Automatically transcribed, so names and technical terms may be misspelled. The audio is the record.

The Colorado Equals Security podcast is your local source for regional security news, local events, and interviews with key individuals in the region. Now here are your hosts, Robb Reck and Alex Wood. Welcome to Colorado Equals Security. This is the newscast for episode 150 for the week of February 3rd, 2020. Alex, what do you call it?

Episode 150 again? It is a sesquicentennial, is 150 years. Sesquicentennial. That's fantastic. I had, in the last week, I have not looked up to see whether that was true or false.

I'm gonna go ahead and say true. Once again, I fooled you, Robb. Easily fooled. Well, we also made it all the way through January, if you can believe that. We're, we're into a whole new month, man.

Uh, that month went very fast. January just disappeared. And it is Super Bowl Sunday. It is. So I will either be, uh, delirious with joy or overcome with, uh, with depression.

Robb, why is that? Well, I am, I am a native Californian. I am. I actually was. I grew up in Redwood City, California, and I lived about a mile from where the 49ers practiced in the '80s.

So I used to ride my bike down and watch Joe Montana, Dwight Clark, Roger Craig, Ronnie Lott, all these guys practice, you know, a lot during the summer. They would all come out and say hi to the little kids. So they definitely have a place in my, in my heart. And I'm rooting pretty heavy for the Niners tomorrow. What about Jerry Rice?

Yeah, was he there too? Dwight Clark? I said Dwight Clark. Jerry Rice was later. This was like Dwight Clark was the guy in the early '80s.

Jerry was a little bit later in the '80s. All right. Right. Yeah. They moved out to East Rockland, I think, at one point.

But okay. Because, because, you know, an NFL team no longer practices in like the local community center for, for a city after they get big enough. But the 49ers, let alone play in the local community, you know, they're the San Francisco 49ers, but they're, Their home is in Santa Clara. South. Yeah.

Yeah. Fair enough. Hey, you know, why don't we talk a little bit about some security stuff? What? So maybe housekeeping to start.

This isn't the Super Bowl show. I thought this was Super Bowls. You and I could talk about that all day after we finish. Well, you know, Robb, we do have a Slack channel if you want to talk about the Super Bowl. We don't have a Super Bowl channel on the Slack channel, but you can go hang out and talk about Super Bowl all you want.

The random channel, maybe random probably would be a good fit for that. Colorado-security.com. There is a button to join the Slack channel. Join. Over 1,230 people.

And when you're done joining Slack, just scroll to the bottom of our website and get your email entered into our mailing list, and we'll make sure you get, you get the show notes in your inbox every week so you know all of the news for the Colorado community. Also, if you're listening to this, you probably know that we put out a weekly podcast, but did you know you can get it delivered to your podcast player automatically every week if you sign up? Subscribe to the podcast through whatever player you use. And while you're there, we would love it if you rated the show and gave props to us and everyone else so that they can know how good the show is. Technology is amazing.

It is amazing. I don't have to manually transcribe these shows anymore. That's fantastic. Yes. Next, we would love it if you would just tell a friend, you know, if you've enjoyed the show, we would love it if you'd help us reach new listeners.

There's— what did we say? There's like 10,000— it was like 18,000 security professionals in Denver, right? There's a lot more people who could be listening to us. Let your friends know. Let those guys get involved so they can be up to speed on local news as well.

And we'll give a special reward to anyone that tells everyone, all those 18,000 people personally about the show. You'll get a free Colorado Equal Security t-shirt. Yes, exactly. Also, another way to get a free Colorado Equal Security t-shirt is to join up— sign up for our Patreon campaign. It does cost us a little bit of money to produce this show, and we'd love to have you sign up and help us defray those costs.

If you sign up for the $10 a month subscription in Patreon, you will get a free t-shirt sent to you. And finally, in the housekeeping section, we, you know, each week we love to do our newscast and also have an interview on the show. We're looking for volunteers who are up for being an interviewer kind of on the scene, go out and sit down with interesting folks in the community. We've got lots of ideas for folks to use it. For you to sit down with, you reach out to us.

We are happy to get you hooked up with those people. In case you were apprehensive about doing interviews, it takes absolutely zero skill to be an interviewer. Yeah. All you have to do is listen to any of our interviews and you'll know that. Exactly.

Yeah. You just have to ask people questions. It's not very hard. All right. That is it for the housekeeping.

Let's move over to the news of the week.

Big news. Robb has a frog in his throat. Uh, first, uh, Denver is among the top 10 worst US cities for hazardous air pollution. Did you not know that I was coughing on purpose, Alex? Of course I did.

So, so apparently it's not safe to breathe here in Denver. It is not safe to breathe. You will cough. You will get sick. Please do not breathe the air.

Hold your breath. So what this article tells us is there's a couple different studies recently, 2 different studies that show that Denver is at elevated pollution. And it looks like over the last 2 years, we average more than 260 days a year of pollution that's above safe levels. That is not good. Although I did see that in 2018 there were 282 days.

So that must mean 2019 was lower. Yeah, it actually said 2019 was 265 days. So the average to me would be over 270. But wow, there's a little weird math going on here. Well, you know, Denver Post is a little bit shorter on employees these days.

This air pollution, it affects those with breathing problems more. It, you know, tends to be the young or the elderly or folks with asthma or things like that. But rest assured that we're going to do everything we can to get these levels back to where they should be, right?

Alex, you and I will do— we've actually done quite a bit already. We are both driving zero-emission vehicles now. That's true. Also, you know, all this blowhardness that we do is going to blow the pollution right out of here. It does look like climate change, you know, global warming is negatively impacting pollution in Denver.

And we— there's a gentleman, Gary Kaufman, who is the state's Air Pollution Control Division Director, which is a position that exists. It's a position. And he says that we're going to fix it. So, all right, let's fix it. Next, if you want to go inside the XB-1, which is Boom Supersonic's new supersonic jet, you can.

So, uh, Boom Supersonic, we have talked about this company on the show a few times, located in Centennial, uh, near and dear to my heart. Um, they are creating supersonic jets and, and these, they had their, their one that called the Ovation, which is like the big one that they're working on. But this, this is a new one, the, the XB-1. Um, you can now look at it. I think it's about a third the size of the Ovation, so much smaller, but they're, you know, really making progress toward being able to actually go live with this.

And you can now see where they are in terms of progress. And, um, there's a video on the link. And I don't know if you watched it. I did watch it, kind of showing what's the plane look like. And I think you can actually do some interactive stuff to figure out how far they are along with various parts of the creation of the plane as well.

That is pretty cool. I am fascinated about supersonic flying. I think that's going to be pretty cool whenever these guys get going. So I am excited to see where this goes. So they have some stats on here.

The average commercial jet cruises at 460 to 575 miles an hour, which is pretty fast. Seems fast. These jets are going to go at 768. My first thought was that would maybe be like 50% faster, not twice as fast. But really, all the numbers they have for flights look like it cuts about half the time off of the flight.

I don't understand that. Again, some weird math here, but that's how it goes. But math is tough for me as well. They do have some good news, which is that Virgin Group and Japan Airlines have both preordered over 30 of these Overture— excuse me, what is it called? Overture.

The Overture flight airplanes. So they're already making progress and they've got a good future ahead of them. And once they are flying, Robb, you could fly from New York to London in only 3 hours and 15 minutes. What about Denver to London? I'm going to guess 5 hours.

They're making it longer, aren't they? 5 hours. That's what I guess. I am excited about this. Looking forward to to seeing how this goes.

Uh, next, uh, Galvanize. We've talked about them in the past. What do they do again? They do, uh, education so you can learn to be a developer, you know, boot camp style development. Um, they have been purchased by K12, which is another education company.

Uh, so I guess good for them. Um, this is adding to K12's portfolio of other things that they do. So hopefully that's going to be a good thing for, for folks at Galvanize and, and people looking for developer education. It was interesting. I, I have heard of K-12.

I think you and I have both known someone who's worked there. Um, K-12, I think, mostly sells software to education. Like, they'll do, like, you know, kind of like your ERP for education. So, like, all your grading and class schedules and all that would be in their system. Um, they're about a billion dollar a year revenue company.

That's a good size. And, but they said in 2019, only $30 million of that came from like, them offering classes, which is exactly what Galvanize does. So they're, they're really trying to, you know, invest more into this, you know, direct education model versus just offering software for other, other schools. Diversification, Robb. Diversification.

That's the key. I know this from playing Monopoly. You don't only wanna own the railroads. You also wanna have, like, the power company and the water company. Exactly.

So it's just like that. Right? You wanna have a monopoly. Multiple monopolies. Next, Colorado got $3.6 million from the Equifax breach, and it is actually being used to help start some cybersecurity programs.

So, um, one of the local community colleges, uh, Colorado— what's it called here— Colorado Northwestern Community College had recently been talking about what, you know, what would they do if they had some additional funding and said they'd love to start a cybersecurity program. And Phil Weiser, our Attorney General, heard this and said Let's make that happen. So they have, uh, are gonna carve out about $500,000 out of that $3.6 million, um, to help, to help this school stand up their own security program. I think that is really cool. Um, obviously we need more people in cybersecurity.

Um, I think this is gonna be a good thing for them and for the, the folks of, uh, Rangeley and Craig where Northwestern Community College is. And, uh, I think more education in cybersecurity is a good thing. Another thing the Attorney General was talking about is creating a loan repayment program for security professionals who are willing to work in government and other public sector organizations, similar to models they'll have for doctors, lawyers, I think teachers as well, who are willing to work at underserved places. If you work there for a certain amount of time, you get your loans repaid. Uh, it's a pretty cool model.

I know people personally who have taken advantage of that and I think, you know, that would be a nice way to incentivize security folks to help out those areas that otherwise, you know, the free market maybe not wouldn't push you that way. Also in this article, there was a quote from someone named Robb Reck who said that we don't have enough people in cybersecurity. Well, it sounds like a really well-sourced article if that's the case. Yeah. There's a couple of interesting stats in here as well.

They mentioned that we, in 2014, we had a 1 million job shortage. So a million more jobs than we had workers in security. Um, and that, that's going to go all the way up to 3.5 million by 2021. Uh, that's globally we're talking about, right? But that's just a really big number of unfilled jobs.

Yeah. I think both of those numbers are not right, but yes, they, we are still, we have no better numbers. We don't have better numbers and we're still behind. We need more people. Every time someone talks to me about the, the Ponemon, uh, cost of a data breach, I don't believe the numbers in their report, but I don't have any better numbers.

So I'm like, okay, well, here you go. At least they got something. Use those. Yeah. Our next article is around— is another interesting local news story.

Regis University's breach that we did cover in quite a bit of detail several months ago. They've now released a lot more details of the breach, and it was pretty ugly. Yeah. So they were pretty crippled by ransomware right at the beginning of their semester as students were coming back to school, which is, you know, about the worst time that this could happen to a higher educational institution. So at this, there's recently an event where the CIO and CFO of Regis were speaking.

And they talked a lot about what happened there. Number one, they mentioned that they did pay the ransom to get their data back and unlocked. They talked about that they don't actually know where or how the bad guys got in, but the first thing the bad guys did is went after the backups. So they did have backups, but bad guys got to those first before they ransomware the systems to make it a more credible threat. They talked about the fact that they paid, and even though they paid, they weren't able to bring up all of the systems using that data.

And I did not get the impression that they were saying that the attackers didn't provide good decryption keys. I think it felt a little bit more nuanced to me, like maybe they were saying that some other issue happened as well. Internal systems just didn't work quite right. Right. I mean, and this, you know, sort of jives with what we've been seeing with a lot of the ransomware attacks on, public institutions, whether it's educational or state government or other things like that.

It is not a, you know, spray and pray, you know, maybe you'll get somebody, you know, attackers get into one of these networks, go after the backups, spend a little time in there, and then encrypt things so that it is much more enticing for those who need to recover to pay the ransom. So there was one section of the article that you and I both noticed, which basically the CFO was saying that they chose rather than try and fix everything to to rebuild all of the systems and move the data over to new systems. And he used an analogy. Alex, why don't you go ahead and tell us what this analogy was? So, Robb, it's a simple rationale.

You know, imagine you had a house and a venomous snake got in and your children were in the house. You could go hunting for the snake. You could call the local wildlife department, but the wildlife department can't tell you how the snake got in. So just build a new house and move your children there. And I think this analogy works for all of us because we've all had to rebuild a house because of a snake.

Snake. It is true. It is very true. I've gone through 3 or 4 houses that way. You know, occasionally snakes into my house too and just move.

New house.

In any case, they were able to recover, although slowly and painfully and expensively. Although they didn't give the actual number that they had to pay for the ransom. That was not disclosed. They didn't want to talk about that, which I can't blame them for that. I can't either.

All right. Well, we have an exciting conclusion to another story. So we conclude the Regis story and now we have conclusion on the— really, it's like kind of a crime, a police drama that's been unfolding over the last few months. This is about some other snakes in a house, although it's, it's a courthouse. And who are the snakes here?

And maybe they're not actually snakes. They're garter snakes. They're good. They're the kind of snakes that eat the rats, right? Yes, they're the good snakes.

They're the good snakes. So this is about Coalfire. And from several months ago, we've talked about there were a couple of penetration testers who were doing a physical test of a courthouse in Iowa. They were arrested because there was confusion on whether they should be there or not. And the hope was that once the confusion was settled, the charges would be dismissed and everything would be fine.

But this has drug on significantly. And it turns out they actually, what, they ended up executing the pen testers? Is that? Yeah. No, they did not.

They just burned down the courthouse and built a new courthouse. They actually— there are snakes in there. There's snakes in the courthouse.

You got to build a new courthouse, Robb.

All right. So to be serious, Coalfire has actually, or the employees have had the The charges dropped, so they are now off the hook. Of course, that is exactly how this should have ended. I think, you know, lessons learned, probably, hopefully on both sides. You know, if you're working with the government, maybe make sure that the people who approve you to do your pen test are the people who also will have guns walking around that building, right?

Yeah, it seemed like an odd situation. It seemed like things were handled poorly on both sides. I am glad that it resulted in these pen testers not being charged with anything. Um, although it seemed like a lot of, a lot more work than it needed to be to get to that point. Well, you know, they have their mugshots in a paper somewhere too, right?

That's, that's no good. I did appreciate that Coalfire and all their releases didn't use the names of the pen testers. Yeah. Last thing you need is to have your name show up on all those when people Google you. Right.

So I appreciate that. Uh, next, uh, Swimlane had an announcement. Um, they have put out a new version of their software. So congratulations to that. Users of the new software will see up to a 35 times performance improvement in alarm ingestion and up to 60 times improvement in search query response.

That's really significant. That is very significant. It's either flying now or it was really slow before. And I don't know which, but either way, this is awesome news. It is.

And it's good to see Swimlane making that progress. I think this is, this is one of those areas security automation, orchestration, and response, where they're, they're really pushing the boundaries and they're getting just way more alerts coming in. And of course, the better you get at this, the better efficiencies you get with having, you know, fewer analysts doing a whole lot more work. So it's pretty good news. And they do note that, of course, with these speed improvements, you now have a much better mean time to detect and mean time to respond.

And the article also says that this is, is really setting up a new baseline for all of the people in this space. So it sounds like, and I don't have any data to back it up, but from, Swimlane's, um, article here sounds like they've really, you know, kind of set a new standard for other companies to try and shoot after. They've thrown down the virtual gauntlet, the proverbial gauntlet. I love it. Exactly.

Uh, next there is a blog post from Ping Identity. Um, this is talking about building strong customer relationships through data privacy and consent. But you got to tell me why, Alex. I need at least 3 reasons why this is worth doing. Uh, you know what, the first reason, Robb, is that your customers want it.

They want data privacy with consent. And I think that, you know, we've seen lots of studies, surveys that say customers want it. We don't always see customers walking away after people exploit their data and do not provide them privacy, but I think it's pretty clear that customers would like it, maybe just not as much as we want them to quite yet. You know, the second reason, Robb, is that you should comply with regulations. Do you have any examples of those regulations?

One of them might be GDPR. Another of them could be CCPA, and then you could add any other state regulation that will soon be forthcoming. Or Brazil has a pretty good one now, right? What about a third? I, I'm almost convinced I'm gonna need at least one more reason though.

What do you got? You know, Robb, if that doesn't convince you, this also creates a better customer experience. That's good. If you can create a better customer experience while complying with the law and also delighting your customers, doing what they want, I can't see why you wouldn't do this. Why would you not do this, Robb?

Do it. I'm convinced. Operators are standing by now. You can call 1-800-PING-IT. I don't actually— I don't know any ping numbers.

Next we have— this is a piece of news that's, you know, we don't have any context here. But Alex, you're always sleuthing on the dark web for any, any kind of corporate information that comes across. What do you find this week? You know, I get alerts occasionally about SEC Form Ds being filed. And these are when someone is getting funding, you have to, you file one of these Form Ds.

And occasionally I get one before there's a press release released about it. So, so is this breaking news right now? This might be breaking news. So, um, Automox, uh, filed a Form D for $30 million in funding. $30 million.

$30 million. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's a lot of money. So congratulations. And of course they are the automated patching, um, vulnerability management.

Yep. Those sorts of things up in Boulder or Louisville or something like that. I think it's Boulder. Yeah. Congratulations to those guys.

We've had them on the show. And of course, we love to see the local success from companies like theirs. Speaking of startups doing well, Secure64 kicked off 2020 with a new headquarters. And we get to see if you click the link, you can see a picture of the new headquarters and the team in it. I think that, you know, they've mostly been located in Fort Collins and they've— but they had officially had their headquarters be in Greenwood Village in the Denver Tech Center area.

I think that they have now officially moved that headquarters to Fort Collins. This picture shows the new headquarters and the team up there. Of course, we love to see our SecureDNS friends here locally having some, some success and moving forward. That is awesome. And that is it for the news.

So let's move over to the Slack Message of the Week. Thanks to Andre Gaeta for his continued support of the Slack Message of the Week. He has been supporting this from before it was a Slack Message of the Week when it was just trivia. Yeah. You know, back in the day.

And if you win the Slack message of the week, you get a free item from the Colorado Equals Security Store. And if you think you've already seen everything in the Colorado Equals Security Store, there's something more in store for you this week. But we'll get to that in a little bit. Next, so next we just gotta say who won the award this week. Serge Borsot.

Serge posted letting us know that the call for presentations or call for papers for SnowFROCK 2020 is now open. If you're interested in speaking at Denver's best AppSec conference every year, Um, it's, it's SnowFROC, which is the OWASP conference here in town. Um, go ahead and get your, your presentation in for that. And while you're at it, if you think that is presentation that you'd like to also do at the Rocky Mountain Information Security Conference, uh, that CFP is open too. Yeah, for another week or so, right?

Yeah, uh, something like that. Um, so yeah, looking forward to SnowFROC. Should be a good conference again this year. And congratulations to Serge. All right, let's move over to our events.

As a reminder, we have a calendar of events on the website going out, uh, several months in the future, but Each week on the show, we just hit what's happening in the next 2 weeks. Coming up this week, on the 5th, SecureSet is doing a capture the flag event. Also on the 5th, ASUS is doing their 2020 kickoff. On the 6th, Splunk is doing their First Thursdays at Topgolf. On the 10th, Graylog is doing a Graylog Community Denver meetup.

SecureSet is doing an intro to Wi-Fi on the 11th. Wi-Fi, I love Wi-Fi. Yeah. If you can hack a Wi-Fi, you're doing pretty well. On the 11th and 12th, ISSA Denver is doing their February chapter meetings.

And then I think this is the last one. Uh, ACES is doing, uh, a confronting hate and violent extremism in the US meeting. So this— I don't— this is interesting. Yeah, that's gonna be something, you know, a lot of, a lot of hate going on. Let's fix it.

Yeah, let's not hate anymore. I was wrong, there's another one. Uh, also, uh, CTA on the 14th is doing Level Up Your Tech Career: Listening Intelligence for Leaders. So instead of going out with your significant other on Valentine's Day, if you want to go to a CTA event, please do. And if you're in Colorado Springs and you're thinking about not wanting to go out with somebody on Valentine's Day, uh, there's a capture the flag event at the National Cybersecurity Center down there.

You know what, there is nothing better to do with a loved one than to do capture the flag, than to break into their Wi-Fi. Yes, exactly. All right, let's go ahead and move over to jobs. Uh, we do have a few jobs in security at Ping this week. I am still looking to hire a product security engineer.

This is someone who's got a development background with an eye towards security. That can be here in Denver or a couple other cities. You can look on the website, click our link for that. I'm also hiring a GRC analyst focused on disaster recovery, business continuity, and incident response. And we're also now hiring an infrastructure security analyst.

I think it's a senior analyst, really focused on AWS security, network security, uh, kind of helping us look at all of the systems that move data through it and make sure we're responding to things wisely. Sounds pretty cool. Uh, Bank of America is hiring a data analytics engineer for cybersecurity. Nelnet is hiring a cybersecurity analyst. AMR is looking for a cybersecurity GRC analyst.

Poly. I don't know Poly, but there's some kind of telco thing, right? It's a parrot. It's— I think it might be Polycom. Uh, could be.

Well, anyway, it's, it's definitely telecom related. They are hiring a senior security analyst, information security. Oh, uh, Dish is looking for a cybersecurity threat analyst. A lot of different analysts here, huh? Uh, CHI, or CHI as I wrote it here, is hiring a privacy analyst.

Optiv is looking for a project manager. And Kivu Consulting is hiring a senior threat analyst. Man, so much analysis going on. Yeah, you said that perfectly. Yes, I did.

Well, that's it for the news. You know, I think we should, you know, kind of celebrate, Alex. We've hit 3 years. We've been doing the show for, I think it was like the first week of February in 2017. That's a pretty good run.

Yeah, you know, we buried the lead here a little bit, Robb. This is episode 150, but it's also the three-year anniversary of us doing this. So that's a pretty big milestone. Yeah, I mean, that's why we're both wearing tuxedos and and covered in champagne. That is exactly why.

At least that's the excuse we're giving this week. I'm also very full from all the caviar that I was eating yet yet again. So one of the things that we are doing, Robb, to celebrate this three-year anniversary is we've decided it is time. For us to get an actual logo, a new logo. So when we started this whole thing off, we, we didn't know whether this was really going to work and we didn't want to spend a whole lot of cycles and our own actual money to put together a logo.

So we went to some AI website that was like, hey, you put in some words, we'll generate a logo for you. FreeLogoGenerator.com. Or it was $5. I think we paid. I think it was, I think it was $5.

Oh, I didn't realize we actually had to pay for it. I believe— I think we could see it for free. We had to put down the $5 to get the actual image. Oh, so we decided we were going to actually do a real logo project. And, and really, you know, since obviously we're so Colorado focused, we wanted to incorporate some elements of the Colorado flag or the Colorado logo into what we had.

So we do have a new logo now. Yeah. So you should be able to go check out our website and see the new logo on that website. I like it quite a lot. We've got a few versions of that, that logo.

In one of them, there's even a secret message, Robb. If you know how to do, is it, is it hex? Is that what it's in? It might be, Robb. You never know.

I don't know what it is. You gotta figure it out. You gotta figure that out. Look for the secret message in and Alex will, will give you a hug if you're the first one to tell him what the secret message was. Actually, I will give anyone a hug.

If you come up to me and tell me that you know what it is, I will give you a hug. Yeah, that's, that's pretty good. So we, you know, the website will have the new logo. We'll have the new store stocked full of items with the new logo. When will that be ready, you think?

It should be ready right now, Robb. Fantastic. People can Go look right now. And by stocked full, I mean if you order something, they will print it on demand and send it to you. That's how it works.

Um, but we're excited to have the new logo. We appreciate, you know, we did get some feedback from the community in the Slack channel. Those who are in the Slack channel are probably not super surprised by this news, but it's pretty exciting for us. Yeah. Also, um, we've got a bunch of, of new swag that we're gonna be giving away.

So we've got brand new stickers. You may have one of our old stickers. You can get a new one. Uh, thanks to Swimlane for providing us with those stickers. Yeah.

We're so, we're so, so appreciative of, of Swimlane. And, uh, we have another company to thank too. Uh, but the, the fact that, you know, when, when we're ready to do this, you know, it's a, it's a significant outlay for a couple guys just to go buy, you know, hundreds of stickers. Um, they were willing to step up and, and help pay for these stickers for us. Um, so very thanks to, to Cody, who's the CEO over there, and, and Swimlane for supporting us as a local organization.

We appreciate it very much. I mean, you know, Robb is independently wealthy and could do this on his own, but, you know, you don't become independently wealthy by just giving away your money. So That's why we ask for other people. Screw the little people. That's, that's my motto.

Exactly. Uh, and now we, we do, I think we were just gonna spend a minute talking here about, um, you know, what have we learned over the last 3 years? You know, it's, it's been a really interesting ride. I, I know that probably the most obvious thing we've learned is that making podcasts is harder than you expected. Audio and, uh, figuring out the technical details of it, it's something of a challenge.

Yeah. I mean, there's that part of it, but also just the time commitment, right? There's a lot of time that goes into this. Um, not only just researching what has to go into it with the newscasts and spending the time getting the interviews, but then, you know, us finding the time to get together every week and do this part of it, do the editing, publish all that stuff. It is a significant time commitment.

And I guess we should thank our significant others, our families for, you know, allowing us to spend this time every week and put this together. Yeah, it's been a really neat experience. It is a lot of work, and obviously, you know, you've seen the interviews tail off lately as it's been a little more work than we could schedule recently. But there's been a lot of really cool things as a part of this as well. We've, we've had the opportunity to do keynotes at RMISC and at SecureWorld as a part of doing the podcast.

Got to interview, uh, and I got to interview Brad Feld, one of the local billionaire starters of Foundry Group up in Boulder. Just, uh, we got to have to talk to. You talked to Cole Wist, one of the representatives from the state. Yeah. Just lots of really interesting conversations that have come from the podcast.

Yeah. And there are so many people that we have talked to that if it weren't for the podcast, we probably never would have talked to. Yeah. And so that part is really cool. I think one of the other things that I learned along that same line is just about anybody is willing to talk to you if you ask them to talk to you.

Right. It seems like there's, there's probably a big barrier there. Um, if you ask somebody there, uh, you know, who are you? Why would I want to talk to you? Um, I've got, you know, an hour of time.

Most everybody's like, sure, I'm happy to talk to you. You know, just let's make some time and we'll do it. Yeah. It's been neat that there are some folks who, uh, have like corporate reasons that they can't be recorded. And we've run into a few of those along the years, but, but it's been, it's really been a blessing.

Um, and I'm looking forward to seeing what does 2020 show for us and really where are we going to take this, you know, going forward in the future. I, I think the other thing is, you know, we knew that this was a great community. Um, but I am just continually impressed, uh, with all of the, the great people and, and how wonderful and giving and caring and, you know, everything else that this community is. Uh, the, when we started, we didn't even have the idea of a Slack channel. Right.

Um, that was not something we thought of. And, you know, someone brought it to our attention and said, hey, we should have someplace where people can discuss on an ongoing basis. I think a few people brought it up. Um, and we're like, yeah, great idea. Someone.

Yeah. Yeah. Good idea. Let's, let's do that someday. Um, but to see that we have over 1,200 people in our Slack community, that, that's just incredible.

Yeah. Big thanks to Travis Shack, who actually was the one who, you know, made us get, get off our butt and do it. He created the Slack channel and put us both in there as admins and was like, hey, it's ready. It's going. Right.

So we're like, oh, okay. I guess we're going to do this. I guess we're doing this. And I think we both agree that the Slack channel might be the best part of the whole thing. It's been, it's been a really great way to connect people, uh, in the, in the local area.

So anyway, I'm— I don't know. I don't have much more to say about what I've learned. It's been a really neat opportunity, and I'm looking forward to seeing what more there is in the future. Yeah. First 3 down.

Next, how many to go? We do have one other group to thank. So in addition to getting the stickers, we also now have a box of new Colorado Equal Security t-shirts to give to our Patreons. Also, you know, for those who are guests on the show and those, of course, who help do interviews for us. And that's a huge thanks.

It's a big outlay of money to Red Canary. Red Canary, another one of the local security companies companies. We reached out to them and to ask if they'd be willing to help pay for those shirts. And there's no logo, there's no Red Canary logo anywhere on the thing. Yeah, but they were still willing to come forward and do this for us.

And of course, that just goes to show how much they want to give back to the community. And we really do appreciate that. Yeah, definitely. So yeah, this has obviously been wonderful. I've really been enjoying it.

You know, thanks, Robb, for, for doing this, going on this crazy ride with me. It's been a good time. It's been fun. We have a lot more learning to do. We'll, we'll hopefully be able to keep going, keep this ship above water for another year.

Yes, definitely. All right. Well, that's it, guys. We'll look forward to talking to you again next week. Thanks, Robb.

Learn more about the Colorado security scene at colorado-security.com, where you can see information about local security groups, a calendar of upcoming security events, and learn more about Colorado Equals Security. Reach out to Alex and Robb by emailing info@colorado-security.com.

Until next time, remember, Colorado equals security.