Techstrong Gang – February 13, 2025

So, is it AI America first or AI America alone? You're watching text. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimo.

Happy Thursday. We've got a great texture on gang for you today. We've got some, actually, you want to know the truth?

This might be the most important text on gang we've done ever. We've got some really important issues that I think you need to know about and you need to weigh in on, meaning you the public, because this is not a time for what was the, what is it? Summer Patriots or Summer Soldiers?

Mike, what? What's common sense say? I, I think it is.

Um, I'm not sure, but I'll just call it Fair Weather Friends. How's that? Okay.

This is not a time to sit on the sidelines and hope things work out. I think every one of us needs to speak up and make up our feelings and wishes known. Um, we're gonna discuss these things.

I've got some great people who I know are not shy about giving us their opinions. Let me introduce you to them. First of all.

Uh, well, let's not go out to sea first. We'll go down to Houston to Texas first, and we'll introduce Anne Ahoward, who's one of our regular gang members and is never short of an opinion. Hi, Anne.

Welcome. Thank Hi, great to have you on today. Always a pleasure.

Thanks for Having me. Absolutely. From Anne, I think we're going to go out and get sort of the royal view of this from our man in Silicon Valley.

John Swartz. Hey, John, how are you? Hey.

Hi, Alan. Hi everybody. I have plenty of opinions about these segments.

So good to be with you. I'm looking forward to hearing him. John, don't hold back.

Speaking of hold back, here's a man. He tries to be politically correct sometimes as he's navigating the seven Cs, or at least the keys of Florida. He's our cyber expert with, or just, you know, life expert.

He's been, he's been around the block a few times. Chris Blas. Hey, Chris.

Welcomes great to have you on. Good to be here. I am in, uh, as you say, I'm actually in what you would say is Key West, you know, but to the point of our conversation today, I'm actually in the channel Bo, the Boca Chica channel.

The Boca Chica Naval Air Station is right here. You know, where there are all sorts of interesting jets will be flying all day long. And as you look at strategy, national security, you know that that military base will never shut down.

You know, look at its location, look at the strategic importance of it and what they do there, you know, is topic for other conversations, speaks to our topics of the complexity nes necessary to actually have effective national security. Absolutely. Thank you.

And then last but not least, the sage of Harrison, our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, welcome. Now, I couldn't agree more with you about the importance of today.

It's a seminal moment. Pitchers and catches have reported for spring training, and it's crucial to this country. I wish you have Your priorities Right.

I, I wish, I wish it was. I wish life was that simple. Wish life was that simple.

Anyway, so guys, let's, let's jump into our first block. Mike, you're gonna kick off for us. But, you know, I, I gotta tell you, watching the news yesterday, you know, I, everything I need to know, I learned from three or four movies in my life.

The Godfather, Goodfellas, star Trek and Star Wars. They kind of are my, those are my true Norths hearing everything that was going on yesterday, I was reminded of the Eugenics wars. Now, I don't know how many of you know the significance of the Eugenics wars in Star Trek, but as a result that, you know, humanity learned to do genetic manipulation and created so-called Super Met.

And one of those guys was a guy named Khan, who was in the original Star Trek series. And then of course, in the movie, the Raft of Khan. And, uh, Ricardo Manto, of course, played card.

I'm re I'm reminded of this in what's going on in ai. We, we are on the verge of AI wars, right? With every, everybody here, uh, staking their claim.

No one, you know, no one pledging the work together, per se. Everybody wants to do their thing. And, you know, risk be damned full speed ahead that don't mind the torpedoes.

Um, you know, and, and over this, we're in a, some sort of new imperialistic. We thought the neocons were bad. We're in some new imperialistic moment here where everybody wants to go carve out their empire.

And AI happens to be the, the new world that they're carving. So, Mike, I, I gave my 2 cents. I'll let you introduce it from there.

Let's let John bring everybody up to speed about who did what to whom. And, um, you know, it seems to me, John, at least that, you know, the vice president was in Europe and forgot his copy of how to make friends and influence people. So Yeah, he played, he played right into his role.

Um, he, he keeps, he spoke. I mean, his message was completely at odds with what every, everyone else was thinking there. But yeah, my head was on a swivel like the rest of you yesterday from the news cycle.

I mean, what Alan said it very well, what we have here is this AI land grab on a worldwide stage. Torpedoes be damned. I mean, just go full speed ahead.

There, literally, almost simultaneously, you had actions going on in three different continents. First, as you mentioning, JD Vance was at this AI summit in Paris, and he talked about America first in terms of ai. He claimed our, our continued dominance, and he's pressed the European nations to back off.

He called it excessive regulation that could kill a transformative industry, just as it's taking off. As soon as he finished saying that, before we even finish saying that, we already had news that the French president, Macron had p placed $112 billion of private investment in the coming years to accelerate AI developments late Tuesday. This is really, it's hard to keep track of this.

The EU announced an invest AI about basically a $210 billion initiative that includes a new European fund of about 21 billion for AI gigafactories. And then not to be left out. Apple, which has kind of been lost in all the shuffle with the machinations going on, is finalizing plans for an AI push in China via a partnership with Alibaba.

This is what, uh, apple did. They went through several different companies. They talked Badu, deep seek by dance, Tencent before, uh, settling on Alibaba.

And they're doing this because the iPhone sales in China are suffering because they lack AI features that their competitors have. So there's this whole machination of, of people jumping into this, this area kind of independent of one another. You know, the one thing that I do wanna mention also about Macron is he compared their project to Stargate, which kind of, in a sense was one of the things Vant was, was flaunting this, this, this alleged $500 billion project between Oracle, OpenAI, SoftBank, and the government, uh, to build on our, uh, infrastructure.

And we'll see how that pans out. But it's, it's, it's, it's crazy. I mean, is literally, we have various world leaders all grabbing for this, this, this industry.

And it's gonna, it's not gonna, it's not gonna end. It's just gonna continue to accelerate. I, I absolutely agree, John, and you definitely summarized that very well, minus the Elon and, uh, open it, open it battle.

But I would say it's not a surprise that Europe wants strict rules. That's nothing new, that's nothing new. And China pushes state backed ai also nothing new.

What I did not expect was the US to not sign a global AI responsibility pledge that China did. That kind of threw me, I mean, I knew the speech was gonna be what it was, but oh my God. So concerns about AI's, dangers, warfare, those all were raised, but we sort of just glossed over it because, you know, we're powering it out.

We're America. Yeah, like, it, it just was okay, I guess this is how it's gonna be now. I was shocking.

I thought it was interesting that the vice president told them they have a choice between either partnering with America or totalitarian organization country that's making AI models. And I'm pretty sure the Europeans are trying to figure out exactly who he is talking about. So, I, I don't disagree with you.

It, it is a, it's a sad day, a sad frigging day to have an American Vice president in France, nonetheless, at a country where our soldiers gave their lives to defend, not once, twice. And we made the world what it is and what it's been over the last century, not by going it alone, but by recognizing who your friends and na and natural allies are. In what world.

It's not one shot. China, China made a pledge that we refuse to like about responsibility like that it is Clear in this imperial presidency, right? This is, this is akin to making a play for the Suitland, right?

In 1932, they have Czechoslovakia and he called it the Suitland, and they took that into part of Germany. We're doing it in Greenland. You know, It's also, it's also that this, instead of America First, it should be America alone, not just each.

It's not America first, it's America. And America alone in today's world will never succeed at that. We can't, you are throwing out Canada our best.

Forget France for a second. Our best ally, the only trading partner that we actually have are surplus with. And you're throwing them under the bus too.

Do you think they're gonna wanna do business with us? This is not make friends and influence people. This is, this is, this is a, a page out of the Nazi party.

I'm, I'm sorry, this is a suit and land kind of thing. Chris, I see your head, your hands up. Yeah.

You know, since we in fact do not have anyone on, you know, to argue the other side, because frankly, I agree with you all. However, you know, let, let, let's acknowledge it and talk to it. Right?

You know, this is the way we hack systems. You know, we look at the way they are, whatever, right or wrong, and figure out how they're working. So, you know, I'm absolutely not shocked.

I mean, that is exactly what we expect of this particular administration. Both, you know, for two reasons. And none of the first, uh, everybody's sort of acknowledging is just to tick all you off, you know, the, the, the chaos and the, and, you know, keeping the heat and the world wrestling, uh, you know, heat, good, bad, I love you, I hate you, whatever.

You always play to that. So that's a big part of it, and which is a dumb idea. Um, but the, you know, the argument that yeah, sometimes you, you need to rush ahead, right?

You know, and I do this literally every day with boats and business and everything else. You know, sometimes it's time to say, you know what, we just need to go take that to the land grab thing. Um, how you can tell, Let, let me, Chris, let me stop you a second.

There's a big difference between you taking a risk with your boat or in your business versus betting the future of the human race on, on AI safeguards. Well, let me, let me, you know, you're talking about a call, I'm making your point. Lemme absolutely right.

But I, I do in my own small way, you know, having input on those things. But, you know, my, my point is the way you know, whether that's a good time, whether it's a good time to take the risk to go forward, is understanding the, the strategic landscape. I do not believe that this is a good time to do this.

You know, the risks of AI are what they are, right? We know them. And in the, you know, we're talking about the Bruce Bruce Schneider article, uh, um, yesterday, you know, talking about the risks this administration is taking with the critical infrastructure information that all of us for decades have been working on protecting, you know, as being, is being, being savage, being handled very, very poorly.

You know, no, no positives anybody can say about that. And we're also taking these risks. So we're compiling risks.

So is this individual, you know, high risk bet to go it alone on AI with no regulations? You know, the wrong one. Even if it's not, we're doing so many other things wrong at the same time, you know, we're compounding risks and we're setting ourselves up for consequences that become unpredictable and hard to control.

That's the problem. You know, I, I think we make our ourselves look weak to quote one of the great artists of our time, Jay-Z, the strong move, quiet the weak start riots. We just made ourselves look like fools.

I mean, we really, did I undermine Yes. The, the, the geopolitical Yes. That I, you know, dunno where to start, right?

So You yeah, I, I feel like we got Is It any, is it any surprise that what what Vance said though? I mean, literally he said it days after, uh, Trump issued one of his hundreds of executive orders where he overturned a Biden executive order about AI safety and responsible use. I mean, it was, it was telegraphed.

He and he and JD Vance kind of enjoys the black hat. I mean, that's what he does. Plus I think that we, I think he's getting whispers or nice, nice encouragement from big tech in terms of pushing back on regulation in Europe, which has always been a problem for these, for these companies, especially Apple.

So Let's not make Apple the only bad guy here. No, I'm, I'm saying I'm, I say big tech. I mean, old big tech pushes back on there, including Google, including and Twitter, where, you know, but, you know, Chris made a reference to a thing about Bruce Schneider, actually it was Bruce Schneider and Davy Meyer, who, I don't know if you know Davey Chris, but Davy's brilliant.

And he's a real dude, right? Penguin blog. I, he's been in the security bloggers network 20 years.

I know Davey. Now what they said is, what's going on with Doug is creating unbelievable cyber risks that our adversaries are going to exploit, for sure Are exploiting now And probably already All. So, Yes.

But, but really it's the symptom of the same disease. They don't give a s**t about risk. They don't care about risk.

They've made it very clear. We don't want Europe regulating risk be damned. We're gonna beat the Chinese.

We are the new American imperium. We're gonna win the eugenics war instead of Kahan, we have Musk. Okay, well, This striving on chaos, it is Quite, it's on chaos.

This, this is a return to imperial times. We want an American outpost in Gaza. We want the canal right near that Gulf of America.

We want the red, white, and blue land. This moron and Congress introduced the thing, and we're gonna win the next new world ai. So John, John, you're in the valley.

How are those companies gonna spin this storyline? Because essentially to Alan's point, they're all saying, we're against responsible usage of AI because of we're worried about regulations. So therefore leave us alone.

That's an untenable position to be in long term. So how isn't an Nvidia and Apple and Google and all these other people gonna come around on a storyline? It doesn't make them look like they are completely off the charts.

I don't, I don't think they can spin it in any way, shape or form. I, I, I, I say I sense here, even in their backyard. I mean, the employees of these companies are upset about what's happening with their companies, uh, the, uh, the people who are not in tech.

And that's a vast, vast majority of the people in this area look upon tech, uh, at the villain, the evil empire. They're in cahoots. They're part of the oligarchy.

Um, they Are the Oligarchs. They're the amount of coverage, the amount of coverage here, uh, that negative about tech is palpable. And I think it's well deserved.

And I, these, these guys have gone through this, these guys play every side. They, they're, they're, they're almost soulless. You know, when, when Obama was in power, they all cozied up to him.

They all sat around him and bowed to him with Obi, with Biden, not so much with Trump. You just see them shifting with the winds. I mean, this, I, I can't get outta my head.

The, um, the, the inauguration in, in these guys blanked on the stage over his shoulder, all on one side, all on the Republican side, laughing, nodding, trying to look serious or solemn. I mean, to me it was just, that's a picture that they will never erase. That will into history Book.

No, sir. And let me tell you the hypocrisy of this. You mentioned the, the musk Mike, you mentioned the Musk group, buildingd 97 whatever, billion dollars for open ai.

What they're not bidding for chat. GPT, they're bidding for the open for the not-for-profit open ai. Because the group says going for profits is now not good under the America first thing.

It goes against their charter. They wanna return open AI to its good, uh, original founding, which was to do good for people and make AI safe for everyone. They talk out of this mouth here.

And then JD Dance talks here. That's called bull. This is out of Orwell.

This is f*****g out of Orwell truth. Speak face. Call it what it is.

Stop being, I'm not gonna be complacent and watch this go down. This is Orwell. You know, Musk truth speak.

People who Wanted open AI to go be move for profits, he was one of the people who was behind that idea until they, they decided they didn't want him to run the company. And he left, of Course. So he has offense.

It's a another case of hypocritical nonsense. Hypocritical nonsense. Anybody wanna say anything else?

I'm not done. I mean, you're assu, you're assuming to be a hypocrite. You, you would have to think about your implications of things.

There's an empathy required there that's non-existent. Not, I mean, we're just, we're just playing it as we go. No, I, So I don't think they're dumb chaos.

I don't think they're dumb. They're very smart. Elon Musk knows exactly what he's doing, and he says whatever he needs to say to get it done.

So does Trump. And so that's, well Assuming, assuming you're accompany and you're building an AI app and you're not comfortable with the, the lack of governance, what should organizations really be doing about all this to kind of be responsible and kind of, you know, if they're inclined to do the right thing, then what should, what is the right thing? You know, the right thing.

First of all, the right thing should be apparent if you really are inclined to do the right thing. The right thing is respect people's ip, respect people's information, respect what the repercussions of your acts are. The right thing is never changed.

The right, you know what I mean? The true north is true north, Right? For me, it's dis disclosures.

I, I have it in my contracts as of this year. If I use AI tools, I will disclose that I've used them because I'm not gonna pass off human time and labor out of retainers. Uh, that, that's not, that's The right thing.

That, that was what I felt was a way to signal to clients on bringing in these tools. But I'm also gonna tell you, because no one likes feeling tricked. No one likes feeling ripped off.

Absolutely. So that was an easy way for me to just let them know, Hey, we're gonna use these tools, but we're gonna tell you and every single client excited about it because they feel like they're a part of it. Because they are Guys.

We're talking about an administration that just suspended prosecution of a war, prohibiting, bribing foreign officials. Okay? You want to talk about the right thing, about morals, about the 10 commandments, about religious Christianity, or whatever your religion is.

I don't know of a, of a religion other than the faren maybe that allow for the bribing of officials. What do we, are you proud to stand up today and say, count me in with them? 'cause it's, I'm, I'm actively renewing, I'm renewing my Canadian passport, so, sure, Go ahead, Chris.

Yeah, I'm gonna shut, I, you know, rather, and again, rather than just ditto heading, you know, because I, you know, I, I agree with what everybody's saying. You know, in any adversarial situation, you need to understand the lay of the land, right? And right now, you know, we, you know, everybody arguing from our side is, is losing, are losing, right?

Why? Well, because we're getting suckered into fighting the wrong battles and spending our energy ineffectively and not actually, you know, the results are obvious. That's just pragmatically fundamentally true, right?

Globally, this is not just a US problem. And really, when you break it all down, you can look at it as policy hacking, right? And, and what's going on right now in the US administration is a perfect example, right?

And the actors, Trump himself, has made a lifetime out of policy hacking, where you just break all the laws all the time and you know how the laws and the policy works. And it's not just what's written down. Do this, don't do that.

It's knowing that if you do this, you know, nine times outta 10, you get away from it, get away with it the 10th time, you can delay it. You can delay it so long, that situation will change. You never have to deal with it.

Someone didn't, you know, got convicted and didn't, you know, suffer penalties in the last couple of months. Exactly like that. Amazing timing for that one.

So this is all a combination of standard conflict, right? Oligarchs sucking up to whoever's in power. Terry Pratchett, you know, writes that into the story all the time.

This is happening forever, right? We had policies and systems to prevent that, or limit that they've been eroded 40 years. We Need our court to put a brake on this.

Look, the mayor of New York was, was indicted. The mayor of New York was indicted, and this administration ordered the Justice Department to stop the prosecution. 'cause we need him to enforce the administration's immigration laws in New York.

If that's not corruption with the biggest capital C I've ever heard, what is it? What is, have we now, are we no longer a country of laws? 'cause if we're not a country of laws, what are we, I was scratching my head about that one.

'cause I was just trying to figure out what the other hundreds of thousands of people who work for the city of New York are doing, I guess. 'cause they can't do anything without the mayor. Come on.

This is guys, I feel like I woke up and back to the future three. And Biff is in charge. Okay?

That's what we're dealing with here. That's what we're, it's Biff world. And, and this is why I say you can't be complacent.

Shake your head and say, we gotta hack this. You've gotta be an activist. And if that means going to file lawsuits, if that means campaigning against it, you, there's gonna come a point in history where they're going to ask what side were you on?

What side of the divide were you on? When Moses comes down with the tablets, what side were you on? Do you wanna be, I was quiet.

I don't, I won't, To be really clear, I'm not talking complacency. I'm talking effectiveness. You know, when you fight, stay as calm as the ocean and watch what's going on behind your shoulder.

Right? Remember, war's not the place for deep emotion, and you might get to be a little older, right? This is important stuff.

We need to spend our time winning these wars. And I, and again, I'm speaking globally, this problem is we have global policies that have eroded and they're being exploited and they're being hacked. Yes.

You know, laws, we have a president right now who will break the law, you know, every five minutes knowing that the consequence, even though the policies and the processes there won't actually get back to him. So we need to fix those processes. And, and again, I think in these information technology world, in the cybersecurity world, there are hints of the kind of systems that may help us do that.

But this is still, you know, this is conflict. Individuals need to work. I would Just, I would just say that, you know, your wallet needs to follow your principles.

And all too often we see people standing on soapboxes saying stuff, and then they don't actually follow that up by looking at who they're doing business with and what contracts and who's supporting what these things now need. A, a, a different weight means to be added to the calculus of who you're doing business with. Agreed.

All right. We've exceeded, we've exceeded our 15 minutes on this one, guys. Um, we're gonna have to take a break here on Textron Gang.

We're going to come back and let's talk a little bit about security. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry. com covers all aspects of cybersecurity, including data security, DevSecOps, cloud security, application security, network security, security threats, and more.

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Home of security bloggers network. All right, folks, we're back. And we're talking about AI and security, as Alan alluded to, and it's a continuing conversation.

We talked about this whole deep CKI thing ad nauseum at this point, but it seems like there are other providers out there like philanthropic who are offering, uh, yeah. Money for people who can crack their AI safety and cybersecurity capabilities. And I can't help but wonder, Chris, have we shifted a gear here without really noticing it too hard, but is security now becoming like a preeminent feature of these AI models and people are gonna start making choices based on security before the fact rather than trying to fix it after the fact?

Yeah. In short, yes. Right.

You know, this is, as we're talking about in the last block, you know, sometimes it is the right time to just rush ahead and see what happens. And sometimes it's not right. And for lots of reasons, not just, you know, the, the current trend with ai, um, security has been building itself into the requirement list of things for a long time.

You know, this one, and again, you know, as you know, holds up like the last block. This one's scary enough that people, to your point, I think consumers are taking it more seriously than usual. And to the point, a couple of the articles, you know, in today's, uh, uh, reference material is starting to become an evolutionary thing.

The nutrient gradient goes towards systems that aren't gonna freak out your customers, right? And this is the literal, you know, Mary Shelley Frankenstein story that we've all lived in Breeze, Skynet. And, you know, how do I get comfortable with spending X amount of dollars when I know I have, I have choices and one freaks me out more than the other one, right?

Because they're going to go, they're gonna get challenges that go, go through tests. They're gonna fail it, they're gonna fail horribly. You don't, if I was, if that was my main purpose of, you know, the main hat I'm wearing commercially these days, I don't want to be that brand, right?

So I think security, I have some hopes, again, you know, that's, you know, my normal optimistic view of things, but I think the drivers are there a little better for this than a lot of things. So, you know, I said this before, I'll say it again. Vendors build security in when their customer's demanding and not a second before.

And The better your beforehand just go outta business, Right? Not a second before, right? And now the issue here is what customers are demanding.

It used to be that in some way the government was a big stick, right? 'cause when the government demanded safe cloud, they did GovCloud. When the government got worried about financial data, there was Graham Leach Bliley.

When the government, right, or the EU government, GDPR and AI regulations JD Vance be damped, they consider it their job to be that big stick in terms of cybersecurity regulations. Um, now we can't count on government necessarily to be that big stick. So who becomes the big stick?

Is it the PCI council, right, which was behind the whole PCI standards, which drove so much security 10 years ago. Or is it the cyber insurance companies who won't give you insurance if you're not, you know, using secure tools. Someone has to come in here right as the big stick to help the individual consumer because it's, in today's world to get individual consumers, or even like the huge, what is it, six or 7 million SMB businesses in the world to go like a school of fish or a flock of birds in one direction is difficult.

You, you need, you need the sheep dogs, if you will, to, to her them. And I think that's, we have to see who emerges. I think the EU will be one of them.

We'll, we'll see what else pops up? You know, I did an interview with my friend from Quas Dip di, uh, Dipo, I forgot his last name. Bai, Dilip Bai, uh, SVP of, uh, Qualis.

They did the scan on, on deep seek that turned up all kinds of security issues, all kinds of security issues. Um, I'm glad to see philanthropic taking the lead with this jailbreak challenge, right? Because they obviously something you know, well, that, That Something's telling them that people care.

Yeah. Sorry, sorry Alan. No go.

This plays really well into what philanthropic has done and, and basically it's kind of this depth move amid of this chaos need for speed, bigger and better models, anthropic decides, you know, this is what we stand for. This, this is why we are not like open IR dse and I, I I give them, I give them kudos and at least bringing this topic up because deep in the recesses of my mind, I keep thinking that we are hurdling eventually towards some major breach that involves ai. And it's, it's gonna happen.

And it's gonna be interesting to see how all the parties involved to rush things, how they're gonna handle that, or how they're gonna pivot from it to use parlance out here. I mean, you hope it works out well for Like, to get your opinion on this thing. I saw, I was talking to this other company and I happened to gonna look at some of the contracts they created, and they actually had language in there that says, thou shalt not take our data and expose it to any LLM.

And it was interesting that they were using a legal case now, basically to say, we do not give you permission to use our data even so much as to write some sort of marketing collateral type of thing, because we don't know where that data's gonna wind up. And you must sign this, and if you violate it, we will sue you into oblivion. So is it illegal Argument?

It's in, it's a, it's a legal argument until someone signs an executive order that says those are no longer enforceable. And then you gotta get a court who's gonna come up and have the, the cone to say, yes, it is. You know, I get it.

We're, we're having a dark moment, but the fact that we're all able to freely discuss this without fear of repercussion penalty or getting dragged to jail, like getting our tissue typed, uh, like China does, uh, we're free, we're free to discuss it. And I think if we continue the discourse that, that all of us will eventually come to light. We have a free press, we have a lot of things that we shouldn't forget that we have, that we have going in our favor, there's nothing that's gonna take that away from us.

Um, I, I, I just can't, I can't believe that I, I don't believe that they will win in that. But, but to your point, I do get asked. So I did a segment on a BBC Sacramento yesterday about deep seek, and I was asked, um, is it okay to use deep seeq?

Is it safe? And I said, well, I would just assume like I would in a search engine that anything you you type in there is is it's gonna be revealed if, if it's gonna be revealed. The fact that there have been so many governmental agencies banning deep seek, uh, for security vulnerabilities tells you that right there, I mean, if this is a preemptive thing, but I do think we're gonna start seeing LLMs called out in more contracts.

I think we're gonna start seeing that because people have to protect their information. And it's been a wild west situation, but I think it's gonna be dealt with on a private level. I, I can't see any legislation coming out of this administration, uh, protecting anyone's data.

Well, I, I, I, I agree and I think the, you know, contract language, you know, I'm always trying to look at things that just have to be done. And, you know, the supply chain world that I've been focusing on for, for in recent years absolutely requires at certain points in the, in the predictable future, certain things to happen and contract language becoming code, you know, actual code that operates in real time, like software has to be part of that. I have to know that I don't call my legal people or send an email to have a human read, a contract to find if there's a clause that disallowed my data to be exposed to an LLMI need as my data is being handled, the, the policies is being handled in to be transparent to the systems.

And in certain hypercritical, you know, high value infrastructures, I expect that to be technically implemented in the next several years. We're not talking a long time. The parts are all there at this point, like any NT area, it just requires an area where the cost is worth doing it.

But then again, the savings in all the other things, you don't have rewards. The rewards have to justify the cost, right is the bottom line. Well wait And they will, We already have compliances code.

So contract, this code is not far off. So I think Chris is spun off. Hey, we gotta take a break.

We're gonna come back. We've got one more segment for you today. You're watching Textron Gang, Discover Textron Group, the epicenter of tech innovation.

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And finally, in the C Block, we're returning to some of our favorite DevOps conversations, or in this case DevSecOps, but uh, harness merged. We're Traceable. Traceable is a provider of an API security platform that happened to be created by the same team that runs Harness.

So they all came out on the same labs, but there's been this ongoing debate about whether or not API security is a standalone category. Is it just part of a larger DevSecOps platform or it's just another artifact just about everybody who made an API security platform came out with a statement in the last three days saying API security is still a standalone thing. Alan, I know you've been kind of following this as long as I have.

What's your quick take? Sure. So, so just real quickly, as you mentioned this, this is a merger Kiss and cousins, right?

Uh, Jody was the founder of both Harness and, uh, traceable. He was the founder of AppDynamics and his, I forget the name of the labs as his funding accelerator unimaginable on something, um, was the initial money into both companies. Of course, harness is a unicorn valued company, CICD.

Um, we've covered traceable and Harness since the day they were both launched here at Textron. I'm good friends with Jody over the years. AppDynamics was one of our initial founding sponsors.

Um, you know, I learned a lesson years ago, my friend Chris Hoff, and you probably know Hoff, Chris Blas, right? Hoff is the chief security guy now at, uh, LastPass. But Chris has been around the security world a long time.

He used to get me going. He'd say NAC was a feature, not a product. And I used to argue because I had a NAC company and I didn't want that.

But long term he's right. But that's the fate of almost every kind of tech product. It become, it goes from being a product to a feature into a platform.

You know, it gets melded onto a platform. And, and so that is the story of API security. It, it had its moment in the sun.

You saw several players, no name security was a unicorn, right? They raised a ton of money. They wanted the big ones.

Um, salt our friend Michelle McLean worked at, there was one before that that Red Hat bought for about 400 and something million back then. Um, traceable was another, you know, my friend Brad Fel said, if you're not in the top three, get the hell out. Because those top three, those first three companies to exit get the bulk of the money.

And that's exactly what happened here. The top three companies got out, they got the bulk of the money. I don't think no name got anything near what it was valued, you know, prior to, I think with Traceable.

And, and again, I have friends at Traceable in, in addition to ti but they've suffered from this lack of AI API security being a thing. And, and they haven't been, you know, running a full speed for some time now. And I think the right thing to do is to fold it into Harness.

And they did. I think Harness like every other DevOps platform wants to be a dev is a DevSecOps platform. And API security is a good part, is a, is a nice add in, a nice tuck in to that DevSecOps functionality.

I, I don't see many standalone API, you know, originally this API security was gonna be a wap, a WAF replacement web access firewall, web application firewall, because WAF firewalls did it monitor API traffic, which is a majority of the traffic on the internet. But now API security is either part of a security company or part of a security play, or, or it's part of your app, it's AppSec, right? Or, or API management in general.

So, so my prediction is we're gonna see either more acquisitions of DevSecOps companies acquiring API security companies, or the very least who's left Renouncing Alliances with various players. There's still like half a dozen little startups in this space, Small round out. I mean, the big ones, the big one.

Look, if you're not in the top three, get the hell out, Said Jack Welch at GE long, long time Ago, and he was right then, and it's right now, then, You know, of course, Jack, just about that statement after he retired. So who knows? Yeah.

I mean, I, I've seen that in tech over the years though, having been involved in a few venture backed startups. If you're not in the top three and you can't make a sizable, you know, a reasonable claim that you're gonna be in the top three in a short time, get out, pivot, sell, do something else. Well, I I I, I have to say on topic, you know, uh, shout out to Roy Fer at, uh, CEO Unified, API, who's a guest on one of the inevitably curve episodes that's, uh, will go online in the next, uh, couple weeks on this topic.

Interesting person to, uh, to listen to on, but effectively what more is there to say yes, right? And, you know, supply chain and so forth is mentioned again in the, in the background material for this segment. You know, this is, you know, DevSecOps, you know, working at SBE in a s om management company, you know, these last, uh, several years, it's DevSecOps.

It's fascinating how that's folding into other parts of the, of companies better than it has because of the shared visibility of these things we're all talking about. So yeah, it's, it's time, right? You didn't notice that you weren't paying attention.

So yeah, now it's time. I gotta leave you with this. You always have to remember they're cattle not pets.

And you know what the fate of cattle are sooner or later, Soon later, they're all hamburgers. Yep. Is That, that's, that's the le that's the lesson of that story.

All right. Hey, it's been a rollicking, uh, Textron gang today. And, and Chris, John, Mike, thank you very much.

Um, just a heads up, I'll be on a two 30 this afternoon on LinkedIn live on my Shimmy Says, and I'm gonna have more to say about this America only, America alone AI strategy. It's actually America alone against the world strategy and, and how you know where this can go wrong. Tune in on that.

You'll also be able to see YouTube shorts not live, but you'll be on YouTube shorts and other places as well as is Textron Gang. We've got a lot of text trunk TV coming up for you the rest of the day. Until then, this is Alan Shimmel for Textron Gang.

Be safe. Be well, speak up, you wear out.