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362- The Firewall Leader w/Rick Bates: Why the Best Leaders Stand In Front · You've Been Heard

• 0:08
  Speaker A: Welcome back to today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm your host, Doug Kameen, and today I'm talking with cybersecurity program manager and former CIO at Zyders Enterprises, Rich Bates. Welcome to the show, Rich.
• 0:22
  Speaker B: Thank you so much, sir. I really appreciate being here.
• 0:25
  Speaker A: So, so Rich, we're, we're, we're talking before the show started here and we have, we have connections between us. Like there's, there is, it's, we are not unknown. Well, we're unknown to one another but, but we are, we are only separated by, by 2 degrees, I guess. Best way to put this. So, so you, you're in, you're in the, the Northern Virginia D.C. metro area.
• 0:50
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 0:51
  Speaker A: And you, you work for, you work for this company, Ciders Enterprise, but in the past you worked for a company that. The CIO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Aaron, he and you work together. So we have, we have this kind of like, I will call it a random connection because it's not, I don't know, I don't think these are random, but we have this connection.
• 1:11
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I worked with John Curran who was the CTO at Servol back when Sirovalt was a thing. It was purchased by Carpathia Hosting and Carpathia was purchased by qts. But JC and I worked together for I want to say about seven years. Six or seven years. And he's a great guy. The word imposition is not in his vocabulary and if there was any way I could circle back with him and work with him again, I would. Just fantastic people.
• 1:50
  Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. I get to interface with him through my role as the Advisory Council with Aaron. And he's definitely one of a kind and worth the. He's so valuable to have at the helm of such an important organization as Aaron with all the work that they do around the. Basically, I'll say around the globe. I know Aaron's region is, Aaron's region is the North America and most of the, what we call the English speaking Caribbean. But he has responsibilities that extend globally.
• 2:21
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 2:22
  Speaker A: Aaron's, Aaron's role as well, which is, it's pretty, it's pretty cool. Pretty cool connection there. So, so you, you've. Now I'm totally putting you on the spot. You've done some hazing before here, business hazing.
• 2:35
  Speaker B: I have, I have done some business hazing. The, the, the layout at Server vault was very, very open, if you can imagine that. The building itself was basically a cinder block cube. And then inside of that Cube. We had Lampert's data vaults. And then over them, well, then there was another area, kind of the cord area that was also like a cinder block floor. And then above that was the, the living area. And JC's cube or JC's office was nothing more than a hole in the wall. You know, he went into this area that was kind of like a closet and it had some shelving around it, which we turned into a desk and such like that. The previous CTO had planned it all out and JC made the mistake going on vacation for just over a week. So my facilities, the vice president of facilities and I went up to Home Depot. We got some Sheetrock and some two by fours and an extension cord and a wall plug. And he dug up some cove molding and some paint and we sealed off JC's office, stole the whole damn thing, ran an extension cord to a plug. So we had a plug in the wall and we put a little table with a little Zen fountain on it that was running water and put his picture up in a plant and his office was gone.
• 4:00
  Speaker A: This is. So you mentioned, there's an important detail here. You worked with the director of facilities. So this is fully sanctioned at this point.
• 4:07
  Speaker B: Absolutely. The CEO was not too happy about it, but he understood a good joke. So JC came back from his trip and you walked down this alleyway, couldn't call it a hallway, and all the cubes were to your left and my office, Mike's office, and then JC's office. And he walked right past it and kept walking until he hit the break area and he was staring at the refrigerator going, where's me office? So I want to tell you that I didn't finish the story when we were talking before. In typical JC fashion, he goes down into Mike's like his little tool area that we had and pulls out a sawzall, comes back up, punches through the wall, cuts himself at opening and crawls in and gets right to work. So yeah, that's how we stole his office.
• 5:02
  Speaker A: That's awesome. That's awesome. I appreciate you sharing that story. That is an amazing story.
• 5:06
  Speaker B: We'll see if JC appreciates it.
• 5:08
  Speaker A: I know. Well, I'm going to see him in two weeks. So when we're recording, this episode will come out at long after I have I see him. But right now, here we are in the middle of April and I'm going to Aaron's public policy meeting in a couple of weeks. So I'm sure.
• 5:20
  Speaker B: Oh cool. Okay.
• 5:21
  Speaker A: I will, I will be able to talk with them about it. Ladies and gentlemen, IT Leaders, before we move ahead, this podcast is not just a stream, it's a stage.
• 5:33
  Speaker B: And if you are an IT leader.
• 5:34
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• 5:39
  Speaker B: And guest, and if you've got the.
• 5:40
  Speaker A: Insight and courage to step up, we promote you to the mic. Apply now@popularitnerds.com waitlist.
• 5:47
  Speaker B: If you have what it takes, go join our growing network of over 160 senior IT leaders.
• 5:53
  Speaker A: Where real voices shape real conversations. But anyways, we're here to talk about you and your leadership journey. Rich. So tell us a little bit about you work for Zeters Enterprises, Zyders. Thank you. I knew I would get that wrong. So you work for Zyders Enterprises and you are the former cio. You were CIO for a long time and you shifted into being on the cybersecurity specialization and management role. But tell us a little about your history, how you came to be in leadership and all that type of stuff.
• 6:24
  Speaker B: So the leadership story really starts a long, long time ago. I've been in DoD government contracting for, I would say most of my career. The 10 years I was with Servovault was the only real gap in that. Even when I had my own businesses, I was dabbling in, in the federal space, you know, a little bit here, there, that sort of thing. But I was on a defense contract at the Defense Intelligence Agency. And I just, I was one of those people that if you saw a gap, you filled it. So what I was doing, because I had to wait for my clearance, I was burning in PCs and stuff like that. But then they moved me up into what was the old Soviet Union and East Europe division office where I put together a 120 node Sun Microsystems network all by myself. It was just me because I claimed the node unix, which is a little bit different from Solaris, but that's all right. But then honestly that, that job kind of petered out. It was like everything was working. So I went to my director and I was like, hey, I'm just being an office boy now. I don't want to do that anymore. And he said, well, as it turns out, the individual who's running the hardware support desk is leaving us. How would you like the job? I was like, great, wonderful. So that's where my leadership journey started. It was a trial by fire because there were two gentlemen down there who thought that they should have had the, the job. And so, you know, I thought about, do I want to sit down with them and kind of smooth things over and such. Like, I was like, no, you know what? I'm just going to go down there and perform. And within about two weeks, Dennis and Paul pulled me aside and said, yeah, you're the right guy for the job.
• 8:38
  Speaker A: So you earn their respect. That's great.
• 8:40
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that I always feel is very important is that as a leader, you have to be your crew's firewall. You've got to stand between them and management, and you're the one that takes the hits. You don't let them take the hits. Right. You turn around and coach them. Unless it's something obviously really egregious, but you turn around, you coach them. And that's what I did for my crew. I was like, guys, just if you run into a situation where the customer's not being professional, not being courteous, you don't react. You just say, hey, I got to go talk to my supervisor and you come get me and I'll do the firewalling for you. So just kind of progressed in that. And when I got to servervault, I was actually brought on just to write the intranet. At the time, I had just come off of a stint with my own job where I programmed in active server pages and good old Macromedia Cold fusion.
• 9:46
  Speaker A: Oh, coldfusion Mad at asp pages.
• 9:48
  Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:50
  Speaker A: I had a time when I knew a bit about cold fusion.
• 9:53
  Speaker B: Yeah, I like cold fusion so much that if somebody came to me and said, I want a cold fusion site, I was like, great, that's $95 an hour. If they came to me and said active server pages, I was like, no, that's $120 an hour.
• 10:07
  Speaker A: I don't want them.
• 10:08
  Speaker B: I'm not playing in Microsoft's world. So anyway, I was doing that, but what we were doing is we were taking orders from customers and setting up solutions. And there really wasn't a process. It was the salespeople would go out and do salespeople thing and things, and then they'd come back and the provisioning crew would jump through hoops and they're like, well, what are we supposed to be doing? There wasn't any clear here's the assignment kind of thing. And then worse yet, there wasn't even any. In the very early days, there wasn't even any gates on what you could sell. So we actually got an order. It's like, here's the order. Make it work. And the dude wanted A Sun Spark 23, 24. I don't know, something like that. One of the smaller ones, but he wanted it to run Mac os. Oh no, that's not going to work. So I jumped in and we, we put together a, a solution set. We put together, you know, how we're going to jump through these hoops and it just made life easier on the entire crew. The sales folks knew that they had somebody to come to who was reasonably friendly, not too grumpy most of the time and say to them, yeah, you can do this or no you can't. So I think that if there's a point to that story is that leadership is not a niche thing. You have to be a leader to everybody. You can't really go and say these are, I'm only going to be nice to my people. I'm not going to be nice to your people. Now you, you have to be professional and help everybody along. Otherwise the organization just doesn't work. And then when I walked into Zyders, they had just won two large contracts that were very tech centric and at the time most of their, it was outsourced. And we just brought those people in because that the, the company that they were working with was little wobbly. So we scooped them up and brought them in. And one of the big things that I tried to do throughout my, my tenure as their, as their supervisor was, you know, you really look at where are their interests leading them, where are their skill sets that maybe they don't even see and kind of coax that out of them. As I had one young lady who's working for me, she was on the help desk, but man, she could diagnose network problems. And so I got together with my senior systems administrator, my lead system administrator. I was like, you got to talk to her. And so sure enough, after about six months of coaching, we moved her over to the Sysops network side of the house. And then I started watching her there and she had a real penchant for cyber security. I mean like it was, it was the most natural thing to her I've ever seen. So moved her along in that direction and she was really, really good because she got snatched away from me.
• 13:35
  Speaker A: Yeah. And that's okay. That's okay. You know, I just, Yeah. I appreciate you sharing your journey here. It always. There's a couple things that stuck out to me, so I'm going to jump backwards a little bit. It. But you mentioned about the importance of being the person that takes like, I call it, take it the arrows from, for your team, like as a leader. And I I, I share your, your viewpoint very, very, very much and very deeply because that's how I, I view the same thing. Like, if I'm leading the team, my job is to be the interface to management, not a block, not, not some sort of like, like, you know, impediment. But I'm also the filter that says, like, okay, well, bandage. It doesn't necessarily understand what needs to be asked here, but I do, you know, so I, I am the translation matrix between management and the team and how we get things done. And also, if there's a problem, if we have those, you know, if you got external customers that are being fussy or just people outside your, your department, like that handoff, I'm the one who's going to step in. I'm not going to ask you. You do the most uncomfortable situations of dealing with the uncomfortable people. They pay me more, if you will, and they pay me in the position of relative authority to step in and say, hey, look, like, this is, you know, we're not going to talk to my staff this way, or we're not going to do this this way, we're going to do it this way. And like, that's a, That's a hard leadership skill for a lot of folks. And I think that, to be honest, I think a lot of folks who end up in leadership, they, that not everyone actually understands it in that context because they see their, they see like their, their, their version of leadership as being like, like a version of, of. I'm going to hold everybody accountable on my team. Which, I mean, I'm not saying you shouldn't, but the way they hold them accountable is essentially to, like, punish them and take the side of everyone else around them instead of backing their team.
• 15:22
  Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that if I had one leadership fault, it was, it is not was, but is that I will coach somebody for probably too long before I just let, before I just let you know you're in the wrong position, you're in the wrong company, whatever that has worked. For the most part, I am blessed that I have not had to. Other than layoffs, I haven't had to cut that many people loose. But even when I did, it was. There was only. I can only think of one instance where it was like, no, no, you're, you're done.
• 16:01
  Speaker A: Yeah. I refer to that as managing by exception. So, like, the way that I manage, like, teams and stuff is I'm like, look, like I'm going to trust you to do the jobs. We hired you because you're Smart manage your life and your day. But if it does get to the point where I have to step in, you probably, I'm, obviously you're not going to like it. It's not like a threat, but like, it won't be pleasant. Like, you know, you don't want me looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck. But same thing. Like, I'll want to give them a time after time after time. And I think that style, and there's different styles for different people and different leaders and stuff, and even different companies require different sets of management. I think, just like you, I've been very fortunate to be in companies that that style of management and that style of leadership is very effective. But there are other companies with that style. Leadership would probably get you canned within six months. They'd be like, no, no, you need to be aggressive with these folks. If you need to get every minute you waste as minutes for losing money or whatever the case, you know, whatever the statements are. But that, that style of management, every, every style of management leaves you vulnerable to a certain type of criticism. And in that particular one, the vulnerability is that you can be accused of, of you have to wait for the problems to surface in order to really address them. I mean, not that you don't try to be proactive in nature, but you, you, you want to trust your team to do the work. So you need to let them fail at some point before you truly step in. Unless, of course, it's some egregious thing where you're like, absolutely not. Don't do that.
• 17:32
  Speaker B: Yeah. You know, and that's, that's really interesting that you say it that way. One of the things that I don't want to steal the thunder of your segment of Tell us something that people might not know about. You said, I have listened to your.
• 17:46
  Speaker A: Listen, I appreciate that.
• 17:48
  Speaker B: Right. Is I was a scout leader for way too long, honestly. I, I, I, I overstayed my welcome, I think. And not so much in Cub Scouts, but in Boy Scouts. And we are talking a couple of decades ago, we're not talking the current iteration, but one of the hardest things that as a scout leader you have to learn is you've got to let the boys fail you. You Scout Boy Scouting was a boy led, boy managed, or I'll say scout led, Scout managed organization. And as a leader, you know, you kind of sat there on the sidelines and you'd say, no, that's not going to work, but whatever they're doing is not going to work. Now if it got Unsafe, of course, that's where you stepped in. But if it's just like that is they are not going to have dinner until 10 o'. Clock. Well, they didn't have dinner until 10 o'. Clock. As long as the fire was in control and nobody was putting their hand on a hot dutch oven, you had to let them fail. And I think that to some extent, not as much, but to some extent that can be true in the business world that you just have to look at them and say, I've told you this is the, you know, I've been around the block a few more times than you have. What you're about to do isn't going to work. And unfortunately people or people will go off, lock themselves in their cube and they'll do it their way and just. All right, now you want to try it my way? Okay, good.
• 19:26
  Speaker A: Some businesses are very amenable to that style of learning and things. And some businesses are very much like we hired. Referring to yourself, like we hired you to be the leader to stop these people from doing this, you know, and, and you know, I would maybe classify those as more of a high pressure situation and stuff. And, and some people really enjoy that type of environment. But I do think the, the one thing that I think is really advantageous for that style of leadership is, is that it, it acknowledges the human condition component of this, which is that people would make mistakes, um, you know, versus I think some of the other ones. I think one of the big, one of the biggest gaps in, in say like the, the I want to manage everything and, and managed against all failure is that that's not always realistic, you know, so we're just going to fail sometimes. They'll screw up. Your, your, your sysadmin will, will not run updates for a day and you know, and, and, and be off schedule or whatever the case, you know, whatever has happened, you've got to deal with and you need to be able to adapt to that effectively. And the more draconian you are, the less likely they are to want to go above and beyond. I always feel like that's a hallmark of teams that I've always led is that they have the ability or they're willing to go above and beyond when the proverbial crap hits the fan, if you will, that they'll jump in and help. But I've seen on other teams where the leadership structure is more, you know, more, I would call it stringent because it's not like I'm not strict but you know, more draconian. I guess.
• 21:02
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 21:03
  Speaker A: In those scenarios, like, the people will help. But it's very grudgingly and it's very like. Like I'm doing my time and I'm out. I'm not here to finish it until it's done. Like, I'm, you know, this is the minimum I'm willing to give you, and I am the hell out of here now.
• 21:17
  Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I did have a manager in my early days that when I showed up and all I was doing was writing web pages. I mean, it's not like if I miss pixeled something, it was going to end the world. But, man, when I showed up in the morning, he was in my cube and he was like, I noticed yesterday you were having problems with this. Here's a book. And within like two months, I had this library of 30 books. And are these fine to keep? Because I really don't want them. But, you know, there's also two kinds of mistakes or errors, whatever you want to call them. There's the kind where you're doing everything the way that you think it should be done. And you've done the reading, you've done the research. It says, do this, this, and this. And your hand's not necessarily on the tiller, it's not necessarily on the speed. But something goes wrong, and it's like, okay, well, let's back it up. Then. There's the kind of error where your hand is on the wheel, your hand is on the accelerator. I'm thinking of a boat here, for whatever reason, and you drive that boat straight into the rocks, and you knew the rocks were there. You knew you were going too fast, and you knew you weren't steering out of the way. That's the kind of error where you just walk up and say, no, we're working. What was it? We tap you on the shoulder and I don't know. There's a whole bunch of different things that you could say there. But really, most people, the error is the first one. In my entire career, I've had one person where I just looked at him and I was like, you knew what you were doing. You knew it was wrong. You did it anyway.
• 23:09
  Speaker A: Body. Yeah. Yeah. I think about that as the. I'm trying to think of the. Oh, I had a. I had a phrase for it. About what? Oh, yeah. Well, the idea that you can do everything right and things can still go wrong. And that's. That part is that can be lost in a lot of executives, especially, like, business. You know, I have, say, line of business executives, you know, so, but I'm not suggesting that like every CEO is somehow unfeeling and uncaring or anything else like that, but it's not uncommon for them to feel for, for business leadership to feel that the way to drive success is to, is to like run kind of like roughshod over the folks that are doing task based work. You know, like, let's get the IT team. And if it's not exactly right, let's, let's, let's. I'm going to come down on, you know, the, the IT director, the CIO or whomever and just berate them as opposed to trying to figure out how to, you know, like, let's, let's, let's work constructively through this.
• 24:10
  Speaker B: And I think that one of the areas of IT where that is so true is in cybersecurity. I mean, you can, I was, I was speaking with a CISO of, and the name of the company escapes me, but I probably shouldn't say it, you know, anyway, because I don't want to, want to be accused of advertising. But basically, they run a soc. They're an mssb, they run a soc. And he was like, yes, all of my clients that I have to go into and research a breach, contain the breach, eradicate the breach, that sort of thing. Every single one of them was fully compliant. And that really hit me. I was like, wow. Like right now I'm crosswalking our, our system security plan against NIST 800, 171 and CMMC and it's like checking all the boxes. Yes, we've got all the boxes checked. And yes, this refers to whatever. And you can get through all that and still just be one patch away from getting popped. And it's not that you weren't going to apply the patch. It was just like, but today's Monday, the patch comes out tomorrow, but it's already being actively exploited. And do what you can, do what you have to, but those situations are just going to come up.
• 25:44
  Speaker A: Yeah, there's, there's a, you know, I was so before my current role, you know, I'm CIO and a mental health nonprofit, but I was a CIO at municipal counties for almost 10 years. And one of the things I would tell the legislature when we would talk to them would be like, oh, so what have you done on the cyber security front? And you know, what protections do we have? And all this other stuff. And I'm like, okay, I want to be clear that like, even though we've done all these things, look at we used to get breached, you know, like something can happen, somebody can, you know, the people are still our weakest link. And as those things cascade, we could still have problems. So our job is not to prevent all the breaches. Our job is to make sure that we have effective plans for mitigating as many of them as we can. So we have to deal with only as few as possible, but also having effective plans to deal with the problems that arise for when one does have. Yeah, I'll tell you now, it's not an if, it's a when. At some point something will happen and we'll have to deal with it. And some of that's also just. I mean, not to say that. Not to say it, like, cynically, but, you know, reminding them so that if something happens, they're not like, you should have protected this, Ed.
• 26:51
  Speaker B: Well, I remember I was at a NYSACA conference. It was pre Covid, so it was a while ago. But one of the things that just. I knew it, I knew it intrinsically, but one of the speakers got up and said, for every one of us sitting in this room, for every one of us good guys, there are a thousand bad guys. And, you know, when you think of those odds, it's. You might as well just call us the 300, right? I mean, that's really where we are in the good guy side of the cybersecurity, and basically in basic general it, that's just where we are. And you also touched on something else that's absolutely correct. Your keyboard is your front line. If you can't educate, equip, and organize your frontline staff and make them understand. That was a bad term, help them to understand and bring them along on the journey of cybersecurity. They're just going to treat it as all, you know, the CIO is saying this, or the CISO is saying this or whatever. But if you, if you walk them down the path of if this happens, then this happens, then this happens, and I'm a big believer. And you don't just tell somebody do this. I mean, unless it's important, unless it's like, or completely urgent, then you're well within your realm to go up and say, just do this. I'll explain later. But if it's not urgent, we have to do this, and here's why. And people buy into that. They're not, you know, I'm sure there are people out there that are just plain old stubborn, but for the most part, folks want to come along on the journey with you.
• 28:48
  Speaker A: Yeah. I have 100% agree. So I'm going to shift us a little bit here. And it's you. You alluded to one of the things that I always ask folks. I have, I have a variety of different topics that I try to ask our guests, depending on what, you know, what their backgrounds are. In your case, Rich, I would love to know how, what was, what was your first computer in your computer experience? Yeah, see, let's see.
• 29:15
  Speaker B: My first computing experience was a green bar paper impact head teletype. So I want you to imagine a, a printer that's about three and a half feet wide and about a foot and a half deep. It's got a box of wide green bar paper under it that you feed up through a tractor feed. It's got a keyboard. And then you go over to this thing called a desk set and it's a telephone. And you pick up the handle and you dial the number and you slam and wait for the robot to scream at you. And you slam that handle into the acoustic coupler and you're connected to mit. That was my first computing experience and that was back in high school. And we had a self imposed limit of 20 minutes on, you know, per session. And if you didn't get off the session in time, the next guy would walk up with a pencil and whack that handset. That would break your connection and you were done.
• 30:25
  Speaker A: So what did you do on this computer?
• 30:28
  Speaker B: I played Star Trek.
• 30:30
  Speaker A: Star Trek, all right.
• 30:33
  Speaker B: No, really, we had a basic programming course and you'd get an assignment, anything from, you know, just print out hello World 20 times to one of the, one of the biggest, one of the best assignments. My dad was a little bit of a pioneer in computing in the Navy. He was in naval intelligence and he had a heck of a time convincing the higher ups that teaching these sailors how to program a tic tac toe game was incredible because it taught you arrays, it taught you the peak and the poke command, it taught you how to do iterations. But anyway, so that's the kind of things that we were doing on that. Now my first in house computer was a Commodore PET 2001. And I hope that your audience looks that up. It was an all in one thing. It was steel case kind of looked like a little pyramid. The keys on the keyboard were the size of Chiclets. Hopefully everybody knows what a Chiclet is. And the mass storage was literally a Radio Shack cassette tape player that they had jammed into this case. And so you read and wrote two cassette tapes and it had a whopping 4K of memory, which we upgraded to 8K.
• 32:04
  Speaker A: There. 8K?
• 32:06
  Speaker B: Yeah. And just to give you a sense of how small that is, and I know I'm going to put the decimal point in the wrong place, but if you just fire up a word document, you don't type anything in it, you save it. Just save a blank word document. I think that word document blank is 35k. I think that's where it starts. I did that experiment once, so that was my first computer.
• 32:34
  Speaker A: And were you serious that you played Star Trek on the Commodore or on the, on the Call of Intelligence?
• 32:43
  Speaker B: Yeah. Did it.
• 32:44
  Speaker A: They have a Star Trek game, huh? Did they really have a Star Trek game?
• 32:48
  Speaker B: They did. It was. It's really, really hard to explain. There is an emulator out there that will run it, but it's one of these things where you were given a giant grid and you were given. And then when you entered into one of the cubes of this giant grid, there was a smaller grid. And basically you took a guess as to where the Klingon was. And so you type in, you know, like P for photon torpedo and then two, comma, seven, because that's where you thought he was. And you'd fire your torpedo and they would. You waste a lot of paper as you watch the, the torpedo go.
• 33:29
  Speaker A: Oh, this. So I just looked this up. This has a Wikipedia entry. Star Trek. It's a 1971 video game, you know, onto a couple different places, platforms and yeah, they even got a screenshot on there. It looks just like what you said. It's got like the, the quadrants and the, you have a number of torpedoes and the energy and then it's like, you know, to guess your condition and stuff. And then, yeah, you, you get to.
• 33:58
  Speaker B: Take where you shoot and then you, you would ti. When you got low on torpedoes and energy, you had to find out where your nearest star base was and limp over there and get repaired and all that kind of fun stuff.
• 34:11
  Speaker A: Well, if you've listened to a handful of my episodes of podcast, you might know that I am a big Star Trek guy.
• 34:16
  Speaker B: Okay. So you and I are on video.
• 34:19
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 34:19
  Speaker B: So.
• 34:21
  Speaker A: Oh my God. Hey, look at that. That's a great prop.
• 34:24
  Speaker B: It is a Bluetooth handset to my phone and I don't know if your audience can hear.
• 34:34
  Speaker A: I think the noise suppression, noise suppression might be stopping some of it. But for the folks at home, because this were an audio only podcast, I'm being shown a Star Trek flip communicator from the original series. Of Star Trek Captain Kirk's Flip Communicator.
• 34:52
  Speaker B: And then here's my Type one phaser for you folks at home. It's the little handheld one. Unfortunately, the company that made this doesn't make. Didn't make them to last. So I can't play the sound. But what would a type 1 phaser be without a snap in type 2?
• 35:10
  Speaker A: So there you go.
• 35:12
  Speaker B: And the company that made these just announced that they're. And for the audience, I'm using the air quotes, their working tricorder is starting to ship.
• 35:23
  Speaker A: Oh, this is pretty cool. See, I have a couple of Star Trek accessories sitting on my desk. I have, I have this Mr. Worf Pez dispenser, and I have this Mr. Spock USB drive.
• 35:38
  Speaker B: There you go.
• 35:39
  Speaker A: You know, that is. The USB drive came in handy a couple weeks ago. So I've had it for years. And of course, quite frankly, who uses USB drives that often nowadays? But my wife was on a job interview and they're like, oh, show up with a, you know, a flash drive with your stuff on it. And I'm like, she's. She's a school principal. And I'm like, you're going to take the Spock because. Because that'll be a conversation piece. And sure enough, somebody was like, is that Mr. Spock? There you go, there you go. And then I also, my, my, my wife was like, the day before. So that's a usb. What do they call it? USB A, whatever. You know, the big old. And I was like, you know, laptops today, it may not have that. May only have a USB C on it. So I gave her an adapter to do, you know, adapt USB A to C. And it was like, make sure you bring that with you. And sure enough, one of the laptops did when she walked in and the staff was like, I'll be right back. And she stepped right out of the room, went to her back, got the adapter and came back in. And that's how you impress people right there. You know, she was like, exactly. Old guys like, wow. That was. She got, she got comments about how well prepared she was. Beautiful, Beautiful. But yeah, so, yeah, so you're a Star Trek guy, too. This is awesome. It's always great to talk to another fellow Star Trek fan. My older son in particular is a big Star Trek fan. We've been working our way through all of the series. We are currently on original Star Trek, which. That one's a little bit. I always enjoy watching it, but it's a little bit of A trudge for an 11 year old. He's a little like, like, okay, if we can get through this, maybe we'll get to Voyager. Yeah. You know, although we started with D Space Nine because D Space Nine, I'm like, D Space nine is the best. That's why.
• 37:37
  Speaker B: Yeah, I would. My, my wife's an interior designer and does some other things and when she would go off to High Point Market and such like that, I forgot which, which channel it was, but they were showing the remastered original series.
• 37:52
  Speaker A: Oh yeah.
• 37:52
  Speaker B: And I was just stunned by what they had been able to do, cleaning it up and, and such like that. So yeah, I do. And I did just like you. I started with episode one and walked all the way through and you know, it was just amazing how they tackled cultural things in those, in those episodes. And, and that part of it was so subtle that you could watch it just for the science fiction but then go back and say, oh wow, they were really talking about this.
• 38:28
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think the subtext, the subtext is, has been sometimes lost to time. Unless you're, unless you're, I don't call you. You have to be like a deep student of history, but you have to be at least familiar.
• 38:39
  Speaker B: Familiar.
• 38:39
  Speaker A: And, and like I knowledgeable enough about like what was going on in the 60s and those types of things that I generally know that the context of why something was brought up, you know, oh, this episode happened because like, you know, the year before there was like this, this thing happened in the Vietnam War or something like that question about this thing. So as a result they wrote an episode that was topical to that and while the lessons, the underlying lessons typically are, are, are able to be seen like the rationale of why it was done and the subtext behind it is not always apparent in some of those episodes.
• 39:14
  Speaker B: Yeah. And I'm old enough that I'm fairly certain I saw some of the original broadcasts of Star Trek. My dad was stationed in Coronado and I just remember I've got a couple memories of flipping through the channels because it was in the rec room and I was in there playing with Lincoln Logs or something like that. And it's like, oh, this has a spaceship in it.
• 39:38
  Speaker A: Cool.
• 39:40
  Speaker B: And of course it would be the one episode where Uhura is basically in a bikini and my mom walks in and goes, what are you watching? Ew, geez, wrong day. Right.
• 39:53
  Speaker A: I could tell you out of Rewatch though that there was a regular series of women in what amounted to bikinis. Oh yeah. In the original series of Star Trek, you know, if. If there was ever a. Whenever there was a woman character, she was either wearing extremely covering flowing dresses or extremely small, not covering much, what amounted to like, like bikinis.
• 40:21
  Speaker B: Yeah, they pushed the limit. They really did. Especially if she had green skin that was all over. Right?
• 40:25
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I can. Some, yeah. Some of the things that, in, like the context of the show, you know, you don't think about now, of course, I. I was also a fan of a different TV show. Not science fiction, but, you know, the TV show Mad Men.
• 40:39
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
• 40:40
  Speaker A: And just that. That depiction of the 50s and the 60s through the early 70s and stuff. And just the mentality about how people approach things. Like we're, you know, I know you, You. You're older than I am, so you lived a part of this a little more than I did. But there's a very different set of cultural norms around what was considered acceptable and how we put things on TV and stuff. And it's interesting to think about, even though today, people. If you put a TV show that's up today and you transported it back to the late 1960s, they might be like, oh, my God, they did this. But the, you know, a lot of the, A lot of the groundwork for, like pushing the boundaries was all done back then.
• 41:28
  Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah. And you think about. Not this has anything to do with it, but whatever you think about, even shows like Monty Python and Benny Hill and Rowan and Martin's Laugh In.
• 41:41
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I used to watch that on Nick at night. And reruns.
• 41:44
  Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you look at those and you think back to what they were talking about back then. They were really pretty groundbreaking. And then you say, okay, now let's try and do that today. Nope.
• 41:59
  Speaker A: Yeah, the humor. The humor is definitely different at times. I do enjoy watching a good rerun in that era. Yeah. So, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna drag us back into conversation. We're coming up to the end of the podcast today, and one of the things I. I always make sure to ask our guests is. And you. You touched on some of these. As we've been. We went through, like, your career journey and your background and stuff. But advice do you have or people that are coming up in that are new. So, like, if you have, you know, somebody's asking you, Rich, you've been in this business for, you know, 30 years, 40 years, what's the best advice you've got for people? Okay, well, yeah, if.
• 42:43
  Speaker B: If they're brand new, like just out of whatever community college Whatever it is, do your time. Sign up for a help desk, sign up for the noc, sign up for the soc, sign up for all that kind of frontline stuff, because you're going to get a broad, broad exposure to everything. That is it. And if you get in with good people, they will teach you. And if you want other resources, and here I am going to throw out a couple names. I hope that's okay.
• 43:17
  Speaker A: Absolutely.
• 43:18
  Speaker B: The SANS Institute actually has free courses to get you started in ethical hacking and, I'm sorry, threat hunting. ISACA has great courses and communities that's built around GRC and leadership and such like that. So glom onto those. And I keep forgetting to look this up, but somebody out there, it might be Khan Academy, it might be somebody else, but they've got a free setup where you can go in and do threat hunting on real data and. But it's in a sandbox, so you're completely safe. You're not going to let anything go, but you've got to seek out those kind of resources. But you've got to do your time. You're not going to walk out of college or trade school or whatever and walk into a senior management position in the comfortable six figures. You're going to have to work your way up. And as you work your way up, find yourself a mentor, somebody who has been through the fire, somebody who has, you know, who's taken the knocks, quite frankly, and is willing to share those experiences with you very, very honestly. You can't find somebody who is like, oh, I'm a victim and my boss didn't understand me. No, no, you got to find somebody who says, yep, yep, I screwed up and I took a hit, and here's what you can learn from it. And then I think the third thing is that your career path is not going to be a traditional architectural staircase. It's going to be something drawn by MC Escher. Because you can be like, at Servault, I was a vice president. They got sold. I outlived my contract, got turned loose, started my own business for two and a half, three years, got picked up by Zyders, but I got picked up as a director. Right, okay, so what, you took a step. You know, a lot of people say that's a step backwards. No, it was a step sideways. Yeah, my staff wasn't as big. Yeah, I didn't have 75, 80 servers under my belt or anything like that, but it was, it was still. It turned out to be a big step forward. So I think those would be the three things. Do your time, get a mentor. Don't expect your career ladder to go straight up.
• 46:03
  Speaker A: That's that's some great advice. I'm really glad you got a chance to show that. And our listeners appreciate, with a long history in the technical and it space, you know, coming on the podcast and giving us some of that feedback. So, Rich, I want to thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.
• 46:21
  Speaker B: I was thrilled to be here. You know, your folks reached out to me, and I went back and listened to some of the pods, and I was like, I really like these guys. So, yeah, it was fun.
• 46:31
  Speaker A: It really was. Well, that's a wrap on today's episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. I'm Doug Kamene, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.