George Kamide: I really studied this in college. It’s weird, I was an anthropology major, and I think sometimes I was an anthropologist of my professors. I had professors who were brilliant in their field, and they could not 101 class. Like it was very hard for them to get out of like graduate level theory and their chain of thought process was kind of all over the place.

 And then I noticed the professors who were very good at it. They had a passion and a clear way of communicating. And I really watched how those people did that. And I think that has informed a lot of my approach 

[Musical Intro]

Joel: My name is Joel and I’m a recovering nerd. I’ve spent the last 25 years bouncing between creative jobs and technical teams. I worked at places like Nickelodeon to NASA and a few other places that started with different letters.

I was one of the first couple hundred people podcasting back in the early aughts until I accidentally became an IT analyst. Thankfully, someone in the government said, “Hey, you’re a nerd that talks good.” And that spun me off into the world of startups, branding, and marketing, for the same sort of researchers and startup founders that I used to hang out with. 

Today, I help technical people learn how to get noticed, get remembered, and get results.

On Nerds That Talk Good, I want to help you do the same. I talk with some of the greatest technical communicators, facilitators, and thinkers that I know who are behind the big brands and the tech talk that just works. 

Joel Benge: In this very first episode, I’m speaking with George Kamide, a renowned cybersecurity communicator, podcast host, community builder, and non profit director. In this episode, George shares insights from his diverse career, discussing his journey from early computing to becoming a thought leader in the cybersecurity and wellness space.

And now, here’s my conversation with George.

I am thrilled to have George Kamide on Nerds That Talk Good as the inaugural guest. George is a multidisciplinary thinker with a knack for breaking down silos, tackling those big problems.

He’s got a really impressive track record in orchestrating go to market product strategies, stimulating thought leadership, and just really addressing industry wide issues like representation, responsible AI. He is one half of the award winning and very popular cybersecurity podcast, Bare Knuckles and Brass Tacks, which he co hosts with another George, just to keep it interesting.

On that podcast, he and George get to the bottom of humanizing cybersecurity from both a practitioner and a communicator’s perspective. It’s a show that I’m proud to have been on before. I’m really excited to have George on as my first guest here on Nerds That Talk Good. He’s the Executive Director and Co Founder of Mind Over Cyber, a non profit dedicated to creating community and networking events for cybersecurity vendors to join forces, invest in the mental health of their customers.

He’s got a really well known, balanced approach to the industry and his frequent reminders on LinkedIn to slow down, like his recent post on Surviving vs. Sur-Thriving, which I’m sure we’ll get a chance to dig into. George, thanks so much for joining me. Very happy to have you here, guest number one, Nerds That Talk Good. 

George Kamide: Yeah, absolutely thrilled to be here and look forward to talking good on the record.

Joel Benge: Talking good on the record, well, you know, as I always say you know, we don’t have to talk well, we just gotta talk good. So I wanna just start just with, give us your background, your villain or hero origin story getting into technical communications. You’ve got kind of a varied background that I started alluding to, but tell us how you got into communicating, but communicating technically.

George Kamide: Yeah, I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about it in great depth, but let me give some pieces of the background and I’ll give you a hypothesis for how I think it came together. So, I have been working with computers since I was seven. My parents moved back to the States from Brazil. We didn’t have a lot of money, so I look back on that now, you know, a DOS 386 computer, and I’m sure it was a fortune.

You know, I’m sure if they went to Micro Center, it was like $3,000. It was a lot of money for us back then. But they saw the writing on the wall, and really invested in me just having time with a computer. I figured a lot out by myself, but they paid for coding classes and stuff. So I share that story to say that sort of at the beginning, I think my technical communication, quote unquote, was really me basically teaching my parents how to use computers, right?

Because they were working as civil servants in the government and that was transitioning to things like email and word processing from I mean, I remember going to my mom’s office and they were still using typewriters, right? And so just the basics and you have to imagine like an eight year old kid trying to teach their parents how to like move the mouse.

“It connects to this” “double-click here” “you save it in this folder”, like, You know, it was a lot.

Joel Benge: You became the de facto IT for your for your parents’ office. 

George Kamide: Yeah, and not always successful, I would say, but I, I think I learned a lot there. And so that became true for a lot of my friend’s families. It was just like, “Oh, ask George. He’s good with computers.”

And I think most people who are listening to this podcast will have been in that position at some point in their life. Fast forward to high school. Aside from soccer and track, I also did a lot of theater, so I learned to be comfortable speaking in front of people. Like, that didn’t, that doesn’t really frighten me. And then and then fast forward a few years after that, and I got a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, so that’s just another form of communication.

So, I think these all came together. As I entered marketing, and specifically B2B marketing, and specifically very new areas at the time, you’re talking 2013. Social media was still very new for B2B enterprise, especially like financial services, which was a lot of my client load. And so I had to communicate in two directions.

I had to communicate upward to them about like how to engage on social and not just use it or think of it as a billboard, and then had to articulate like why the strategies we were. outlaying were different intentionally and what they could expect. And then also had to communicate like weird things about ETFs, electronic traded funds, which was new financial instrument at the time, to audiences through their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, right?

So it just flowed both ways. And I think having to go through all of those modes of communication and having to learn. new things while you’re doing it just really is a useful process for communicating technically because I think some of the worst technical communicators are the people who know it backwards and forwards actually because they’re so steeped in that jargon that they’re used to communicating with peers and if you don’t have to change gears and communicate to people who don’t know it while you might be learning at the same time I think that was a trial by fire, but it was very useful for developing that skill.

Joel Benge: So you think being on the, the leading edge of these several waves; early computing, early social media, early subject matters really helped you abandon that, know it all perspective. You’re like, “Hey, we’re all figuring this out together.” Would you say that that’s something that really holds a lot of practitioners back is they’re like, I know this and I can skip over all the hard stuff and, and just talk to you like we’re peers. 

George Kamide: Yes, and I noticed this, and I really studied this in college. It’s weird, I was an anthropology major, and I think sometimes I was an anthropologist of my professors. I had professors who were brilliant in their field, and they could not 101 class. Like it was very hard for them to get out of like graduate level theory and their chain of thought process was kind of all over the place.

There were lots of pauses. They would reference things that nobody had read yet. And then I noticed the professors who were very good at it. Again, people very well distinguished in their field, but they had a passion and a clear way of communicating. And I really watched how those people did that. And I think that has informed a lot of my approach, whether it’s, I mean, we might get into some of the techniques, but things like analogies and then like breaking things down piece by piece.

But I, I really made a study of like how people taught really complex theories and topics. To people who might otherwise not know them. And also like a college professor’s job is hard two ways. One, they have to do that. And two, they have to ideally make you passionate about it too. I mean, there’s a way you can understand it and still glaze over, but I mean, I think they do it because they love it and they want you to love it too. And I thought that was really powerful.

Joel Benge: Passion It can kind of be a double edged sword, right? We see this a lot in especially cybersecurity. The people who are very passionate, about the subject matter. We see that we’re sharing passion. And so we speak about the subject matter. Do you think, do you think it’s more the passion of, “I want to impart the love of the subject matter.” as opposed to, “I want to geek out on the subject matter itself”, do you think that’s the …

George Kamide: yeah. 

Joel Benge: … difference? 

George Kamide: I think there. Yes, it’s being able to throttle that passion through different context windows, if I’m gonna like mix a whole bunch of descriptors. But, I know friends who are hackers, and they could get super into the weeds on like, you know, the library files and the repos that they rely on and they could get into the Python and they could have that argument.

And sometimes they’re just comfortable there. But some of them do a lot of speaking. And if you’re going to go on a stage and talk about how you did something to people who are not an expert in that field, you definitely have to convey like, why you think this particular field is important. Especially in cyber, because you’re trying to attract attention to the idea that this particular threat or this particular vulnerability or this particular exploit is really worth paying attention to. Or you’re trying to talk about it in a theoretical way to extrapolate the threat elsewhere, but if you’re not If you can’t throttle that passion, if you can just sort of stay in the bits and bytes, maybe you acknowledge that about yourself and then you just stay in those circles, whether that’s hacker forums or you just go straight to the Def Con villages and you only do like the labs and the technical workshops and stuff like that.

But I think once you decide you want to talk about it with a broader audience, you really need to be able to impart that because again, you could be a clear communicator and people could be asleep in the audience.

Joel Benge: So that’s a good segue into those strategies and techniques. Which is once you’ve identified, you’ve done the soul searching, and you know, part of the things that I do with my clients is figure out what you’re about first. Figure your shit out first before you figure out how you want to talk and what you want to say, right?

So it’s there and you do a lot of talking about self reflecting and slowing down, taking yourself outside of the technology. What are some strategies and techniques that you you’d suggest to that person who maybe they’ve they’ve reached a certain level in their career as a practitioner, but they realize maybe they’ve got a little bit of a theater background, which we both share, you know, they’re like, “Hey, I kind of do enjoy being in front of people, but when I get in front of people, I can identify that throttling issue.”

What are maybe some strategies or techniques that you found, maybe even observing the, the people around you who do it well.

What helps? 

George Kamide: That’s, that’s an interesting question. Let me back up one step and I will say, when you say figure your shit out, I think that also means figure out what works for you and what you’re good at instead of like try to do what other people do. So, for example, the first time I ever did a talk at a cybersecurity conference I was pretty nervous because I’m not a technical operator had a little bit of the imposter syndrome.

I went and I watched a whole bunch of talks, and about video number five on YouTube, I was like, these are awful. I was like, they, these are really boring. There’s like paragraphs of text on a slide. There’s a lot of ums and uhs. There’s like no clear communication. And it was in that moment of brief imposter syndrome that I was like, “oh, I don’t have to do it that way.

I’m more comfortable on a stage. Storytelling.” I mean, again, from theater to writing fiction to even if you get in front to pitch Sony or these big banks that I was working with, you have to tell a story. You have to capture that imagination. And also, it’s an aesthetic experience. Like, if it’s boring, it’s boring.

And so you have to make that interesting. So, to figure your shit out, I realized, okay, I I can do this because I can structure this talk as a rough narrative arc, and I know where the points that I’m going to hit, and that got me away from trying to memorize bullet points or speaker notes. You can hold a lot in your head as a story, and as long as you practice that, you know where you’re headed and where you’re going.

And, and then, it was so much easier to engage with the audience and the material. It was also more fun to engage with the material because you could develop these places like, Oh, as I switch from this point to this point, I will tell a small anecdote. And that is going to help the audience hang these concepts on that story rather than like, let me just kind of go logically through all these concepts. That’s very hard for people to hold, especially for more than 10 minutes at a time. You’re just like throwing abstract ideas at them. So my tip is, as a speaker, you need to do a lot of practice and you need to practice at a pace slower than what you are comfortable at. Because when we get nervous, you get energized, you start breathing more, you start talking faster.

And as I learned in theater, when you do that, like kind of your voice gets higher and your, because your vocal cords are getting constricted, and it doesn’t leave you a lot of range. to either communicate dynamically, like place the emphasis, like you can’t, you don’t have any tonal range once you get like up in your throat. Like it’s really tight, and then it makes you more nervous and it sets this like doom spiral of nerves.

So you have to know the material and you have to practice slowing down and speaking at a pace that might feel more relaxed and a little bit lethargic compared to your day to day conversation. But I promise you when somebody is on stage and they are looking at your slides, ideally, which do not have a lot of words on them, and then they’re looking back to you, it’s very hard for them to visually take in that data and then take in the data from the auditory and like hold that all together.

So if your listeners are paying attention, I’m sure they’ve noticed that I have slowed down similarly, and I, can now hold these thoughts in my head without having to do lots of ums and uhs because I’m basically speaking at a pace that is matching the pace of my own thoughts. So that’s the first thing is find out what you’re good at, a structure that works for you, rehearse the hell out of it until you feel very comfortable.

If you need to make notes that’s fine but do not write sentences because you will get wrapped around the axle trying to make yourself remember those sentences. Just remember the main points and remember how you carry… I think Tell people it’s the transitions between the slides that are more important than the slides themselves.

Because that’s the smoothness as you go from like slide three to four, you’re carrying somebody through a narrative and you have to understand what those transitions are and then practice it and practice slowing down more than you might be comfortable with and you’d be surprised what the result, the end result is.

Joel Benge: That’s helpful because you have less stuff to pack in. You’re not mentally overloading the people who are, who are doing the receiving. I love that as, you know, two, two theater guys, and this is, this is something that I’ve come to, I always write longhand. 

George Kamide: Mm 

Joel Benge: I always start with the, I have the end in, in mind and these are the lines that I’m going to write.

And then about halfway through working on a presentation, I scrap all of it and then it just becomes vibes.

And it’s like, this is a story point, this is a vibe, I want to make sure that I, I leave them feeling this. And then the lines, if there’s a really good zinger in there I’ll know it because I’ll riff it several times, which is one of the things I work with my clients a lot, which is pay very close attention to things that you say in conversation frequently, or things that you hear in conversation frequently, because those are hard-coded, hard-baked into the mind of the sender and receiver, and you can almost make a connection on that. For security, we joke, hey, it’s always DNS. 

George Kamide: Yes. 

Joel Benge: If I say that, people will know, oh, gotcha, we’re on this, you know, we’re coming from a place. But it becomes more of a mantra, it becomes more of a it’s less of a line that I’m delivering and more of a cultural or character touch point. So I’d love to know how that first talk went.

George Kamide: I thought it, I thought it went really well. I felt very comfortable. I didn’t have a lot of words on the slide. I think I heard a while back that Google had a rule internally that slides could not have more than seven words on them. I don’t know if that’s apocrypha or if it’s real, but I try to stick with that.

And especially, when you come up in advertising, you know, The shop that I worked for, it felt like Mad Men sometimes. Yes, some of the sexism, to be sure. But also, like, those sort of romantic pitches that Don Draper would do, and you’re like, “it’s advertising, man.” But people feel that. And when you’re standing up in front of Sony, and you’re pitching them a big idea, you can’t have a lot of words.

You are really trying to hold their attention. And so like, we only use gigantic images for the most part, other than when you get to the end, and there’s some like tactical readouts and stuff. But when you’re trying to guide people. It was, it was a lot of images and I, I felt really good about it. I would also say in terms of technique, make sure the structure of your communication is something that you too can hold on to.

So I know we’re talking about public speaking, but other strategies and techniques are, even if it’s like a website or a one pager, if you’re trying to cram everything in there, like 10 things, It’s really hard for you to do that, so imagine how hard it is for your listener or your reader. So, I tend to work in groups of three.

I think, I don’t know if that’s like my own peccadillo or, or if that’s a hard and fast rule, but it’s something that, it’s very easy for me to remember three parts of a talk and lead from Act 1 to Act 2 to Act 3. And even inside of those, if I’m presenting a lot of concepts, it’s tempting to do all of them, but I will try to pick the three most, because I think that’s kind of the mental limit around which people can really hold a lot of information as you’re talking.

Joel Benge: I think we’re hardwired for three. I think I’ve read that in, you know, many cultures, many religions. You know, three is the magic number. I mean, it was Schoolhouse Rocks, right? And, and even, it’s a good, It’s a good segue kind of into the tactical structure of making an argument, making a talk, right?

You even said the three act talk, the three act play. Within there, you know, you can have your sub thoughts, but keep it to no more than three. We’re, you know, in cybersecurity, we are hellishly notorious for commas and complex sentences with six or seven… 

George Kamide: Sub clauses.

Joel Benge: sub clauses. And, you know, just thought a couple of weeks ago about this concept of the cluster-thought it’s like, if you, if you find yourself, and we learned this in writing, you find yourself wrapping three lines on a page, you know, five different sub thought bubbles you know, and usually that’s when we’re editing by committee, right? I have to fit in everything. It’s a cluster-thought, man. It is like too much. Break it up. Give it some air to breathe.

George Kamide: One, sentence, one idea is

generally. 

Joel Benge: One sentence, 

George Kamide: In, in, in terms of like technical writing, when you’re reading fiction and you have these multiple, you know, that there’s a reason a writer does that is to like create a mood or like a simulacrum of thought or consciousness. Cool. But when you’re trying to impart technical ideas, Trying to stack them on top of one another in a single sentence.

Again, by the time they get to the end of the sentence, if they can’t remember and hold on to the concept that you’re trying to get them at the beginning, then it’s going to do you no good. You’ve processed a lot of words, but you may not have effectively communicated. Those are not the same thing.

Joel Benge: Right, and what’s the most important thing you want them to walk away with? Give that to them first and last, often, in your argument structure. So, we have similar backgrounds, similar origin stories from the dabbler nerd with the early computers, and I remember Windows for the first time. Ah, there’s 

George Kamide: Yeah. I was like, Oh, I don’t need to use command line.

Joel Benge: It’s, I was at, I was at BSides Charm For those who aren’t in the cybersecurity industry. BSides is a, is a a cluster of conferences, cybersecurity conferences. And there was actually a vintage arcade night and the guy had old school, he had Famicons, which were the Japanese Nintendos, and a really early Tandy.

And he, he said, you know how to, how to start one of these up? I’m like, look at me. I mean, you know, LOAD “*”,8,1. I’m like, what? Let’s get into it. You know, so, so as I remember those days, and then I similarly fell into theater and you know, liberal arts background and then somehow wound my way into being a tech practitioner.

You kind of went from Never being a practitioner per se or doing the hardcore wrench turning. So always on the, the side of advocating for and helping someone who, who was, and I’m, I’m no longer you wouldn’t want me doing anything. I just help the people who do talk about what they do now. So tell me, talk to me about some of the, the challenges and not naming names, but maybe challenging clients or projects where and how you’ve helped circumnavigate. And, and bring maybe that technical practitioner. Maybe you’ve got a founder who is, maybe they’re not the most eloquent speaker, how do you equip them quickly and easily to better advocate for themselves. Or do you think that’s a point where you need to bring in that Don Draper founder, or, you know, lean more on the, on the marketing and communication side. But, you know, one of my big things is advocating. You can do this as a nerd, as a practitioner, you could just have to talk a little gooder.

So talk to me about some experiences you might’ve had.

George Kamide: Yeah, I would say both in the marketing agency world and in startup land, as I affectionately call it, the people with the best ideas are not always the best at communicating them. And. I don’t know if that’s because they’re like too close to it, especially technical founders. They saw some gap in the industry or the tech stack and they had the lightbulb moment and they probably helped build the MVP or they recruited the engineers and they could draw the architecture.

And so then when they go out to speak to people who were not in that room at the time, it’s very difficult. The same is true of marketing professionals. They, they also live in a world filled with jargon, ROAS, and stuff like that. And they can very quickly start to lean on that. And then if the people who sign the checks don’t speak that language, it’s very hard to get them to understand the value of those terms. So, I have always coached people on the mom test. Like, could your mom understand what you’re saying? And the most frequent tool to do that is to start with a story. And because a story is easy to remember, because it’s probably a lived experience.

And, you know, we have, I’ve spoken with technical founders who were security engineers at other companies, and I was like, you need to talk to, in this case, CISOs or other practitioners. Sorry, Chief Information Security Officers, your buyers. About the moment that you realize that the thing you wanted didn’t exist. And then like when you, yeah, and when you catch them and you see them nodding and you get that moment of recognition. If you can, if you know the audience and it’s not a VC, but it’s a technical person, then you, you know. can kind of go down that path. But you must hook them first at a level that’s not so cerebral.

You need to be like, like, “this was a very frustrating problem for us. We demoed a whole bunch of tools and none of them would do what we needed because of this,” you know, insert problem here. And, you know, you take it from there. So I, I would always, it’s so tempting to connect on a technical level when you’re talking to a technical audience, but the, you know, Storytelling is what will get you both through a technical audience and a non technical audience.

That’s the same story that you can begin with, whether it is a VC pitch, or whether it is a technical buy. You open the story, and then you, the step two, act two, is probably modulated accordingly with your audience. Like, you can go down the technical path, or go down kind of like a business outcome path.

But, I would tell everyone, ” One, you’ve got this, but two, you’ve got to go back to the story of why this was important to you.” Not like, “I had an idea and wanted to make a lot of money,” like literally nobody cares. But like, you have to connect on that emotional level and make them feel kind of the pain that you were in or whatever, or the excitement that you feel if it’s the advertising pitch, and then like take them through that.

But it’s really that opening that matters, because that opening is like whether they start to look at their phones or multitask. Or whether you’ve got them, you know, hooked and then you can take them down the rest of the way. 

Joel Benge: So, the first principle founding, maybe it’s not the founding story, but the, that root should always be the beginning of everything.

George Kamide: I believe so, yes. I mean, humans are storytelling creatures. We’re also, from an evolutionary perspective, meaning making machines. And if we can’t attach meaning to something, it’s very hard for us to, one, care as an audience, and two, process it, I think, in the way that a communicator wants it to be processed.

Joel Benge: I’m curious if you’ve read, a book that I have been working my way through ;The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. I’m wondering if you’re familiar with that because that’s that was recommended to me by somebody when I started working on my book. And yeah, absolutely, I believe that’s how we connect first before we connect cerebrally

George Kamide: yeah, sorry to go back to that first story of when I was reviewing InfoSec talks and was like super bored by them. I was like, this is the wrong approach. I looked up a friend’s TEDx talk, and it was about the dangers that burnout poses to cybersecurity at large, both defenders burning out, but also like workforce burnout leads to people making the dumb mistakes that lead to compromise. She opens it because it’s a TEDx talk with a story of her own experience. And I was like, that’s it. That’s how she got the crowd. It’s like, I broke down that talk and instead of looking at more InfoSec talks, I looked at more TEDx talks and TED Talks. Like, you have to start with, they always open with a narrative.

Like, that’s a pretty formulaic structure, but it’s also highly effective at communicating really big ideas. So, just wanted to put that in there.

Joel Benge: I love that. And I love if you can pull up a link to that, I’ll include it in the, in the 

George Kamide: Oh, absolutely.

Joel Benge: What I was going to ask is, is what are some other resources, sources of inspiration—you and I have talked Aristotle. But you don’t have to have like an MFA or, you know, a background in communications But if you’re only resting on your, your technical chops, what would be a place to start watching TEDx the storytelling animal, Jonathan Gottschall, I’ll include a link to that too which most people would be like, this has got nothing to do with what I talk about/. 

George Kamide: I mean, I’m obsessed with evolution and human psychology. So, I have read a lot about basically just how people learn. And so I think as we’re talking to a cybersecurity audience, if you want to hack the audience, you have to know how the audience operates, right? Like if you, if you want to hack a system, you have to understand like how it loads certain libraries, how it does whatever it does.

So that’s the same principle is I want to understand how an audience processes information, how people hold onto ideas. Sure. But practically speaking, yes. What are things that you love in terms of communication, whether it is a movie— even if it’s a YouTuber, like how they like make you excited about an unboxing video.

I think we all see good communication on a daily basis, but we’re only operating at the surface level, which is the enjoyment and the dopamine. But I think if you make a practice of trying to study those things and literally write down like they do this and then they do this, you can kind of break down these structures and begin to see how effective communicators do these things.

And so I think it’s there. I think a lot of the media is available. It’s readily available, but it’s about kind of changing the gear in your mind to less, like, let me take it in to like, let me examine it, take it apart, pull it apart and analyze it.

Joel Benge: Why do I like this? Not, what is it doing for me? Why do I like this? Why does it work? I mean, Mr. Beast isn’t the the world’s first YouTube billionaire because he got lucky. He works and works and dissects almost to the point of becoming formulaic, which, from a technical communication standpoint you know, we’re seeing a lot of the emergence of Follow My Framework, Follow My Formula, you know, Mad Lib type stuff.

And AI LLMs are, you know, large language 

George Kamide: Insert spec 1 here.

Joel Benge: Yeah, you know, and, and to, to a certain extent, you have to start with some of those. You have to understand you know, you can’t totally freeform. I don’t know better than, than Google what makes a compelling website.

But I also don’t want to rip off and, and look and sound and smell like everybody else. Where do you see the future of technical communications as more people are opting for, you know, Generative AI stuff. I’m, I’m using chat GPT, but I would never let it write for me. You know, I let it research for me, build arguments for me, but, you know, they come out sounding like everybody else, then I don’t want that.

So how, how do you not fall into that where you say,” Oh, I see Mr. Beast and what his formula is. I’m going to do that,” which you kind of alluded to earlier.

George Kamide: Yeah, I think, well, yes, and I say make a study of it, but I’m very careful to say don’t imitate it. Let me take this in two parts. In the Mr. Beast example, sure, you could break down, there’s like lots of fast cuts, there’s like the way they move the camera and, you know his, he and his team analyze their videos ad nauseum and and how they do that is legion by now.

Joel Benge: And you’re not, you’re …

George Kamide: …yeah, yeah, yeah,…

Joel Benge: …as a, as someone who’s just getting …

George Kamide: …right, but there…

Joel Benge: …he’s got a whole team… 

George Kamide: exactly, but there is an inherent quality to his earnestness that made him who he is, and that is true of all YouTubers. If there’s not that special thing that makes them them, then you would just tune into whatever, right?

There’s a reason. So, the same is true, now let’s turn to the other. For you, the individual communicator, like you can stand on frameworks and you can use formulas. Eventually, I would argue, your brain is going to get bored with them, which is fine. It’s like running soccer drills. Like, you can’t do the cool stuff until you can just hold the ball at your feet comfortably for lengths of time before you can start, like, trying to do fancy footwork to get past somebody in a duel.

So you have to Master, what I had a Olympic weightlifting coach call the Brilliance in the Basics. He said people would come in and they would try to, they would just go for these impressive lifts. They would try to go for personal bests, whatever, but they might not be able to do like 50 push ups. And if you can’t do some of those basic movements very well, very clean, then when you start trying to do the hard things, especially in weightlifting, you’re going to get hurt, you know? And so, fine, use the frameworks, use the other stuff, or analyze a TED Talk, break down the structure, try to like map your stuff into that structure, fine.

But As you get more familiar with that, you need to challenge yourself because the stuff that makes you, you is going to start to come through and you should not be afraid of that, right? You should embrace that and yeah. And I would say the same thing is true of brands. I mean, like, what the hell are we doing here if your mission is to just sound like everyone else?

And there’s like an epidemic of copycat-ism in cyber in particular. I think everyone’s looking over their shoulder. And I just think that that’s not a way to do business because if your goal is to just like slip into the stream and affect the same thing as everyone else, then it’s really just this like miasma of white noise that no one can tell the difference in your product.

The companies that stand out Today, at the time of recording, think like the Wiz and the CrowdStrikes of the world. Yes, they have gigantic branding budgets, but they didn’t always. They did have a unique approach at some point, and they did some things tactically that really made them stood out. And as they gained market share and capital and, and revenue, then they could double down on those same principles to stand out and be unique.

Joel Benge: So looking at companies like that, they may sound, you know, Oh, they’re the big behemoth. They’re kind of passe now. Maybe it’s just, we’ve gotten used to them and we’ve gotten used to people trying to rip them off. And, you know, I’ve had clients say, I want a website just like CrowdStrike. And I’m like, 

George Kamide: You’re not CrowdStrike.

Joel Benge: Do, do you have, do you have CrowdStrike money?

I’m like, we can do that if you’ve got CrowdStrike money. But let’s find out what is it about CrowdStrike that relates to you? “Oh, they’re the best. They’re, they’re, they’re so successful.” I’m like, well, that, that’s not something you can bank on. Like, let’s find the thing that is you that you can start with and, and build upon.

I’d love to know where you find inspiration among the white noise, either industry wise, or just in your personal life, who are the communicators, the authors, the people out there who you think are doing it right, that you draw inspiration from?

George Kamide: Oh yeah. I’m going to give you like a mix of media. So, two authors that really have captured me at the moment are, well actually a few, but here I’ll break it down. Maggie Jackson, she’s a writer. was a journalist for a while, but she tends to write books that really dig into topics. Like, she was one of the first to write about attention, like as a thing that people study.

She has a new one called Uncertain, which is about the new research and cognitive science around the value of uncertainty versus our cultural aversion to uncertainty. I think that’s very powerful. I mean, these are like, Really cutting edge psychological studies and concepts and being able to break that down for a lay audience is very powerful.

Annie Murphy Paul does the same thing. And then Brad Stuhlberg, and then what, who’s the author of Range? Anyway, there are these, these people who can like ingest a whole bunch of new behavioral science, psychological research, whatever, and they, they kind of have a thesis about its impact on the world.

And then being able to one, communicate, like, here is the new research, because you can read those books, and they do the same thing, they have to introduce you to the new concepts as a thesis, they have to show you the supporting, and then they have to kind of carry you to how this impacts your life.

That’s hard to do, hard to do well, I would say. And all three of those authors have very clear prose and they’re entertaining too. Like again, they usually open a chapter with a story because that’s how you’re going to be able to hang the concepts. And they can always refer back to, I also, I like, I like those callbacks because it gives you an opportunity to check in the understanding with somebody.

Hey, remember, especially in transition. So we have this. And now we’re going to look at that, you know, and you can lead people. I always think of it. You’re trying to like hold their hand through these ideas. So those are authors. I would say as like podcast material I think Ezra Klein is like. I mean, what an incredible job.

Just like, engage with ideas of the day, everything from AI ethics to certain political topics, but being able to ask those questions in a way that leads somebody who is definitely not an expert in, you know, whatever type of policy to being able to have kind of a cogent opinion at the end of an hour is a very impressive feat.

Joel Benge: And also to be able to take a different subject matter every episode, every time you encounter them, but still be able to draw an overall ethic or an overall approach. It’s not just someone who drops in and delivers information to you. It delivers them with a perspective. How important do you think perspective is, even in technical communications?

George Kamide: When you say perspective, are you talking about kind of like the personality or the point of view?

Joel Benge: More along the, the why approach. So, you know, we, we see a lot of technical communicators and B2B SaaS and they’re like, you know, “we are a cloud based identity access management solution.” Okay. Why? Who gives a rip? “Well, you’ve got identities in the cloud. You need to manage their access.” And it’s like, that’s not a why.

Like, if, if you need a perspective. It’s like, oh, well, we are, and 

George Kamide: Yes. 100%.

Joel Benge: clients. I’m like, why are you doing this? Why are you, who are you advocating for? “Oh, well, we build this platform for small business, small mom and pop businesses who don’t have access to Microsoft platforms or something like Okta or like that.”

And it’s like, oh, okay. So you’re democratizing or making cloud access accessible. Well, that’s a 

George Kamide: Yes. No. 1000%. You have, you have to have a point of view because if you don’t, I mean, you’re just a billboard. You’re just sort of like squawking lines up there and it’s true of everything and I think that that is the most underappreciated aspect of of branding exercises. I think people think branding, they’re like logo, colors, like how we look.

Joel Benge: What Hogwarts house are you? 

George Kamide: Yeah, if you have a really good branding agency, they actually take you through a lot of questionnaires, because that’s what they’re trying to get to. What is your core idea, principle, and then try to infuse everything that comes through that. And I think that’s 100 percent accurate, because if you do not have a point of view, like, Let’s go back to that meaning making machine.

Like, I don’t have a reason to attach meaning to you as a company or as a product because it’s just another, like, four letter acronym or abbreviation.

Joel Benge: Yeah. It’s just, it’s data. It might be a detail, but it’s not anything that you can really dig into. I just came up with that. The triple D method. I just invented a new framework. There we go. Maybe I’ll invent a new framework every episode. Awesome. I’d love to wrap up just asking you kind of, what’s one of your favorite personal projects that you’ve worked on?

And why? And this might be an opportunity to share something of George to the people who don’t know you or do know you, or to even do a personal passion plug.

George Kamide: Yeah, I mean, I think the most obvious is the podcast. You know, George Al-Koura, my co host, and I don’t get paid for it. And it feels like an incredible opportunity to engage with the cybersecurity ecosystem, for lack of a better term, on all possible fronts. And we then have to kind of discover our way through, you know, are we talking to, most recently, Adrian Wood, an AI Red Teamer, so it gets pretty technical and pretty strategic pretty quickly.

Are we talking to somebody about how to get newcomers into the field. That’s a little bit more social and more business acumen. And just having to engage in that is, and also, again, it’s an aesthetic experience. Like if the podcast audio sucks, if the interview is boring, we’re constantly making those changes because I will listen back and I’m like, this episode is kind of dragging here.

And that’s going to affect communication. So, like, how do we address that? And so, yeah, that’s been, that’s been a big passion project. And also, I guess, Mind Over Cyber, which is the non profit. Shout out to Maria Graham and Carlos Guerrero, my co founders. But being able to clearly communicate mindfulness meditation benefits to a skeptical audience both from the sponsorship side, which we need, and also the practitioner side has also been very rewarding because, one, I think it’s very needed, but two, trying to crack that nut and then seeing it work and seeing people gain the benefits of it has also been very rewarding.

Joel Benge: Awesome. So, yeah, I mean, the podcast, I’m just enjoying every single episode. I think you just announced that recently you passed 10,000 downloads? 

George Kamide: Just this week. 

Joel Benge: You’ve been doing it for just a couple years, which is amazing. People can find that at BareKnucklesPod, is that correct?

George Kamide: Yeah, And also anywhere they, anywhere they find it their podcasts. Yeah. 

Joel Benge: Yeah, just look for it, just go to any cybersecurity conference, look for the awesome what’s that? The Fist Lightning Bolt hats. 

And do go to their swag store, which, cause, as you said, you guys aren’t getting paid for this. It does support, 

George Kamide: It pays hosting fees, basically.

Joel Benge: And MindOverCyber, is that MindOverCyber.org.

Did you guys get that? You landed, awesome, you landed the good domain. Good domain is always 

George Kamide: That’s right.

Joel Benge: I just want to, with some closing thoughts if you could sum up, we’ve heard a lot of different themes. 

George Kamide: mm hmm.

Joel Benge: You know, using storytelling, chunking things to make it very easy for people to comprehend figuring yourself out, your strengths, but also looking at what you want to accomplish and a Aspire to and not just ripping it off, but dissecting it and understanding it.

Do you have any other closing piece of advice maybe for that, that technical practitioner that’s maybe listened a couple times and they’re just like, “I just, what’s one thing that I could do …

George Kamide: yes. Thank you.

Joel Benge: …that, that I can walk away with and I can try?” 

George Kamide: Yes. I would call it the Feynman technique, named after the famous quantum physicist Richard Feynman. His technique, he was, like Carl Sagan, an incredible communicator of intensely complex stuff. Top of his game, right? Nobel Prize winner. And he could still engage a lay audience. Maybe like a Neil deGrasse Tyson of his time. His technique was to take a concept, you know, write it down in as plain language as possible, communicate it. He said to a 12 year old and wherever they had gaps in understanding, he would take those notes and then revise it. I will say a peer of the same age, right, for this particular audience of this podcast.

So like, can you explain it to somebody who’s not in cyber in this example, without relying on any of those acronyms or any of the jargon. And if you can do that, just continually revise it. I mean, this is how he was able to explain, like, the rotation and spin in quarks to, like, groups of kids.

And again, it sounds very simple, but it’s this constant revision and constant, like, Can you explain, like, let’s say, take whatever exploit you want to talk about, like, for example, the Microsoft recall problem, where it was storing, whatever. Can you explain that without saying technical terms? in languages that everyone could understand as to why it would be bad to adopt that technology.

That would be tremendous if you could do that. 

Joel Benge: And knowing that they don’t have to have all the detail. That’s like, just give them the broad strokes and the next class, the next conversation, the next pitch—because your objective shouldn’t be to land or close or deliver all your information in conversation one. It’s developing a relationship, so it’s give them enough that they can retain it until you meet them the next time. And you can fill in more detail if they choose and if you so inspire them to take that next step.

George Kamide: Yeah.

Joel Benge: I want to give you an opportunity at the close. How can people get in touch with you? Where else can they find you besides the pod?

George Kamide: I would just say LinkedIn because it’s literally the only thing I can maintain. Like, because people are like, I’m here, I’m here. I’m like, I don’t have time. I can’t manage it. So LinkedIn for the most part, for sure.

Joel Benge: Well, George, thank you so much for joining. I definitely count you as one of the nerds that talk good. Always tops in my book. And I really look forward to our next conversation.

George Kamide: Thank you, Joel. It has been a blast.

[Musical Outtro]

Joel: If you want links to the resources mentioned on the show, head on over to the episode page. And for information on booking a message therapy workshop, getting your hands on the MessageDeck, to check out my upcoming book, or just buy me a coffee, go to nerdthattalksgood.com/podcast. 

 Until next time, happy messaging.

 Remember, you don’t have to speak well, you only gotta learn how to talk good.