Wrap-up: Final Episode of Security Voices

Speaker A: This shrimp is stunning.

Speaker B: It turns out that being retired has some advantages over working for a living.

Speaker A: One should never confuse adventure travel and family travel.

Speaker B: Just sitting on the rocking chair on the porch waiting to die, that's all I'm doing.

Speaker C: If that sounds like a really dumb

Speaker A: idea on the surface of it, you'd be absolutely right.

Speaker B: Everything is no more than two steps from Daniel Kahneman. Welcome back to Security Voices, and this is a special episode. Hey, Dave, how are you doing?

Speaker A: Fine. We took a little family vacation to Nicaragua, of all places, where I learned a life lesson. One should never confuse adventure travel and family travel.

Speaker C: So taking an 11 year old through

Speaker A: Nicaraguan customs when you're jet lagged and tired because you were on a super funky flight at like midnight and having to get through on Spanish and small

Speaker C: bills, schlepping stuff for like three hours across the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, if that sounds like a really

Speaker A: dumb idea on the surface of it, you'd be absolutely right. So it was really restful. Once we got there, it was great. And once we got back, I'm a proud Wolverine. Of course, I went to the Rose bowl, so it's been kind of a wild break, but it's been restful and super exciting with my Wolverines finally winning their first bowl game since 2015 against Alabama. So, yeah, I'm about ready to go off to, uh, Houston next week against my better judgment, and watch them play in the CFP championship against Washington. So things are fun over here and exciting. I'm back in the saddle, working now. We've got a big quarter ahead of us, Important time for the company, so no rest for the wicked. I've been back at it since last week.

Speaker C: How about yourself?

Speaker A: What's going on down in Georgia?

Speaker B: Well, it's winter here, which means that, uh, the azaleas are about to start blooming. The camellias are all in bloom, the hibiscus is flowering in the front yard. Typical winter, but I'm just playing with things. One of the guitars is getting refinished, uh, finishing the French polish on it. Built, uh, a giant shrimp just for the hell of it, and had that out as a Christmas decoration. Sandy Claws, the Christmas shrimp, starting to work on a giant set of wind chimes with 5 foot or longer pipes for the, the low notes up to one foot. So that's a massive thing. Just, uh, playing with all sorts of stuff, taking care of the yards, wandering aimlessly through life, basically just sitting on the rocking chair on the porch waiting to die. That's all doing These days

Speaker C: while making

Speaker A: a six foot, seven foot flaming shrimp.

Speaker B: Yeah, the shrimp was, uh, I won't say anatomically correct, but it's pretty close. It's got the right number of sections and tail and the head and it's got big bug eyes on them. The antenna do have, ah, propane fed through them. So we kind of flaming antenna on the, on the guy. It was central figure in our solstice celebration. And then we put him out in the front yard to, uh, celebrate the winter holidays, Christmas and all.

Speaker A: This shrimp is stunning. I've copied over a couple pictures to our random channel at Open Raven on Slack, and the shrimp has a huge fan base now over here at Team Open Raven. So. You are gifted, sir.

Speaker B: That is so cool. Yeah. Tomorrow we'll be, uh, working in the forge. I got a couple of little projects to do, but, uh, just, you know, just uh, trying to do all sorts of stuff at once. Built a quilt rack for lady friend Her. She's a prolific quilter. She does amazing stuff. So the living room and the project space is filling up with quilts and we're filling up with pets. Just, uh, you know, having a good time. Turns out that I don't want to rub this in as you're looking at the quarter you're looking at, but it turns out that being retired has some advantages over working for a living.

Speaker A: Yeah, I will join you, but no time real soon. My work isn't quite done yet. In that spirit, however, this is our final episode of Security Voices Together and the final episode of Security Voices. There's no point in either one of us carrying it on here. It's been an amazing journey, but we both agreed kind of last fall, actually kind of early winter, that we'd call it a wrap. You're retired. I'm busy as hell with startup life, and I've started to do some things with University of Michigan and still have my board seat and so on. I have enough extracurricular activities before I even consider family life. That, uh, pushing this on without you, sir, and certainly into your retirement just didn't make sense. So it's been an amazing journey, but this will be wraps for Security Voices. There'll be no additional episodes from us, although I think the old ones continue on out there and we'll leave the site up at least. No reason to bring it down. It's cheap to maintain out there, but,

Speaker C: yeah, this will be it for us.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's been fantastic. I mean, I'm trying to remember when we started talking about this, but we you know, you. We kicked the idea around, uh, what, a couple years before we. It actually became a thing and we launched it in February of 2019. And I'm not sure, but I think a few things may have changed in the world since February of 2019. As I recall, I was there for classes at Second City in Hollywood and we did it on site at what was the company you remember, Replicated.

Speaker A: So Grant Miller and the replicated team were still in la. They were still a young company. They've since Grant since moved to Austin. The company's grown up, done a big Series C and so on. It was over in Culver City and there just wasn't at the time, Jack Rysider with Darknet Diaries, I think hadn't launched or was just about to launch.

Speaker C: Risky Business was out there, which was good. But there wasn't anybody doing this kind

Speaker A: of long form kind of interview type podcast at the time. In my head I was always thinking kind of a Tim Ferriss style podcast without Tim Ferriss, but for cybersecurity, honestly there was just. I'd always kind of wanted to do radio and like you and I when we were at Tenable, I'd always wanted to do something like this with you. I believe you and I chatted about it when we were in Ireland together. We yapped about it at a Guinness pub there. So to me, mission accomplished across the board.

Speaker C: Were there any other ideas or things

Speaker A: that you wanted out of this originally, kind of reflecting back at this point?

Speaker B: No, I think we got it. We wanted to have good conversations. We wanted to bring people into, you know, bring conversations. Uh, I think the way you described is we have all these great conversations at conferences, at meetings, randomly, and it's too bad we can't share them. And I think we did a pretty good job of that. If I were to find fault with something, it would have been great to have more fresh voices. We certainly made a, uh, strong effort and brought a lot of fresh voices in. But you can always look back and say, well, maybe we could have done better. But I think we had a lot of fresh voices. And then when we had people who I don't want to, you know, uh, you know, the usual suspects or whatever being long form, I think we got more out of them. They shared more than the normal 10, 15 minute, highly produced, scripted kind of interviews that they often do, they became people. I think in cases where everybody knows our first guest, Wendy Nather, everybody knows Wendy, but that was a very personal conversation. She's a dear friend and I Think even for the better known people, we got to talk to them as people, not just as um, industry people, 100% on both accounts.

Speaker A: One, there were a number of people that we reached out to. They just weren't responsive. And lots of times it was the people who don't normally do this stuff. It was funny. It was easier to get the busy people who normally were involved with media than it was to get the people who probably would have benefited disproportionately from being on the podcast and being interviewed and getting the publicity and the things that go with it. Not that we ever generated a massive footprint, but having said that, the people who did listen to the pod I think were very influential across the board and we could have helped some people. And yeah, I think this is where like running it as a two man show as opposed to a big production, we were able to reach some great folks. There were some guests like Straith. I re listened to some of the Straith episode this morning, which was really cool and I was glad we were able to have her on who probably best fits that bill of kind of up and coming person doing interesting stuff. But yeah, that was an area where we really didn't nail it. But I do think exactly what you said. We've been able to humanize and have unhurried conversations with people that that will be very relatable to folks coming into the industry.

Speaker C: And I think that was something that

Speaker A: I think was important to me and I believe it was important to you is part of this was the intention was to leave an audio legacy here of conversations with incredibly influential and important people in the space in a way that makes them approachable to anybody for free, with no advertising, with no interference, whether it's product dialogue with Al Huger, that episode is fantastic. Or category conversations with Oliver or Go down the Line. It's like even Wendy as a first episode, like you said. I mean being able to listen to her and her advice was great. I think we nailed that one and you know, be proud to leave it up. And for young people and folks who are early in their cyber career being able to go in and do this, I mean a lot of the early investors were considered open Raven. There's a whole bunch of investor conversations there.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was just going to say that the investor conversations were educational, they were entertaining and informative and a broad span of perspectives from Chen C to Ping to Kara Nortman and others. And also something that uh, for people and I think most of our listeners are into the industry aspect of it. When you pair the investor series with the following. The tale of Open Raven, that episode of compilation of conversations with several people at Open Raven and what happened and how you processed. If you're thinking about, uh, starting a company, there's gold here. I mean, there's absolute gold here for people who. And even if you're at a company that's starting to take money, it was a little tiny thing and they're starting to take money and heading down a route. Understanding how the investment world works and why it works the way it does can just make it easier for you to sit there as a product manager or team lead and understand what the company is doing and why. Those things I thought were good and they were, you know, they were fun. I, uh, came away knowing that Kara is very smart and you don't want to get on the wrong side of Kara Nortman. You would like to be on her good side. That's true for a lot of these people. They don't get where they are if they don't have the strength of their convictions, faith in themselves. Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's been interesting. I mean, Kara actually left right after our series B. She left Upfront, she became a big wig general partner at Upfront and then left right after to pursue her passion, which is women's sports. She was always involved in women's soccer, especially for the US the women's national team. But now she's running, um, Angel City FC in the women's. The national women's soccer league, and running a women's venture called Monarch, I think is what it's called Monarch Partners or something along those lines. So, yeah, she's one of the fascinating people that we had on who have kind of since moved on from security. But, you know, at that moment in time, it was so cool to get her perspective on things and to have her involved. And, you know, it's interesting that was one thing for the company. I mean, candidly, we wanted to have a woman on the board and, you know, she's no longer on the board and now we have a board that's all dudes. And it's just sort of the rough and tumble nature of things and how you can have the best of intentions as a company, but things happen along the way on that spirit. Actually, like I wanted to track out. So we started in 2019, early 2019. And not only have I built a company and you've got, you've had a ton of things happen during this time frame. One of the more important ones is your own retirement and Leaving cybersecurity and phasing out of B sides and so on. So this is very thematic for you. But if we sit back and say what's happened in the world. Well, of course, the pandemic. And as I was listening to the early episodes this morning, I, uh, was listening to the episode with Ken White, I was listening to the episode with Sven Crosser which was right before RSA and we were talking, I was like, yeah, IBM's just pulled out of RSA and after that the avalanche of companies that pulled out and it was kind of interesting. But we had the pandemic which really went on for most of the podcast. Save the past like 18 months. We had the insurrection and everything that happened with Jan6 and transitioning from Trump to Biden. We had George Floyd and like the Woke movement, now the anti woke movement and all the hilarity that's come through that and all the pain. We've had the banking collapse of SVB and we got like the Michael Zaluski episode which was right after all of our money was seized by the US government for Open Raven.

Speaker B: And what was his one bit of advice? You know, if we can distill it down, have a rainy day fund.

Speaker C: Yeah, you know, it's.

Speaker A: That actually turned out fine.

Speaker C: And part of the reason it didn't

Speaker A: even like raise my cortisol levels given everything else that had happened. A huge thing kind of the unthinkable to uh, a certain degree. Just two wars, you know, the war in the Ukraine and the one that's happening in Gaza Strip. I mean this podcast has been founded and then existed through turbulent times on a global scale from an industry perspective, from cybersecurity. We've gone through a cycle where it was a boom time for startups and kind of the end of a 10 year bull run now to a bust cycle and one that's very much about consolidation and people not going after small companies and preferring to purchase from companies like us, but preferring bigger companies as a general trend right now and kind of fleeing to safety and so forth. So I mean, my God, for about a half decade worth of a podcast

Speaker C: we've, you know, we've had a couple

Speaker A: decades of things happen. I loved the Michael Zaluski quote he said. I forget who he was quoting, but he was like, in some decades weeks happen and in some weeks decades happen. It was something along those lines, to paraphrase. But yeah, certainly the case.

Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, he having grown up in Poland and seen what he has seen through life, it's amazing. He just thinks about things in a analytical but fun, analytical way. Uh, the other day he was talking on Mastodon about plowing snow. He said this would make a great video game because you're trying to push the snow, but it falls off the edge of the blade and whatever and how you can angle the blade to do this. And, you know, having plowed for decades in New England, I jumped in and it's like, yeah. And you push the equipment, it breaks. If you baby it, it takes longer, but you don't have to get out in the snow. But he thinks about gamification of all sorts of things. So that was, that was cool. But yeah, a little bit has happened in the world since then. And, uh, you know, just mentioned the war, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is not a great time to have vintage Russian motorcycles and need parts. So I have had to make a few things out in the forge for bracketry and stuff and make some stuff fit. Uh, just, uh, you know, be one of those. It's all about me. It's. It's. It's not. But it was just funny. I actually bought one of those, right. The old one right before the invasion and dropped it off for some repairs the day of the invasion. And a guy that owns the Russian motorcycle dealership, it's actually an American company now, but they make the bodies in frame in Russia still. We just kind of looked at each other and he was like, well, we'll see what happens. It's just one of those things that the number of third, fourth, fifth level repercussions from these things, you know, what, what it's done, and, you know, the political tensions of NATO and everything else and the cyber attacks that are either directly or indirectly part of war have been interesting. And so here we are.

Speaker A: Let's talk about our guests for a moment. So we had on Camille, and Camille Stewart, I think is her last name, if I'm not butchering it too much. Uh, Camille was awesome. We had her on for election fraud. Camille now has a very big job in the US Government. She was at Google when we spoke to her. Let's see what her official title is here. But Camille Stuart Loxter, she's actually gotten married as well. She's now the Deputy National Cyber Director at the White House. Amazing. And she's just incredibly impressive. So proud to have her in the government and encouraging to see her there. And Nan Mulchindani, who we'd spoken to when he was doing a variety of different things. I think he was at the Jake of the DoD, the Joint AI Commission and doing so now what we know to be incredibly important work in the early days of really them considering AI and what they were doing but then moved on and now he's the CTO of the CIA and it's amazing that we've got a freaking conversation with him sitting up there for people to digest and have his background. So those were two of just the cool ones of people who he'd spoken to now in big government roles. And then you look at Nilou and I think she's taken on even more positions and our only ever two part interview because it was so big and so freaking good.

Speaker B: Yeah, that one just kept going. Her personal story is amazing and her professional story is amazing and the way she wove them together and just like amazing. I keep using that word.

Speaker A: Extraordinary human being.

Speaker C: Kind of like a little bit like Michael Zaluski. Like I think if you were to

Speaker A: like when you go through Michael Zaluski and his background and who he is and listen to him, you realize like oh my God, maybe I haven't accomplished that much in life.

Speaker C: You get that same feeling from Nilou. It's like wow. I thought I might be overwhelmed by things like I might have too much

Speaker A: going on, but now I think actually I don't have nearly enough.

Speaker C: Like I'm so disappointed in myself after hearing about Nilou's life.

Speaker B: I may be running non stop but apparently I'm lazy.

Speaker C: Yes, yes, she's amazing and so is Michael.

Speaker A: Two of my favorites.

Speaker C: Now if we look at people in

Speaker A: cyber positions, we've got Josh Lemos who we spoke to early on AI and a good one. He was talking about machine learning and AI back before it was much of a thing, heavily ML focused. But when he was at BlackBerry he became the CISO at uh Block the Artist Formerly Known as Square and has since moved on to GitLab. So Josh has changed around quite a bit. Justin Somani is now over at Unity Gaming Engine and we've got Mike Lyons who joined us right around the time the Joe Sullivan story broke and everything was happening there. Mike's now over at Sneaky and there's been a number of CISOs and folks we've had on that have switched positions. But those guys have all jumped into big jobs and it was interesting to re listen to Zane Lackey who when we spoke to him he was Signal Sciences, CISO and evangelist and so on. He's now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and ah, re listening to some of that this Morning actually.

Speaker C: I was like, oh, yeah, there's a

Speaker A: venture capitalist in there. I hear it.

Speaker C: It's in there.

Speaker A: Some of the AI stuff too was interesting. We had Sven Crosser on. So Sven was talking about it too and made a bunch of points about data that are now incredibly prescient.

Speaker C: Zane was talking a lot about open

Speaker A: source and it was funny at the time it was 2019 and there was

Speaker C: a comment in there about open source security.

Speaker A: I was asking him, like, hey, we just had this huge issue with Apache struts. Where do you think this is going? Are we at the beginning, the middle, near the end of it?

Speaker C: He's like, kind of the middle of it.

Speaker A: And then log four J hits a couple years later, you know, shitstorm ensues and so forth. So that was kind of interesting to go back in terms of other people switching jobs. We had Sean Cooley on who. Sean was CTO of Cisco at the time and he since started an IoT company called Mapt, which I'm an investor in, which is doing quite well. So mapta, it's his own kind of take dumb buildings, turn them into smart building type technology. So Sean's moved on. Mark Tremzil, who he interviewed, who was at Datadog at the time, explaining their security strategy, left Datadog, started a company called Atomic Jar, which has already been acquired by Docker.

Speaker C: So he managed to not only leave

Speaker A: his job, start a company and sell his company in that time. I'm slightly jealous of that.

Speaker C: Going on another five years of a startup. Yeah, he called me after that and he's like, hey, yeah, I'm thinking of starting this company. And I gave him some advice and he must have ignored it because he's exited and done very, very well. Yeah. So clearly he knew something I didn't. I'll have to call him, but, uh, yeah, I'll pause there.

Speaker A: But just definitely like a crew that's on the move. And Chentsy has just been deeper into her fund as far as I can tell, and all over the place.

Speaker B: Yeah, rich mogul with the stuff. He talked about his drive to make the world a better place, his rescue mission engagement that he's been doing forever, trying to do, uh, the company and now at Firemon, but also just engaged. I'm, um, having a senior moment. What's the program?

Speaker A: Rubicon.

Speaker B: Rubicon, right. Uh, Team Rubicon. Yeah, he's been involved in that forever.

Speaker A: I listened to some of that this morning. It was actually, it was right around the time of the fires, so I actually forgot about the crazy fires we had for a period of time. We like brimstone falling from the sky over here, ashes littering the cars and everything else inch thick. I'll never forget that interview with Rich. You look at this guy and you're like, yeah, he's had a very accomplished career. He's both, you know, he was CEO of Securosis and ciso, I think of another company, it was Disrupt Ops, I think, which has since been acquired by Firemon. And he at the same time was a father of three and you know, actively continue with Team Rubicon and a big part of CSA and the standards for cloud security alliance. I mean he's an amazing guy and you know, is one of those people who just, he deserve his bio and everything he's done just deserves that long form conversation. I've been able to run into him at events since then and he's just, he's just incredibly impressive.

Speaker B: He is indeed. Yeah.

Speaker A: He started a series recently that, and we've been swapping messages somewhat where he's taking and doing cloud security tutorials, like no bullshit, kind of breaking it down, really good content tutorials, taking the work that he's done in CSA and elsewhere. And I'm sure he's doing this while

Speaker C: he's out helping with Team Rubicon.

Speaker A: In between being a dad and everything else. It's like he's another one of those just incredibly impressive people where long form dialogue you just realize how impressive the individual is.

Speaker B: Yet another overachiever, you know.

Speaker A: Yeah, kind of backing up here. We had 60 episodes, this will be the 61st.

Speaker C: I want to say.

Speaker A: If we tallied it all together, it'd be a good 70 plus hours of content from a guest perspective. Probably 55, actually more. We're probably well over 60, 70 guests or so because we had a number where we had multiple people, including the India episode we just did, which was a lot of fun and great. So I think we finished on a really good year.

Speaker B: There were some good insights in there, especially as someone who deals with people from India continuously trying to uh, set up a meeting with somebody in India. And that 10 and a half hour time zone is making it difficult. But I am starting to back away from B sides. But it's not easy to hand off something you've been doing for 15 years because, uh, they ask you what you do and then it's like, this is what I do. Oh yeah, I do this too. Uh, and this too. Oh, I did. You know, there's just so many little tiny things that add up but there's some great folks stepping up. Since we did that first episode, There have been 457B sides events around the world. Yeah, it's amazing. We're well over 900 events total since that first. Maybe we'll do another one. I don't know. We're just going to do one July of 2009. I expect the event 1000 to become in the summer.

Speaker A: Amazing.

Speaker B: Most of the conversations to start the events happen with me. I've done about 200 of those. So you want to do a B Sides conversations while we're doing, you know, in the past five years while we've been doing the podcast. So, yeah, things have happened on the B sides front. We've had a bunch of amazing conversations, you know, and as you said, you've built the company, your son's growing. My life is very different. It's, uh, Some stuff has happened which actually nobody needs to. If you know me, you know what it is. But life has thrown some stuff at me. And that was kind of what pushed me towards retirement, was, you know what, I'm in a position where if I stop buying guitars and motorcycles, I can probably afford to retire. So I did the dumbest thing possible, which I started building guitars, which is far more expensive than just buying the dumb things. But, uh, you know, I have held to no more motorcycles. But, yeah, you know, um, so, yeah, it is time to say goodbye to this. But I, I think we've done some amazing stuff. We've had some great conversations. Some of the conversations with people who've been friends for years. I learned things about them and their personal and professional lives. You know, whether we're talking about, uh, Wendy or Gary, uh, McGraw or other folks that we have known for, you know, for years. We had hacks for fan cakes on. We had pancakes on Leslie Carhartt, you know, and she's a dear, uh, friend. She's basically family. We've shared life experiences that have bonded us and it is just great to have those conversations out there. And, uh, in the, the long form. It was your idea to, to do this kind of long form, like you said, Tim Ferriss like real conversational thing. And I love that idea. I had a great time all the years doing the podcasts for Tenable. I had a really great time doing the stuff with Paul Assadourian and Larry Pesci and the whole Security Weekly crowd. You know, the artist formerly known as Paul.com, don't sue him. He doesn't use that name anymore. But, you know, if You've been around as long as I have. You, uh, you know that one. But the idea of just doing this, no sponsors, no commitments, we just do it ourselves and we'll have nice long conversations I thought was a fantastic idea. And I think that if we factor in what you've been going through and what I've been dealing with, I won't even fault us for not getting episodes out as reliably as maybe ideally thought of in the beginning. But on the other hand, we didn't have the burdens of having to filter ourselves or things like that. We just had conversations and pushed it out. And if the sponsors pulled their money. Oh, wait, we don't have. We don't care.

Speaker A: Yeah, they never complained once. It's funny, we had very quiet sponsors.

Speaker C: They paid like crap.

Speaker A: But they're remarkably well behaved.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker C: Almost like imaginary friends. It was great. It's great. So do you have a most memorable

Speaker A: or like one or two pods that we did that kind of sticks out in your memory? What would be like a couple top episodes for you? Just things that stick for whatever reason.

Speaker B: It's hard to pick favorites or whatever. But I learned a bunch of stuff I didn't expect to learn on that Satellite Hack episode. There was some wild stuff there. I thought the Nilou Juggernaut was amazing. I mentioned the, um, From a knowledge transfer that. The Investor series and your tales of Startup. I think as a set is something that, you know, the industry, as you said, is evolving. We're not in boom times anymore. However, there are lessons there for everybody that remain incredibly valuable. So there's that. The one that you did in the cigar bar was entertaining as hell. It was a good. It was a good one, but it was also hysterical. There were a few of them. Yeah, there were a few of them that were kind of hysterical. I've enjoyed the distillation of the episodes for those. Those intros with the, uh, with the sound bites in them. Because the first time I did it, it's like, maybe we can hook people's interest with these. And it turned out to be a fun thing to do. And I think so.

Speaker C: Good.

Speaker A: You did an amazing job on that. Amazing.

Speaker B: It's been great. Ah, where next? I mean, I think for me, uh,

Speaker A: the, uh, Michael Zaluski episode was really good. I mean, his thoughts around generative AI and prepping, you know, which is something given all the disasters and the crazy stuff that's happened. Having someone say, hey, here's how you reason about disasters in a rational way from someone who has Real credibility in it in a book that was easy enough to read.

Speaker C: I'll contrast that with Kelly Shortridges, which

Speaker A: was awesome and a great recommendation to interview her from Eitan Goldstein. But having said that, that was not easy to get through. It was worth it. Total payoff. And that was one of the better ones we did this year. Just Kelly is just brilliant. But wow, that was a lot of work. Michael's was nearly like effortless and a really interesting angle and such a fascinating human.

Speaker B: It's a joy to read. And the title is accurate. Practical Doomsday down here in coastal Georgia. And I have some friends who are not the full tilt buying an abandoned missile silo kind of preppers, but they're on that end of the spectrum. And his Practical Doomsday, it's like, you know, have some money set aside. Here's how you deal with water, here's how you deal with this problem. Here's some practical stuff and some really common sense practical commentary about like, physical safety and physical defense. Talking about firearms and the m. His thing about the number of people that have bought body armor, it's like, you know, if you need body armor, we're screwed. I just seriously, you know, different people have different situations. If you are the kind of person who could end up in a really ugly situation for real, not in your fantasies, not after, you know, binging John Wick and, you know, things like that. But for real, uh, I still don't know. A little physical fitness is probably going to do you more good. And that's sort of just absolutely practical stuff. And it's like you said, it's an easy read, it's a fun read. And because it's laid out logically, you can skip around and pick what interests you. And he's brilliant, you know, and he's where web hacking pretty much starts. Honestly, I think I mentioned that at the beginning of that podcast when I expanded the shoulders of infosec history wiki to include web stuff, web appsec. I sat down with R. Snake and Arsenic and I had a long chat about it. And he's absolutely one of the foundational figures. And when somebody like Arsenic says, well, it starts with Michael Zaluski, that's kind of, uh, a nod to where that begins. Uh, so that was a great one. But we had so many Straith was an interesting top. Just a way of thinking about things. And that idea of robotics ethics, man, that's for real. As more and more robotic things wander the planet. Yeah. Uh, and you look at how much robotics is Happening in the battlefield and how much of the battlefield is in urban environments? Well, the ethics kind of are a thing, but on the other hand, the ethics of war is an oxymoron. So, you know, I was listening to

Speaker A: some of the Jamie Winterton episode this morning, too, which is about, basically, we said, from tool to sidekick, thinking about technology and AI, as she was doing. She's at ASU Arizona State University, and her joint commission, she does with the dod, I believe it's with the dod. And she was talking about, hey, we're going to have human machine teaming on this stuff. And you look at a lot of the things that have happened since then with AI, and literally it's being called Copilot, you know, by Microsoft. It's like, holy shit. Like, this is it. This is happening. That was one of the more interesting revelations as I went back through things. There was a bunch of these, like, funniest and most painful and hardest interview and all this stuff and intriguing guests. But I think we've covered a lot of that. Maybe we just jump to, like, what did you learn from this? And I'm happy to start out. I think, like, for me, a few things jump out that I learned from doing all of this. And one was, you can get used to hearing your voice. I hated it in the beginning, having to listen to every episode before I'd write about it. I finally got to the point where it just didn't bother me anymore, and I made some adjustments to where I could tolerate myself. So the answering machine problem kind of went away. And the importance of synthesis, having to listen to the episodes and then write about it made a lot of the things we talked about my own from my knowledge base. And that was incredibly important. Matter of fact, I'm going to have to figure out how I replace this as part of my learning journey. Because I learned so much from doing the podcast. It really forced me to learn things as we went through it. Those are two of the bigger learnings.

Speaker B: Anytime you write things, it really sticks it in your head. It does, uh, not quite as profound a learning thing, but going back through to pull quotes and then think about the context of whether or not that stood alone. I would go through and pull interesting quotes and then go back to listen to them without the context of the conversation and be like, oh, okay, you know, so language and context. But, you know, going through every episode after it was done, really reviewing it all. And then, um, Hugh had put it in the notes here, so I will, uh, jump in and say it. Everything is no More than two steps from Daniel Kahneman.

Speaker A: It's unbelievable how important that book is. It's staggering how important thinking fast and slow is. Just how foundational. It's unbelievable.

Speaker B: Yeah. The way we think and the way we don't think. Right. And, you know, the subtleties of things. Uh, that's profound. Speaking of things that aren't quick reads,

Speaker C: but so important. And I honestly, if it wasn't for

Speaker A: this podcast, I probably would have read it eventually, but getting a couple of nudges. And there's been a number of books like that that I've finally broken down and read because of this, and every one of them's been worth it. I mean, really, really important book. And all across the board, too. You know, in many different areas. I'd say, like, making good content is incredibly hard was one of the other learnings. I mean, this work you do on Audio Jack is fantastic. And I know that because I listen to a lot of pods where they don't put in the same level of attention, and it sucked. And I'll say that there was an episode or two where I didn't do as good a job on researching, and the podcast suffered for it. I had to do the work to prep, and sometimes I meant reading a damn book like three or four, maybe five or six times that the person had written or watching stuff. I tried to do one Hungover. Terrible idea.

Speaker C: So the Data Lake episode, A belated apology for my performance on that. Uh, it actually turned out to be

Speaker A: a good pod, but. Oh, dear God, I had a night the evening before. I don't recommend podcasting. Hungover.

Speaker B: Yeah, you'd also put this here, but I was going to say promotion, but you put in here. Marketing is a ton of work, marketing and promoting podcasts, especially in the amount of the number of podcasts and the number that don't need to exist, to be candid.

Speaker A: Oh, the vendor podcast. Good Lord.

Speaker C: Really? Really?

Speaker B: Yeah. It's amazing that there are people that consume this. And when I look at some of the things that people consume with big numbers, I'm like, I just don't get it. But the same goes for the whole influencer thing on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. I'm like, what? What?

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. You know, there's a lot of people

Speaker A: that feel the same way, but it's incredibly hard to talk about without sounding like a grumpy old man.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, I am a grumpy old man, so I can do it. And it's, you know, you'll Know, when I talk about my hobbies, I'm talking about there's nothing computerized. That's one of the things about that pushed me to start handing off B side's responsibilities was when I was, uh, working and being paid to sit in front of a computer all day. I didn't really enjoy sitting in front of a computer all day, but it was what I was doing. And now that the alternative is hopping on a motorcycle or hopping on a car and going on a road trip, or hopping the motorhome and go on a road trip, or lighting the fires in the forge or working on the guitars or building a barn for the motorcycles or, you know, landscape gardening stuff or whatever the heck I want to do other than sit in front of a computer. Yeah.

Speaker C: I'll tell you, it's.

Speaker A: It's been incredibly motivating for me and inspirational. You've had a great transition into retirement, at least from the view in the cheap seats. And I've been making my little list, my Dave list of things I want to do like that. Mine is I've started to get much more competitive with tennis. I'm the punching bag for my son for tennis, uh, before his matches. And I've decided I'm actually going to compete if my body allows me to. And, uh, through all the mayhem of recent years, I've fallen in love with classical piano music and especially Claude Debussy. So I'm going to learn how to play Clair de Lune at some point.

Speaker B: Really? Which.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've got my own list and I've been watching you kind of biding my time. Not quite my time yet. I'm still working over here and happily so. But you've had an amazing transition. It's been fun to watch and kind of chronicle on the pod.

Speaker C: So final thoughts. This. This is it, man. What a delight.

Speaker A: What a pleasure to have done this with you, Jack. It's been everything I wanted it to be. Such a fun adventure and journey.

Speaker C: I'm, um.

Speaker A: M glad we did this together.

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm very happy we did it together and it's been good. It's just time for us to. I mean, you've got to focus on what you've got to focus on. And I need to spend even less time in front of a computer, so I'm doing that. But I think we largely have done what we wanted to do. I mean, we can nitpick a few things, but I think we have had great conversations with amazing people, some lesser known and some more not. And that's going to stay out there

Speaker A: and we leave them behind for people to enjoy. And hopefully the people coming into the industry can listen to those and make it more approachable, make it suck. Less people looking to fund that company. We've left our legacy behind us here and it'll be up for a long time for folks to enjoy. And of course, thanks to everybody who contributed, the amazing Melanie Ensign, Eitan A.H. goldstein, who always gave me episode feedback, Corey Bodson, and just the myriad of other people who gave us great feedback and encouragement along the way. So thanks to everybody who listened and supported us. It was awesome.

Speaker B: It was fantastic. And, uh, I guess that's it, Dave. Right?

Speaker C: I mean, that's it.

Speaker B: What's left to say? So long. And thanks for all the fish.

Speaker C: That's it. The Douglas Adams. Thanks for all the fish, y'. All. Thanks for listening and spending time with us. We're still around. We're still around. If that's a Douglas Adams quote, I suppose the Monty Python is. We're not dead yet. We're still around. Say hello. You can find us. All right, thank you, Dave. Thanks, Jack.

Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this, the final episode of Security Voices, and thank you for listening through the years. As we said during the podcast, the website will stay up for the foreseeable future. So if you'd like to hear earlier episodes of Security Voices, see transcripts of the shows or learn more about our guests, visit the website@, uh, securityvoices.org.