Episode: 4576
Title: Responce to Lee/Elsbeth eps
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4576/hpr4576.mp3
Transcribed: 2026-07-31 16:14:16 (official HPR transcript)

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4576, for 2026-02-16
Today's show is entitled, "Responce to Lee/Elsbeth eps"
The host is operat0r and the duration is 00:39:18
The flag is Explicit, and the license is CC-BY-SA
The summary is "Yet Another White Male Opinion"
Hello everyone, I want to do another episode of Hackable Public Radio with your host operator.
So this one's in response to episode four, five, two, two, this,
four, five, three, sevenish, and kind of four, five, five, oneish, where it talks to Elspith about
IT and women in the workplace and kind of neurodivergence, and I want to share, you know, as a white
male, like anybody needs my opinion, that some of those things is she struggled with or
conducive to just being in the corporate environment, and I'm sure everybody knows what I'm saying already,
but I just want to experience or share my experiences with some of the struggles that she had
as a white male. So it's going to be compounded, of course, if you are
of the minority and, you know, it doesn't matter what type of minority or all you're going to experience
these in a worst case, worst or case. So the only thing I can complain about is that I'm neurodivergent
and I struggle with that, but kind of the whole thing about, you know, people taking credit
is one that kind of sparked me, that's always going to happen across anything, and, you know,
I, when I did have a brief stint of being a manager of five or six people, I kind of read the
manager books and they said, you know, the general guidance is try to not take any credit for anything
and try to give the credit to your employees if they do the work, obviously. So, you know,
you take all the blame as the manager and your employees are the ones that are supposed to get the
credit and you, you know, stand on their shoulders or whatever. That's the general idea of the
quote unquote, good manager is to shield him from the bad and raise them up with the good, but
that's not what happens in corporate culture when people are trying to get jobs and whatever.
I didn't start out this way and probably the last job I had a director and I was talking
with him and he's like, yeah, Robert, you're so, you know, so negative or pessimistic or whatever
the term he used was, and I said, man, I haven't, I haven't always been this way, the industry made
me this way, working in defensive security at large organizations in corporate America has made
me this, it has made me defensive and, you know, not trust people and just generally having to,
you know, mask at scale and try to not, my famous, infamous term is, you know, your baby's ugly,
my baby's ugly and there's elephant in the corner of the room over here. I don't have time
or patience to establish relationships, any of that stuff, I just want to do my job and that conflicts
with, you know, how people normal people neurodifficult people work and that's what I struggle with,
but the whole credit thing, I think everybody can experience string set in some level.
I can't remember any time that it's specifically made me uncomfortable, but then again,
I'm the imposter syndrome is pretty heavy within the IT space and a lot of people have it,
but don't realize that they do have it. So the recipe for that scenario is you have imposter syndrome,
you do a thing or you make a thing or you build a thing or you help something and someone else takes
credit for it and you don't really notice that you should have stood up and take credit for it or
whatever the case may be. So that might have been some of the things that I experienced,
whereas like, well, you know, that wasn't really the expert here, but I'll just fall on the,
you know, on the guidance of whatever's messaging, my direct report or, you know, peer or whatever,
and let them take the credit, let them take the heat, I don't, you know, I call it mental gymnastics
to deal with people. Let them have the kudos, you know, if you're after kudos and acknowledgement
and taking credit and feel goods and working in industry or working in at least IT and
information security, you're in for the wrong reasons. There might be a snowflake job out there for you,
but that's not what I've experienced within these four to 500 companies at least. Maybe small
businesses and startups, but that is not what I've experienced. I get my kudos from local events,
helping people online, community doing workshops and presentations and helping people online.
That's where I get my fill, helping neighbors, things like that.
While the other part, I'll talk about is, you know, the work life, like COVID work life balance.
And I think it's kind of, everybody has their own view, but I think what happened is, you know,
people got stuck inside with each other and spouses, whoever, and one of them realized,
man, this person has messed up and they realized they are neurodivergent or have some other kind of
thing that they need to sort out. And so, you know, we're in that space where people,
more people have got diagnosed, people have figured out that, you know, the only reason they were
working out their job is because that's their job and they wake up and they go to work and
then they come home and they didn't have time to really think about how shitty their jobs were.
And I feel like a lot of people during COVID, you know, just stopped and looked around and thought,
you know what, my job sucks. And I need to, you know, find a new job that doesn't treat me
horribly. And I'll say, you know, the industry's jumping up and down, especially in an
infrastructure agency security, you've got people jumping up and down and say, oh, we can't, you know,
we can't, we can't, we can't retain time, we can't blah, blah, well, boohoo on you, you made
this industry this way. You're a product of treating people like trash and throwing them away
and, you know, when I walk into an organization, I fully expect them to disappear and evaporate
the next day like in that stock market movie where there's like telephone cables hanging from
the ceiling. That's what I expect. I'm pessimistically in that headspace, a lot of the times where I
just, I expect at any point in time, these stockerizer stations are just going to can tons of people
and I'm going to be in that that where we organization worked at, they let out 12 percent
and then they did a mandatory return to work and lost another, you know, three percent or whatever
and then they did another round of layoffs. So like, Thao's post-COVID, the trickle down, you know,
effect of that and it's just, I think people realized that they're, like, my, I've heard stories,
people, you know, here locally they worked in the job and they didn't like the job or whatever
and they started to pick up a hobby of making, be honeybee, honey, would be send next thing,
you know, they're selling honey and they get these big contracts for, you know, large organizations
to sell their honey to wherever that's they went from doing whatever it is they do to doing
something they actually enjoy doing or at least for that period of time enjoy doing. So I think
that people, help people realize how crappy they were being treated and hopefully people have
moved on to better things and I think retail is suffered a little bit, fast food chains,
everybody's looking for work but that's some of what it, you know, whatever.
Another thing of kind of a, we, you know, going the HR route for things. I, I don't even know
what the guidance would be but in my experience, HR companies are designed for, you know,
basically to protect the company. So if you go run to HR to something you better be prepared
to lawyer up and sue them essentially or don't say anything at all unfortunately that's how
corporate America works today and, you know, unless you have like specific proof of something
or your ironclad or even then it doesn't matter, you know, the lead will get buried and things
like that. I just kind of, the pessimistic angle I've got. So like, you know, kind of saying that,
I couldn't move up in an organization because of, you know, HR issues or whatever, that's,
that's just the nature of the piece. You know, if you, if somebody goes to HR about something,
they're going to be put on the radar as a risk to the organization because you are,
you're a risk of organization and they're going to treat you like that. I had an employee that was
sleeping and I warned him because he had a long commute. I honestly didn't give a shit the
few slept, but he would sleep in meetings with my direct reports and he would, you know,
kind of take these long commutes and I worried about him going home late or coming in early
and falling asleep at the wheel and killing himself or someone else more importantly and that was
what was important to me is, you know, I don't want you falling asleep in the car and killing someone.
I really don't have to give a shit if you fall asleep. Don't really care about the optics
of you falling asleep in front of my boss, but I'd have to care about those things because people
care about stupid shit like that and in, in my experience, if you want to move up an organization
that the fast track that I've seen people do is that they leave and go to a different organization
and then they come back. That is the fast track, the method that I've seen people jump back
at forth, especially in my security consulting space, you know, you leave an organization,
you work there for five years, six months and then you come back and you bounce back and forth
between it too and every time you get a job, you get a race. In my experience, to try to actually
get a race and fight for someone for a race is much more difficult than actually just getting a job
somewhere else for six months and then calling your coworker and saying, hey, I heard things are
upside down over there at insert companies used to work for. I have come back to several companies.
I've been fired more times than I'd like to admit. I've been laid off a lot of times and I'm
almost feel like I'm immune to it, but obviously, you know, I lose sleep over stuff like
that because I have a family and I support people and I try to pretend like none of it matters
and I can just get a job in IT or something but at the end of the day, I've been through
kind of every iteration of that type of thing and it kind of sort of immune to it and it's
kind of whatever, but for people that again have worked the same place for 15 years, 10 years,
whatever, they don't have that skill set and they don't, they're not as, you know, adapt that,
developing those skills to bounce back and looking for a job as a full-time job and it's hard
and it's difficult and, you know, AI can help with some of that stuff, you know, with language and
communication. But yes, you know, that's kind of my thought on moving up in an organization and
I just, all I hear is people complaining that they're not getting erased, they're not getting
erased and aren't getting erased and like what, what easier way is there to get erased and to
go somewhere else and whatever. And my experience has been, like, I want to work somewhere where
the people aren't terrible and this is everybody's experience that I love that I want to work
with people that I can tolerate that aren't toxic and that's really all people are asking for.
It's like, minimum, most people just want to work somewhere where they're, it's not a horrible
environment in toxic and that's pretty much the standard. We've learned to kind of accept at least
an IT and in fact like, and the people I talk to have that same kind of aspect, but if you're trying
to go get her and you're trying to, you know, excel yourself and move and quickly you're going to
have to work really hard and find the right people within an organization or you just swap
back and forth, jump around, do contract where take different jobs and kind of develop those skills
to be nimble in a market to move around and have different skill sets. I've been lucky where I've
gotten a lot of my jobs through, you know, knowing about who you know and also kind of mass
media using IT and my skills in IT to notify large amounts of people or apply for large amounts
of jobs or do things kind of at scale that most people wouldn't be able to do easily. That's kind
of how I've identified some of the stuff. Some of my opportunities that I've got but most of them are
kind of who I know. And I don't want to try to pretend on, you know, where she, you know, where she
was at the time or what her background is or what her interest was in education and furthering her
development or career path or whatever. But, you know, if you work the same place for a long time
and there's not any other history, there's not any other skillsets being built. It's probably
could be just a matter of, you know, that, again, that imposter syndrome where, you know,
get an AI prompt that tells you and walks you through each one of your things. I did one that
took about four hours and it expanded my resume out exponentially to ask me questions. Oh, yeah,
I have done this. Oh, I have done this. I, you know what? I have done this. I've done this. I did this. I did that.
And next thing you know, your resume is massive and those ATS systems can scan them and get
all the GCPits they need to get out to, hopefully push you up in the line a little bit. But I don't
have any professional training. I got a networking specialist diploma in school and my technical
skillset sharing my information online. I think has helped, you know, having my own website,
sharing, you know, through social media or sharing my experiences doing meetups and going to
conferences and just putting myself out there has, I think helped people understand who I am,
what I work on, what my skillset is very quickly. And that's kind of helped me get, you know,
get me connected to the right people. So that's, that might be some of the, you know, if you're an
introvert, like a lot of IT and if you're interested to hear people, I think I started out
being an introvert. And then as I got older, I realized that it's not really that difficult for me.
So I don't even know what I would classify myself. I have an end-gram type, whatever,
that conflicts with, with actually how I feel like I am. But yeah, I'm the Myers-Briggs ENFJ
in a tri-type in-gram 729. And this helps with prompting too. So you can get a prompt that says,
you know, don't use indexes, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have that on my AI notes. I'm kind of
tains any right now. But you can do the Myers-Briggs personality test and then figure out what your
tri-type is and put that in your prompt. And it will be more like you than the token, whatever.
And there's also some notes around diversity within LLMs without, you know, so they don't
send you the same answer. If you ask an LLM a joke, they'll tell you the same joke, like 15 times
in a row, no matter how you tell it to be creative. There's options. There's ways to get some
diversity in those response using specific prompting to kind of make it kind of force it to be
to go off those, to go off those grinded paths that they've been shortest distance paths that
they've been, whatever, to be more random creative if that's for like a better term.
So that kind of kind of help, you know, or hurt you. So I kind of broke out of my shell realizing that,
you know, what makes me feel good is sharing my knowledge with the community and if one person gets
or understands it or it helps them then I feel like that was all worth it. You know, because
out of the stuff I do feels very niche and then, you know, anything I try to do at the normal scale
feels like it's being washed out by all the other social media garbage or whatever. So I find myself
doing stuff. Hopefully that nobody else has done because again, the impuffer syndrome kind of rolls in
and says, well, you know what? I can't do a thing on that. That's already somebody else is an expert on
that. Well, somebody else is an expert on that. Well, they might be, but they're not sharing their content.
So I did a video on how to like swap out the locks on a pins on a door and somebody laughed at me
or make fun of how the way I did it and I was like, well, where's your video? Where's your documentation?
Where this is how I did it if you've got something better or you've got some other source of
truth or better way to do it. Let me know. And I would have done it that way, but this is based on
the research I did and it works. So like it may be hacky and that's the whole point. Is it works?
I did kind of going back on off tangent. I did management for, I think about six months
before I realized that it wasn't the right fit for me. It was probably the right fit for me, but I wasn't
ready. And I also was kind of an intoxic environment financial industry. It can be pretty toxic,
but that's a muckity muck, as they say. And my problem was I tried to solve people problems with
technology and that was one of the infamous quotes that my direct report was that you know,
trying to solve, I tried to solve people problems with the technology. And then he said,
all problems are people problems. And that kind of made a lot of sense to me at the time. And
you know, this gentleman at the time we love hate. You know, he respected me. I respected him.
He was he was a master at his craft and how's a master at my craft. But we were on like two
different planets. And you know, we kind of understood each other and we connected in a way that,
you know, at the time, didn't really understand. And then I realized later that he's, you know,
neurodivergent himself, which goes back to people getting late diagnosed, you know, in their 30s,
40s even, um, people doing presentations and having a blackout, realizing that they're
highly functioning autistic. Like this stuff goes on diagnosed, the testing is whatever, the stigma is
still bad. I have, you know, friends and family that have, you know, children that they're trying to,
you know, whatever. It's like we need to communicate and help each other out. Because
all these people have to people, more than have people listening to this podcast or probably
neurodivergent in some way. And if you don't, if you're not, you probably aren't just,
I don't realize it because it's a numbers game. There's, there's a, it's a lot of it. And, you know,
these, these people, again, you know, and the, and the podcast talked about, you know, having
having diversity, you know, whatever. And then that's not the case. I know I talked to someone
a group and I think it was a Nashville conference. And she was part of an organization that would
help leadership teach leadership about neurodiversity and understand how to work with people
that, you know, thinking a different way and how to deal with that, right? And that's not something
anybody gives us shit about, at a corporation. But, um, at some point, hopefully, uh, people in
an organization who realized that their staff is, their IT staff and security staff, and their
programmers are mostly neurodivergent. Um, they're probably hopefully going to get some kind of training.
And the stigma will be whatever and people will understand that, you know, people with neurodiversity
have to, you have to work with them a little bit more and meet them where they are and
do accommodations and all that good stuff. But, you know, that's not where we're at today, right?
And I'll share my one story. Um, I was at a big financial institution, you know, big heavy audit.
I don't think my head up. It's like 16 degrees outside today. And, you know, it's all hands on deck
where we're, we're audit compliance people out of the word work. I'm a highly, you know, specialized
skill, you know, uh, I have a very particular status skills. That's, that's the guy I was, um, they brought
me in consulting if they wanted something broken. And this was, you know, early, you know, 2015,
something like that, where there wasn't a whole lot out there. We kind of wrote the book on that stuff.
And, you know, at the organization I was working with that, I mean, as you can all upset,
you know, they didn't understand what I was doing or they didn't understand my approach or whatever,
and they're like, well, I'm like, I wrote the book on my job. Like, nobody told me, you know,
to your point, there was no path. There was no traditional path for my security back then.
And if it was, it was, I had already long blown past it. But, you know, I had my own processes,
my own documented flows that I went through. And he's like, what is this? This is, this isn't
make any sense to me. I'm a manager and you're, you know, how do you, you know, you're doing
your job wrong? It was like, how do you, how can you possibly tell me that I'm doing my job wrong?
When there's no one to tell me how to do my job. And, of course, now there is a framework
and things like that out there. But back then, there was, you know, even 2015 era, there was not really
anything that was concrete enough and whatever they could, they could give you that. And I, I followed
whatever we had back then, and I adapted it to my own technical processes, but it was all high-level
stuff, right? So this big financial institution, we had, you know, we had to be compliant
for something at some certain date. So every single, you know, consulting organization was there,
all hands on deck, you know, I had to like pull in a chair from a different part of the level
of the building just because we had like three people to one cube, three of our guys to one cube.
And that, actually, the next month that I came there, I brought my own hub, not a switch,
a hub, and then I brought my own folding chair that I put inside of my luggage,
so that wouldn't have to worry about having to grab a chair and make sure that Sally got it back
at the end of the engagement or whatever. So I brought my own chair and I brought my own hub because
it wasn't anything there. And we're going back and forth, we're going through processes, and kind of
like a, you know, we got these people that will do like, you know, kind of bounty hunting and they'll
there's a debt to be paid. They'll go out to these sort of mom and pop bounty places,
which have no security controls. They have no, they have people, people, PII, but they don't know
how to handle it. They don't know anything others supposed to do. So our job was to
kind of audit these off-soft audit these companies and help guide them through some kind of security
policy. So, you know, at first it was, whatever, and we were doing stuff in Excel, and then I started
building it out to know anything about SharePoint, build out a whole flow and SharePoint to send
people to the authoritative sources. I sent templates to our clients, kind of the bounty hunters,
and had them, you know, basically signed them, which I was told later that you can't do that. You
can't write their security policies. You can't help them, you know, develop it. I was like,
well, hey, then, then you're asking someone to do an impossible task. It's like asking an aunt
to, you know, create an understand metaphysics. It's not something they can do, and or had the time
pastes to do. So I would help them build out frameworks, and I would go over it with them,
and I would say, do you have this, do you have that, and they would say, no, yes, whatever,
and they would sign the document. Well, come to find out. That was, you know, I wasn't allowed to do that,
no, blah, blah, blah. So we went back to this old method of doing everything kind of in Excel,
and basically the whole process that are client, which is the manager or project manager on the
engagement, I basically replaced his job function with SharePoint. So that way, we wouldn't have
the weight on him, because we would, he would, he was flaky and being a person and having opinions,
and whatever, and when you're going through an audit process, it's like zero ones, zero ones,
zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones, zero ones,
if less greater than go, like that's not how my brain works as an engineer. So when my process
is a people, people are not fucking processes. My process was SharePoint, and sometimes people
are part of those processes where they have to, you know, approve something, so I had to build
into the process, and then, you know, we went, and he said, oh, I don't do that. We went back
to doing what we were doing, you know, two weeks or three weeks prior, and, you know, I didn't
realize at that time, but there was no space to have meetings, so we would have meetings in the
lunch room, and, you know, people would get upset on my team because I wasn't paying attention,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, because, you know, there's an ATM over here.
That's, you know, connected to the internet, and there's somebody walking over here, and,
oh, there's a point of sale machine. How does that work? You know, look, it's one of those
digital things. I went over the hidden menu, it's like, there were so many distractions in a lunch room
to try to have a meeting in the lunch room and a break room, not even a break room. It was a, it
It was a cafeteria that they were having me have meetings in and they would jump up and down
and say, oh, yeah, you know, I wasn't paying attention during the meeting.
Well, of course, I'm going to teach during the meeting.
I'm neurodiverse and there's all this other crap going on and this environment is not
conducive to have private conversations about information security in a, you know,
Fortune 500 bank institution for a great sake, but yet I was the one to feel like I was
the odd one out and I wasn't doing what I was supposed to be doing.
So that's kind of a, you know, a story might, you know, poor white, white male story that
that kind of has kept me over the years at another company where these used to work
at where, um, I if it didn't find out to a later, but some of the leaders have had been kind
of more or less forcefully slash whatever removed and because of something that I found out
later that I did. So I had found out that I could essentially plug in my phone into any physical
workstation and log in without any credentials and I made a coworker make a video of me doing
this. So I'll walk up to a computer and somebody's laptop actually was another coworker's laptop,
walk up, you know, it controlled the click button pop shell and then, you know, sent that off
for the races and, you know, here I am not that was not part of engagement or anything. I just
realized that there was something weird with the authentication process or the log on process
and thought I'd take it a second step and see what I could discover. And I'm been on to me that
that video was used with leverage to let one of the ski key stakeholders or the people that
I joined the organization for. I interviewed for several people. My director for among others was
was in there and they were that was what I learned much later after they had already left
that that was kind of used and they were both kind of champions in that organization because they were,
you know, breaking down walls and breaking down barriers and burning bridges and, you know,
whatever. That that famous quote by Ashwa Wattu, whatever, the expansion.
It's like, she says, I learned all the bridges in front of me and behind me. I don't get the
fact. That's kind of sort of how they were at it. They were very precise and now they were dealing
with the organization but they were taking things seriously and trying to make changes and people
started realizing that these security people are getting on my last nerve. They're interfering with
the business and we're going to apply pressure and get them to essentially leave or get laid off
or whatever. So there were lots of shenanigans at that organization that led to that type of stuff.
But kind of those things, you know, that what you do impacts people in a real way and kind of
understanding that and thinking before I act and being for a little bit of her modest,
I learned pretty early on but sometimes you can't help yourself because you get excited about
you know, technology or showing somebody something or understanding how a piece of technology works
and just saying, hey, look, this thing is like, you know, putting plain text passwords all over to
our logs. By the way, and then people get offset when it's supposed to be into and encrypted all the
way to the vendor and you find out that in actuality, you know, the credit card number to be
sent to three, not one, but three different places in plain text and sitting on a log file somewhere
on some other server. But that's just, you know, understanding technology and being modest about
your approach to that and how you want to communicate it and being a manager made me kind of
realized that, you know, dealing with this from a security people and then throwing grenades and
is kind of a real thing and respecting leadership and management as long as they respect you,
you try to shield, try that they try to shield you from stuff. But at the same time, you have to kind of
try to use them and consult them before you go do anything, especially being nerd out there so you
don't understand, I don't understand, you know, the analogy is kind of, I'm an alien in the
human suit. I don't really understand how people's brains work, I'm very logical and if I can't
assign something logic or define what the problem is, people tend to get very, get very frustrated
with people if they don't, can't explain to me what problem they're trying to solve because of
bullshit, you know, politics and red tape, I can't help them, you know, I'll communicate that in
such a way that um, to peers or leadership, say, look, I want to help, I want to do work, I want to
solve problems, but you have to cut through the bullshit and help me help you and if you're trying
to get me to be the one to figure this out, you're asking the wrong person, you need to find somebody
that can help you with this because I don't, I don't do people, people can fees me and they're
illogical and a lot of times they don't mean, now with the exception of people that care about their
jobs, understand technology and can do the title that is in their email signature, I don't usually
have a problem with it's to people that don't know what they're doing, they don't know anything about
what the title of their title and their email is and their toxic and they don't want to do work
and they're, quote unquote, busy because they're ignorant or uh, people are like a better term
lazy and don't want help with automation or whatever, that's kind of where I get myself in trouble.
And I'll say, you know, when it comes to that what I experienced in, you know, the 2000s
early 2000s, yeah, I was bad, I'm sure some of the things I said or did with my peers and in
groups with other guys, women around on social media or not social media, but like just in person or
whatever, whenever it's a girl around, we're just stupid and we don't know how to handle our emotions
or whatever and we say or do stupid things. I can't excuse any of the things that I said or did,
but we don't know how to deal with our feelings and then we kind of say things because, you know,
we think with our, we lease sometimes. So that's a result of that going to conferences and
and things like that back in the day, yeah, it was bad. There weren't a lot of
and hardly any females there and then the ones that were there, I'm sure ahead.
Not a great time and over time that has improved, but I feel like now it's it's one
extreme or the other. It's divided. It's people are still like dudes are still just
dickheads, like absolute, like dude, you can't say shit. Like, like,
and you know, it hasn't really happened to me recently and then like 4 to 500,
but the smaller the organization, the smaller the said, the smaller the group, the more isolated
the situation, the more people are unprofessional, you know, those things come into your head and you
say them out loud. And that's, you know, reshaping that takes time. It wasn't that long ago,
we were, you know, confident women over the head, grabbing into the cave. I'm not saying any of
it's okay, but like, you know, it takes time. So for me, it's, you know, I was nervous before,
but now I'm even more nervous. So it's hard to like, you know, find people that are genuine,
women that are genuine and that space that haven't been, you know, already pushed off and
whatever. So when I meet someone that's generally excited about it for me, security,
that's very hard to talk to them because I don't, it's, it's, I have to be extra masky. I put
on my mask for professionalism and then I put on my mask for to not be sexist essentially,
or not say anything that's offensive and, you know, that's hard to do. As a person that's always
the jokes to, you know, everything like that and anything that's anything, a minority
ends up getting in trouble or ends up getting sort of made fun of. So, you know, being the
funny guy doesn't always work very well in this environment and I've said and done things that
are offensive to other nationalities and things like that. And, you know, you know, for better
worse, comedians have, you know, gotten better about that stuff and, you know, I'm free to make
fun of myself. I'll say that I'm particular things and my wife will say, you can't say that,
like, well, you know, one basically that I struggle. I'm neurodiverse. I can make fun of,
I feel like I have some capacity to make fun of people like that, because whatever, um, but then,
you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a struggle around people that care and, you know, you try to
approach women in tech or women in information security and it's so, there's so much
history there and so much trauma, I guess, that it's the whole thing is just, you can't
let your guard down at all. Um, and that's unfortunate and it's because, you know, kind of a product
of our brand environment and how I was raised, um, you know, like, you know, my, my, uh, you know,
direct relatives, like my grandfather was like super racist and it's like that bothered me as
even a young kid. I recognize stuff like that, but, you know, as you get older and you realize
that you can't make the jokes he used to make, because they're actually efficient and people
can gaked in the wrong way, but sometimes I'll say, sub to my wife, this is like,
sister's, it's actually true and it's, you know, love inches. I'm like, well,
yes and no, but it's something that's true and it's funny. Like, I'll give the example of,
I didn't know anything. I live in the language order and we have a big huge
door to tech and I knew all the smart people went to tour to tech and like, whatever and I was
down there doing some work or doing a presentation or something and, um, I was, when I was walking,
I was talking to somebody else and yeah, I was walking around the area and I saw like, like,
you know, I was near tour to tech or whatever and I saw a bunch of Asian people and I was like, oh,
it must be like Asian people a day or something and like, I didn't know, like, I genuinely thought
that like, it was like something because it was so many Asian people, I thought genuinely it was like
some kind of like Asian appreciation month or something and someone her overheard me and was like,
very offended and I was like, I wasn't, I was saying it to kind of bring up that like,
I didn't know that it was that, you know, whatever, I don't know what it is now but like,
I wasn't saying it to be mean and I didn't even know I was being racist. Like, I just
genuinely was like, I'm confused. I didn't know why so many Asian people were there and that was kind
of the thing that like, you know, that didn't realize before until it was like two they
and like, you know, sometimes being around other friends of family, you know,
I'll try to be the funny guy and that blows up in your face sometimes, you know, like,
being offensive aside sometimes you'll say something that triggers someone.
Plus over example, like, we were at a boat party a long time ago, one of those party boats
and we were with some of my wife's friends and we were all kind of having fun and I
didn't know particularly know this person very well but I was going to like push them in the
water and I triggered him because he had some trauma with something and it blew up in my face because
I thought I was going to be the funny person and push this guy into the water and it like triggered
and it was a big whole production and that's kind of the unfortunate thing about being
or a writer and kind of being the funny person and laughing at yourself and making jokes about
yourself, you still end up offending offending other people even though you're making one of
yourself and kind of using that as a mask to, you know, take, take the heat off your weirdness
and then be funny. So that's, you know, blowing up on my face a fair amount of times and I've
gotten better at like recognizing and thinking before the words come out of my mouth and just kind
of keep my mouth shut and try to be PC about stuff is sometimes starting because the more
comfortable I get around someone, the more things I say that, you know, aren't particularly funny
to people because that's just how I deal with stuff and that's how I've always done it
and that's kind of blown up on my face professionally and, you know, personally.
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