Techstrong Gang – May 14, 2025

Hey everyone. Are we ready to spend more money on cybersecurity? You bet.

You're watching Text On Gang. Hi everyone. Happy, happy Wednesday to you.

It's Alan Shimmel here for Textron Gang. Welcome to our Wednesday edition. We're a little heavy on the cyber today, but perfect 'cause we've got some heavy, you know, some serious cyber folks on our gang for today.

Let me introduce to them real quick. First of all, uh, giving us our true north. He's still up north.

I think he's gonna stay there a while. Our cybersecurity gang member from Text for Textron, Chris Blast. Hey Chris, how's it going?

Doing good. You know, we've got a new, uh, federal cabinet in, in place up here and I'm actually feeling pretty saucy about the direction of the company and we will get into that more. I love it when you saucy Chris.

Um, moving on from Chris. We'll stay up north though to our guitar man. He's fu analyst, DevOps, security.

Mitch Ashley. Hey Mitchell, how are you? Really good.

I guess that makes this saucy security. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Pick your day of the week.

Every day is a saucy day of Security Saucy deck. Alright, now let me introduce you to our newest gang member making her debut here today. Her name is Jules Okafor.

She's the CEO of Revolution Cyber. And Jules, welcome to Text on Gang. It's great to have you on.

It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited. So, Jules, we always, you know, no hazing and loud, but we always ask the new person to kind of give our audience a little bit of your story, a little of your journey.

So if you wouldn't mind share a little. Sure. So I am the CEO and founder of Revolution Cyber.

Um, our firm, firm focuses on integrating culture and communications into cybersecurity program management. Uh, we've been doing this work for about six years. I'm also an attorney, um, who has, uh, chosen not to practice, but then went into security where I practice basically every day.

Uh, and, um, I live in the Columbus, Ohio area and really enjoy having really provocative conversations about cybersecurity. So I'm excited to be here today. OHIO, right?

Yeah, you bet. You bet. So, very cool.

Welcome and thanks for being here. And then finally, uh, oh, he's home in Harrison. I guess he's our resident Yankee fan and chief content officer, Mike Ard.

Hey Mike. Hey. And there's Been this wave of orange and blue all over New York City lately, and I think it has something to do with the Knicks.

The Knicks. The Knicks looked really good last night. I have to tell you the truth.

I was, you know, it was a long suffering Knicks fan. I keep in mind the last time they won a championship, I think it was the year I was bar mitzvah, um, which was a really, really, really long time ago. Uh, 1973 to be exact.

So, hey, fingers crossed. Anyway, guys, let's jump into it. You know, there's a recent report out by our friends in at fu uh, Fernando Montenegro, Mitchell Krista case, um, cybersecurity spending will reach $288 billion by 2029.

Mike, you want to give, lay some groundwork here and maybe we'll hear from Mitch to start. Yeah, the surveys suggests that that represents something north of an 11% compound annual growth rate between last year and 2029, which is only, it sounds like a far way away, but it's only four years when you think about it. So my question to Mitch though is, is that enough or is it too much, or are we just finally catching up to what we should be spending in the first place?

Well, first of all, I gotta say cha-ching, 288 billion, billion's, quite a number in anything. Um, cybersecurity, you, that's a tough question to answer, Mike, because you know, we, you used to use the analogy, and I don't much anymore, but cybersecurity's kinda like insurance, how much do you need? Right?

Just enough so we don't get hacked or just enough that if we do, we can respond and recover from it. I think, I think the greater issue is when you kind of delve down into the report, and this is something, there's a whole database behind this, uh, in something called the Future intelligence platform for the cybersecurity group and the other practice areas that details the financial analysis and what the different spendings on, on different segments are, what goes up, what goes down, that kind of thing. I think today, right, today you're, you're at this inflection point of we have the things we've been spending on in cyber, but we also have rising kind of application security as a concern.

But even more so bigger than that is how are we gonna secure ai? And we don't know, you know, what's the budget required to do that? So this is one of those, upon reflection, we're gonna have to keep revising and adjusting where this might go.

So it could go even bigger than that. It doesn't necessarily, this is a big, the biggest number we'll see, right? Jules?

It, the report calls out or identifies the fastest growing segments or integrated risk management, security operations, and then identity access management, cloud security, application security, and data security. It seems like it's all flavors, but does that resonate with what you're seeing among your Customers? Yeah, uh, I believe, and, and sometimes I used to feel very bad about this, when there are economic downturns that the increase in cybersecurity actually occurs quite significantly because, um, there's much more of a threat because there are more people who are, uh, you know, feel untrustworthy and people feel like they have a lot more to keep, uh, safe.

So for me, with regard to our consulting, we're seeing a rise in all those areas. So I believe the spending is necessary, but it is being spent incorrectly in terms of people are not investing necessarily in the right hygiene, um, the right kinds of integrations to make things work well. They're really just buying more technology.

And so we're gonna continue to see that number rise until we start to see that people are investing in services, investing in training people inside the organization. And also we're starting to see people investing in doing the right thing before it's required. You Know, Mike, another thing in this report too, uh, Jules, to your point is it isn't just about more tools, it isn't just about more technology.

I think the shift is on to what are the outcomes of what we're spending on for our security dollars and what's the real value, what's the real impact to the business? Where can you measure it? Sure, there's some level of blocking and tackling that we have to do.

So that's one trend. The other is the move away from, you know, the cornucopia of every secure security tool you can fit on the shelf to more platform type solutions. That better integration sharing of data, because now workflows, processes crossed traditional scope by boundaries, silos within the, within organizations.

And we've gotta have kinda one single source of truth. And how do we get data that's integrated to the point even where some vendors are recognizing, Hey, I don't have to put all that data in my platform, I have to have a platform that can get to the data wherever it is, because it's just not realistic. Enterprises are gonna sign up for the, the nut they'll have to pay to put it all in one product and lock it in there And, you know, the, yeah.

So, so if I can add to that, I think that, you know, uh, one of the places that's may be seeing increases is, you know, maybe I'm being a little bit optimistic here, is, is as security spend bleeds into operational spend, right? That I'm not just buying security because as, as Mitch says, I need more insurance because of bad thing. Um, and to Joe's point, I'm actually buying the right security tools and integrating them appropriately to my business.

Maybe that means, and I think this, there's some truth to this, that security for securities purposes is becoming less, uh, the issue as security because I'm a business and I need to do these things and these same tools give me an actual business and economic invention, uh, advantage. So please, So I, I Have a different view on this, right? Let me introduce myself.

My name is Alan and I'm a security holic. And it, this reminds me of an alcoholic anonymous thing, right? One drinks too many and a million's not enough.

We could spend 10 times this on security and still not have good security. And that's the problem. It's not a question of just look, we could always use more dollars, always.

Security budgets are always tight, but it's not about the budget. How what percentage of security tools and processes and products and services are bought and never used or used sparingly or not used correctly. It's about fundamentally changing how we view cybersecurity as part of our business, right?

Yes. It's part development. Yes, it's part of operations.

Yes. It's part of hr. Yes.

It's part of risk management and finance. Yes. It's part of the boardroom.

Yes, yes, yes. Right. Until we recognize that cyber isn't just something we throw dollars at, as I said, like an alcoholic, you'll, there's never enough drinks f for us to be satiated, Right?

So there's a report also on Security Boulevard from check marks talking about a survey of CISOs no less, where half of them were saying that responsibility for application security is shifting into the business units. And to Chris's point, um, maybe we're hitting some sort of moment in time here, Alan, where the business units are taking more responsibility for security 'cause they're being held accountable for it. And maybe those AA meetings are starting to work.

What do you think? So I, you know, Mike. Yes, but I I think though we want to get there, we're a long way off from getting there is is the issue, right?

And so I, I don't want to be a doubting Thomas or some old curmudgeon security guy. We used to have one of them working with us, and then he met a beautiful woman and got happy and he couldn't play the curmudgeon anymore. Um, but that's, that's the, the, the fact of the matter is we could throw, you know, you some will say you be, you could throw that money onto a bonfire of the vanities and for all the good it's going to do, we, we need, they're a they're a fundamental infrastructure design, whatever you want to call it, issues that prevent us from being more effective in security.

And yes, making other business units responsible for that is, is maybe a good, a fine beginning as we say in Vegas, but there's, there's more to it, I'm afraid. If, if I can give you one example, maybe, uh, a example of, of hope or despair, you know, and in, uh, to my point, right? In the software bill material world, in the supply chain world that I spend so much of my time in, um, interesting conversation yesterday, um, about this, you know, uh, that, that, you know, SBO four security, and this happens all the time, and I think we can go through all the security technology out there that we're really familiar with.

And it started because security people said security thing and software bill materials is here because we're security people. However, right? It's really about inventory control and efficiencies and various other things.

And I have always thought that that is the primary use case in the end. You know, it's the vast minority use case now. But I really do believe we're, we're seeing, you know, we're seeing adoption in that direction.

And again, so this $289 billion, you know, I'd like to believe that it's not all literally just for security. It's not literally just insurance, but you know, more and more of it is being put there because it's also good efficiency, effectiveness, productivity. 'cause that's how, that's how we get outta your aa analogy, right?

Where we're not just just buying more guitars, you know, we're actually, I mean, look, this is great. Careful there. You, you'd cross the line, Chris, Yeah.

Don't go to guitars with him. Okay? It's sensitive.

But, but look, this is great news for security vendors, right? So you get an analyst firm putting out news like this for security vendors. Boy, they're licking their chops.

You get the sales team revved up. You know, here, here's, here's a a counter narrative to this, which is, you know, right now we're going through, we're in the early throes of revolutionizing how we create software. Not, I'm not saying AI solves all problems, I'm just saying it's changing how we work.

And organizations are, you know, in early experimentation, adoption, some people are doing more with, you know, with more you ai, native ai, augmented development. Um, but it's certainly a huge trend and it's not, you know, it's not sitting back and waiting to happen. Developers are, are sort of a natural to adopt new things and try new ideas.

I I think we're gonna go through the same thing in, in many other segments of our business, and especially in security. It's very data centric. It's very, very analysis centric, uh, information processing and applying sort of the additional knowledge and processes to it makes it, we're very well suited to ai.

I'm not solving saying AI's gonna, you know, take every security job, but if it, if it even has half the change to security work that AI is, is having in development already, that may cause us to really rethink some of the things that we're doing. And maybe the, in the kind of, there's a pony in there somewhere where we actually rethink and start over and do some things differently that might lead to different or maybe better outcomes. That's the optimistic view.

Jules, we lost you there for a bit. I, I, I don't know if you want to pick up where, what you were going to say. I did, I did.

So my, just in consulting and working within organizations and having to operationalize security theory, um, I find that the business itself is the biggest risk. We are not set up to do what security needs us to do, to move quickly, to be nimble, to make quick decisions. And then every time we come up with a solution, it requires this very lengthy investigation.

Lots of people, time and security actually works against time, right? So the more time you give something security, the more risk is involved. And so what I'm finding over and over again, it is very important if we look at the lens of security as definitely ripe for change and revolution.

But I find the biggest challenge over and over again is the business isn't ready to do security the way we would like it to. And I don't know that we're as quick to adapt as we should. And so we'll keep throwing money down the drain and not getting the value back.

It's why businesses are taking it over. They don't believe that we're, we're responding in time. They don't believe that we're driving revenue, reducing cost.

And we keep, like Chris said, doing security for security's sake. But what if they don't care? Do, are we willing to admit that to ourselves?

What if they don't care? And then, and then what? Well, they're also comfortable with risk, right?

I mean, the security people tend to look at risk as an absolute and business execs, it's just one more risk to them that they gotta consider and they're willing to take on more risk if the revenue and opportunity justifies that. And I don't think that they necessarily always trust the cybersecurity people to make that decision for them. That's Exactly it.

And they're often enough, correct. Frankly, that's why they're running the company. And that you can hire cybersecurity people is 'cause they've made the right decisions today to have the money to hire cybersecurity people.

Mm-hmm. Well, you're a little saucy today, aren't you? Correct.

Right. Don't get me Started. Well, but you know what, so thi this to me is, is, is screaming about what is the role of the CISO then, right?

Because historically, or you know, the CISO is supposed to be that bridge from the business team to the cyber team, from the risk management team to the cyber team. The CISO is the cyber representative at that level. And you know, the fact is, there are some CISOs who are glorified, glorified security architects.

Then there are some CISOs who really are part of that exec team, and a lot of them wind up being like CIO slash ciso. We've met a few in our time, right, Mitch, we've had some folks on our shows. Um, but look, overall, there's another sort of counter to this report, Mitch, which is, you know, I've heard from a lot of people that said, Hey, we keep increasing our budget every year.

We buy every shiny new trinket you bring to us, because that's supposed to be the magic bullet. And you know what? We still don't have any magic bullets.

We got a lot of shiny trinkets. They don't all, I can't all wear 'em at the same time. They clash.

I'm done, I'm done buying shiny trinkets. Show me something that works. And, and I think there's, there's that.

Now all of that being said, I agree with this report, security spending will go up because it's a, it's the CYA safe thing to do. So, oh, we got a security problem, lemme spend a little more money. Doesn't mean security's better.

I very much agree with that. You know, I'm tired of spending more on security and not necessarily knowing, knowing if I'm getting more, maybe even less. The counter of that is the data says, and, and this is not just in this analysis, but in a, uh, CEO and also in a CIO, uh, analysis that we did, security is the number one growing budget item in technology.

And it's been that way since you and I. Yeah, we've heard that. But they have T-Rex arms, Mitchell, you know, their arms don't reach into their pockets.

So good. I think they're getting closer to the table so they can reach. I would like to point out one thing though.

The, the bad guys have something to do with this. They're getting smarter, they're using more sophisticated tools, and as such, the attack surface we're trying to defend is also broader. So, you know, the game is changing, and I know we play whack-a-mole all the time, but this game now is operating in real time.

I mean, you think back four or five years ago, you could spend, you know, three weeks looking for a threat and then you'd fix it and everybody would pat you on the back. And now we're measuring threat time in seconds. So it's a different world.

Well, someone said to me, if, uh, if, you know, AI is gonna put security people outta work, it's also gonna put bad, bad guy security people outta work. There's a thought for you. Well, no, they they've never been dumb.

They've never been done. All right, let's take a break. We're gonna come back and talk about malware, malaise, new report at Open Text.

You're watching Textron Gang. Hey guys, we're back. And we're talking about a report now from OpenText, which they get an analysis of all the endpoints that they track.

And, uh, I think there was like 115 million of these things that they looked at, and they found out roughly 2% of the endpoints have malware running on them. And that may not seem like a big number, but if you extrapolate that out to the number of endpoints there are out there and put in 2%, you're suddenly looking at, you know, a couple of million endpoints that are infected with malware. And interestingly enough, they also pointed out that when they clean up some of these systems, about 40% of them wind up getting reinfected.

So we just wind up kind of going back and doing the same thing over and over again. Jules, I know this is your life, but is this just the best we can do? Or is there another way to think about this?

Oh, um, I, I believe that we can, I always believe we can do better. Actually. I have to believe that, or I can't get people to pay us to do the work we do.

But I will tell you that the endpoint, the the endpoint protection that is currently on the market is not designed to do it quickly. It also oftentimes, um, especially when we see, um, um, endpoints being reinfected, it's often due to behavior in the organization from people who are using, you know, devices and, and, and systems. For, for, For, you know, I, I'll jump in here.

Um, for me, there was a moment where I realized the emperor had no clothes when it came to endpoint protection. I think it was semantic. It was when Semantic and McAfee basically ruled the roost and they went from being just like pure antivirus to Endpoint protection suites.

And I realized that they, the amount of resources they were taking up made pigs blush. And for the amount of protection I was getting for all those resources, it was, it was pretty useless. And I've never been a big, you know, and then Microsoft shortly thereafter came, um, so JUULs, think Microsoft came out with free defender or whatever they call it thereafter.

And, and that whole endpoint, I think that took the air outta the endpoint balloon, all of a sudden it got affordable again and a little leaner. But I, I've never been a big believer that it actually works. You know, it was interesting, the last CIO job I took over full-time, CIO The two issues were, number one was our, our antivirus software, we called it then is consuming way too much of my computer resources.

Slows it down. The second one is we want Max as in addition to Windows unrelated to this, but you're right, defender definitely changed the game, turned it free, and it kind of just made it a default. You know, you have this stuff installed and if something got in the way and got too onerous and too resource consumption, you just got rid of it and did something else.

It's, it's, it's a bit of commodity at this point, But is it really effective, is the question? Well, good, good question. You know, does, does the lock keep the, the bad person out of the house at night?

Right now, once you see 'em on the ring doorbell, you don't really know. Well, I think the way that bad guys are attacking us has changed too, right? They're not hacking in anymore.

They're stealing credentials and then logging in and then dropping in malware after they logged in. And so the amount of effort to drop in the malware is almost zero or close to zero. And I think that we're still fighting maybe yesterday's battle.

Chris, what do you think? I'm just trying to find anything intelligent to say about this. So look, you know, so my, my middle child, 25 years old, you know, doesn't trust any of this technology, and we're like, unplug the Alexa dots and so forth, and we're talking about this the other day and you know, I, I've, I, you know, I don't trust any of this stuff, right?

You know, and, you know, I talk about something and suddenly I'm seeing ads for things and I wasn't logged into anything, right? And, you know, but at the same time, I don't wanna be alarmist about it. I think generally speaking, you know, as we're talking about the last segment, if you have a company and it exists and it has existed for a while, you're doing the right things by definition, right?

Don't freak out. And as you identify things you want to secure, look at how you can secure them. Now, are you going to say, I don't have any malware, like on my networks and systems?

No. Good grief. I also have no proof that my competition doesn't have a long distance microphone pointed at me.

And, and, and, and, and so, you know, I I, in, in conversations like this, look, I agree. Do it better for love of Mike. You know, install the, stop doing the, at the same time, you know, we had to be pragmatic about this and, and realize we live in a world where yes, 2% of your devices are infected.

So move on. That's, I thought 2% was a very low number. Yeah, I was gonna say that's not too bad.

But it Doesn't mean it's accurate. And, and I'll be honest, um, most of the, the devices are designed to show you the problem not to fix them. So I know I have a ton of malware.

Well, now what do I do? Even I just upgraded my antivirus, McAfee on my laptop and it showed me all these problems, and then to fix them was an upgrade, right? So it's like, okay, now, Well, that's always the answer, right?

You the nail on the head, all security, nearly all security products are Just more information. Well, that, that's how they get to 288 billion, right? Upgrade, upgrade, upgrade.

They're not separate. No. So here's what concerns me more than, more than do we have enough money in the budget for security?

Is security's slow to respond to a lot of things? And I know we're kind of keeping up with the bad guys. This is the game we play.

If the same, what's happening in the software development market is vendors have gone to pre, uh, pre-release. They don't do betas. They do early releases, they do research releases.

They do all the very incremental e every day there's something new coming out from a development tool or an LLM or somebody about writing software with ai. If security, it will get into a mode like this if it has any chance of keeping up with the pace of software development, as that starts to build up. If it doesn't, we will fall so far behind in our current, it'll take a whole new generation of companies to solve this problem.

So if you're out there, if you're a security company, yes, I'm an analyst and I want talk to you, but I truly believe that there's a strategy you have to employ to be able to be competitive as AI starts to have a bigger impact. Again, AI is not the solution for everything, but it is the disruptor. I think my problem with the whole thing is there's not a lot of shame in spreading malware, right?

People are like vaguely unconscious of it. It's kinda like spreading typhoid or cholera, and they don't understand that they are, you know, contagious. And maybe we need to have a different philosophical approach to this that's similar to how we contain those diseases.

But that's just my way of thinking about Just swimming in a Pluto River. No, that's, I enjoy yourself. That's a personal decision in this country now, right?

We're not gonna force anyone to get vaccines here or use malware detection. Oh, so what if the were made my brain Malware use the term quarantine. So it must be, must be bad, but we gotta get rid of that.

But look, can I just say one other thing though too? I know as, as semi you want call us journalist or public figures here at Techstar, we all love a good survey, right? I think PR agencies, that's the first thing they tell their clients.

Let's do a good survey. We'll get some good pickup in the, in the media on it. 39% of malware infection rate on business.

I think that's almost an acceptable risk. 80%, 87% of malware designed to evade detection. Hello?

Captain. Obvious. Like is this survey worth the paper?

It was. Well, it wasn't written, so I guess it's not worth it. But, you know, yeah.

You know, gimme, gimme some insights here that I'm gonna hang my hat on. This is, this is, this is cotton candy softball kind of stuff, right? And I wish I I, I wish we had the gumption as journalists and publishers in the media to tell the PR agencies when they're pitching this cotton candy, take it to the carnival.

I, I don't see real insights here. And yet we just spent 15 minutes discussing what it is about malware and endpoints that we need to take. You know, it's a good conversation starter.

That's the point of the whole thing. But I don't think, I'm sorry, go ahead, Jules. The good, The good the, the people who are good at this will ignore that.

That that's for the people who don't have any other justification for spend. I mean that, you know, nothing here. I'm kind of yawning saying, yeah, move along, move along.

It's not the drudge you're looking for along, gimme the next survey. All right. Hey, we're gonna take a break here.

We're gonna come back and ask you to fill out a survey. No, we're not. You're watching Textron Gang, And we're back with something a little bit different.

But there's a thing up there called I guess synthetic DNA and we're gonna store data and using the same kind of mechanisms that your DNA remembers things by. And at least that's the theory and the hope. And I think the reason we're paying a little bit more attention to this is the volume of data that we're creating.

And of course, trying to secure has just become massive and it's only gonna get bigger and bigger. And I think the way that we store data is still relies too heavily on, you know, flash that's expensive and even iron metal discs that we're still storing stuff on. And maybe it's a time for a different approach.

But Alan, have we reached a point with storage where we just need some fundamental bring breakthrough. This may or may not be it, but something's gotta change. Well, look, the, here's the bottom line.

Storage is expensive. And for as long as I've been in technology, it's like liquid filling the, the, the ca the chamber that you put it in. The more storage you give me, the more storage I'm going to use, right?

I remember put, you know, using those big old floppy discs and the hard little three and a half inch disc and then it had a 40 meg hard drive. And, and then now I'm, you know, I look at machines that have terabytes. So What did you work at the FAA or something?

Yeah, Exactly. Well, only, yeah, Newark Airport. A Newark airport.

Yeah. But, but you know, it's, I think it's always a good thing. It's always a good thing to kind of copy nature, because nature, you know, through trial and error and evolution, the usually the best solution wins out, right?

It comes up with great ways of doing it. And when you look at DNA, what really is DNA, it's four bases, right? Put in a double helix, tightly coiled up into the nucleus.

For the most part though, in, they're also in the mitochondria of a cell. The density of the information packed in. And remember in most of our chromosomes, I don't know, 60% of the, of the, of the DNA doesn't seem to have any obvious use.

It's extra space, extra storage. But the amount of storage, you know, 'cause in all it's bits and bytes, whether it's a organic or not, the amount of storage we could put in there in that small space is phenomenal. So we now have the ability to make synthetic DNA and it doesn't have to be the four bases that we necessarily, you know, liquor and, uh, organic, DNA and, and, you know, uh, life DNA if we could harness that double helix of, you know, the DNA structure to, and the other thing is, you know, you could take a a, a mammoth that was frozen for 30,000 years, defrost it, and that DNA is relatively intact, right?

Do that with a hard drive, bury that inside. So lemme another viewpoint, Alan. Um, but I'm gonna come back to the kinda DNA, the biological metaphor here.

I would argue that storage is cheap because we are with ai, not to talk about AI all the time. I'm seeing, I'm seeing Where we're, I'm a little pattern with you with this Mitch, with AI boy today I did. But, um, you know, machine learning took off, you know, a few years back because we have so much storage we could keep enough data around to actually make those algorithms useful.

Um, I Go ahead, I hear you out and then I'm gonna counterpoint this, Hear me out, and then you can, you can cross examine me. So, um, if we didn't have a story, if we, if we wouldn't have what we have today in terms of AI applications kind of things, if storage wasn't cheap, or let's say cheaper. Now I like the biological analogy because you can look at the GPU as the Darwinian thing that came along and changed everything as that was, that was An S razor.

Yes. That was the accident that, oh, you know, happy accident that GPUs happened to be really great at these kind of algorithms for ai. Who knew until we knew, right?

And that's what changed the technology, uh, kind of fabric that we work with. And maybe there'll be a breakthrough like that in storage. Maybe there won't be.

But I have a feeling we'll find a way to drive cost down to meet the demand that we have, Mitch, we have so far. Why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we?

And how does Gartner know we're not gonna solve that problem in 10 years like we have 10 years ago? So tell the, tell the Splunk customer how cheap storage storages tell the observability customers, the sim customers, how cheap storage is. 'cause they're paying a fortune cheap is relative.

Is it cheaper That's made? Those are manmade. Not, I mean, not the cost of storage.

So, so, so the so per megabyte, the drive is cheap, but the amount of data is expensive. But, but it's all relative. It's all relative, right?

You give me more storage, I'm going to use more storage. It's kind of like, look, for as long as I've been in PCs, a kick ass best in market PC was always five grand, right? And that one happened from 3 86 to 4 86 to Penem to I seven, I nines to Max and everything else.

You wanna buy the best PC out there today, it's gonna still be that same five grand. Now, that PC I bought today makes, the one I bought in 1997 looked like a dinosaur. And it is a dinosaur, but it was still five grand.

Still five grand. It's the same thing with storage. I still spend my five grand, maybe I get more storage for my five grand today, but it's not enough because I need more storage today.

I want to use more storage today. So we need, if we're going to keep that Moore's law, call it Mitch's AI law, moving right where we, we are gonna double the amount of storage we use every, whatever it is, time period. We need a better, a better paradigm, a better model for storage.

DNA copying nature itself is a way to give us the density that we're gonna need. Now, I don't know, you know, like where do you store this DNA, for instance and stuff like this. But, But Chris, let's get counterintuitive here for a minute.

So it's gonna be awesome that we're able to store all kinds of data, none of which will be secure. So is this a good thing for us, or what In short, just yes. Right?

There's a, there's a, you know, 11-year-old me in 1976 reading about this in Scientific American who's just jumping up and down, right? And I like this, you know, whether it's this or holographic memory, all these things we've been talking about forever. It, it begs the question, you know, what would we do with say 10 million times more storage than we all have together right now?

If we had that tomorrow, what would we do? What do you begin to do with that? And it, and, and I will use the, the dreaded, uh, acronym as well.

I think what we're talking about in AI and LLM and so forth is the same sort of thing. You know, when I look at supply chain, you know, over the last five years and say, what would you do if you could in the next 47 milliseconds, look at and investigate every single point in your supply chain? You know, you can't think about that because that's never been conceivable.

I could do that in six to eight months, but when I start saying I can do it right now, so, and this is the same sort of thing. If I had that much data, I had that much storage, how does that fundamentally change what I'm doing in the first place? Uh, the, the answer is that you could make more mistakes here.

Here's the, here's the thing is quite literally most innovation comes from a lack of, not from more of it just, so more storage allows more people to make mistakes and store things they don't really need. It doesn't allow people to be efficient and thoughtful about how they're using data. And so this feels like a gimmick to me, um, a bit.

And, and maybe I will be, um, convinced some other way, but I, I honestly feel like, like I've got, even if I think about, let's say my iPhone, uh, because I've got a limited storage, I'll take the same picture a few times to get the right selfie. That's what it feels like. It's like people just store all kinds of things to make sure it's protected.

But many breaches occur because there are unnecessary bits of data stored that should have been deleted. And I think that just creates additional risk at scale. And so that's my viewpoint.

I I gotta, I got a real life story to counter that one. So I'm one of those people guilty. I take multiple selfies 'cause my wife never likes how this one she look, and I don't know what makes a good picture or not, they all look the same to me.

But, so now I decide I'm gonna clean up my iPhone and I get this plug in cleaner upper or whatever it's called, right? And, and it says, oh my God, you have, you know, 56,000 duplicate pictures. Would you like me to undo them?

I said, yeah, you know, to clean it. I said, yes, clean it. I clean it the other day.

I'm looking for a particular picture. We were doing something, I needed a picture. And you know what, all those selfies though, they claim they were duplicates.

Each one's a little different. And I, and I lost it forever. I lost it forever.

And so, right. And so the next time you're gonna wanna keep the photos, I'll be, I not, I went and deleted that cleanup app. I'll never put that on my phone again.

It messed up my contacts too. So what, I had a lot of duplicate contacts, but one had Mitchell's home, number one had Mitchell's cell phone number, you know, one had the bat phone num the batcave number. So I needed it.

So I, you know, we, I'm telling you, storage is like putting on clothes, you know what I mean? It feels good sometimes to put on comfortable clothes that have a little room inside. Well, There's a, there's an algorithm built into our DNA, the IMNT.

I might need that. That's, that's what's Driving there, is that there Is that, I think I, I think a is trying to invent continuous photography where we'll just take photos every five seconds, Have that on the iPhone, right? That's, That's the thing.

Yeah. So Let me, let me, let me, you know what, let's take that for a second. We, we did a round table in, uh, RSA and, uh, that the, they're sending out gifts to the round table participants.

The new, uh, the Ray Band meta glasses. Think about it. If storage was ubiquitously cheap, why wouldn't you record everything?

Why wouldn't You? My Uber driver had a pair. What the heck are you looking at while you're driving this car?

There, there, there are definitely times from my twenties that I, I am perfectly happy. We're never recorded. Well, thank God we grew up before there were cell phones, Mike.

Exactly. But, but that's the world. I think that's the world we're coming to guys.

I think that's the world we're coming to. Uh, I, I take my inevitability curve approach to it. 'cause they, you know, I have literally been thinking about this one all my life.

We will get to this point where you can in fact record every moment of your life that's gonna happen, period. So the only question remaining is what do we do? And Jules, to your point, you know, I think, you know, I would actually agree with it, but I would think what we get less of is control.

Like, I remember the days I used to be able to manage my email inbox and take every individual one in, file them. And part of you know that, that driving innovation is when you realize you have so much of something, you can't do it that way anymore. So maybe that's the last, Hey guys, I hate to do this, but I looked at my clock and we're on the, we're on it.

Um, this article, by the way, on DA storage is over up on Techstrong. It, you could check it out there. com, you could probably get the blurb on this cybersecurity to the news, and you can, you can probably sign up Mitchell, right?

For a free intelligence portal account to check it out. If You don't find it, click, click on the link in the article. It'll take you right there.

Absolutely. Alright. Hey Jules, what a great first time on the gang.

We can't wait to have you back on here. I was excited. I loved it.

I, next time no storms, I'll schedule that. I hope well see what you could do. See what we could do.

If we had more storage, we wouldn't have storms like that. We'd better, we'd be better forecasting using ai. Of course, Mitchell.

Um, anyway, Mike, Chris Mitchell. Jules, thanks for joining us. Thank you for joining us here on Text On Gang.

Just a reminder, as usual, we have another two, three plus hours of text Strong TV following the gang today. So stay tuned for that or watch it on demand on our O TT channel or Textron tv. YouTube, wherever you like to consume video.

Until next time though, this is Alan Shimel for TechOne. We're outta here.