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John Watters

John Watters

President of Mandiant

Oct 18, 2026

11:53
OK, Nigel and Alison are going to take me to the heart of the action, the house in Knighton where Samuel Greatrex once lived and where, remarkably, the original tree is still growing.
12:05
Originally, the garden would have stretched all the way down there.
12:09
So you have to walk on this rather narrow field and slightly awkward path.
12:36
And are you now pestered by Annie Elizabeth fans banging on your door? Well, we're
12:39
trying to keep a distance.
12:41
Yes, we don't want to be too annoyed.
12:43
There are certain people like Nigel who we will tolerate.
speaker_0HOST
1:44
When we talk about these AI-powered cyber attacks, what can an attacker actually do today that wasn't realistically possible a few years ago?
1:54
And they can do the same things way faster and through way different vectors that they could have never seen manually.
2:00
So the automated reconnaissance capability that allows an attacker to go profile a target quickly and build bespoke capability to maintain a durable advantage over that target has never been like it is today.
2:13
I mean, it used to take months, maybe a year, to target a profile effectively.
2:18
Today, these guys can do it in a very short period of time.
2:21
So the advent of AI-enabled attackers really hit the scene probably about 12 to 18 months ago.
2:29
And last year, you had a bit of innovation stagnation on the defenders as they tried to sort out how they're going to fight the fight, build on the policy and guidelines and guardrails around deploying agents in a defensive posture.
speaker_0HOST
4:30
Given how strong CrowdStrike's results were, what does Palo Alto need to deliver tonight for investors to believe that the cybersecurity spending cycle is accelerating?
5:44
Talk to me a little bit more about how you see the critical minerals sort of choke on the supply chain impacting the broader economy.
5:53
Yeah, good question.
5:55
So yeah, everybody thinks F-35, well, not my problem, right? We already got a bunch of F-35s.
6:00
just by way of reference.
6:01
So there's 50 critical minerals and metals on this list that the United States have that are our core dependencies to maintain our economic growth and to sustain our ability to project force forward.
6:15
50.
6:16
You'd never heard of 40 of them.

5 MINS LATER

11:20
So where do you see, John, the demand for this going over, let's say, the next decade and then much buffer you said one day which makes me nervous how much buffer do we have in our inventory of these critical minerals yeah yeah that's a good

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