DtSR Episode 718 - Black Hat Recap And The Rush To Rebrand Everything

Guest: Dr. Chase "ZeroTrust" Cunningham

TL;DR: AI Marketing slop took over Black Hat Las Vegas 2026, and Rafal sits down for a one-on-one with Chase Cunningham. Featuring their patented level of snark, real analysis, and hype detection, it's a fun conversation.

Description

Black Hat is supposed to be where the security industry shows its best work. This year, it also showed its biggest temptation: slap “AI” on everything, crank the volume, and sort out the truth later.

We break down what we saw on the floor and what it says about cybersecurity right now, with Chase Cunningham (Dr. Zero Trust) bringing receipts from vendor go-to-market changes and the money flowing into “AI-first” security startups. We talk about why so many tools sound identical, how “AI infrastructure” became the new catch-all label, and why the word “leader” stops meaning anything when everyone uses it. Then we get practical: how do you ask a booth team to define their artificial intelligence, what counts as autonomy, and what answers should make you walk away?

The conversation gets real when “AI security” turns out to be a polished UI sitting on top of a large language model API call. We dig into vendor lock-in, pricing and subsidy risk, and the uncomfortable question of who eats the impact when model providers change costs or terms. From there we go straight at the hottest promise in security operations: autonomous SOC and agent swarms. Non-deterministic models can be useful, but mistakes at machine speed can turn into outages and bad calls, so we map where automation helps and where humans still matter.

We also call out what we didn’t see: serious talk about hiring, growing junior talent, or serving SMB security needs even though many breaches flow through third parties and smaller vendors. If you care about security outcomes more than security slogans, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share, and leave a review, then tell us: what’s the most inflated AI claim you’ve heard lately?

YouTube video: https://youtu.be/mww1YpP-J0k

Transcript

Welcome Back From Black Hat

SPEAKER_01 0:51

All right. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome down to Security Rabbit Hole to yet another edition of the Down to Security Rabbit Hole podcast. This is Raf. That's Chase. We that's Chase. We are episodes. Yeah. We are episode 618. And this is special because it is the Monday after the Black Hat AI extravaganza. Just call it that. Just call it the AI extravaganza for the next couple of years. Anyway, Chase, do a quick intro.

SPEAKER_00 1:23

Yeah, sure. So Chase Cunningham, retired Navy, Dr. Zero Trust podcast and stuff. And then I write books that no one reads. And I, you know, generally just kind of make commentary on the market, I guess. Nothing very useful, but I do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

You know why nobody reads your books? Because they make sense and they're hard.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

I mean, yeah, that's probably pretty fair. My mom reads my books.

SPEAKER_01 1:46

So well, well, that would be a different problem if your mother didn't.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

I've sold a total of at least one book.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So there you go. That's it. Total of one. That's that's one better than me. Hey, so we're back. I did not

Vendor AI Rebrands And “Leaders”

SPEAKER_01 2:01

I did not get sick from black hat.

SPEAKER_00 2:03

So I am It's too early. You gotta give it time. There's incubation periods.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

All right.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Well, you just guaranteed you're gonna get sick.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

So are you feeling alright? You feel good?

SPEAKER_00 2:15

Oh, as of right now, I don't have any Vegas funk, but you know, so far fingers properly.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Did you properly did you properly disinfect? I properly disinfect.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

I washed my hands all the time. I even stayed in a three-minute office trip. Like I did everything I could to stay away from the Vegas funk.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Yeah, you know what I mean though. Self. Anyway. All right, cool. So we're we're back in from Black Hat. I know you've got some strong opinions because I read them. I have you guys that are listening, you know I've got some strong opinions. So that said, Chase, I'm gonna give this to you first, and I'm gonna say, what were your impressions of Black Hat this year?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Well, so I mean, number one, like I'm somebody that lives and breathes in the data world, right? Like I don't like to I don't like to just make conjecture and bitch and moan about whatever stuff like that. Like if it's something I'd say, I've probably done some research into it. So as of right now, and I've had my little bot out there doing what bots do and running on, you know, the change in go-to-market for vendors around Black Cat. Let's see. So here's, you know, Black Cat says the 2026 business hall had 400 plus exhibitors. It's pretty substantial. And if you filter down through that 400 plus exhibitors and you say, okay, of those 400, how many of them actually substantially pivoted their go-to marketing from something prior in 2025 or 2024 to AI centric in 2026? 82% of vendors changed their shit to show up at Black Cat with AI centric. Now there's one that's pretty comical when you really read at it, and like it goes, we're the AI infrastructure company. Whereas literally a year before that, they were threat visibility, prevention, detection, mitigation. There's another one that is also an AI infrastructure company that says they're the leader. And then there's another one that says they're the leader. So like I'm not sure if if maybe like I failed English or if you know grammar and and whatnot is how can you have 10 leaders in the same space leading the same shit and actually have a leader? Like that the literally the word leader doesn't work that way.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yeah, yeah. That's but that that's not what they're trying to do, right? This is this is look, nothing marketing puts out has to be true. I think that's what we've learned. It doesn't have to be true. You just have to be able to put it on it. It can't be like you can't be like, hey, we are you know, we are we're doing something that uh and you can't be a public company and say, like, hey, we did 10 billion in business and then you did like a dollar, which is why a lot of these companies aren't public because liar liar, pants on fire. That said, I I don't have this the numbers you did, but I I I worked a booth and I told a lot of the folks that that follow me on LinkedIn, I said, come to the binary defense booth last, because if you're looking for particularly like I think we're gonna get lumped into like this AI sock world. I'm not particularly crazy about it because it doesn't mean shit, except for the fact that somehow AI is involved in your sock, which for many of you listening was like three years ago. But that's besides the point. Duh. Like, duh. But the the thing that I noticed is as I said, like go go everywhere else and come here last. And but there I'm bordering on the belief that about three-quarters of what I read on booths was AI mark, like Claude Slop. Like somebody said, Claude, create me a booth and what I should put on each panel, and they'd like and and and make me relevant to AI. By the way, I'm an AppSec vendor, make me relevant to AI, by the way, I'm a third-party risk management company, I'm an EDR, I'm a network security company, I'm a what whatever identity company, and like everyone, AI. Like but we did this, I guess I'm not I shouldn't be surprised, right? Because we did this with surprise at all.

SPEAKER_00 6:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

We did it with XDR, we did it with Big Digital.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

We've done it with Pick Your Thing, like you know. I mean it is Does this feel different? It feels different just in the I guess like the level of kind of fuckery is really what's different to me. Is it's like we like you said earlier, is like we don't have to have any bounds in reality as long as we can slap AI something here, then it's AI or whatever. And it wasn't like normally you find, you know, maybe maybe a dozen where that's like showed up here at this time. Um it was just everywhere, and like you said, it was just kind of like people were like screaming into the clawed Ethernet, like, tell me how to be AI relevant. And they were like, whatever you say, I'm gonna throw on my shit. And I asked a lot of people that were, you know, there, like, okay, define how you leverage artificial intelligence. And is this really autonomous? And most of the time I got either like that dog watching television look, you know, tilting your head, kind of confused, or I got some like

Funding Frenzy And Peak Greed

SPEAKER_00 7:23

market thing about you know, autonomous this and AI that and whatever else. And I mean that but I will say to be fair to the vendors, I also ran into a lot of end users that I had tossed with that were like, we're gonna get an AI capability to do X. And I was like, okay, why? But yeah, like I mean, you mean a policy engine, right? They're like, well, no, it's an AI-powered policy engine. I was like, what that okay. And then, you know, let me get this straight. You're gonna have an AI policy engine for IEM and an AI policy engine for network and an AI policy engine for and like, does it sound like you have one ring to rule them all, or does it sound like you're getting a lot of policy engines that may not play well together?

SPEAKER_01 8:09

And we're back to 7,000 variations of the same thing that doesn't work together.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

I mean, and looking at the okay, so here I did another poll too. So this is from my peak greed comment I made earlier. So uh this is sort of you know where we're at. So the total funding based on companies that grew an investment or came out of stealth at Black Cat 2026 is $1.13 billion for 17 different companies. Do the math on that. Like giant monkey balls, how much money you know is being thrown in here. So $1.13 billion newly disclosed capital, 17 companies average $66 million in funding per capital. Six of the 17 raised $100 million or more. Three of the 17 came out of stealth with over $50 million in funding. Meanwhile, like I've and I'm not saying that those companies don't deserve that or whatever else, maybe they do, but I'm saying meanwhile, I'm talking with vendors that are focusing on you know solving problems and their shit is very legit and whatever else, but they can't get 50 grand. So like there's some I don't know what the disconnect is or how this is playing out, or whether it's just

Booth Tactics And Negative ROI

SPEAKER_00 9:27

BC evil VC stuff or private equity shenanigans or what, but like it's not right and it's causing a problem. The the days of people being able to come up with innovative solutions and get funding for it are going away, and that's really not good. It's gonna be folks that can come up with the best fucking PowerPoint deck that are gonna win. I mean, if you're coming out of stealth, $50 million in funding, holy shit. I talked to one company, zero customers, zero deployments, seven million dollars in funding.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

But the I listen, I I I walked around and looked at everybody, right? I I at least I tried. I did my best. I spent at like two hours that I went, two and a half hours maybe, I went in through the maze of the booths. I I still had a lot of and I this I don't understand. Companies that don't show up themselves, they bring, they hire like literally local talent. So there's a there's one booth that was near ours, and I said, I your company name is intriguing. What do you do? And she and the lady looked at me and said, I'm just here to stand in the booth and point you to the to the to the smart people. I was like, We're still doing that. Some folks are I mean, it wasn't like it wasn't like at you know the the whole booth babe doing air quotes, don't hate me. That concept from like years ago, right? But it but you still have somebody that like as a customer or a potential customer, you have like 30 seconds, maybe that's probably being generous, to grab my attention as I walk past. And if I ask, tell me more, and you're like, let me point you to somebody, what what's the point? And there were I I'm not gonna be the jerk today, I'm not gonna call anybody out, but there were so many booths. You said, like, hey, 7 million dollars of funding and zero customers, zero deployments. Yes, there are within our space, there are companies that have clearly splashed some cash on booths, like, oh, you're trying to be the next whiz. I see what you're doing here, right? But there's like there's like two different uh versions of this. Like, there's companies that I know the insides of, and I sort of wonder where you got the money and why you're spending it on this rather than developing a product. I suspect I know the answer more on that later. Uh, and then there's those that you're like, wow, you had like a small city last year and you've been reduced to a tabletop. What happened? And and obviously the answer to both to neither of those is just as simple as it sounds, but there's all there's so much money spent for that two and a half days of show, and I wonder what the ROI,

API Wrappers And Model Risk

SPEAKER_01 12:24

if anything, is on those it's negative, it's a tax write-off.

SPEAKER_00 12:28

It's like people buying corporate jets. It's like, I know I'm losing money on this thing, so I'm just gonna write the shit off. I mean, I would because I asked one or two folks, I was like, how many leads are you gonna get out of this? And they said, our goal is a thousand. I said, Okay, cool. How are you gonna follow up on a thousand leads? Well, we're gonna send an email blast. And it's like, sure. That okay, I mean, you're throwing grenades in a swimming pool, fine, but like, what is the you know, would do me the math on how much it costs you guys to be here and how many responses you get out of those thousand, and then what the ROI actually is.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

It's you know, just the only the only appropriate answer to how you're gonna follow up with all those is AI call center, right? Like, that's the only appropriate supply. Claude, Claude's gonna, dude. I s you it would it's shocking. I'm sorry, this just hit my head. It's shocking how many vendors are basically a front end to Claude or or opened. Oh, I saw that interview. That's their entire thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

I was like, what? Yeah, I was like, wait a minute. There was one vendor I was talking to, and they were talking through their stuff, and I was like, that that's an API call. And they were like, Well, no, it's our proprietary. I was like, sure, but what you're doing is you're calling anthropic and then you're ingesting that and putting it into your UI. They're like, Yes, that's it. And I was like, that's an API call. Cool, great. I'm glad that you can buy your new Ferrari off of this, but it it's kind of bullshit.

SPEAKER_01 13:54

And you I have to wonder, everybody that that just built all their like their big product, their big thing, Secret Sauce, uh, as a giant cloud interface, or you know, cloud code or whatever it is, like when those things start to get ex either stop subsidizing them, right? So they're gonna start getting more expensive, and and or the the cost of using an open model is one one hundredth of that of claw and you shift, and if you do, who's the victim in that? Because that feels like the big model providers are about to get shellacked.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Well, I mean, I did talk with a couple companies that were like, we're using, I think it was open claw or something like that. I was like, you realize that's fucking

SOC Automation And Agent Mistakes

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Chinese, right? They're like, Well, it's we don't have any. I was like, but it it's like I mean, come on, man.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

Yeah. And like inherently, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that except for the fact that you know there are like this arm technical technology arms race between the two countries, which feels like a fight for existential survival. So maybe handing them data and code is maybe not the best option. I I'm just a guy, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

So what do I know?

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah, I so I I want to say like two, like from last year and the year before and the year before, not much has changed except it's the same companies, it's the same ideas. This one, this year it's now with AI, and now with agents. This is the other part that drove me. And I saw it reinforced this morning in a in a blog or in a long LinkedIn post, and I about lost my mind. And it was somebody that was talking about like this, you know, the the modern sock workflow or something, and it was like, you know, on one end, detections and then human, and then how it's going to be is detection agent swarms, which is oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:58

It's like that's magic.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Like, don't please don't say I was like, oh, so magic, cool. D do you it's like I had this argument, uh Chase. I had this argument maybe it was a debate. We were like fighting, but like I had this, it was a it was a heated debate with somebody who was standing in the booth, clearly highly technical person, but we started talking about like how how how good do you feel handing your customers the result of your agent base, no human in the loop, sock invest sock output. And they're like very confident. It's like okay, based on they're like, well, you know, we do this research and this and this and this enrichment and this, and so they said all the right words. And then, you know, I I was like, but but people, like, do you do we no longer need people because everything you told me it uses a non-deterministic model, meaning, right, for those that are newly initiated, as I was at some point, like it it it it doesn't

Hiring Pipeline Problems And SMB Neglect

SPEAKER_01 17:00

like it doesn't do the same thing twice, exactly the same, which is why it's super frustrating when you're trying to generate a GIF and you're like, oh no, no, same picture, but with a different thing, and it's like a totally different picture. Like, well, that sucks. Yeah, come on, right, right. So I said, Well, non-determinism means there will be mistakes. They're like, Oh yeah, but humans make mistakes. Like, so you want to replace like the whole argument was replace humans who get tired and need sick time and they're expensive with machines who may make the same amount of mistakes, but are probably as much or more expensive.

SPEAKER_00 17:40

I mean, I think there's I think the the the bubble's gonna pop here soon because there's a lot of those companies that are in our space that are really already getting their ass sent to them about laying people off and the AI side of it there. But the other thing that stood out to me, walking around, everybody does all this all the time, bick, big, bick. I didn't see anybody talking about hiring. I didn't see anybody talking about bringing in junior people from outside of the work, I didn't see anybody talking about reducing certifications for jobs, like all the kumbaya bullshit that people pedal in front of everybody and then they get on their high horse, whatever out. I didn't see it on the floor, and I didn't see people actively championing that. So I think you're all full of shit. Like that's I mean, that's where it is, because it can't be both. Yeah, that's fair. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars in point, like I said, 1.13 billion dollars between 17 companies. That's a lot of money. That's a lot of cheddar, and I didn't see I had no conversations with anyone about divergent hiring or you know, people coming out of college or all that stuff. It just wasn't there.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

No, because because what we're about to I mean, Chase, what we're about to do, and I could be wrong. I could be completely wrong. I suspect I'm not, but I could be wrong. Do you remember in the late 90s, early 2000s, we decided we were going to outsource everything to low-cost work in India and and that part of the world? What's the first thing that happened like three years later? We're like, hey, how come we're not having anybody in like L2, L3 that we can hire? There's nobody to hire. And those of us that lived through that first part went, because you outsourced it all over there and like you you killed the you nuked the farm team. Like, where do you think people are gonna like? Do you honestly think that people gonna come out of school and be like, all right, 10 years experience, go? Like, that's not how it works. But apparently, now AI is gonna shortcut that. You're just you're just not gonna need anything of that. Like, experience from experience. It's gonna give them AI, they'll be fine. What?

SPEAKER_00 19:41

I mean, it's just uh I don't know. There was just so much of the recursive, and I I feel like I genuinely haven't come from Forrester, like I I feel for the people that are trying to come up with the marketing for these things because it's hard and it's not easy to do it. And I I I really wish that they were given more opportunity and they could be bolder and things like that, because most of them want to, but you've got the VCs breathing down their necks that have cut them those giant checks that are gonna say, by God, you had better come out of this with a thousand leads, or we're gonna like murder your children or burn your house down or set your cat on fire. And then you've also got like the market itself that is super competitive. And to my point, in that blog I wrote this morning, everybody I talk to is like, well, we're we we're an enterprise security company. And I'm like, Yeah, how many fucking enterprises are there? And are you guys not following like the Yeah, I mean, but are you not following the trends of enterprises are not typically where the compromises have occurred? It's vendors, third parties, contractors, mom and pop shops. And I may have had five conversations with companies that said that they specifically served those markets.

SPEAKER_01 20:52

You know what's interesting though, that now that you said that, because we are telling everybody that anybody can go get an AI and be a small business, right? You can you can just let agents run your cash registers

The AI Bubble And Coming Consolidation

SPEAKER_01 21:03

and and do and like you'll have to do you can you can be anybody, it's we've leveled the flame field, everybody can now be a small business owner, but nobody's gonna take be able to buy any of these security services because that's all for enterprise.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

Well, and I mean you know, if you're gonna run your own small business, great, but then what's your plan for what that infrastructure looks like and then where are you gonna you know do what and how that is gonna work? But then you go out there and you talk to the floor and you're like, how many folks near consult with small businesses or offer you know plot plan scheme strategy services for SMBs? And most of them are like it's cost prohibitive for us to do that work. And it's going, then we're not fixing the problem. Like the the house of cards continues to be built, and we're still sitting there going, like, man, I hope a hurricane doesn't come along.

SPEAKER_01 21:55

Yeah, well, yeah, I listen, I I think the the trend where Was definitely be loud, be AI, be as bombastic as you can with the claims you can make. Make the claim, worry about how you're going to substantiate it later. And and from what I saw, it's it's it's the same thing we did last year, and the year before that, and that was the year before that, and the year before that. It's just this somehow feels different because we're talking about a like the way some people talk about it, it's a fundamental and complete shift in how we operate and how we do work. And if we like if we screwed, like look, listen, if we screwed up XDR, quite frankly, the outside world wouldn't care, right? If we screwed up cloud, okay, that could be problematic, but yeah, we get eventually right. Like we screw up what we're doing with AI, like we're gonna ruin lives, we're gonna ruin countries, we're gonna ruin a whole bunch of stuff. And I I don't know that anybody really is thinking greater good, they're thinking greater pocket. Like more money for me. I don't care about the I maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

I think there are people that genuinely care, but I think that there's the you know, the ultimate evil, which is the dollar bill that drops into this that drives all those other decisions. And it's you know, I mean that's that's part of the problem for you know those that are involved, I think, is that you're what's the phrase from the Dark Knight, Harvey Dent said, right? You're you either live long enough to die a hero, or you live long enough to die a villain, or or you live what is it, you live long enough to become the villain, there you go, or you die a hero. Like that's kind of it. Yeah. If you're on the side of the body, I like good.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

I think my favorite Batman quote is some men just want to watch the world burn.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_01 23:54

I feel like there's a lot of there's there's a lot of people that are in a position where they're completely okay watching things around them burn as long as you know they're pocketing the the the the money on the chaos it causes. That that's disturbing. On the topic that's like super near and dear to my heart right now, and it kind of has been for a long time, is this whole idea of of SOC. Like, what's the SOC going to look like? Where is what's AI's place? How do we and and and to the extreme, like how do we replace all the people with with AI agents and just call it done? Can't we just throw away all your tools and and code our own? Uh I I had somebody stop by and and say, well, this is pretty advanced, I like it, but I think my my device, I think I can find somebody that can vibe code this uh and get get with the parts I need out of it. I was like maybe I doubt it, but you know, possible. Like nothing's impossible, right? Like you can do it. But there's a lot of like there's a maybe maybe what I'm what I'm trying to say is like there's a lot of folks that feel it like what's that what's there's a term for it where you've had enough enough adult beverage where you you kind of like 10 feet tall and bulletproof is a drunk as a Tracy Morgan song. But like I'm feeling 10 foot tall and bulletproof, right? I've had a few and like I've had so much AI blown up into my nostrils that I can do anything and I can save all the money and and protect everything. And look at me, I'm invincible. Like I think it'll some of that is happening too.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

Oh, sure. And I mean, you know, like it's everything is everything is a balance, but I think that the balance right now is just so heavy on the you know shenanigan side and on the practicality side that it's not it's not really driving the thing forward. I think there are some companies that like I could put a list together of companies that I know because I've personally checked them out and tried their tech and whatever that are solving problems, but I honestly can't put those out to the market because then I'll have other folks come after me and go, well, why didn't you say that about us? Here's our lawyer, and that's libel, and blah blah, even though it's like, no, I'm just saying that their shit is solid, yours is yours.

SPEAKER_01 26:11

Yeah. Kind of final thoughts because I'm gonna run up on time here. But what's your take on because I've heard a lot of folks talk about in the hall, mostly in the hallways, right? Talk about the fact that this this you know this is kind of exploded, but it's going to very quickly reconsolidate because there are companies that I don't think are going to be there next year. Uh I can name the ones I think in my market segment. I better not, though, because like you said, no customers, no

Markets, Treasuries, And The Zipper Effect

SPEAKER_01 26:41

real deployments, burning cash, features like in the AI world, right? In the AI reality we live in, to say that it's gonna take me six to eight months to deliver a feature, a major, even if it's a major feature, feels like you're gonna lose.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

I mean, I think that there is a bubble. The bubble's here, the bubble's gonna burst just like every bubble does, and then there's gonna be consolidation, and then the pendulum will swing back towards some semblance of the middle. But I don't think we've got to that yet. I think it's probably Q2 of next year when it really kind of starts to go, you know, collapse in on itself. And that's when there's gonna be some hard conversations for people to have with the folks that have cut them those checks and whatever else. But probably by then a lot of those people will have pumped and dumped and exited. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:33

What's interesting is the I don't know if you guys that are listening, listen to the All In Podcast, a great podcast. They publish and they're way more free with their with the way they can talk than I can. But they were talking about the fact that the the treasury we eat treasury yields are incredibly good right now, and a lot of people are like, well, I can try to make my fortune on uh by continuing to ride this speculative AI thing, or I can go to into uh what feels safe, and like the hint of destabil destabilization out in the real world is causing a large run to treasuries. If that happens, money outflows from the chip sector, and that thing implodes real fast. It's like the they call it the zipper effect, right? Once like one falls, then two, then four, then eight, then sixteen, then then one goes.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Yeah. I mean, it's the cash rush, which uh is interesting too, because I mean I you know, there's there's market investment. Like I what's funny tangentially, right, is I I did a book signing for the buy the breach thing, and I I've been telling people for years, if you do what I'm saying in this book, like you'll make money because it's not wrong. And funny, I was actually selling a book for a guy. My Robin Hood bot texted me and said, Congratulations, you just made X dollars on a trade. And I was like, that um, what what more proof do you want, man? Like that's right, that's right. Go make your own.

SPEAKER_01 29:02

That's the insane part, right? That's the insane part, I think. Yeah, I think it's the insane part that we've got we've got a whole bunch of these indicators that are sit there screaming at us saying something the system feels upside down, but people are still pouring money into it, like it's going out of style. And I and I'm a little concerned about what happens next because it's gonna happen. Like I every every bubble is gone pop. Every bubble burst eventually, like that's the physical nature of bubbles sooner or later they're is it a the question though, Chase is it gonna be a slow deflation or rapid kaboom? Because I've I've speculated earlier in this year that like I think I can hear the air coming out and it's deflating, but I don't know that it's I think it's still like big enough to where the percentage change is like one percent at a time. And I think the longer it goes, the bigger that number gets, right? That's how you know volume goes, right? You go one to like 1%, then 2%, then 3%, then 10%, then 20%, then 50, then 80, then 90, and you're done.

SPEAKER_00 30:04

I mean, I I think that what we're really gonna see is that there's gonna be very practical use cases for a lot of this stuff that are very valuable, that solve some really good problems, that help and actually are valuable. Then we're gonna see the pop on a lot of these things where people realize after getting you know elbow deep in it, that this is just fucking clawed API that's sitting on top of a UI, and that's gonna derail a whole bunch of stuff, and that'll pull the investors back, that'll pull funding, all those things. So, you know, I think it's kind of like I don't know, maybe it's two bubbles. Maybe there's one bubble that's slowly deflating, and then there's the other bubble of like realization that's gonna happen soon and it's gonna be more of a pop.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Oh man, if that I'll tell you what, if if cash stops pouring into the AI models, right? The frontier model companies, because now it's a duopoly, there's only two that really matter. If those start, I mean they're they're they're everything says that they're strong growth in those, but I I I look at the financial models for them and I just I wonder like how the hell does that work? Because I that kind of math doesn't math for me.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Yeah, every time I talk with investor folks, I'm like, that the math okay. I mean, I I guess it's lucky you have that much cash to like play with, because I mean the way that they choose who to invest in just boggles my mind because it's like I can give you a list of people.

SPEAKER_01 31:33

Yeah, but play cash eventually runs out, and you're playing with real-world consequences with your play cash, right?

SPEAKER_00 31:40

So it's somebody else's money, so what does it matter to them?

SPEAKER_01 31:44

Sure, but the but what the secondary order effect is with actual people's money.

unknown 31:50

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 31:51

Because you eventually impact consumers, you eventually impact

How To Judge Vendors Fast

SPEAKER_01 31:54

end users, and that's gonna become super problematic. And you see people already fighting back against data centers in their neighborhoods, in their in their areas, you see the backlash against all these uh AI enabled technologies, that you know the the tracking, the this, the that. I I I I think that if you keep pushing, I I think if the messaging doesn't change, if it's uh computers are gonna solve all humanity's problems, humanity's just step out of the way, I think the backlash gets harder and harder every time it slaps that wall, and eventually it'll break it.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

I mean, maybe Wally was a documentary, not a movie.

SPEAKER_01 32:41

That that that seems to be a popular good opinion. All right. Let me uh let me end it on this because I think it'll be uh it'll we'll we'll leave this as as the bumper for the episode. But so tell me, what when

RaffCon Shoutout And Closing

SPEAKER_01 32:57

you go to a show like this, how do you give me in a 60-second version, how do you get to figuring out who you're gonna see, what you're gonna go look at, and what's relevant and what's not because it's really hard to tell.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Yeah, so like for me, I put together a list of the vendors that are new. I put a list of the vendors that are doing things that are not like crazy outside the bounds of norm, but are innovative. And then the the final thing is I look at who the markets they serve, and then I basically try and go just recon them and see what I can find out from the people at the booth. And you usually get some really good gouge on what's going on there. Probably a lot of the time I get asked by their executives to do like closed door stuff, whatever else. I'm not really interested in that. I'd rather talk to the you know folks doing the work.

SPEAKER_01 33:48

Fair enough, fair enough. All right. Hey, um, so for those of you guys that don't that know, every year for the last several, uh Rafi Marty and I have been doing uh RAFCon. In case you're curious, this is the uh this year's shirt, and I thought it would be super cool. That's cool. Isn't that awesome? Like that is that is so I I can't take credit for this. Is Josh Jones over at Crush Security. I'm I'm pitching, I'm just giving you uh if you're listening, go check out Crush Security because Josh is an awesome person, he's got a great team, and he's kind enough to make t-shirts for me the last two years. So odds are if you're wearing one of these, go thank, think, take, tell them thanks. And I hope you hope you got a chance to check us out this year. If not, there's always next year. There might even be another one at RSA. Who knows? You just never know. Anyway, Mr. and Dr. Chase Cunningham. Dr. Zero Trust. Dr. No. Thanks for coming on the show and and ranting a little bit. I think this felt therapeutic. I feel like I got some of this off my chest. I feel like I feel a little better now. You know, like when you when you sneeze out those, uh all that dust. And you accrue.

SPEAKER_00 34:54

It's like post post-Taco Bell uh visit to the toilet, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Wow. That's that is not where I thought you'd go with that. But that is, yeah, that's uh you gotta purge and put it all out. That's the image we're gonna leave people with. Oh my god. All right, thank you so much, you guys. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching. We'll be back again next week. Thanks for listening to the Dominic Security Rabbit Hole podcast. We'll catch you guys another place, another time, on another Dominic Security Rabbit Hole Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 35:29

This is Dumba. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to leave my Donna review and share this with your friends.