Hacked CEO to Cybersecurity Author: Scott Schober on Transparency, Branding, and the End of Passwords
Cult Products · 2026-05-26 · 33 min
Substance score
41 / 100
Five dimensions, 20 points each
What our scoring noted
Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.
Insight Density
There are a handful of usable points scattered through 33 minutes - the 90-day password-change myth, the book-as-business-card channel strategy, and quantum computing's threat to AES-256 - but they're heavily diluted by origin-story padding, general encouragement, and awareness-level cybersecurity basics most B2B operators already know.
If my password is long and strong and secure and it's worked for 10 years, why should I change it every 90 days? It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. People are telling you, I'll change your password every 90 days. It's more secure. It's actually proven that it's more insecure.
our AES 256 bit gold standard encryption that the US DoD uses and everybody else around the world can be compromised like that with quantum computing
Originality
The anti-90-day password rotation argument is mildly contrarian and clearly stated from experience, and framing a book as a 'business card' and canceling advertising in favour of brand-building is a reasonable counter-narrative, but the rest of the episode recycles standard cybersecurity awareness messaging and generic 'believe in your idea' entrepreneurship advice with no genuinely fresh frameworks.
write a book not to make money. You write a book to make a connection. I call it my business card
cancel all your advertising. I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, but it's the truth. I did. I blindly listened.
Guest Caliber
Schober is a genuine operator with real credentials - second-generation CEO of a 54-year-old engineering firm, products used by FBI and Secret Service, 25,000 locomotive units shipped - but he has clearly transitioned substantially into a media/speaking/author identity, making this feel part-practitioner, part-professional podcast guest.
we've sold over 25,000 units on all just about all the locomotives throughout the entire United States
we give you a green light, red light. And that's been embraced by law enforcement, by Secret Service, by FBI
Specificity & Evidence
The episode contains a meaningful cluster of real specifics - dollar figures, named contacts, a dated incident, unit volumes - but they sit alongside extended passages of vague generalisation about human behaviour and brand-building, pulling the overall evidential quality to middling.
one Monday morning, I came in and I had $65,000 stolen out of our checking account
terrible train crash 2008 Chatsworth, California 25 people died tragically… led to a 50 piece pilot. We've sold over 25,000 units
Conversational Craft
The host asks broad, open-ended questions that are essentially prompts for the guest to monologue, never challenges a claim, does not follow up on interesting threads (e.g., the dark-web attribution, the quantum computing threat), and wraps difficult topics with deflecting humour rather than probing.
I'm hoping just through the act of talking to you, I'm not suddenly going to find myself targeted by a hit squad of cyber criminals. But you never know.
does it really feel like we're in a dramatically different space? Or does this just feel like it's kind of par for the course?
Conversation analysis
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the verbal tics along the way.
Share of words spoken
- Speaker A88%
- Speaker C10%
- Speaker B2%
Filler words
Episode notes
Scott Schober, CEO of Berkeley Varitronics Systems, explains why cybersecurity founders need transparency after his company suffered a hack. This conversation follows Scott's journey from a sixth grade hobbyist in his father’s basement to a leading voice in the industry. After a targeted attack cost his company $65,000, Scott chose to share his mistakes publicly through his book Hacked Again. We discuss the shift from traditional advertising to building a personal brand as an educator. Scott provides a reality check on the current state of digital identity, detailing why the 90 day password rotation rule creates more vulnerabilities than it solves. The episode also looks at the looming threat of quantum computing and its ability to compromise existing encryption standards in seconds. What You'll Learn: How building a personal brand through books and education can replace traditional advertising spend. Why total transparency about security failures builds more trust with customers than perfection. The structural problems with 90 day password rotation policies and why they increase risk. How to transition a multi generational family business to meet modern cybersecurity demands.
Full transcript
33 minTranscribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
I go contrary to a lot of experts in the world of cybersecurity. If you're an engineer and these layers of authentication have to be implemented, you get it, you understand it, you can implement it, but it's a pain in the butt for the average user. Welcome to Cult Products, a podcast by EIR Digital. I'm your host, Phil Keeney Bolland, and on this show we sit down with the founders and leaders shaping the next wave of cybersecurity innovation. You'll hear the stories behind how they found their first customers, defined what made them different, and built products that earned a loyal following in one of the toughest markets on earth. Let's dive in. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Cult Products podcast. Today I am joined by Scott Schober, the CEO of Barclay Varatronics Systems, which I'll be calling BVS to avoid stumbling over Varatronics. Welcome to the show, Scott. Hey, great to be here with you, Phil. I was wondering if we could maybe start with. So you don't mind me saying that you've been in the cybersecurity game for a little while. BVS originally founded in the 70s, I believe. Yeah, early 70s. And it is a family business, so we're actually what, it's about 54 years old now, roughly. I did not find the company because I was only about 2 years old then, was founded by my father. So I'm second generation and a number of years ago I resumed the helm of president and CEO of the company. We were initially a design company and then I kind of pivoted the company more toward product oriented and security products. So I've adjusted a little bit where our focus was. We originally came out of really the build out in the 1980s of wireless test equipment. So we built the actual test tools that built out the cellular networks as we know it today through all the different first, second, third, fourth, and now we're into the 5G fifth generation wireless networks. So we do transmitters and receivers and propagation analysis to find out where's the best spot to put those ugly towers and make our phones work. So we understand a lot of the wireless connectivity issues, but also we understand a lot of the vulnerabilities, how you can use phones wrongfully for cyber criminal purposes, let's say. And that really helped us launch a product line of security tools to help combat against cybercriminals and work with law enforcement. That is absolutely fascinating. It must have been. It's in your blood, I guess, to go into this. Did you always know you were Headed in that direction, taking over the family business, getting into cyber security. And it's a great question. I would say kind of yes. And maybe just a short bio on myself for a little bit of context or backstory. I started working this company in the sixth grade. So I was going through sixth grade coming out of elementary school and I remember my father was a self taught engineer, brilliant, and he still is. And he said to me, challenged me, he said do you want to learn how to fix something? And I said yeah, sure. And he goes well you have to learn how to solder. So he taught me how to solder and use a basic meter. And he says I've got these keypads here. We were selling keypads at the time the company for voting, audience research type of things. We did a lot of work for the television networks and what commercials do people like and not like. He said well, I got a lot of them. And I said yeah, I'll do it. And he goes, I'll give you a dollar for each one that you fix. I said, great, I'll learn how to fix them. I didn't realize he had over 600 of them that had to be fixed. So I was like this in sixth grade learning how to solder. But I went through them and fixed them and learned if the polarity of something was backwards, a diode put in wrong or an LED or something broken or bad solder joint and how to test them and use the meter to measure the voltage. And that kind of got me interested and I said, wow, I really enjoy hardware, electronics that the hands on type of things. And at a young age I quickly got involved in robotics. So we took that very serious as kids and they rewarded us or paid us with all the pizza we could eat and all the video games. So growing up I have fond memories of having. We always were allowed two arcade games in our basement at any one time because it was so fascinating to me just to learn, just to absorb. It wasn't really the trying to amass and get degrees and things, but it was the challenges and I think the fun of learning things that were different. And I think doing all that from 6th grade till present just had my hands involved in things. So it worked out well growing up in a family business and we were small in the beginning, a handful of people. Now we're, we're over 25 people, mostly engineers. And you know, the people around me that I'm surrounded with are far smarter than myself. They've got PhDs and deep experience and I've learned a lot about putting together good teams, smart people that can think outside the box, that maybe wear multiple hats, really help to create innovation and come up with ideas and challenge one another. And I think that's a fundamental part that makes at least my job fun. It's very stressful at times, and sometimes I say I wish I was just delivering pizzas for a living. But at other times, it is really fun because I don't know what each day the challenge is going to be coming in here, and I'm challenging engineers, I'm challenging myself, and just having fun coming up with different ideas. And most of the stuff, as I kind of alluded to, center around security and cybersecurity, where we're trying to think outside the box. How do we counter different types of threats? How do we counter common problems like financial crimes? It's a huge area of research I've been writing about and doing research on and coming up with different tools and technology. So, for example, ATMs, skimmers have been a huge problem for well over a decade. So we've developed tools that you could simply insert into an ATM and instantly tell, hey, is there a skimmer here that's about to steal your debit or credit card? We give you a green light, red light. And that's been embraced by law enforcement, by Secret Service, by FBI. And we've sold thousands of units in the past few years that are in the field every single day being used to fight cybercrime, which they estimate is about $2 billion a year in excess, just in skimmer fraud, which I never realized how bad the problem was. It's because most people don't know about it. It's scary, and it feels like things are moving really faster than ever. It feels like the challenges are exploding. The messages that we're being hit with all the time is, you know, this is worse than it's ever been. It's more complex. There's new threats emerging every 30 seconds and new products that you need to buy and all those kinds of things. As somebody who's been through probably multiple cycles of Internet and cloud and all of those kinds of things, does it really feel like we're in a dramatically different space? Or does this just feel like it's kind of par for the course? More of the same? Unfortunately, I'm an optimist by nature, and I always try to stay optimistic about everything in cyber. Unfortunately, when I back up, back to maybe 2010 to where we are today and in 2010 time frame, I really started immersing myself more in the world of security. That was our pivot as a company. And I found myself educating a lot of people. So I'm on stage, I'm talking about things, but these are more toward engineers, maybe a little bit of law enforcement, different groups. And I talked a lot about cyber. And the more I started to learn myself, I said, let me share back and educate. So I was speaking on the subject often. And then what happened was I got a target on my back. And back in those days, 2010, 2011, 2013 especially, cyber criminals were really doing well. It was a smaller group around the world. They were targeting people like myself and others that were educating people how to stay safe because it's messing up their gig. Hey, they're making a lot of money stealing people's credit cards and wire transfer fraud and the early days of DDoS attacks and account takeovers by getting people's credentials and passwords and login credentials and things like that. And next thing I know, I said, geez, what's happening? And out of the blue, I said, geez, my credit card got compromised, my debit card got compromised personally. And at the same time, for my company, I said, this is way too coincidental. Four cards all at the same time compromised. Strange activity. And then I had my Twitter account. Back in the day, I was an early Twitter user that was compromised. Our online store that we set up, we were starting to do commerce. We have repeated DDoS attacks. Now we're not receiving orders. I said, what is going on here? Then one Monday morning, I came in and I had $65,000 stolen out of our checking account. I said, this is not good. This is something serious. Became a federal investigation, and law enforcement's involved, the banks involved. I'm doing research. I started working with an Israeli company that was doing some searches on the dark web. And they traced it back, some of the activity that I shared with them, to some notorious cyber criminals that were basically trying to send me a message and shut me up. It turned into a mess. What do you think? Did you ever find out what it was specifically that had really got their backs up? I think what happened is it's when you start exposing criminals in that dark web, in the underground world to their techniques, and you help people to stay safe, it really starts to hurt their business model. And now they have to work harder and they have to use new scripts and change their game. It's a cat and mouse game back and forth. So the more I did, the more I educated and honestly, I rolled up My sleeves. I got annoyed. I said, you want to do that? Okay, let's play. I'm going to expose everything I can that I learned. And it wasn't myself alone. I can't say I could take credit for this or that. There were a lot of great research. Brian Krebs is a fellow colleague. Krebs on security. He publishes a weekly newsletter that educates people. And it's everything from fraud, identity theft, skimmers, you name it. He had a target on his back. I've met him. I've spoken with him and the likes of Kevin Mitnick, spoken on stage with him and met him. He became a friend. He sadly passed away a few years ago. But he was the world's greatest hacker that was reformed then educated people. He too was targeted. So this story I'm telling you is very common with those that came out of the community of hacking and pirating games. As I did and became reformed and said, hey, I'm going to do good. I'm a white hat hacker and I'm going to help people and educate people for good. They become a target. Unfortunately, that kind of comes with the territory. As a result of it, I was actually doing a TV interview at Bloomberg in New York City. I came off and went and calmed down and said, I'm going to get a bite to eat and get a drink and. And I got a phone call, I think was the Associated Press, and they said they heard about my story about my company being targeted and hacked. Would I like to go on the record? And I said, no. I said, this is embarrassing. Back in the day, you didn't hear about cyber breaches and compromises. You were ashamed if your company was targeted, especially a company that was expert in wireless, as we were, and emerging into this new realm of cyber that nobody really knew about back then. And I said, jesus, it's embarrassing. How'd you find out? Oh, we can't tell you that. But can you go on the record and confirm some of these things we knew? Boom, boom, boom. And I said, geez, you know what? You already know everything. I said, I'm going to be transparent. I said, I'll agree to it as long as you share it from my perspective. And I'm going to share my mistakes, what I did wrong, so other people don't go down the same path that I go down. And so I went through this and I spilled my guts and it was a bit embarrassing. But afterwards, I got praise from a lot of business colleagues. He said, you know, thank you for sharing your Story. I have a similar experience. I was compromised and I was targeted. And next thing you know, you kind of connect with different individuals in the industry. And then a few people started talking to me saying, you know, you should document this. I'm like, what are you talking about? Write a book. It's a book. I said, I'm not an author. I can't write. I'm a computer science guy. I'm a geek. I'm not a writer. I don't polish. I don't have that ability. I was pushed and pushed at the time at a dear friend who also was a publicist helping me get on TV and radio and build a brand at the time, which she did an amazing job. She pushed me and other colleagues pushed me and business colleagues and my family. And I said, you know what? Let me try. It took me two years. Oh, it was painful. Had my brother help me, who is a gifted writer and a co author for my later books, and he helped edit it and kind of got into my head growing up and in the games and other things. We related and works for the company also. So the combination of him helping me with my weakness allowed me, after two years, get it launched. We did self publishing, put it out on Amazon, get it in Barnes and Noble, get it into the libraries. And surprisingly, I don't know why I'm surprised, but I guess I'm surprised because I don't look at myself as a writer. It took off and we got a lot of success. And suddenly people are calling and saying, hey, I heard you were hacked. Hey, I heard you got this book. Hey, I want you to speak. Hey, I want to hire you for this. And it actually led to more business. So kind of we didn't plan it. We didn't think it would happen. You think it's one of those things you give to a couple friends and neighbors, hey, relative. Hey, here's my book I wrote, and that's it. And it goes away. Next thing you know, people are asking, well, what's your next book? And I'm like, what's my next book? I just finished book one. I never want to do this again and again. Pressure, success. You get pulled into the writing, and then suddenly you start having more stories and more things happen and more problems happen, and we're targeted even more. And so I wrote two Small business owners. Cybersecurity is everybody's business. That was my second book. The process got smoother. The time to develop and write a book shrunk down from two years to nine months. I said, wow, this is a lot better. I can do this. It's a little more manageable. So I started to learn how to write and share personal stories that resonate with me to hopefully my listeners so they can walk away with a couple tips, a couple points, things to learn from and maybe it's explaining or relating to them the importance of, you look at your login credentials, you got your username, your password word, how important multi factor authentication really is, that added layer of security. And then I would relate layers of security to maybe someone trying to rob your house. Everybody could relate to that. You have, you know, alarm stickers and a padlock and a deadbolt and cameras. Those layers of security simply deter a cyber criminal to move on to the next house. Same thing with building layers of security in cybersecurity world, on the Internet, on your computer, deter thieves, they move to the low hung fruit, the easier target on someone else that's going to be a victim and steal from them. So the entire history of humankind is how people kind of can relate to concepts, can have an emotional impact on them, can get them hooked, all those kind of things. And then the other I think, really interesting thing is just how much you were then able to put yourself out there from day one as well. Because, you know, a lot of people said probably wouldn't write a book about something potentially not just embarrassing, but kind of contrary to what you do as a, as a business and own it and say, right, I'm going to face this business, I'm the face of this hack. Let me tell you the story. What would you say to, and I do speak to a lot of people who are slightly reticent about putting themselves out there. It's a big step, can be embarrassing. You know, all your mates are going to see it, clients and customers are going to see it. Why should somebody do that? Is a brilliant point. Building on that, when you're transparent, people see that you make mistakes, you're not perfect, you're vulnerable. But it also conveys a sense of, I think, honesty. You're true to yourself. And what that means to me is when a customer talks to me, they talk to my company, my support team, my engineers, they're going to hopefully see that same messaging. They're going to buy something, they're going to invest in something, but they got a company behind it, they've got years of research and design and support and no company's perfect. Where companies shine is when there are problems, how do you handle it? Do you call them back? Just send a Blind email. If you take the time to really be there, get in the trenches with your customer with problems, they notice that. How do they reward you? They come back and give you more business. And I think that's kind of what I learned, even with writing a book. You write a book not to make money. You write a book to make a connection. I call it my business card. I was told early on, when you write a book, give it to everybody, just give it away and don't worry about selling it. Everybody thinks about, oh, if I give a book away, then no one's going to buy it. Nobody wants to buy your book in that standpoint. You don't want to pressure your friends to go buy your book. Your customer base is probably not your relatives and your friends. They're going to do it because they like you. Maybe you're a nice guy or nice girl, whatever, but give it to everybody. Why? Because everybody you give a book to, they're your salesforce, in a sense, indirectly. They're going to tell someone, hey, I got this book from this guy. It's about cybersecurity. Oh, really? Well, we have a cyber. We just got compromised. We're a victim of ransomware attack. Who is this guy? What does this book about? What does her company do? That's how business builds, by networking and sharing and being transparent and being open to your problems. So in a backwards way, I think I stepped into a powerful channel that allows you to network, market, and grow a brand. When you grow a brand and you hear this all the time, you hear all these famous people, brand and innovator, and what are the other term? Influencer, and all these other terms that they make up. I don't know what half of them are, but people tell me, oh, you're an influencer. Oh, you're an innovator. I guess I don't. I'm running a cybersecurity company. Whatever you want to brand me as, that's fine, I'll accept it. My goal is to educate. I look at it as. I'm an educator first, sharing information, distilling it into ways that people can digest it and understand it to improve their lives, to stay safe. If I could do that, that's my parting words in all my book. I say stay safe or whatever. So I think you learn how to do that. My background, growing up as a kid, I mentioned I was kind of the geek behind the scenes. I couldn't stand in front of a classroom and give a report. I couldn't look people in the eye and Speak. I couldn't get up on stage, so I had to learn how to put myself out there as a brand or a face of the company to write a book. I get hired regularly to get up on stage in front of tens of thousands of people to speak. I didn't have that natural ability. I had to learn that over time. I had to build confidence. And writing does that to some extent. Interviews like this, these are podcasts, I think are excellent forms. I always encourage people, and maybe you're not going to be on TV tomorrow or on the radio, but podcasts are a nice stepping stone to insert yourself into a media format that actually gets listeners. When you're driving in a car, people are listening to this, perhaps on their phone, or they subscribe to your podcast, and maybe they pick up one or two tips or points that's valuable, that's imparting and sharing information that maybe is lost in TV with commercials and distractions and things like that. So sometimes thinking out the box and building your brand differently really helps because it feeds your business model back. And I think that that's so intricate. I have numerous times conclusively seen when I speak on stage, when I go on a podcast, when I go on a TV show, when I go on a radio show, when I write books, when I write blogs, when I educate, I see results. When people call, when people email. Hey, I want to learn more about you, your company, your products. I have something that needs to be designed. Again and again, it's happened. And I stand back and look at it and I say, wow. Traditionally, I used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising, magazines and mailings and all kinds of things we would do just to kind of solicit interest in our company. I was taught early on, when I started writing my book and when I started to build a brand with my publicist, she said, first of all, cancel all your advertising. I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, but it's the truth. I did. I blindly listened. And I said, I'm going to go in full steam and try this. I'm going to build a brand. And what happened was, instead of me chasing business, people chase you. It sounds counterintuitive. It's weird. Instead of me asking to speak at an event, people will call me and say, hey, can I hire you to speak? And we'll pay you this much dollars and we'll buy this many books. It's backwards, it's counterintuitive, but it works. And it doesn't happen overnight. To your point, because a book is a long and tedious process and learning how to speak and becoming an expert on a subject, I think the most important thing, maybe for your listeners, whatever your business is, be the best at it that you can be. Be an expert in your niche, not in the general area. Find your niche, carve it out, and continually educate yourself and share that information generously with your audience. Audiences appreciate that, because now they start taking things to practice. Hey, this crazy guy, Scott, got this hacked again book and this book and that book, and he told me I should use multifactor authentication. And he told me how to avoid a ransomware attack. And he told me how to remember this complicated password and, you know, little things like that. And then they start implementing it and they say, wow, I feel safer. I don't feel like my identity is going to be compromised. I don't feel like I'm going to have my account taken over. I don't feel like this is going to happen. It empowers them. So part of it is you're building your audience and you're empowering them. And maybe you look at it as you hear all these coaches and people that try to pump you up and teach you how to believe in yourself. I think I had to learn how to believe in myself and the message that I was giving and live by it, implement those things. If I'm talking about, hey, why is it so important to use a good, solid password manager? It's because nobody remembers stupid passwords. They got to be long and strong. And by the time you explain it all, everyone's like, I'm not going to do that. It's easier just to use one password and use it across multiple logins. Well, that's a mistake. I was really kind of looking forward to asking you today, which I think, how do you feel things have changed within cybersecurity, thinking about this current era to maybe going back through from 2010. What do you think the big differences now are and how are you kind of coping with those? I think back in 2010, when I would talk to people about passwords, protecting your identity and being too social on social media, or they would discuss a ransomware attack. I got a deer in a headlight stare. Most people were kind of like, what are you talking about? Huh? Huh? And they go back to doing what they would do. Unfortunately, a good percentage of people now are aware of if you say a ransomware attack, they know what it is. They understand the basics of it. They don't understand the intricacies of how data is ex filtered and how that could be used to further extort information. And they don't understand the inner workings of Bitcoin, but they kind of know it. It's probably you pay with Bitcoin or something and my computer's taken over. They get the basics and how do you avoid it? Don't click on something that's good. So education is helping. Unfortunately, cyber criminals are a step ahead. They're going to improve their phishing attacks. They're going to move to smishing vishing or whatever to you. You know, a text message where you click on it on your phone that then does a redirect to a site that looks authentic and. And people type in their information. So people are the problem and people are the solution. And I've said that from 2010 and I'll say it today and I'll probably say it again in 10 years till my eyes are bleeding. We are part of the problem. We're creatures of habit. We tend to be lazy, we tend to be complacent, we tend to find the shortcut, we want the easy way out. We don't want to do things that are long and tedious. So we're always making a conscious choice. I wrote one of the chapters in one of my books on this about we will choose. And they could use tools and techniques and education to help reinforce that messaging. Where are the exceptions of that rule is where the demographic that's very difficult, that's targeted more than anything, I think, are seniors. That was my third book, Senior Cyber. I was helping my grandfather at the time. He was in his 90s. My father and mother, who were in their 70s at the time, and they were frustrated using mobile phones and passwords and computers. And I remember my father one day sitting there, I was trying to help him and he goes, what is all this? He goes, I'm an engineer. And he goes, this is stupid. He goes, nobody's going to do this. I says, you're right. And that's part of fundamental problems. Cyber criminals know. We don't have the patience to sit there and write some fakacta password and remember it and then have to. We're told we're changing it. People are told, change your password every 90 days. That's another myth I don't agree with. And I argued against many people. If my password is long and strong and secure and it's worked for 10 years, why should I change it every 90 days? It's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of. People are Telling you, I'll change your password every 90 days. It's more secure. It's actually proven that it's more insecure. Why 90 days? Now you type a new password, now you write it down somewhere, you put it in your password manager, on your sticky note, in your magic book, whatever. Every time you write down a new password and you get rid of your old password, there's a chance someone else sees it, someone else shoulder surf, someone else copies your sticky note, someone takes a picture, whatever. You're just increasing the likelihood that you'll forget it or someone else compromises it or, or it's in transit somewhere on the Internet because you emailed it to yourself or wherever. So people don't realize we're the problem. We're creating an insecure world by surrounding ourselves by these insecure passwords that we don't know how to properly manage. I've got a little more than 200 passwords I manage. That's a lot of passwords. That's pathetic. But I'm not alone. A lot of people probably have somewhere in that neighborhood of 50 to 100 passwords on average. That's a lot to manage. It becomes almost your part time job managing your security. I don't like that and nobody does. And then I hate to add this in, but this is a reality check here for listeners. Quantum computing is going to is here and it's emerging. Quantum computing, with its speed and advanced parallel processing, basically undoes everything that we know today as secure. And saying it in simple Layman's terms, our AES 256 bit gold standard encryption that the US DoD uses and everybody else around the world can be compromised like that with quantum computing. So passwords that take thousands of years to compromise with automated software tools that are being used today that are long and strong, passwords you and I use can be compromised in a second. With quantum computing applied, that to me is scary as anything because our entire world is based on insecure passwords that we all struggle with right now. What's going to happen when we enter the quantum era? It's going to be a long, tough ride. It's going to change things from a security perspective as we know it. Well, on that cheery note, I think we might be coming up to time. I'm hoping just through the act of talking to you, I'm not suddenly going to find myself targeted by a hit squad of cyber criminals. But you never know. Yeah, I know who I'll be calling if, if I need some help dealing with that situation. It's been really great to chat to you today, Scott. I really appreciate you coming on. I like to just sort of end these shows really with a kind of final thought from you, which is if you could just go back, you know, to the start of your journey, taking over the business, running it as CEO, what advice would you give yourself that you now take for granted? I think early on, and even to some extent till today, even I'm constantly told no, I have an idea, I have a thought, I have a product, I have something that can counter a serious vulnerability, a serious problem in the world of cybersecurity and security in general. And many people that again are far smarter than myself will say, no, that's a dumb idea that can't be done. I don't think so. Nobody will buy it. Whatever the case may be, don't take that at face value. Challenge it. Go do the research. I didn't do that early on. I took a lot of things at face value and believed in people when they'd say, nat, I ain't going to work. Some of our best products and best ideas were ones that I didn't give up on. Short story or antidote terrible train crash 2008 Chatsworth, California 25 people died tragically. We got a phone call from a rail company out there in la. Asked to develop a little engine to do cell phone detection for distracted operator. We did it. We did trials. Never fully implemented. Two years of on and off completely failed. I was told, it's not going to work. I was ready to give up. And people telling me, no, no, no. And I said, you know what? No, I don't agree with it. Let's perfect it, let's improve it, let's not give up, let's keep going. Didn't sell a single unit or single solution. After those two years, we got a phone call from the largest locomotive manufacturer in the United States. They said, we heard you got this crazy idea you're doing something to combat distracted operators. We want to talk to you. Conversation ensued, led to a 50 piece pilot. We've sold over 25,000 units on all just about all the locomotives throughout the entire United States. To combat distracted operator. When operators trains look down and phone their girlfriend, play games, whatever, missed their signals and ended up crashing a train. It took off. And when I reflect back and what impact did it have? I don't fully know. But hopefully deep down there's never another crash like that. Tragic 25 death and in part, it's because of the innovation that we created and it makes trains safer on the tracks because these trains, these locomotives are pulling hundreds of cars, toxic chemicals and everything else and they crash. And that could lead to hundreds of thousands of people in a city dying. It makes a difference. But you got to believe in your idea, your vision, execution of it, and never give up. Even when people say, nah, it's not going to work or it's a dumb idea. Don't focus on the money. Everybody focuses too much, I think, on making money money focus on a solution. The money comes later if you have success. When you believe in an idea, obviously those ingredients in marketing and sales and the price point and return on investment, so and so forth, they will come eventually. But a good idea is only as good as you can develop all those ideas later on. You got to prove it works first and not give up on the idea and find that one adopter, all you need is one company, one person that believes in your idea. Then it takes fruition and grows into something amazing that doesn't stop. So I always tell people, believe in it. That's all. Just believe in your ideas. Well, I think that's a much more optimistic note to end the podcast on. Scott, thank you so much for joining today. It's been great and if people want to follow you, hear more from you, where should they find you? Yeah, they could always jump on my website. Our company website is bvsystems.com and I also have my own personal website, scottschober.com with my books and speaking and tips and downloads and we've done thousands of videos for education and all. Welcome anyone to check that out and stay safe. Everybody out there, thank you for the opportunity. Brilliant conversation. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, thank you. Great. Thanks everybody for listening. COP products is brought to you by Yaya. Helping cybersecurity companies define who they're for, what they do and how they're different. To learn more or visit Yaya Co. And don't forget to search for cult products in Apple podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Follow the show so you never miss an episode. On behalf of the team at Yaya, thanks for listening.
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