UnHacked - Cybersecurity Made Simple for Small Businesses

Justin Shelley (00:12)
Now the now the intro music's glitchy. Did you guys have that experience too, or is it

Joshua Holloway (00:15)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (00:16)
just on my side? Good.

Joshua Holloway (00:18)
Just a little

Mario Zaki (00:19)
No,

Joshua Holloway (00:19)
bit. I figured I figured

Mario Zaki (00:19)
it is.

Joshua Holloway (00:20)
the camera couldn't contain my my standard dancing.

Justin Shelley (00:23)
That's probably what it was,

and then you just froze. I you're good lord. Guys, I thought we got to a point where technology had kind of peaked. You know, we we we had, I would argue, a decade of that, where there just wasn't any real change in technology. It just was what it was, it was good enough. Then all of a sudden we started getting things, you know, think of AI, all kinds of new shit, and none of it works. That's how we're gonna start.

Mario Zaki (00:50)
Are we talking about like Apple or or

you know, in general?

Justin Shelley (00:53)
Everything, everything. That

Joshua Holloway (00:55)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (00:55)
is

that is the premise for episode one zero four of Unhacked. We're gonna go one four, yeah. Did you miss one hundred three?

Mario Zaki (01:04)
No, I thought we were at one five.

Justin Shelley (01:07)
you missed one. Time warp. Nope. It's one four today, as far as I know. AI might have ate one that might have advanced us. I don't know. But here we go. We talked last week about doom and gloom. into the world. I was feeling a little spicy. I'm not sure what I'm feeling today. Maybe we should have like an emotional check-in when we start these, instead of a introduction. Because everybody knows who we are and what we do, and that's getting really boring. So okay, we're doing it. Emotional check-in.

Last week I was doom and gloom. Today I'm conspiracy theory minded. That's where I'm coming in today. and and we're gonna get out of the doom and gloom conversation and we're gonna talk about what is likely going on behind the scenes for all these headlines that we're getting around AI. Mario, then Josh, what's your energy level today coming into this thing?

Mario Zaki (02:01)
I feel pessimistic today.

Justin Shelley (02:04)
Ooh, okay. Pessimistic. We were just talking about pissing excellence. Now you're pissing mystic. Pessimistic. I heard you're wrong. Josh,

Mario Zaki (02:11)
That's

Justin Shelley (02:11)
what do you got?

Mario Zaki (02:13)
Most

Joshua Holloway (02:14)
Hi, I'm Josh and I'm feeling

No, I'm feeling great.

Justin Shelley (02:20)
Hi, Josh.

Joshua Holloway (02:23)
Thanks guys. No, I'm feel I'm feeling great, man. I'm over here working. I have one more day of work before I'm on vacation for two weeks and I'm excited.

Justin Shelley (02:33)
well, fuck you. I

Mario Zaki (02:35)
Well, don't forget your laptop

Joshua Holloway (02:36)
Well, thank you.

Mario Zaki (02:37)
next week.

Joshua Holloway (02:38)
Dude, I never forget my laptop. It's if I if I could have it sutured into my body, I pretty much would.

Mario Zaki (02:44)
Mm.

Justin Shelley (02:45)
Well, where are you going for two weeks? Is this public information? Or are you you know you're not supposed to announce it, actually, because somebody will break into your house or something like that.

Joshua Holloway (02:53)
that's okay. We have

s we we have some we have somebody staying at the house and all that fun stuff.

Justin Shelley (02:56)
Okay.

I I'm due for a vacation.

I'm just

Mario Zaki (03:00)
So don't try it, hacker.

Justin Shelley (03:02)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (03:02)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (03:03)
Yeah. It's a a Navy SEAL. all right guys, so here's here's where I'm coming in today. We're just gonna jump straight into it. I I do believe that there is more to what's going on than just what we see in the news. Hmm. That's new and different. So AI, the the powers that be

Keep throwing out these announcements of AI is gonna end humanity. AI escaped our sandbox and broke into somebody else's system, hugging face,

Joshua Holloway (03:34)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (03:35)
completely on its own. and it's just odd to me that they're trying to scare us. The ones developing it seem to be the ones leading the charge on scaring everybody. So that's what we're gonna talk about today. It's gonna be largely unstructured.

And we're just gonna duke this thing out and see if we can come up with anything intelligent whatsoever. I've got three kind of running theories or potential answer or yeah, answers to this question in my mind of what's really going on. One, it really is an issue. I mean, they did in fact break into hugging face. was not all by itself. Two, they're pushing for regulations because there's a hidden agenda there.

We'll get into what that may or may not be. Or this is all a marketing stunt. I had a friend years ago, and anytime there was something kind of fishy going on, he would always say, follow the money. And and you could usually find a lot of answers. When you stop looking at what we're being told, you take the emotion out of it and you just look at the money. we'll find answers that way. So, guys, that is it. That is the introduction.

And I'm just punting this thing down to the other end of the field and I wanna see what happens. Go.

Mario Zaki (04:52)
I honestly I think it's option D. I think it's all the above.

Justin Shelley (04:56)
okay. I thought you were gonna none of the above and you had your own theory.

Mario Zaki (05:00)
No, I think it's all of the above.

Justin Shelley (05:03)
Okay.

Joshua Holloway (05:04)
Well and I you know, I also think, you know, there needs to be some regulation. I also I think there is a l a layer of of scaring tactics, right? Because only the top three AIs are you know, are the ones that are gonna protect us, help us and they're all trying to go public. Well, one of you know, one of them dead. You got open AI who's pushed off their going public offering to next year. they're currently trying to raise additional capital. It's like a trillion plus and

Yeah, I I think they're trying to scare us a little bit, but I think there needs to be regulation and control. some time ago they the the government did sit back and set up guardrails and nobody seems to be following the guardrails that they set up.

Justin Shelley (05:49)
What were they? Tell us more.

Mario Zaki (05:50)
What

are those guardrails?

Joshua Holloway (05:52)
It w the guardrails were set up around how it should be studied, applied, and built out. And, you know, when should we give access to com commercial, right? They just pretty much said, hey, we have AI. Here's here's commercial use. Good luck. Have fun. It it almost feels like we're the beta testers or the alpha testers. and you know, they're just they're using us to build up all the, you know, all the strategies, right? We're R and D and we're paying to be R and D.

Right? Because we're using it all day, every day. We're coding with it. They're, you know, looking at our apps, they're looking at our ideas. They're they're looking at everything that we're putting in and they're training. I mean, how how often like robo taxis are and not just Teslas Robo taxis, but just robotic taxis? People started driving those around for for years before they started being allowed to drive themselves. And it was because essentially we were training the models. and I feel like

We probably should pump the brakes because you have things like hug hugging face. But but yeah, it's and I know I'm bouncing around a little bit, but I want to go back. So there are guardrails.

Justin Shelley (07:02)
Well, okay, so let's let's

let's talk about the pump the brakes because the the counter argument to that, of course, is this is gonna shock everybody. One person can't do it alone, one company can't do it alone, because if they do, then everybody else out develops them and and the the one who slowed down loses the race. we can regulate this country to an extent. I wouldn't even argue we can really regulate everybody here. but what we cannot do is regulate international development. So

Wha how do you do it? Like you you just you just made a claim, Josh. Defend it. How do you do it? How do we how do we pump the brakes without losing the race as a nation and then becoming at risk to the ones who just outdeveloped us?

Joshua Holloway (07:47)
Well here's the problem. Like there's I don't I don't think there's a right answer on how to pump the brakes because you do have so many borders and you have so many like China for instance, right? They're literally flooding us with new models, you know, with the ability to take off the guardrails and i it's it's just wide open. So it would take Go ahead.

Mario Zaki (08:05)
Well also don't forget

Trump Trump is also against you know he wants

Joshua Holloway (08:11)
Pumping the brakes.

Mario Zaki (08:12)
to be yeah, pumping the brakes. He wants us

Justin Shelley (08:13)
Now just by saying

that, ninety percent of the country is gonna go the opposite direction.

Mario Zaki (08:20)
That's true. but it you know it it it has to yeah it it it has to come from

Justin Shelley (08:21)
Anyways, that's that's a bad bad joke based on social media memes. Ignore, delete, move forward.

Joshua Holloway (08:26)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (08:28)
the higher up as well. Like just like you know a company, it's all starts from the top, you know. So if he's not if if he's on the exact opposite because he doesn't want you know Russia or sorry, Russia, China to outdevelop us, you know, he's gonna he's gonna push for it.

You

know, and to be honest with you, all these companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and you know, SpaceX, I don't know what the hell they're their official, whichever n name they're going by, it it it you know, who's to say they're one of them is not is gonna is not gonna stick to what they have agreed on? Like, you know, you would to say you're going to s

slow down development, what does that mean? Like are you only allowed to release one model a year?

Justin Shelley (09:21)
Yeah, I'll I'll be honest on this one. I flat don't believe it. I don't think for a second that anybody is gonna slow down development. They might say they're going to in hopes that the com competition does or the other nations do, but I don't think for a second anybody who's developing AI slows down. I don't think it's I think that's more reckless than development, honestly, because

Joshua Holloway (09:46)
Well I

Justin Shelley (09:45)
Look at I you know I made

this now go ahead. I'm I'm gonna stop because I'm gonna get too

Mario Zaki (09:50)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (09:50)
far into

Joshua Holloway (09:50)
No, no, no, no.

Justin Shelley (09:51)
my conspiracy theories here. What were you gonna say, Josh?

Joshua Holloway (09:53)
Yeah. I I was just I was just gonna

say, like, I don't think we can slow down because nobody's gonna slow down, right? So that means instead of slowing down, how do we better

Justin Shelley (10:03)
Well, let me let me correct

your wording a little bit. Everybody is not going to slow down. Right? It would be fine like if if slowing down meant anything at all, if one or two people or a hand handful of these companies slowed down, if that meant anything at all, but it doesn't, because you can't you would have to get everybody to do. And then what the hell does that even matter? We slow down and what? So we get there slower. So instead of a ten year end of the world deadline, now we're at eleven years. Like what does it even mean to slow down?

Mario Zaki (10:32)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (10:33)
Like

they're not even defining it. They're just saying, We gotta slow down. my God. And what?

Joshua Holloway (10:39)
Well, and I I think the problem is, and you're absolutely correct, they are not prepared to protect. Right? It's moving so fast that it doesn't matter whatever they do to to protect everybody. It's already behind the curve. Like I think the slowdown aspect is you can't slow down because no nobody is gonna slow down. So we need to speed up how we protect or how we deflect or

Justin Shelley (11:01)
Right.

Joshua Holloway (11:01)
stop.

Justin Shelley (11:02)
Right. Mario?

Joshua Holloway (11:04)
You know, and I think that's

that's where it should come from.

Justin Shelley (11:07)
Okay. Mario, thoughts on that?

Mario Zaki (11:09)
Yeah, no, I I I completely agree. I I think there I don't think there's ever gonna be a definition of the speed that they're moving at. Because even if like OpenAI releases Fable Five and then they come out with five point one, we don't even know what the difference is between five and five

Justin Shelley (11:31)
Right.

Mario Zaki (11:31)
point one. They could have just said, five is just getting better and better every day, but meanwhile they're still developing it.

Nor like normal. All we're really

Justin Shelley (11:40)
no.

Mario Zaki (11:41)
seeing I'm sorry?

Justin Shelley (11:43)
I'll tell you exactly what the difference is in the models. They keep charging more for Warning, if you use this one, it's gonna eat your tokens faster. Just so they can get us used to eating tokens faster.

Mario Zaki (11:53)
Yeah, I a hundred percent. You know,

and I I actually you

Justin Shelley (11:55)
Does it any different? No.

Mario Zaki (11:57)
know, but you know, we we don't really, you know, yeah, people are benchmarking or whatever, which is all bullshit in my opinion, you know, but they don't know we don't know what they're really what's the difference. Like they can just say, Okay, we'll we'll stick with five point for a year, but meanwhile they're just improving five point for the the whole time.

Justin Shelley (12:21)
Let's talk about marketing. Is is this a marketing stunt? And I don't mean I mean, maybe that's a hundred percent of what's going on, maybe it's five percent. But let's talk about the marketing behind this, the the PR that they're getting. Because on one hand, you've got people who are terminating their careers of their own volition. They're leaving their company, they're leaving, they're going out, they're getting a a microphone and they're they're telling everybody that the world's gonna end, right? So somebody's walking away from a career.

Because they're so passionate about that this is a bad thing. that's the counter argument. My argument for marketing is you know, that they're coming out and they're saying, we're so powerful. This device is so powerful, we can't even contain it. But don't worry, we'll do this, this, and this. Eventually, as long as we can get everybody else to back off and clear the field for us, we'll fix the problem. But my God, we're so powerful right now, we're scared of ourselves. Thoughts.

Joshua Holloway (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean

Mario Zaki (13:23)
I mean

Joshua Holloway (13:24)
bad bad publicity is good publicity and i i it brings curiosity. So the you know, the the argument for marketing is is is pretty darn strong, you know, because you're just flocking to their their cool, faster, better pro product.

Justin Shelley (13:38)
Yeah. Yeah. 'Cause I wanna see what it does. Like if this is so powerful. Let me try it out. I like

Mario Zaki (13:44)
y exactly.

Justin Shelley (13:45)
I like cars with big engines.

Joshua Holloway (13:46)
Yeah, how many of you tried to use it to

break break into a computer?

Mario Zaki (13:50)
Yeah,

Justin Shelley (13:50)
Josh, we are recording live. We can't talk about that kind of stuff.

Mario Zaki (13:51)
it it's

Joshua Holloway (13:54)
oops, I've never done

that.

Mario Zaki (13:57)
You know, we should just go and tell like all our prospects how go yeah, our security's so good we can't even contain it ourselves. You know, you

Justin Shelley (14:04)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mario Zaki (14:05)
got you what the hell does that mean? You know? You

Joshua Holloway (14:08)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (14:08)
could easily contain it, you know, it just obviously it's just proper, you know, it's bullshit. You know.

Joshua Holloway (14:17)
So are you saying in a way in tenfoil hat that's a psyop?

Mario Zaki (14:24)
What?

Joshua Holloway (14:25)
Just

to s just to see how the human race does

Mario Zaki (14:28)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (14:28)
with all this.

Mario Zaki (14:29)
Yeah. one hundred percent. You know, like if they're saying, our are you know, it's exactly like what Justin just said, like it's so good everybody's gonna want to try it, you know, like it's so powerful, you know. let me go ahead and try that. If they're saying it's you know, it's gonna, you know, be the cause of the end of the world, let me see what they're talking about. Okay, let me put in my credit card.

Joshua Holloway (14:51)
Actually that's really good point 'cause now if you think about it like forensically, you're drawing people who have bad intentions to use their tools in a bad way to begin to try and do it because they're hearing like it's so powerful.

Justin Shelley (15:08)
And it can be done.

Joshua Holloway (15:09)
I can I can do these things. So, you know, I mean, who was it? Was it Anthropic or I think it was Anthropic that was talking about they foiled somebody trying to use it to build a

Justin Shelley (15:22)
Bioweapons or Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (15:22)
Bio bioweapon. Yeah. So if

people are done like if you think about it, if I type something into Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, whatever it is, and I say, how can I make smallpox in h in the home, right? Like I want to be able to build my own contain. Why would that not flag in a system and immediately alert security that would then alert the FBI, that would then

Bring local authorities blazing into my house, like you know.

Justin Shelley (15:53)
You've got the

the ending scene of Christmas vacation going on.

Joshua Holloway (15:57)
Yeah, yeah,

pretty much. They're busted through the windows. I mean, it'd be the same thing. You you know, and I don't know about you guys, but I've definitely tried to skirt around chatting with it to see what I could get away with. You know, you know, obviously I'm not asking how do I build nuclearly nuclear reactor or bomb, you know, things like like that. But you would you would think for security reasons that they would flag conversations like that.

Justin Shelley (16:22)
Okay, and that's my point. They do. They do. And so why is this news? If it's not a publicity stunt? Just things that things that make you go, hmm.

Joshua Holloway (16:31)
Because if it's so

it's so powerful, we cannot be contained.

Justin Shelley (16:37)
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna

Mario Zaki (16:37)
Mm.

Justin Shelley (16:38)
give you a real world here's here's what's here's what's going on for me. I've mentioned a few times I've I've built some tools myself. I'm reevaluating everything I do with my business, right? Because everything's changed. We are living in a completely different world. One of the tools that I use, which I will not name, I I swapped out it's in it's in beta development or it's it's actually in in production now. But when I started using it, it was beta. They floated some pricing out there.

And I'm like, yeah, I mean that that's reasonable. It's less than what I it almost seemed too good to be true, which fed into some of my

Joshua Holloway (17:12)
Tell it was.

Justin Shelley (17:13)
right. but I get in there, I you know, they they give me a little crack. I try the crack and I'm like, damn, this is like some next level blue crystal breaking bad stuff, you know. Like this is good and I really like it. And so I'm like, yeah, I'm in. And then then they start floating the pricing out there, and the the main tool is still very reasonable.

But the AI component, which was that blue crystal they're given me, which rocks. I mean, it's it's great, is 10 times the price that I was quoted. Not 10% more. Ten times more, a thousand percent more. It's crazy that, you know, and and it's the AI component. So here is my theory, and I want you guys to challenge me on this.

if we go way back, I don't remember the episode number, we had somebody on here when I first said, I first floated this theory of I think this is like the the drug dealer is getting us hooked on crack so that we're customers for life, and then they're gonna raise the prices and we're screwed. And the guest we had on, he's like, No, that's not true because it's open source and you can download it, you can run it on your own hardware, no problem. Like, okay. So I at at that time, I'm like, there's no way I'm ever gonna do that.

Now that's coming

Mario Zaki (18:28)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (18:29)
up. We're actually going to bring a guest on in a couple of weeks who's going to talk about that very thing. So I'm I'm really intrigued by this whole conversation. And now I'm thinking, all right, if these big names want us to keep paying them, they have to keep us locked in, which means they have to keep these open source things locked down, which means they've got to scare the shit out of everybody so that we the government will come in and say, nope, you can't do that. We got to trust anthropic, we gotta trust open AI, we gotta trust all these big names who have promised.

For ages, meaning like days in in the time warp we're living in, that they're gonna protect us. So we can't trust you guys with your own self hosted stuff. I think that's my conspiracy theory, that's my tinfoil hat. I think they're trying to prevent us from circumventing their locking us into these contracts. It just the price just keeps going up. The token usage just keeps going up and up and up. That's my theory, guys. Break it down.

Mario Zaki (19:21)
Yeah, but

you know what? again, if you follow the money, you know, you're gonna have all these companies sit there and bitch and moan about, you know, like like Dell and Lenovo and HP, where all these computers and servers are going for crazy money now because they're controlling the market.

You know, if you pretty mi you know, and that's because people are buying it and downloading local models and and running it locally instead of the subscription. now all of a sudden, if you say, All right, no more downloading, no more, you know, open source, you know, run your own, then those companies are going to start complaining.

Justin Shelley (20:04)
Yeah, so who's got the most power? also they're they're they do fine. I don't know. The hardware companies are gonna make money no matter what, because we're either running it in house or we're running it in the cloud. It all takes hardware. It all eats up compute, as they're calling it now. I don't know, I mean it's somebody's always unhappy, no matter which way it goes, who has the most power? The one who has us the most scared. Why are they continue to put out these headlines to scare the shit out of us, tell us the world's ending? Because they want the money, they want the control. Prove me wrong.

Joshua Holloway (20:37)
No, I wonder if this

Justin Shelley (20:37)
Bueller.

Joshua Holloway (20:38)
is also a guise that if you if you do want to run a local model, it there's gonna be regulation or there's gonna be a license that you have to obtain to run a local model. Or it's

Justin Shelley (20:48)
That's what I'm saying. Regulate it.

Joshua Holloway (20:51)
regulated and or maybe you won't be able to get a local model any longer because they'll block it to just the AI companies because why should you have a loaded gun?

Justin Shelley (21:06)
Right. That's what I'm saying.

Joshua Holloway (21:07)
That you could potentially pull.

Justin Shelley (21:08)
That's what I'm saying. That makes more sense to me than the CEO

Joshua Holloway (21:12)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (21:14)
of an AI development company saying, my god, we gotta slow down. This is way too scary and dangerous.

Joshua Holloway (21:20)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (21:21)
They're not gonna slow down. They're gonna try to keep us slowed down.

Mario Zaki (21:27)
I mean it it's just human nature. Who's gonna want, you know, any business owner, you know, I don't even wanna say it's the American white because it's it's the w the worldwide. And like who what business owner sees success, sees money coming in, says we gotta we gotta slow it down? You know? Who's gonna do that? Nobody's gonna do that.

Justin Shelley (21:48)
But and then and they

do it by making their case. And this is why we did episode 103 last week and 104 this week. well, also because the numbers matched up. we we intentionally scare people first, and then we come in with the solution. It's like get everybody all panicked, and and we're gonna come in like, don't worry, just trust me and you know, go ahead and and pay me as well, right?

Joshua Holloway (22:13)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (22:14)
Isn't

that isn't that what cybersecurity has been for decades, anyways? Like this is just AI now trying to play off of it. Yes? True. Is it a real

Joshua Holloway (22:21)
Y yeah, you're you're not wrong. Yeah, you're not you're not wrong.

Justin Shelley (22:24)
problem? Absolutely. Do they are they financially incentivized to help us? No. They're financially incentivized to keep us scared and to keep the threat real.

Just a thought. Just a thought, guys. if we could solve all computer problems today, security, hardware glitches, software glitches, if they could all just go away, would any of us want that? No, because our businesses go away with it.

Hmm. Hmm. Would doctors want to solve all diseases? Do pharma companies want to solve all diseases? Hmm. I don't know, guys. It's just stuff to think about. I haven't had my tinfoil hat on for a long time, but I'm telling you, I'm stocking up on tinfoil right now. I'm going to Costco and Sam's Club both. Well,

Mario Zaki (23:07)
You weren't kidding about conspiracy theory today, huh? You weren't kidding.

Joshua Holloway (23:10)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (23:13)
hey, I'm I'm throwing it out there and I want I want the counter arguments. I want to see where I'm blind here.

And viewers, that's you as well. Get on our website and and tell me what you think. Cause these are interesting times.

Mario Zaki (23:27)
Yeah, and if in case nobody knows, it's unhackmybusiness dot com.

Justin Shelley (23:32)
I was trying not to to plug it too much today, but

Joshua Holloway (23:32)
Shameless plug.

Mario Zaki (23:33)
Ha ha

Justin Shelley (23:35)
thank you, Mario. So I don't sound like a broken robot. Broken

Mario Zaki (23:38)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (23:39)
record? my god, like a broken robot. That's a new one. I guess.

Mario Zaki (23:41)
Broken ro AI robot, yeah.

Justin Shelley (23:44)
I guess. All right, guys. I I've said everything. I'm like, I'm out. I I laid it all out there and I was expecting a little bit more pushback or something from you guys. And you're just sitting there like like the classroom when the teacher is like Bueller, Bueller, you you're all just like quiet. Like

Mario Zaki (24:00)
It's because just like every conspiracy theory, you you you gotta sit there and think, you're like, huh, i you know, he he may be onto something here.

Justin Shelley (24:01)
I can s I know. Josh's gears are turning and Josh isn't

Joshua Holloway (24:05)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (24:10)
usually quiet. No offense, Josh, but you've usually got something to say. You just keep taking your deep breaths like you're gonna come in. And then you breathe it out.

Joshua Holloway (24:17)
Yeah.

Well no, so I yeah, I I definitely wear the tenfold hat from you know, from time to time. but you're not making illogical sense. Like there's a there's a lot to be said here where are they scaring us so we just use their tools? That's a high probability, right? You talked about how we talk about cybersecurity. Reason why we talk about cybersecurity with businesses because at the end of the day, if they don't do anything, bad things are gonna happen, right? But

We want them to use the better products. We want them to believe in cybersecurity. But how often do they not? Like, think about it from our perspective, guys. Like we can talk about cybersecurity all day, every day, but until our clients feel the the burden or a potential client feels the burden of a cyber attack, they don't care up until the point in which it hurts.

Right. So are they trying to push us into a corner where we feel the pain faster so that we'll jump quicker over to their solutions or their promises and say, Hey, we don't care that it's, you know, gone from twenty bucks a month to a hundred bucks a month because your product is the best, it's the fastest, it protects us the most. You know, and and then they're always gonna be detractors, right? just like in conspiracies, you know, you have people who believe it, people who don't. you know, naysayers, right? They're they're gonna be like, I don't wanna go with open AI or

I don't want to go with anthropic or I don't want to go with any of the Grok or whoever because they say that they're the best and I feel like they don't have my the the my best intentions. And yeah, I I think you gotta take that one with a grain of salt because then you look beyond our borders and you know, what is China doing? What is other Russia

doing? What are other countries doing? You know, and do we while

Justin Shelley (26:01)
That's what scares me. Yeah. That's why this whole argument of slow down falls flat.

There there is no slowdown. We we cannot or somebody else takes the place. W you know, like this is not an option. Not an option to slow down.

Mario Zaki (26:15)
Yeah. Another thing is too, is like they can't go the opposite way. They they feel like no none of them is gonna say, no, we have to go, you know, twice as fast. We have to we have to, you know, make this develop so much quicker. We gotta, you know, take over the world, you know, before the end of the year. Nobody they're not gonna say that because they don't necessarily like they wanna scare people, you know, we we're talking about they wanna scare people, but they wanna scare people to make look like they're they're innocent.

You know, that they're doing the right thing. They don't wanna sound like a complete assholes and say, yeah, you know, we're gonna we're gonna fuck shit up.

Joshua Holloway (26:54)
Well, the other thing you could look at too, and you're absolutely right, Mario, I agree with you. is we go back to follow the money. Every one of these AI companies are way over leveraged. And the twenty dollar a month isn't

Justin Shelley (27:06)
yeah.

Joshua Holloway (27:07)
per per person is not going to get them out of it. Right. I mean, obviously open AI is trying to go after a trillion right now and they're still not even going public. Anthropic just went public. They're buying so much equipment and they're building so many data centers.

they they need as much money as possible to even make some kind of a return.

Mario Zaki (27:29)
I mean Elon Musk is

Justin Shelley (27:29)
And I guys

Mario Zaki (27:31)
is getting ready to to put a data center in outer space.

Joshua Holloway (27:35)
That's actually pretty smart. I think. I think because cooling's no longer an issue.

Mario Zaki (27:41)
Yeah. But that that's crazy. I mean you you you mean to tell me that they're gonna slow down and meanwhile they wanna put an you know, put a data center in outer space? Come on, they're not gonna slow down.

Justin Shelley (27:53)
The slowdown argument is just in my mind, unless somebody can give me a shred of evidence that there's anything to it, I think it's pure not even marketing hype. It is pure horseshit. It's absolute horse shit that they're feeding us. I don't buy that one for a second from any angle from anybody. There's no way that's happening.

Joshua Holloway (28:10)
Probably just saying it

to calm fears, especially after that one guy quit and like I work for Anthropic, I work for open AI, nobody's doing everything anything to protect us. It's all

Justin Shelley (28:20)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (28:20)
horrible. And then they are s they're secretly talking it about it amongst themselves that they're scared, but yet they keep pushing forward

faster and faster and faster.

Justin Shelley (28:29)
Yeah. Yeah. I don't I don't buy it.

I really do think and it's three weeks out, we're gonna bring a guest on here who's gonna talk a lot about the open open source, also known as kind of open weight as far as AI goes,

Joshua Holloway (28:45)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (28:45)
bringing this stuff in-house. I honestly think they are scared of that. I really do believe that where they lose their power is if people start self hosting this. You we've seen this in our industry over and over and over. We just cycle back and forth between

Owning everything in-house and then outsourcing it or cloud editing or you know, putting it out in the

Joshua Holloway (29:03)
Cloud.

Justin Shelley (29:03)
you know, with the this started with dumb terminals and mainframes. And we've just been rubber band bouncing back and forth between some version of that forever. AI, I think, is the next version of it. We're gonna start bringing our servers and processing right back in-house. Data, like I am so sick of vendors in our industry. They own us, they own our businesses. It's why I'm retooling everything.

I am tired of not being able to control where my data lives and who gets breached and why and what they do when they do get breached and when they have a an outage. Like all the stuff we used to be able to protect against, it's out of our hands now. If a client of mine gets breached, do I really get to say that I did something wrong? Or do I have to push it down the field to, well, this company that I've outsourced to did something wrong? Well, did you check them out? How do we check them out?

I don't know. We we've given away all of our power as we just keep pushing everything out to different vendors, different platforms, different S you know, software as a service, SAS, SAS, however you want to say that. I I think we're gonna see a it's gonna come back in house. That's that's what I think's going on.

Joshua Holloway (30:08)
I agree.

I I don't I totally agree with you. You're you're definitely gonna have a lot of people try and bring their own models in house to protect their data. I I've I've talked about this a couple of times, maybe not necessarily on the show, but I I one hundred percent agree with you that people are gonna find a way, cheaper way to find to have their own models local.

Justin Shelley (30:27)
Because the vendors are

they're screwing us. Like when I got this 10

Joshua Holloway (30:31)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (30:31)
times my expected invoice, right? Not twenty percent more. Ten times, not even what when you know my anthropic account went from twenty to a hundred, and I'm like, yeah, no problem. That's a hundred bucks. It's a difference of eighty, it's a rounding error in my accounting, it doesn't matter. But when a vendor takes it, you know, a significant piece of my business that costs a significant amount of money.

And

10x is it, holy shit, that's a problem. And they can all do this to us at any given time. That's a problem, guys.

Joshua Holloway (31:02)
You know what it is, Justin, I think you're you're at fault here. I do.

Mario Zaki (31:06)
I agree.

Joshua Holloway (31:07)
I I think

Justin Shelley (31:07)
Tell me more.

Joshua Holloway (31:08)
I think I th this is why I think Justin's at fault. I think all these companies listen to Unhacked and they heard

Justin Shelley (31:12)
Ha ha.

Joshua Holloway (31:13)
us talking about how we could fifty X the bottom line and save so much money and they're like, Holy shit, we'll ten X all of their bills. We'll be able to get

Justin Shelley (31:19)
Like, yeah.

Joshua Holloway (31:22)
more money from You know, but yeah, it all joking aside, like I I feel you're absolutely correct where

You know, they're they are afraid of us bringing it in house. They're trying to make it seem even more scary. If you notice, was it like Kimmy K three, all all the different Chinese models are s like they're suit they're the boogeyman now. Like there are new

Justin Shelley (31:43)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Holloway (31:44)
like Russia, like be afraid of those. We don't know what they're doing. Although the hugging face had to use one of those models to protect themselves, right? and it it's a good idea. Yeah, because we regulated our

Justin Shelley (31:50)
Hmm, interesting. Because we regulated ours! Because we regulated ours!

And so the answer is to regulate more? Come on!

Joshua Holloway (32:01)
you dude the the more

you tighten and squeeze, the more that slips through, right?

Mario Zaki (32:05)
So

Justin Shelley (32:05)
Yeah.

Mario Zaki (32:06)
I do you think that this employee was paid by the Chinese to quit and say that?

Justin Shelley (32:15)
It it is it it fits my tent it fits

Joshua Holloway (32:17)
Mario just put on his tinfoil hat.

Justin Shelley (32:19)
no it it I've I've I've had the thought, the question. I I won't pretend to know an answer or even to have a guess at the answer, but I've definitely had the question. Or or threatened. You're you're falling on your sword for us, buddy. If if you want your family

Mario Zaki (32:34)
And the thing is,

Justin Shelley (32:35)
to live.

Mario Zaki (32:36)
I I would and we I've discussed this with some of my technicians. Like one of my techs is like pushing very hard for us to bring in, you know, bring all these models in. Like they want he wants us to build like a server and stuff like that. And I tell him, like, you know, to build something like this is gonna cost like forty thousand dollars, fifty, maybe sixty thousand dollars for for me to put all these GPUs in it and

And run these like crazy models. I'm like, I'm fine with my $200 a month, you know, subscription bill. You know, so you know, like, and and the thing is a lot of times when we are talking to, you know, obviously maybe prior to a year ago before these prices became crazy, is customers will ask us, like, should we put this on the cloud? You know, and they they would want to get like some, you know, a server.

on this on there. And I'm like, well, you know, just having it on the cloud doesn't make it, you know, completely better. You know, you're not you're not it's not going to be cheaper. It's going to be significantly more expensive. You know, it's convenient, but it's going to be more expensive. Your break even point with like a server, bringing a server in house, a lot of times it was like anywhere between six months to a year would be your break even point. That is not the f case right now with

Bringing a server like an AI server in house. Your your break even is a lot more than one year because of the hardware cost.

Joshua Holloway (34:12)
Right. And I mean, back in the day we we used to have that same problem, right? We would we would buy a server, it had a a a specific price point, and we only ended up using ten to fifteen percent on a normal, and then the server would ramp up to fifty, sixty percent on a heavy workload day and then go back, right? So the answer to that was virtualization, right? We were able to better utilize our hardware, buy less hardware, and use virtualization to utilize the hardware.

more efficiently and better, right? So I think we just uncovered that it's the hardware companies who are tired of losing money because of virtualization and they just want to sell hardware again.

Mario Zaki (34:55)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (34:55)
And

they're going to and they I mean look at the price of hardware in over the last couple of years. It's just

Joshua Holloway (34:59)
Oof.

Justin Shelley (35:00)
insane. And availability. You can't even get it. It's crazy. So they win, right? They mission accomplished there. Congratulations,

Joshua Holloway (35:09)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Shelley (35:10)
Dell.

Mario Zaki (35:14)
Yeah. Yeah, it it's

Joshua Holloway (35:16)
Yeah, could change?

Mario Zaki (35:17)
it's in in less than a year prices have more than tripled.

Justin Shelley (35:21)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (35:21)
yeah, easy.

I have servers that I've spec'd out at the beginning of the year that were are you know, the normal fifteen grand ish, depending. they're fifty. They're

Justin Shelley (35:34)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (35:34)
fifty grand and the lead time is three months.

Yeah, well and

Mario Zaki (35:39)
Now, do you think

that's gonna get any better? Do you think that's gonna come what somewhat come back to normal, you know,

Joshua Holloway (35:45)
I hope so.

Mario Zaki (35:46)
anytime soon?

Joshua Holloway (35:48)
I hope so. I I just don't know.

Justin Shelley (35:49)
I I don't I

I don't my crystal ball says no. Not what depends on how you define soon, because until this wave does slow down and it will slow down eventually, it won't be because the CEO of Anthropic decided he was gonna be a good citizen and slow down. it'll slow down because development will, like always, just hit the point where it's like good enough. Right? That's what it slows down. How far away are we from that? I don't know.

One one thing that is going in the right direction is that AI becomes more efficient as it is developed, right? So we're we're needing less and less compute power to produce the same results. But at the same time, our appetite for better results is exceeding that. So I mean that that stuff has to stabilize. I don't think that we're gonna see, you know, all this manufacturing pop up to support the demand because everybody knows that demand's gonna it's gonna s level off at some point and probably decline.

So

I I think we just have to wait it out.

Joshua Holloway (36:50)
When it starts to decline, we'll

see the price decline. That that that's the only time we'll ever

Justin Shelley (36:53)
Mm-hmm.

Joshua Holloway (36:54)
see the price come down is if if they bought enough. But you the what is enough and what does enough look like? Because life cycles, right? What do they say? Every five years, even the data centers have to be swapped out. Think about the money

Justin Shelley (37:08)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (37:08)
that's to be made. I mean, we handle life cycles, guys, like our desktops, our laptops, three to five year life cycles, servers, five, seven years. Obviously, our clients ask us to circle.

Justin Shelley (37:19)
File servers, Josh.

File servers. We're talking about

Joshua Holloway (37:22)
Share.

Justin Shelley (37:23)
AI servers that are eating up all this GPU and RAM and stuff. It's like those

Joshua Holloway (37:27)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (37:28)
aren't lasting five to seven years. They're they're putting

Joshua Holloway (37:30)
No, they're not.

Justin Shelley (37:31)
all this money in. They're they're negative going into this thing. They're gonna build all these data centers. And by the time they even have a hope of making any money, all their equipment's gonna be obsolete and they're gonna have to start over. I don't know, man. This is

Joshua Holloway (37:41)
Yep. Yep.

Mario Zaki (37:42)
Yeah, but then are they gonna just turn

around and sell it to the people that wanna have, you know, in in house servers? You know,

Justin Shelley (37:46)
Probably. The in the in house? Yeah.

Mario Zaki (37:50)
then then all of a sudden now you're buying these really good models that were good

Justin Shelley (37:54)
I mean the

Mario Zaki (37:55)
a couple of years ago in-house.

Joshua Holloway (37:56)
Yeah.

Justin Shelley (37:57)
The refurb market got very interesting over the last couple years. I wouldn't touch it before. I wouldn't if it was something wasn't brand new with a perfect warranty, I wouldn't touch it. I wouldn't touch it for in-house, I sure as hell wasn't deploying it to clients. you know, when you can't get a server

Joshua Holloway (38:11)
Yeah, but right now it's new

Yeah, I was just gonna say with new equipment has the price tag that it has, the delays that it has, the secondary

Justin Shelley (38:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Joshua Holloway (38:20)
market. And but here here's something. If you're gonna go to the secondary market, ask your IT guy. Like, I wanna know because I don't know about you guys. I've ran into this and I ran into this recently. I've seen brand new clients who are like, Hey, we just spent thirty thousand dollars on the server.

And I'm like, you spent thirty thousand dollars on an eight year old server. And they're like, What do you mean, eight years old? And said, We bought it brand new. And I'm like, I'm pulling out the little, you know, the tag with the manufacturer

Justin Shelley (38:49)
shit.

Joshua Holloway (38:50)
date and everything. And I'm like, I hate to be the person who tells you this, but you bought an eight year old computer that was sold to you as Brent.

Justin Shelley (38:58)
Their IT guy sold

something that was shit. That's

Joshua Holloway (39:02)
Yes. And I I gotta tell

you, man, I th that's when I would like to take some IT guys outside and flog because how dare

you? How how dare you?

Justin Shelley (39:09)
I know. And that's my argument

for regulating our industry, which I don't wanna do. I don't wanna see it happen. But like there's so much shady nonsense going on.

Mario Zaki (39:17)
You're not gonna be able to re

you're not gonna be able to regulate that. Yeah, I if somebody is just you know, unethical, you Yeah.

Justin Shelley (39:23)
Well, it's already regulated. Honestly,

Joshua Holloway (39:23)
They're a used car salesman.

Justin Shelley (39:25)
it's already regulated. That's fraud. It's straight up fraud. If they're

Joshua Holloway (39:27)
There it is.

Justin Shelley (39:28)
if they're selling it as new and it's eight years old, it's already illegal. So we don't need new regulations,

Joshua Holloway (39:32)
But he

Justin Shelley (39:32)
but

Joshua Holloway (39:34)
but here's the conversation I had with them. They're like What's the point? We just we fired them, we're with you, like and I'm thinking, no, that person

Justin Shelley (39:45)
Hold them accountable. That's the point. Get them off the streets,

Joshua Holloway (39:46)
Yeah, hold them accountable. They're gonna keep doing it.

Justin Shelley (39:49)
yeah.

Joshua Holloway (39:50)
Yeah, they're gonna keep doing it. And I'm just saying, if if you're gonna sell secondary, be very honest. Like, don't try and sell the server to somebody that is brand new. Yes, I knew it's I know it's new to them. Don't try the loophole. But like if if you're gonna sell secondary, be up front, try and find or attach a warranty to it as well and say, Hey, look, if I was to buy this brand new for you, it'd be fifty grand, but I can get it for twelve.

Justin Shelley (40:16)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (40:16)
And I it's it's four years old or it's two years old or whatever it is. And we're gonna start from this point and we're gonna go out three to five more years and then hopefully and I'm hoping fingers crossed prices are gonna come down and we can get brand new if you want or need to.

Mario Zaki (40:31)
I actually the the that pretty much exact same thing happened with us, you know, about two, three months ago. I had a cli I have a client, you know, an existing client who their server shut the or were shitting the bed. They was still somewhat operational. And they're like,

Joshua Holloway (40:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mario Zaki (40:48)
you know, we wanna revisit the conversation that we had a year ago by getting a new server. I'm like, We you know, we well, that quote that I sent you last year is gone. You know, like we can't you know

so I priced them out a new server, you know, Dell. And I'm like, you know, here here's the same server. It's three times the price. and by the way, number one, I told you I could have it for you in like ten days, it's about three months now. And they're like, Shit, well, what are we gonna do? We need to do something. And I told them, like, I can get you a like a a different server on like Amazon.

And I told him, I'm like, this is a server I'm getting on Amazon. It's an HP, it's blah, blah, blah. You know, we're gonna upgrade it. You know, we're we're gonna swap out the SSDs, we're gonna add more memory to it. But this is what it's gonna cost. And it is, I think I think it's like two years old. But I was up front with them. I'm like, this is this is it. It's not brand new. I am buying it from Amazon. We're obviously gonna test it first and stuff like that. and they're okay with it, like they had no choice, but I was up front with them. I didn't try to

Sit and like, yeah, yeah, no don't worry, I'm the only one in the world that can get you a server in in in one to two business days. No.

Joshua Holloway (42:06)
No, but I I think it also makes a good point too, right? Because any business owner should be asking their IT guy for proof. Cause I've seen internal IT guys have side deals and they bring in equipment and they sell brand new. And it's not, it's it's it's it's used. And they and they got it from a friend who padded their pockets. And and I think the business owners should be checking this too. It's like, hey, show us show us proof that you just purchased this brand new or

Show us proof that this is aftermarket or secondary market, gray market, whatever you want to call it. and and that responsibility, well, one, we should our industry should be extremely honest. Two, business owners should be checking this. And I think too many people have gotten comfortable and they figured out a way to line their pockets more.

Mario Zaki (42:59)
You know, we we work with a good amount of government offices and in you know, in in in the contract it says, you know, we're allowed to mark up, you know, ten percent. And, you know, when we're submitting an invoice for any new hardware, we have to submit, you know, a copy of our receipt. You know. And you know, I always do that. If it if my credit card information or whatever, I you know, I I cross that out and I send it to with the with the invoice, you know.

Joshua Holloway (43:26)
It's actually a good way to do it. Yeah, that's actually a good way to do it. They I mean that's

Justin Shelley (43:27)
Interesting. Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (43:32)
maintaining or keeping track of that and making sure somebody doesn't I actually like that.

Mario Zaki (43:36)
Yeah. Now what I I have to admit what I do hate is when somebody's like, Hey, can you get us a quote for this you know whatever hardware and then they take our quote and go buy it themselves or you know try to get somebody else

Justin Shelley (43:52)
yeah.

Mario Zaki (43:52)
to get it for cheaper. You know, I I I you know, yes, you know, we and I tell something

Joshua Holloway (43:54)
I can't even tell you.

Justin Shelley (43:57)
Listen, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna redirect

us guys because we're just bitching about life as an MSP right now. and and I'm redirecting because I will go off for an hour on that one. I think I think by the fact that we're just talking about random shit, we've probably either scared ourselves off of the original topic or we've beat the dead horse. either way, like let's just take a couple minutes and and wrap up, do final thoughts.

We're forty five minutes into this nonsense. let's let's give our our thousands and thousands and thousands of listening audience members their the rest of their day back. So Josh, you go first this time. Mario, final thoughts and then we're gonna get the hell out of here.

Joshua Holloway (44:44)
All right, my final thought is is welcome to the roller coaster. Get on and ride because it's not gonna slow

Justin Shelley (44:48)
Yeah.

Joshua Holloway (44:49)
down. the best thing you can do is protect your bubble, work with a company that can help protect your bubble and explain what's going on and and help you out because the big companies aren't gonna slow down, it's only gonna get scarier, and you need to work with people who are gonna protect you. And and just yeah, that that's my final thoughts.

Mario Zaki (45:12)
Yeah, and I guess I mean maybe we should have said this forty five minutes ago, but if you came here, you know, say you know, thinking we were gonna tell you exactly what what's going on in their minds, we don't know. But we didn't we weren't gonna

Joshua Holloway (45:24)
Nobody nobody can.

Justin Shelley (45:24)
Nobody knows. We don't know.

Mario Zaki (45:27)
tell you this in the beginning of the episode. You know, we'll tell it to you at the end.

Joshua Holloway (45:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Click.

Justin Shelley (45:32)
Yeah.

I I'm gonna say we've we've said this a lot, but I do feel like this message needs to be driven home continuously. and yes, there's a shameless plug coming. we we have to get back to just protecting what we own, knowing what we own, having it inventoried. It's one of the first steps when you do go to unhack my business dot com and sign up and start

You know, one of the first thing you do is identify what you have and where it lives. I don't care what the technology is, I don't care what the hardware is, the software is, I don't care where AI is. We have to know what it is we're trying to protect and do that. so that's point number one. And then I'm gonna end with I am for like I am super optimistic. I am very excited, I'm very happy about the way the the technology industry is right now. It's been stale and boring for a long time. I got into technology because I liked the change.

I like that we could do cool shit. and we're finally again being able to do cool shit. Is it scary? Yes. Is the world gonna end? I don't think so. but it could be a meteor, even if it's not AI. So we're we're all screwed no matter what. Nobody gets out alive. So let's just like ride this wave and and enjoy life. That's my that's my take on all this stuff. So guys, we're

Mario Zaki (46:49)
Justin, I

think my my speaker went out for while you were talking. What was that website again that you were talking about?

Justin Shelley (46:56)
I'm sorry that you missed that, Mario. It's unhackmybusiness.com. you can find all of the episodes here. You can leave feedback for us, ask us questions, or you know, make an account and go in and start evaluating your security posture, as we call it. get a score, get risk, get get numbers on how much your risk is gonna cost you if you don't do this stuff. All right. Thank you for that plug, Mario. I I I'm and convenient timing for your speakers to go out.

Mario Zaki (47:23)
My pleasure.

Justin Shelley (47:26)
Three

Joshua Holloway (47:26)
Ha ha ha.

Justin Shelley (47:27)
weeks, guys, and we are gonna bring a guest on and we are gonna talk about bringing all this stuff in-house, what it means, how we can do it, what it costs, should we, should we not? And hopefully by then the the giants will not have already regulated us out of that option. That's what I've got.

Joshua Holloway (47:42)
Yep, exactly.

Justin Shelley (47:43)
say goodbye, guys, and we're getting the hell out of here, and I'm starting my weekend early.

Joshua Holloway (47:48)
No. Goodbye.

Mario Zaki (47:48)
Unhacked.

Joshua Holloway (47:49)
Stay unhacked.

Justin Shelley (47:50)
You could unhack.

God, I hope when we export that that glitchy audio isn't there.