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It's Not If, It's When: The Backup You Don't Have

Hard lessons64 min20 May 2026

Railway went dark for three hours. A ransomware crew took an ERP offline for weeks — and there were no backups. When it happens to you, do you have a recovery protocol, or just a hope?

DP
Dave Pengelley
MS
Matt Slager
MB
Marno Brits
RW
Richard Webbe
YouTube
Show notes

Railway went dark for three hours. A ransomware crew took an ERP offline for weeks — and there were no backups. So here's the uncomfortable question: when it happens to you, do you have a recovery protocol, or just a hope?

This week the panel works through what resilience actually looks like once your business runs on agents and someone else's cloud. Air-gapped redundancy. Knowing your KPIs before you automate a thing. The quiet shift from "automate everything" back to augmenting the people who already know what good looks like.

Then it turns forward. If AI is the next platform to monetise — agents that know you better than you know yourself and buy before you blink — what happens to trust? Because prompt injection is still unsolved, even Sam Altman says so. An agent with web access and a wallet is a new kind of risk. The agentic commerce future and the security gap underneath it, in the same conversation.

Plus: the new aioperatorspod.com is live, built agentically end to end — and the first AI Operators IRL event lands in Sydney this June.

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Chapters

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00:00Cold open — Hamilton, binaural beats and focus music
05:05Welcome — how's everyone going
05:37Matt's morning: Railway down, services dark at an 8am demo
07:13Telstra scam calls and AI voice cold-callers
09:13AI avatars on video calls — the four-finger test
11:21AI Update: the Railway outage, breakdown (Google Cloud block)
13:16What Railway is — and the redundancy lesson
14:54Disaster recovery architecture — distributed vs one throat to choke
16:40Pronto ransomware — weeks down, no backups
17:34"It's not if, it's when" — air-gapped redundancy for production
19:15DR as insurance — when do you roll the dice?
20:49Dave's war story — dropping the live database
22:00Critical path — analyse what actually breaks
23:17Augmentation over automation — superhuman teams, not replacement
24:23Token cost forces the question — which agents add value?
25:00Satya Nadella clip — start with the output you care about
26:20Start with the end in mind — find the constraint
28:33Know your KPIs — Netflix and the insurance-payout data story
30:03Data without experience is just data
32:11News: Antigravity 2.0 and the Gemini CLI
33:31Gemini 3.5 Flash — speed, TPUs, pricing
35:08Google's $100 Ultra plan vs staying on Claude
36:26Karpathy joins Anthropic; Musk's OpenAI lawsuit thrown out
38:33Win of the week — the Adaptive AI Solutions site
40:24Marno's win — surpassing his old salary as a business
41:22Richard on AI conferences and the fundamentals
42:57The monetisation eras — internet, social commerce, what's next
45:00Agentic commerce — your agent buys before you blink
46:49Ads inside AI research — AI as a biased single source of truth
49:53Prompt injection — the unsolved problem
52:28Fake news on steroids — trust, regulation and zero trust
53:53Digital currency and the risk to banks
55:43Dave's wins — his son's first agent, and "AI for AI's sake"
57:32aioperatorspod.com launch + the AI Operators IRL event
58:35Building the site agentically — Claude Design to Claude Code
1:03:49Wrap + sign-off
Resources

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