94: Guerrilla Theory with Peter Schawacker

This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: Leading in cybersecurity is like mixing the perfect Paloma cocktail. Yep, that refreshing blend of grapefruit juice, lime, tequila, and sparkling water that originated in Mexico both require just the right balance of key ingredients.

Chris: Visionary cybersecurity leaders strategically guide organizations to build a solid security program while establishing an internal culture focused on combining technological experience, business strategy, communication skills, and relationship building. When crafted by leaders as balanced as a Paloma cocktail, cybersecurity strategies offer long lasting protection. Speaking of Palomas, you’re going to want to take a glass, fill it with ice, add oz Blanco tequila, half ounce fresh lime juice, half ounce simple syrup, quarter cup grapefruit juice. Finally, top it off with sparkling water and garnish it with a lime.

Chris: And just as the Paloma blends flavors into refreshing harmony, strong cybersecurity leadership brings harmony between security, productivity, and innovation. Salute to all strategic leadership. Peter Schawacker is a thought leader with over  years of hands on experience advising organizations on how to manage cyber risks and get in front of constantly evolving threats. Peter has an uncanny ability to cut through the complexity and provide practical wisdom to security teams and company leadership alike.

Chris: His candor and direct communication style has earned him the trust of many Fortune  companies, where he served as interim CISO and strategic advisor. Peter, thanks for joining me, man. I do want to shout out a mutual contact who initially introduced us. Maya Ferreira.

Peter: Ferreira? Yeah.

Chris: Oh, you pronounce it better than I do.

Peter: She doesn’t pronounce it that way. I live in Mexico, so I flipped the r..

Chris: I was actually looking to involve her in my documentary, and that’s when we ended up connecting. And then she recommended that I connect with you. She actually runs a really killer blog called Bull in the server. So, for those that are listening to this, go check out bull in the server. No. When we first connected, we determined that we both had an east coast connection. So you’re originally from the Philly area? Correct.

Peter: I thought we agreed we weren’t going to talk about that.

Chris: Oh, we’re.

Peter: It’s okay. Fine. We don’t have a non-disclosure. We just have a friend-d-a. No, I’m originally from a suburb of Philadelphia called Westchester, but I broke out of that place when I was  and went to Los Angeles. Nice, but Jim’s Steaks. I still have an opinion on that. Fight me.

Chris: So that means you’re for Jim Steaks or you’re against Jim Steaks.

Peter: I’m for Jim Steaks. Wiz with.

Chris: Okay.

Peter: Except no substitutes.

Chris: I’m with you on that.

Peter: Pats is overrated.

Chris: So, Westchester. Did you go to Westchester University?

Peter: College school is for suckers. Be cool. Drop out of. Been. I’ve been. What’s the word? Expelled from excellent colleges, excellent institutions? No. My dad was a university professor and my mom was a music librarian at different colleges and I grew up between them. So I hung around. I did an awful lot of dating in the universities nearby. And I did go to school and I took some great classes, but not my thing. I like to get paid for the work I do.

Peter: The idea of paying other people to make me do work for. No, like, that wasn’t my jam.

Chris: Yeah. So would you consider yourself self-taught then?

Peter: No, I don’t teach myself anything. No, I’ve studied at the feet of the masters. I mean, I got books. I got books. I have, like, international. I got principios de contebile, dad. And I got some stuff in English, too. Those are my teachers. I really like the St. John’s College method. St. John’s College is in Santa Fe and forgot where in Maryland. And they follow what’s called the great books program and the great Books program.

Peter: There are no professors in the room, but the books. The books are your teachers. And the professors are called facilitators, I think. And so you start with the with. And that probably includes Homer. And then you work your way up through, like, Galileo and Einstein and great literary classics. And so you learn from the books and from each other. I love that. So. And my dad, like I said, he was English professor. His thing was Anthony Trollop was boring as can be.

Peter: But I learned to teach from him. And I realized that. I realized much later from people like Paolo, Frede, Bell hooks. Those folks, if you don’t know who they are. I’m easily found on LinkedIn. Hit me up and I’ll give you the isbms. But we all teach ourselves. We are all self-taught, but at the same time, the information comes from someplace else. And then we have to invent in our own heads. That’s pretty much what I do for a living today.

Chris: And you said that geographically you’re based currently in Mexico. So how did you end up there?

Peter: This is my third attempt at Mexico. First time was in a place called Wahacade Juarez. I was supposed to do a project in the Bay Area. And I lived on expense accounts for years. Like Montreal, Ottawa. And I was going to do that. And I’d gone to Mexico just for fun with my then fiancé she would turn out to be. And they called me and they were like, congratulations. We cut the travel budget. You could do this from home. The problem was we rented out our home and we didn’t have a place to go. So we’re like, let’s just stay on Miguel.

Peter: So we had that. She and I did not work out rapidly, and I moved to Denver, and I moved to Mexico City. I was working for Optiv, and they kicked me out of my office because I wasn’t a vice president. They’re like, this is VPs only. I was like, I’m next to the CEO’s office. I like my office. And they’re like, well, work from home. I said, I don’t want to work from home. I don’t like it there. And they’re like, well, work wherever you want.

Peter: So I’m like, can I have that in writing? So they sent me an email saying, yeah, you can work wherever you want. So I went to Mexico City. They didn’t know for six months.

Chris: What year was this?

Peter: This is like , okay? So I was an early digital nomad, and I figured out that if you have some residence in the states to tell the tax authorities about in your country, like, IRS doesn’t care. They get their money, and Mexico doesn’t care as long as you paid somewhere else. So I was in Mexico City for a couple of years, and then New York, and then the pandemic happens. And was laid off. And I had some money, so I came down. I’d been here once to Oaxaca de Juarez, and I loved it. I love the food and the politics.

Peter: There’s like, a lot of sort of militant feminism, and it’s a wild place. It’s like the New Orleans and Mexico, and it’s how I want to. And then, like, a week in, I met my esposa. She wasn’t my esposa yet, but a year or so later, we got married, and she’s my business partner. So we’re incorporated in New Hampshire, where I’m domiciled, and in Mexico, down here in Oaxaca. So we’re a global conglomerate.

Chris: And how many years have you been down there?

Peter: Three and a half, I think. Something like that.

Chris: It sounds like a nice place.

Peter: You should come down.

Chris: So since you’ve been down there for a while and, you know, the environment, how do you feel the US and the Mexican cyber culture differ from each other? Is there a difference?

Peter: Yeah, there are differences. I mean, there’s strengths and weaknesses everywhere. I mean, one of the reasons that I started this was I realized that to do cyber, you probably have to speak English. So there are plenty of English speaking people here now. We still do events in English and Spanish because everybody learns better in their first language. And I’m a visitor here. I’m a permanent resident on my way to citizenship, but I’ll never be, like, actually Mexican.

Peter: I’m a guest. I spent a lot of time trying to contribute to the community through the cyber community. But in terms of skills, there’s a lot of GRC here. There’s a lot of third party risk management, ton of sock people. We started out specializing in Blue team stuff. So staffing socks, that’s what I’ve done most of my career is built socks. Like, the first security job I had was one where I was sort of accidentally given a sock at Citigroup to start, like, the very first one.

Peter: I didn’t know how TCP IP worked, and I had root on  firewalls. It was crazy. I was, like, deploying and running iss real secure and running vulnerable scans globally. I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to do that. But it was like, I didn’t know. And people would just point at me, point it. They would just, like, point at stuff and say, here, that’s yours. I’m like, what is it? And they’re like, manuals are over there. You’ll figure it out.

Peter: I’m not particularly smart. I’m just, like, intrepid and curious, and I like getting paid well. And it paid well. Yeah, still pays well. People are often like, so how did you do it? How do you know all this stuff? I’m like, I’m really curious, and I don’t die. That’s it. That is the formula. Be insatiably, ridiculously curious about things other people aren’t curious about. And don’t die. And make a lot of friends and leave with love and compassion.

Peter: That’s what keeps me going. And, yeah, it’s like magic. It just works.

Chris: You said be curious about things that people aren’t.

Peter: Yeah.

Chris: So how important does that niche factor matter, especially today?

Peter: It’s essential. And it’s become kind of a lost mean. What did Mitnick steal from that phone company? It was technical documents, it was like the signaling system. He wanted to know how the computers that ran the phone system worked. He wanted knowledge that he just couldn’t get from borders books or whatever. Or B. Dalton. And I’ve always been the same way. I just want to know how the system works, and I’m not afraid to dig into things I don’t understand.

Peter: I read the communist manifesto when I was eleven. I didn’t understand it. I read Julius Caesar when I was twelve. I didn’t understand it. I just knew that there was something magical in these things. They were on my dad’s bookshelves. I tried Anthony Trollop. No, don’t even bother. He loved that shit. I don’t get it. I still have his dissertation. I don’t read it, but, yeah, you got to ask questions that are not really answerable, like, what is inside this thing?

Peter: Smartphones and non-user service syllable devices in the DMCA destroyed hacking. We got kind of ghettoized in things like raspberry pis and Arduino. We became this little corner where you could do hardware hacking, but that’s just not enough for most of us. It’s too safe. Our answer is, I go out and buy weird hardware. Like, I buy repurposed point of sale terminals that have, like, this. I’ve got this set that’s like this weird array of serial ports that I cannot begin to understand.

Peter: When I was a kid, I would take, and I like a lot of people, maybe you like, I would find broken electronics and take them apart and just kind of, like, take in the beauty of these things, sort of the elegance. And there’s something, like, mysterious. I’m an Arthur C. Clark guy. He said something like, any technology, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And I love the wizards.

Peter: I wish I could be one. I can’t. I’ve got this thing. This is Aleph Null. It’s an imaginary number. It’s the cardinality of all sets. It’s an infinity of infinities. Do I understand this? I do not. I do not understand olive null. Georg Cantor barely did. He thought it was a revelation from God. He had bipolar disorder and it was a psychotic episode. Georg Cantor, he invented set theory, which some really smart people, like Wittgenstein said was daft, but it’s the very foundation of computer science, and it’s absurd. Infinities, like, multiple infinities.

Chris: Interesting.

Peter: Totally daft. And yet, there we are, right? Mathematics is not a real thing, and yet everything could be. Well, a lot of things can be understood in mathematical terms. So my approach to security is incredibly eclectic. But when they say, like, you’ve got a square and make a circle, and then you go outside the lines, it’s like, where they draw outside the lines things come from. That’s how it works.

Chris: Yeah, that’s really interesting, man. I’ve always been drawn to illusionists from the perspective of just understanding the architecture, understanding the presentation aspect. And it wasn’t until later on that I really took that technical perspective to it. There definitely are parallels there.

Peter: Yeah. Well, now I’m a business hacker. I do the tech, that’s my Sundays. Every Sunday I do something. I spend the day learning some technical thing because it’s soothing to me, because it’s simple. People think technology is complicated. It’s not nearly as complicated as the humans, and the humans and groups are fascinating. So I start a company and I’m like, how does this thing work? And the thing about being an entrepreneur, especially a self-funded one, because this is all my money, because I don’t like investors, really, you have to learn everything.

Peter: I had to figure out how to do taxes in two countries. I had to figure out, actually my partner Lauer, she’s the CEO of the Mexico company, I’ve got the US company, but I still had to figure out how do I stay out of jail? Which turns out that’s a risk when you make money and especially when you’re operating internationally. I had to figure out how to get cyber famous in, you know, pretty early. Everybody kind of wants to talk to the gringo because they’re like, you’re where you’re in Oaxaca. This is literally like starting an IT company in New Orleans. No one does that, no one does this.

Peter: And then on the other side of the mean, we started doing community development work, we started doing bachelors and breaches games, which is like internesponse tabletops as a game. We translated the core deck to Spanish on a volunteer basis. We just did it for fun, for free, for love. And then we started doing Linux user group meetings because I realized, because I do a lot of recruiting. Some of this is advisory, some of it is sock building, some of it is assessment, some of it is IR, but a lot of is recruiting because it’s a good way to help people and it’s a good business. It’s not great, but it’s good.

Peter: I was meeting all these people who didn’t know anything about Linux, didn’t know networking, didn’t know how systems really work. They might be in the top % of like try hack me or some such thing, but they actually don’t know how it works. I’m like, what are you protecting? They’re like the company, like, you have no idea. So we decided to start a Linux group, because it’s how I came up. I came up in lugs.

Peter: So we do that. So every Saturday we get together and do some practical thing. We built a lab here. We intend to site to site VPN it with one in Pachuca, which is not terribly far from Mexico City, and another one in Dubai. And so we do that. And then we’re going to be doing a CISSP study group on Thursday nights that starts in two nights or two days. Okay. One in English, one in Spanish alternating.

Peter: And it’s all community taught. So I and another member of the group are doing the first section, which is about stuff that most people are going to find boring. So BCDR not my favorite thing I’m teaching. Know one of the things that. Getting back to the question you asked about Mexico, people are really good at adapting to lack of resources and adversity. Back until the s, most of Mexico was not really.

Peter: It wasn’t a nation. And there’s still parts of the country that are under kind of banditry. We fly to Mexico City. If we drive, we watch carefully for the Guardian national, which used to be the federales. We stay on the main roads, we’re careful and people are used to that. People understand risk in different ways, but people also organize differently, like all of the organizational structures. Well, the United States, you have civic culture, you have lots of cyber groups and stuff like that. And you have Issa and ISOC and they’re very active. And then you have things like bowling leagues and you have rotary and stuff like that.

Peter: Here you have the government, you have the church. Catholic, Catholic Church. And there are others like LDS is really active here. And you have families. People don’t come together in the same way. So we’re like, don’t see any reason people couldn’t. So we started doing it and people are like, I love this. And you’re not charging for it. I’m like, we don’t charge for it. I won’t charge for it. I refuse to. So every now and somebody will come along and be like, you should sell tickets. I’m like, I’m not going to.

Peter: The business funds the community. The community gets us visibility and makes it easier to recruit when we need to. And mostly it just drives us. It makes a  hours day is like doable. And we do it for fun and for free, for love.

Chris: That’s awesome, man. What’s the size of the community now going by?

Peter: The number in discord is like . Wow. But it’s like a small. There’s small groups that show up, there are a lot of people sort of sign on and never come back.

Chris: And you still do this on site?

Peter: No, we don’t do it on. I would like to do it on site in Oaxaca. And then we were going to try to do it on site, and I realized I don’t have enough chairs. My house is actually really big, absurdly large. I was paying $, a month for a one bedroom plus den in Brooklyn before I came down here. And now I live in a place that costs like $, a month.  sqft. Jeez, it’s like ridiculous. There’s way more house than I need. So I’m like, okay, what I’m going to do with it? So I have employees who work downstairs, more like interns that I pay.

Peter: Everybody gets paid.

Chris: So that’s a new definition, to work from home. It’s work from your home.

Peter: Well, people who. I’m a big believer in remote work, except for people in the first five years. And the reason is you got to eavesdrop. No, the guy who’s here now is not next to me because he’s in a wheelchair and the stairs are pain the ass. And getting him in the house is kind of a hassle. Getting up the stairs, impossible. And I have one other person who’s in New Jersey. It was somebody I hired because if I didn’t hire, she was going to get deported.

Peter: So I’m like, all right, I’ll make an exception. But normally we’re Mexico first, then Philippines when we have a night shift, Greece and Turkey. If we have GDPR show up. And I want to do something with Africa. One of our most, actually our most active member of the Linux user group. He’s in Ethiopia and he’s brilliant. He’s a great guy. So we’re going to start an Amiya time zone Linux user group with him as manager of it.

Peter: If I make money on something, I pay. If I don’t make money, I don’t pay, although I pay sometimes to organize stuff. But anyway, it started out as we’re just going to concentrate on Oaxaca. Trouble is, this town is mostly like tourism and agriculture. We dream of someday making a cyber tech hub out of it, because, like, what was Austin before? So anyway, exactly.

Chris: And just to clarify, this is your user group, not nearshore cyber? Correct? Or is there some synergy there?

Peter: Yeah, nearshore cyber is the business, but nearshore cyber is also the name that’s used for all the community stuff. None of the community stuff is incorporated. And I won’t do that because it just complicates everything. It works okay with me as benevolent dictator and I think it’s going to work that way until I die. And then people want to go on, great. But it is difficult sometimes to draw a line between the two because they are synergistic.

Peter: The business creates opportunity for people. I don’t want to train people on things that I can’t at least steer them toward a job. I’m infuriated by the training industry. In our business it’s a crime. People are told like, take this class, do these games, blah blah blah, and they can’t deliver anything useful. So the first thing that we did when we stood up the lab and started doing the Linux, well, the first thing we did was set up an IRC server, but that was for Yux, but it also got people hands on with Linux.

Peter: The next thing we did was set up a CMDB. Why? Because every time I do a Sim job, and most of my career has been, most of the engineering in my career is Sim. The lack of a good CMDB or any CMD was a major impediment. Like we’re going to do this right way. We’re going to start with CMDB. And we found an open source. One, it’s pretty good. And so I know now that the people who work with that CMDB can do a couple of things. One, they could put it on their LinkedIn.

Peter: Two, if they wanted to, they could create a diagram from it, post it on the Internet and say, I work on that. We’re using Pfsense as a firewall. We’ve got like Zabix for discovery. But the point is that when you do these things on a volunteer basis in a way that’s practical and open, you could publish. You do that with your job, you work on some network at wherever you work, and you post on the Internet, you’re lucky if you just get fired, right? This is one of the problems is people can’t show their work, right?

Chris: So you mentioned that you’re still very technical. You still have a passion for technology. So I’m curious to know what technology captivates you personally the most today and how do you see it shaping the industry in the coming years?

Peter: I still go back to the basics all the time. I love Linux, I love the internals of Windows. I’m not good at writing software, but I keep reteaching myself like I have to relearn Python every two years because I don’t use it enough.

Chris: Do you program at all?

Peter: Now, I can do it, and I respect it. And I think one of the great sins of cybersecurity is the claim that you can do it and not know how to write software. Like, what is wrong? What’s so bloody special about us that we can say, oh, I can read a script, but I don’t really know how to write? We have a reputation for not being able to build things, and it’s well deserved because we don’t generally build things.

Peter: You know, I have a ton of respect for the people who come in from cloud and CI CD who, when the security industry failed them, they took it upon themselves to do their own security. They’re like, we can’t wait for you. You’re never going to learn cloud. And for ages, it was hard to find security people who knew, who thought anything other than, well, the cloud is just your computer or somebody else’s management. It’s complete nonsense.

Peter: It’s a completely different way of looking at computing and about applications and business. And I was lucky. I was at Optiv, and I did an acquisition of a company that did, like, big data and cloud, and they could build, like, hundreds of servers on bare metal in, like,  minutes with one click and one config file. And I managed to get them acquired despite a lot of headwinds. And then eventually they wind up transforming the company.

Peter: And so I don’t know. I’m not good at fitting into boxes because I just see, where did the box come from? Where does that come from? The most important reading that I’ve done is from the mid-19th century, late 19th century. I’ve read things like, I always go back to the original documents. Kind of like going back to what I mentioned about the great books program. Like, you want to understand western culture, you got to read Homer, you got to read the Iliad. And I read it every other year.

Peter: You have to read the Odyssey. You have to read the Aeneid. You have to travel. You have to learn other languages. You have to understand art. You have to understand design. You have to study music, you have to practice. You need to learn, like, the best way to understand security is to get outside of it and then come back in and flow through it, and then you’ll start to see where it comes from. We have a history.

Peter: It’s not well documented, but we do have a history. It’s mostly an oral history. It’s in podcasts like this.  years from now, I will not have written a book, but you can listen to this thing and hear what I was about. Right. And people will be like, oh, there was this guy, Chris Glanton, and he was a big deal. And I know Chris is just, like, a good dude. He’s smart, and he’s done some cool stuff, and he’s got a podcast, and they’ll be able to hear people say, maybe I could be like them.

Chris: Yeah, man.

Peter: That’s crazy.

Chris: I love what you said. The best way to see security is to get out of it. Yeah, that’s a great quote.

Peter: And then go deeply into it and go to the core of it. Like, what is it to me? And at the moment, to me, the essential characteristic of security is that there must be an intelligent, malicious adversary. And if you understand that, then it all starts to make sense. This is why BCDR makes no sense. This is domain of security. And I’m teaching it. I’m like, it doesn’t unless somebody meant to do it or did it and lied about it. It’s not security.

Peter: It’s just like, it’s tornadoes and fires. Cyber philosophers often get criticized as being too theoretical. I’m like, theorem, praxis, you got to have know one is about the structure of the world. One is about the substance of it. It’s Apollo, Dionysus. Everybody needs to read Nietzsche, especially his first essay that got him thrown out of his university job, the birth of tragedy, out of the spirit of music, where he introduces the idea of the Apollo and the Dionysian, and all of western culture and all of philosophy and all thought that you can consider modern, postmodern thought comes from that essay.

Peter: I know more about security from that than anything else.

Chris: Wow. Do you think that when you look at academia now, is that something that you don’t think will ever get incorporated into a security curriculum? That should be.

Peter: It has to, but it’s going to take generations. Security is really new accounting, and I learned this from, like, I have to learn accounting in Mexico, which means I have to learn accounting. And one of the first books that I picked up talked about the origin of the accounting field in the late 15th century. And people are still trying to figure out accounting. Like, people think accounting is dry and boring. It is not. It’s fascinating.

Peter: Now, it took me approaching accounting with the expectation that it was going to be fascinating, and I was absolutely confident that I would be correct, because everything that people work on in a serious way is fascinating, or people don’t do it. So accounting starts in the late 15th century, and there’s a document you can get, and you can read about it. And I forgot it was in Spanish, too. And my Spanish is. I’m, like, really bad. My Spanish is awful, mainly because my wife’s English is so good, so you.

Chris: So you Don’t have to speak Spanish.

Peter: Anyway, I’m not going to talk about it, but yeah. What makes us think that we’re supposed to be a profession at this point in our history? We’re not a profession. Professionals are credentialed, are credited. I was actually talking to a guy a couple weeks ago. He’s in the UK, and we’re talking about guilds and the guild system in. Apparently, the guilds are governed by the crown. I’m like, so do you mean, like, we couldn’t do that in the states, or he’s. No, no, you could, because this thing goes back to the Romans.

Peter: The guild system is older than cyber. One of the things that cyber needs to do is find where its roots are. And its roots are, we don’t know yet. Is it law? I mean, the insurance industry kind of has its act together. It starts with Lloyd’s. I studied for the Colorado privacy and casualty certification exam a couple years ago because I had some clients who were insurance. I wanted to learn their language and I want to understand their perspective, so I studied for the exam.

Peter: It’s great stuff like insurance. People have this really interesting way of looking at risk that we do not have. We can learn a lot from those guys on a population basis. Actuaries can tell you with a pretty good degree of accuracy how you’re going to die, when and how. What’s so special about us? We should apprentice under another industry. We won’t, because there’s too much money flying around. There are too many knuckleheads. There are too many people have entered the industry.

Peter: These people who say, we need more people in cyber. I’m like, you have no idea. What we need is better. It better. It makes that stuff more manageable. You throw a bunch of security people at it, all they’re going to do is, like, what they do, which is fight fires all day but not see to the fireproofing.

Chris: So you think we’re going to get there? It’s just going to take time.

Peter: I don’t know. Will the climate sustain us long? I think we’ve got about 100  years left of habitable planet, and that’s it. I don’t think we’re going to get there, and you just follow trend lines. Climate war. Pretty good chance we’re going to have a nuclear conflagration. It’ll probably be over water. So I don’t know. I live day to day. I know that I have friends, I have family. I don’t want for anything, really.

Peter: And I don’t know. I hang around a lot of Buddhists.

Chris: Well, I love your philosophy, man, and I appreciate you sharing that with us. And I think that listeners to this will also enjoy hearing it and potentially gain a new perspective.

Peter: A lot of people have that view. They don’t know how to express it. There’s genius in every one of us. There’s genius in every one of us. And there’s some tricks that will get you there. One is do what geniuses do. I had an ex-wife. I’ve had a few. And she was a straight up, like,  iq genius. Like, he was not good. She couldn’t forget anything. She remember every number she saw. It was creepy.

Peter: But she once referred to me as a genius. I’m like, what do you mean? She’s like, well, you do what geniuses do. What do you mean? She’s like, genius is not what you have in your head, it’s how you apply it. And if you do what really smart people do, you will get smart. If you read the books they do, you’ll get there. And the human mind is astonishingly powerful. This is why I’m not impressed with AI, for the reasons other people are.

Peter: It’s not going to get smart like us. The problem is people are going to mistake it for intelligence like us and follow it. There will be llm religions. I bet they’re springing up now. There’ll be people who worship those things. And what do those things do? They eat electricity and silicon. It’s all they want. And there are people here who don’t have heat, don’t have water, and it’s going to go to generate power for llms.

Chris: That’s insane.

Peter: Yeah.

Chris: So you’ve traveled extensively. And because this is barcode, I have to ask you, what’s the best bar that you’ve ever been to?

Peter: I hate bars. I got sober in six, okay? And that’s how I got this. And if anybody sees this and knows what that is, you’re one of my people.

Chris: Let me say it again.

Peter: The semicolon.

Chris: The semicolon. Okay.

Peter: Yeah.

Chris: So can you explain that?

Peter: A writer gets the end of a statement, and they can either end it with a period or they can put a semicolon and keep going. I chose to keep going. But when I was in my late teens, I ran an illegal booking agency. And there was a place called. There was a place called the Barbery. It was on the waterfront in Philadelphia. I was booking bands all over the place and managing bands and bars I couldn’t enter and I could drink a lot.

Peter: And the barbery was cool. We run by a guy named Bill Staples. I’m sure he’s gone now, but he was great. He took me and my partner under his wing and it was a dive bar with really great shitty rock and roll bands. And I loved it.

Chris: Nice. I just heard, last call here. So I got one more for you. If you opened a cybersecurity themed bar, what would the name be and what would your signature drink be called?

Peter: It would be named for some magic word that I heard in Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Mekalekahi mechahini ho. And to get in, you would have to say mekalekachai, mechachani ho. That would be the keyword that would get you in. And if you didn’t know that, you wouldn’t even know. Like, there’d be no sign. No sign at all. It would just be just a wooden, heavy wooden door. Could withstand cannonball fire. And you just have to know.

Peter: And no one would be there but me. And I’d be quite happy because I’d probably have a book.

Chris: That’s great. All right, man. Well, Peter, we’re going to wrap it up, man. I appreciate you stopping by before we go.

Peter: You almost called me peewee. I will take note of that.

Chris: No, I would not.

Peter: I’d be cool with that. I don’t mind.

Chris: So we mentioned nearest shore cyber, the user group. Where can our listeners find you? Connect with you online and find out more about what you’re doing.

Peter: LinkedIn. Find us on LinkedIn. We have a website which I never update at www.nearshorecycyber.com mx. And it includes our origin story, which I’m told is good. But yeah, LinkedIn is where you find me. We don’t have one page for the community stuff because the one thing we can’t seem to do is make a web page.

Chris: All right, Peter, thanks again, man. I appreciate it. You take care.

Peter: It’s a great pleasure.