledge of history. That's true. People lack imagination and maybe the wherewithal sometimes to move forward and to move into something different.

And part of that can be the fear of, of change. Part of that could be the way that corporate America has worked for so long, right? People get pigeonholed into jobs.

You're used to thinking of yourself as this. Maybe we don't because we see, you know, whatever. But people mostly on corporate jobs, they get on a track and this is how they view themselves.

And that's how the corporations view them. They lay off people with expertise and institutional knowledge because the expertise wasn't right in the specific area that they needed anymore. But those people moved to other, I don't remember history being so neat.

What I do remember is there would be technological changes in that. Are You the 2000 year old man that you remember this? What's the story?

Gerald? Mel Brice. You look back In history, you know, what you see is yes, farming changed and a lot of people moved to cities, and then before long, there were revolutions in those cities and there was a lot of turmoil before.

Long entire monarchies were upended over this stuff. So I think what we haven't learned from history is maybe we need a better plan than just kinda laissez-faire letting all this stuff happen before something dramatic. Learn how to take part in it.

Learn how to be a part of the change. You know, you know, guys, You're being naive. You're being naive.

Idealistic, No, not idealistic naive. If you think people aren't putting these reports out, be they're putting it out because they're dumb or they're being laissez-faire, or they don't know what they're doing, they know exactly what they're doing. They're manipulating the algorithm.

Yes. Okay, there you go. They're manipulating the algorithm.

You wanna get ahead politically in this world, manipulate the algorithm. You wanna get ahead financially, manipulate the out. You know, we did, a couple weeks ago, we did our first AI music video, a fake video on, on, uh, in ification of the internet.

Well, we've got one out. It'll be out on my shimmy says tomorrow. But I, I, I released it early on LinkedIn today.

It's a rap song. You know, I don't know if you guys saw this story with, uh, Nicki Minaj, big rapper, who's a darling of the right wing. Well, a company, uh, SI think is the name of the company, says that about 18 or 19,000 bots, they're 85% sure these are bots, actually manipulated the algorithm and brought her to everyone's attention.

And that's what made her go viral from there. And so this is song is a response to this. Go, go check in out.

It's out on, it's on my LinkedIn. We'll have it on. Shimmy says it's a, again, from our tech strong video crew here.

It's pretty, it's a pretty fun, entirely fake. The words are made up in ai. The music's made by ai.

The video and the characters in it are made by ai. But go, go watch the video. Um, we know history, but you know what?

Americans have never been known as scholarly. Unfortunately. Let's, let's be honest, if we, if we were, we probably wouldn't be in the mess we're in, right?

People don't know history. People don't, they get easily manipulated. They get this way and that, right?

They get played against each other for, so that, uh, someone above them doesn't, you know, get involved. Don't think this is all random. It's not.

There are people who have motives and, and, and I I was reading an article today. Do you know during Roosevelt's early term before the war, that in the Depression there was a group of industrialists who plotted a coup to put someone up to overthrow and, and, and become in charge because of the socialist revolution that the New deal plotted. I think there was someone saying that we had to cut most of the office jobs out.

'cause these people were only working an hour or two a day. They looked suspiciously like Jack Parler. No, I'm kidding.

They did it. But the, the Roosevelt story is true. This is, this history repeats itself, and those who don't learn its lessons are doomed to repeat the mistakes.

So I recommend that you go to Hyde Park because I do believe they address that, uh, in, in the museum there. So, Mm-hmm. Excellent point.

But again, we're, we're outta time for this segment, but an excellent segment. Good stuff all around, Mike. Now we'll go to something a little heartening.

What El what else do you, what other do you have, Mr. Sunshine, what do you got for us today? So it turns out that, you know, in this whole, uh, argument over the funding of ICE and the shutting down of Department of Homeland Security, that the folks at Csar are taking it on the chin, and there's fewer of them to protect us.

The good news is, well, the lines at the airport are shorter, but, you know, our cybersecurity stuff is like, you know, I guess expendable. But I guess the issue here, Terry, is that, um, maybe the United States government in this administration doesn't really care about cybersecurity and these people are just perceived as being, shall we say, annoying. Yeah.

Well, possibly. I, I believe that that's the case. Although may, maybe it's that all of these people only worked one or two hours a day and, uh, you know, could be replaced or taken over by ai.

I don't know. No, this was, you know, this is, uh, a particular sore spot for me. 'cause I love csa or I always have loved the concept of CSA and thought they've done, uh, good work.

And, um, it's been sad the last several years, uh, starting, I think really toward the end of the Trump administration, right? When he got rid of Christopher Krebs because of the election. Uh, well, 'cause Krebs said the elections were safe and Trump didn't agree with that.

And I, and then just sort of decimating it, we see money go to everything else, you know, to fund this administration's agenda. Especially, you know, things like controversial things like ice and whatever. And then meanwhile ceases, um, uh, uh, numbers are being dramatically reduced right at a time where I think we all can agree there's heightened threats.

Um, and we, we can't really afford to lose that expertise. But also, uh, and that, and that sort of vigilance, but also, uh, too, it really affects the, the public private collaboration aspect of security, which is so important. You know, it's like the government can't do it alone and private industry can't do it alone, but together it can be very powerful.

But I believe that's, you know, um, being eroded. So what, Alan, you wrote this one it with the numbers and you said have gone down about a a thousand. Well, with, with the current, uh, stoppage of funding, they, they estimate there might be lit maybe a thousand people actually working on c Csar right now, before the funding, this past funding, you know, the government shutdown, I guess is the word, I think it was still 3,400 from down to, would make from about 44 or 5,000 Yeah.

Prior to Trump taking office. But, um, there's a double whammy effect here though too, guys, that, that we need to, to attack, first of all, in terms of how do we, how much is CA prioritized? We can't even get a director of CA approved in the Senate.

Yeah, we don't have a, we don't have a, we have an acting director who's not the guy who they actually nominated to be the director. So it's kind of leaderless rudderless, you know, they claim the mission is changing. gov that we spoke about earlier this week at Stellar Project to keep the homeland safe.

Um, so, you know, they have them doing that kind of thing. We, we don't have a thing. And then at the same time, you know, when they cut the funding to Mitre and, and NIST and so forth, they say, oh, someone has to step up and help with the CVE, Uh, program that the security company, the security industry relies on.

Everybody stepped back. CISA had no leader, they didn't know to step back. They said, okay, cce, you do it.

So now CISA has a hand in the CVE, uh, maintaining the, the database and so forth. So I think it's still primarily minor, but, um, so, and what goes on as a result of all these AI security stuff that we talked about earlier, we're turning out new CVE numbers. Like, like, like little pills proliferate, right?

We've never had so many C vs whether they're legitimate, serious, critical or not, where we're, we're printing cvs like, like the Fed prints money. Yeah. And look, I, It's a problem.

And I think you look, this is, this is systemic and it's very disturbing, Terry. Um, you know, this administration literally encourages hacking, right? We know that, uh, has stood up on stage and said, Russia, if you're listening, right?

We know they have that. We know they have deep ties to malicious actors across the globe. Um, we know they have a deliberate strategy of flooding the zone, right?

We know they have a deliberate strategy of the death of truth, the death of science. These are requisites for authoritarianism. You can't lie about winning when the referee's right there saying you lost.

Same thing with measles outbreak, right? We just saw a thousand cases of measles in Texas alone. Uh, because we're ignoring truth.

We're nor ignoring reality. We're ignoring the warnings. Uh, we're dumbing down our science.

Um, I will tell you as a CTO myself, I'm dealing with this every day. I'm looking at CVEs and so forth. I'm trying to figure out where am I getting my source of truth from?

I am increasingly turning to localized resources. I know California, um, has, uh, banded with a couple of other states to form their own bodies. I'm looking to European advisory bodies as well to try and understand where my truth is coming from.

And especially around things like CVEs and zero days. Um, I don't know that I can believe what's happening in this administration in terms of, of cybersecurity. Uh, it's not even just that they don't care.

I think they deliberately don't want security. They want to be able to hack other people's streams. They want malicious, actor malicious actors to hack into corporate information.

They deal in secrets this administration. I'm, I'll stop Myra 'cause I'm getting more Yeah. Because I think's a lock at your door with a couple of mass men, Andy, but you don't answer.

Want to come, don't answer. But, you know, thi this brings up something I wrote about today, which is, uh, you know, the, the heavy handedness of the DOD with, with, uh, Claude with philanthropic, they're threatening them. The, they're threatening the War powers act or not at war, but they're threatening the War Powers Act and so forth with them that, because Claude is insisting that they cannot use Claude for, for, um, what Claude considers unethical Yeah.

Illegal kidnapping of foreign country leaders. That one, Well, well, they're, they're, They're saying you're not allowed to use Enro to do autonomous targeting of lethal monetary license in there, or to do mass cyber surveillance of citizen populations. Right.

You Know, on the do-able, you know, the DOD says, we can do whatever's lawful, and of course they determine what's lawful, right? Right. Sinking ships, sinking boats in the Pacific that they think might be carrying drugs.

I, you know, all of these things, If I, if I might Go ahead, Throw the politics out for just a moment, right? 'cause there's a lot going on there that I don't want to touch. But I think my challenge with the CSA thing is this, this, this brings up co uh, a personal conflict for me because in general, I'm a small government type of guy.

You know, our government is huge. We have two and a half, two and a quarter million, sorry, two and three quarter million people in the Federal Employment Service, right? That's a lot of people, right?

And the, and personally I think it should be less, but as a percentage of the workforce, CSA is very small as an organization to try to protect just the federal workforce. And then the utility it provides for private industry is great in the public private industry. Partnerships, I think improve both government security and private security.

Yeah. I don't like the shrinking just to Frank. I think we need to be much more targeted and say what really should cease to be doing.

Um, I think, uh, Alan, you wrote about this and said, I think you alluded to it, but it's really, I believe that it really does beg the question right now of really redefining and being very explicit about what CS a's mandate is and trying to get that particular mandate funded. And whether it's funded as government funding private contractors to provide the services public private partnership or government employees doing it. I think the resources that we could spend, uh, invest and invest in securing government, uh, uh, IT equipment and military IT equipment is well worth the money spent.

I agree with you Jack, and I don't wanna drag politics into it, but the fact of the matter is, the president administration takes money from different cookie jars, like their cookie jars, and he, they don't really care if it was allocated by Congress for csa. If they need to put some extra troops in whatever city they're coming into right now, they'll take money from CASA's budget to do it. And until we have, it's not the way it's supposed to work, whether it be the legislative branch or the judicial branch enforcing these things.

And, and unfortunately what happens is it's the let me do it. And when the judge tells me I can't do it, I'll stop. Or I'll just, you know, will they, I'll just Keep appealing it until then.

I'll just point out that that's how every, that's how every administration is up. No, This, This up. Jack, I appreciate, I'm Not gonna go there at this level.

I'm, I I think you're, come on, come on. I think you're being a little bit, uh, I think the term you used earlier on, Alan was naive. And I think you really need to be a little less naive about that particular aspect Of work.

Jack now's not the time or place for it, but I I could There's enough, there's enough evidence. So lemme tell you what Mr. Sunshine says about all this.

Go ahead, Mr. Sunshine. You absolute Sunshine is still the best disinfectant.

And that's why we talk about Absolutely. There You go. And that we're at our 40 minute mark.

The sunshine in my arm. Guys. What?

Great. Another, another great discussion here on the gang. Love it.

We gotta run. We got text drunk tv, replay following this, and, uh, I think it's next week or the week after. We have a tech field day coming up.

So that'll be, uh, up there. We have Shimmy says tomorrow. Enjoy your day, everyone.

Andy, John, Jack and Terry and Mr. Sunshine, thank you for, for, for, uh, being on the gang with us today. I'm Alan Hummel.

We're out.