AI, Influencers, and Job Automation in Security with Ira Winkler at RSA Conference 2024

This is Textron tv. Hi everyone. We're gonna wrap up our, uh, 2024 RSA coverage here with my good friend Ira ler.

Couldn't think of a better person to wrap up this week with, uh, for those of you who don't know Ira, IRA well, IRA's a security rock star, right? He's very well known. He has a long history.

You could probably Google it, IRA Winkler, and unless we wanna embarrass him and make him tell us about it. Well, you could, I, if you want something ascertain, I will say Google, IRA Winkler, cockroach and maybe add Syria to it. Okay.

Okay. It was really fun when the Syrians were coming after me. Okay.

So Ira Winkler, cockroach, Syria. We'll see where that goes. Yeah.

If you could pull that up and insert it while we're talking. Absolutely. He'll, he'll know what it is.

Um, funny stuff. So, IRA, look, this is, uh, my 23rd or 24th RSA. It's gotta be even more for you, right?

That probably about, maybe 27, give Or take right there. Well, we're Yeah. Contemporary.

So, exactly. What do you think about this year? Well, frankly, it's, it's the same but slightly different.

I mean, this year As always, I mean, for me it's like there's RSA itself, which I love. And unfortunately, maybe I went to my session 'cause I had to, and then a couple of others. But there's a lot of other things going on simultaneously, like the VCs.

VCs have some really good segments going on. Yes. And then, um, but just really meeting with friends outside.

I mean, the joke is Lobby Con and everything like that where just even I call it Street Con where I just run into friends and you find out so much about the industry there too. Absolutely. You know, it's interesting.

I actually had a friend come down yesterday. She went to store her luggage here at our, our, uh, broadcast center. Mm-Hmm.

And she's not even in the security business. She's here because she's in the, in the event business for another tech related thing. And she came here to see the show.

Mm-Hmm. And her observation was exactly this. That there's so much satellite ancillary stuff going on at any one time.

Mm-Hmm. And all day and night that how much is actually going on in the Moscone Center Yeah. Versus what's going on, on the street here on Howard and forth Mm-Hmm.

Where all of the, the buildings or the stores that used to be here are now being rented out for the week, like takeover. Yeah. By, you know, you've got a, uh, a swag shop over there Yeah.

For CrowdStrike. And this one has a little popup stand. And, and you're right.

You walk on the street, it's all your friends, the VCs, pooling, you know, their, their portfolio companies into presentations. It, there's a lot of competition for your time. It's hard.

Yeah. I mean, I, at any given time, like I show people my thing and there's like six, seven columns all, like, you don't realize how many independent things you could fit in an iPhone calendar app. Yeah.

No. Yeah. And it's, but then it's a matter of, okay, where is gonna be the biggest payback?

And in some cases, I gotta admit, you know, I work for a vendor company and for me meeting CISOs, like, where can I meet most of them might be a priority, but at the same time, luckily my friends are at those events anyway. Right. So that's a good thing.

But then it's a matter of where do you go that you stay current? And, and this sounds, whether it sounds good, bad or arrogant, sometimes I like to go to the events where I, like a lot of people are, are by the default events. Like, you know, where people aren't gonna be invited to the like event, like the VC events.

Because that's where you see people who are like in the industry doing hands-on work. 'cause I think this industry glorify CISOs without appreciating the work that the hands-on people do. Whether you're at like the marketers who go back and forth, you know, the people who are maybe gain a conference badge and they're not gonna be invited to all the, like the eight level events.

But those are people who do work. And a lot of those people, you know, you can't underestimate them. 'cause a lot of these People, there's bread and butter of this industry and their tomorrow CISOs.

And You know, that's where I get it. Like, you know, frankly, I'm friends with a lot of CISOs not because like, I mean, some of my past positions get me in the room, but I'm friends with a lot of CISOs not because of that, but because I would talk to them when they weren't CISOs, when they were just engineers working on different aspects. So that's a function of our age.

I see it with me too. I knew them before they were CISOs. Yeah.

So did you. And we all knew each other. We came up together, you know, it brings up something.

And you know, this Ira, for the last 20 years now, I've been putting on the security bloggers, right. You know, party on Wednesday night of RSA, the last two years we, it was kind of, you know, it was a thrown together thing. It wasn't as good as before Covid, frankly.

But I began to, I felt like I was at one of those movies where we raise a glass and say, here's to us. And those like us damn few left, because every year there was less and less of us. Well, I, I think frankly, I blame the economy.

I, I hate to say I blame the economy. Mm-Hmm. But what I blame is the market that it there is right now, because I would write articles for computer world.

I would write for CS OI would write for dark reading. Now these people are just taking sponsored concept. No offense.

Offense, You don't pay. No. And, and there's like, and look, I live this life.

You, you're not offended me. And, And there's, the problem is, is that there are people who are, who would have a voice who don't like you see some people who can afford to put together their own channels, people who do this. But they have to be like, there are all these people, like old man yelling at cloud or young woman yelling at cloud these days who are trying to get there.

And unfortunately, and this is like, like if you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll see my meme of Dr. Evil saying security influencers. Mm-Hmm.

And these security influencers are ruining the industry in my opinion, because they spout what people want to hear, not what they need to hear. They don't have any variety in what they talk about. They just pontificate on what is easy to get likes.

And those are the people getting the visibility that the bloggers who previously would have long, thoughtful information, there's no market for them anymore. Absolutely. I got a bunch of thoughts on that.

Bear with me. Number one, my, my thought on this whole influencer thing, I, I really think it's a case of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. You know, I had a conversation with a large security vendor that you, you and I both know their founder no longer alive.

Yeah. Okay. Um, unfortunately passed away.

Gary Tural. Anyway, they told me they had done a, a promo deal with a, a big influencer who had hundreds of thousands of followers on Mm-Hmm. Social media.

And this influencer, you know, did a series of promo webinars or whatever for them. And it resulted in zero business. Yeah.

Very few registrations. Yes. You may have a lot of followers on Instagram.

That doesn't mean you a, you know about security and B, people give a crap what you, what you're doing them. And, and so this vendor said we'd never do a deal. Like we, we'll never do a promo like that again.

It was worthless to us. Uh, so I do think over time this influencer thing will, you know, cream rises to the top and crap flow of crap sinks and, and I unfortunately, I'm gonna disagree with you. Yeah.

Because people keep sending me things and want me to publicly comment on individuals. And there's an individual right now who's selling horses on, doesn't even have a real job selling courses on how to break into cybersecurity. Who hasn't figured it out themselves then because of the number of followers, they get invited to speak at conferences about How to break into Around the world.

Absolutely. I've that sitting, I'm sitting there like, really? And, and the problem is that too many people and it's, it's like you are saying like vendors who actually give these people money.

See what you are saying. Zero results. Yeah.

However, we have conference organizers who are finding out that, hey, it's a bunch of likes. I invite them and they'll get a hundred thousand people to see my conference. Well, but I don't know if they really get a hundred thousand people.

And that's the point. Well The, they won't get them necessarily to attend. They'll get visibility.

Maybe they'll get online. I'm not saying that these people are completely useless because the problem is that they get the visibility. I hope that people see them for lack of actual tangible knowledge.

But unfortunately I've learned what I hope for and what I believe is not necessarily always gonna be the case. And in the meantime it hurts the people. Like I'm out here and I have a good voice, I have a good following.

And when I say, look, you need a degree. All those people say you don't need a degree, you don't need experience. You don't need certifications.

Because the government came out and said the government didn't say you don't need any experience. The government, even I-B-M-I-B-M, good company, they said you don't need a college degree. They, you don't need a college degree.

If you have 20 years of experience in the industry, not you're gonna come outta college school. A ferry will spread ferry dust on You, pay pay you $180,000 a year to start. Right.

And Boo Booz Allen actually was having a program of 150,000 a year with no college degree. But that was, if you're coming outta the military with a top secret SI security clearance, they will pay you and train you because they can't get people to clearance. Clearance then it takes that long.

But they Leave out the caveats. Sorry I could go on that soapbox for a long time. We're gonna come off it though.

I just wanna quickly web that segment up with, hey, I changed the name of security bloggers network to security content creators. 'cause too many of us don't blog. Too many of us video like this.

Yeah. Many of us, you know, we use other formats for our content and that's okay. So it is the security creators network and uh, you know what, we had about 50% women there last night.

A lot more younger people. Mm-Hmm. I was thrilled with it.

So thank God for that. I think it was the right thing. I want to spin a pivot as we call it.

Right? Yeah. Pivot a little bit into um, ai.

A lot of people are saying this was the year it's RS AI conference. Thoughts quickly on ai either, I Think this is, sorry, I'll curse here. I think the whole, a lot of the content was complete b******t.

Okay. I think half the people talking about AI don't know what AI actually is. They come up with a topic that sounds interesting like AI and like, you know, implementing people, whatever, ai, and this is where we're having a problem.

I even saw a keynote panel where I nobody actually address what AI is. They just assume they might as well name it. Fred.

Fred has shown up at our, at our conference. Fred is in the building. Fred Is in the building giving a keynote talk.

AI is math. People don't understand that AI is just fundamentally math. And we're being trained to be afraid of math and the implementation because AI is a certain set of mathematical formulas that we've actually had around for decades.

Like for example, the Netflix algorithm is theoretically ai. Mm-Hmm. All antivirus software is the, these days complete AI machine learning tools.

It's a certain set of math that can take a lot of inputs and takes tuning of the inputs and can give you results that all of these massive dis information previously couldn't, we previously couldn't do. But now that we have the Nvidia chips and all those other chips, we can make more useful applications of mathematical formulas to give us decision making capability. It's a big data thing And it's a big data, but too many people, and the reason this is important is when people are out there talking about ai, you know, they're talking about, well AI is gonna take away, no, AI is not gonna take away your job, your job.

And this going back to my college degree thing, if you have a job that requires basic decision making that can be automated away with better, with the use of more decision points or more data that a human would normally have, your job is gonna go away. And that's not because it's AI taking your job. That job is because you have a job that requires a low amount of information and decision making capabilities.

And until you learn more, you can be automated away. I'll tell you a quick story. My son gets admitted to the Kelly School of Business at Indiana University six years ago.

I go with him there for admitted student day teacher gets up there and says we need to do away with minimum wage because by having minimum wage we are in, we are, you know, forcing employers to fire people who do low level jobs and replacing them with machines. And I raised my hand and I said, are you a communist in Indiana? He said, of course I'm not a communist.

I said, because only a communist would make do work for people. Because anybody who believes in a market would tell you that if I could get a machine that could do your job cheaper, better, faster than you, I'm an idiot not to fire you and put that machine in. You don't give people busy work.

And it's the same thing with ai. Have you had a job where AI can truly replace you like that Ira, you're gonna be replaced. Well, I mean, let me take this a little step further.

'cause you, I both, we know our political beliefs. Okay. But you know, here's the thing.

Like I hear about, oh, California implemented a $15 minimum wage or whatever. Now all of a sudden there are these kiosks, those kiosk would be there anyway. Anyway everywhere.

Absolutely. If there is a way to take people outta the loop, McDonald's and everyone else, and I'm thinking even knowledge, jobs, jobs without Growing them, it's market Part of the red basic job to do things. Yes.

And this is a good important thing people have to do. They have to understand that they, if they have a job that could be automated, like my son works in the financial industry and not Kelly School of Business, but Okay. A Different one.

Well my son didn't go there. But anyway, he wanted, at first he wanted to be a trader. And what he saw working inside, I won't mention the company, but what he saw was trading is being automated away.

Yep. They are. And, and he would wanted to go possibly into electronic traders instead he went into a different aspect of sales.

'cause he knew trading was going away. And people need to understand that, that even these high tech jobs and why, because if a trader involves that, maybe there will be a few concierge level traders. But right now, for example, Schwab, why is Schwab so valuable?

Because they made it easier for people to log on and do a trade without a trader, A person. Yep. And now, so it's not just minimum wage jobs, it's don't any job.

No, I don't need Oh no, I'm wage in general. Yeah, no in general. But this is the market anyway, IRA, they're, they're wrapping things up here.

We gotta wrap up. But stay tuned. We may see more of Ira on Tech Truck tv.

Hey man, it's a pleasure seeing you. What a great way to finish IRS and having you on. Hopefully it was entertaining for You're always entertaining my friend.

It just gives me a way to rant. Anyway, Will you rant all the time on LinkedIn? I know, but now I have Thousands of you.

Now you have right track and now it's all in living color. Ira Wakeley here at RSA. I hope you've enjoyed our RSA coverage this year.

We're back, well we won't be back in RSA till next year, but we'll be on Techstrong TV again on Monday. Until then, this a shimel. We're out.