Hacking Your Health
Hacking Your Health Podcast with Ben Canning and Dave Kennedy - Two guys setting out to hack body, mind, business and beyond. We are here to provide a single source, bullshit free guide to understanding your body and how you can live better, for longer.
Hacking Your Health
AI, Burnout & The Optimization Trap
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This week Ben and Dave discuss why the fundamentals still win in a world obsessed with optimization. From training, nutrition, and GLP-1s to AI, entrepreneurship, stress, and decision-making, they explore how progress comes from consistency, embracing failure, and focusing on what actually moves the needle. They also discuss the opportunities and challenges created by AI, the difference between good stress and burnout, and why sometimes the best thing you can do is stop overthinking and start doing.
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Back Again And No Excuses
SPEAKER_00Yo, what's up everybody? Welcome back. We are still back. We are keeping our promises. We are back. We uh once again are back to technical difficulties, but we made it work. What's the update, dude? How's it going?
DaveDude, everything's going good. Uh staying busy. I am more busier than I know what to do with right now, but uh that's okay. That's okay. We still need time for the podcast, regardless. Dude, we did. We did. Listen, if if if I could fit this in with being CEO of two companies, listen, audience, what are you guys and gals doing with your lives? Get in the gym and hit hit shit because uh I am more busier than I know I've ever been in my entire life, and I'm still getting in the gym and I'm still making podcasts. So there's no excuse. No excuse.
SPEAKER_00Get into the gym and start a podcast, is what you're saying. You can do both. You can do both. Nice. Okay.
DaveSo how are you doing?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, I'm doing good. I um I mean, similar to last week, I'm just getting set up for upcoming events and uh playing about with stuff that I shouldn't be playing about with on AI. But training is good. I think actually message James for anybody who doesn't know who the fuck James is. Uh if you haven't been listening, James is my coach. I've worked with him for probably four years. But I missed him in my check-in. He's awesome. Yeah, I messed him in my check-in this week. Um this is the best I've I don't want to say ever felt, but I I think well-rounded in terms of how I feel in terms of nutrition, training in the gym, getting cardio in, balancing it all, being able to get work done, and like not feeling like I'm just fitting my sessions in. Like it all seems to work well. The flow of my sessions are good, I feel strong. So, all in all, I feel good. Which I realize whenever I say that out loud, I'm like, well, obviously, the goal is to continue to feel better, so I should feel the best that I've ever felt. So I think that we're doing the right thing, is what I'm saying.
DaveYeah, it's it's it's crazy because like you know, you go through ebbs and flows in life, and you know, I've definitely been through some ebbs and flows, but um, everything is good right now. Like uh my my family's good, you know, the work is good, the Dean's good. The DeLorean is really good. I was driving it yesterday. Um, you know, had a family that you know, it's it's always the dad. You know, the dad's like, dude, and so the whole family comes out, you know, I'm at the gas station to get some gas, and the family comes out and he's like, Listen, I have something to tell you. Um, I haven't shown this movie to my kids, but I promise you, I'm going home right now and we're watching all three of them. I'm like, good man, I'm good. I'm like, you better promise me because like that's a that's a classic, you know. And um, but their mind was blowing, you know, shooting the fog out the back and the flux capacitor and everything. So yeah, I drive
Decompression Routines That Reset You
Davethat. It's kind of like my um my peaceful place, right? You know, like when it's really nice outside, it's not raining, I've had a stressful day. I just hop into my DeLorean and I just cruise around and you know, have a good time and you know, just stop at a couple places to say hi to folks, and it just like decompacts me, you know. And I think everybody needs that decompaction type of of place or something you do that just allows you to kind of chill and relax because uh you know life definitely puts it all on you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think somet something that maybe this is maybe this is us finding out our topic for today. Maybe you already have 10 studies that you want to talk about, but uh I think like something that you just do for the sake of doing, do you know what I mean? Like something that's not work-related, something that allows you to just like completely switch off from all the other stuff. And I I find in instances like that, like that's whenever I have my I don't want to say best ideas, but it actually gives you time to like step away from the stuff and sort of 30,000-foot view of everything that's going on, and you come up with like, oh, this is how I fixed that problem or this thing that I've all week. I just needed to not do the thing and step away from the thing, and now I know what the answer to the thing is. 100%.
DaveI I find that all the time. And it's like, you know, I'm I'm very much like a gut reaction type of person that to making decisions. Like, I there's a lot of, you know, I've I've found different people throughout my life that just have different traits. You know, they they they think differently, they operate differently. You know, some folks require a lot of information to make decisions, um, you know, and need to know every like detail inside and out. You know, me, I'm like fly by the seat of my pants, you know, make decisions. If it's a wrong decision, then I just fix it and go to the with the other decision. You know, and that's that's always been super successful. I was actually talking to um my COO today, and uh, you know, when since I've taken over being CEO at Binary Defense, he's like, dude, things are moving way too fast here. And I'm like, yep, yep. And I'm like, I'm like, just just pick up, you know, just you can be behind with a sprinkler and putting out all the fires of the chaos that I leave behind me. Uh and you know, obviously it's it's methodical. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, you your whole goal is to be creative, to be innovative, to move fast, to not have to deal with, you know, um so many decisions, you know, that that slow the company down. And and so that allows you to be, you know, very quick, but you have to do it obviously methodically in a way that doesn't damage your business or organization. And you know, it's interesting because I always look at things from a very technical perspective, obviously being in cybersecurity and being as technical as I am. But like for me, you know, like what we're building with like our AI solution and everything else, like the technology works and it works well. And I know it works because I've built it and my team has built it and I use it every day. And so, like, as long as the technology works, I know the stuff behind it will work eventually too. You know, like the sales process, the marketing, the legal, you know, the support and the implementation and this, you know, the costing of it. Like, I'll figure all that out later, but I I I need to make sure that this works right the way that it should, and it and it has to. And as long as I have something that works, everything else comes behind
Simple Training Beats Gym Hacks
Daveit. And I think we get so like caught up in you know, just needing all of the data, all the facts, everything has to be perfect when you could just do some really brilliant things really quickly. And that's the same thing for lifting too. It's like, you know, when I first got into lifting, you know, I was watching all these influencers, I was watching all these different ways of doing things, you know, and I remember I still remember this to this day. Um, we we had a, I think it was in Texas. It was Texas or Arizona that we had one of the meetings uh with the Arizona. It was Arizona, and you gave me the the the permission to run the legs workout. Yeah. And I went way overboard, like to the point to where like like half the folks left halfway through it because they're like, this is stupid. And it was stupid, you know, but at the time I was just like showing them everything you could do and ways that you can kind of build everything up, but it was way too complex. And when it comes down to it, it's like what I'm finding out of my lifting specifically is that you know, you don't I don't have to spend an absorbent amount of time. Like I just got done doing push yesterday, and my entire body is wrecked. Like I can feel, you know, my chest, it hurts every time I, you know, move my shoulders. And I was in the gym for like 40 minutes, you know, and and got a solid workout in 40 minutes. It's the only time I had, you know, the whole day. You know, literally like rushed downstairs, rushed out the workout, got it in as quick as possible, moved up. And I think we just get so complex with like, hey, progressive overload and time under tension, and you know, you need to do this this way. And if you do this one hack, it's gonna increase it by 0.002%. You know, it's at the end of the day, it's like put the muscle under a lot of stress, you know, uh, you know, keep going so you can't go anymore. And then you just keep going, you know, keep rinse and repeat. And it's a super simple process that I think a lot of people just get overly complex with it, as I did as well, by the way. Um, and I'm finding I'm getting more gains, I'm less injured because I'm not doing crazy ass stunts in the gym, you know, trying to do some crazy workout. You know, I just go to go to what's normal, go to what's what's what's familiar to me, um, and then just keep pounding the muscle away. And you know, I think we have to look at life a little bit more simply in many ways than more complex.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure. And I've I mean I've done it myself. Like I've you know, with we you and I have done it where we're like reverse banding stuff and like attaching all these different things just to get this, like, like you said, point one of a difference. And it's like all this fucking around that I could have actually just been lifting. And I think I think that the the fitness space, the wellness space, whatever way you want to phrase it, I think they are in the their over-optimization era. Because like everything needs to be, you know, I needed the specific trainer to do this thing, and like exactly when I needed take my fucking electrolytes and maybe at an elite level or professional athlete, yeah, I do understand that. And I had a conversation a couple of weeks back. Um I can't remember the context of the I can't remember the context of the conversation, but essentially I was I I laughed at like basically my job is to make sure that adults eat vegetables and eat properly and make sure they drink enough water. And the guy that I was talking to laughed and he's like, you know, everybody's looking for you know what the DLP one's gonna do or what the silver bullet is. I'm like, but okay, what about like just the foundational things that you need to do to stay alive? Like, why don't we just start with that? And you're thinking, I understand that all of that stuff potentially has its place down the line, but everybody wants to just jump to that and skip all the foundational stuff that actually has worked and will continue to work forever.
Foundations First With Food And GLP-1s
DaveYeah, you know, for me, um, when I look at like the GLP ones, it's a it's a great way when I'm during a cutting phase not to be as miserable, you know, with not having to eat as much food. But I have, you know, I can be miserable and still do it, but kind of make it easier for me, right? And so I have the tools and the foundation, you know, to be able to not eat or cut weight, you know, or gain weight whenever I want and use them as a tool because I have a solid foundation on top of it. You know, it's it's crazy because like, you know, I I can see myself like, you know, a shit week that I've had, and I just eat like total, total garbage and I see it on the scale. I'm like, all right, I need to tone it down, I need to go back down again, you know, and I go right back to that same point, you know, back down to where I need to be, you know, and it's always just that that constant foundation. And even when I eat like shit, like I know I'm eating like shit, and I know that, you know, it's I'm gonna pay for it the next week, and I know what I'm gonna have to do the next week, but at least I'm staying consistent with it, you know, and I don't try to do that often, but you know, like normally I'm just like focused on protein, getting the food in, getting the carbs in for energy, you know, just to sustain my body to do whatever I need to do for that that given day. Um, and then I'll, you know, I'll use GLP1s as kind of just a additional curb of appetite, but very low dosages, you know, I'm not trying to shed weight, you know, just use it as a way to like, you know, get that that that stuff in your head away from you know the constant urge of of snacking or eating. And uh it works really well for me. So as a tool, it makes a lot of sense as long as you have the proper things in place to actively go and do it. And I'll tell you, I mean, I really do think like Retta retruitride is is a phenomenal drug. I mean, I think it's one of those ones that's that's really game-changing. I mean, it reverses fatty liver disease, improves kidney function, improves cardiovascular health. You burn additional 500 calories, it restructures how you do glycogen so that you're focusing on pumping it into your muscles. Um, and on top of it, it's a GLP one agonist, so you don't get the craving or hunger, so you're not getting the bone density and muscle mass loss. To me, it's like a revolutionary drug. But the problem is, just like with any of the GLPs, you know, as soon as you start doing it, you're gonna go overdosed on it. You know, you're gonna go high high dosing, you're not gonna eat anything, you're gonna waste away, and you're not gonna be you know better off one way or another. You're shaving, you know, one part of longevity for another part of longevity. Um, so you know, it's it might help, you know, in the short term and get you where you need to be. But at the in the long run, if you don't have those proper foundations built to support something like that, then it's just gonna, you know, cause you're just a different cause and effect.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's funny you mentioned the foundation. So um five days into a 21-day cut, and I was uh I was talking to someone sharing photos of like even five days ago to nine. They're like, how have you been able to make such a difference in five days? And the comment was like, it's such a a male thing to be able to do that you can just like make that difference in such a short piece of time. I was like, okay, yes, it's been five days, but it has also been 12 years. It's like I've done 12 years of this that I know exactly what I need to do, I know exactly how my body responds, I know the changes I need to make, I know that my body will respond in the way the way that it is designed to do so. So it's like it may seem quote. This isn't by accident, you know. Exactly, it may seem quote easy, by the way. And like, but I've done this so many times and I've spent so like I've built the foundation over time. I've been, regardless of like levels of consistency or being 100% accurate for years and years and years, like I've remained consistent with the majority of stuff that I've done. I just need to make those small changes for a set period of time on my body response because I've I've collected the data. I know, I know how it works.
DaveYep. And and it's the thing, like uh, you know, I'm not as mature in that as you were, because you started a lot younger, obviously, than than I did um in the amount of years that you've had to instill to it. And I'm finding myself, you know, constantly kind of course correcting and doing things differently just based on you know what's going on in my life, or you know, as I get older, I'm not as you know, you know, as resilient as I was before. You know, I have to recognize that I'm 43 years old, you know, I'm not 28 anymore. But you know at the same time, like, you know, the things that I'm doing is to promote, you know, how I feel. So laser focus, my mental clarity, um, you know, one, my confidence, you know, when I walk in a room, I don't feel like this overweight dude that you know doesn't take care of himself. You know, if he, you know, how is he going to take care of two companies if he can't take care of himself? You know, um, and also just being there, you know, longevity-wise for my kids and being energetic with it, you know, just took my daughter to dropped her off at her boyfriend's house, which is a whole nother weird uh thing, uh, you know, but um, you know, you know, and being able just to be flexible with my work schedule and you know, uh taking my kids out to concerts and going out and playing with them, you know, and and and and still kicking their asses, you know, like that's what it's all about, you know. And as we get older, you know, it doesn't get any easier. But at the same time, if you keep that consistency in place, it really isn't that hard to go and get 30 minutes, 40 minutes of a workout. It isn't that hard to not eat like total ass all the time. Um, you know, it's not hard to to you know be able to prioritize what's most important for you. And I was meeting with somebody this morning for breakfast, and uh, you know, that I I get this a lot. And they're like, dude, I don't know how you do all the stuff you do. Like it's just not possible for one human to do that.
SPEAKER_00I get that a lot for you. Yeah. People think not for me, for you. Like, I'm like, I don't fucking, I don't know. I do not know. I don't have the answer to that.
Priorities Beat Worry And Perfection
DaveBut here here's here's the thing. It's like, you know, there's a million things going on at a given time, you know, with with life, with work, with, you know, business, with, you know, personal stuff, whatever. You know, there's a million things. And it and the and the truth of the matter is what's most important to get your goals that you want out of life, not what is currently out there today. And and I do really well at that. You know, um, I only I only get things done that are important, that make a make a difference, right? I don't focus on the stuff that will take me a long time and I don't get a return on it, if that makes sense. So, you know, it's like it's like a friend, and this might sound like really callous, but I don't have a lot of really close friends because friends take a lot of time. And and and what's my net gain for that of having more friends, you know, and I don't mean to sound like I don't want more friends, like I just don't have the time, nor is it a priority. My priority is my family, you know, my priority is my businesses, my priority is my health. You know, I don't really have time for another buddy on the side, you know, to go and have beers with, right? And so, you know, I you know, it's it's funny because I'm I'm I'm actually like a really shit friend, to be perfectly honest with you. Like all my buddies are like, hey, when are you guys coming out? I'm like, dude, I I my weekend's toast, you know, like and I'm exhausted from this week. Like, I'm not hanging out, I'm sorry. Like, you know, I'm happy to talk to you on the phone or whatever, but you know, I'm not gonna go and have a couple beers. I just don't have the time for that. I don't be wrong, you know, I just I was up till 2 a.m. with my buddy Krista you know last week. And and I and I appreciate those times. Like we, you know, had a campfire out, you know, we're talking about faith and you know, just where we are in life. And you know, it was just a great, great time. And I I cherish that time. And his he's super busy, he's running multiple companies, you know. I'm super busy, you know. But at the end of the day, like that's the first time we got to hang out in probably two or three months, you know, and he's been asking me. I'm like, I'm just a shit friend, man. I'm sorry. Like, you know, like I, you know, I got a lot of shit going on, but I do prep, you know, these when we do have this time, it's precious to me, you know, and we have a great time with it. And I definitely had a couple more uh uh beatboxes that I probably should have, you know. I was like, oh shit, I need to slow down here. I'm starting to see double. But uh, you know, it's like uh, you know, for me, it's just all about prioritization. It's all about the things that I need to get done, and it's all about the things that are most important for me. And I think people get they lose focus of what's what's that priority? You know, they have all these fires going on at a given time and they feel like they have to take care of all of them. You don't. You don't, you know, there's a statistic or something, it was something like out of Stanford that was like 99.9% of the things that we worry about never come to fruition. So why worry about them at all in any capacity? Like our whole system here in the United States or wherever you're from is a self-built ecosystem by man and women, right? And and so the the you know the the the strife that we have, the struggles we have with someone talking shit online or you know, an unhappy customer, that that's stuff that's all it's all not real, it's fake. You know, it's not a but but our minds can't process you know negativity and things we worry about any differently than a caveman could, you know, a million years ago trying to fight off a bear. It's the same, you know, reaction that we have in our brains for things that that stress us out, but none of it's real. I mean, like, you know, it's not like we're actually fighting off a bear for our life. Like, none of this stuff has a huge impact in our life in any way, shape, or form to actually impact, you know, ourselves, but yet we worry about it. And so, you know, for me, I'm really good at at taking stress. And if I have a lot of stress, I offload that stress. You know, I'm like, hey, I'm too stressed out right now. I just need to drop this stuff here. You know, it's not gonna hurt me, it's not gonna hurt the companies, it's not gonna hurt my life. Is it really something that I need to be be dealing with? And then I just move on. And if I have to address it, if it if it happens to be that 0.1% that I have to address it, well, guess what? I'm gonna address it. You know, but at the end of the day, like there was um uh something I do recently. Uh it was a it was a sponsorship. It was a very large sponsorship that that Trusted Sec does. And, you know, it was stressing me out because I really like the person that I'm dealing with, but I I just don't want to invest that much amount of money in sponsorships anymore, you know, uh for the company. I want to put it on AI and a bunch of other places. And I was putting it off, putting it off, and I don't do that very often. Like, you know, but I was putting it off because I didn't want to disappoint that other person, but it was something that I had to address. And I'm like, well, I'm just gonna type the email, I'm gonna send it, and I'm gonna call them and say we the schedule call to talk about it. This is how it is and this is where we're at. I'm sorry, you know, but this, you know, this is this is this is what I have to do. And you know, my my my reaction was, you know, I I don't like one of my big, I would say, strengths and weaknesses is I don't like letting people down. You know, like I I really struggle with that. And when I let somebody down, it impacts me personally and on a very personal level, right? And my dad, you know, it's funny, I'll go back to when I was like 12 years old, and uh maybe I was 13, and I was starting to get into the rebellious teenage years, you know, and and believe me, I put my parents through some some serious shit. I I feel so bad. Like I was I was not a good kid, uh, you know, just not a not a good friend, not a good kid, not a good friend, I was an asshole. Um, I mean, in in perspective, right? You know, and you know, I just sucked at school. I didn't care about it. They couldn't motivate me no matter how hard they tried. You know, I was lazy, I didn't do a lot of stuff, you know, and and so, but I remember I was I was um training for my first degree black belt, I was doing my test for a first degree black belt on tech wondo. And um I was kind of over it. I was kind of over the whole tech window thing. And my dad was a black belt and he was on the panel to see whether or not I met the criteria to become a black belt. And I just biffed the whole thing. It just I didn't I didn't care about it. I wasn't in on it, you know, and I totally failed to test it. I didn't become a first degree black belt at that time, okay? And I remember my dad saying something to me that's always stuck with me, and I I and it's like it's one of those crazy moments you look back at that was completely trans transformational. And I'm glad my dad said this to me because it really changed me as a person. But he's like, Dave, I'm I'm I'm I'm concerned about you because the person that always cared about other people and the person that deeply cared about the well-being of others, you seem to be losing that. And I was like, man, damn, you're you're right. I'm like, you're right. I really am starting to lose that. And I I've always taken that to heart of like trying to understand, like, you know, the other person's perspective. If I'm in a conflict with somebody, you know, they're probably going through some shit. You know, so I I I've learned a lot through the years of of just trying to understand people uh and and try not to let them down. And so I have this thing with me, like if I will put something off forever if I'm it's if it's me letting somebody down. But what I realize is, you know, what I've realized over the past few years is like, no, you're making it even worse by dragging it on, you know, and causing this this this friction of no time period of of progress when you really just got to rip the band-aid and you got to do it, you know, and and that's helped me out in business. You know, if I got to let somebody go that just isn't performing, you know, normally I just would have, you know, let it go and and and that impacts your culture of your company, you know, especially if they aren't producing, they're not coming to work, they're not doing what they're supposed to do. You know, so we I I've taken a completely different leaf on that and really just try to execute and get it done versus delaying. Um, and I think that's important for everybody to think about is like, okay, am I putting things off that I say I'm gonna do tomorrow because I don't want to disappoint somebody or I, you know, I don't, you know, I'm not prioritizing in the right way in my life to make those changes to make things possible. And you know, you just gotta do it. You just gotta like go in and do it and know that, you know, hey, that 99.9%, the the point one percent is probably not gonna happen. It's probably just fine. And it's not gonna impact your life and just hit it on.
SPEAKER_00But I think it's like the the stories you begin to tell yourself in your head and you you catastrophize over the whole thing and you make it worse. And the longer that you leave that, the worse that it gets. But in actual fact, sometimes it's not even as bad as you make it out to be in your head. And I think I always I can't remember, I'm gonna give credit to her mousey. Like I think it's the maybe it's Lila Hermozy, one of the hermozes anyway. The um, you know, not making a decision on something is making a decision. And the like you said, is I'll make a decision. Generally, it's not gonna be life-changing, lifelong, life-threatening. And if I need to change it, I can change it. But it's like I'm not gonna know either way. So it's like if I have two things that I need to pick one, then I'll work it out. If it's not the thing, then I just do the other one. But if I don't, then it's just gonna make it's just gonna make it infinitely worse.
DaveIt just makes it so much worse. You know, like when you start to internalize things in your mind, you get in your own head, you know, it causes so much paralysis on making progress. And, you know. Everything is about progress in life. You know, and if you don't have progress, then you know you're not living life to its fullest. You know, if you're stuck in a dead end job and you can't progress, if you know you're not making a difference in that company, you know, what's the purpose of us being here in the first place? Right. Like it's like, you know, I always I get asked all the time, you know, like, hey, I'm stuck in this job, they don't take security seriously. You know, every day I go into work, I just dread it. I'm like, he's like, how how would you change the culture of the company? Dave, how would you change the culture of the company? And I'm like, dude, listen, first and foremost, get the fuck out of that place. You know, leave. You know, if you're not making an impact and you're not making a change and you're not able to provide what your calling is in life to go and do, go to not happy. Like, why be unhappy where you're at in life right now? Go somewhere where you're gonna be happy, where you can make a change, where you can make a difference. And that's why I like I look at fitness the same way. It's like, you know, it's it's it's contagious. Like my daughter, my both of my sons, they all understand macros, what to eat, you know, and in and not in a crazy way, right? You know, they're not like obsessed with food and what they put in their body, what they don't. But like my daughter's like, hey, dad, we don't have enough salads in the fridge. You know, I don't want to eat some garbage over here. Is anybody can order get some salads? I'm like, absolutely. You know, no question about it. Uh, you know, Aaron, uh whole focused on fitness, you know, like just got back from orange theory, you know. So, you know, it's it's one of those things that, you know, it's it's contagious around you when you focus on the right things in life. And, you know, when I took over CEO Binary, uh, I
Leading Through Stress Without Burnout
Davewas nervous. I was really nervous because I haven't been CEO Binary before, but I've been CEO trusted say. And, you know, I have confidence in myself, but that confidence is contagious. Like my entire company is now completely energized in all fronts. You know, I'm creating stress because I'm pushing the teams to its capacity, right? But I always tell them, like, listen, stress is okay as long as I'm not burning you out. And there has to be, and I and I I sat with our developers um about a week ago, and I, you know, we we have little huddles in Slack. And I was like, hey, folks, I just gotta be perfectly clear here. If you see me working on the weekends and knocking out a bunch of cool stuff and merge requests and you know adding new features, it's because I want to and it's my passion. I don't expect that from any of you at all. I'm like, go home with your families, enjoy life. You know, there has to be a balance between work and what you're doing here. But while you're here, I'm gonna use you folks to its max capacity of what you're capable of. So we can all do something pretty amazing here. But I need to be perfectly honest. Like, if you're burning out, you need to tell me that's a sign of strength. I don't look at that as weakness. If you're burning out, it means I'm pushing you too hard. Um, and and we need to take some of that off of you so that you can be successful, not have to stress out about work. And you know, I think that resonates a lot. I've always said it at TrustedSec. Every quarterly meeting I have at Trusted Sec, I'm like, hey, y'all, if you're burning out, let your managers know. You know, it's a sign of strength. I fully support you. We'll get you some time off, you know, let you catch up, you know, we'll take the work on, we can figure it out, you know, but don't burn out. You know, like burning out sucks. I've been there many times, you know, and it's one of those things that it's really hard to recover from and takes even longer from burnout to get back to healthy versus, hey, I'm stressed, get back to healthy. Very different story, right? So we have to recognize that and recognize, you know, you know, certain people work really well under chaos and stress. You know, um, some people, you know, do not work very well with chaos and stress. They need that comfort zone of everything that needs to be defined ahead of time. So, you know, balancing that with my teams is very important. You know, I have my COO is very much a factual-based person, needs to have all the data to make decisions, whereas I'm like making 700 decisions in a day and he's having to figure out what that actually means and bring it all together, right? And that actually works really well together, you know, because I can have him execute on the details that I wouldn't necessarily focus on. And I can go and still be creative and still drive the company forward and everything else, right? And so there's a balance, but you know, stress is good, chaos is good, as long as it's controlled stress, controlled chaos. It's like it's like lifting weights, right? Lifting weights is stress on your body, but it's good stress. It allows you to fix, we're designed to handle stress. Uh, we're not designed, though, to just be overly consumed with stress that creates depression, creates all these issues. You know, you overload is a real thing. Being burned out is a real thing. Um, you know, you feel like you have too much stuff going on in your life that you can't get get out of that hole, and that's a terrible feeling. Um, so you got to balance that and figure out, hey, what's causing this bad stress, what creates this good stress, and focus on the good stress that that makes you, you know, you know, bet uh uh be a better person.
SPEAKER_00So I think the I I've always sort of had this the mentality whenever it comes to training and coaching, and you know, the way I phrased it, phrased it in my younger coaching days was like the the gym and the I guess intentional stress allows you to build your bandwidth to like handle other stressors in life. And I don't think I was I don't think I had the tools back then to articulate it well. And it was actually whenever I first read, and I know our feelings on this man now, but the Aubrey Marcus book, whenever he talks about the cold shars, and I know your thoughts on cold shars, but anyway, the premise of the the thought is like that cold shard is intentional choice of acute stress with the like the thought behind it of like it'll allow you to then handle other stresses of life, and like you said, the gym is a stress, cardio is a stress, and your body doesn't know the difference between that stress and back to if you're getting chased by a bird. But I'm not saying that the gym needs to be a thing, it's just the thing that I chose. But having something in your life that you are actively seeking out a stress that is more beneficial for your life allows you to handle the capacity of other stress, and to your point of like living in the you know, people who enjoy living in the chaos, like I am that person, like I I do my best work when in the chaos. And I was actually just joking on a call before here that our Belfast event is uh just over 13 weeks away. And I'm like, I'm in the point in my mind where like I really want to plan it, like I really want to have the whole thing planned. But to me, it's too far out. Like I'll do better work if I leave it for like two months. I'm like, fuck right, okay, this thing's happening in a couple of weeks. I need to sort this stuff out because I know that that's whenever I operate best, and back to priorities. Like there are other things that I need to deal with now that I potentially aren't as quote fun as planning an event, but they're the things that I need to do day to day. So instead of procrastinating in those things that I have to do but don't want to do by something that's fun that I will enjoy doing, um I'm not gonna get those things done, and then it will still accumulate too stress. And I think even I I see it with with conversations with literally everybody with AI and everything that's going on, like everybody feels like everything is moving way too fast right now because it is, it is but you need a way to number one take yourself out back to the DeLorean, like be able to take yourself out and sort of ground yourself in something that you enjoy doing, but also understand that like for me, if we're talking about the AI conversation specifically, for me it's completely environmental. Like, I don't know if it said this to you, but I had a conversation with Helmy a couple of weeks back, and I was like, he came to the gym and I was like building something. He's like, What are you doing? I was like, Oh, I'm just AI, something, whatever the fuck I was building. He's like, nah, I don't I don't use it at all. And I was like, What do you mean? He's like, Nah, like I don't even use ChatGBT. And I'm like, what do you mean? I'm like, I can't get my head around like because I'm surrounded by everybody's using AI to do everything in the space that I'm in, everybody's like a amount of conversation that I have about AI every day, I just assume that everybody's having those conversations, but they're not. So to me, I'm like, I feel like I'm way behind because I'm not in the you know latest this and I'm not playing with the latest tools and whatever else. And I'm like, none of this stuff fucking matters. Like it doesn't, it's not gonna be the thing that helps me become a better coach and stop getting again stressed out about these things. It's something that I enjoy. And to your point, like I think that what I've realized in the past couple of years, and probably similar to yourself, like I enjoy building the thing. So like being able to, even earlier on, I had I'm not a have loads of tabs guy open, but I had way too many tabs open and AI building all these stuff and things. I'm fucking loving it because I'm like, this is so cool, all this fucking stuff that I can do. But also don't get distracted by the fact that I'm a coach and need to coach people. These are cool tools that will be beneficial at some point down the line, but it's not my highest priority task right now.
AI Noise Versus Real Useful Work
DaveYeah, I'd say like AI, the discussion of AI, it's it's very interesting right now because, you know, for folks that are newer in this industry, you know, I've been in this industry for about 28 years. And really early on in this industry, you know, the late 90s, early 2000s, it felt very similar to what it is today. There was new things coming out. It was like drinking from a fire hose. There was researchers out there that were doing things that had never been done before. We didn't have all these protection mechanisms that were built because of the security industry, like data execution prevention, address space layout randomization, or ASLR, or you know, all these all these technologies that came out because the industry, you know, was innovating almost every day. And that lasted until about 2010. And then we hit this like really coast period where nothing really changed. Nothing really changed in a 15-year period in cybersecurity. You know, it was very much the same things, you know, zero trust and architecture and password management, doing the basics with volume management, monitoring detection programs. Like nothing changed. And so we had this like 15 years of just being complacent uh with you know, new technology would come out and promise to fix the industry and it would be marginally better, but not anything innovative. And what's happening right now is you're seeing a completely different industry be birthed from what it was in the early 2000s. And AI is really changing everything that we do, not just you know, in cybersecurity, but you know, entire corporations, you know, how they can innovate, um, how they can do medical research faster, how they can get products out faster. You know, it's it's it's uprooting everything that was was pretty standardized for the past 15 years, right? And and so it's it's very easy to be overwhelmed um with AI. You know, like for me, I live every single day in AI. I built a massive, superly intelligent AI solution for our company, you know, over a year timeframe. And and and but here's the thing, I started off with nothing. You know, I have a book back here of building your own large language models from scratch. So I started writing my own large language models from scratch to understand how the math worked, how neural networks work, how you know, uh, you know, all these things worked, RAG and everything else, just to figure out like what is this actually doing? How does it actually work? And then starting to build my knowledge and foundation off of that. And, you know, I even still get overwhelmed on the changes. Like I was in the middle of a talk uh on Tuesday, I was uh speaking at a customer in New Jersey uh to his his leadership team, and you know, in that one hour that I was speaking, mythos got released, and I had like 72 text messages and like 500 emails. I'm like, for crying out loud, like I missed one hour. I happen to miss the you know, mythos being released to the world that was gonna kill everything, which it hasn't, by the way. It's all a bunch of bullshit. But you know, it's you know, this this industry is moving very fast. But the cool part is is like find where you can apply it in your life to do cool stuff. Don't worry about all the other noise that's out there. And I'll be perfectly honest with you, like as I've gotten to become you know more and more fluent with what's going on in AI, 99% of the hype out there is a come is complete and utter bullshit with from people that don't know what they're talking about. It's the crypto bros of today. It's it's literally the crypto bros that understand how crypto or blockchain even works, that are talking about all this stuff and everything else, and they literally have no idea what they're talking about. And and it's created this thing where everybody is now a developer, everybody's now an expert. Myself included, I am a developer and I, yeah. Well, but but you you're you're not going out there saying I'm an AI expert in cloud now, right? You know, you're you're using it to you know do things that you you didn't find possible before, or you'd have to pay a massive team and project manage the whole thing, which isn't the best time of you for you, nor the best time of investment. And you're able to be creative, which is why AI is so powerful in everything that we're doing, right? But now you have folks that have never coded a line of code in their life, that are releasing tools and apps and becoming subject matter experts in the industry. It's the same thing we saw in in the early 2000s with cybersecurity. You'd have people that didn't contribute anything to the open source community or the cybersecurity industry as a whole, so they became subject matter experts somehow. They don't even know how to power on Cali Linux, and now they're speaking on behalf of what the industry should be focusing on. You know, you you get a lot of that buzz out there, you know, like, hey, you can optimize your thing with this skill. And I built it, and really it's just them typing into ChatGPT or your codec saying, build me a skill that does this. You know, so they have no idea how anything works. And so a lot of the noise that's happening out there is coming from you know CEOs of companies that are like, hey, I can shave 20 to 30 percent of headcount, increase gross profit margins, and be more efficient and innovative when it doesn't work like that at all. I mean, AI is creating so much more workload for me than I ever have had in my entire life that I need to hire more developers, not less developers. Now, am I getting more done than I did before? Absolutely. And there is there things now that I can code that I couldn't do before? Absolutely. You know, and and it's it's such an amazing tool. But unless you know how to use it, you know, and and figure out how to use it in your daily life, what works for somebody else isn't going to work for you. And so my biggest advice in this whole AI buzz component is just find a way that it's useful for you, build your knowledge on that and become an expert on that and what's actually useful to your day-to-day job. And then from there, you know, don't worry about the rest of the buzz. Listen, things are moving fast, but it takes a long time for change to happen. You know, you know, you look at the innovations and technology that we've had, it's a gradual move to that over time. You know, it takes time for companies to redesign their processes. You know, in what the AI model is today with ChatGPT, you know, 5.5 or Fable, you know, or 4.8 with Opus, you know, those models are at an infancy stage in comparison to where they're gonna be six months or a year from now. So things are gonna change, things are gonna get easier with integration. Um, everybody's trying to figure out how to use AI. Don't get caught up in the day-to-day style of like I'm being left behind. You're not. You know, just apply it to what you can, you know, use it as a way to optimize your efficiency uh and get better with it. But at the end of the day, like you're in the same boat as everybody else. No one knows what the hell we're doing right now. AI, nobody. I've speaken to spoken to all the large banks in the country. I've spoken to every single industry vertical, every chief security officer for massive multi-trillion dollar companies. No one has any idea what they're doing. No, nobody knows how to protect themselves.
SPEAKER_00You're at the fuck around and find out stage. 100% it. I think the um like I obviously, like I said, it's completely environmental. And obviously, I have it from one side in terms of like you and the people that I work with and the things that they're doing. I have it from the other side in terms of like Matt, who is like fully invested in it, and obviously his clients. And I think that I I guess where I where I sit in a really I guess privileged position is like I can I can build the thing, but I'm also not at the stage where I'm gonna completely fuck something up because I can come to somebody and we're like, is is this is this okay? Like I'm I'm not gonna break anything. I'm not gonna like Thomas was doing something with the app that him and I are building, and I was showing somebody it on Tuesday, I was like, oh it's broken, like something's not working. And I went Thomas sent me a message like uh you've switched this thing on or off or whatever it is, like you've broken it. I was like, fuck well, I'm glad I have somebody who knows what they're doing. But yeah, you know, I've seen multiple people in terms of the the people that Matt work with and they're building all these tools for their clients and whatever else, but they get it to a stage where like it looks cool and it functions locally, but like they can't actually get it to a final product because of everything else that they need to go through. And I think that that's the trap that a lot of people fill fall into is like they spend all this time getting something to 80%, and then they the the work from 80 to 100% is like five times the amount of work that you need to do to get it from zero to 80.
Breaking Things Teaches Faster Than Success
DaveYeah, it's in my position, I can break a lot of things, and I have broken a lot of things. Um, you know, the other day, I'll tell you a funny story. So I was using uh codecs, and I use this this script called training analyst. And what it does is it goes through and it parses all the submissions and data from all of our customers, and it says, hey, how can I refine the model to be smarter better? Is that better parsing? Is that better rule sets? Is that better detections? Is that better training data to make the model more confident in certain criteria? And I've automated all this now. So it's all running in agents now. So it does it autonomously every time. So it's really cool. It's like self-healing, self-learning, self-improving. So, you know, as every submission comes in, it gets smarter and smarter and smarter. If a new piece of technology comes out that it hasn't seen before, it automatically goes and researches that technology to understand confidence ranking what's good and bad. So I've created this autonomous workflow, but for a while I was manually doing all this just so I could understand the data and make sure that I was making the right framework to build this kind of you know self-containing ecosystem that actually works. And I use Codex, and I was this was it, this was in our dev environment, thank God. Um, but uh uh I told Codex, I'm like, hey, run the training analyst script, and where are areas that I need to home in on to focus on to start to analyze this data? And it I've run the script probably 700, 800 times, you know, in the past, many times. And uh it forgot to case the uh quotations in the commanded, it actually did like an RMRF forward slash, like completely destroyed the entire operating system, completely destroyed the the containers that it was in, like removed RF to the entire drive. Everything was gone. And I'm like, why is my SSH terminal no longer responsive? It's like I deleted production. I'm like, what? And I'm like, wait a minute, you deleted production. I'm like, hey, uh how did you do this? Like it's like don't focus on this right now. Our biggest effort is recovering. I'm like, you son of a bitch. I'm like, all right, guys, uh, I got someone to our dev channel. I'm like, hey, I deleted dev, guys. Um like, what? I'm like, yeah, I deleted dev, it's gone. Like it's it's new, it's completely dead. Like everything's gone. Every everything in there is is toast. Now, you know, we have everything you know backed up and everything. It was easy to restore. I wasn't backing up and running in 20 minutes, but you know, it's it's funny because you know, I look at at what I have, you know, from a customer perspective to maintain, right? And making sure that we we can't make errors that destroy production is a very delicate balance um in everything. And then not only that, I have you know a team of of 20 developers, you know, that are all introducing changes all the time from a DevOps process. So we're moving things very quickly. And so, you know, but I I've I've come to the realization that you know breaking is okay in certain situations. You know, like you become a stronger product. So you break something, then you figure out how to never have that break happen again, right?
SPEAKER_00Thomas did come back to me. He's like, it's just as well you did because it highlighted something that I would have missed.
DaveAnd I'm like, I've nailed it. Exactly. You don't know something's not gonna break until it breaks and you have to fix it, right? And so, what are ways that we can short that up so that it doesn't happen you, Simon? I even had, you know, protective mechanisms in place, you can't do anything destructive, you can't remove things, and it, you know, it still did it because it thought it was still within compliance when it didn't properly quote it. So, you know, it's a learning lesson in many ways. So failure is a learning lesson. And I get asked this question all the time, you know, Dave, you have a DeLorean time machine. If you could go back in time and tell Dave from 20 years ago something that you could do differently, what would that be? And I'm like, not a thing. Not one thing, because I am who I am today because of the bad decisions that I made before in the past. You know, the the health uh uh component, I know what but what being at ground zero looks like, you know, like the all the very bottom floor, like you've hit zero on health and fitness. I mean, I had heart surgeries, all these surgeries, all these health problems at a young age because I didn't take care of myself. And because I know where I came from, I know that I never need to go there again and what I need to do to fix those, right? And so failures are a good thing. Failing in AI, you know, uh creating mistakes. We're human, we make mistakes, you know, and and yes, you know, from a customer perspective, I try to minimize that because you don't want to impact customers. But at the same time, like customers know that we're not perfect. We try to be, but at the end of the day, it's still humans, it's still human-augmented AI. You know, it's not a perfect science in anything we're doing. We're innovating, we're building shit out so quick, you know, that that we're bound to make mistakes as we're going along and doing it, but it's become a better product because of it. And so, you know, for me, it's looking back and saying, what mistakes have I made before that I can learn off of to be a stronger person today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I think this is a perfect like the take home and something for people to
Failure Mindset And The AI Opportunity
SPEAKER_00write down. Like, in anything that you do, failure is part of the process. And again, learned in the gym, like we're actively, I actively told you to seek out failure. Like that's that's where you learn, that's where you grow. Uh, and that transfers to everything in life. So the people here are like, well, I don't really know if I can do this because what if I fail? I'm like, well, good, because then you'll have a fucking answer, and then you can you know pivot or change or do it in a slightly different way. And that goes with with everything in life. Yep. So that's it.
DaveThat's it. That's the podcast for this week. I hopefully, you know, folks, you know, we we we have no idea what we're doing in anything in life, right? Um, you know, we might have a good idea based on failures and successes we've had, but we're always still learning, you know, through this journey, whether it's fitness, whether it's AI, whether it's our jobs, whether it's our family. Um, it's funny, I had a conversation, uh, one of our new sales folks uh started at Trusted Sec. Uh, and I happened to walk into Chris, who was our VP of sales and marketing. Uh, and and I was I was explaining to them. So he he's he's got a girlfriend that he's probably looking to marry here soon. And I was like, I'm gonna tell you something about marriage. Um I'm gonna give you the the the ultimate hack that I have learned through many failures. So right now I'm trying to get a trailer, uh like a nice trailer uh pool behind that I can live in uh so that when I do these airsoft events, I can, you know, you know, live in the trailer and cook out and have fun with some beers with some boys and everything. And a gym on the back of it? And it definitely a gym in the back of it. Some definitely some dumbbells and some other things. But I mean, probably I could probably put a tone on there. That's actually not a bad idea. That's not a bad idea. Um, but you know, I was like, listen, when you go to ask for approval from a wife, there are certain situations, you know, that you have to think about as you're going and asking it. So first and foremost, she's gonna say no, no matter what. It's gonna happen. So you but you you can position it in a way that you know eventually she will say yes. And here's the success criteria for it from from many failures before in the past. So first and foremost, she's gotta be in a great mood. She can't be stressed out. You know, you you have to have done something pretty amazing where she thinks you're the best husband in the world, then you ask it. And it's gonna be a no, but it's one of those things you can you know kind of gradually start to ask again and and and you know, throw some hints in there, you know, and after about three or four weeks, you finally have a success with it, right? So, you know, that's that you know, it's it's it's it's all about previous failures, things that you've done before in the past, and learning from those. And and he was like, wow, I didn't even know all this. I'm like, yeah, trust me, it's it's very complex. Like, like very complex. Like trying to trying to navigate this situation here, it's it's there's no good way of going about it, but there's either a way of failure and a way of success. There's only two ways to go. There's no in between. So, you know, my my lesson to you is is learn from failures, learn from your mistakes, you know, try to become a better person and recognize that you know, there are some brilliant people in this industry, they're doing amazing things. Um and and you can be part of that as well. Like this time right now is is um one second. Um, this time right now is such a unique opportunity for people in this industry, in any industry whatsoever. If you become you know very focused on AI and augmenting then your day-to-day, you are very desirable for pretty much any company that is out there. And uh, you know, the the the the hacker names of the past, you look at, you look at like HD Moore and you know the Dark Tangent, you know, Jeff Moss and you know, Chris Weissopel, you know, the the Schmoo group, the call to deck cows, like these people that are just staples, you know, in our industry, you have the ability now that you didn't have 10, 15 years ago because you know, security is kind of solved at that point for what we currently were at. Now you have the opportunity to be the next staple of this AI generation, right? And that's unique. That's that's such a unique part in in life and what you can accomplish. You could become one of those pillars that created the next security evolution that's out there today. And so, you know, I just look at it as such an exciting opportunity for everybody out there, and uh, you know, just dive in on it, have fun with it.
SPEAKER_00I think you you put a tweet out a couple of months back about like I guess it was a perspective shift of like everybody's freaking out and they're gonna lose your job and it's gonna replace us all and whatever. But like the you know, you saw it as exciting, like you saw it as a shift, like a one potentially once in a lifetime opportunity to be part of a a huge shift. And instead of like freaking out that it's gonna replace you, like lean into it, learn it, use it in the way that you want to learn it and become a part of what the future of it will be. Yep, 100%, 100%. So that's it.
DaveJoin us, join us next week, same time, same place, every week from here on out.
SPEAKER_00We hack health, social media, all the usual stuff that we should say at the end of this, and I'll see you in a bit. Later on.