The Anthropology of Cybersecurity with George Kamide | Exploring the Intersection of Tech, Culture, and Food Systems

15.862 - 29.73 Kristin Demoranville

Welcome back to another episode of the Bites and Bytes podcast. I'm your host, Kristen Demmer-Enville, and today I'm excited to be joined by the extraordinary George Kamidi, co-founder of Mind Over Cyber and co-host of Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks.

30.07 - 45.059 Kristin Demoranville

George brings a unique combination of expertise in both anthropology and cybersecurity, and today we'll be exploring the human factors, cultural dynamics, and complexities of the global food supply chain. A special note before we begin, I want to acknowledge something important.

45.28 - 61.676 Kristin Demoranville

This episode was recorded before the recent updates on the avian flu and listeria outbreak linked to deli meat incidents. I wish to extend my thoughts to those affected and be sensitive to everyone working through these crises. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy my conversation with George. Let's get started.

63.007 - 75.158 Kristin Demoranville

It's finally happening. I have George K. We'll get into who George K. is in a second. I want you to start with your favorite food and your favorite food memory, because it's literally my favorite question I ask everybody.

75.178 - 94.496 George Kamide

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.

94.577 - 116.874 George Kamide

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.

117.114 - 140.643 George Kamide

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.

140.703 - 159.068 George Kamide

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.

159.508 - 175.869 George Kamide

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.

176.169 - 182.657 Kristin Demoranville

It always is a connector for sure. I feel like just about every culture has some type of like rice and beans and meat.

183.138 - 192.69 George Kamide

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.

192.97 - 205.878 Kristin Demoranville

And I think that is some of the coolest thing because it's about community at that point, right? It's about what you can get in the local community and it binds people together differently. And I've also had something similar experience-wise when I was in Puerto Rico.

206.539 - 225.632 Kristin Demoranville

I was there on an outreach trip and Rice Campoya and Beans, it was the most delicious thing I've ever had in my life because it stewed for, I don't know, 12 hours or something like that. Yes, yeah. But it was more than that because it was about the people who were serving it to me. You know, I knew that they had given their time and their money that they didn't have that much to give to do this.

225.993 - 231.537 Kristin Demoranville

I was actually expecting Georgie to say something about Japanese food or I was not expecting that at all.

231.857 - 250.95 George Kamide

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.

251.111 - 272.444 George Kamide

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.

272.624 - 293.833 George Kamide

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.

293.893 - 300.236 George Kamide

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.

300.376 - 320.048 Kristin Demoranville

Or what they were eating when they saw the site. I've gotten that quite a few times. And I love it how people get so passionate when they talk about food. And especially all the guests that I've had. I had someone that I didn't expect completely nerd out on pizza on air. Just so excited about the whole process of it. And the making of everything. And the temperature. And the pressure.

320.128 - 337.379 Kristin Demoranville

And the rest of the people are just thinking, man, I just need to get a pizza pizza. It doesn't matter. I don't care about it. But listening to people get so impassioned by the food that they love makes this more of a joy for me as well on a personal level. I really love people's stories. So I do have a question about the tacos though.

337.719 - 342.983 Kristin Demoranville

Like what's the favorite right now in the house with the tacos since that seems to be the item your children go towards?

343.263 - 370.383 George Kamide

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.

370.743 - 392.686 George Kamide

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.

393.587 - 410.95 George Kamide

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.

411.09 - 422.192 George Kamide

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

422.352 - 440.636 George Kamide

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

440.816 - 457.539 Kristin Demoranville

glad that you had a good experience. I had a similar one in Mexico City. I was on a food street tour, actually, and it was the best thing I could have done for my palate. I did the same thing when I've traveled anywhere, getting used to the textures and the flavors so I don't, you know, make a fool out of myself at a table or couldn't navigate chopsticks or something like that.

457.699 - 471.403 Kristin Demoranville

But I remember thinking authentic Mexican food, and I mean authentic, like not what we do to it here in the States, of course, is some of the most amazing food I've ever had, hands down. And there's some stuff I think about daily to this day, actually.

471.643 - 492.494 George Kamide

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.

493.094 - 515.39 George Kamide

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.

515.57 - 517.551 George Kamide

And I have at least digested some of this tortillas.

517.591 - 531.205 Kristin Demoranville

Exactly. And some of the things I love the most about suit adventures outside of your own comfort zone is when you don't speak the language or you don't speak language well, or you can understand a little bit of it. Situational awareness kicks in usually. And you're kind of having to guess what's on the menu.

531.425 - 545.642 Kristin Demoranville

And then you end up with this like plethora of amazing food that you've never thought of because you couldn't really read the menu. Don't get me wrong. It's like an adventure. I did something like that in Mexico City. Did not end up with crickets. I thought we were going to. I'm glad we didn't. I think I would have been a little weirded out by it. I'm just not a bug eater.

545.702 - 559.962 Kristin Demoranville

Like, that's not my thing. But everything that we had was amazing. And nobody in front of us spoke any English. Nobody around us spoke any English. They didn't have English menus. And you just point. And like, That looks good. You try to use Google Translate, but it's kind of, it's cheesy. You don't really want to do that. You just kind of go with your gut instinct on it.

560.082 - 568.855 Kristin Demoranville

So the same thing when I was in Japan, same thing when I was in Malaysia, like all these places, I just was like, that looks great. Do that. Or if it's visually in front of you, that looks amazing. I don't know what it is.

569.296 - 587.607 George Kamide

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.

588.007 - 591.448 George Kamide

And I guess we're going to figure that out when it comes to the table.

591.668 - 609.712 Kristin Demoranville

I think my favorite interaction with that was I was actually standing in a train station in Shinagawa in Tokyo. Granted, English is a little more prevalent in Tokyo. And the sushi chef did not speak English. And he was very irritated with me, clearly, because I wasn't moving it along. It's a fast moment there. And I was my last time being in Tokyo when I knew it was.

609.772 - 624.659 Kristin Demoranville

So I was sort of like laid back. a little bit more than I probably should have been. You know, taking my time ordering and not getting too excited. They didn't have any scallops, so I was kind of sad about that, but I pointed at, you know, I want the fatty salmon. And he was like, and he pointed at the wasabi. This is what we do. We just point at things.

624.899 - 627.64 George Kamide

Yes, gesticulate wildly until you get through it. Exactly.

627.68 - 634.444 Kristin Demoranville

He pointed at the wasabi, and I made the little teeny moment with my hands. Oh, no, no, no. This man dumped it all on me.

635.044 - 635.325 George Kamide

Love it.

635.725 - 644.715 Kristin Demoranville

I was, every orifice was just steaming. But I remember thinking, and he giggled. You could tell that he was amused by what he did. And I was amused. But I also was amused because I was, you know.

645.176 - 649.581 George Kamide

I'm going to give this gaijin the largest pile of wasabi I can muster.

649.601 - 666.199 Kristin Demoranville

Yeah. Yeah, but it gave me an opportunity to like cry out that I was leaving and I was really sad. And nobody would question it because I just had a really strong wasabi moment. Those are the kind of cultural things that I love. Or if someone wants to practice their English while they're serving you a drink or, you know, those kind of things and they want to know all these things.

666.219 - 686.226 Kristin Demoranville

And it's awesome. I love that connection and food and drinks are such a vehicle for that moment. And this is why I think that it's so important to protect it and why we need to continue as cybersecurity professionals to focus on that human factor of why we're doing it. It's not just because it's data, it's about human lives.

686.466 - 700.292 Kristin Demoranville

So before we jump all onto that, George, I will let you introduce yourself. I will say, everyone, that it's because of George that you have this podcast, because if it wasn't for his encouragement and sitting down and having lunch one day, thinking of food, that this podcast wouldn't have been born. So, take it away, George.

700.492 - 722.462 George Kamide

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.

722.482 - 737.607 George Kamide

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.

738.387 - 760.105 George Kamide

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.

760.385 - 780.932 George Kamide

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.

781.352 - 796.241 George Kamide

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.

796.581 - 818.378 George Kamide

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.

818.698 - 844.891 George Kamide

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.

845.132 - 866.923 George Kamide

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.

867.083 - 889.358 George Kamide

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?

889.658 - 912.013 George Kamide

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.

912.233 - 934.75 George Kamide

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.

934.77 - 942.055 George Kamide

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.

942.295 - 965.693 Kristin Demoranville

Get the percentage. I'll try to find the statistic and throw it into the show notes. But majority of soy, corn. Corn. Are all for animals. And it's kind of on a whole other side and not to get onto some kind of soapbox. It's kind of crazy to think about that we do that, though. Because naturally, I don't think pigs and cows and chickens and other things like that, beef, eat soy and corn. Yeah.

965.913 - 976.463 Kristin Demoranville

We kind of find that to be a strange thing. We're feeding animals things that they're not normally eating, but we don't have enough grassland or forage land for them anymore because of the way we live on this planet.

976.623 - 984.41 George Kamide

And also like that number of pigs or chickens just wouldn't naturally congregate in groups that large.

984.81 - 987.832 Kristin Demoranville

Correct. That would be crazy if they did. I mean, then you'd have an army.

987.852 - 989.894 George Kamide

It would be terrifying. Oh, yeah. Terrifying for sure.

989.914 - 997.239 Kristin Demoranville

I've never played with any of this information. I feel like somebody is probably going to make a meme off of that right there. Like just the army of like animals coming at us.

1000.221 - 1030.238 Kristin Demoranville

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1071.023 - 1089.32 Kristin Demoranville

I think that aha moment, George, is something that I consistently have in this industry because I am innately curious and talking to people who do this production work, they tell me stuff I learn something new every day. And I think it's amazing. And also that aha moment when I was doing my degree in environmental management, it was like the light bulb clicks.

1089.7 - 1108.381 Kristin Demoranville

every couple seconds like oh my goodness really we do it like that that's what that is oh no like and you just get kind of like super overwhelmed because you start to picture the whole ocean when we need to just start making cups of tea instead of boil the whole ocean if you will and it's a very daunting task because we didn't put cyber security in mind when we put this tech in

1108.621 - 1124.03 Kristin Demoranville

It wasn't even a thought. It was just, oh, I need to do this because we're going to get higher yields, better production, it will be better for everyone all around. And they didn't think, oh, nobody's going to hack food or tamper with food because we're good human beings. Everybody's a good human being. Nobody's going to mess with food.

1124.27 - 1130.113 Kristin Demoranville

And lo and behold, we're seeing this in real time with Ukraine, as an example, and other places. Yeah.

1130.373 - 1153.821 George Kamide

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

1154.261 - 1167.844 George Kamide

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.

1167.864 - 1185.914 Kristin Demoranville

Yeah. And I think the other article recently I just ran into, because obviously I pay attention to a lot of the farming community news, they've been talking about the quality of the soil because of the wars that are going on. What's going to happen to the topsoil because of it? And of course, people are like, that's a stupid thing to worry about a lot. The Earth will just heal itself.

1185.974 - 1203.972 Kristin Demoranville

Yes, but the Earth takes a while to heal itself. It's not like it's a snap of the finger and it's magically healed by some massive technology that us humans have created. Probably destroy the planet more if we try to create a technology like that. Let's be honest. But I think the fact that people are looking at this in such a systems thinking approach, this is what's happening here.

1204.112 - 1223.021 Kristin Demoranville

It's going to affect here. You know, it's all interconnected. And it just goes to show you how fragile the food system is ultimately and how fragile the food supply system is. And again, how do we how do we deal with this? I feel like I spent quite a bit of time, George, educating the cybersecurity community that this is a problem and there's tech there.

1223.041 - 1243.31 Kristin Demoranville

A bit on air, I've talked to people who literally thought that cows were built by hand or that nothing's secret or safe inside the food industry. And I had to 100% clap back and say, your favorite snack recipe is secret. That's just a random example. And then how the machines are made to create your said favorite snack.

1243.53 - 1260.638 Kristin Demoranville

I worked for a company that they created a machine that suspended eight blueberries in one mix. And they had to do it in such a way that gravity was being restricted. It was very, very engineer crazy. But that patent for that machine is secret. They obviously wouldn't want a competitor to know that. How to suspend blueberries in a mix.

1260.958 - 1270.282 Kristin Demoranville

So it's just, it's frustrating to me that I have to not only help, I'm obviously helping the food industry and that's great. And I love that. And that's where it fills me up. But I have to like turn around to my competitors.

1270.322 - 1294.399 Kristin Demoranville

colleagues and be like hey guys are you thinking about this in a you know a holistic manner in which it encompasses everything and what you're doing over here probably is affecting over here and bottom line you're probably hurting a farmer i i it's one of those moments where i'm constantly having to to have that conversation and obviously part of the reason why the podcast is here is to open that space up more and have those conversations and that dialogue between all the different people that are involved in the stakeholders

1294.679 - 1319.677 George Kamide

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.

1320.097 - 1342.234 George Kamide

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.

1342.434 - 1362.833 George Kamide

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.

1363.094 - 1388.214 George Kamide

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.

1388.695 - 1408.586 George Kamide

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.

1408.846 - 1428.219 George Kamide

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.

1428.859 - 1438.622 George Kamide

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.

1438.642 - 1455.066 George Kamide

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.

1455.646 - 1476.771 George Kamide

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.

1476.831 - 1491.417 George Kamide

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.

1491.577 - 1509.229 Kristin Demoranville

Exactly. And it's so great that you brought up that traceability aspect because the food safety side of the house is that's their big thing now, traceability. Because they need to be able to trace it back and what happened in the food. They know that they're going to have to use tech to do this. Basically, they want to check all the way back down to see.

1509.249 - 1518.477 Kristin Demoranville

So that's what they would like to be able to do at some point. But that traceability aspect is already very prevalent in the food side because it's part of their mandate. It's part of the regulations now.

1518.737 - 1532.09 George Kamide

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.

1532.11 - 1552.255 Kristin Demoranville

Correct. Yes, it's very much true. And we won't even get into s bombs. But like that starts to get real, like, creepy and scary. And people are tackling that. And that's not for me. But I appreciate the people that are doing that work, because that's definitely a lot of traceability and, and ability to be able to communicate what's in something to software in this case.

1552.455 - 1572.314 Kristin Demoranville

I do think that we're going to need partnerships and collaboration when it comes to traceability, when it comes to cyber events. We need to normalize feeling like crap when something happens. Yes. I was speaking to another colleague who does the work that I do similar, and they were talking about how there were two ransomware attacks that hit this year.

1572.754 - 1595.942 Kristin Demoranville

One paid the ransom, one didn't pay the ransom, and they increased. They equally both were screwed. It was definitely a bankrupt situation on both sides, just for one purpose or the other. But what this person was telling me that they were really saddened by, besides that fact, because that's horrible in itself, was the emotional reaction from both sides. One company was angry and just volatile.

1596.422 - 1611.706 Kristin Demoranville

The other one was remorseful and shameful and crying, like grown men crying. And I said, are you okay? Because I was a cybersecurity expert going into help. Are you okay? And the response back was yes, but I was not prepared to deal with their emotions. I did not know how to do that.

1612.606 - 1637.863 Kristin Demoranville

and it got me thinking that as cyber security experts we see people literally at their worst like at their worst moment you have to have such a high level of emotional intelligence to be here to understand to either a not absorb it or b take reaction to it i was just speaking at a meetup group yesterday just with some new newer coming into the world of cyber and there's part of me that always wants to be like right away but not like in a joking way but uh-huh you would not be the first

1638.143 - 1656.71 Kristin Demoranville

Yeah, I'm sure. But I was talking with this one person who had just come out of desktop support and is now in the identity space, which I thought looks great. And I was talking to him and he said, you know, I really feel like my time in desktop support and IT really taught me how to deal with people. And I said, that's great. Hold on to that because you're going to need it. Trust me.

1656.73 - 1673.688 Kristin Demoranville

I said, you're going to need to know how to handle an executive who chucks their laptop at you from across the room. you know, when they're angry about something. You're going to need to know how to handle a boardroom that's full of people that are upset because they didn't understand what you're trying to say because they didn't get the research ahead of time and you dropped a bomb.

1673.949 - 1675.551 Kristin Demoranville

And then you're going to have to deal with that fallout.

1675.691 - 1698.097 George Kamide

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.

1698.497 - 1706.839 George Kamide

Many companies are willing to sponsor their cybersecurity employees for technical training certificates and the technology stack that they're using.

1707.219 - 1724.316 George Kamide

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.

1724.336 - 1726.498 Kristin Demoranville

It's like you've failed and you didn't fail. Yeah. Yeah.

1726.818 - 1746.956 George Kamide

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

1747.396 - 1763.828 George Kamide

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.

1763.848 - 1772.494 George Kamide

It takes a very cool head because reacting emotionally or in a highly fatigued state also often leads to worse decision-making.

1772.734 - 1785.719 Kristin Demoranville

And I think specifically in the food industry, because it's such an emotionally charged industry. And I'm not saying like food people or farmers or ranchers are emotional. I'm not saying that. I'm just saying it's a heart and soul moment. There's a lot of heart that goes into these jobs.

1786.299 - 1798.845 Kristin Demoranville

And to have something that happens that you have no control over or you feel like you have no control over, it makes a person kind of half crazy. One of the best trains I ever got, George, honestly, I don't. I've had tons of technical training over my, say, over 25 years now.

1799.105 - 1815.856 Kristin Demoranville

The best training I ever got, aside from all the leadership training, aside from everything, I was culturally trained how to handle random scenario situations that were emotionally charged inside of different cultural environments. And I'm talking about country environments. I'm talking about work environments. I'm talking about industrial environments.

1815.996 - 1830.644 Kristin Demoranville

And I learned so much and I actually went through two rounds of it. I went through like the advanced level as well. And I just remember absorbing this like I was this like kid in school again and just really loving it because it resonated so heavily with me because we need to do that kind of work inside of cybersecurity.

1830.784 - 1845.793 Kristin Demoranville

But the problem is, and you know, there's two George said, if you go to speak about this at a conference or you go to pitch it as an abstract, people were like, what does this got to do with anything? This doesn't make any sense. Why would anybody want to talk about this or learn about this? And I feel like the industry is hungry for it. I feel like they want to know.

1845.993 - 1862.888 Kristin Demoranville

And I also think that it's important to be able to serve and protect our communities because crises, as I've learned recently, are really about the community level. It's not about like the big picture because the community is what's affected. And how do we serve better if we can't even manage our own community? But these are my little journeys.

1863.388 - 1884.546 George Kamide

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.

1884.566 - 1893.108 George Kamide

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?

1893.248 - 1897.749 Kristin Demoranville

They probably like kernel. I don't want to talk about popcorn or kick in or something, you know.

1897.969 - 1909.152 George Kamide

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.

1909.392 - 1938.423 George Kamide

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

1938.783 - 1952.106 George Kamide

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.

1955.865 - 1972.591 Kristin Demoranville

Hey everyone, just a quick break to share some exciting news. We've hit a major milestone, 5,000 downloads. Thank you so much for your support. Also, the show is still up for the Women in Podcasting Network Awards of 2024 in the technology category, and your vote would mean the world to me.

1973.311 - 1984.475 Kristin Demoranville

Please don't forget to cast your vote by October 1st. The link is in the show notes. Let's keep bridging that gap between cybersecurity and the food industry together. Now back to my conversation with George.

1987.808 - 2005.497 George Kamide

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.

2005.657 - 2025.638 Kristin Demoranville

I do think there is an interesting movement in the food industry to focus on some of the softer skills though. I'm thinking about like the regenerative ag farms like Vital Farms and Muffin Greens and not to call out brands, I usually don't, but two examples of companies that are taking the most of tech and also educating consumers on what's going on in their companies.

2025.919 - 2044.175 Kristin Demoranville

And they're very transparent and open about it. I think that people will be more willing to spend a little bit more if they knew where their food was coming from and how it was prepared and what steps are being taken to protect it around all these different aspects and avenues than if it's just whatever. But I also think about the imbalance of our food supply in general.

2044.355 - 2062.265 Kristin Demoranville

Cheaper to buy a hamburger at McDonald's than it is to buy three apples or whatever it is now. I think that we've got that kind of layer of crazy town as well to deal with. There's too many factors in here. And then if you chuck in the food safety aspect, how we're basically one breath away from some kind of foodborne illness at all times. It's kind of insanity to me.

2062.525 - 2069.929 George Kamide

Yeah, I've been following that new avian flu very closely because it's weird that it's showing up in cows.

2070.189 - 2071.87 Kristin Demoranville

So it may not be as weird as you think.

2072.31 - 2073.371 George Kamide

Or sea lions.

2073.571 - 2089.586 Kristin Demoranville

This is my opinion of that. And I am not a scientist working on this. I want to make this very clear, but it's probably being moved around by humans. So example would be if you walk into one facility and then you walk out and you go to another facility, you're probably taking that contaminant with you.

2089.807 - 2106.038 Kristin Demoranville

Recently, I was rereading some food safety training brief because I was curious what they were saying about this particular industry. And one of the things that jumped out at me, which is like such an aha moment, but yeah, that's like a dumb thing. Don't come to work if you're sick and you work in food. That makes sense to me. And I never thought about actually calling out.

2106.158 - 2126.993 George Kamide

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.

2127.314 - 2147.146 George Kamide

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.

2147.366 - 2162.5 George Kamide

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.

2162.601 - 2182.859 George Kamide

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.

2183.379 - 2199.052 Kristin Demoranville

Yeah, please stay home. We don't, we don't, nobody wants to get sick. I think we all kind of learned that lesson in a really different way because of the pandemic, for sure. Regardless of where you sit on the spectrum of conspiracy around it, we all know that germs are past because humans touch things. We get them. We're taught that very young anyways.

2199.192 - 2217.085 Kristin Demoranville

So I think part of it goes into this aspect as well with the contamination of all the food lately. I think everybody keeps asking me like, why do we have such listeria poisoning? Like all this E. coli, what's going on? And I said, you have to follow the trail, literally. You have to think about it in that, you know, holistic sense of where does it come from? And how is it moving? What are we doing?

2217.265 - 2233.974 Kristin Demoranville

What are we not doing? And I think this is this is the part that scares me is because if that system's broken, how how exploitable is that? You know, that's what keeps me up at night is knowing we're a breath away from some type of foodborne illness because somebody, whether it's a nation state or some jerk, just wants to mess with our food.

2234.174 - 2241.357 Kristin Demoranville

And I have sat in labs, George, ICSOT labs and watched people. production lines being manipulated and you didn't even know what happened.

2241.497 - 2260.446 Kristin Demoranville

Literally, lights didn't change, it looked like everything was running fine, but yet on the output later on when you're watching the forensics data, it shows what they did, changed the pH by blah, blah, blah, and you have an entirely new product in front of you that hit the shelves and could hurt people. This is what, this is when I feel like, and I'm, this is again, a little bit conspiracy.

2260.506 - 2277.458 Kristin Demoranville

So just everybody bear with me. I don't think that security as a whole, cybersecurity as a whole is going to really take up notice on what's going on in the food industry until something really catac, like a catastrophe happens. Cause we are definitely the bandwagon group of. all this traffic happened and everybody all of a sudden has an opinion and is an expert on it.

2277.619 - 2294.289 Kristin Demoranville

And I don't want that kind of wake up call because that, first of all, that means people might be hurt. But the other part is I don't want people who don't know talking about it in a manner of, I read an article, I read a book, so that's why I'm now an expert people. And I'm afraid of that happening in the food industry and the food supply.

2294.309 - 2298.071 Kristin Demoranville

That's something that really does make me upset and keeps me nervous.

2298.291 - 2322.126 George Kamide

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.

2322.666 - 2345.138 George Kamide

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.

2345.378 - 2367.448 George Kamide

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.

2367.548 - 2385.177 George Kamide

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.

2385.757 - 2396.703 George Kamide

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.

2397.193 - 2409.92 Kristin Demoranville

Hello, listeners. It's time for today's breaking news segment, where we'll bring you up-to-date headlines from the food industry and examine how cybersecurity plays a role in these crucial issues. First, let's turn our attention to the Boar's Head food safety crisis.

2410.2 - 2425.749 Kristin Demoranville

Boar's Head, a well-established name in deli meats, is facing a severe public health crisis after the Listeria outbreak linked to their ready-to-eat products. Tragically, nine people have died and 57 others have been hospitalized, many who will suffer from lifelong complications as a result.

2426.089 - 2442.618 Kristin Demoranville

The recall of these products was issued, but that was only part of a much larger problem. Recently, inspection reports shed light on unsanitary conditions at one of their facilities, including the presence of mold, insect infestations, and leftover meat residue, which likely contributed to the contamination.

2442.918 - 2453.204 Kristin Demoranville

In response to this crisis, Boar's Head shut down the Virginia facility, discontinuing its Liverwurst product, and formed a Food Safety Council, composing of top experts to prevent future disasters.

2453.684 - 2466.215 Kristin Demoranville

Next, let's discuss the avian influenza outbreak. Since April of 2024, 14 human cases of highly pathogenic avian influenza or bird flu have been confirmed.

2466.435 - 2479.921 Kristin Demoranville

These cases primarily affect poultry workers exposed to the infected birds. Though human cases remain rare, the virus has caused widespread concern within the poultry industry, leading to the culling of hundreds of thousands of birds to contain the outbreak.

2480.241 - 2494.424 Kristin Demoranville

In response, the USDA and CDC have heightened their surveillance efforts and reinforced biosecurity measures at poultry facilities nationwide. That's your breaking news update where food safety and cybersecurity converge. Stay tuned for more insights after the break.

2496.115 - 2516.626 George Kamide

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.

2517.026 - 2537.849 George Kamide

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.

2537.929 - 2556.507 George Kamide

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.

2556.607 - 2573.277 George Kamide

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.

2573.317 - 2585.203 George Kamide

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.

2585.464 - 2599.672 George Kamide

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.

2599.952 - 2618.5 Kristin Demoranville

I think the ability to be relatable and to find the ability to find common ground is what's probably the most important. I will say that food safety culture has adopted cybersecurity as part of its culture processes now because food defense is very similar to what we go through and in cybersecurity.

2618.68 - 2635.233 Kristin Demoranville

I do appreciate that I have been welcomed by that side of the house in terms of an ambassador for cybersecurity, because that's kind of why I look at myself when I'm an ambassador for cyber, because they don't know enough about it to do anything about it necessarily, but they need to be informed enough where they won't do harm.

2635.534 - 2655.643 Kristin Demoranville

And I do think that every cybersecurity professional, and this is my opinion, has that responsibility to be an ambassador for your sector of security. whatever that means. You are a representation of what that part of the sign of the house looks like. This is why the hacker in the hoodie has stuck so well and it's become this number of things for what a hacker is, is because it's easier.

2655.823 - 2668.525 Kristin Demoranville

It's easy for people to understand what that is. I constantly have to remind people that not all of us are hackers, that we actually, some of us are, you know, we talk about risk and we talk about system thinking and we talk about different ways to avoid being vulnerable and be resilient.

2668.665 - 2673.966 Kristin Demoranville

And I really, I want to leave our episode on a positive note because it's been a little, you know, we've been a little

2674.326 - 2695.792 Kristin Demoranville

harsh that's okay though i feel like you and i sort of especially are okay with being a little harsh but we need to really move away from recovery into resilience and i know that's like a hot button thing and i kind of need that every bell whistle on the marketing trail but i actually really do believe that that that you're going to get hit with an attack it's going to happen but can you survive it or you're not hit by an attack but your critical supplier is

2696.192 - 2712.621 Kristin Demoranville

Exactly. What happens when, you know, your counterpart, your partner gets hit? Is that going to affect you? Are you liable for that attack? There's questions there. I've had a lot of those questions recently of do you have strong security riders? The beef industry is worried about this because the GBS attack, they're still concerned about it.

2712.721 - 2722.226 Kristin Demoranville

They know that they need to work on their whole supply chain. But because everybody keeps focusing on boiling the ocean and not making that cup of tea, it gets really daunting. And I always say, let's start with the basics.

2722.626 - 2750.662 Kristin Demoranville

is your door of your house locked did you lock your windows is your alarm system on do you have a guard dog you know we go through kind of like the basics of that understanding and then i say do you feel like you have a window open upstairs it's not locked where is that in your facility do you have concerns and then that's where what you mentioned george the shame kind of comes in is getting people to realize that it's not a shameful moment to admit that you probably have something wrong or something's not done because we can just deal with it it doesn't have to be okay great congratulations yeah

2750.862 - 2770.858 George Kamide

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.

2771.078 - 2795.494 George Kamide

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.

2795.754 - 2812.005 George Kamide

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.

2812.145 - 2825.636 Kristin Demoranville

Yeah. And I think that we should start throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know, and start seeing what's going to work and what's not going to work. I think it's not going to be a one size fits all that fixes the supply chain. I think a lot of people are looking for that silver bullet. And I'm just like, yeah, no, it's not going to be that.

2825.956 - 2840.827 Kristin Demoranville

It's going to be little increment fixes here and there, kind of like playing Tetris. You just kind of have to work through it. And I wish I had a silver bullet. I wish I could say like, this is the magical thing that will fix all of your needs. Like, I don't, I can't, there's nothing that I can ever come up with, probably be that anyways.

2841.007 - 2860.2 Kristin Demoranville

But the small little changes, the small adoption, adoptions of different behaviors, because to me, it's people in process always. Tech isn't going to break itself. It's people that do all that nonsense. And I think people get confused that because of AI and all kinds of other spinny things around that, they think that machines are causing the problem. No, it's people. It's legitimately people

2860.6 - 2880.926 Kristin Demoranville

the problems and i this is where i say social engineering is really the state of cyber security at all times we are constantly trying to figure out how someone could do something why would they do it how would they get their financial motivation to do this or just be disruptive in general i often think that adversaries are like angry teenagers like just chaos Just chaos. And that's how I see it.

2881.907 - 2898.75 Kristin Demoranville

And it helps because it's like if you've ever been to like a punk like gig or a punk concert or like a rock concert or a metal concert, it's like pure chaos at times. The pit's going. Everybody's freaking out. That's how I see an attack happening. Like everybody's just freaking out. It's like the attackers, the people are being attacked. It's just this chaos. Right.

2898.85 - 2916.956 Kristin Demoranville

But somehow there's sort of order to it. You just have to kind of work through that moment and like, OK, this is what we're going to do now. We're going to clear this the stage. We're going to get the person out who got crushed in the pit. You know, like, and that's how it kind of would have to go. And the fact that, again, we are constantly looking at this global food supply, all this stuff.

2917.056 - 2935.466 Kristin Demoranville

We really just need to focus on the company, all the suppliers around it, and the employees. That's it. Like, it's all you need to think about. And then don't add new tech without considering cyber. But that drives me up a wall. Like, you said technology. Cyber should just be right there with it, like, as a friend. It's like salt and pepper. We don't say pepper by itself. We say salt and pepper.

2936.606 - 2943.289 Kristin Demoranville

You have to say tech and cyber together. And that would be a magical moment for a company if they could do that consistently.

2943.569 - 2962.735 George Kamide

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

2963.015 - 2982.746 George Kamide

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.

2982.887 - 2999.365 George Kamide

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.

2999.685 - 3020.631 George Kamide

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.

3020.831 - 3028.333 George Kamide

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?

3028.353 - 3043.918 George Kamide

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

3044.218 - 3066.938 George Kamide

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.

3067.018 - 3084.365 George Kamide

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

3084.825 - 3105.583 George Kamide

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.

3105.703 - 3125.354 George Kamide

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.

3125.374 - 3145.477 George Kamide

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.

3145.737 - 3165.426 George Kamide

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.

3165.526 - 3180.575 George Kamide

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?

3180.775 - 3199.908 Kristin Demoranville

It's true. And I think what we need is to nurture and foster more of, and I'm going to use the term, it's probably not the right term, the disruptors inside of organizations where they're not the The ones who don't sit in the silos, the ones who can go across the silos, right? And they can be able to move freely. I'm going to go on a limb and say, that's you and I, George.

3199.948 - 3215.99 Kristin Demoranville

We're very much those people who can move across silos without issue. And I will say that I've always been labeled as a problem because I could flow in different spaces and I definitely could- Stick to your lane. Yeah. I got stuck to your lane. Stop being so Northeast. You're too aggressive.

3216.691 - 3218.671 George Kamide

Stop being so Northeast. That's fun.

3219.451 - 3236.402 Kristin Demoranville

I've gotten all the things, but I think some of that was probably because I'm a woman as well. But that's a whole other show, too. But I will say that the food industry is they want us to be there. They want help. They recognize the problem. They're big on forecasting. So they do try to plan for three to five years at all times.

3236.942 - 3256.709 Kristin Demoranville

And I think that that is an opportunity for us to come in and be partners with them and help. hopefully lean a little bit more on breaking cultural norms and inside of business and becoming just what we are as human beings. We're just trying to survive, you know, have kids, have our kids be healthy and safe, live a good full life, the whole thing that we all want, right?

3256.809 - 3271.712 Kristin Demoranville

So if we can kind of focus back on that, and that's always the overarching, especially in the food industry, I see that a lot. People go back to, we're just trying to create healthy, safe food that people are going to want to eat. That's an easy mantra, right? We all get behind that. I can definitely get behind safe food.

3272.192 - 3287.984 Kristin Demoranville

You know, we definitely could say something like in our industry, we just want people to be resilient. Well, that doesn't really ring to a lot of people because resiliency actually is an action. It's very hard to get to be resilient. It is. You have to go through something to become resilient. Right. So it's a tough word in itself.

3288.204 - 3298.233 Kristin Demoranville

And I think the food industry understands that because they've already been through some stuff. You know, they go through stuff all the time. I think, again, moving forward, I think that culture piece is really key, George.

3298.273 - 3314.65 Kristin Demoranville

So I'm really glad that we talked about this today, because if we don't figure out how to work with that and how to be better, even in our own industry, how can we serve others effectively, ultimately? Yeah. Thanks for being here, George. Like, this has been great. I love rifting with you anyway, so I'm glad we finally got it on air because it's always been fun. Absolutely.

3314.65 - 3318.791 Kristin Demoranville

Is there anything coming up that I can help promote here for you? Anyone tell the listeners.

3318.811 - 3338.054 George Kamide

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.

3338.674 - 3342.875 George Kamide

It's been a very busy year and we'll just keep pushing on the culture front, really.

3343.257 - 3344.144 Kristin Demoranville

Thanks, George, for being here.

3344.427 - 3345.435 George Kamide

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

3352.796 - 3364.782 Kristin Demoranville

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Bites and Bites podcast. Remember to like, comment, and share this episode. Thank you to our guest, George, for his enlightening discussion on the intersections of agriculture and cybersecurity.

3365.082 - 3377.209 Kristin Demoranville

If you enjoy listening to George, please check out his podcast, Bare Knuckles Brass Tacks, which drops weekly. The link will be in the show notes. Also, remember to vote for the show for the Women in Podcasting Awards. The link is also in the show notes.

3377.589 - 3382.603 Kristin Demoranville

As always, stay safe, stay curious, and we'll see you on the next one. Bye for now.