Cyber909: Episode 18 with Tony Bradley

Transcript

Narator:

Welcome to Cyber 909, your source for wit and wisdom and cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer and cyber aficionado, Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions, and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for Cyber 909, episode 18 with Tony Bradley.

Den:

Well, folks, welcome to another episode of Cyber 909, the podcast. It's confusing by name and nature because we don't really talk about cyber stuff much, but we do talk about things related to cyber technology, leadership and everything else. We have inspiring guests on the show, and this week is my good friend, and I'm going to say the guy that could turn my shitty Scottish text into some great grammar that can be read by anybody in the world. So Tony Bradley, welcome to the show. Why don't you introduce yourself for our audience?

Tony:

Sure. Thank you. I'm Tony Bradley. I have previously, I have worked in the cybersecurity trenches and the network admin trenches once upon a time, but for many, many years now, I've just been on the content side and the marketing side of things. I'm a senior contributor at Forbes. I've got my own site at tepec. I work with a number of clients in a freelance capacity, and I'm also managing editor at Security Buzz. I have my fingers in a lot of different pies when it comes to cybersecurity content and content marketing.

Den:

And our journey began when I was at Adobe and we, I led enterprise security. We were doing some zero trust. You were working with the Adobe team, the security marketing team at Adobe as well as we're trying to, I'm just going to say, share and promote a great brand of a great culture at Adobe and a great culture of security mindset. So we'd done the tech spec stuff back then, and then we worked together again at Banyan Security where you were one of the people that helped us with our marketing content. When I started 9 0 9 Cyber, you were the first person I wanted to reach out to work with. As we start building this brand, I got a lot of love and respect for you, man. You're doing some great shit. Your writing's great. My writing is, someone once said to me, they were like, oh, you can tell the Scottish guy wrote that.

And it was one of the things my team done, and funnily enough, I didn't even have a hand in any of it, but my boss at the time just instantly thought that that was my trademark Scottish bullshit and nonsense. So let's dig into this. Yeah. You've been around the industry, you've been a practitioner, so you know what it's like to be in the trenches. You've worked with a lot of cyber companies, I mean secure vendors and help them carve, carve out their niche and prove themselves and stuff like that. You're currently at NetApp as the gig there, which is a respectable company over there. And so I'd love, over the years, how do you see, I mean, just from a security industry over overall, what do you think has been positive or negative about the evolution of the industry in the last, let's just say five years? And then where do you see it going?

Tony:

Well, I mean, on the positive side, I mean, I do think that there are companies that are doing innovative things, and there always are. I mean, I'm a little, I'm jaded about platformization when it comes to a single vendor and there's a lot of m and a consolidation stuff going on right now, and vendors out there trying to reposition as like, Hey, just buy our platform. The one thing I think is different now than when we had the platformization and kind of single pane of glass discussion, say a decade ago or 15 years ago, is it was much more vendor lock-in proprietary platform back then. And now, even the companies that maybe have all of the pieces or most of the pieces, and they would love for you to just lock into their platform, at least acknowledge that there is a world out there beyond their own tools and have the APIs and the integration to pull those things in. So you're not required to use all of their stuff. But I think the challenge has always been the cat and mouse game, that new attack vectors come along, new technologies are invented, new attack vectors come along, the attack surface expands. Someone has to come out with a new solution to defend that, and then eventually that evolves to either into its own cybersecurity industry segment. Once Gartner comes down from on high to give it a blessing name, it rolled into other platforms. But we continue to see that cat and mouse evolution.

If I was going to pick a negative, a downside, I think from the marketing perspective, I think it's just, it's the buzzwords. I'm in the industry, so I don't know what to tell you about how to get around that, but it undermines the messaging. So a few years back, right before covid shut the world down, when I went to the RSA conference in 2020, I went there with a project in mind for my work as a freelance content marketer. And that project was, I walked the show floor, went to all the booths, well, maybe not all the booths, but I went to a lot of the booths to look at their messaging, and I made a bingo card, a list of the buzzwords. And so even back then, and this is pre chat, GPT, I mean the cybersecurity industry, we've talked about AI and ML for years and years and years.

So those were some of my buzzwords was companies claiming the thing was built on AI or built on ml, had different things like complete visibility or just different terminology that companies use. And I made this list of the buzzwords that I need to update, but I used it. I've been using it for years now. When I engage with a new client, I basically sit down and I say, listen, I want you to tell me what you do. Tell me what this product or service does for customers. But you can't use any of these buzzwords. And the reason I do that is just, it's an exercise in if you can't explain what your product does and what the benefits are for me without using these buzzwords, then you don't really understand it either,

And we can't clearly convey to others what it does. In that case, my caveat then is I say, well, listen, when we create the content, when you market this to the world, when you put it on your website, when you write a case study, when you write a blog post, whatever it is we're doing, we'll put the buzzwords back in. I'm not telling you you can't use them because it's kind of a requirement. If every company out there, if every one of your competitors is out there talking about how they've launched a generative AI element into their tool and you don't, then you kind of stand out for the wrong reason. So in a lot of cases, or in most cases, I do feel like you sort of need to weave the buzzwords back in. But I think it starts with, if you start from a foundation of being able to clearly articulate what you do without the buzzwords, then even when you put the buzzwords back in, the messaging is a lot clearer. You can still differentiate it from someone else who's just throwing up a word salad of buzzwords.

Den:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking we'd done our zero trust stuff at Adobe 2017. By 2018, we were on stage at VIR talking about it. And even then you say zero trust, but the reality is you're solving problems that the business has, the methodology or the architecture or whatever. It might not even neatly fit in the zero trust thing. Now, what was interesting back then was John Kinder bag, and some of those guys were talking about zero trust, and Google was talking about beyond carp, right? And then all of a sudden, by the time we get a few years later, roll on 2020, everybody's a zero trust vendor. And I don't know, man, it just blew my mind how everybody was like, well, we do zero trust. Why? Because we are doing least privileged. I'm like, that's not fucking zero Trust. What the hell.

Tony:

Right? And I think you and I talked about this. I think we talked about it when you were on my podcast when you were at a yobe, which is, I see zero trust as a, it's an evolution from the concept of least privilege. It's an adaptation of how we implement that. But to your point, I've seen the same thing with XDR. I saw the same thing. You're seeing the same thing with generative ai, where there are companies that do those things uniquely well, but they get lost because once every single company in the world claims that their solution is an XDR solution, it's like, well, if everyone is an XDR, then nobody is an XDR

Was another one. Gartner came out with the CE report in 2022. Immediately, every vendor out there says, well, we are a CE provider. We do continuous threat exposure management. It's like, okay, you have one aspect of it. I mean, it's a whole process and you're a part of it. Sure. But if everyone is out there saying it, and going back to my experiment at RSA, I tried to view things to the lens of I'm in the cybersecurity world. You are in the cybersecurity world. A lot of the people at RSA are in the cybersecurity world, so we understand these things. And I can go from booth to booth at RSA, listen to their pitch and with a pretty decent degree of accuracy who is really using Zero Trust or who is really using generative AI or is an XDR or whatever, as opposed to who is just putting that on their marketing materials. But the thing is, most of the world are not in the cybersecurity industry. And someone who just runs a business who goes to RSA and walks the floor, how are they supposed to know? How are they supposed to figure out which company is honestly doing that thing and which company just is using it as a marketing?

Den:

Well, I, so I love the approach of saying, Hey, let's describe what you do, how you do it without using buzzwords. We can add them later. What advice do you think founders or startups are not heeding that people tell them? If you're going to, maybe I'll twist it the other way. If you're going to give them one piece of advice that they should listen to when they're thinking about their marketing strategy, what would that one piece, one gem, one nugget, what would that be?

Tony:

Is it is going to come off as self-serving, but honestly, I would say do marketing. And here's where I'm coming from. I've been at different companies. I was at Tenable, I was at Alert Logic, I was at Cybereason, whatever. I've been at different companies and whenever companies are looking at, okay, well, we need to make some cuts, it seems like marketing is often the first thing to go. They're like, well, we want to stay focused on, and I mean, there's some logic to it to say, well, we want to stay focused on product development and make sure that we're creating some value for customers. We want to stay focused on sales and make sure that someone's out there bringing the revenue in from the customers.

And so a lot of times companies are quick to say, well, we will just get rid of the marketing or we'll cut way back on the marketing or whatever. And I feel like that is shortsighted. I feel like it doesn't, when the market started to falter and contract a few years back, and a lot of companies cut back on marketing, especially around the pandemic, my pitch to companies was basically, listen, this is temporary. I get that. It is our new normal for now, but eventually things are going to return to normal. And when that happens, you don't want to start from ground zero trying to reestablish your brand. You still need to be out there. You still want brand recognition. You still want to be part of conversation and not start from zero. And that said, and I'll just add onto to it, I think that AI really helps with that. I mean, your generative AI helps a lot with that. And I think you can do some, you can definitely streamline your marketing. You use the tools intelligently. I guess my word of caution would be don't make the mistake of thinking that you can just get rid of all of your marketing,

Den:

Marketing team

Tony:

And use chat. Because again, with a fair degree of accuracy, I can go on LinkedIn, I can go online and I can see who literally copy and pasted from chat GPT, because PT is very formulaic in how it writes content. It's formulaic in a fifth grade essay sort of way.

Den:

Yeah.

Tony:

Well,

Den:

That's probably good for the Scottish guy. That might be a step up still, Tony. Right? It's funny. And here's the thing though. I mean, before we hit record, we were talking about a case study from my Adobe days and how I could have ran that shit through chat GPT, and both me and then our advisory C. So we played around with what does chat GPT think of this document and none of the results, nothing made me feel comfortable. I'm like, this is where I want to have somebody like you jump in and take my 13 pages of Canon shit and turn it into eight pages of glorious writing because I want to retain the humor. I want to retain the emotion. I want to retain the storyline, the narrative that's underneath. And I don't think some of these tools are, I mean, you need to be a prompt, genius writer, I think, to get some of that shit Good that I'm not there yet.

One of the things, and I do want to talk about AI and how that's going to change the marketing, the life of marketing. But before we get there, couple of nuggets you were talking about, and what I'll paraphrase is the ability, if we all say we're XDR, then how do you differentiate yourself from the competition? So from a marketing perspective, I know you guys spend a lot of time on this, if we all say we do the same thing, I'm a consultancy, we do cybersecurity, we've got resourcing and recruiting services, we've got virtual C source subscription. We then have the strategy and execution. There's a million people that do all of that shit too though. So when you talk to people like me about differentiation, how do you help us stand out from the crowd? I mean, what do you think really matters to get that recognition?

Tony:

Well, I guess I would say I start from the other side of that coin. So I would sit down with you, Aaron and A have sat down with you and start from the perspective of, okay, well, you tell me what do you think you're doing differently? Everyone thinks they're doing something differently, otherwise, why would you bother creating the company? And I've talked with people who left a company that does identity security to go launch an identity security provider. And I've asked them, I'm like, well, why did you do that? You were already at a company that does that. And then they say, well, because I had this idea and I wanted to do things differently than they wanted to do. And I said, okay, well, let's start there.

So I would start with trying to basically extract from you or extract from my client what do they think they do differently? What is your pitch when you go into a client? What are you telling them to try to get them to? Why should they choose you over someone else? Once I've got that and I've got something to work with, then I kind of go from the other side to reframe it as, okay, well, what is the market at large interested in? What are people talking about? What are the topics that are getting traction? And then connect the dots, try to take, okay, this is what we're doing differently and this is what the audience wants to know about. Here's how these two things go together.

Den:

Yeah, no, that's excellent. Yeah. What's funny though is as you're saying that, my little brain's just sitting in the background being like, oh, yeah, this is how we differ. I internalize that straight away. I'm like, oh, well, we do this. We do that. We do. And I always believe a lot of people say they do the same shit. And when I was at Banyan, it's like, okay, where's your trust vendor? We want to go down the buzzword of the Sass e business. Yeah. But there's 10 vendors that say they do that. So why would someone and how would someone recognize us as worthy of their time? So I think that is the little nugget, and marketing's very emotional. So as you're thinking of building a campaign that plays on someone's emotions, what do you generally think of as the hook that gets people to pay attention? What's the opening line kind of advice that you've got there?

Tony:

Well, I mean, I think I go back to what I was just saying that I would then go, that's the point where I would be looking at what is being discussed in the world and how do we connect those dots? Because if you just create marketing content from your sort of self-centered perspective on the world and you care about it, but the question is why should I care? Or why should someone else care about it?

And a lot of companies fall into that trap of, especially on the product marketing side. Product marketing is like, whoa, no, we created all these features and benefits. We just want to talk about those. And it's like, okay, well, that's great. I can see that you're very excited and you're very proud of the features and benefits you created, but we have to find a way to connect those dots to what someone cares about. And I mean, to put it into a marketing cliche, it's sell the sizzle, not the bacon. So to answer your question, I would take it and look at, I would go out and look at, okay, well what is trending right now? What are people talking about? And connect those dots, because if I just write content and publish it, whether it's on Forbes, on security buzz, on tech spec, wherever, if I just create content and publish it because, and maybe it says great, smart things and it's very well written content, but it has to have a headline and it has to have an opening hook that is related to something the audience gives a shit about.

Den:

Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah. And that's the thing, everybody talks about zt, and for me, I've been like you, I'm a veteran in this ship, 30 plus years, identity is being my bread and butter for most of that duration. So I look at it like identity and zero trust. And at the end of the day, there's a million companies out there that will say the same stuff. It's bringing credibility to your brand I think is vitally important. And you mentioned something earlier about during covid, people pull back and stuff. I actually think that's the time to double down. I think at some point you've got to recognize that if people aren't going to conferences in person, if people aren't meeting up in person, then your salespeople aren't taking them out for dinners. How do you get your brand moving even faster? It's a digital marketing strategy.

Tony:

And some companies did. So I mean, I'll tell you that what happened immediately when we all got home from RSA in 2020 and the world shut down and they said, okay, everybody stay home. I had conversations that were ahead of RSA and at RSA with clients that I expected to close the deal with and move forward with a relationship that canceled, that pulled back and said, you know what? We're not going to do anything right now. And for a minute I was like, oh, shit, my cash flow is about to dry up. But what ended up happening is for every one vendor I lost, there were two that think like you just said. I had others who came to me and said, Hey, now that we're not doing in-person events, not only do we feel the need to double down and expand our visibility digitally, but also we've got all this budget that we had allocated. We were planning on going to Black Hat. Now all of a sudden I've got $200,000. I don't know what to do with. And I'm like, well, I'm happy to help.

Den:

Pull me in. I can do that shit. Now, we talked about AI a couple of times there. How do you see AI changing the life of a marketer?

Tony:

I see AI changing things the same way. I see AI changing things for security in general and for a lot of things, which is it augments and streamlines what you do. It can't replace what you do. Also, going back to what I said, you can't, generally speaking, you can't take a topic and just say, Hey, chat pt, write me a blog post on this, or create a case study and then copy and paste that directly and be like, cool, we're done. But I'm definitely not on the Luddite end of the spectrum who says, well, don't use ai. I'm not a purist in that respect. I think you absolutely should use ai. I think it would be a critical mistake to not use AI at this point, but you have to use it intelligently. So you can use a chat GPT or Gemini or whatever, whoever's out there, I see it as it helps get you beyond the blank page stage. You can throw some ideas at it and say, Hey, here's a topic I want to write about. Give me some ideas. So it helps you get started and it can even can whip up an outline for you to say, Hey, look, maybe the article should look like this. I think that that is helpful because prior to chat GPT, prior to generative ai, that is generally how I got past the blank page stage was to start with the outline. I was like, well, if I try to think of this in terms of I'm just starting from word one and I'm just going to start writing, that's hard to conceptualize for me.

But if I write an outline and I say, I'm going to talk about this, then this, then this, this. Well, now instead of looking at it, I've got a blank page that I have to fill with a thousand words. I'm like, well, I only need to fill in 200 words for this section.

I just need to come up with some thoughts on this one part of it. So I find that very helpful. But like I said, you can't use it in and of itself. And also people need to really understand, and I think the audience of this podcast and people in tech in general understand this, but average people don't understand that chat. GPT, yes, they're continuing to advance everything. There is a, I forget what they're calling the current one, but they come up with, so now they're on oh one, whatever. And so there are models that do more reasoning, and so it is getting beyond this, but in general, these are just large language models. They're just trained on a set of data, so they only know what has come before. And chat GPT is not this magical wordsmith of creation. It literally is just a predictive model of saying, Hey, based on everything I've scanned the whole internet, I've cataloged it all. And based on my analysis of the internet, it seems likely that in a sentence that starts with these five words, the next word would be this. So by definition, whatever chat boutique cranks out for you isn't going to be creative. It's not going to be, it is incapable of pushing the envelope or even really being thought provoking because it can only provoke thoughts that already existed.

Den:

Yeah, and I mean, it's going to be a continual evolution. I mean, the reality is chat GPT of February, 2025 is not going to be the same as February, 2026. I mean, this shit is rapidly moving forward. I would love to think though, like you said earlier, it brings efficiencies. It can help speed up some of the work that a marketing person will do. It will speed up a hacker's life and ideally a defender's life. So I see it being a great accelerant. Garbage in is still garbage out. So if there's poisoning or bad data going in, then you're going to get what you're going to get. I don't see eradicating whole industries. I mean, do you see anything like that? Do you ever see a day where a whole industry or a whole job function just disappears because AI's got so good?

Tony:

Well, I don't know that I see that yet, but I agree with you. Things are moving rapidly and there is a reasoning model of these LLMs now. So it can kind of start to think a little bit. We're not at a GI yet, but we'll get there. So eventually it is possible. I mean, I think most things that there will still be a human involved, but I'm humble enough to admit that what I do could eventually be replaced. We're just not there yet.

So I think honestly, if I was going to pick an industry, I think I would pick mine first. I think I would pick the creation of the written word as something that generative AI is pretty damn good at. I don't think, like I said, I don't think any company should be using it copy and paste as it stands right now, but it's pretty good. I mean, if you had nothing else, if you were a one person or four person startup and you don't have a marketing team and you just need to create some stuff, it's all right. I would just go in and make sure you refine it and tweak it a little. The other thing that it really helps with in terms of accelerating the workflow though, is let's say you put in the work and you write your own content. You're not just copy and pasting the content from a generative AI platform, but you can then still take that content and put it back into a chat GPT and say, give me a social media post for this. I want to promote this content across LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, whatever. And it will very quickly craft for you, Hey, here's some social media blurbs, here's some hashtags. So it can be helpful in those ways where it's like

Once you've created the content, because all of those things take time. I mean, we've been doing them for years, but it's like that really does add a lot. It was like, I've already taken all hours of my day to research and write this content, and now I've got to spend more hours trying to come up with pithy little ways to reword it, promote it on social media. And so it can help streamline that process.

Den:

And for me, I've been playing around and leveraging it for, so any of these chat, GPT, Gemini or whatever, just even ideas for questions on a podcast. So the reality is there's nothing wrong with me saying, Hey, I'm going to have a podcast. It's going to be this thing about this topic, and do you have 10 provoking questions? Stop provoking questions, and then I'll spit some shit out and then I'll look at that and I'll be like, okay, that's not a bad one, but then I'll not use that question, but maybe it'll give me an idea for a variant of the question. Or maybe actually I've used some of the questions that it spits out, or I want to write a document about blah, and here's the opening thing and it'll come back with some stuff. And I'm like, okay, let me noodle on that. So I think for me, I love the ability to leverage it for ideation. If I'm drawing a blank like you say, or give me, what sections should I be thinking about creating as part of a post about blah?

Tony:

Because I have found it in using it that way. I have found that even when I have an outline, I have an idea of I want to talk about, I'm going to talk about this topic and here's what I'm going to say, that ideating it through a generative AI a chat GPT. Sometimes it'll say, okay, but also this. And I go, oh, you know what? That is a good point. Let's add that one in there. And the thing that just occurred to me while you were talking about that is while for some people there's a stigma around this of you're cheating, you're being lazy, you're whatever. By relying on generative AI instead of doing the work, it just occurred to me, look at any executive, they've got executive assistants, they've got managers that work under them. They literally use humans to do this same shit. So there's nothing wrong with you as a human using the generative AI to do the same thing. Because if you're the CEO of a company, it's not like you magically came up with every idea that you've ever said someone else on your team is coming up and saying, Hey, look, here's a list of ideas. Now your job as CEO, it is to look at the list of ideas and say, okay, yes, I like these. Let's tweak that. Let's throw that one away. So yeah, just do the same thing. But with generative ai,

Den:

I mean that's exactly life of den right now. I mean, got a little startup going where we're building, we're building, we're building this part of the building process, the go to market, the brand recognition, all of that stuff. AI is a good tool in the toolkit. But for me, Tony Bradley's a great tool in the toolkit because I know the work you deliver, I know the quality, I know your turnaround time, time. I think what I get for the money is excellent. And I also have chat GPT in the toolkit. So it's like I will leverage, and then Joe that I worked with at marketing at Banyan, I, I've got a whole bunch of people that I surround myself with in order to build this business, build this brand, and create the empire. They're all tools in the toolkit, and you're pulling them out and leveraging them when you can, as you will as well when you're writing stuff right? There's a place in your armor array of tools where AI is going to be useful and you'll know when and where to pull that out.

Tony:

Well, the creation part, and there are far too, and I know I've said the word chatty PT 124 times now, and it gets a lot of attention, but that is one tool. There are thousands of generative AI tools out there right now, and a lot of them have very niche and specific use cases and purpose, and they do specific things. So if you go beyond the sort of broad spectrum generative ai, like a chat CPT, and you look at some of these other tools, you can also then from a marketing perspective, use them again to do things that we've been doing for years manually or using other tools. But you can use a generative AI to do things like identify market trends, identify just to help develop the strategy of, well, where should IB marketing? What is resonating, what is not resonating? You can use it in combination with other tools to provide a more customized, unique angle mean with the right tools. Instead of saying, okay, I'm going to create this, this marketing collateral, I'm going to send it out to a thousand people, 10,000 people, whatever. I can say, I'm going to create the general template of this marketing collateral, and I'm going to use generative AI to customize this. So the one that DEN gets is different than the one Tony Bradley gets based on their interests and how it matters to how you get more effective marketing is with precision.

Den:

Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking of the tools that I've enjoyed playing around with Midjourney for me as a graphics platform. I mean, I love it. I think it's just

Tony:

BB with it. I dabbled with it and I've used the chat PT, Doy Integration River so far I think it's okay. I'm not super impressed because I feel like it kind of does the same thing all the time. You can just look at an image and go, oh, that was creative with Chat gt, because it's got sort of a stylized way it does things. And also it's just really bad at text. It just makes gibberish up out of what should be normal words. So if you take an article on continuous threat exposure management and you say, Hey, make me an image that goes with this, and it'll try to put the words in there, but it'll be continuous management and it's just a gibby letters. I'm like, what are you doing? Either spell the words right or don't put the words in.

Den:

Yeah. So it's funny you say that. I was doing a holiday card post or something, so I'm doing Here's the unicorn and a holiday setting and use these words, and I put the words in quote, I was very explicit, and like you say, it came back with bullshit, nonsense, gibberish. And I'm just like, holy crap. Can I just get the image then with no words and I'll overlay the words myself later? So yeah, I think there's a ways to go for the whole AI thing, but it's exciting to watch how different and diverse little companies are emerging in what they'll do. I mean, I've got video gen. I think that's fun to play around with. There's another one, it escapes me at the moment, but we are, in fact, maybe I've got the shortcut here. Autotomy is great for music stuff. I've got a conveyer thing, but there's one where it'll clone me and my voice. I just need to train it a million times. I can make a video and then in the future type in the whole script and it'll redo it and stuff. I'm like, oh,

Tony:

I use a tool like that a year or so ago. So I'm sure it's improved dramatically, but, and so those things are very helpful because then if you put in the work, you do the training, it knows your voice and mannerism, and now I can just feed it a script

Den:

And

Tony:

Make a video with a voiceover from then, that's very useful. But going back to the image thing, I would say content writers, your job's a little bit threatened graphic artists. I think you're safe for a while.

Den:

You got a minute. Yeah.

Tony:

Because similar to you, and this goes back not this past holiday season, but 2023 holiday season, I had asked Chati to create something and it made this image. I was creating it for Hanukkah and it made this image and it had this candelabra that had 20 candles. And I was like, well, no, that's not right. And the thing is, it's so bad at taking direction, and I see people who've put together little tutorial videos where they're like, well, you just have to prompt it and then you can refine it. And it's like it sucks at refining. It sucks. Because like you said, when it puts the gibberish in and you say, okay, you know what? I love this image. This image is amazing. Give me the exact same image, but just take the words out. It can't do it.

Den:

Can't do it. Doesn't

Tony:

Regenerate the whole image. And it will still put some words back in. It'll put different words.

Den:

And

Tony:

I'm like, why are you not doing what I asked you to do?

Den:

And I tried to do this with my logo for the 909Cyber, all I wanted to say, take this logo and make it futuristic and 3D and everything to this day, everything that comes back is bullshit, unusable nonsense. So yeah, I think the whole AI thing, from a marketing perspective, it's going to be exciting to see how that evolves. I don't see it anytime soon eradicating the industry. I do see some jobs reducing, but not necessarily eliminating in the short term. I can imagine instead of a company hiring a full-time tech writer or content writer, they might reach out to you and say, Hey, we just need a fractional kind of thing situation, because we can generate a lot of content and maybe we just want you to clean it up. Or maybe we just want you for the big stuff. I mean, I think of it like the strategic stuff, the stuff that's really important for me to get right for the business. Then I'm not using AI for that stuff. I'm knocking on your door being like, Hey, Tony, this is important to me that this is a good polished result. Now, in the background, you use all the tools in New Armor all you want, but the reality is is me as the client, I'm like, I just need a good quality result at the end of it that I can trust.

Tony:

Right. Well, and going back to what I said earlier, as it stands right now, the generative AI tools out there are only really good at regurgitating what already exists. So if I'm trying to help you create content that shows how you differentiate in the market and shows what your unique value is in the industry, I can't do that by just regurgitating what already exists in the world.

Den:

Yeah. Yeah. So a fun, it's going to be a fun journey, I would think. Midjourney though, it'll be a fun midjourney or maybe a fool journey. Tony, it's always great having you, man. I appreciate, I appreciate a few things. One is you've been in the industry, you're a practitioner, but you know how to communicate to practitioners, which I think is invaluable. And then we've worked together between the Adobe Banyan and you're part of my nine to nine cyber journey. So I really appreciate that and hopefully, and now tech, and let me make sure. So from a tech perspective and then also the security buzz, where are these kind of platforms or channels moving in the future? Just before we wrap up? I felt

Tony:

Text effective has been, it was something I created when I stopped writing for PC World, just because I still wanted to have a similar outlet. I wanted, wanted to have an outlet where I could publish it, will technology and cybersecurity stories and do product reviews and such. I still do write for Tech Spec, but I also have a lot of contributing writers with Security Buzz. I'm the managing editor, but we've got writers who are creating the content. I'm just kind of helping define, okay, well, what do we want to write about and getting it polished and stuff. I mean, security Buzz is looking at doing webinars and doing other things. I'm not really trying to do that as much with text. I mean, text I think is fine as it is. And it is part of what I do as a freelance content marketer because I can write, if I write something for you, we can put it on the 9 0 9 cyber blog. We can create it as market collateral. We can pitch it out to some third party outlet, but I always know that I have text effective in my back pocket that we can just publish on. And then I've got my podcast, which trivias act for anyone out there. But my theme music on the Text Spec podcast was created by Den.

Den:

Yeah, actually, thank you. Yeah, it's really funny because we've got a bunch of music that we've created for available for people to leverage. We're actually going to update the website and put in links to available music. So yeah, maybe Tony, we give you an updated version or an updated bit of music in the future. Yeah. And then I'm going to be a guest on your podcast as well. It is been a while since I've guessed, and I guess we'll need to come up with, or maybe our audience can DM us and ask for some topics that we can talk about. What do you want us to hear about? So yeah, so Tony, I appreciate it, man. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your help and the journey, everybody. Thank you very much. Thank you, Tony. And I do have a shout out to our audience. Share this. If you find this useful, share the podcast. Share, share, Tony, share me. But if you've got feedback for us, we'd love to hear your feedback and guaranteed, we'll listen, we want to build this pod, make it bigger and make it more valuable to everybody. So please like, subscribe, share, click links, do this or that. And thank you very much, everybody. Have a great week.

Narator:

Thanks for listening to Cyber 909. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and don't miss an episode of your Source for Wit and Wisdom in cybersecurity.

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