You’re listening to cybermedia. Why are you listening? What other cybermedia do you consume? And why do you do it? Is it delivering what you want? Where is cybermedia falling short?
Check out this post for the discussion that is the basis of our conversation on this week’s episode co-hosted by me, David Spark, the producer of CISO Series, and Dave Bittner, producer and host, The CyberWire. Joining is Graham Cluley, host of Smashing Security podcast and Leo Laporte, founder of TWiT (This Week in Tech) and host of Security Now podcast.
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Huge thanks to our sponsor, Palo Alto Networks
Full Transcription
Intro
0:00.000
[David Spark] You’re listening to cybermedia. Why are you listening? What other cybermedia do you consume? And why do you do it? Is it delivering what you want? Where is cybermedia falling short?
[Voiceover] You’re listening to Defense in Depth.
[David Spark] Welcome to Defense in Depth. My name is David Spark, I’m the producer of the CISO Series. And joining me just for today, possibly in the future more often, but he’s been a guest before, but he’s playing the part of my co-host. It is the producer and host of The CyberWire and actually many other shows over on that program, Dave Bittner.
Dave, say hello to the audience.
[Dave Bittner] Hello, good to be with you all.
[David Spark] Great to have you here. And actually, this is a show that I’m very excited about, but before I get into that, I want to mention our sponsor and that is Palo Alto Networks and Cortex Cloud, a phenomenal sponsor of the CISO Series. Secure your cloud in the AI era, autonomously eliminate risk from code to cloud to SOC.
We’re going to be talking more about just that a little bit later in the show. But first, I’m super excited about today’s episode, Dave, because not only are you here, but our two guests who I’m going to be bringing in in a second. So, I normally don’t have three guests on a show total, but this is a different story.
So, I have this working theory that security professionals come to our program and the CISO Series for selfish reasons. They want relevant news to their jobs. They want to learn how to talk or to become a CISO and generally advance their careers. Now, as media’s changing, I’m going to ask you, Dave, are we still meeting those needs?
And do you feel you’re doing it with The CyberWire? And what is changing that we need to keep up on? Just set us up here.
[Dave Bittner] Well, I certainly hope that we’re meeting those needs. I think every one of us sets out to do that every day. So, to your point, I think it’s important every now and then to reflect on that to see if you’re actually doing that. I don’t know about you, but we get plenty of feedback.
If we do something that people don’t like, we certainly do hear about it, [Laughter] in certain terms. So, I think people seem to be engaged. The numbers seem to be pretty steady on the number of people who are listening. So, I think all of us here have hit on something that people want to consume.
[David Spark] And I brought on what I think is probably the biggest shows in cyber right now. Let me introduce our guests here. So, for those don’t know, Dave Bittner is the host first of The CyberWire. You also host Hacking Humans. Do you host other shows there, Dave?
[Dave Bittner] Let’s see, I have a show called Caveat, which is about law and policy. And I host Research Saturday, which is exactly what the name sounds like.
[David Spark] It’s about research and it’s on Saturday.
[Dave Bittner] [Laughter] Correct. Not getting anything past you, David.
[David Spark] All right. So, the two other guests here that I want to bring on and thrilled they’re here, first is Graham Cluley, who’s the host of the Smashing Security Podcast. Graham, say hello to the audience.
[Graham Cluley] Hello, everybody. Lovely to be here. Thank you for inviting me, David.
[David Spark] What I love about your show, Graham, is that you have coined this term, which I adore, bickertainment. Explain what bickertainment is to our audience.
[Graham Cluley] Oh. [Laughter]
[David Spark] Which pretty much says it all in the title right there.
[Graham Cluley] It was actually one of our guests who came up with it because for the first nine years of the podcast, I was co-hosting with my friend Carole Theriault, who’s a fairly salty sort of person. [Laughter] And we had a sort of fractious relationship, I suppose.
I would pontificate about something to do with cybersecurity, and she would burst my bubble and bicker. Some people thought we were actually married. It got to that level of bickering, but no, we weren’t married to each other.
[David Spark] Anyway, it’s a perfect term for your programming and it’s great. And then super thrilled that I have been a guest on his shows when we were working at ZDTV and TechTV and now his show, TWiT, This Week in Tech, which also has the Security Now podcast.
And I’m going to give you enormous kudos here, Leo, in that you are an OG in tech media broadcasting. In radio and TV, you could count literally on one hand and have a few fingers left over as to who really started it all, and Leo is one of those people.
Leo Laporte, say hello to the audience.
[Leo Laporte] Hi, David. It’s good to see you all. It’s nice to be on a show with Dr. Solomon too. I’m very excited about that, Graham.
[Graham Cluley] Oh, well, yeah. Good old Alan.
[Leo Laporte] The original Dr. Solomon, right?
[Graham Cluley] Well, no, it wasn’t me. I was working for Alan Solomon. Yes, that’s right.
[David Spark] I don’t know. What is Dr. Solomon? What are we talking about?
[Leo Laporte] Oh, you’re not old enough, David.
[Graham Cluley] Oh, oh, oh. [Laughter]
[David Spark] I’m plenty old, but just not enough, I guess.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] Dr. Solomon’s Anti-Virus Toolkit was one of the very first antivirus products and I was their first ever Windows…
[David Spark] Oh, yes, that I do remember.
[Graham Cluley] Yeah, so I was their first ever Windows programmer and back in the days of Windows 3.0.
[Leo Laporte] For your sins.
[Graham Cluley] For my sins. And I worked for Alan Solomon who was indeed the guy who did it all.
[Leo Laporte] I thought it was like Peter Norton, just a figurehead. Okay.
[David Spark] All right, we’re not going to get into the weeds here, people.
[Leo Laporte] I will answer the original question. How about that? Would you like me to answer that question, David?
[David Spark] Yes.
[Leo Laporte] You know what I think is amazing is these are the kinds of topics that back in the day, we wouldn’t even cover on ZDTV, and certainly mainstream media doesn’t cover very well. So, I think what’s really been a revolution in media in general is that, thanks to podcasting and YouTube and all the niche capabilities we have now, you can get real good cybersecurity information in this fashion.
It used to be you’d have to subscribe to one of those free weeklies like InfoWorld or PC Week or eWeek and look for the bits that you needed. Now, I think you can go right to the source and get really distilled valuable information [Inaudible 00:05:46].
What are they looking for?
5:46.704
[David Spark] Paul Lanzi of IDenovate said, “I need a variety of content types because I consume it in different ways. Podcasts for car rides and walks, texts for train rides and procrastination breaks at my computer, short-form audio flash briefing content for my morning routine.
Almost all of those content types, if it’s clearly AI generated, I skip it. Life is too short for bad wine and AI slop.” Howard Holton, CEO over at GigaOm, one of our favorites as well, as is Paul, who said, “My consumption has changed. Most of my news content is focused on texts because I read much faster than most people speak.
I watch videos for technical training.” So, this just sets up what Paul and Howard said, is just how people consume. And one of the reasons I say podcasting is so powerful, Dave, is the overwhelming majority of people consume it, consume it when they are not working.
Have you discovered the same?
[Dave Bittner] I think that’s right. I think most people consume it while they’re doing something else, which I think is part of what makes it so appealing is that you can double up on what you’re doing. You could be folding the laundry and learning something.
You could be washing your car and learning something. You could be at the gym. And so we certainly hear that. The odd ones are when I’ll run into someone at a trade show and they’ll say, “I listen to you while I’m in the shower every day.”
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] Well, the advantage is yours. I think being able to make better use of your time, everyone has too little time. And so being able to double up on things like that, I think people find really attractive. It also helps those tasks pass a little more quickly.
It’s not so odious to be folding the laundry when you’re listening to something that’s entertaining or enriching.
[David Spark] Well, and this is a kind of a key thing is that we are providing information, but we have to provide it in an entertaining way. Graham, you’ve discovered bickertainment as your mode of entertainment.
[Graham Cluley] Yeah, I think that’s right. I think people are expecting their content in different forms. And of course there are different audiences. I mean, one of the things that I noticed about us guys is that we’re sort of approaching this problem from different areas.
All four of us are producing content. We’re not just consuming it, we are consuming it as well, but we’re making quite different things for different people. So you, David, you’ve got this community source debate with CISOs and security leaders; The CyberWire, Bittner’s corner of the world.
That’s a daily news briefing. Leo, you’ve got security now, which has been going for what, 21 years, something like that?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, yeah.
[Graham Cluley] Real deep dives into things. And my Smashing Security is sort of like storytelling with a bit of humor. It’s aimed at a broader audience.
[David Spark] By the way, how many years has Smashing Security been around?
[Graham Cluley] This is our 10th year we’re in, yeah.
[David Spark] Wow, wow. And you, hold it, Dave, you’re at 10 years, aren’t you?
[Dave Bittner] We just celebrated 10 years as well, yeah.
[David Spark] Congratulations to both of you. That’s phenomenal.
[Dave Bittner] Thank you. Nothing compared to Leo, but…
[Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] No.
[Leo Laporte] As I said at the beginning, I’m old.
[David Spark] By the way, Leo holds up very well. I’ve known Leo since 1998.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter] Thanks to chewing gum and glue.
[David Spark] And you look still phenomenal, Leo.
[Dave Bittner] Man hasn’t aged a day, no.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] The thing I would say to other people, though, is Leo mentioned earlier, isn’t it great that we have these platforms you can hear directly from people? Is people can still jump in on this game now. Ten years ago, when I started my podcast, we sort of dilly-dallied for a while and we thought, “Aren’t we a bit late?
Are we a bit behind the curve?” And that was 10 years ago. [Laughter] So, if we almost didn’t start then, don’t think that you shouldn’t start now because there is potentially an audience for you.
[David Spark] Well, we are even greener than you. When this drops, it will have been eight years. We hit a very specific nerve when we came to the market because we were specifically talking at the time about the relationships between buyers and sellers.
That was a super-hot button issue, and we doubled down on it. I don’t know if you know, but the original name of our podcast, believe it or not, this was the full name of it, The CISO Security Vendor Relationship Podcast. So, it was a full frigging name.
That was…
[Dave Bittner] Well, that’s…
[Laughter]
[David Spark] I know, I know, I know. We even had a logo made up, everything. I had an enormous sign, the whole thing. We finally shortened it to just…
[Leo Laporte] That’s why we call it TWiT.
[David Spark] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Self-deprecating.
[David Spark] I want you to know, when it had that title, no one called it by its correct name, not even me. And I mean, no one did. So, we realized it’s time to change it.
[Leo Laporte] Well, back in the ZDTV days, we always had to explain, “No, it’s not about pasta. It’s not Ziti TV. It is Ziff-Davis TV.” That’s why they changed the name to TechTV because nobody knew what the heck we were doing.
[David Spark] No, no. I think the main reason – well, TechTV made more sense, obviously – but the conversation I used to have with people all the time, for those people who’ve been consuming tech media for a long time and remember when Ziff-Davis was the king of the mountain, I would say, “Oh, I work for ZDTV.” And it goes, “Oh, I know Ziff-Davis,” but this was the time that Softbank, who owned them, was selling all the parts off.
[Leo Laporte] It changed quickly, yeah.
[David Spark] And I’m just like, “Well, actually, no, we’re not because they sold that part off,” or “We’re not part of that, but we all have the same name. It’s really confusing.” And so it was a giant mess.
[Leo Laporte] It was a lucky thing, too, that we renamed it because I honestly don’t think it was the best. I like both those quotes because what that reflects, both Paul and Howard, is different strokes, right? And I love it that you have the choice.
I think what we do on TWiT, we’re always kind of thinking about the audience. I said in the very beginning, you always want to respect your listeners, respect their time, but [Laughter] the shows have gone from half an hour to three hours.
[David Spark] [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] So obviously, I’ve fallen down on that. I think what people really want, they want the information. I think if they come away from any show with two or three or even one nugget that they go, “Oh, I’m going to remember that” or “That’s useful,” they’ve got value for money, especially since it’s free.
But also, I think they want companionship, I think they want a relationship. And that’s one of the things I learned in years of radio, I’m in my 50th year in radio, is that’s a relationship business. That’s a personality business because you’re talking in somebody’s ear.
And podcasts, especially, have that parasocial relationship. So people come to us for company, that’s why they don’t mind that it’s a longer show. As long as they get some value for the time they spend with it, I think that they’re happy. They get both.
[David Spark] That’s a really interesting point. And I want to talk about just sort of the value people get. Because I went to a meeting just two nights ago about Claude, and it was long and it was boring, but there was one nugget that came out of it, and I go, all right, this was super valuable, the one nugget.
Even though I killed two and a half hours, that one nugget was worth it kind of a thing. I’m at that stage in my life, it’s if I get one thing out of it, it’s worth it.
[Leo Laporte] I will say, I have a pet peeve because a lot of times, I’m looking for some facts, some factual information. The search always turns up a YouTube video. And the YouTube video, and this is really the perverse incentives of the way YouTube’s algorithms work, takes a long time to get because they want you to watch for a certain length of time, so they get credit, etc., etc.
They have to hit the bell and subscribe and all that crap. And by the time they get to the meat, I’m like I’m zoned out. So, I think [Laughter] this is why I prefer podcasts. Often with YouTube, I’ll turn to text instead. In fact, it’s no
accident YouTube now offers transcripts for everything because honestly, I’ll just drop the transcript down and find what I’m looking for.
[Graham Cluley] And sometimes, what you’ll find is someone’s left a comment actually saying the thing you’re actually looking for will be 4 minutes 54 into this video.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter] That’s the famous “saved you a click” post, right?
[David Spark] Yes.
What is everyone complaining about?
13:34.680
[David Spark] Adam Palmer, CISO over at First Hawaiian Bank, said, “What most cybermedia misses is decision value. Security leaders aren’t just looking for news, we’re looking for how it changes a decision or strategy. What should I fund, stop doing, or explain differently to my CEO/board next week?” Really good point.
And Mike Bickford said, “Specific topics are often hard to search in podcasts and other media. AI would be helpful here, not as content per se, but an easier way to pinpoint topics and the discussion around it. I want to hear what others are doing or trying and the results.” All right, so just let me qualify the reference to AI actually in this segment and the last segment is that these are all responses to a post I put up about what is cybermedia doing for you and do you value AI and where AI has its place.
Let’s start, I want to get an interesting take. Are you using AI in any format, Graham? Where is the value you see either for yourself as a producer or as a consumer?
[Graham Cluley] It certainly is a concern because the volume of AI-generated content is getting so high and the signal-to-noise ratio is really being messed up and it does become a discovery problem, doesn’t it? It’s actually finding the actual content that you want.
I think most people still want something which is human edited and human voiced rather than something else. Am I using AI? Well, I’ve actually – hush, hush – I have been using AI, but I’ve been using it to sort of assist the podcast rather than in the creation of the podcasts.
[David Spark] We’re getting a lot of head nodding here. Yes, there’s a lot of assistance.
[Graham Cluley] Yeah, so I’ve been doing a bit of vibe coding [Laughter] over the last few weeks. It’s like I haven’t programmed for 30 years, but suddenly I’m programming again because I thought I’ve never had decent transcripts. There are services and my podcast host creates transcripts, but they’re not very good and I’m not very comfortable putting them out there and I don’t really like what Apple generates.
[David Spark] Well, we actually pay for a service because we have a lot of terminology and proper names of people.
[Graham Cluley] Yeah.
[David Spark] And honestly, that’s what we’re paying for, for them to get the terminology and the people’s names correctly written.
[Graham Cluley] Exactly, now I don’t have a huge budget for that kind of thing, so I’m not sure what sort of response we’re going to get from it. But I have built a system now with a little bit of help from AI, and I’ve installed some models onto my computers and things to do that, to do a lot of the grunt work to get the transcripts to such a stage where I think I am fairly happy with this.
So, to answer Leo’s point earlier of where is the meat? Now people can search through and actually find it, and they’ll be able to find it to the second or when you’re actually playing the podcast, you will get the words which we are saying displayed on the screen as you’re listening in our web player.
So, you’ll actually have it there as the word. So, if you prefer to watch these things or if you want to read the full transcript, it is available to you. But it does seem we keep on being threatened by AI podcast hosts. And of course, Google had that thing.
What was it called?
[Leo Laporte] NotebookLLM.
[Graham Cluley] NotebookLLM, yes.
[David Spark] May I just ask, we all heard it. We were all like dazzled by it, but how long did you want to listen to it?
[Graham Cluley] [Laughter] Right, exactly. So, I’m not sure that these robots are really going to replace human interaction.
[David Spark] No.
[Graham Cluley] The genuine authenticity. Again, I think it’s Leo was saying we’re going straight into people’s ears. That it’s such about the relationship.
[David Spark] That is a really good point. I want to double down on just that. I’m going to throw this to you, Leo. I go to these conferences, and it is visual and audible noise, and I think about a podcast is literally a 180 from that. You’re most of the time in someone’s head and they’re as focused on you as possible.
I can’t think of a better way to talk to an audience than that. I mean, and I think this is why this medium is so strong and powerful. Your thoughts?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, I agree. I mean, as a longtime radio guy, I mean, that’s the medium I love the most. But I have to say, I do worry about people’s attention spans. They seem to be degrading rapidly. So, we use AI for transcripts. Although Steve Gibson on Security Now actually hired a court reporter to do really good transcripts, and that’s been much more valuable, I think, than the AI transcripts.
The AI transcripts for us are mostly for SEO, so it’s easy for a search engine to figure out what the show was about. We do use AI clips. Clips are very important now on YouTube. They’re probably more important than the full-length show, so we make sure we have good clips on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
That’s just little 30-second or a minute long bits from the show. Those are of great promotional value.
[David Spark] So, we do that too, but it’s again, just an assistance. It helps us find it, but I still have a producer making the video.
[Leo Laporte] Absolutely. The AI’ll generate these edited clips, which we can then polish and produce.
[David Spark] Right, okay.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, yeah, I always want a human in the mix. And I always hear from our audience, why don’t you have chapter markers? Because they really do. I mean, honestly.
[David Spark] Oh, we do that. We have chapter markers. Each one of these segments has a chapter marker.
[Leo Laporte] Exactly. And the only reason we don’t do it is it’s just manpower, but Apple is now doing that automatically, and I think more and more you’re going to see automatic chapter markers. The other reason I don’t do it, let’s be frank, I don’t want people skipping the commercials and the chapter markers make it very easy to do that.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] I mean, I know people are probably hitting that 30-second skip button, honest.
[Leo Laporte] That’s okay. It’s fine. I don’t mind.
[David Spark] Probably right now they’re doing it to you, Leo.
[Leo Laporte] We do our commercials just as you do. We do them interstitial, read by the host. And the theory has always been we try to make it feel like the programming. We make it clear that it’s an ad, but we don’t want it to feel like it’s disjuncted from the content itself.
And all of our advertisers, as with you, are very apropos to the topic. So, I think that people don’t really want to skip them that much because there’s some value in the ads, I hope. Anyway, AI, yes, I love it, I use it. I do the vibe coding. In fact, I’ve vibe coded all sorts of tools to help me with a show.
But ultimately, at least for now, who knows, five years from now, I may be AI. But for now, I think a human is a better way to do it.
[David Spark] All right, I’m throwing this to you, Dave. Where do you stand on the AI in terms of your own production and consumption?
[Dave Bittner] Well, I’ll sidetrack us just a little bit, which is to say that I, for about the past year or so, I have had a fantasy about how I would like to be able to use AI with my podcast consumption, and here is my problem. There is a show that I like a lot, and it’s not any of our shows, anyone who’s here, but I like two of the three hosts a lot.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] And I don’t like the third host aggressively.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] So what I want to be able to do is to load their show into an AI and say, “Please keep Host 1 and Host 2. Analyze Host 3, who never uses 1 word when he can use 10. Take the points of whatever he says, make a concise summary of it, insert that in the show.”
[Leo Laporte] You’re talking about me now. I know you’re talking about me. I know it, it’s okay.
[Dave Bittner] Oh, Leo, the truth hurts, Leo, the truth hurts.
[David Spark] [Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] I didn’t want to say it. But no, I would love to be able to do that. I think that is a kind of thing that I could imagine AI being able to do, to take existing content and customize it in a way to better suit your desired consumption. We’re not quite there yet, but I could envision it happening.
[David Spark] Wouldn’t it be better, Dave, to start a petition to get rid of this third host?
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] Yeah.
[Graham Cluley] Have a fundraiser.
[Dave Bittner] I’m far more passive-aggressive than that.
[Leo Laporte] AI could totally get rid of it. I’m telling you, AI could totally do it.
[Dave Bittner] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Leo Laporte] Many is the time I’ve wanted to do that myself, so I understand.
[Dave Bittner] [Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] I had a situation recently, there’s an AI company now called Cluley. So, my surname is Cluley. I did really well on the old SEO. Someone looked up Cluley. Now I get this bloody AI company instead.
[Leo Laporte] And worse, it’s a creepy AI company created by a guy who cheated his way through Stanford, got kicked out.
[Graham Cluley] They are. Yeah, yes.
[Leo Laporte] And it’s now an AI that helps you cheat. So, Dave, I’m sorry about that, Graham. That is the worst possible.
[David Spark] Just a quick thing about SEO and your own name. So, I got a friend named Patrick Kearney, who is in tech himself, and there is also supposedly a serial killer by the same name.
[Dave Bittner] Oh, great.
[Graham Cluley] Ooh.
[Leo Laporte] That’s why they always give the middle name. You know that, right?
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Well, when he goes into interviews, he says, “I know you’re going to search me after this. I’m just telling you, I’m not that Patrick Kearney.” [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Oh, I have to try that.
[David Spark] When we were naming our kids, this was a fear of mine, was am I going to accidentally give the name of my child? Now, after the fact they’re born and God knows what happened, somebody with the same name.
[Leo Laporte] It’s too late.
[David Spark] But we actually had to search names to make sure we were not giving our child a name of a serial killer or something else horribly damaging.
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How do we determine what’s most important?
24:02.166
[David Spark] Julie Tsai, who is a CISO in residence over at Ballistic Ventures said, “I consume about 95% of my media on demand as audio, video, and appreciate thoughtful filters more than ever. For the first time in about 20 years, I’ve started considering again paid subscriptions to human-edited media.'” Mark Rogge of EnforceAuth said, “AI-generated summaries and research synthesis feel acceptable, even welcome, but AI-generated thought leadership with no practitioner fingerprints?
Ah, people smell it immediately and tune out.” Yes, couldn’t agree more on that. And Mike Wilkes who’s an enterprise CISO over at Aikido Security said, “I think I will be needing an OpenClaw skill that consumes the AI-generated media content on my behalf and presents me with a brief summary of overnight news as a custom NotebookLM podcast personality each morning.”
Now, if you know what you’re getting, I think that’s acceptable. But I think the whole thing, what I was alluding to earlier, Leo, is the NotebookLM thing was surprising. Also, the second you realize it’s not real humans, you’re just like, “Okay, this is interesting.
I’m now getting creeped out. I don’t want to listen to this anymore.” I think that was everyone’s feeling, yes?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, it’s very generic. By the way, I just want to say to Mike over at Aikido, he’s the guy who told me that when their AI agents don’t perform well, they threaten to fire them, and he says it works miracles.
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, so I’m just saying Mike knows. Mike knows. This is a constant question for us because as I said, our podcasts have ballooned to three hours in some cases. But I think the reason people listen to our panelists and the reason I choose the panelists is because they are the curators of the content, right?
They are the ones saying, “This is important, listen to this.” So, we try to make every show, we do every show weekly, and we try to make every show be that signal. Those are the things we think are important, the things to pay attention to. And that’s of course a big part of my editorial process.
I use AI to gather information. I never use AI to choose information. I think that’s our value-add is we’re deciding what’s important. And I think that increasingly that human curation, that you find somebody you trust to curate the information, to highlight the stuff that’s important, to help you do your job.
[David Spark] Very, very good point. So, I’m going to actually switch gears here. I know that they talked about AI here, but I want to just switch gears because it came up because we were talking about sponsors. One of the things that we always say about our programming is that we have two audiences, our listening audience and our sponsor audience, and that we have to treat them equally and respect both of them equally and not let one kind of take over because it’s very important to maintain that balance, to show respect to the sponsors and show respect to the audience.
Dave, I’ll start with you, Dave. Like, what is your relationship with your sponsors with the programming and how they get involved?
[Dave Bittner] Well, it depends. I mean, we have two primary avenues to interact with sponsors. We have ads, we sell ads, same as what Leo described previously. We do host-read ads.
[David Spark] As do I.
[Dave Bittner] Yeah, as do you and as does Graham. [Laughter] Those work very well for us. But then also we do sponsored interviews and we’re overt about that, labeling them as such when they happen. Not all of our interviews are sponsored, but when they are, we’ll be sure to let the audience know that.
But we also tell our sponsors that even if you’re coming on for a sponsored interview, it can’t just be a pitch for your product. What we’re looking for is value added. What we’re looking for is what’s the thing that you know from your unique position in the industry that will help our audience do the job that they do?
And 90% of the time, they’re hip with that. Not everybody can deal with it. [Laughter]
[David Spark] I will actually tell you, I think sponsors are pre-hip to this stuff because in almost every case, I would say only maybe one or two cases that have gone a little off the rails for me, the sponsors get that they shouldn’t be heavily pitching their product, and they kind of already know that.
Like, we really don’t need to explain it to them.
[Dave Bittner] It’s sort of the joke with my team is that a chief product officer sometimes just can’t help themselves, [Laughter] and that’s fine. Sometimes that’s why we edit too, to trim those things down. But I’d like to think again, what Leo was alluding to earlier, that certainly the ads are noisier than the main content of the show, but I’d like to think that the ads aren’t completely noise because they are relevant.
We try to carefully curate who we allow to advertise on our shows. And everybody who’s listening understands that it is a business, and so this is a necessary thing. But we try to make it as palatable for everyone as possible.
[David Spark] By the way, do you think that your audience, because I believe our audience, because we’ve heard this from our guests, is that they listen and respect our sponsors too. Do you think that your audience is doing that?
[Dave Bittner] I think overall. Like you said, some people just dive for that 30-second skip button and I can’t blame them for that. There are shows where I do that as well. We’ve also gotten feedback from people who said, “I made a major purchase because of something I heard about on your show.”
[David Spark] And same here. And that’s how we get repeat sponsors as well.
[Dave Bittner] It’s the key. And the stuff we sell ain’t cheap, right?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, that’s right. These are, I’m sure, all of you are more expensive than radio ads, which are $5 per thousand listeners. [Laughter]
[David Spark] Yeah, they’re not consumer products what are being sponsored on our shows.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah. The other thing, from the very beginning, I told our advertisers is we want to do features and benefit ads. In the old days of advertising, really old days, before the psychologists came along, I’m talking in the 1900s, ads were like Sears catalogs.
Here’s what it does, here’s what it costs, here’s why you want it. They were very practical. And then they got fancy with psychology and does your breath smell and things like that, and I think advertising kind of took a wrong turn. Our audience is way more sophisticated than that.
They want features and benefits. They want to know why a product is
good. And so I think that’s part of what we do is we make sure that those ads – and they’re longer than a traditional radio ad, they’re sometimes several minutes – are of value because they talk about, “Here’s what you’re going to get. Here’s why you need it.
This is what this does,” at a higher level, at a higher technical level, than any other form of content.
The other thing I think that’s important, again, and this comes back to the relationship, is the level of trust that you all have built with your audience. When you say this is a good product, first of all, they know that you turn products down. I think that’s really important.
I remember a few years ago, I was at an upfront in New York. That’s where podcasters or TV shows pitch to advertisers. And at the upfront, I said, “We say no to a lot of advertisers,” and I heard an audible gasp from the ad [Laughter] agencies in the audience, “You say no?” But I bet you all do that because turning down an advertiser is really important to our integrity so that our audience does get the sense that when you hear an ad, it’s for something we vetted, that we chose.
It’s not just whoever had some money and threw it over the transom. So, this is what’s so different about this kind of medium, especially in the cybersecurity realm. People don’t have time to waste on stuff that just doesn’t work or isn’t good.
[David Spark] All right, Graham, your experience with your sponsors.
[Graham Cluley] My audience is more important than any sponsor. And I’m sure you guys, like myself, I receive emails every day from companies saying, “Can we come on your podcast? Can we talk about this? Can we do this?” or the PR agency pitching them.
And I’m just like, “Well, are you going to be boring?” Because our podcasts, we don’t want to be boring. We don’t want to bore the listeners, right? We’ve built up this audience. We don’t want to put them off. If you’re going to come on and be dreary and dull and all the rest of it on an interview, then we don’t want you.
So, we make them jump through some [Laughter] hurdles. We’re not going to let them be the main guest on the show.
And equally, when we do an ad, when we do a host-read ad, what we’re increasingly trying to do is we’re trying to make it entertaining like the rest of the show. I recognize our show is different from some of the other security podcasts out there because it’s not designed necessarily for CISOs.
It’s made for a broader audience and it’s trying to be more accessible to the general public. We can’t get too bogged down in something dull and dreary and feel like death by PowerPoint or a lecture, and so we try and make it more fun. You said at the beginning that we’ve got two audiences.
We’ve got our regular audience and we’ve got our sponsors. I’m not sure all of my sponsors listen to the podcast, actually.
[Crosstalk 00:32:35]
[David Spark] Oh, I’m sure.
[Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] I think if they were to listen, they might reconsider in some situations sponsoring us. But I think the important thing is to be authentic and to be real and have a relationship with your audience. And if you do that, you’re going to have a good show.
[David Spark] I want to double down, and I want to close this whole thing out about something you alluded to there about we get requests from sponsors that are so inappropriate. And you said something that goes, our brand is the number one thing of value.
We will do absolutely nothing to damage the brand, nothing. You can throw as much money as you want. If it damages the brand, I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I’m going to give you a perfect example of this. So, we’ll get a request from a sponsor, and this doesn’t happen often, but we do get it, and I would say that it usually comes from fairly young people who are not aware how it works, and they will say, “If we sponsor the show, do we get the names and the email addresses of everybody who listened?”
[Dave Bittner] [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Oh, my God.
[David Spark] I’m sure you’ve heard this one before, yes?
[Leo Laporte] Oh, my God.
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Sure, yeah. Why not? Uh-huh.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Stop for a second, just for a second. Technically, we don’t have that information.
[Leo Laporte] You can’t do it.
[David Spark] But let’s just say we did for argument’s sake, how long would I be in business? How long would I stay in business? If you knew your information was being sold to every podcast you listened to, how long would you listen to those shows?
[Leo Laporte] Can I say something though? Spotify does, Amazon does.
[David Spark] They track and sell all that stuff?
[Leo Laporte] And this is why I think it’s one of the worst things that’s happened to podcasting is these big companies that know perfectly well that’s what advertisers want are forcing you to use their app. Why do you think they force you to use their app?
They’ve got your information and they can tie it to your listening habits. That’s what advertisers want. We don’t give it to them. We can’t because we’re an RSS feed, right?
[David Spark] Right. Yes. The thing is the reason I bring that up is they will ask a question that would destroy my company. Can we have this to essentially just destroy you? And the thing is when someone comes to me like that, I go, “You don’t want to partner with us.
You want us to die for your own benefit.”
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Well, why wouldn’t they? [Laughter] We just have to put up a good fight, that’s all. [Laughter]
What else are we missing?
34:42.882
[David Spark] Nick Espinosa of Deep Dive Radio Show, frequent guest we have on as well, who says, “Cybermedia tends to focus more on the tactical and less on the big-picture strategy. Well, you can talk about the news of the day, but how does this fit into the bigger picture of society or evolving political landscapes or the engine of the economy?
What do the next 5, 10, 20 years look like?” Montez Fitzpatrick, CISO over at Navvis said, “On two fronts where cybermedia falls short.” He says, “One, potential for vendor influence to overly shape the narrative. We must be careful to not conflate the product as a panacea to fix all problems.” We talk about that a lot.
And second, he says, “Lack of OT security. Yes, large percentage of environments will have at least some operational technology constraints. This is a vertical that is under-emphasized.” I would agree.
And Mike Wilkes, again, enterprise CISO over at Aikido Security said, “Formatting and glitz have been encroaching on pure content in our industry, and I find it a bit distracting. Pandering to short attention span theater is not contributing to good outcomes when we consider the goal of education and information sharing.
Neuroplasticity ought to include more than just fits and spurts of attention.” I will toss to you, Dave, on this. These are the concerns, and I would say they’re probably the concerns of all of us. We’re aware of this too. We don’t want to be seen like these fears that people have.
Yes, Dave?
[Dave Bittner] I think that’s true, and I think Leo nailed it earlier when he said that the people that he chooses to be panelists on the shows, that’s the filter through which the news travels, and I think that’s the value that all of us bring to this, that we’re the ones aggregating the news.
We’re deciding what we’re going to talk about and in what order we’re going to emphasize it and how we’re going to present it and how we’re going to tie it all together. And I think that analysis of the things that we aggregate is something that is hard to imitate or replace or have an AI substitute for.
I saw someone refer to it recently as a marketplace of authenticity, and I love that. I hope, for all of our sakes, that there continues to be a marketplace of authenticity so there’s a place for us to provide our own touch on how the information is sorted and presented and shared.
[David Spark] Leo, when I worked in media with you, we saw things that were succeeding, doing great, and then they’d fall apart. And that’s the thing, just because you’re doing great today doesn’t mean you’re going to be doing great tomorrow. And that is sort of something we’ve all seen in media, that things that fly high can crash and burn in an instant.
Do you sort of have the healthy-level paranoia, I’ll start with you, Graham, that you got to be on top of things or I’ll be irrelevant tomorrow?
[Graham Cluley] [Laughter] Yeah. I was out giving a talk, that’s the other thing I do other than the podcast, the other day, and I sat down next to this guy after my talk and he said, “Oh,” he said, “You have a podcast.” I said, “Yeah, I’ve got a podcast called Smashing Security.” And he says, “What’s the
name of your YouTube channel?” Well, my podcast, unlike some of you, isn’t video. We’re just doing audio, and it is a bit scary because it does appear that young people are consuming some of their media, at least this is what we’re being told, in a different way.
Which is why I am beginning to dip my toe into the Instagrams and the TikToks, if only to promote the audio version of the podcast.
So I think it is healthy to be a little bit paranoid that the world may be changing and I better not be too much of a dinosaur. Even if personally, for me, podcasts are always going to be audio primarily. Every night when I go to bed, the way I fall asleep is listening to podcasts.
When I was a 14-year-old, I would go to sleep listening to talk radio. I like that human voice in my ear. I find it soothing, it helps me go to sleep. So, some of your podcasts are perfect for this, by the way.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] Thank you.
[Graham Cluley] But everyone’s different. So, if we can find this great content, if we can communicate it authentically, and we can find the medium through which it’s going to resonate with the widest group of people, then that’s terrific. But I think all of us should continue to reflect as to whether we’re doing the right approach or whether sometimes it’s right to change things up a bit.
[David Spark] I want to know about your healthy paranoia, Leo. I want to point out to our audience, you’re probably listening to a century’s worth of experience in media right here.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Seriously.
[Dave Bittner] That’s Leo alone.
[Leo Laporte] And I’m the bulk of it.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] I’ve been in it for 30 years, Leo. I’ve been doing it for a long time myself.
[Leo Laporte] Just you and I are 80 years alone, David.
[Dave Bittner] [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Coming from the other side of relevance, I’ll say hi to you guys over here in the irrelevant side of the equation. Honestly, it’s great to be doing this long enough where I don’t really care anymore. Dare I say that? I’ve been very fortunate because my own interests and passions have led me in a good direction.
When we started podcasting, there were like five podcasts total. But it wasn’t something I did thinking, oh, this is the future. [Laughter] I’m glad it’s become the future, but it was just by chance. We’d started doing video in 2008, long before YouTube had just started, long before anybody thought video
was the right thing to do, and it cost us a lot of money. But I did it because I thought, “Oh, this’ll be fun,” and I came from a TV background. I thought, “Well, it’ll just be fun.”
So, I’ve never chased relevance or currency. I think the most important thing I would say if anybody wants my advice, and I don’t think you should take it, but if you did, I would say consider the audience always. Let’s be where they are. Let’s give them what they want, and they will tell you what to do.
[David Spark] Well, I think this is also where AI can help because AI can help us find where the relevance is too.
[Leo Laporte] You know what? The audience is pretty good at letting you know. [Laughter]
[David Spark] Mm-hmm. That’s for sure.
[Leo Laporte] That’s the thing I think is very important for anybody who’s in any form of mass media is to listen to the audience, and we’re fortunate because podcasting especially is a community-driven sport. And so we have chat rooms, we have forums.
I have a Mastodon instance. Every show I do has a live chat room. We stream it on seven different platforms and people can chat on all of those. So, I get a lot of feedback. That’s maybe the best information of all is listening to the audience, give them what they want.
[David Spark] But I would argue a little bit on that is give them what they want, but at some point, there’s got to be a balance between listen to the audience, give them what they want, but they’re also looking at you to lead them as well.
[Leo Laporte] Oh, yes. You can end up chasing your tail if you…
[David Spark] Right, you have to be sort of the one to have the vision for them to follow that too as well.
[Leo Laporte] Exactly. I agree, so it’s a balance, absolutely. The audience you hear from is not necessarily the general audience. You hear from the most active listeners or the most passionate listeners.
[David Spark] You also have your fans that you hear from again and again and again, who are the most vocal and they have an outweighted sort of influence, if you will.
[Leo Laporte] Or my enemies, let me tell you, the enemies can be pretty vocal too.
[Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] Yeah, there are some people who listen week after week after week just to insult me. I mean, it is. [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Absolutely.
[David Spark] [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Somebody said, “I’ve been listening to you for 20 years and I still hate you,” and it’s like, “Well, okay, thank you.”
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Then I’m doing something right. [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] I literally get that email daily, and not from the same person. So, yes, you’re right. Listen to the audience, listen to your heart, listen to your passion. I guess pay attention is probably the best thing to do. Don’t go on automatic.
[Dave Bittner] Don’t you think, Leo, that sometimes it’s important too to know when something has run its course?
[Leo Laporte] Well, I’ve ran my course a long time ago.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] But you’ve had shows that you’ve retired over the years, right?
[Leo Laporte] Oh, I absolutely canceled more shows than I have on now by far.
[David Spark] How many shows are on your network now currently, Leo, how many?
[Leo Laporte] Fifteen shows. We’ve had as many as 40 in the past.
[David Spark] Wow, 15 shows. And so how many are you dropping in a week?
[Leo Laporte] I do five every week.
[David Spark] The other three of us, we’re all cyber specific, but you’re all tech and cyber. You do everything in tech.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, we have a Mac show, a Windows show. Really, I shouldn’t be taking any credit for the security show. That’s all Steve Gibson. And that’s the important part on that show is people want to hear what Steve has to say. I’m just there for the ride.
[David Spark] Mm-hmm.
[Leo Laporte] So, yeah, we cover basically all tech. Some of it’s consumer, some of it’s enterprise, but mostly, yeah, consumer.
[David Spark] How many shows do you have on your network, Dave?
[Dave Bittner] Oh, gosh, about 20 or so, I guess. Something like that.
[Leo Laporte] If you can’t count them, you have a lot.
[David Spark] Twenty and they’re all active?
[Dave Bittner] Yeah, well, because we have shows that we run on our network that we don’t produce. So, we have those as well. And you know, we’re doing a daily.
[David Spark] Yeah.
[Dave Bittner] So that’s a lot.
[Leo Laporte] That’s a lot of work, a daily.
[Dave Bittner] Yeah.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah.
[Graham Cluley] I just have one baby and I’m looking after it.
[Leo Laporte] And you love it more than any other.
[Graham Cluley] Exactly.
[David Spark] Well, we have five shows on our network. That’s a good level right now for us. We did retire one show and replace it as well.
[Leo Laporte] Oh, gosh, the list of shows I’ve retired is infinite, it feels like.
[David Spark] Oh, this is the thing. What is your pet peeve of other podcasts? I listened to other podcasts before I started mine, and I wrote a list of this sucks, this I like. I’m interested to know from other people’s podcasts, what drives you nuts?
I will start. Here’s my favorite. When someone is starting a podcast and they publicly announce who wants to be a guest on my show.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter] That’s sad, that’s just pathetic.
[David Spark] When I see that, you are literally announcing to everybody, “I’ve got no quality control, don’t bother listening.”
[Leo Laporte] I’ve got nothing.
[Laughter]
[David
[Leo Laporte] Bad audio’s a pet peeve by far, and I also hate it when they do a little bit too much happy chat at the beginning.
[David Spark] Ah, I hate that. Hate it.
[Leo Laporte] We do some, but there’s a very well-known daily news show from a major enterprise that has all of a sudden started each show with the most inane happy chat, and I don’t know who told them that was a good idea.
[David Spark] How was your weekend? What’d you do this weekend, Leo?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, I don’t care.
[David Spark] Nobody cares.
[Leo Laporte] How’s the weather?
[David Spark] Nope. No one cares.
[Graham Cluley] That’s absolutely mine as well. It is the inane chatter. Specifically, it will be, “What’s the weather like?”
[Laughter]
[Graham Cluley] Where they will report what the weather is like outside.
[David Spark] I’m dying to know what the weather was like last week when you recorded this.
[Graham Cluley] Yeah.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] Right, somewhere else.
[Graham Cluley] Nobody cares. Nobody cares.
[David Spark] What’s another pet peeve of yours of other podcasts? Dave, you go ahead.
[Dave Bittner] I hate it when hosts talk over their guests. I find myself… [Laughter] Thank God.
[Leo Laporte] I do it a lot.
[Dave Bittner] Oh, we lost Leo.
[David Spark] [Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] Like if I’m by myself and I’m listening to someone and a host is talking over the guests, I will yell out loud, “Let them talk! Let them finish the sentence!” because hopefully, the guest is more interesting than the host. That’s what we all strive for is to have guests that are more interesting than us.
So shut up and listen.
Closing
45:43.945
[David Spark] All right, we’ve come to the part of the show where I ask you which quote was your favorite and why. Dave Bittner, tell me which quote was your favorite and why.
[Dave Bittner] I like this one from Adam Palmer who is from First Hawaiian Bank. He says, “What most cybermedia misses is decision value. Security leaders aren’t just looking for news, we’re looking for how it changes a decision or strategy.” I think that’s right on.
[David Spark] I think it’s right on as well. Graham, your favorite quote and why.
[Graham Cluley] I think the one I liked the most was the quote from Paul Lanzi, “Life is too short for bad wine [Laughter] and AI slop.” I think he’s exactly right about that. I mean, the thing is there’s a lot of AI-generated content, but it’s often recognizable because it lacks some sort of human element to it that makes good security commentary really interesting.
[David Spark] Very good, and Leo, your favorite quote and why.
[Leo Laporte] My favorite quote was from David Spark who said, “This show is brought to you by Palo Alto Networks.”
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] I really enjoyed that, I thought.
[David Spark] Oh, my God, Leo is looking for a Palo Alto Networks sponsorship.
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] I’ll tell you the quote I hated, and I love Mike, Mike Wilkes of Aikido, who said, “I just put everything into my custom NotebookLM and have it read to me.” I don’t like that, not one bit.
[Laughter]
[Crosstalk 00:46:59]
[David Spark] I want to just throw something out. I feel this way, I’m in very much co-opetition with you because just because someone advertises with us or with you guys does not make it mutually exclusive in that often, like what am I saying, Dave and Leo, I just saw you at another event where we were being sponsored by the same organization.
This happens often. I also think there’s a lot to go around in this business. There’s not actually a lot of us here.
[Leo Laporte] We tell our advertisers frequently, in fact, we’ll turn down advertisers when they say, “Well, we’re just going to buy you.” We say, “You can’t do that. You’re not going to be effective. You need to spread your money around.” The old rule of thumb is every ad has to have four to seven impressions before people remember it.
So it’s really important that we tell our advertisers, “Buy David’s show.” We tell them, “Buy Google ads.” We say, “Get an ad on Reddit.” We want them to be in more than just our show because it will work better for them.
[David Spark] I’m sure you’ve had this conversation, “Let’s just buy one episode and see how it goes.”
[Leo Laporte] Oh, we don’t let them.
[Graham Cluley] No, no, no, no.
[Leo Laporte] We won’t let them do it. I’m just like, “Turn it down.”
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Or they go, “Well, we’ll see how many people click.” This is my favorite thing when they ask about the banner ads. “Well, how much clickthrough are you getting on the banner ads?” And I always say, “Let me ask you, since the beginning of this year, how many banner ads have you clicked on?
Is the answer zero? Guess what, that’s the same number of our audience as well.”
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Yeah. It’s really hard to explain to advertisers that attribution doesn’t work very well. You just have to look at your results, look at your numbers, and see if your campaign’s working because that offer code or the special landing page or the count of clicks, it’s just not good, especially with a sophisticated audience like all of ours.
[David Spark] That’s a good point. So, we’ll get, and I’m sure you all get this, that they’ll have a customer that’ll say companyxyz.com/security, or they’ll say your specific company name. And it’s like but our audience knows you’re doing that to track them.
They know that.
[Leo Laporte] Well, it doesn’t even matter, they just go to the website. They’re not stupid. Let me tell you something, at TechTV, way back when, I really wasn’t happy with the direction it was taking. It was going more general. They were putting shows like Cops on instead of tech shows.
[David Spark] By the way, I had left before all that happened. [Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, it wasn’t good. And I went to the management. I said, “There’s 14 million programmers in this country. You really need to aim at a tech-savvy audience.” And this is what he told me, Joe Gillespie, you remember him?
[David Spark] Oh, yeah, yeah. Leo and I, by the way, worked together for three years.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, he said, “Leo, let me tell you something. Brand is the refuge of the ignorant. Advertisers don’t want smart listeners because they don’t buy by brand name,” and it bothered me so much.
[David Spark] I heard so many quotes that my head spun at that place. Surprise, surprise, it went under.
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, it went under. Guess what? It went under. Because the best way to serve an audience is to serve them. You don’t do a show about how football works on ESPN. What are the rules? No, you serve the enthusiast. And that’s what we all do, and I think that’s something we can be proud of.
[David Spark] The number one failure of ZDTV, TechTV specifically to what it had turned into, what I believe, was when they went to that, what is it? Nine-hour wheel? What was it?
[Leo Laporte] Yeah, we did a news… We decided we wanted to do…
[David Spark] They decided they’re going to do investing, tech news, gadgets, and I said, “Who is this audience?” I go, “Dude, find the one person who wants to watch all of that.”
[Leo Laporte] They were just too early because the TBPN, which is six or four hours of everyday Tech Bro news, just sold to OpenAI for hundreds of millions of dollars. They have 7,000 viewers a day.
[David Spark] Oh.
[Leo Laporte] We were just ahead of the game. [Laughter]
[David Spark] Yeah, timing is a lot of it. All right.
[Leo Laporte] Timing, it’s all about timing.
[David Spark] We’re going to close out the show. I want to thank our sponsor. One of the best quotes, according to Leo Laporte.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter]
[David Spark] Huge thanks to our sponsor, and that would be Palo Alto Networks and Cortex Cloud. Secure your cloud in the AI era. Autonomously eliminate risk from code to cloud to SOC. Just go to their website, paloaltonetworks.com, search Cortex Cloud, find out more about it.
And thank you again, Palo Alto Networks, for supporting our programming. But I want everyone to give a good, solid plug of your show and why they should listen. I will start with you, Dave Bittner.
[Dave Bittner] So, it’s The CyberWire. You can find it wherever all the best podcasts are listed, and our value proposition is that if you listen to our show on the way in to work, you will not be surprised at your daily standup meeting.
[David Spark] I like that.
[Dave Bittner] You do not have permission to steal it.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] We do have a competitive show of yours. We’ll talk about that later. Graham?
[Graham Cluley] Oh, well, I do Smashing Security each and every week, and if you want a little slice of British cynicism wrinkled across your security news, then maybe I’m the chat for you. And I have the huge advantage of being a weekly show rather than a daily show.
So if you’re fed up with those cybersecurity podcasts that come out every single day.
[David Spark] It can get annoying. I agree.
[Crosstalk 00:52:08]
[David Spark] I’m with you.
[Graham Cluley] …podcast. I agree. I agree. So, Smashing Security. Thank you very much.
[David Spark] Leo, who I’ve been a guest on TWiT, which I love coming on to that show. I’m so bummed you had to leave your original, well, not your original, your second location, the Brick House.
[Leo Laporte] We’ve actually had three studios, but now I’m working out of the Attic Studio. So, this is the fourth, I guess.
[David Spark] Fourth studio.
[Leo Laporte] It qualifies, but I don’t bring people in anymore because, well, I don’t want them to see my mess.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Do you not have the other studio still? Or is this it?
[Leo Laporte] No, no, we cut the cord. The studio cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that we decided we didn’t really need to spend. Nowadays, you could do this thing on a boat. It doesn’t really matter where you are, right?
[David Spark] Yeah.
[Leo Laporte] So, in the old days, we had a studio. We built a beautiful tens of thousands square foot studio.
[David Spark] I saw it, it was stunning, it was stunning.
[Leo Laporte] And we did it because, honestly, I wanted to show advertisers, this is back in the mid-2010s, that we weren’t guys in our jammies in our mom’s basement. That podcasts actually were legitimate media, and I think we proved that. And that was the whole point of that, so we don’t need to prove that anymore.
[David Spark] Give a good pitch for Security Now.
[Leo Laporte] TWiT.tv, that’s all you need to do. Go to the website. The security show stands on its own. Steve Gibson has been doing it for 20-plus years and is one of the leaders in this area. His real skill is explaining how this stuff works and, yes, what it means to you and your business.
And I promise you, if you listen to Security Now, you’ll never have to go to another standup meeting again.
[Laughter]
[David Spark] Well, for those of you who don’t know all the programming on the CISO Series, we’ve got lots of it. We got five shows on our network. And one of them is a daily show called Department of Know at the end of the week, which sort of answers the very question that you brought up as well, Mr.
Dave Bittner. Why not listen to both of them? You should. Well, it’s part of our daily show, Cybersecurity Headlines, as well. Anyways, consume all of our programming. If you listen to all of them, if you sponsor all of them, you will hit the entire cybersecurity market of listeners.
[Leo Laporte] [Laughter] That’s a good point. That’s a good point.
[David Spark] We are the shows.
[Leo Laporte] It’s a good package.
[Laughter]
[Dave Bittner] That’s right. We should have a bundle. Today only.
[David Spark] We should have a bundle.
[Laughter]
[Leo Laporte] The Not-So-Humble Bundle. I like it.
[David Spark] [Laughter] All right. Thank you, gentlemen, as I really appreciate you coming on. First of all, I was so looking forward to this recording, like you wouldn’t believe, and that’s why this is a double supersize show because I wanted us all to have freedom to talk longer.
And I think our audience will appreciate it as well. To our audience, we greatly appreciate your contributions and for listening to Defense in Depth.
[Voiceover] We’ve reached the end of Defense in Depth. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss yet another hot topic in cybersecurity. This show thrives on your contributions. Please write a review, leave a comment on LinkedIn or on our site CISOseries.com where you’ll also see plenty of ways to participate, including recording a question or a comment for the show.
If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, contact David Spark directly at David@CISOseries.com. Thank you for listening to Defense in Depth.