George Kamide
Appearances
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, I also think that that's interesting and worthy of discussion is when the war broke out in Ukraine, let me rephrase, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it destabilized prices in such a way that even these aggressors could come to the table to negotiate like wheat exports. Because while the U.S. does not rely on Ukrainian grain, many millions of
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
people do across the Middle East, like Oman, Yemen, which is also suffering from horrific conflict. So like this one thing here could create a famine, you know, tens of thousands of miles away.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Like many cultural foods that are used to typify a country, let's say the pastas of Italy or the noodles of China, the paella of Spain, feijoada was poor people's food, more specifically slave food. It was basically whatever meat scraps were thrown to the slaves, they would put in this pot. And because they're working long hours, you know, somebody was watching it for a long period of time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah. It's also so multifaceted, right? Like, so after I left college and I really wasn't working with industrial agriculture, my next touch point with the nexus of technology and farming was like the right to repair or as sick codes work was just being able to hack into systems like remotely controlled Harvard, like all the technology.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
is there to enable the farm also makes it vulnerable to the food supply stuff. And that was even before I was in cyber. But I understood that software dependency and that vulnerability. And also, yeah, I think just the I don't know if transparency is the right word, but like There's so many layers in it. And I think many of people who occupy different layers can't see through to the other one.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Right. So they're operating kind of in an information vacuum and like, I'm just going to look my thing over here and really not consider the implications downstream. But I think if we can get to models where there's more information sharing, you may not have. something to do with it today, but there's maybe information in the system that can be used later.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
So, for example, you know, NASA maintains a third party database where pilots and airlines can anonymously report errors and misconfigurations and problems and accidents. And others can learn from that. And every year that data is collated into like updated guidance for pilots. Right. So I just think that is a very powerful idea. The ability to basically show your work and your mistakes.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Because in Cyberland, a breach is going to hit a headline. So and so lost all this stuff. Turns out an S3 bucket was left open to the Internet. Or so-and-so taken for a ride because of the move at file transfer exploit. Okay. And then like maybe two weeks later, we see in the popular media another thing hit by ransomware.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
But I had it a lot growing up. It was delicious. And so my favorite food memory is the first time I went back to Brazil since we had immigrated to the States. Being able to locate this fish water that was being cooked out in this field in a gigantic, like the biggest pot I have ever seen in my life. And I located it by smell alone.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
If we dig in, as people who work in cyber will see, it was the same vulnerability or the same exploit. But I feel like if people could catch something, because they're always near misses in cyber. For every headline, there are probably 10 instances where there was an oh shit moment and they caught it before it was a problem. Either it was a vulnerability or a misconfiguration.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
But there's so much shame in cyber and people are so afraid to talk about those mistakes that withholding that I think is keeping us less safe overall.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Whereas if somebody could feel comfortable enough to report like this happened and we kind of have intelligence sharing through the ISACs, but I don't know of a mechanism where people are publicly sharing, and it should be anonymous, problematic settings, configurations, mistakes.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
overlapping tool sets, whatever was the problem so that other people can learn from that and that we don't have multiple casualties because of the same issue. And I think, for example, if we had that in the food supply, it would actually not only be a breadth issue, it would be a depth issue, right? You could have people talking about software issues in processing like OT, ICS instances.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
It could also be, who knows, like just the billing software, right? That's what a lot of ransomware just hits that operational part of the business. Anyway, I just think because we're operating in opaque layers, it gets harder and harder for us to understand like where we could do better, essentially.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You had pointed out to me, or I think you'd said it to me, that we have more traceability and information in a barcode, like on the back of a pack of Oreos, than we do in our standard supply chain of software.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Like it was just sort of like a cartoon, like drifting on the vapor of the hot. So it was just felt like a very full circle moment from growing up with it as a kid and being told stories about Brazil. And then finally being able to go back to Brazil for the first time and turns out that food was the connector.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You know, those kind of moments. My co-host is very clear on from his military days, like the way it worked is if there's a sit rep situation, it's not rank. If you're like the junior analyst who is writing the report, you got to be able to stand and in 30 seconds deliver the news to the commanding officer. And I don't think that we invest as much in those communication skills, which is a miss.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Many companies are willing to sponsor their cybersecurity employees for technical training certificates and the technology stack that they're using.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And we just sort of rely on the communication skills like you either have it or you don't, which I think is unfair because it means if they're not nurtured and you're highly technical, you can kind of get railroaded into like you'll always be the technical lead, but they're never really going to let you into management because you can't interface between the layers.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
yeah and so if you do nurture those i think you get instead of having that skill set concentrated in to the management level i think broadly we might be able to have better communication sort of through organizations security maybe is not viewed askance as it often is like oh those are the it weirdos
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Um, and then also dealing with these situations, like being able to maintain a calm head during an incident and calmly report on like, this is how we are responding to it. We remember we had this plan that we walked you through and we are at this stage of the plan and this is how we're adept. I don't know.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
It takes a very cool head because reacting emotionally or in a highly fatigued state also often leads to worse decision-making.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah. When you think about paella, it's like the farmers were like, what do you have? I got these clams. What do you have? I just like throw it in a giant pot. It's a very collaborative food for sure.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, I mean, look no further than the recent CrowdStrike and Windows outages for the impact on millions of people who have no idea what those companies, like what CrowdStrike is. Household name and cyber. My mom knows what CrowdStrike is, what they do. And just the ability to clearly communicate why can you not get home today? Yeah. Right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And you can't just say like supply chain, SDLC, kernel level update. Like what is that going to do for the person who is now stranded in the airport?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
We don't do ourselves any favors by making it harder to communicate the complexity of our systems or our event. I think a lot of it starts with that awareness and then trying to empathize with where other people are coming from.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
everything from this is why the food system is fragile because this and then this is connected to that and then this to even doing it within orgs right usually the front office of like a big whether it's a food processing plant or food processing conglomerate you know like a tyson's or a conagra like they are operating in a different mode in front of computers than the folks on the floor than the people who actually have hands-on materials getting the stuff off the truck and
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Even within the organizations, the language can become obscuring as to like, why? What does this piece of machinery do? What is it connected to? If it goes down, what's the plan and what is the impact? Again, I think it comes back to communication.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I've been on a kick all year trying to rebrand soft skills as vital skills. I think the reason we don't invest in them is because soft relegates it to this thing that like, it's just on you. You go develop your soft skills. Whereas these are the things that are also critical to making operations run more seriously.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, I've been following that new avian flu very closely because it's weird that it's showing up in cows.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Or sea lions.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Create the culture that allows people to feel comfortable to be like, I am really sick today and I shouldn't be coming. pay people to be sick as well. It would be really helpful. But that's a whole other conversation. Well, I mean, for example, you and I have both spent time in Japan. And the thing about Japan that I think is fetishized in the West is the idea of social harmony.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Don't get me wrong. It's amazing that people don't talk loudly into their cell phones on the train. But pushed into the extreme, that also means people are expected to be at work if they're sick, which is why Japan has always had a culture of wearing face masks even before COVID. You're sick. It is incumbent upon you not to disrupt social harmony by getting other people sick.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Also, people wear face masks because it's flu season. They don't want to get sick. But I mean, I had friends and students in Japan who were like full on feverish and they would show up at work and they were fine if they didn't work, but they had to like put their head on their desk and they, but they physically had to be there.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And I was like, I don't understand this paradox that to disrupt the social harmony would you to be absent. But when you go and touch all the hard surface in this office, and get more people sick, that seems like a productivity nightmare, right? I would rather you stay home, get well, and then come back. But yes, especially to the food supply, for sure. Please, for the love of God, stay home.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, a number of cultural and biological things there. You know, I think as humans, we have to continually make our peace with the fact that we are very bad at that kind of long stage planning. Yeah. From an evolutionary standpoint, like for all the tech we have, the hardware between our ears has unchanged for 100,000 years and probably no updates on the patching schedule anytime soon.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, that is true. I mean, there's a lot. See, that was why it was going to be hard. It was either going to have to be Brazil, Latin America or Japan. So I went with the first thing that came to mind. I will say I was an anthropology major and the two cultural modes that are saturated, we say saturated with the most meaning, are food and sex.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Which means like we are in these new, more complex systems and we're carrying that evolutionary baggage, which includes survival stuff, right? I mean, this has been shown repeatedly in like how to teach people how to even save for retirement. It's very hard to hold these things in the future. And so trying to plan for hypotheticals feels very difficult.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And so that's often why bad things have to happen before. And then everyone's like, Why? You know, like when the boat slammed into the pylon in Baltimore Harbor and just like took out a bridge instantly. You know, then there are all these articles about like those weren't made to withstand container ships of that size. It's like, oh, right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Because when the bridge was built, we weren't shipping like that. And I'm sure somebody at some point said, hey, if we're going to renovate the harbor equipment to accept boats of this size, somebody probably raised a red flag. Like, you know, structurally, a lot of other things aren't made for this, but really hard to plan for that until it happens.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And now everyone's like, it's so easy to ask in retrospect, well, why hadn't it been fortified for whatever? I mean, how many times have we learned this with like earthquake architecture, right? It took a lot of people getting hurt.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
The other thing is the, basically the social media brain. You know, we've been living with the last decade of being essentially rewired in our social behaviors to weigh in on everything. I personally find maybe one of the more liberating passages of Marcus Aurelius' meditations is simply the passage, you do not need to have an opinion.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
It is how a people think of reproducing their lineage and all the rituals around that. And also how does it feed itself? How does it nurture itself? How does it continue to survive to the next generation? So you brought up the people who cooked. So, I mean, today we have history, you have culture, and you can layer in class, economics. We'll talk about security.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
That you is Marcus Aurelius talking to himself, emperor of Rome, arguably most powerful person on the planet at the time. But that is very liberating. You see stuff here like, I don't really need to weigh in there, but there's this reflex to do that. So this is, I guess, where I try to apply my wares. I'm not a technical operator, but I do understand culture.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And I think it's something that gets not enough attention because it's the mode through which we operate. So cybersecurity as an industry has a culture. Food safety has its own culture. And we're sort of operating between these layers at all times, sort of toggling between them. That's just how human society is constructed. But I do think being aware of that is very helpful.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You know, I think we would probably not have CISA were it not for Homeland Security. We would not have Homeland Security were it not for 9-11, right? So we had to kind of go through the disaster to think of new systems and ways to mitigate disaster. So I don't know what I'm trying to say, Kristen.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I'm trying not to say that it's going to take certain disaster for it to happen, but it might take a different reframing. To be able to like either tell it through a story that's relatable.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
There's something that has to like pierce the cultural veil to make people think through these complex systems because just sort of screaming gets you labeled as like Chicken Little because it's just not evident to us. So it doesn't hit the radar.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
There's just so much that goes into food and it is something that can be a medium to convey all of that almost instantly. Like the moment you taste it for the first time, they're like all these cultural layers that you're unaware of, but some part of your human cultural radar is picking them up. And I think that's why it's so fun to share food memories.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
This is whatever, moving on. Because it's also like, let's be honest about how complex these systems are. Like if you're like, it's cool. I got it unlocked. I did a tabletop exercise. Like it's fine. Like the thing that you're dealing with is insane. It is, I'm going to word this carefully. It's the most complicated system in history to date.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Which is to say, like, no other humans have had to deal with this level of complexity. We're talking about code level complexity. Like, is somebody going to brick all the John Deere machines through, you know, some vulnerability? Is somebody going to ransomware just key suppliers like JBS? And so it's fine to say, like, I think I have it, but I'm going to this is my process for making sure like.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Who are you to think? I mean, no other part of the economy has ever been this complex. And that's sort of like the crazy thing about living in the present is it is always at its most material complex. And so it should be fine to be like, I don't know. I'm not certain. It's, you know, let's check that.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Like, oh, I was traveling here and people might talk about the sites, but they almost always talk about the food also, the things that they ate.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, there's a joke to be made about silos, given that we're talking about farming. I will not make it. But to your point about people and culture, which is a word I've probably overused this episode, is also creating a culture where people can dissent, where they can argue, where they can raise issues, right? If
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
If we post 9-11, try to empower literally every citizen of these United States to, if you see, say something, say something. But we do not allow that, I guess, break from the rank and file in our internal teams. Like, no, who are you junior analysts to like raise this concern? This is an obvious problem. Right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
So you're not going to tech your way out of it, but you can build processes where people can either review each other's work or they can begin to say and feel comfortable raising their hand. I think that's from and, you know, best case scenario, they're wrong. Great. And but you have like don't use that as a punishment against them.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And as long as it's, yeah, as long as it's good faith and it's not, you know, boy who cried wolf. But like, I don't, again, especially from a CISO perspective, you know, 90% of the CISO's job is not like hands-on keys. It's, it is negotiating these different processes inside an organization may, and again, procuring technology, small portion of that pie of responsibility.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And so to imagine that like the upper echelons of a security organization can keep a read on the pulse of everything is sort of delusional, right?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You actually do rely on the people who are, they're watching the logs or intercepting the packets or whatever, doing that work and then being, feeling empowered to stop the presses, push the button, whatever it is to pause and like, let's review what looks to be an anomalous event or whatever, and, or
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
you know just architecting your teams to have that because right now i think the way we have built our teams is built around an old-fashioned model of how we works like network switches in the basement we don't longer have that it's in the cloud right code built in-house yes but also third-party code repos And even human specialization, right? You are the insider risk manager.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You are the SOC analyst. You are the tier two SOC analyst. You are the incident responder. You're the forensic person. The volume and complexity that we're dealing with today, I think we need to learn new ways and experiment with new ways to make ourselves a little bit more agile, not in the code dev sense, but like being able to respond because
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
As AI tools get layered into new technologies, which they will because there's just a market pressure to do that. I don't think that the teams we have today can ingest that information that fast. I think if you're architected for human specialization and you have machines also specializing, you create enormous bottlenecks in your ability to respond, triage and do whatever else. And so, yeah.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I don't know. I think that's interesting. I think it's a hard problem to solve. I would say it's not unique to security. Entire businesses have been built around this level of human specialization. And I think the best organizations in the world will start to invest in either organizational psychologists or just new ways. You know, like we went from kind of specialists. Right.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Well, we went from like, you know, I think the most visible reminder of these changes is going from like cubicle to open office plan. Right. That was interesting. supposed to be a physical way to get more collaboration, more sharing. I would argue that didn't really work, but that was an idea that like, this is how we should organize teams or a lot of the tech in the Valley is organized very flat.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Again, they were experimenting with how do we foster innovation? Well, okay, so they're re-architecting things for innovation, delivery of product. How are we architecting teams for faster response, faster recovery, greater resilience, right? Again, like you have these teams under budget constraints and you lose one part of your team, either to layoffs or a riff or whatever.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Like, do you just completely lose all that talent or have you kind of cross-trained your team? I mean, people get sick, death in the family, serious injury. Are you telling me that if that CTI lead is out, for a couple of months like you just don't have. I don't know. Like, how do we think about resilience within our teams as well?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Stop being so Northeast. That's fun.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, I mean, Bare Knuckles and Breast Hacks will be keynoting, will be the closing keynote of Secure World Denver, October 10th. I think that's very exciting. We are keeping it pretty close to the chest, but the title of our talk is Radical Transparency. I think if anyone knows us, they know that you might need a fire extinguisher after we're done, but that's the way it goes.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
It's been a very busy year and we'll just keep pushing on the culture front, really.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yeah, so they have always favored soft tacos. Mm-hmm, I do too. And we have, and sort of street style, in other words, much smaller tortilla. Yep. Lately, they've been favoring the flour tortilla, although there is an outfit here where we live where in the farmer's market, mom and grandma are personally pressing masa tortillas, like as you're ordering them, and that is incredible. Yeah.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And one day I will take them to Mexico and I have this insane taco story there, which was I was in southern Mexico and the family I was staying with was like, we're going out for tacos. Didn't really know what to expect. At that point in my life, I'm pretty sure my experience of tacos was whatever chain Tex-Mex restaurant we had on the East Coast, which is to say the nadir of Mexican food.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
So we go out there and there's like three things you can put on the taco. So that's it. He's giving you choices. He's like, it's like cheese, chicken, or beans. I was like, oh, and these tortillas were very small, like the size of your palm. Yep. Oh, okay. I didn't really understand what was going on. Okay, great. So ordered whatever.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And then I turned around and there's this table with this array of like 90 salsas. And I was like, oh, I see. This is merely the vehicle to transport the salsa into my
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
face it's really the salsa that's the meal yes and and i i did my best i did my best to eat every single one i'm not sure i got there but the cost of the time was insane it must have been less than 90 cents per taco so i really tried to do as much damage as possible but that was like a peak experience for sure
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
The family we were staying with, you know, the day is hot. And so we would come back from the university and lunch is the biggest meal of the day. And I kid you not, the housekeeper who was in charge of preparing the meals, my friend Scott and I sit down and there is this like just cartoonishly large stack of tortillas.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
He and I are like really uncertain as to like whether we are expected to get through this mountain of tortillas. Anyway, we got through as much as we could and it was incredible. But it was also like, this is why you have the siesta because I cannot move. Right. It was like just it's super hot and a full on food coma. And you're like, yes, I am not moving again until 3 p.m. when it gets cooler.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And I have at least digested some of this tortillas.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I want that. Yeah, China had more pictures. When I was in Japan, I was learning Japanese and I was living near Tokyo, so the lot was in English. But when we traveled out to the countryside, if you got into the place that didn't have it, you're like looking at them and you're like, I think that is the kanji for codfish or it's like umbrella.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And I guess we're going to figure that out when it comes to the table.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Yes, gesticulate wildly until you get through it. Exactly.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Love it.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I'm going to give this gaijin the largest pile of wasabi I can muster.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
George Kamidi. I am head of community and events at the CISO Society, co-founder, executive director of Mind Over Cyber, which is a nonprofit and co-host of the podcast Fair Knuckles and Brass Tacks, with another George who is a CISO. And... Yeah, lucked into security by way of many side doors. And I also had, we discovered a food background.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I'd written my undergraduate thesis on deforestation in the Amazon frontier, which was the result of large scale soy farming. And yeah, I think when I entered undergrad, I would not have guessed that I would be writing about like industrial agriculture.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I didn't really have a lot of connection to that naturally, and I didn't really know a lot about it, but I was an anthropology major and I was interested in how I could get back to Brazil. And one of my professors directed me toward this research topic. And it was interesting because from an anthropological perspective, what you're trying to do is learn how different groups see land.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Oh, wow. Yes. First, I am very excited to be here. I know we've been talking about it for a while. Favorite food. Oh, okay. I'm going to go with tacos first. There's so many I could pick, but tacos were the key ingredient into getting my kids to try new things.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
I think the debate is obscured like Oh, it's deforestation. But producers, that's what they call themselves instead of farmers. You know, if they say produce, that's the universe they see and measure everything in. So it's about yield. And it was just like a very interesting way to explore how people are thinking about things. And then I had been also in a number of environmental studies classes.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And that's when I think I really got enamored with the complexity and the precarity of the food supply. And I was like, oh, this is very different than what I thought, which I think like most people, my exposure to the food supply was the grocery store.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And, you know, my dad had an extensive garden, so I wasn't so unaware that like carrots come from the ground or that stuff has to get dirty and then get washed. But I just didn't see all of the systems. I didn't see it as like a linkage of many chains and things. You know, should one go down, that's a big deal. And then when I was in Brazil, I mean, this was circa 2004.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And even then, we're talking about farms, the likes of which most Americans have never seen. Yep. In terms of technological advance and size. So Brazil is measuring farms in hectares. I saw farms hundreds of thousands of acres, like hundreds. As far as you can see in any direction toward the horizon, a crop, cotton, soy, whatever. And then they rotate. But monoculture. Yep.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
You know, you'd have to drive more than an hour to get to the other side of the farm. And this, again, 2004. So I want to emphasize where people might think Brazil was at that time. But these farms were run by like five people. Yeah. And they had laser guidance systems on the posts, you know, and the harvesters would just follow this grid that was being projected.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
So that was my introduction to the level of technology in industrial scale farming and also just the amount of software involved in order to get the gains that they wanted. Like, you can't farm that much land with human labor. It's just kind of impossible. Yeah. And so... Yeah, just kind of considering that cycle, like how is it dependent on technology?
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Why technology is like literally the only way it can be done. And of course, its role in the economy of Brazil at the time and also its role in the larger world economy. So these soy farms were growing soy to feed pigs in China. So you see all of this. And I think, again, as someone who had minimal exposure to this, you think, oh, you are growing this for people.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
Like, how much soy could anyone need? And I thought maybe it was soybean oil and some of the stuff that was being used in processed food manufacturing. And it turns out, no, it was like harvest the soy, get it on the boat. Insatiable hunger for it from China as China was growing its middle class. Middle class social demands for meat meant, in China's case, pork. The pigs got to eat something.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
So it's just like grain. We were just growing food grain. I don't know. That was all very eye-opening to me. And it's sat with me ever since.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
If I could get it into a taco, they would eat it, and now they love tacos, and they are on the hunt for taco trucks, and they have a very discerning palate for their age, so I'm going to say tacos. Tacos. Favorite food memory. My family is from Brazil, and so there is a traditional Brazilian dish called feijoada, which is black beans that is stewed over very low heat for a very long time.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
And also like that number of pigs or chickens just wouldn't naturally congregate in groups that large.
Bites & Bytes Podcast
The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems
It would be terrifying. Oh, yeah. Terrifying for sure.