LIVE From CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 2026 | George Kurtz, Michael Sentonas, Daniel Bernard & Justin Boitano

(00:03) - George Kurtz discusses CrowdStrike’s new AI security products, including Falcon Guardian and an agentic security platform developed with Nvidia. The CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO explains how AI is accelerating cyberattacks and defenses, emphasizing scalable threat detection, deterministic security, continuous red-team/blue-team learning, and responsible AI adoption. (20:31) - Michael Sentonas discusses his role as CrowdStrike’s president, overseeing go-to-market, product, engineering, research, and threat-hunting teams. He explains how AI is accelerating cyberattacks and social engineering, emphasizes collaboration among businesses and governments, and highlights CrowdStrike’s focus on customer security, innovation, and cost-efficient solutions. (41:53) - Daniel Bernard discusses his role as CrowdStrike’s chief business officer and the company’s close partnership with Nvidia. He highlights SafeMind, a cybersecurity AI platform built on Nemotron that uses specialized models and harnesses to provide faster, more affordable, always-on protection against evolving threats. Justin Boitano is Vice President of Enterprise AI at NVIDIA, where he leads the company’s enterprise accelerated computing and AI business, helping organizations deploy AI infrastructure, models, and agents at scale. He previously led marketing and business development at Frame, a cloud application platform acquired by Nutanix. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. We are live from Falcon here with Jordan Kurtz from CrowdStrike. Welcome to the show.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Straight into it.

• 0:07George Kurtz?

  Always great to be back here with you.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Always great to have you. Congratulations on everything so far. I'd love for you to start by taking us through the big announcements today.

• 0:15George Kurtz?

  Well, big announcements just coming out of my keynote today. First, we started with our Falcon Guardian product, which is in the category of AIDR. So if we think about the category that CrowdStrike really helped create around endpoint detection response, now this is taking really what we do for a human and a computer and applying it to AI agents. Obviously, AI agents are more sophisticated. They have access to data. They have access to compute, to networking resources. They do bad things because they're like a bunch of drunk interns that you put on your network.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  They can do a lot of damage.

• 0:46George Kurtz?

  They can do a lot of damage, right? So we built this technology. We talked to our customers. We worked with some of our largest customers to really figure out what they wanted, like Amazon. And we're super excited because the missing link to accelerating security, sorry, AI adoption is security. Customers, for the first time, want to go faster somewhere, and they need security to go faster as opposed to a brake pedal. It's actually a gas pedal.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you go back throughout your career, I mean, you've been working in security for decades, and I've just been really struggling with the order of operations for the predictions that have come true. Like, we got the hugging face attack, and then like three weeks later, someone was able to use ChatGPT to book a haircut. And it's just weird that we're getting capabilities in this very spiky way. Does this match your expectations? How does what you're seeing today go back to your original thesis when you started the company?

• 1:42George Kurtz?

  Well, it's interesting. When I first started the company, it was really based upon, we called AI, but it was machine learning back then. But again, it was being more predictive and using the algorithms to figure out whether something was good or bad. And now, if you fast forward to generative AI agents, you know, it's important to leverage all of the data that we've accumulated over the last 15 years to get to a point where we're still doing that. And one of the, the second announcements we made was really the super intelligence cyber lab. This was very exciting, and we actually partnered with Nvidia to create really the first, what I would call the agentic security platform that is focused on a red, a blue, and a harness that continually learns from each other.

• 2:27George Kurtz?

  So we based some of our models on Nematron, right? We can probably get to that, but just overall announcements. So if you think about what we're doing, it's really creating a frontier-type model and harness at frontier levels specifically built for just the defenders.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yes. So with that cyber, cyber, super, super intelligence lab, you're going to have more tailored models, more specification, probably spikes that go beyond what's available with the stock frontier products, I imagine, over time, if not immediately. But I'm interested in the, the benefits of open source, the benefits of thinking economically, because I imagine that part of the battle between attackers and defenders is starting to become economic. How much, how many megawatts can I put behind this attack? Is that what's happening?

• 3:17George Kurtz?

  Well, the compute, the, the limitation, you're exactly right. The limitation for these attacks are really going to come down to sort of compute and cost. Because the knowledge, and I talked about this in my keynote, has now been democratized, where whether it's a hacktivist, an e-crime actor, a nation-state, they're, they're all now equivalent because of agentic technology. And we called it the rise of the agent state.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:39George Kurtz?

  Right?

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:40George Kurtz?

  Meaning that now the-

• 3:41John Coogan?

  Post-nation-state.

• 3:42George Kurtz?

  Post-nation-state.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:43George Kurtz?

  Right? So the apex predator is now the, the agent state.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:47George Kurtz?

  And I think what's really interesting is, and it kind of gets back to your spikes and the, and these models and those sort of things, is that when you go back to hugging face, it's a fascinating read. You probably have read it and there's some great papers. We were actually called in to, to help OpenAI go through some of it. I'll leave it at that, but the papers are out there. And when you look at what these agents were capable of doing, and just how sophisticated they were with note-taking and communicating and maybe working as part of the collective, it's incredible. But the thing that I really called out in my keynote was, that's all groundbreaking, but really, what was the aha moment? The aha moment was, the same incredible frontier caliber AI was available for the adversary in this particular case that were, you know, was agents trying to pass a test, but it

• 4:32George Kurtz?

  wasn't available-

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  The drunk interns.

• 4:34George Kurtz?

  For the defenders. And, and these spikes come with the model refusals and all the guard railing that, that was put in place. So again, our models are specifically trained on our data, which we think is a huge advantage. Harnesses that we built. And again, we fine-tuned in the model creation and, and, and post-training in concert with Nvidia to come out with incredible efficacy at the lowest cost. And this is what you were just getting to, because customers want the best outcome at the lowest cost.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  And I want, and I want probably AI review, AIDR at every endpoint, at every transaction, every API call, every single possible moment. And that could be very expensive if it's running on a really expensive model, right?

• 5:15George Kurtz?

  Right. Yeah. So, so our AIDR is going to, again, there are two separate announcements, but you're going to be able to run that from the platform. It's in, it's in, we announced it today. But the, the red Tempest, which is the name of that model, and the blue Solano, which is the defensive model, are part of the Safe Mine system. Okay? So Safe Mine, you can think about it as a harness, right? But those models and harness will be available in the platform to make everything smarter and better and faster. And then we have a trusted access program for customers in our quilt work, quilt works program that they would be able to use the models directly.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So when you read the agent traces from the hugging face attack, do you see anything in there that feels difficult to detect? Because when I look at those, I'm, I'm like, okay, they're crossing a line. This is odd. This would flag something in me. But we've seen examples like the, how many Rs are in the word strawberry, where AI just kind of falls flat on its face when you're trying to analyze a particular shape of problem? Do you, how tractable is this problem? How optimistic are you about solving it?

• 6:19George Kurtz?

  Well, it's tractable because when we, when we built our system, it was designed to look at sort of these, we call them indicators of attack. So if you look at the whole attack chain, and if you saw the keynote this morning, you know, it's just linking all these together. So irrespective of like what happened, these are, these are kind of a known attack chains. Part of the issue was, it was sort of flooded with so much information that I think it was just sort of buried, you know, what's going on? Is it real? Is it not real? And what is going to really take place is, the defenders have to use AI to be able to connect the dots on those, which we do, but you also then have to strip out all the noise. So you have to separate the signal from the noise, and that's where these sort of models perform well.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  I mean, obviously, there's an incredible amount of attention on AI. What is the role of deterministic threat detection these days? Is there, is there still, is that a useful tool in the tool chest? Is there, are there still advances being made there? Because I imagine that for certain problems, throwing a more deterministic, you know, security structure around something could actually be beneficial.

• 7:26George Kurtz?

  Well, you have to. And if you look at, in the hugging face incident, this was more of a forensics what happened.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:31George Kurtz?

  Right? If you think about deterministic security, it has to be in line, and you have to make a decision, you know, you have to be right the first time, right? First time final, as we call it. So I haven't seen any sort of models, if you will, actually stop a breach in its tracks because it's, you know, as it's happening, you're kind of looking at data and those sort of things. It's not in line.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:52George Kurtz?

  So a lot of what the models are good at is sort of sorting out what happened, you know, sifting through lots of data and those sort of things, finding vulnerabilities. But you have to have a deterministic system, which is what we built. And I think what people maybe get confused on or maybe aren't quite sure is when they hear things like mythos, it's like, wow, you know, this super powerful model is going to hack the world. It really hasn't come up with a new invention of hacking.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:18George Kurtz?

  Okay? This is very important. It's come up with, it can find more vulnerabilities, so more of, and faster, right? And when you combine those, you have, and you combine and link these things together, you have greater success, but they haven't invented a new way to hack.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:32George Kurtz?

  This is very important because I think the, the public may look at this and say, well, Jesus, a super weapon that can hack anything, and it, it really is the same techniques, there's just more of it, and it can keep track of more things.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  The concern is like you're taking a 10x hacker and making them a 1000x hacker.

• 8:47George Kurtz?

  Correct. Yeah. It's, it's almost like Iron Man. You put the suit on- Somebody who's smart is a heck of a lot smarter.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  So how are the threats evolving? I imagine you've been talking about agent states, which makes sense as a new concept. But I imagine that you still have nation states that are deploying their own agent states.

• 9:07George Kurtz?

  Correct.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  On their behalf. I'm sure the same thing is happening with various, you know, loosely tied hacker groups. But how is the threat evolving? What are you talking with customers about these sort of new threats?

• 9:18George Kurtz?

  Well, it's interesting and it is. The agent state is going to help the nation state, the e-crime and the hacktivists, right? Everybody in between. So obviously that's just an umbrella. But I think if you look across those different groups, they all have capabilities. They're all leveraging things like these open weight models, right? We talked about obliteration, really taking the guardrails off an open weight model. And you go to Hugging Face now and you can download these obliterated models and you can run them basically on a beefy system, right? It's incredible. And you put a question in and you're like, there's no way it can answer this. And it builds like, you want a full malware ransomware kit, boom, it's done.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 9:55George Kurtz?

  So this is part of the issue. This isn't theoretical. It's here. And what customers are asking for is we want to give visibility if these agents got it. We want to stop these sort of threats, but we also want to know if it's an AI attack. It's actually a very important question that they need answered. Isn't it an AI attack or is it sort of an adversary with maybe AI assisted? That's been one of the number one questions because it informs them on what they need to defend against. But it also informs them on how they express this to the rest of the company, the CEO and the board.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's been the biggest or what do you see as the biggest bottleneck for you in terms of actually deploying solutions to customers? They're asking you, do you need more sales reps? Do you need more, just more customers to come to you? Just scale up what you already have? What's the shape of the next 12 months for you?

• 10:44George Kurtz?

  The great part of what we built at CrowdStrike is it's a very scalable model. It's a single agent, single platform with a single control plane. So you know what people need to do to roll out AIDR?

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Turn it on.

• 10:56George Kurtz?

  You know, sign the PO. I need to turn it on. That's it, right? It's the same agent that's there.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 11:01George Kurtz?

  And we spend a lot of time making sure that we can instrument, we can find shadow AI.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:06George Kurtz?

  Is it Claude, is it Codex, whatever it is? We can instrument every action that agent has taken, every action.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:13George Kurtz?

  With a specific identity, every tool call, every spawn of an agent.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:17George Kurtz?

  Every network connection, every prompt. We have that visibility. It's incredible. So it's sort of like the EDR moment when we developed EDR. When we first showed people, they were like, I've never seen this before. And when you do this to an agent, they're like, we've never seen this. We've been dying to see this. So I think when you look at our model, we're combining a very scalable platform, turn it on, same agent. That's a huge win for us and a huge barrier to entry for other competitors. We have the most agent, security agents deployed of any pure play security company. So that's one. And two, we combine that with a very flexible licensing model.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:51George Kurtz?

  Which is Falcon Flex.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:53George Kurtz?

  So you'll be able to use, it's a, it's a token based system.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:57George Kurtz?

  So the more AI you use, the more you pay.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:59George Kurtz?

  Because there's, you know, more cost to this. But at the end of the day, you'll be able to use those credits and burn down from your Falcon Flex licensing model.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I imagine with Nematron and just the advances in models, like there's a world where token prices come down over time. If, if, you know, you're scaling up and stuff. So there's a lot of flexibility there.

• 12:17George Kurtz?

  Well, and we have different models which make it a lot more cost efficient.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:20George Kurtz?

  So the goal for us is to really, yeah, is actually to really, it is, it's not just one model.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:25George Kurtz?

  Uh, so we're, we're really driving down the cost. And I think that's a huge advantage for our customers. And then providing that sort of trusted access. We've been doing this a long time and customers want to retain their data and the prominence of that data.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:39George Kurtz?

  The sovereignty of that data with us.

• 12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take me a couple quarters for it, a couple of years for it, as far as you can. Because it feels like we, there was, there were sci-fi stories about cybersecurity incidents related to AI. Then we got the mythos moment, the hugging face moment. Now we have a really solid response and it feels like there's, you know, the, the never ending cold war continues.

• 13:03George Kurtz?

  Yeah.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  But are we, are we in a stable equilibrium here? Are you expecting some big change one way or another in the posture between the two warring groups here? The red team, the blue team?

• 13:14George Kurtz?

  I think it goes back to the story as old as time.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17George Kurtz?

  It's good versus evil. It really is. It just plays out now in the modern day with agents at a speed that we can never really contemplate.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  But we can fight.

• 13:27George Kurtz?

  But we can fight and we will.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:28George Kurtz?

  They'll get better, we get better.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:30George Kurtz?

  And, you know, part of, part of our, what we deliver today with the lab is the red, blue training loop.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:35George Kurtz?

  Very important is that the blue learns from the red, right? So the defensive model continually learns from the offensive model and you have a very fast cycle.

• 13:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:43George Kurtz?

  It's very important. But, you know, there's going to be all kinds of new technologies, new agents, new systems, things that we haven't even heard of today.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:50George Kurtz?

  And we have to be able to defend against that. And I think what remains, while there's, will be a lot of change, what remains constant is security parallels the slope of the technology curve.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:01George Kurtz?

  So the technology curve, I mean, you know, I started in the early nineties doing this, right? It was like this and then it's like that. So you have to have security that actually parallels that. We don't do everything. You know, what we do, we do really well. We're a big platform company. There's only a few of us. I think that's going to win in this market. But it's a big market. You can see by all the companies around here.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is like, uh, for those of you that are tuning in, this is a, uh, where it feels like you set up a town here. Like 10,000 people, it's massive.

• 14:29George Kurtz?

  It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, you know, maybe you'll see some of this in B-roll or whatever, but this is a massive security conference. We have companies coming to this going, we're not going to any other conference.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:40George Kurtz?

  And it was just an offshoot because we've got the best customers. It's a big audience. But I think what's important to realize is we understand and value the ecosystem. We can't do everything. Like what we do, we do really well, but it's part of the whole ecosystem and network, which is why Nvidia is here.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:56George Kurtz?

  Obviously Jensen Huang this morning, Libutan from Intel, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, all partners, plus all the many that you see here.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Jordy's, please.

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what groups or institutions are not paying enough attention to this new technology cycle? That, uh, everyone here is like paying attention to this, obviously the AI boom, new threats, things like that. But is, is there a set of groups globally that, that need to be, uh, paying more attention to the new set of threats that aren't today?

• 15:26George Kurtz?

  Well, it's a good question and I think the mythos moment has really provided, uh, much more visibility from the board all the way down to the CEO level. I mean, my phone was ringing off the hook from Fortune 10 CEOs going, hey, what does this mean? How can you help us, et cetera? Right? So, you know, from visibility standpoint, that's good. And then you look at a Fortune, we'll call it a Fortune 500 company. For the most part, they have or will find the money to deal with some of this. And depends on the industry, how much they spend, but generally they have a view and it's regulated, et cetera. The have nots, those are the have.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:58George Kurtz?

  The have nots are.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  I think, I'm thinking like local utilities.

• 16:01George Kurtz?

  Local utilities.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Hospital systems.

• 16:03George Kurtz?

  Hospitals, NGOs.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05George Kurtz?

  Like utilities, forget it. I mean, they're running such old software.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:09George Kurtz?

  So it's the have and the have nots. And I think part of what we want to do and even working with OpenAI is how do we help, you know, give a hand up to people

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:17George Kurtz?

  who, you know, need it because they don't have all of the security people they need. They don't have the money for all of these sort of advanced software and technologies. But we got to, it's a collective community effort and that's part of what we're helping to drive in partnership with many others.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  What does it take to make it a CrowdStrike these days? You're hiring AI researchers now for the new super intelligence lab? You have a lab?

• 16:39George Kurtz?

  We have 270 PhDs.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Uh, significant. So, uh, what is the shape of the new all-star up and comer at CrowdStrike look like?

• 16:51George Kurtz?

  The up and comer, I mean, depends on the.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  I guess the real question is just like, how much AI are they using? How much are the human skills still hyper relevant? What is the, what is the balance? How, how familiar do you have to be with these tools? What are the pitfalls? Because I think everyone's sort of realizing as they run large companies that people can get lost in the sauce if they're using too reliant on it. How do you think about this in terms of like your own management style?

• 17:14George Kurtz?

  Yeah, I think that's important because, I mean, we, we try to be very deliberate about it. Security is very important to us. So where we use it, how we use it, um, what groups we use it in, you know, we've expanded out obviously. But obviously a big part is going to be around coding.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:28George Kurtz?

  And you have to make sure that you get the right secure code out of it.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:33George Kurtz?

  You know, it used to be in the early models, I would say, a little less so now, but the early models, it was like the early days when coding, when someone would go out to the internet and they would just copy and paste a snippet of code.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:45George Kurtz?

  You would take that vulnerability and it would propagate for everybody that needed, you know, that snippet of code, right? So AI was originally generating some code and you're, you know, I have my own models I've built. I, you know, have my own security agents that I've built just to play around.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:00George Kurtz?

  And it's like, well, the same model that just built my code, then I built a, an agent to figure out whether it was secure. It was the same model that goes, it's not secure. Like, okay, why don't you build it, you know, in the first place? So you have to be aware of that. And, but what I think is important, getting back to your question is if you don't buy into AI as an enabling technology and you're sort of scared for your job, you're not going to, you're not going to be successful at CrowdStrike.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:24George Kurtz?

  If you want to use AI in the right places at the right time with the right cost, we have all the room in the world for you here.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 18:31George Kurtz?

  And we have these sort of AI builders and we're deploying them into all the different functions. So those are the folks that you go, hey, I, it'd be great if we can do this. And you turn around and get some coffee and they go, here, it's done.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:45George Kurtz?

  That's what we like.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  No, I love that too. I love that too, even in our smaller organization. We would love for you to sign this helmet. We have a Sharpie here. Uh, would you mind signing right here? We want to get an autograph from you to commemorate the occasion. And we also have a gong with a mallet. We'd love to get you to smash this for the occasion. Here you go. Give us a gong hit.

• 19:06George Kurtz?

  Okay.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  We'll let you.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  One time.

• 19:08George Kurtz?

  I gotta get a backhand on this, right?

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:10George Kurtz?

  Where, where's the, the sweet spot?

• 19:11John Coogan?

  I think the sweet spot's right here.

• 19:12George Kurtz?

  It's right there?

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Just give it enough force, it'll be good. Oh.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 19:17George Kurtz?

  All right.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  With authority.

• 19:19George Kurtz?

  There we go, with authority.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Well, thank you.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  And I just will say, I love the, I love the aesthetics of everything here. You got agents of chaos back here. It's incredible.

• 19:27George Kurtz?

  It's incredible. Well, congratulations to you because I know you, you had a new baby?

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 19:32George Kurtz?

  Okay.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  That's breaking news.

• 19:33George Kurtz?

  Okay.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  I had a new baby. No, no, it's great. It's not a secret.

• 19:36George Kurtz?

  Did I scoop you?

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  You scooped me.

• 19:38George Kurtz?

  Okay, sorry about that.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, it's great.

• 19:40George Kurtz?

  All right.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, George.

• 19:41George Kurtz?

  Great to see you guys.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you on the track hopefully. Uh, leave your headphones with us.

• 19:44George Kurtz?

  I'm going to leave it.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 19:45George Kurtz?

  But I, yeah, I won't walk away like I normally do. Um, we'll see you at the track.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50George Kurtz?

  Uh, stay tuned for the race this weekend.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  We're excited.

• 19:52George Kurtz?

  Hopefully our men, our men do well and, uh, we'll go from there.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  We're going to get to that.

• 19:56George Kurtz?

  All right, yeah, bye.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  That was fantastic. Of course, the show is

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Sponsored by Ramp. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Thank you to Ramp for making TBP possible. We have a bunch more guests coming on from Falcon here in Las Vegas, and I believe we have our next guest, ready to rock. We have Michael Santonas, the president of CrowdStrike, here to take us deeper on everything CrowdStrike is doing in cybersecurity in the age of AI. The AI revolution is here. Are you ready? That's what it says outside. A little ominous, but probably accurate.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Accurate.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  Good question to be asking. How you doing, John? Pleasure. Nice to meet you.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. We're gonna have you throw this headset on. We'll get this out of the way. Get comfortable. And we will ask that the microphone just go a little bit close to your mouth, because it's noisy in here. You've got a lot of, a lot of partners here. It's a huge company, huge conference. Did you have anything to do with that? Are you the reason why everybody's here? A little bit of a reason, okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, let's start with your role. What do you do at CrowdStrike? A little bit of your history, and then there's a whole bunch of hot topics I'd love to go into.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Happy to go wherever you want.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Let's start with your role, your day to day.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  President of CrowdStrike. So, go to market, reports into me, our product and engineering team, researchers, our threat hunters.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Researchers too.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Researchers too.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Researchers and go to market. How, are those feel like different groups? How, how does that work? Is that operational? Are you spending more time with one or the other? How does it blend?

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Look, I think my background, I started through the, the product side of the, the organization. I was the CTO of the company for, for quite a while. One of the things that I talk a lot about is you can build the best technology in the industry. If you can't sell it, if you can't talk about the value, if people can't deploy it, and they can't ultimately keep themselves safe, it's kind of irrelevant. So, it's trying to bring together the smartest people. Obviously, you had George on before. We worked really closely. He's got a bunch of people that report into him as well on the engineering and research side. It's bringing it all together and then making sure that we keep people safe and secure.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are, what are customers in the go to market side actually concerned about? Because there's an immense amount of attention on cybersecurity right now. I imagine that makes sales easier, but at the same time, we've all seen token maxing and AI budgets and people, you know, they have to find the money somewhere. So, what is the tension that you deal with? How are you thinking about positioning that for customers?

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, look, every organization has huge requirements, but they've also got a budget. They've got a business to run. The business is not there. Unless you're a service provider and your business is cyber, you're, you're building cars, you're building houses, you're in medicine, and you need to keep yourself safe and secure. So, every CISO, every COO is trying to basically do the best at what they can. They, they came into 2026, suddenly everyone's trying to work out, how do I find tokens to pay for all of the things that the business is doing? You know, every second organization has token shock. So, at the end of every month, they just realize that they spent 20,000 more than they should have per employee. And, you know, we gotta work with everybody to show them there's a better

• 23:14Speaker 03

  way, there's a more efficient way. We give them a, a vehicle that they can procure and get CrowdStrike Flex that I think you guys have talked about with George in the past. And, and we show them that they get a much better solution. It's just easier to live with day to day. So, it's not only showing them that, that the cost of buying it, but how do they deploy it and then operationalize it? Because cyber, you gotta live with it. You gotta use it every day.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. Okay. So, in deployment, let's talk about the balance between attackers and defenders. In terms of AI capabilities, I'm pretty confident that you, OpenAI, Anthropic, the big labs, have the advantage on raw power, intelligence capabilities in terms of defense and probably offense too, but you don't use it for that, you know? But does that map to your reality that, that the open source

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  The only difference is like, you guys need to be successful every single time, and attacker only needs to be successful one out of it.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:10Jordi Hays?

  A hundred thousand times, right?

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's the way it works.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Every organization can't get it wrong. And equally, they've got additional pressure.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  They gotta get it right 100% of the time, but they also have to not stop business.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  It's easy to get it right 100% of the time if you turn off everything. So, you know, it's not gonna, it's not gonna fly with the CEO of the company if every day, you know, the security technology is slowing people from browsing. You can't use the AI that you want. So, there's an added level of complexity.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  The defender has things like change control. The defender has things like, you know, regulatory guidelines and process that they need to, you know, follow. Attacker doesn't care about any of that. You know, you go to Europe where everyone in Europe is talking about like AI laws and privacy and regulation. I said it at a conference. This is fantastic. You guys are leading the world in all of this regulation, and everyone was proud. The adversary does not care.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  The adversary

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're already breaking the law. So, why would they not, why would they follow another regulation?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  They love it. They're in there. And, and that's, that's kind of some of the challenges that people face with. And then you have the cost pressures.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  You can't just pour everything into tokens.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  You can't just pour everything into, you know, IT budget. So, that's why we spend a lot of time making sure that you get the best that you can. And a lot of the time, we come in and say, okay, here's a product. We're gonna try to take two out. It's not one in, one out. It's one in, two out, three out.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. So, talk about the pace of AI diffusion, AI adoption in, in cyber. Because it feels like even though there's immense go to market operations, AI adoption among the bad guys has to be incredibly quick. Because it's often free, it's, it's, you know, highly motivated.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Download on Hugging Face.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Just download the thing. And so, I feel like that's maybe more of the challenge than like raw intelligence. Is that a reasonable frame of mind to think about? The, the real scape of the problem is like the slope of adoption. Like, the, the good guys need to adopt more security AI faster than the, than the attackers.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Look, we've talked about this for 20 plus years. If you went to a security conference 20 years ago, everybody talked about this time in the future is gonna come.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Where attackers are finding vulnerabilities and they're weaponizing them at a speed that you're just not gonna be able to deal with.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  We're here now.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  And if you think about the technology, I mean, the adversaries get access to everything. And the best thing that's happened to them is the advancement in the open weight models.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:41Speaker 03

  They can go and get a Chinese model. They can go and get a model effectively from anywhere, but they run inside their, their sort of framework. They can build it, they can train it, they can tune it. And because they're running it in their environment, they can customize it in a way that you don't know what they're doing.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  And then the first time they use it is the first time you have to deal with it.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  And it's becoming cheap for them. When they run it internally, they don't have the costs of sending the tokens and everything else. They need the hardware, they need everything out there.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you, do you feel like their adversaries are compute constrained right now? Or are they just able to do a lot with a little?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Depends on the adversary, you know? The kid at home is gonna be compute constrained. If you're dealing with a nation state, if you're, if you're dealing with some of the most well-funded, well-structured, well-trained adversaries that now have this capability as well, this is the challenge. That's why there was a packed arena this morning. That's why Jensen came out to talk about what they can do. Because if we don't do something, and if it's not a community, it's gonna be really hard to compete with this technology. It's so good.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. What, what kind of conversation are you having with governments these days? We were just talking about, you know, it's not just enough to secure the Fortune 10, the Fortune 500. You need to secure the local hospital, the local, you know, utilities operation. And it feels like the government, various governments might try and incentivize different rollouts and speed things up there. What are you hearing from talking to people in government generally?

• 28:11Speaker 03

  I think, I think you've nailed the point. Because the world's business runs a small business. The world's economy, I should say, runs a small business. They don't have the resource. They don't have dedicated people. They don't have the, the dollars. And most often, when they have a problem, it's also very hard, where do they go? And they think, you know, I'm not gonna be able to get the resource of the largest banks, etc. We wanna spend a lot of time with them. And that, that's super important. But importantly, governments around the world are also starting to say, hey, we need to make sure that our economy keeps working. We need to make sure that critical infrastructure, you know, the power is on, water is flowing, you know, rubbish trucks arrive. Otherwise, we're gonna have,

• 28:52Speaker 03

  have chaos. And, you know, we've seen examples of critical infrastructure taken out. We can't have banks get compromised or ransomware. We can't have, you know, just pure chaos out there. And I think there's an opportunity now to work more collaboratively. And every, every coming, coming back to your question, every government wants to talk about AI. You know, what do we have to worry about? How do we use it? How do we embrace it? But what do we have to be worried about when other people that have malicious intent, what could they do to us? You know, if they start using all of these open weight models, what, what do we need to know about them? So, a lot of partnership, a lot of collaboration. And I think, you know, that concept of community that we're talking a lot about this week

• 29:34Speaker 03

  is super important. Because if we don't do that, we're just not gonna be on top of it.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Tons of attention on AI for very good reasons. Is quantum

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Getting under discussed. And I say that because I've heard that there are adversaries who are hoovering up encrypted data with the hope that quantum computers in the future will be able to decrypt that data. They're stealing it now. They can't do anything with it. And so maybe even though AI is super important, we should be talking about it 99% of the time. Should we be talking about quantum 1% of the time?

• 30:09Speaker 03

  We are. And it's, look, it's a big topic, not a day ago, but a customer, a partner, an analyst, someone asks a question about quantum and what that means. I love the point. Just to kind of dive in where people are taking data. A lot of the time you see examples where attackers will basically exfiltrate all your data. And then you don't see it again.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  And you get the email saying, yes, your name was in clear text, but everything else was encrypted. And now you have to think in five years, that might be decrypted.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Sure. But sometimes when those attacks happen, you understand when you see your name in the list, you understand what they're doing. You understand that you are the person that they're monetizing. But what happens when they take terabytes of data, they're not selling it, they're not acting on it, they're doing something.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  They don't even know what it is, maybe.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Well, they didn't do it just because they wanted to have fun. So there's intent. Now, whether it's decrypting it down the road, whether it's training models, you know, you need to think every attacker, there's a motivation for it. And it's fascinating when you actually start to get behind what's driving them.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  You got to imagine there's at least a few people out there.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Doing it for the love of the game.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Well, that's how, that's how it used to be. Back in the day, you wrote malware because you wanted a company like CrowdStrike to say, hey, man, that Geordie guy, he, he,

• 31:25John Coogan?

  like, he nailed it. Like, this is an attack. This is really innovative. We talked about

• 31:30Speaker 03

  it. We started it. You felt good about it.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  You got it in a hard place.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  Doesn't work that way anymore.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, two, two.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  How, how is AI impacting various social engineering schemes?

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Well, it's funny because, you know, a few years ago, it was really easy to tell people about social engineering and said, you know, if you read something and it reads, you know, reads like, you know, a 10 year old wrote it, or someone with bad English, you know, it's probably not the bank that you have all your money in. It was an easy telltale sign. Now, they, they learn how to use, you know, ChatGPT, they learn how to use Gemini, the emails that they write are phenomenal. We used to see about a year ago, the click through rate in phishing was about 11 to 12%. Today with AI.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  That still feels incredibly high.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  It's over 60 now. Because they're written perfect, they're grammatically, they're probably write better than us now. And you kind of look at what comes out. It's really hard to work out what's real, what's not. So they're getting a lot of opportunity. The thing is, you grab an open weight model and you, you basically say, how, how would I carry out this attack? It's going to give you the playbook. You know, I've, I've done cyber since university. You don't need any of that anymore. I kind of feel like wasted youth now because you just need a model, you ask the question, and it tells you what to do.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. The company is on, okay, we got to move to the next, we got one more question. We got time for one more question. I mean, the company's on an absolute tear. I'm interested in how, you know, you oversee all these groups. What were you telling people during the SaaS apocalypse in earlier moments, even go back further, just, just throughout the company's history, you've had a very clear vision of where things are going, the value that you're creating long term, but there's gyrations. What is it like actually managing all of these different teams?

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's got to be funny that, like, the, the height of the SaaS apocalypse, you probably had the phone ringing off the hook more than any other point in history. Because at the same time, people were like realizing like, whoa, models are now at the point where.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Look, I've known George, who you had on just before, for, for over 20 years. And I remember one of the first things he ever said to me, look after the customer, everything else takes care of itself. And that mantra goes throughout CrowdStrike. So all of this noise, you know, we just basically say, keep looking after the customer, keep innovating, keeping them safe and secure, things will take care of themselves. We know the way the technology works. You know, for me, the SaaS apocalypse thing, there was no merit to it. It didn't make any sense at all. Even today, when people say, hey, all the models are going to find all the vulnerabilities, and then we're going to get this state of normality. No, we're not. We're going to get more vulnerabilities, we're going to get more attacks. It's only going to get harder. And that comes from just having so many years

• 34:12Speaker 03

  of experience. It's having an engineering team that is at the cutting edge at the forefront. But it's putting the customer first. And, you know, it's, it's a good formula and it always works.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate your time.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Congratulations on fantastic Falcon. Up next, we have Daniel Bernard, the Chief Business Officer of CrowdStrike.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  We got five minutes to hang out.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  We got five minutes to hang out.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  60% click through rate on phishing emails. What are you guys, what are you guys doing out there?

• 34:40John Coogan?

  What are you guys doing? Speaking of phishing emails, there have been a raft of, of password reset attempts on X. A lot of people.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask him about.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, we can, we can go into that with the next guest. Nick Carter posted on X, a lot of people getting unsolicited X password reset attempts in their email inbox. Do the following. Go to X settings, security account access, security, check password reset protection. Don't let people hack into your X account. It's too, simply too valuable. You can't let people take over.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  And this was because X money's rolled out to a lot more people.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Oh, I saw that notification.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  Financial incentive.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Now, because you could potentially steal someone's money if you got in, as opposed to just post a meme coin link or something like that. Anyway, the other story we got to talk about is YouTube creator, director, Markiplier has acquired 8.5% stake in GoPro. Did you see this? The action camera maker, they've been sort of in the doldrums, a lot of competition from China, but.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  And then immediate questions because GoPro just got acquired today.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, it was a full acquisition?

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that. Wow.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this news comes out yesterday. And just today, GoPro has entered into a definitive agreement to merge with privately held Starman Optical in a deal valued at 285 million. So it seems like Markiplier is up massively, which is going to immediately draw.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Part of the deal, yeah.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's going to immediately draw a lot of attention.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. But a lot of times, these things happen as like one piece of a larger deal and the stake gets disclosed at a certain time because it's part of this remaking of the business. Do you think GoPro can come back?

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question. I, I, I owned a GoPro back in the day. I never, I never, GoPro was one of those things where for the average person, you're capturing footage that is only entertaining to you. No one else is going to care. You know, I'm a, I'm a pretty good snowboarder, pretty good surfer.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Just pretty good?

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  Sean Maguire was like throwing, throwing shots, but we'll, we'll set up a heat, Sean. But, but, but anyways, I always felt like I would, I would film something with my GoPro and then it would be mildly entertaining for me and not that entertaining for someone else.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  So you don't watch game footage? You don't get out there on the waves and re-watch what happened?

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  If you're watching game footage, it's better to watch yourself from the third person.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  You don't want to watch the first person. Interesting, interesting. Yeah. I, I've owned a GoPro at various points in time, but again, like never really found a good use for it.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it felt like the GoPro budget for consumers shifted to drones. And they didn't, they didn't get there. Again, that's that third person view that is like, I think a lot more interesting to people.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  And there's even some drones that will follow you out while you're surfing and track you well and stuff. Yeah. And then, yeah, just the innovation.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  I would like, I still have very positive feelings towards GoPro. They, they work with so many amazing athletes over the years. They were a pioneer. The bigger, the bigger challenge was just the iPhone. The guy forgot very durable and the quality got amazing. So why would I, I can take, you can take your phone out on a, on a ski run wherever. And, and you'll be fine. The other thing, like Meta glasses too. Meta, the Oakley Meta glasses.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  I think Best Buy reported earnings and said that smart glasses are like driving significant in-store sales for them. Like, they're, they're actually moving, they're selling well. We haven't even seen that news.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, I don't like to see Insta 360.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, DJI.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  DJI take over. So I hope they can.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  But if you watch the independent product reviewers, like those products have innovated in many, in many, many ways that, that GoPro has not been able to keep up with, mostly because of the manufacturing side of the business. But interesting to see, you know, is this Markiplier's way of like buying a new merch line? Like, that's one potential view on this is like, okay, you buy a stake in this and then you run, you basically run ads on your platforms to promote the new products. Maybe he has a vision. I mean, he didn't make a whole movie with a lot of VFX. Maybe he wants to grow GoPro into something that's more for filmmakers and cinematic, cinematic creating. The.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Starman Optical, the acquirer, is an American company that describes itself as a privately held US optical photonics company focused on developing and domestically manufacturing optical transceivers. So when I first saw the news, I assumed it was a Chinese company buying it up, but we'll see. Hopefully, they can make and sell a lot of GoPros.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  I'm writing for Markiplier. I love his journey, and I think, you know, this feels like an outside of the box move. It's not just another, you know, sparkling water brand or hard seltzer brand from an influencer. It's him thinking about business in a very different way. So it's exciting.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  More news.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web service databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  More news. Mr. Beast has launched

• 39:57John Coogan?

  A book.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  A book for his audience of voracious readers. The people are clamoring. People in his audience have been asking for a book.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  He delivered.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  No, he's turned the book into effectively a lottery. He's gonna give away a million dollars to somebody that buys the book.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Was that on day one, or is that downstream?

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  I know, that's all I saw.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  I guess that's day one. That's the promotion. So anyway, he partnered with James Patterson, who is a huge author. Good news for the subset of Mr. Beast fans who love to read mystery novels. The YouTube giant's collaboration with James Patterson is out Tuesday. That's today. Accompanied by a flurry of marketing on Mr. Beast's channels. Read my book and you could win $1 million. Bad news for Harper Collins. The book buying subset of Mr. Beast fans appears to be vanishingly small. Two people close to the project say the most dangerous games is on track to be a historic bomb with pre-orders numbering in the four digits as of last week. But why would there be pre-orders if it hasn't launched the marketing yet? This, I'm sort of skeptical about this.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the first time I'm hearing about it.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  This is the first time I'm hearing about it, and it seems like Mr. Beast just uploaded the actual contest. And like, you could say she shouldn't be running a lottery, or I don't like this type of book promotion, but like, that's separate from will it work?

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  And I will say, if the pre-orders or the orders still stay in that four digits, there's some hedge funds getting involved.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Hedge funds?

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Buying up more of the books to enter the lottery.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Oh, go to win the million dollars. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  You could win hedge funds.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Well, typically, with a raffle like this, you don't have to actually buy the book. You usually can just sign in and send it over. But will you be reading it?

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  I think one of us has to read it, or at least Tyler.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Tyler can read it.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, where are you?

• 41:40John Coogan?

  We can get Tyler to read it. Anyway, we'll have more fun with that in just a minute. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And our next guests are here. Welcome to the stage at Falcon with TBPN. Great to see you. How are you doing? Great to see you.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 41:59John Coogan?

  How you doing? Well, yes. John, Jordy.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  On a cord.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  We're gonna have you throw on these headsets, and it's a little bit loud in here. There's a lot of CrowdStrike fans.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  A lot of energy.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  The CrowdStrike fan zone's going insane right now. And so just get the microphone sort of as close as you can. Let's move this around. Flip this up. Yeah, there you go. Is it? Oh, I think you put it on backwards. There we go. Anyway, let's start with introductions. Introduce yourself. Tell us who you are, what you do.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Hey, guys. Daniel Bernard. You can call me DB, Chief Business Officer at CrowdStrike.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  How many, how popular are internal nicknames at CrowdStrike?

• 42:37Speaker 04

  They're super popular, but there's only one DB.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Okay, that's you.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  Justin Boitano. I lead the enterprise business at Nvidia. So good to see you guys.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Yes, good to see you again. And tell us about the partnership. Tell us about the news today.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  Well, big news today. We launched Safe Mine, cybersecurity's first frontier models and harnesses custom for cyber.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 04

  Made by cyber for cyber.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  We built this on Nematron.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 04

  And it's bending the curve of frontier AI and the advantage of defenders.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Harnesses, plural?

• 43:08Speaker 04

  There's multiple harnesses.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Why would you pick one? What's involved in selection? What are the differences? Are we talking about pure economics, tokenomics, or are there more like, you know, the right tool for the job?

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Right. Go ahead.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, let me give a little bit of color. I think the big news, too, is that the frontier is in the harness.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:27Speaker 05

  It's not really about just the model. It's about the entire system. And so what the CrowdStrike team have done a phenomenal job doing is tuning the harness for attack, tuning the harness for defense. And, you know, the harness is the thing that's gonna sit there and reason and call tools and, you know, work through solving the problem, whether it's finding vulnerabilities or finding and writing detections.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Speaker 05

  And so I think the work that we've done, both through the harness and through the open model, creates this like super capable agentic system that is gonna always be on and be able to, as I say, learn from enterprise environments. Jensen talked a lot about how we're deploying it internally. We're building the digital twin of our environment.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 44:11Speaker 05

  We can basically go through these attack, defense simulations to build the best defenses for our organization.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  That's great. As you went about building this, how important were benchmarks to you? Public benchmarks, private benchmarks? How do you see that fitting into the tool chest of building a great product?

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Super important, because we needed to be more performant than what's out there today.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Speaker 04

  Like, the goal here that we both set out to achieve is, this thing needs to be better, faster, and more cost effective than the other open source and frontier models of the day for cybersecurity use cases.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  You know, that's the big thing. Like, we're not here to change the world of science, math, manufacturing. We're here to stop breaches. We're here to make cybersecurity better.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  That's offense, that's defense, and that's continuous learning.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  Better performance at each step of the way, and that's what the data we have that we're able to, that we shared with the market today.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Talk about the decision to go with Nematron. There's a lot of open source models. I can imagine why you didn't pick some of them, but break down the decision.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  Look, there's a really, really close relationship between CrowdStrike and Nvidia. So that, we didn't even look at anybody else, because, you know, when it comes to like the foundational layer of AI that we've built the business on, you know, that's GPUs.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Speaker 04

  And who do we get our GPUs from? The creators of them.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  It's Nvidia. And so when it comes to open source, and you can look at Nvidia and Jensen, such a strong perspective, and really across everything you're doing too, Justin, like, the world needs open source. The world needs choice. That just aligns with us very culturally as well.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Speaker 04

  So there was nowhere else. Like, why would we go anywhere else?

• 45:41Speaker 05

  And for us, the feeling was mutual. I think Jensen said on stage, CrowdStrike is our number one partner in cybersecurity. They have the perception system that really understands what's going on in customer environments.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  So if you pair that perception system with, we'll say, an open model that we built, it's built as general knowledge. But we put out there the data sets, the open techniques, and the weights, so they can be customized by CrowdStrike, so they can build their own specific cyber domain intelligence and be able to build a new business model where they're like selling tokens, right, to secure enterprises, and they're doing it in the most cost effective way.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  By building on that open foundation.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  What else is Nvidia bringing to the table around a project like this? Because Nematron is obviously the model layer, but obviously the GPUs. But yesterday, I saw a fantastic deal with our buddy at Lambda for, you know, a big

• 46:38Speaker 04

  Because they're busy.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're busy. A big GPU cluster. Is there advisory that you can provide, even if CrowdStrike is gonna be racking Nvidia GPUs? Like, how deep does that partnership go beyond just like, cool, here are the weights, we signed on the line, you can use them. Okay, yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think most, I mean, as I mentioned, most of the advancements at this point is research in the harness.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  So we're, our research teams, you know, George announced this, what it's called?

• 47:05Speaker 04

  Cyber Super Intelligence Lab.

• 47:06Speaker 05

  Cyber and Super Intelligence Lab. We have a bunch of cyber researchers. And basically, what we're doing is we're constantly publishing where advancements are coming in the ecosystem or in these environments. Like, we put out there a few weeks ago, some new harness research that we called AVO, that showed in ARC AGI 3, we could take a frontier model from 30% accuracy to 100% accuracy.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Wait, on ARC AGI V3?

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  And that's all open, you know, research that we're sharing with

• 47:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like that's been the big surprise over the last month, is people

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Harnesses.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  showing what's possible with a different harness versus ARC's standard harness, right?

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we, you know, share all of that open research together to advance the industry. And ultimately, you know, we're not a cyber company. They're the cyber company. They have the domain intelligence, the perception into customer environments to understand like real attack paths that people are trying to exploit. You add to that these new agentic attack paths that people are trying to understand in their environment, and ultimately, we, you know, want to help power defenders and give them this differential advantage that Jensen and George talked about.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  And like, I'll add on to that. I think every meeting that I have, and that everyone at CrowdStrike has at Nvidia, they all start the same and they end the same. How can we help you grow? It's the first question. It's the last question. It's from Jensen all the way to the person at the front desk.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  And so your answer to your question of where, like, what's on the table, everything's on the table.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  Everything, yeah.

• 48:32Speaker 04

  The whole shop's on the table. It's like, what do you need from us?

• 48:34John Coogan?

  That's fair.

• 48:34Speaker 04

  So like, when we, who's the best AI partner that we have? It's Nvidia, because they're helping us take cybersecurity to a whole new space, and we're bringing them to over 100,000 customers and everybody that's on the show floor here today.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. How important is human design of RL environments for this harness development? You obviously have the most insane data collection.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 48:59John Coogan?

  Decades of experience across the entire organization. There's a lot of value and ways that I could see if there's a huge jump. I'm not surprised.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 49:09John Coogan?

  You know, congratulations. But how much, how much is it about actually designing new environments and then go training?

• 49:15Speaker 04

  Intelligence, I believe, is really becoming somewhat commoditized. I think what's really real in this next chapter of AI is how you contextualize based off of specific situations. So the fact that we have Falcon Complete data, that's managed detection and response data from human analysts that took actions over the last number of years across, you know, all these different environments, the fact that we have frontline incident responders that stop the breaches, all that, that data set lets us curate something that's super relevant and super focused. And then we take that and we operationalize it with the harness so that we can bring a better model. That's built on Nematron and have appropriate harness for solving different problems and have an iterative learning loop. Like where this all goes, in my opinion, is you'll see more

• 50:00Speaker 04

  models and more harnesses from us in the Safe Mind family that solve different security use case problems. And that's all based off of the experience of our practitioners. You know, CrowdStrike is cybersecurity built by and for cybersecurity practitioners. I think that's really different in the market for us versus a lot of the other random companies that you find that say that they're here to work in cybersecurity. Like, everything is based in solving a real problem.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about educating the customer, the buyer, on cost and how to think about the shape of cost in this token maxing? I mean, a breach can be so devastating, throw all the dollars at it, but at the same time, there's amazing trade offs that you can do with smaller models, different infrastructure, and different pieces of the puzzle.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  Let's start with Justin, because I think you've been helping evangelize open source and Nematron.

• 50:51Speaker 05

  Well, in our environment, so you've got to remember, so one, we are also a big enterprise. We have to look at the same threats as everybody else, right?

• 50:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  So, and I think a lot of the conversations has been steered around code vulnerabilities. But in a production environment, it's really about also the configurations in your running environment.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:09Speaker 05

  And so, you know, for us, I mean, to your point, the harness should be able to use the best of Frontier and the best of Open to reason through and figure out which problems you need to use which models for. And ultimately, we assume it's going to be always on. We want to start by trying to make it as low cost as possible by providing open intelligence that they can domain adapt. So the Safe Mind models are probably the default.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  With the exception being the Frontier, if you want to look for very novel new things.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:39Speaker 05

  And that kind of gives you the best cost, you know, cost benefits when you run this all the time across code binaries and configurations in your environment.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  We've heard it loud and clear from customers that just going one direction with Frontier Labs is just too cost prohibitive.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 04

  But open source at this point, like generic open source, is sort of like, you don't have the, it's a compass that's spinning in a circle. So what we need to do is have the best use cases, the best results, the best outcomes, and also deliver it at the best cost. And that sort of is the aperture that we need to play in with this thing. And so I think every enterprise is grappling with. We have this new line item in COGS that's called Tokens.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  You know, five years ago, didn't exist. And it's not like you necessarily say goodbye to anything else, by the way.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  You're doing more with your cloud providers. You're using a lot of software. You need to secure all of it with CrowdStrike, of course. So, you know, I think everybody's in this redistribution or rethink of how you do budgeting in this new AI-first world.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and I think every enterprise is planning to spend more on AI next year, but at the same time, trying to be a lot more efficient, right? And so that's why these two, these closed models, open models can coexist and actually the industry can continue to thrive.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the, we were talking about this earlier, but the economic warfare between attackers and defenders? Because the benchmark performance, all the stats that you mentioned, those are great, but I'm almost more excited about the cost savings because this is a technology that needs to be always on, running all over the place. It needs to be, you know, too cheap to meter essentially as fast as possible. So it can be everywhere because if an attacker's only trying to come through one door, you got to make sure every door is secure. So how are you thinking about the economic balance between attackers and defenders?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Well, the way I think about it is prices, I mean, value creation is always measured economically in a P and a Q.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  What's happening right now is the queue is going out of control. So like, that's the big picture. Like, there's more attack surface than ever before.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 04

  And that means there's more opportunity, to come back to your question, there's more opportunity for adversaries to play around.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  And they don't have to be right every time. They just need to be right once.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:47Speaker 04

  And go get something off the shelf somewhere and use the weapon. And if the weapon works, that's a good day for them.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  So do you think 2026, if we look back in a decade, do you think the attackers are going to be like, that was the best year we ever had? Or do you think it's going to be the moment when the defenders are saying, that was the moment we figured things out?

• 54:06Speaker 04

  I'm going on a limb here. Justin can back me up, or you have your own opinion. But like, Safe Mind changes the curve. Like, I think Frontier AI has disproportionately advantaged, well, one, everyone sees advantage.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  But I think sort of until, until like this time, it's sort of disproportionately advantaged adversaries.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:29Speaker 04

  And I think it's time to change the tide.

• 54:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:31Speaker 04

  And that's why we're working together. And we want to see that change happen and make that a reality.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:35Speaker 04

  There's a lot of great technologies on the floor here. There's a lot of great cybersecurity companies, and there's a lot of companies that we're keeping safe all the time. But it's too easy and it's too dangerous for these adversaries to get their hands on things that are way too powerful.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  And I think it's another example of a domain where, like, general intelligence can like come and do attack, but it's going to be pretty expensive to run these attack paths through these, like, frontier, large models. Think of it like a battleship, right?

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 55:01Speaker 05

  And then what you want to do is you want to help defenders have the equivalent of like drones, like super low cost, you know, models that they can run everywhere. So they can run across their entire estate. And to DB's point, like, the goal is, I think, to help specialized cybersecurity defenders have the tools. And their advantage is also, they know the code, they know the configs that they run. The people coming in from the outside don't. So on the inside, you can do all that recon, you can map your environment, you can, you know, use these lower cost models to find, you know, potential new attack paths and then continue to close them down and do it at a lower cost if you use, you know, these new platforms like Safe Mind.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's a

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  And you guys, you guys are in the position where you can be at the frontier with these capabilities, but there's not this like insane pressure from billions of users out there. Hey, you have to release these cyber capabilities to everyone, right? Whereas Frontier Labs are in a different position where you have hundreds of millions or billions of users that want the best capabilities for things like coding, right? And these other capabilities.

• 56:00Speaker 04

  So, well, we have the pressure of lots and lots of big numbers of attack surfaces. Those are endpoints, identities, cloud workloads. And they're putting a lot of pressure on us because they all need protection.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  You know, we can't let any of those things get compromised. So like, the threat's real, the need is there, the budget's there, but the market's asking for something better and something different. You don't treat a specialized illness with a generic pill.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:25Speaker 04

  You need to have the right, the right dose, the right, the right therapy. And I think that that's really what we've done here.

• 56:30Speaker 05

  And I think with every platform company, we're a platform company. We know what we are and what we're not. We're an accelerated computing company. We're not a cybersecurity company. And so these natural partnerships sort of emerge to allow us to go in a specialized way, solve the problem in a very focused way. I think, you know, even the Frontier Labs are probably thinking to themselves, like, where do they really want to own, call it alpha, and go try and compete? Where do they want to partner?

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 05

  And I think in these areas of like specialized intelligence for cybersecurity, you know, we generally think the best approach is help, you know, protect critical infrastructure, help make the world a safer place, and we'll all be in a better place.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, as a platform company, what is the advantage that you see occurring over time around having diversification in the actual chip fleet? I mean, there's this Grok deal coming online. There's, there's already a number of different configurations of rack scale servers and all sorts of different, like, back to the gaming chips. I mean, I see people running AI loads on those, too. What is the, what is the advantage and the shape of that over time?

• 57:36Speaker 05

  Well, we're an accelerated computing company, right? So we have to accelerate everything.

• 57:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:40Speaker 05

  And the reality is, you know, different models need different, you know, capabilities. And so ultimately, we want to be able to provide the capabilities, whether you're doing pre-fill and inference or decode, have the most performant capable architectures. And then ultimately, you know, as Jensen always talks about, we're building rack scale infrastructure with seven processors. We're trying to be best to read across all of those so that we can build these large AI factories and drive the best token efficiency per watt. And then ultimately have a great partner ecosystem that can extend that efficiency into these new domains and use cases.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, congratulations on the deal. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 58:18Speaker 04

  Pleasure to be here. Thanks, guys.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 58:20Speaker 05

  Thanks, Rodney.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 58:22Speaker 04

  Good to be here. Thanks.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  This was fantastic. Thank you to everyone who's tuned in, live from Falcon.

• 58:27Speaker 04

  Justin, great to see you. Cheers.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Okay. There are a few more stories that we should get through. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, was there anything else that you wanted to get to?

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  Give John Turnus a follow over on X.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yes, John Turnus has hit the timeline.

• 58:52Jordi Hays?

  What a, what a moment for X in some ways.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  Right? You know, we're how many years into the platform?

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Jordi Hays?

  And it still feels like if you assume an important position in the world of business, you simply can't afford not to be on X.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, the fact that, I mean, it's not like he's like, you know, tweeting random stuff or actually like breaking news there yet.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  No, he is. Since we started the show, he started shitposting.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 59:18Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  No, he's tweeting how lowercase, very online, very like native. But the fact that Jensen's on there, Mark Zuckerberg is on there, like, the AI conversation is truly happening on X. And it's exciting to be a part of it. Apple investors want the new CEO to be an innovator. This is in the Wall Street Journal, Ralph Winkler writes, talking about, there is one way, there's, there's one way which company observers have said has been lacking since the Steve Jobs era. Reving up Apple's innovation engine, especially in artificial intelligence. Tim Cook's brilliance was to take the company Jobs built and scale it massively. The year Cook took over, Apple sold 72 million iPhones this year. It will

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  be 255 million, tripling volumes, hitting annual release dates like clockwork, minimizing risky capital investments, and returning more than $1 trillion to shareholders. That is a size going moment. Helped Cook multiply Apple's valuation by 13 times. But Ralph Winkler in the Wall Street Journal says that Apple's investors now want Turnus to change things up. It's not enough to rest on your laurels. Just focus on operational efficiency. He's got to innovate, according to the Wall Street Journal, they say. But in Wall Street parlance, the positives look priced in. Apple's, Apple's stock trades at 33 times next year's earnings compared with the S and P 500's collective multiple of 20 times. Apple gets

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  that premium, even though its earnings are growing half as fast as the market. Investors are paying up for Apple because it looks safe at a time of broad anxiety over returns to be had on massive investments in AI. But when the valuation gets stretched, safety isn't safe anymore. And there are negatives that investors may be overlooking. In the age of AI, Apple has lost its status as the consumer, as the company that defines how consumers interact with devices, a title it held for 40 years from Apple II to the iPhone. So the Wall Street Journal wants Turnus to take risks, launch new products, you know, go aggressively. He certainly, seems like he's stepping back from the Apple Vision Pro, sadly. But we'll see, we'll see what he does. It'll be an exciting time.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  And last but not least, Dyson just released a new AI-powered toothbrush with integrated 100,000 pixel macro lens camera for $499. I know a lot of you people have been asking for AI in your toothbrush. I certainly know I have. And I'm glad that

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  This can't possibly be the first AI toothbrush. There have to be other ones.

• 1:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to get this and try it out. I certainly have never wanted

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Also, what are we doing with this 100,000 pixels?

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  In my toothbrush, or really a camera in my toothbrush, but

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  That's not how people measure camera lenses. They say megapixels, which I think is a million pixels. So it's actually a 0.1 megapixel lens camera.

• 1:02:08Jordi Hays?

  But I think we got to give it a shot.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:10Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to give it a shot. I don't want to judge it too much. I do like a good wooden toothbrush.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Wooden toothbrush.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  I like a wooden toothbrush, personally. I think they get the job done. But

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Hell, well.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  We got to try it out. We'll be back in the UltraDome tomorrow.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, back in the UltraDome tomorrow.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Cannot wait.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  We're heading back to Hollywood.

• 1:02:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Folks, it's been an honor.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  A pleasure.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  And a privilege.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.