Techstrong Gang – March 28, 2025

Hey, everyone. Are, are we finally gonna marry mass production, a mass customization you're watching? Text Drug Gang.

Hi everyone, it's Alan Hummel, and it is Friday. Well, I, I'm just sitting here thinking, is it really Friday? Well, truth be told, we recorded this Thursday, but I'm recording it for Friday and this week has flown by.

I don't care whether it's Thursday or Friday. What a, it just, it's quick. Um, anyway, hope your week has gone well and you're ready for a happy Friday with us.

We've got our Friday gang assembled to talk about some interesting things. Let me get right to it and introduce you to them. It looks like he, uh, he's, is he?

Yeah. He looks like he's back home. Yes, I am.

You're talking, you're referring to me. Yeah. John Swart.

Keeping, keeping watch, keeping watch over Silicon Valley. I from Hyatt Top, the Golden Gate Bridge where his, uh, penthouse is our, our Silicon Valley editor, John Schwartz. Hey John.

How are you? Uh, I'm good. Uh, it's rainy.

It's a little dark. Um, but, uh, yeah, it's a long week and, uh, baseball season's here, so I'm very happy. Absolutely.

Kinda like a Lex Luther kind of hangout, right? Lex Luther would've a place at the top of the golden game. Let's go.

Let's go far. No. Are the Giants opening this weekend or Today they Are opening in Cincinnati against the Reds.

They're playing Thursdays opening day, and then they take Friday off, like half the teams in MLB, and then they game two is, uh, Saturday for them. Excellent. Excellent.

Go G Met. Alright, moving on from John. We're gonna go from there down to Texas.

I guess. There must not be any holidays nearby. I don't see any background, but it's our own.

Ann. A whole award. Hey Ann, how are you?

Hi. I am good, thank you. Easter's not that far off.

I don't really, that's, I don't decorate for all of 'em. Oh, okay. So I'm not really like an Easter person.

You may see a buddy sneak in there somewhere, but I am not gonna, it's you can't, you can't chase every rainbow. No, you are right. You're right.

Somewhere over the rainbow. You know, wicked is out on Peacock, so we've watched it four times in my house over the last two or three days and, um, yeah, over the rainbow. That's a good way of thinking about it.

Anyway, moving on. And it's great to have you on. He is knee deep in his, I'm surprised he doesn't have a Yankee cap on, quite frankly already.

He's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey Mike, how are you? That was yesterday, but, um, I would say Friday I have the same series of processes in my mind.

I wake up and I go, thank God it's Friday, which is closely followed by, holy crap. It's Friday. Yeah, It really, it's, it's one of those weeks.

And of course Mike, you and I are traveling, right? We're going to London where we'll be in CubeCon next week. We'll be doing a few text on gangs live from CubeCon.

A few well not live, we'll record them at CubeCon and, uh, and we'll be doing a few not from CubeCon. So stay tuned for that next week. Anyway, Mike, we've got some excellent topics to dive into today.

You know, the first is this idea of can we finally customize its scale to match mass production? And it's been kind of a holy grail, but we haven't really done it. And you think AI is, is gonna make it happen.

To your point, it, this is kind of a philosophical conversation because we have this article up on digital CXO talking about this, and it's not a new idea, but we've been chasing it for a long time. But the article posits that, um, with advances in 3D printing and robotics and ai, maybe we are on the cusp of being able to do this filing. But Ann I know you've been hearing about this subject as long as we have, but what's your sense of is any or all of this, either a feasible or B desirable?

It's absolutely feasible. Uh, I think consumers expect customization at this point. I think they're gonna start to expect it in the medical setting, um, because mass production has been happening as long as I can remember my entire life.

But it only fits if the product fits the person who uses it, right? So I think when it comes to medical manufacturing, personalization is going to be the key for, um, all this custom, uh, manufacturing. And I think that it, there's an increased customer, uh, expectation thanks to AI robotics, other, other things we're seeing, and I think in medicine, uh, everybody's an individual, we're all special snowflakes.

So custom fit medical devices and components are gonna lead to better patient satisfaction. Um, I think manufacturers do, the article did say face challenges related to inflation, supply chain disruption. And I think, you know, it has to become cost effective to start customizing.

But I think if the money's there, it's obviously gonna happen. Um, and I think the article also touched upon a little bit the importance of sustainable and resilient manufacturing. Um, because that practice will actually help us to reduce delays and keep consistent supplies.

So I think that we can expect that customization is going to become common. I think that, that, that seismic shift is happening now. It's starting and I think that consumers are going to start to expect it.

Um, if you could 3D print something and it can fit exactly what you need, why would you do anything else? You know? Well, that's depending on the cost, but Alan, would you pay extra to design your own boat, for instance?

I did. Well, I mean, I, I have been looking at 3D printed houses and, and, uh, customizing houses for some land I own up in Northern Ontario. Um, probably gonna do that Wise move.

Yeah, well, I mean, go there. Well, it just makes more sense. Absolutely.

It makes sense to go go with a custom printed house or a custom design house from a, a set of options. So I think we're gonna see, you know, you have option A, B, C, right? But we can customize this in these ways.

I think it's gonna start maybe in that way. Yeah, I, it, it, and I think it starts off that you could have, you know, I, I'm reminded of when I first moved to Florida 23 years ago and we were looking at new homes and you know, a company down, well, they're a nationwide company. Lenar, Lenar home builders, if you've ever gone to look at a new home in Lenar, right?

The, the kitchen cabinets come in, this shaker white, if you don't like the shaker white, you can instead choose the shaker white. But if you don't like that shaker white, you could still pick the shaker white, right? And, and we didn't buy in our house as a result of that.

But you know, the next step from that is you could do shaker white, shaker black or shaker gray. But then the next step from that is really where you get to mass customization. Where I can, I can mix my own colors.

I can give you the hex numbers and pick any color I want. Now, interestingly, believe it or not, we see this in clothing or, or online ordering, right? Like, you know, when I first got into the web, I never thought we'd buy clothes online, especially women, because women like to try on clothes.

And I'm not knocking anyone. They're, they're much, they care much more about how their clothes fit than I do. I'm a slob about it.

But, you know, I never thought women would buy clothes online because you couldn't touch it. Feel it, try it on and you don't know how it's gonna look. But yet they sell plenty of women's clothes online, don't they?

Right. But if you're a woman like me who's six feet tall, well it, it's hard. You need custom sizes.

It's a great solution because you're not gonna find what you need off the rack. Exactly. And that's what we've seen is mass customization of clothes online where, you know, you, I, I forgot to, I'm not mentioning names anyway, but you could stand in front of your iPad or phone and it, it literally measures you.

Or you could take your measurements and put it in, and then you can, in essence get custom made clo clothes custom made for you. Right. That fit your particular body.

And, you know, is it cheap? It's not a heck of a lot more expensive than buying off the rack stuff online. 'cause they're doing it at scale.

I, and you don't, you don't buy into it. I I mean, I think most women I know right now that are closed horses are doing rentals. So there's so many services now that do custom clothing rentals.

It's thought to be a more sustainable way to be. Yes. So you Rent it and then send it back.

Yes. Or you keep it if you like it. So it's like a try before you buy almost Why A Lot of women are doing That.

Why no one's told me about this. I I've heard of it. And you know, then there's a whole thing about who wore it better, right?

There's 10 photos of somebody wearing, or people wearing silver. Right? Well, you look at the review, I look at the reviews and those pictures to see, okay, is their body shape similar to mine?

Are they tall? If this is a short dress, are these tall women wearing it or are they complaining about it? So it's actually crowdsource trying things on.

I think that's maybe the way of the future because it's, it's, you know, usually a nominal fee, a hundred dollars a month and you get so many outfits and then you return them. And it's also thought to be more, you know, eco-friendly 'cause you're not wasting, And then someone, it's where the trends are going and they do, they clean them and send them to someone else? Yes.

Which is better than what you experience in the store where people try stuff on and they put it back rack and then you Yeah, Exactly. It it could be a little icky. Yeah.

Wow. This is blowing my mind. First of all, I gotta tell you, Anne, I've only seen you on Zoom.

I had no idea you're six feet tall, because who knows what legs people have on Zoom, but this is a whole new Mike, you knew about this. I did. I've heard all about this course.

You know, I have a daughter in the fashion industry, so I hear it About these things. I guess you would, John, do You? And they are using ai, believe me, I know one of their data scientists.

I've heard, you know, I, my my daughters, um, have talked about this concept too. You know, try before you buy, remember I was gonna mention, just throw something out. I remember a long time ago, companies like Intel and some others were talking about, or conceiving this magic mirror technology where you would stand in front of a mirror, you wouldn't have to try something on it.

It would size things on you or project things on you, Show you how you look in it When you looked in it, because there was this idea, and close is a great example where you would, you wouldn't buy something blind. I mean, you'd wanna touch it, feel it, see how, how it looks on you. So I just wanna kinda go back to this whole idea of mass customization kind of plays within all these trends that we're seeing.

Like literally every day there's an agent AI announcement or some sort of announcement involving robotics or customization or going to market. I mean, today it was a PWC announced an agent ai. And it's just like all kind of clearly moving in this direction.

And especially as Anne referenced medical devices, um, components, healthcare. There's so much attention being paid to that and the opportunity. So I think it all is kind of moving in, in, in a, a direction of monetization, especially in that field fashion.

Perhaps even in, in this types of content we consume. It's, uh, it's limitless, but again, it's also at the mercy of things like supply chain disruption. And I won't go down that road, but I think that definitely could throw a, a wrench into things.

Well, here's where it gets really interesting in my mind, is that I can do the mass customization in smaller and smaller factory units that I can put closer to the point where people are consuming things. And if that's the case, then I don't need to go manufacture all this stuff halfway around the world and ship it on a boat over here. I can make it closer to where people are.

Now, there's a political aspect, this, so the edge That We're talking about, um, you know, bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US and as far as I can tell, we're just gonna bring robots back to the US And, and that's the, that's the, the gist of it, Mike. This isn't gonna bring, it'll bring jobs for people making the robots or building a factory, but it's not bringing factory jobs are a fallacy in today's world. I don't care how many tariffs you slap on stuff, right?

And, and the, and you know, factories just don't have people working lines like that anymore. They are robot's. It's also becoming much more cost efficient.

I was talk, I mean, I'm doing this feature story on robotics and I was talking to folks about manufacturing and they're telling me the experts at least were saying that it's, it's, it's probably more cost efficient to have a robot. The parts, the, the, the machinery itself is getting cheaper and cheaper than we, we get to the point where you literally have this dy not, not like dynamic pricing, but dynamic customization or, or manufacturing. I mean, it just to even oversimplify some ballparks, I know the Oakland a's talked about this, this idea of checking the inventory.

Some football teams do this during, in-game and to, to, with a better understanding of what to produce or what to make in terms of food and what to sell. So they don't have a bunch of popcorn that's untouched versus hot dogs that are high demand that they run out of. And I think in a sense, you could have set that same criteria to a factory in terms of producing almost anything once the robotics in the AI are in sync.

Are they still the Oakland A's? No, they're, uh, you know what they're called, they're called the athletics. But um, the local, that's a controversy.

Um, locally they're referring to 'em as sa the Sacramento a and the Chronicle elsewhere. They're just calling them the athletics or the A's. Okay.

But, but that sort of, you know, I remember internet first came out, Mike, you probably remember John, you probably do too. There, there was this startup, uh, Pointcast network that remember that the idea here was we were gonna mass customize your feed, your news, your, your internet, you know, tailored to you so that you don't have to drink from the fire hose and everybody can get their, you know, and, and even though that was a failure, the concept stuck, right? People today, we all have our own interesting mix.

Here's another thing. Go buy all these 23 and me DNA profiles and you can customize medicine based upon people's DNA 'cause that I think is something not buying the 20, I said that in jest. I hope the 23 of me DNA profiles aren't for sale though, who knows?

But more and more we're gonna see medicine, medicines and supplements and so forth nutrients that are customized for your particular DNA for your particular makeup that you know works best for you. They, They showed a demo of that an IBM conference like 10 years ago. Someone waking up and, you know, pinprick and then, oh, we've custom printed 3D you know, printed your, your medication.

I mean, imagine what a bo that would be for diabetics and other people with serious medical conditions. It's kind of amazing. Yeah.

But I, you know, 10 years ago it sounded sci-fi ish. Today it may not. Yeah.

So I think it's coming faster than we think. And I think that there's a lot of economic incentives now that may not have been there, and there's a lot more, uh, political noise in the system too, driving this conversation. So we'll see what happens.

You know, Mike, I, I'll tell you though, to your point about making the factories on the edge closer, maybe not across in China or whatever, it, it's not just having a factory and the robots that make the, let's say, close for instance. You need the material. You think the material is made here, right?

I mean, one of the, one of the things that made England great, right? Was they were importing all of their colonies and everyone all over the world sent the wool back to England, but only they made, uh, was it flannel? And, and what was the other material that their suit suit like felt and so forth, right?

So you still, the materials are made from raw materials that oftentimes won't necessarily be grown here in the, in the, in this case, the us those materials that, you know, those raw materials are then manufactured into finished material, which are then manufactured into finished products. So you may move the, the assembly, if you will, here, but the raw materials and the processing of those materials, you know, are still going to take place elsewhere. So, well, According, according to my Civil War history, we can grow cotton in this country.

So, I dunno, Okay. Yeah, we could, but there's a reason why we don't. Right?

In all honesty, it's, it's, you know, there's a reason why we don't grow cotton in, in here like we used to Things. You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. So we, it can all go back, man.

Here he is Eli Whitney himself, making the new gin. Wow. Cotton gin references.

Wow. All right. Wow, guys, This conversation went way all over the, all over the place.

Baseball Got was meander. That was a meandering conversation like Old River. That Alright?

Course, of course. The, the debate is did he actually invent that or did he just steal it from the British? There is that debate, right?

That's, but we would never steal IP like some other countries. Never. Never.

Oh boy. All right, let's take a break. We're gonna come back before we get in trouble And Ice comes up here with mass people in Deports Me or something.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey folks, we're back and we're gonna shift gears a little bit. We're talking about video and how AI is being used to first create more video.

And then we're seeing some advances where there are new classes of processors known as asics that are being designed specifically to make it less expensive to encode video and process it. And that's a step in the right direction. We've seen Akamai, um, earlier this week launch a, what they're calling a video processor unit in their cloud service that they're claiming is the first of its kind.

And it should hopefully reduce the cost of processing video. But John, you have the article on using more AI to create video and that we're seeing more of this in production. I think, from what I can tell, video's gonna be everywhere soon.

Yeah, it is. I mean, it already was in terms of post-production, but now we're seeing the spike in pre-production use, especially among marketers. They can churn out these high quality videos, bigger budgets.

Now it kind of runs counter to what I would've thought initially, but what they're, the marketers are finding out is by using, um, AI and video, their budgets have been increasing. They've been ben benefiting 'cause they're getting better lead creation and conversions according to this state of the video report by Wistia. So, um, I talked to the head of content at Wistia and he said, we're seeing a level of AI usage and video pre-production.

They, they, like, they haven't seen before, involving things like scripting, script planning, editing, tone of shifts in a script. And that's kind of interesting. I I really didn't know what that meant, but it basically meant making a script punchier or, or more narrow in focus.

And before he said those exercises would take hours among people, now it takes minutes with, um, ai. So they're kind of cutting down on those costs. They're producing shorter videos also, by the way, which is much more in tune with the audience now.

And like you watch a movie now versus, say if you saw something 40 years ago. Yeah. The, the, the amount of cuts and editing is incredibly accelerated now.

So people have short attention spans. They like things coming at 'em in this m like kind of post MTV uh, consumption model. So we're seeing that you mentioned the Akamai news.

Um, the, the use of AI for video creation is searched about 41% compared to 18% a year ago. The tools are getting better in terms of scripting, brainstorming, and then of course post-production like captions, dubbing, and visual generation. So we're gonna see more of this.

Um, I might, maybe we might see more of it next month in April at the NAB show, but I think it's definitely a trend that is going to only accelerate. I agree. So first of all, hey Boomer, I got a message for you.

Video is all over the place, right? It it, I mean, we live it here at text. You're watching this video, right?

We didn't start Techstrong Media Ops as a video play. It was a written websites. We, we, we write articles.

That's what we do. But, you know, about five, six years ago we moved, seven years ago, we moved to dabbling in video. And I would say today, you know, we're, we're producing here and we're nothing, we're just text on.

We're not a big media house, but we produce on average of 35 to 40 different videos every week, including the five Textron gangs every week, right? Monday to Friday, Mike and I do a bunch of of interviews. We do a bunch of podcasts, video, podcasts, webcasts.

We do a bunch of, uh, reoccurring series kinds of shows. And, and we're a poster child for this. I, I will tell you that I use the ai just as you say John, in pre-production.

It writes my scripts. It, it punches up my scripts. It gives scripts.

I, here's two great examples. We did the predict event in January, predict 2025 was the beat Goes on, was the theme, like the Sunny and Cher, uh, uh, song. The beat goes on, the hero image for the website was an AI image.

The, the, the whole look and feel of the event was generated by, by ai. We did a, uh, a sunny and shared, you know, sati satire thing. Kim Parker, our CO and me on I was Sonny.

She, she, she was Cher. And that script was written by ai. And I said, write this script in this, you know, in the tone of the Sonny and Cher Show.

And it did it perfectly. I've got a new one coming out, blues Brothers for our cloud native event. One from the ro one for the road in July.

That AI again wrote the, made the picture, wrote the abstract and it, and wrote the script for the videos. We're going to use It. Is it, so that's just in pre in post all of our videos are now being put in and, and you know, we're getting a 32nd summary, a two minute summary for the various social media platforms.

And it works, whether it's YouTube shorts or tiktoks or LinkedIn and, and it's optimized for each platform. AI just does it. It works.

I I think anyone who's not doing this is missing. You know, their their di they are, they're gonna get left behind. It's boomers, right?

It, it dinosaurs. This is At my agency. We're using it a lot for video, um, for captioning.

Is is an easy one. Oh, Absolutely. And voice.

We no longer have to hire and deal with Voices. Voice over. That's dead.

Yeah. I mean they they were not easy to work with a lot of them. Yeah.

A lot of the uh, yeah. Yeah. I was just gonna throw a lot of the, uh, actors are, the voice actors are being replaced.

I remember doing a story about that a couple years ago. I mean, it's just so easy to to to, to replicate or simulate something that's similar and it with a script created by ai. So basically it's all a pitance of what it used to cost and time.

It's time. It's time that the time Yeah. An agency, right?

We run off of time. And so it saves me time of having to go hire one, find one we've already hired, do a contract, all of that. I don't have to do that.

Um, so You, I was having this chat with somebody who works in Hollywood, and admittedly they have a bias, but they were, and it's counterintuitive thinking a little bit, but they were positing the following theory. They were saying, yes, we're gonna see a lot more videos driven by AI and the bulk of those videos are gonna be bad. And eventually people will start demanding higher quality videos.

And he felt that that would be good for his industry at the end of the day. I mean, yes and no. I, I mean, I don't, I don't think it's gonna be as simple, uh, because it's gonna take money.

I mean, they're, they're doing studies now showing younger people would rather watch short form video on social media than pay for cable. People are paying for cable and streaming services. That's, there's no way that that's good for Hollywood.

I, uh, cable is you, you know, is interesting. Uh, don't make fun of me, but I'm the president of our HOA and, and, and i I, we had a meeting this past week and I said, Hey, I'd like to solicit offers for, for, uh, cable internet and phone services. And so we wanted to do a little survey of what people in our neighborhood in our development, you know, what services did they use and what did they pay.

'cause I mean, we're the only game by us is Xfinity. It's the only one that has fiber anyway. And I was shocked that the over over overwhelmed, like 80% of the people are actually paying Xfinity almost $300 a month for cable, internet and home phone.

Now, I, I haven't had a home phone after I realized the only people who ever called me on the home phone was spam because I never, I didn't even know what my home phone number was. We cut cable a couple years ago too. 'cause I streamed everything.

But yet, you know, I I think maybe 'cause I live in a bubble, I don't, I'm not sure that 20 year olds are watching YouTube and those videos over Netflix because they want to, because frankly, you know, my two 20 year olds living in Brooklyn cannot afford Netflix. So therefore they don't watch Netflix. Netflix basically.

Well, they both told me if their parents weren't skin flints, they would because my kids just say, dad, what's the Netflix login? Right? And then yeah, well, that's just it.

Then they go looking for the Netflix login, and then I get a email from Netflix saying, you know, yep. How come you have an IP address in Brooklyn? Don't they crack Down on that and knock it off?

Yeah, I thought that they were cracking down on sharing. No, they do. But you could buy the deluxe Netflix program that allows a few more people to glom onto your account.

But, um, what Mike's your, your friend, um, in Hollywood, Mike is onto something because I think there will actually reach a point, maybe the generic nature of the videos that are done in marketing or whatever, whatever, what have you. They're gonna probably, eventually, there's gonna be a, a a, a percentage of the audience out there that's gonna want something above and beyond. And I, when I think about that, I think about just the emergence of HBO, right?

With all the, the networks that were out there just churning out the same crap year after year in terms of sitcoms or detective shows and first segment of the audience wanted something new or something different that's distinguishable and then that caught on and it grew to where it is today. I would, I wondered that same phenomenon probably might apply to AI produced scripts. I mean, they're gonna, they're gonna probably feel very generic and formulaic Until something else.

No, they'll better as you, they'll ride rise to the occasion, right. As it, they'll continue to improve as they go. But I got a question.

Mike, what are you name dropping here about friends in Hollywood? He's just a director you never heard of, so, I mean Okay. I thought it was like Kevin Costner or someone.

I, I dunno, IIII I'm referring to an actual interview we did on Techstrong TV about four months ago. Okay. But let me, let me, let me though, try to reground us here on this look using AI for video, for entertainment purposes, all of Hollywood or something like that.

Or to be an influencer on social media, right? That's one thing. But I think it was, Ann said it in the beginning, in today's world, the 20 something Gen Zs, whatever they are, whatever we're calling them, they communicate via video.

They get their news and information via video. They socialize via video. Right.

It's not, it's no longer that video is just a movie or a TV show or entertainment. Video has become our basic lingua franca. It's become the way we interact, whether it's us here on Streamy Yard or on a Zoom call or teams or whatever, your platform of choices or FaceTime or how I, I find out what's cool or how I get my homework or how I do my classwork, frankly, if I'm in school, right, or Every time we mention Trump, I I cannot see Anne's eyes roll the way I can on video.

Right. E exactly. Absolutely.

You don't really roll my eyes. But yeah, I mean, I, it's, oh, You roll your eyes a little bit. Yeah, you do.

Anne, I know I've known you long enough. I I I do this. That's A personality tick once in a while, Once a while, Hey, now that we know you're six feet, I'm going easy here before I get in trouble.

Yeah. And I lettered in a bunch of sports, so Really very cool. Um, but anyway, no, seriously, video is, it's more than entertainment is what I'm saying.

And it's woven into the very fabric of how we communicate. And, and AI is playing a never increasing role in that. I I do have one request.

I sure wish somebody would come up with a cheaper way to store all this stuff. Wow. Well, you know, to the point about the Akamai thing.

So again, we live this here at Textron. The problem with Akamai having some custom silicon that's gonna speed up my processing is I run into the next bottleneck, which is I have to upload the raw video for them to process. And that takes time.

That takes time, right. Especially if I'm remote. If I'm here in studio and I got gig, multi gig connections, all right.

It's gonna take a little bit of time. But if I'm for a small Fee, they will drop a point of presence right next to your office. I need it in the office.

Right? I mean, look, you know this Mike, our video people are all clamoring from the New Max Studio Ultra with dual m threes and, uh, and, and a whole bunch of, you know, there's, I forgot how many cores and ram and terabytes and, you know, but they're, I mean, these are five to 10 grand a a pop these stations. And you know, that's a lot of money to pay for a computer these days.

It's true. The total cost of video is still pretty high. Or it just takes them a little more time to do it on a Mac studio, you know, on these good old m fours that are out there now and, and stuff like that.

So, all right. I don't know if the Let's out those Commodore 60 chords while we're out. I had one play Punk play punk.

My dad had one. Yeah. Alright.

Hey, let's take a break. We're going come back here with more video. Uh, we've got our next block coming up on GPU, protecting us from ransomware.

Have we found, uh, another great use for GPU Jensen? Ken is must be the size himself. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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And as Alan alluded to, we have this story up on Security Boulevard where our researcher has taken a GPU and used it to come up with the keys necessary to decrypt ransomware. I think in this case it was the acua one. Um, and it kind of shows some hope for using GPUs to, for ransomware.

And, and maybe it's a new tool in our arsenal. And who knows if the cost of GPUs come down, Alan, can we get to the point where maybe we just eliminate ransomware altogether, Uh, from your math to God's ears, Mike. But in all honesty, I think before what you've just described comes true.

We'll, we will have maybe, uh, quantum, you know, breaking the ransomware encryption a lot cheaper and easier than the, than the GPU will. Um, here's the problem though. I've been in security a long time, guys, and this is a cat and mouse game, right?

So you're telling me the cows, the cat just got a little smarter. It's not long before Jerry comes up with a new thing to be smarter than Tom, right? 'cause Jerry's always smarter than Tom Jerry's always do I have it right?

Tom is the cat. Jerry's the mouse, right? Yeah.

I always got confused to tell you the truth. But anyway, um, Jerry runs a little faster than Tom does. And so, all right, so now you've got some new GPU that's gonna crack my encryption.

Well, I'm going to go from 2 56 to five 12 encryption. And there you go. Now it takes you years to get to break that encryption.

And when you get to five 12, I'll go to 1 0 2 4. I think that's all you're doing. I mean, I applaud the novel use of GPUs, and as I said, Jensen must be besides himself over this, but I don't think this is going to be the end of of ransomware.

You, you just, you know, this is an arms race and now they, they just went to multi delivery vehicles of their nuclear weapons, right? Instead of just a single, there's always, there's always a bigger boat. I might argue a more federated approach will emerge and we'll use GPUs for the, uh, less complex encryption and quantum for the more complex stuff.

'cause it costs money on the other side to use higher rates of encryption. And it will become a battle of economics. So I think we'll see a service in the future that will take on these ransomware issues.

And it'll be, you know, half You, you already have you Use, the other half will be quantum. You already have post quantum algorithms out there that are open sourced. Lily, I'm telling you, this is, this is the cat and mouse game, man.

I I, I hate being the cat. So you wanna join the, you wanna become a cyber criminal and become a mouse. It's funny you say that.

You know, when I was at Still Secure, which was the first time I, you know, I co-founded a real security company. Before that I was involved in security, but I, I wasn't a security vendor. And I quickly found out that the best way to get people to pay for security was to having them be a victim of a, of a breach.

And I brought it up at our meeting. Maybe we should have some of the hackers not do anything malicious, but break in and say, Hey, we broke in. You got problems here, let us help you.

Then I found out we'd all go to jail if we did that. Mm-hmm. So we didn't do it.

Um, and yet, And yet there's all these gray hats out there that do do that, and a lot of folks resent that activity. Yeah, that absolutely. You know what, I kind of feel that way sometimes with the bug bounty people, right?

We, we get emails all the time, Hey, I found the bug in WordPress, or, or it's not even our software. And I'm like, okay, so you were trying to, you know, you were fuzzing our site and, and, uh, you know, you're telling me about it, thank you. But it's not even our code.

I couldn't help you if I could. You gotta go tell whoever, you know, writes that code. Anyway.

It, it is. But that's the nature of this beast. And again, I applaud the novel use of the power of the GPU, right?

In brute forcing encryption. And now that it's out there, what makes you think the bad guys aren't going to use Nvidia GPUs to break encryption on legitimate sites, not just ransomware encryption. Every action has an equal reaction, right?

Are you suggesting we don't have control over the entire GPU supply chain and they might wind up in illicit hands through third parties. You could buy 'em in Singapore. That's what the Chinese do, don't they?

Uhhuh? I mean, John says, I'm not saying John gave me like a Sergeant Schultz street over there. It's I know nothing.

I know nothing. It's, but is it conceivable though that what this, um, was, this is the software programmer from Tiny Hack wrote about this. Is it conceivable though that ransomware that there is a reduction, there's like some sort of dent made into it temporarily before there's a reaction.

I mean, it could, and, and in that and the temporary reaction drive some of the ransomware, uh, criminals away to something else, or they just kind of linger and wait for the next attack vector. So I, I think you gotta understand the bad guy ecosystem. You know, this isn't just Boris and Natasha saying, come, let's get squirrel, right?

There are layers, layers of, of the guys, the people who are actually infecting your device or organization and asking you to give them Bitcoin are not the people who wrote the ransomware. These are jobbers who are buying the ransomware from yet other people who developed the ransomware. So somewhere, you know, there's Dr.

Evil right in his factory and his minions are, are developing new ransomware encryptions and stuff like that. They then put that out into the ecosystem and it works its way down to the jobbers who are delivering the phishing scams. And they, they then sell the information they get to people who just aren't social security numbers.

Then other people want other PII to create fake identities all together, or credit card numbers or, you know, there there's this whole hierarchy of, of, of Chaos Inc. Right? And, and so the people who were working on the ransomware, uh, algorithms, John, aren't, they stay on top of this stuff.

They're, they're not dummies and they're making a lot of money. So I, I don't think they're going to just go away For, to your analogy. So for every 10 Toms there's a million juries.

But if we don't start, to John's point, if we don't start taking out some of the Jerry's, even though they may multiply later on, they'll just be more and more of them. So we gotta, it is not like we can do nothing. I get that ally when none pursue us.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I, I don't wanna be Debbie Downer here and tell you, you know, but guys, this, this is the reality of it.

Yes. We, we fight the good fight. We fight the good fight and we keep, you know, ever vigilant and all of that kind of good stuff.

But we've gotta prepare for resilience. We've gotta prepare for response. This stuff's gonna happen.

How do we respond? And, you know, and, and again, as a long, long time security person, I'm not saying we shouldn't put efforts into prevention, but we need to put a lot of effort into response and resilience. And I, I just, you know, I I I seen too many magic bullets come and go in security in 25, 30 years to think that, you know, this one's gonna kill the vampire.

You know, it's, it's, it's in so years and years ago I did this book with another guy about, uh, cybersecurity, actually. Uh, Mitch was one of the people that we, we, we interviewed quite a Bit. Who?

Byron. Byron Cheeto. Yes, yes.

Byron, I know Byron. I remember that book. Yes.

So we, um, we, so we were working on it. Uh, I went to an RSA conference and I think Bill Gates was one of the keynote speakers. Yes.

And I remember interviewing him and asking him about this, like, this concept of, of, of, I think he was talking about spam and he said, you know, we could just, we could eradicate spam overnight all he had this simple solution. And it, and it just kind of speaks to the point where you can't exactly eradicate this step, but you can make momentary inroads. But you're right, it's a process, Alan.

He goes on and on and on point, kind of spy versus spy for Mad Magazine comes to mind. It's, it's not, there's no easy solution, but you know, at least there's like some sort of progress on the attack on the defense side here, there, There is progress, there is, there don't, and I don't really, I don't want to discourage people out there. I don't want anyone getting depressed, but there is progress and we do make progress, right?

I, I was talking to someone yesterday, you don't hear a lot about SQL injection anymore, do you? Right. That used to be the scour of Websites, but it's still the number one vulnerability I think I, I don't know if it is anymore in terms of actual attacks, right?

Attacks, injections, buffer, overflows. Right? We, we've done a heck of a job making our apps more secure, a heck of a job.

Not to say that we don't still get attacked successfully, right? Uh, phishing, we've done much better with phishing. But I gotta tell you, I, uh, I'm gonna make a confession.

I hope no one's listening. I actually got an email from MailChimp yesterday that was so real looking, and it just said, uh, I forgot what the message the hook was, but it, it was legitimate. I clicked on it and thank God I had the protection on my browser.

My browser popped up and said, Hey, there's a phishing site, go away. And I did. And then I went back and looked at the email and the, you know, I went into the header and it was, it was phishing.

They're getting so damn good. And I'm, I'm usually pretty vigilant in my mail, but he got me, and if not, my browser saved me. But Anything that shows up in your email has any sense of urgency attached to it and should be suspicious because that's the, they give right?

The time. Yes. The, the time threat that's always, especially in the tech spams that I get, like to toll payments, which are Bs I've been getting a lot of smishing on toll payments lately.

Yeah. Yeah. They told me I'm subject to criminal.

Yeah, yeah, Yeah. I was waiting for ice to knock on the door. Anyway, um, what else do we have on this One?

But, but, but, but Alan, you know, if the day comes that you do get kidnapped somewhere and someone sends us an email about it, we're not gonna believe it. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't pay a red nickel for me anyway, Mike, don't worry. Let them know you're in A Mexican prison and let Yeah.

You're El Salvador. El Salvador. El El El Salvador.

Yeah. Great movie by the way, Salvador. That's a whole nother story.

Sorry. Lock on a signal app and plan our response so You know, you can, alright, so Mike throws a bomb from the Pheno Gallery. Alright, let you know what it's time you get ready for your Yankee game, my friend.

All right. Gotta go, gotta go. Hey, this has been a great text drawing gang.

I hope you guys at home have enjoyed it as much as the five of us have, or four of us. Excuse me. Uh, I was looking at the four squares on my monitor and I realized one of them is me.

So there's four of us and, uh, have a great weekend. We've got a great tech, strong TV line up coming up right behind this show. So watch that.

We are, as I mentioned, we're gonna be in, uh, London for CubeCon next week though. Monday will be a regular Textron gang. Uh, we won't start London Techron gangs probably till Tuesday, I think, and definitely Wednesday and Thursday.

But until then, everyone have a great weekend. Enjoy the, the spring is coming. Weather.

I hope for you all. Until next time, this is Allen Hummel. We're outta here.