RUSSIA UNDERPERFORMING, US INVOLVEMENT IN THE CONFLICT, AND FIGHTER PILOT TRAINING

January 19, 2023

S04 - E02

Chris Gerritz and RSnake dig into Chris' career path from training to be an Air Force fighter pilot, to running AFCERT, to founding his company and eventually getting acquired, twice. They also dig into what is happening in Ukraine, and how badly Russia is performing in that theater of war. Lastly they discuss a group Chris helped start called Thinkers and Drinkers and how both sides of a conflict need to be heard by the other if progress is the goal.

GUEST(S):

Chris Gerritz

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Robert Hansen

Today I'm with Chris Gerritz. We dig into his career path from training to be an Air Force fighter pilot to running AFCERT, to founding his company and eventually getting acquired. We also dig into what is happening in Ukraine and how badly Russia is performing in that theater of war. Lastly, we discuss a group Chris helped start called Thinkers & Drinkers and how both sides of the conflict need to be heard by the other if progress is the goal.

With that, please meet Chris Gerritz.

Yeah. I don't know if it's sleep or dehydration or just talking too loud at the bars or staying up too late. Or weird pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. I don't know what it is. But something about Vegas; I always lose my voice like 100% of the time.

Chris Gerritz

I don't think it was planned. None of this was planned. My career did take a few turns here and there and it ended up being an incredible experience. In 2003, I joined right out of high school. This was like right after 9/11 so that inspired me. I went into the delayed entry program pretty early, as soon as I could, just because of that whole situation.

I was always technical. I was a nerd. I played video games, huge land parties. We were not the cool kids back then.

Robert Hansen

Now we are.

Chris Gerritz

That's exactly what happened to Crimea and look what happened. They got completely taken over. Then there's an even more interesting argument that I saw, it was going through the economics of the value to the United States in terms of letting this happen. The best answer I saw was things like, for every dollar we put in, we make something like 100, I don't think it's exactly 100, but some amount back. A fairly high ROI. I forget what the actual number was.

One example of a hidden value that we get on top of all the actual value we get from degrading our enemy for every dollar we spend, is, all of the allies in the region are watching this play out. They're watching US or Western weapons against Eastern weapons. They're seeing absolute decimation and a complete lack of good doctrine. The equipment is failing for ordinary reasons like rusting out and getting stuck in the mud. Electronic warfare is not even being used, which I do want to talk about in a second.

So if you were going to buy weapons, would you buy Western weapons or would you buy Eastern weapons? Now, they might be a little cheaper, making them half off or a 10th off, but is it worth that? Is it worth it?

I think what's going to end up happening is pretty much any buyer of weapon systems in the world is going to be taking a strong hard look at that and going, "I don't think I want Russian weapons." I mean, unless I have no choice at all. I don't think that's a wise choice.

Which of those sets of arguments do you personally align with? Or do you have any feelings about that?

Chris Gerritz

I don't know. It's a very complex situation. I spent 10 years in the military. Certainly, after getting out, it's difficult to be 100% patriot, we're-always-right person. That's who I was when I joined. But after a while, you start realizing that the world is a very complex place and things aren't very cut and dry. We all want it to be cut and dry. We want decisions to be made that are very decisive.

I think one of our pitfalls right now is we're looking at this scenario and saying, "What historical context or what historical example is this? Is this Crimea? Should we do something? Or is this Vietnam? Should we not do something? Is this a scenario where we're going to have something brand new and we're going to have World War III? We're all trying to figure that out right now. I don't know if anybody has that answer.

So I'm probably on the side that says these guys have been an antagonist, if not an enemy, but an antagonist for a long time. Does this benefit us? I don't think war benefits anybody in the long run. But letting a warmonger go run amok is also not good for anybody either. So I'm probably there.

I think the technology questions are very interesting. I think that's the most interesting thing about this, is, what new technologies, after 20 years of insurgency combat that we've been exposing ourselves to and we've been building fifth-generation fighters that have no use in those scenarios. So after 20 years, what does a new war look like with real countries? We're seeing that right now. We're also seeing how big of a pufferfish that someone like Russia is. They're not doing as well.

Robert Hansen

I heard a really good explanation about why that might be true and many sub-reasons, obviously. One is because they were originally a communist-driven organization, where all decisions had to flow up to the very top. Which is a massive problem, even if you start delegating. You're like, "Well, okay, it won't be me. I'll be in an oligarchy. I'll have a bunch of generals beneath me who make these individual decisions."

The problem is that now you have to have the generals really close to the line to make any sense of what's going on and make decisions. Which means your generals are in harm's way, which means that you're going to be able to kill their generals, and now what happens? And we've killed something crazy, like 30 or 40 generals.

Chris Gerritz

By "we" you mean Ukraine?

Robert Hansen

Robert Hansen

Why did someone steal it? I mean, the keys were in it, but I figured no one would steal it. We have seen quite a few drones, though. There have been a few large loitering drones out there, but not many. The bulk of them have been very small, personal drones and extremely effective.

One I saw was a really interesting video. It was a very small DJI-type drone, so small that it had a little grenade under it that looked large. It flew over battlespace, and the caption under it was, we dropped this down the chimney of this Russian thing. Whether that's true or not, I have no idea because it's very hard to tell in the video.

We debated this a long time, being part of the air force Cyber Command on what a war would look like in cyberspace. Like, would this be a highly prevalent way to fight a war? Would it even be available?

Yeah, there's no utility other than just chaos. Maybe as a terrorist attack or something but zero economic upside. From a nation-state perspective, you're just hobbling your own capability as well. I think that's analogous here. I think you're absolutely right. They were very much more concerned about their own communications than anybody else's. It's crazy.

The other thing that I've talked about a couple of times, and I want to get your take on it, was GIS ARTA artillery. Have you heard of this?

Chris Gerritz

No.

Robert Hansen

This is fantastic. Apparently, some reporter found this thing.

Chris Gerritz

GIS, as in Global Information System?

Robert Hansen

As in, mapping software. Some researchers found this out because some security company claimed that this piece of software had been compromised. It turned out it probably hadn't been compromised. But anyway, that caused this reporter to take a look at it. Like, what is this thing? I never heard of it.

Secondly, that same reporter also noticed that there was this very specific incident where there was something that these airplanes wanted to blow up. But instead of blowing up the thing that they were after, they blew up nearby. All these bombs are blowing up, or missiles started dropping in this one specific place, but it's not like they missed in the sense that they all were exactly where they were supposed to be, except where the target was actually just over here.

So their coordinates were wrong, but their aim was perfect if that makes sense. Usually, it's the other way around.

Chris Gerritz

Does that mean it was intentional?

Robert Hansen

No. What it means is they had old, crappy side scanning radar from these old Su aircraft, or these old Russian aircraft. Their centroid is known to be wrong. He deduced that that's what's going on, but he's like, "But why are they so accurate?" It make sense where their centroid error would be off because it's old radar systems. That's how they work. But why is everyone so accurate? How are they able to get all these things going on?

And these are different types of explosions, too. It's not just one thing. It's a couple of different types of explosions going off. So we figured it out. It's a software that's JSR for artillery. It is effectively Uber for dropping bombs. You basically say, "Hey, there's a target right here at these coordinates. Who has bombs or a grenade or a rocket or whatever? Just someone dropped some ordinance right here right now."

So somebody might say, "Sorry, I'm tasked to do something else." "Yes, I have the ability to do it, but I'm not going to because I've got an important mission." But otherwise, if you got a cannon nearby, like, "Oh, yeah, sure, we'll drop some bombs in there. I'll drop some ordnance and this way or that way, or whatever."

One of the advantages of that is many of the Russian defenses are set up to protect in the case of multiple launches. So if they see many things coming from one location, they're like, "Okay, that's a high-value target. start dropping bombs there." But if there's just one missile going off, or just one cannon going off or something, it just doesn't look like a juicy enough target from their targeting acquisition software.

So they're able to be extraordinarily, ridiculously accurate, especially with HIMARS and some of these others, where they can basically drop 10, 20 different things from different locations all in one place coming from different directions. There's just nothing you can do about it. There's nowhere to run. And with the combination of drones for the targeting acquisition, this is effectively a done war. We're looking at the total decimation of the Russian army unless they pull out some sort of magic trick or something.

Chris Gerritz

They have a lot of army. They can keep shoving them in.

Robert Hansen

That's what they would have to do, or nuclear weapons or some other mass destruction, which we don't want. So I think the Republicans are right to be concerned about that particular issue. But it is interesting to watch this all play out.

From what I can tell, the software is ultimately unique. I've not heard about it anywhere else. I've never seen anyone else reference anything close to it. But it is absolutely being heavily used by Ukraine and absolutely going to be used on the battlefield of the future. It's a genius idea. It's so simple.

Chris Gerritz

It's the consumerization of the military. You take technologies like Uber or even concepts like that, and you say, "How can we adapt that?" When we were doing mass collection, how do you search for all that? Well, let's contact Google, they know how to search. How do I get independent organizations to deliver something that I need over here? We'll Uber in some artillery.

Robert Hansen

That's right. I think it's really fascinating to watch it play out. I think you're right. How do we hybridize what we know works really well, as opposed to the Russian model, which is we have a general who gets to decide who gets to get blown up today or not, or he's taking a nap, we can't disturb him right now. It's like, no, no, no, no. We need bombs here now. It's almost the exact opposite doctrine.

Chris Gerritz

Have you heard of how they do reporting in the Russian military? It's called picture reporting. I was reading a lot about how they do reporting. Some of their military units were reporting back false information. They were doing that because there's not a whole lot of motivation in some of these units to do what they want to do.

If they're told, "You must take this hill," in order for them to get the accolades from the higher command and to go all the way up to Putin, they have to take a picture of them taking that hill. So often, they'll say, "Well, I don't want to take that hill. I don't have the manpower to take that hill. You haven't given me the tools. I don't have any ammo." So they'll just send three people up there at night, sneak up there, take the photo, put the wagon, take it down, and run away.

Robert Hansen

It's like a counting coup or something,

Chris Gerritz

There have been reports of this multiple times on a lot of these channels that I watch of these picture reports being forged. Just send people in to get the picture, don't even hold it and then leave. Then the higher command thinks we have that territory. No, you don't. You took a picture.

Or, Hey, do we have enough ammo? Well, here's a picture of the warehouse. It's got a bunch of AK-47s. No, those AK-47s were sold on the black market to people who wanted bump stocks and fully automatic weapons in Western countries. That's an empty warehouse. But there's an old picture that you send in.

Robert Hansen

I think the whole thing about some carcasses of the Russian soldiers, and they were pulling apart their equipment just to see everything they had. They're looking at their kit, making sure they understand what's in there. They found that a lot of the C-Four was just blocks of wood. A low-cost bidder just decided to replace their plastic explosives with wood, which is fantastic.

That just shows the level of corruption that was super pervasive. Another example of that that I thought was really interesting was, there was some mechanic who worked fairly high up in mechanics inside the US Army. He was in charge of something like 1,000 tanks and making sure that they were all running. He said, one of the things that he noticed very early on in the war was many of the Ukrainian pictures of Russian tanks in the mud were track vehicles, not Humvees.

All these track vehicles had these rust patterns or break patterns that was indicative of something that's a very common problem with all track vehicles. But it's easily identified and easily fixed if you know what you're looking for. What that means is that, literally, no one is looking at any of those things. Because somebody should have run the track over one time, make sure that it doesn't have that rust pattern or whatever is causing that problem or breakage of the plastics on it and make sure everything's up.

If it's not, then you pull it all apart, put it all back together with the next one that's working properly, and then that thing will work for another four or five years, no problem. And he's like, it's an enormous pain. You've got to go through every single one of those, and you have to do it on a regular basis. So you're never really done with this job. You just keep going through. When you're done, you just start over. It’s a job that never ends.

It's obvious that the Russians are not maintaining 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of these tanks. So when winter is really upon us, again, which is February timeframe, when it really started snowing, you're going to see that a lot of those things get stuck in the mud again for the same reasons that tracks are falling off or breaking.

This all points to this level of corruption within the Russian government and how they function compared to Western militaries that I think they're going to have to take a very long, hard look at.

Chris Gerritz

So this is an area where the amount of hours that we have in the plane, for instance, is significantly higher than our partner countries that partner with us. When we do NATO training, we do NATO training in Texas, we bring pilots from Italy, Germany, and France to fly the same aircraft that we fly. But we are not on the same level when we're doing red flags.

They do have good pilots, but most of their pilots do not get the type of hours that we get. If you're flying an F-16 in Arizona, you're doing a mission every Friday, every Thursday. You're planning that week, you fly that mission, you fly sortie. It's going to be three hours. It costs 10s of 1000s of dollars an hour just in fuel, let alone maintenance.

I mean, they tear those planes apart and put them back together all the time. The Italian military doesn't do that. They don't have the luxury of flying every week. And when they do fly, they're not flying the mission aircraft because the mission aircraft costs $100,000 an hour to go out into the air. So they're flying another aircraft just to maintain their qualifications.

You'll see that in the Russian military, and you'll see that in other areas of the world. Nobody has the amount of money that we spend to maintain our equipment, to make sure it is combat-worthy, and to make sure that our pilots and our people know how to use it. It is significantly different. You don't know just how different it is until you've been in a classroom with all of your partner countries.

I mean, I had two pilots from Afghanistan, and the difference between schooling wasn't a language barrier. The things that they knew and were trained on were completely different. And these were their brightest stars. So that's something that...

Robert Hansen

That's their top guns? Wow. That's really interesting. I've heard similar stories about the amount of rounds fired by their expert marksmen as compared to ours. Or the rounds fired, even just grunts coming off the line. A lot of them have maybe fired two rounds total out of their guns and then another one to give them feedback on the first one and that's it.

No body armor. Sometimes no helmets or the helmets are World War II repainted. I think it's very interesting to see that all playing out. One last thing about the Ukraine thing while we're talking. I saw Letterman and Zelensky on David Letterman's new show talking. And it was an unremarkable thing so I'm not recommending it or anything.

One thing I thought was interesting is they did the entire hour-long segment or the bulk of it inside a subway station. The subway station was still operational so you can still hear it. But during the episode, you heard the air raid sirens going off.

I just wanted to get your take on what you think the upside and downside of hitting the civilian population is from Putin's perspective. Like, why bother?

Chris Gerritz

Well, first, I don't believe that civilians should be involved in those types of things at all. I think that's a moral failing doing that. But also, when you're losing and when you're on the defense, sometimes it's all you have. You've got to operate out of a civilian building. You've got to operate out of a subway.

During the insurgency era, that's all they could do. They knew we had restrictions against hitting schools, so they'd go hide their weapons at schools. Yeah, there is a moral failing in that, but also they're trying to defend their country.

I started my career in computers and network security. I did secure communication, before going to pilot training. Pilot training was short two years for me. I got transferred over when I got diagnosed with my autoimmune disorder that hurt my hand.

They put me in San Antonio. San Antonio has the Air Force Cyber Command and a lot of other assets. NSA Texas is there. There's quite a bit of cyber stuff there. In fact, most people think of Fort Meade. They think of Baltimore. San Antonio has pretty much a copy of most of that capability. So that was an interesting area.

I was actually assigned to the wounded warriors at Fort Sam Houston, but I was working day to day for Air Force Cyber Command. They put me in one of their units. Actually, a super interesting story of how I even got into it. When I reported to the wounded warriors, I said, "Well, what's my schedule? I don't have a job anymore. I can't fly." They said, "Well, go to your doctor when you need to." Well, that's maybe every two weeks right now. They've got to figure out what to do with me. The bureaucracy of the military has to figure out what to do with me and that's going to take a while. In fact, it took like two years for them to figure out that they were going to medically retire me.

But in the meantime, I went to look for a job. They said, "Well, we can give you a job, but it's going to be like guarding the gate or something stupid. You're the only officer in the Wounded Warriors here, so if you want to go find one, go find one. We'll write it up for you."

I ended up marching my ass down to what we called Security Hill on Lackland Air Force Base. I did a little Google search, trying to find where's the Administrative Office? Where's the wing? Weirdly, they didn't put any of that on there. It was not on the internet at the time. None of these secret organizations are on Google. So I had a hard time.

I ended up finding the wing building. I was stationed in a bunch of different places and the wing building is usually an administrative office. It's not in a skiff. It's not in a really high-security environment. This entire building was a skiff, which is the highest classification you can have outside of Washington DC and the White House.

So here I am, a little Lieutenant, knocking on the door of this big vault. Of course, no one's answering me. This guy in a suit comes up behind me and says, "Sir, can I help you? You were knocking on the door of a skiff." I go, "Well, I'm with the wounded warriors. I used to be a pilot. I'm looking for a job, Electrical Engineer. I just want to give my resume to the wing admin to see if there are any openings where I can go help."

And he just goes, "Well, I'm an electrical engineer. Come on in. He just signs me into the skiff, barely knows my name. He signs me in, rolls right past the wing admin, barges into the General's door. The General stands up for him, hangs up the phone and says, "I've got to go." He says," What can I do for your, Rich?"

I'm like, who is this guy? Why is the General being deferential to him? He just says, "Hey, do you want a free engineer in one of your units?" He goes, "I'll take a free engineer." He said, "Give him your resume," and he walks out the door. I'm like, "General, who was that?" "Oh, that was the CIO of the Air Force. He's here for like a day. He just went out to check his phone."

Just the right place, the right time. He ended up taking my resume and saying, "Actually, do need some electrical engineers. How long are you here for?"

"I don't know. It might take a year for these people to figure out what to do with me. Just find me a place where I can be useful. This is the stuff I like. I like cybersecurity stuff."

We put together a little crack team to go figure it out. We assumed that it had to be someone big, like Russia, North Korea, or China. Back in 2011, we were really worried about North Korea, Iran, and China. Russia, not so much. So we assumed it was one of them until we got a cease and desist order the said, "Stop removing our power," from a three-letter agency.

They said, "We deploy that during the exercises. Whenever we're acting as opposition forces, we attack and we deploy malware and stuff. You are currently distributing government property and giving it to research partners to figure out what this stuff is. They shouldn't have access to this. So, please, stop."

I think they often do this sometimes. When Red Teams get their techniques burned, they say, "Well, don't distribute that too far because then I can't simulate a bad guy that you don't know much about because now you know too much." It's hard to simulate.

So they're very protective of their tradecraft. They're very protective of how they attack. In terms like the NSA Red Team, sometimes they're using knowledge that the NSA has because they happen to sit in the same building. So let's not go and distribute that too widely. So the cease and desist made sense from there.

What ended up happening in 2011 for the particular thing that you're talking about, that we've discussed before, that particular mission, we decided to look into the actual legality of, can they compromise this many of our systems, and do we have to let them? What we found was, yes, they do have authority to breach our networks during these exercises. They do have the authority to leave it there if they need it for a future exercise. But we don't have to let them. So we just decided, let's take all these new techniques in this threat-hunting concept that we're building, and figure out how we would remove a really sophisticated actor.

I think the NSA accounts are really sophisticated actors. Let's go and remove them. Let's see how fast we could do it. Let's see if we could really find it all. Let's see if the NSA has to call us and say, "Hey, can we get back in your network?" That would be a really nice position to be in. That whole experiment was like, during the exercise, how do we remove a really bad actor?

Robert Hansen

That's great. The way I remember this story, you were telling me quite a bit of ago, so I might have misremembered it. You actually took some of those lessons learned from that. And when you left the military, that's how you decided, "I think we can do this. I think we can turn this into an actual company."

Chris Gerritz

Medical retirement pushes you in a certain direction. I did stay on as a civilian for a little bit. But one of the things that really occurred to me when I started interviewing after I was getting medically retired and leaving the military, I was interviewing with different organizations and realizing nobody was being proactive in cybersecurity. Everyone was very reactive. Everyone was very architecture based.

Yes, I was definitely not the smartest one. But I happened to be into the wounded warriors. They couldn't promote me and they couldn't send me anywhere. So I was the only one left for a couple of years because we did such a good job. Then suddenly, I am the smartest person in the room.

That whole experience of being able to watch that whole thing play out and knowing that being proactive was working. Then also, by the way, the government networks are really difficult to triage and get through and to get access to everything. That was a huge challenge. I know they're out there, but I can't even get access to these systems.

I can't even jump into a new network that I know is compromised because the attacker came through your network and you don't have the tooling that I use on my network to discover them. So how can I hunt in your network if you don't have my tools, my sensors, and my policies? That means I have to re-architect your network to go and hunt.

That was the impetus for Infocyte, my company. I talked to Russ Morris, who's my co-founder. He was a captain getting out at the time and he was an Air Force Red Teamer. I said, "There's a commercial application here. This one question of, how do I hunt for bad guys?"

We spent years building up the infrastructure and Air Force network to go and find the actors that we were trying to look for. But time and again, it was always like they were not in our network. They're not in our well-instrumented network. They're in the not well-instrumented network that we'll never find them in because that's where they can hide. They're in the shadows.

Infocyte was all about how do I solve that problem of you have a network that is not instrumented correctly, you're not logging. And it turns out every commercial organization we talked to was like this, except for a very select few. So I said, we can build this tool, and we can go out and assess your organization. We can hunt in this organization. We can find hidden problems that you don't know about because you're not instrumented to find them. That's what Infocyte was when we first created it.

Robert Hansen

What were your major crazy success stories? Like, you walk in and then you just found something crazy? I know there were a number of them.

Chris Gerritz

There are a couple of them. Today, most hacking has a really flashy end, it's ransomware. I got hacked, my entire organization is hacked, and now we all got a pop-up that says, "I owe you Bitcoin." You don't need to hunt for that. They just told you that they're there.

The type of thing that we were finding were precursors to that. A lot of times before that ransomware, someone's in that network for a long time, or they got in real early and didn't know what they had. Then they say, "Okay, this is valuable, I'm going to want to ask them for two Bitcoins because they're a bigger organization. I want to know who they are."

Or the type of actors that are spying on you, or the type of threat actors that are using you to attack other organizations. Those are the types of hacks where you'll never know because they don't want a pop-up.

Robert Hansen

Or just changing data slowly over time. Those are terrible. They're very difficult to find.

Chris Gerritz

Those ones in specific, especially political organizations, you don't want to see that. Those types of attacks aren't seen as much and they're not in the stats. Those were the ones we were finding.

So when we went and ran the software, we'd say, "Hey, you are breached." They go, "Well, I haven't lost money in the last three years and you're telling me it's been here for three years. They've had access to my network and they're not doing anything, they're not impacting my business. Is this worthwhile to me?"

I'm like, "Well, let's see what they're doing. You're not logging a lot so I can't tell you everything they're doing. But I can tell you they're using you to attack other organizations. I can tell you they have access to your emails. I can tell you that, if they wanted to, they could take you down. Do you want that?

That conversation ended up happening is hospitals, where they were breached and being used to attack other organizations, or precursors to a ransomware attack where they were just propagating their access throughout the entire network so they could ransom all at the same time. That could take weeks for some of these actors, maybe hours for a really good one that's got a well-architected network.

There's always this time component with hacks. People hack more organizations than they can actually process. So a lot of people end up being hacked for a long time before the impact occurs if there ever will be a big impact that you're going to see. So, whether it's a hospital or a bank.

We've had biotech companies that were breached, and they didn't know it, and it was years. Someone, whether its competitor in a different country, has access to your network and your research data. Do you want that? I can't tell you the exact impact of where it went, but I know they have access. Those are the types of things we were finding.

Robert Hansen

This actually reminds me of a conversation I had just a couple of days ago with somebody. There's a friend of a friend who can somehow get all these crazy tickets. Not just sort of good tickets like scalping type and not for crazy, huge prices like you might see with a scalper. These are like $1,500 tickets, they can get for like, $30. They are real tickets and this person will actually go and they'll have this amazing time. It's like, I can't believe I had these crazy awesome tickets for like 30 bucks.

But it's not just one place, it's many different places. He's like, how is this happening? Not actually having access to these networks, it's impossible to know for sure. But one of the many ways it could be is just somebody says they have a Bank of really awesome tickets for dignitaries or whatever. Then a certain cohort of people can pull out those tickets as needed for these emissaries or mayors or whatever.

And instead of them getting utilized, they just pull them out, they suck them out, or some variant of that. From a conference organizer's perspective, or a concert organizer's perspective, they're not losing any money. They'd already banked these to get rid of them. I mean, they're designed to give to ultra-wealthy or ultra-politically powerful people or whatever.

So they were expecting to lose that money either way. It's just that they didn't go to where they thought. They're not going to get the political clout associated with giving them away to the mayor or the governor or whoever it is.

I think those types of actors, yeah, they didn't lose money, but they didn't get what they wanted. A lot of those systems, you can just imagine. I go to Circuit America sometimes and I call them asking for tickets. They're like, "Well, this system is terrible. Nothing is in sorted order. It takes me forever to find anything." A system like that, obviously, they're not going to notice somebody who's just grabbing one or two seats here and there.

Chris Gerritz

Yeah. Penny stealers for offer space.

Robert Hansen

Exactly. Over time, one back-end at a time, it's maybe not very useful. But when you get enough of them and it's constantly flowing to the network, and you get a stable of people who are really interested in buying your $30 tickets or whatever, it suddenly starts adding up and becoming a real thing. The risk is high because you're putting yourself out there and it's easy to find what's there. But what's the value of hunting that? It's just not very high.

Chris Gerritz

And that was a big problem. We couldn't convince. Back then, it was in the 2013-2014 timeframe when I was trying to pitch this. Would this even have a commercial application? Do we even want to know? Is it worth it if something is not seen on the balance sheet as an impact as a business impact?

Fast forward to today, it's actually pretty common practice. People want to know early. We realized that these attacks do occur. We do realize that access like that is a bad thing. And if a regulator or an insurance company finds that we didn't do anything about it, and we're not proactively looking, we're going to get hit. They're not going to cover me when I do have a real impact.

I think a lot of things have changed over the last decade. This proactive nature, threat hunting, monitoring my network, having good visibility on what's going on in my network. Whether it's even these tickets that are floating out the side that no one even realizes, no one even knows. Low-grade theft and fraud have monetary consequence. But when you're hacked, and someone has unfettered access, they could do anything.

They're not doing anything right now, or they're stealing pennies. They're stealing little tickets that nobody cares about. But that same access, especially when it's at the operating system level and the network, can be sold to anybody with a bigger agenda. That's the real danger.

Robert Hansen

I totally agree. You mentioned the time component. I think this is an interesting side comment. What do you think about the future of the world where adversaries have fully weaponized, and using the word AI is wildly too complicated for what I'm really describing, but something that can take a brand new exploit, convert it into code, and fire it off with effective machine efficiency?

So instead of it taking hours or days, and you're saying it might take days to pivot around inside of a network, it's more like milliseconds, or maybe a second or two to do the full composition analysis, double-check to make sure it works, and fire it off at exactly what targets you're after, but definitely not days. What does that do for hunting?

Do you think that's sort of the death of that slow, by comparison anyway, reaction? Or do you think that there will be a counter-reaction? Or how do you deal with that kind of threat?

Chris Gerritz

I've had this discussion a lot because of the conception, and you're not a layman in this world. You know there are ways to hack fast, there are ways to hack slow, and most hacking is a pretty monotonous process. But most laymen, especially the buyers of cybersecurity products have in their mind the movie theater, you can hack in seconds. And if you have a good enough hacker, they can break any door and break any lock on demand.

Robert Hansen

Of course, they can, given time.

Chris Gerritz

Obviously, they can break that lock. The reality is a little bit less than that, or a lot less than that. Like in the military, if the general wants a cybersecurity effect and they say, "Hey, take down that power plant," and they haven't pre-attacked that organization or have an implant or have a way in already, or know about a vulnerability of a piece of software that they currently have, or even done the recon to know what software they have so that when I'm asked to take it down, can I?

If I have to go and recon, find out what software is running in that power plant, find out is it vulnerable to anything, develop an exploit, attack the organization. Okay, I'm in. Am I in the first ring or am I in the deep where I can turn off the whole thing? That's going to take some time.

No one likes that request of "take down the power plant," "turn off the lights" when we haven't prepped the battlefield. So preparation of the battlefield on the military side is a huge component of cybersecurity and it's constantly happening. We want to be able to turn off the lights on demand. We have a lot of work to do before that.

With criminals, oftentimes, they are hacking everybody. So they take over a million computers. Well, which one has money? I just took over a million computers. One of them is grandma, one of them is a flower shop. Oh, over here we got a bank. The bank I can actually exploit, I can extort, I can take money from and they'll probably pay me off. But I can't ask for that same amount of money from the flower shop that doesn't even have it.

So there is a large component to this, of even understanding what you hacked. Even if you had that AI system that said I can hack anything on demand when I press the button, even if that existed, now you have too many assets and you don't even know what value they have.

Robert Hansen

What if I could precede the battlefield with knowledge of what is out there? Then when I'm ready, when the exploit exists, when it finally arrives on my doorstep, and someone's finally developed it, I'm like, "Okay, great, I can fire it off at the second that it comes out."

Let's say a brand new exploit hits the world. Someone in the world has got it, and they publish it somewhere, and I happen to see it. I should be able to be on the box within a second of that arriving to your inbox and my inbox at the same time, your Blue Team and Red Team.

From your perspective, it looks an awful lot like I'm the adversary. I have precognition because there's no way I could possibly have done all of that crazy, knowing that you exist, that you have this vulnerability, and taking this vulnerability and turning it into code and actually running it on your computer and getting full access in that timeframe. It just seems illogical that that would be true. Yet, I do think that, while it may not exist today, I think that if something like that were to be built, and I have built components of it so I know it can be done, I think that that changes how we react completely.

A lot of the defensive stuff that we talked about in computer security just doesn't work anymore. Even things like web application firewalls that are designed to stop web application threats. You can't update the backplane fast enough. It's a multi-second update of the backplane where I can be on your computer and under a second. So it's an order of magnitude too slow. And that's in the best case.

Chris Gerritz

The world is changing. I don't think proactive measures are going away anytime soon, especially for large networks that are persistent for a very long time. The world has changed, and the way we defend our networks is really lagging behind. I think that's going to be ever-present because of corporations and governments and bureaucracy.

Robert Hansen

I totally agree. I'm just throwing it out there. What might the world look like in that scenario? What changes?

Chris Gerritz

In that case, it might look like the movies. I can imagine this little board. I've got 10 targets or 10 organizations that I may want to attack sometime in the future. At any given moment, the software that they have, or the things that they're exposed to, some of them are green, some of them are red. I can get into those right now if I wanted to; I can't get into those right now if I wanted to.

I would need to do some more research. I have a team over here researching all the red ones that I can't get into. I want that board green. But regardless, I've got 10 targets. If I get the go order, I can give them at least two options. I can imagine that being a real thing.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, I think so too. I think it's getting closer. Maybe not this year, but I think a lot of the software components, a lot of the ability to decompile more complex vulnerabilities and turn them into code are really close. One problem with vulnerabilities is hackers often put their own exploit code that will counteract or actually hack the hacker trying to use it. So you have to be really careful with this code.

But I have a feeling if Robert Hansen can identify, I think a computer could do even a better job at doing it much faster. I know you have a number of competitors out there. How did that end up going when you got into head-to-head deals? How did that all play out?

Chris Gerritz

This is an exercise in business. The world changes a lot. Being a technical cyber guy, going in and saying, "I'm going to go create a business," never even worked in the commercial world in my life. In fact, when I asked for money, the feedback I got was, "Have you ever had a real job?" I'm like, "No, I worked for government for 10 years." Get out.

But we did have some backers that said we got great domain knowledge, let's go out and create something. It's a hot space. Detection in general was a hot space. CrowdStrike and SentinelOne were brand new back then, raising their first series A's and stuff like that, and showing real promise that this is a real market.

We were on the side of the market. We were underfunded and didn't have a lot of business acumen. That's actually a bad thing. When you're trying to go and defeat 28 different companies that all raise $100 million, and they all have really good business pedigrees on their executive staff, two captains from the Air Force aren't going to get a whole lot of money. They're not going to get a whole lot of clout and it's an uphill battle.

I was naive, and I think that naivety is really the reason I did it. I'm really glad for it. If I had known what I knew now, I would not even start.

Robert Hansen

No, and that's very common. A lot of people are either, I don't mean this in a bad way, way too dumb to know that they shouldn't be doing this. But often those people are very successful because they just beat their heads against a wall that everyone else says, "That's a wall, stop doing that." Eventually, it will break and then they get through it and then you're on the other side.

Chris Gerritz

It's a combination of stubbornness and luck.

Robert Hansen

Luck is a big part of it.

Chris Gerritz

I think also we had the type of creativity you have when you have a business that has no executives and no structure, no oversight, really. You can tinker and do whatever and try different things. That's where the real innovation is happening. That's why startups do so well.

That's why I see big companies say, "Well, I created this little branch that's going to do some R&D and create a startup within a big company." It never works.

The oversight stifles innovation. It stifles creativity. When they have a harebrained idea, you're like, "No, we can't do that. That's too much risk." Versus a startup that just got half a million bucks from a bunch of rich people who can afford to lose it. Yeah, go try it, and see if it works. Don't try the thing everyone else is doing because those companies are better funded than you.

So we would look at the companies that were getting a lot of money in this detection space. CrowdStrike were the heavy gorilla that was doing really well. Carbon Black was a big one in the EDR space. So we were ancillary to that.

Robert Hansen

Robert Hansen

When we went down market, we said, "The enterprise is already doing this. Why aren't you? Then we started seeing insurance requirements, saying, "Hey, you need to monitor your network. You need EDR." So we got in at the right time with the right product for the small business. And because we were such a small team, we were able to pivot fast and do that.

And because we had direct contact with them, we were able to say, "Our product is actually too complicated for them, we need to make it easier. It's got a space shuttle interface, we need to make it an iPod interface, simplify it, and then we can sell this product to them." The big enterprise players, the CrowdStrikes of the world, they won't be able to pivot down because they've been serving this really large enterprise market and they're distracted. That was about the 2018 timeframe when we decided to do that.

Robert Hansen

I think that was a great idea because I cannot imagine a world where I would ever recommend any of those. Even if a company was right on the cusp of getting to be big enough, and I knew that they could skirt it over the line, I'm like, why bother? You're going to get the worst possible customer service because you're the smallest customer, instead of just working with you.

A lot of times, smaller companies might be very tiny but very important in their own right. Are we saying that they don't deserve good security? A lot of those small companies serve enormous companies. I remember I did this analysis for this one company. This is almost a very similar situation where they were worried about people modifying their data. Not stealing data, not deleting data, modifying data.

They were a company that did health care stuff. They were basically trying to do autism research. The problem is, their adversaries are very fanatical on both sides. Some people believe autism is a genetic thing. Some people think it's an environmental thing. The people who believe it's genetic, they think that if it's genetic, you should be able to test for it, and that means you should be able to abort the people and get rid of them. But there's a whole bunch of people who say, "Wait, you're going to abort me? I have autism. I'm still a productive person. Why would you do that? I don't want that to happen." They're very angry about that.

Then the other side is, "It's probably some drug." If that's the case, China has this insanely large amount of autism. If it's drug-related and US manufacturers create that drug, which is incredibly likely, that could initiate a war. So there are two conflicting and very politically interested groups to make sure that it goes whatever direction that they want it to go.

Robert Hansen

You eventually got acquired. Tell me about how that went.

Chris Gerritz

My first acquisition of my first company, Russ and I, the co-founder, always thought about what would this look like. When you're in that cycle that you just started, you're going to change the world, the reality sets in, what did we do? Russ' wife is like, "Why did you make him quit his job? We had such a good life? Damn you, Chris."

We're friends now again. But that whole process ends on an acquisition. For us, the move to go down market into small businesses was the number one thing we did. We got on the radar of Datto. Datto is an organization that serves the small business market through partners. They provide technology stack, they provide backup, they provide all these other components of delivering a managed IT service.

And by the way, when you're delivering that needs to be secure. That started being a bigger and bigger conversation. Before, it was just antivirus. Then 2018, 2019, 2020, especially as we got into the pandemic, it started being a really relevant concept where insurance says, "Thou must monitor your network. You have to do more than just the antivirus you've been doing."

The enterprise is already well adopted with all of this stuff. In fact, CrowdStrike, SentinelOne and others went to IPO. Huge companies; really successful. Datto said, "We've got into get that too." All of their competitors in the small business space were starting to white-label that enterprise technology and trying to adapt it and go shove it into the small businesses. It's not going to work as well. They don't have anybody to run it.

So that was the strategy. Datto came along and said, "We should buy or build because we need to make it work for our customers." That was the whole strategy. They went out and scoured everybody looking for who's operating in the space? Who's simple enough for the small business?

Oh, there's this company in Texas that's doing this. They have really good people. We evaluated them. I wouldn't say they're better than any of the big enterprise players, but the expertise is there. The capability is there and they're operating in our space.

So we were on their shortlist. We ended up winning out on that shortlist. They purchased the company. It was a huge outcome for Russ and I. I think we contribute that to the fact that we raised about $13 million in total venture capital, struggled a lot, especially against competitors that had hundreds or $500 million in funding.

Robert Hansen

And then went public, so suddenly they have a billion dollars to spend on marketing.

Chris Gerritz

Right. When you're trying to compete with a company that spends $100 million on R&D and $600 million on marketing, that's really tough. At the exit, we had about 30 people working with the company. We got acquired. The whole objective was to adapt it and deploy it into the security stack or into the entire IT stack that our partners use by at Datto.

It was a really cool proposition. Really cool to be part of, and to watch actually happen. It's been a year now and it's been very successful.

Robert Hansen 1:26:49

What was it like working with VCs? Do you regret that decision? Was that the right decision? Would you do differently next time? Any sort of lessons for the entrepreneur?

Chris Gerritz

When you work with VCs and you're doing really well, they're the best people in the world. When you're not doing really well, they're terrible to work with. They hate you, you hate them. You're a zombie company. And they know it. They know that 9 out of 10 of their companies are going to go nowhere, or just break even. And breaking even is a good outcome if you're not the winner.

It's always funny to me that that's the concept. Yet, I've had conversations in the boardroom where they're like, "Chris, I've never seen anything this horrible before. This is a terrible outcome. This is not going well." I'm like, "Nine out of 10 of your companies do worse than us."

They drive every company to be the Grand Slam. When you take VC money, you're going to orbit. That's probably the one thing I would say, to answer your question of would I do it again? Is VC the right route? If you're trying to get to orbit, VC is the route. They'll give you a lot of money to do it. Especially now that I've had an exit, I could go ask for a lot of money and go put another thing in orbit if I wanted to.

But 90% of success when you're trying to get to orbit means you're crashing in the ocean. People don't realize that. When you go the VC route, you get to orbit or you die. There is no average business. There's no lifestyle business. There's no 50% growth every year for 10 years.

There've been some awesome companies built and sold for a lot of money that took 15 years to get there. VCs are not waiting around for that. You get to orbit or you go away. We're going to make sure you're spending money to the point where that's 18 months from now.

Robert Hansen

That is one thing I really dislike about VCs right there. They really want to see your burn nice and high because they want to make sure that they get another chunk of revenue, another chunk that they can invest in. And if you're not, if that burn isn't sufficient, then they can't put more chips on the table. They want more and more and more chips on the table.

Well, that's interesting. Would you do it again, though? I know you're in the middle of it. You're still in the company. But five, 10 years from now, when you're done, hanging out in your yacht, and suddenly, you get an idea, are you going with it? Or are you just like, "No, I'm not doing that again."?

Chris Gerritz

It's a huge question. I think now that I have resources, it changes the question. Back then, I had nothing. I had ideas. I had knowledge and I had $0 to my name. Anybody that would give us money was what we needed. Some of that was just necessity. Like, who would do this.

The first six months were like a whole lot of loss of control. Oh, my gosh, this isn't mine anymore. I'd be constantly reminded that this isn't mine anymore. I went through a weird one. This is unique to our situation, but we got bought by a publicly traded company. We had this whole plan. It was an awesome organization. We integrated into it and liked the people that we were working with, and the leaders that we had.

I met the CEO. Five months later, and these guys go dark on us. It's like, "Okay, we're just operating on our own. A lot of independence." Then we get to this announcement, "By the way, the company that just acquired you just got acquired by a big competitor."

On day one of that announcement, we were like, "What about our plan? We were going to relaunch this product under this brand. Is that still in effect? Is our agreement still good?" Because some of that was a little bit of a handshake. How do I define the performance metric? It's really up to the company. The new acquirer is going to put some lawyers on this and realize it's pretty light. What does this mean for us?

Still had hair but too old for the clubs, too old for the social life that we were trying to have. We were not married. We just realized we were too old for this, but we're not married, and we're not old enough for tea and crumpets and wine, and all the other stuff that adults do. So something in the middle, let's just create it.

So we created it. We said we want to go to a bar still, but we want to be able to hear the people that we're with. We want to be able to talk about some deeper conversations than just the simple junk that people talk about. We're not going to a sports bar. They exist.

So we created Thinkers & Drinkers as a Thursday thing. It was four people. We'd have a topic and that topic would rotate between a political conversation that was a current event, or philosophical. Like, what do you think about death? Some crazy things that make you think.

And after a few drinks, you start talking about some deep stuff. You bring up some deep things with strangers because we've had a few drinks, lubricating the conversation. That ended up being something that a lot of people liked. They kept coming week after week after week and kept getting bigger and bigger.

We put on the internet. 20, 30 people will show up. We'd have these really large format conversations on deep topics. We'd rotate between fun topics and deep topics so that we would build rapport.

We had a couple of rules. Like, we were not a debate group. We're not here to debate left versus right, or who's right or wrong. We're trying to figure out what you believe and why you believe it. If you leave here understanding why they believe what they believe, even if you disagree, then we've won.

We are discussing that. We have had a few cases where we've done that. In general, it's been organic. So someone from one of the cities where we've been active has gone to that new city, but they've been to a bunch of the meetups so they know the format. They don't just carry off a random thing. That has been a very successful model.

We've had two where complete random strangers saw it and said, "That's a great concept. I want to do that, can I be involved?" When we did it, it ended up being so wildly different that we couldn't even connect with them.

We do these international trips where we bring the leaders from all the groups together, and we go to a different country and hang out for a week. A lot of fun. The cool thing about that is, regardless of what city you're from, we all connect with each other, and we're all able to have deep conversations. It's been really cool to see that happen.

We want to maintain that. So right now, we're still trying to figure out what our expansion strategy is. Because the concept of a random stranger listening to this podcast is, Oh, you guys meet up and have this conversation. That concept is not rocket science. You can do that. Being involved with Thinkers & Drinkers requires us to have some rapport. We want to make sure that if I go to your city, I'm going to experience the same thing and it runs the same way. We're still trying to figure that out.

Robert Hansen

Got you. I went to your Instagram page and I trolled around looking at specifically the Austin group intentionally. What I was trying to do is pull out some of the topics that I saw that you had talked about. Denver, for instance, they're very active. I did not go to Denver's page and pull their stuff out, or their subsection.

I grabbed a couple just because I hadn't thought about any of them. I'm coming in completely blind. I intentionally did not do research, you just have to trust me on this. I thought this might be fun, me coming in completely blind, and you having all of the advantages of sitting through one of these things.

One thing I'll say before we get into that is, until you said the lubrication part of that, I just glossed over that as part of the name and not really relevant to the format. But I think you're right because one of my largest beefs with group conversations, I've got two: one is, it seems like one or two people do all the talking, and then the rest just sit and listen.

I mean, we could have a disagreement and it's not going to devolve into a FISMA fight because we have other things we connect on. In ours, one of the things that we do is rotate the topics specifically to build rapport. We're a community so we have repeat people, and we'll do things that are fun.

So I'll have a topic on modern dating. We always choose topics that everyone can have an opinion on.

Robert Hansen

That is not one of mine.

Chris Gerritz

The key aspect is we're not an intellectual group. We're not like a snooty, you-have-to-be-smart-to-come-talk-to-us because the topics we choose are something everyone has an opinion on. If I choose a topic on modern dating, we've all probably experienced a little bit of it, and probably have some opinions on it.

Even if you're married, you've seen your friends go and get on apps and be like, "That's the dumbest way to meet people ever." Or, "Hey, that's cool. I wish I had that." Everyone has an opinion on it and can offer something. And it's a fun topic where if you have a weird opinion on it, no one's going to bite you over it.

So we build this rapport and this ability to talk to each other. So that the next meetup when we say, let's talk about war, or let's talk about free speech, and these really thick topics that could potentially have these really divisive lines, especially in our current political context, those ones are less likely to result in a fight if we've had a little rapport. We can compartmentalize the fact that I'm disagreeing with you on this topic, but we had a great time when we were talking about modern dating.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, but even with all that, I still think the part that I was missing was the alcohol. Some people don't drink at all so they're going to be a little put off by that part of it. But, I really think that that does do something for people. It lowers your inhibitions just a tiny bit, maybe not even very much. But just enough for they're like, "You know what, that guy is really hilarious. I'm going to laugh at that joke." Yeah, man, I totally agree with you about that.

It's not a conversation I like to facilitate, though. I've run away. So I came at it sideways. I said, "Let's try to get away from the left versus right or whatever we're doing in our country today." That's one of the reasons why we do this group and continue to do it eight years later. It's because I think it's a necessary thing to bridge people that don't share opinions.

So I took that concept of socialism, I said, "We'll do it, but I'm going to come at it sideways." We'll still talk about it, but it won't be the same framing. So I said, "Let's do social safety nets." So, the topic was social safety nets.

I opened it by giving a quote by Margaret Mead, who's a famous sociologist. The study is the history of civilization. I forget the name. Anyway, she was at a conference and she was asked, "What is the first archaeological record of civilization, in your opinion? What would it be?"

Of course, most people when they think of that, they think, "Well, we found a hammer 28,000 years ago. We found a sickle. We found someone had cultivated the ground, and now there was farming. Therefore, we have this archaeological record that civilization at least existed back then and from that point forward."

And she said, "No, it's actually 10s of 1000s of years before the hammer and farming or any of that stuff had occurred." It was even mended femur. They found human remains where the femur had actually mended. We know that it takes 10-plus weeks in a good environment. We know they're completely useless to a hunter-gatherer society while it's not healed.

And there is no case in the animal kingdom where an animal would be cared for, for 10 weeks, while it's useless. It's just going to die. They're just going to leave it. So, this is the first case where they found a group of animals that had come together and put resources into an individual that had no way of contributing back to society back to their group. For 10 weeks, they were useless. In fact, they made the group worse.

Robert Hansen

Yeah, but you don't know how good a knitter they were.

Chris Gerritz

Should be a good dinner. But yeah, they couldn't contribute back. Why are we spending all of our resources and not moving when we should be moving? We're hunters and gatherers, and we have to move and we have to stay here for 10 weeks? We don't even know if he's going to live, or he's going to get gangrene and die. Yet, they're going to do it anyway for this individual that cannot contribute.

We have no promise that they can contribute. We don't have any promise that they're going to actually survive this. Yet, somehow, this group did it. She said, "That's the first archaeological record that we have of civilization." She defined it as a group of individuals who did something for not just themselves, or for a selfish reason.

So what do we owe each other in our society? What do we owe the people in our city who can't contribute back to us, say, the homeless? I mean, they're not doing anything for me. What do you owe them? Do you owe them anything?

That prompted a conversation that was phenomenal. We talked about the concept of what the government should do? What should we do? What should philanthropy do? Is that good enough? Will that work? It ended up being on socialism, even though nobody brought up the word really. It was really cool.

Robert Hansen

That's great. All right. So, topics I saw, number one: maintaining relationships. It's sort of similar to online dating, which is that you're going to do online dating once you don't have a relationship anymore. How might that conversation start? How might you open that one? Or how did you open that one?

Chris Gerritz

Some of these topics are really broad. We could take that out a lens from dating, and maintaining a long marriage, or friendships. So we could talk about, you meet somebody, and then you never talk to them again. Or your high school friends that you've known forever.

That was actually one of the reasons we brought it up. Why is it that the people that I was in the military with in my early years, struggling with, I'm still great friends with today? The people I went to school with when I was really young and spent a lot of time with, I'm still friends with today.

Today, I can count on my hand the number of really strong friends that I've met later in my life. A lot of them, there's a high possibility they may trail off, and I might not speak to them for a while. I'm just an acquaintance.

Robert Hansen

Okay. You and I become friends later in life, five, six years back. Why do you think we remain friends?

Chris Gerritz

Very quickly, I have this insanely good set of friends who are willing to get into these more complex conversations and spend the time necessary. I'm not going to be right 100% of the time, and they're not going to be right 100% of the time. I'd rather know from my friends when I'm wrong than just be spouting off random stuff all the time. So I think it's worth it to be a little challenging.

Coming up with bold assumptions; prove me wrong about this. Not because I want to be wrong, but I want to make sure that I'm right.

Chris Gerritz

I think there's probably a personality trait. Because you can meet those people who I don't have an opinion on or they don't really interest me all that much. People that really don't have an opinion on anything. They're the floaters. They float through life.

You also have the dogmatic folks that are like, party line. I have to be an apologist. I don't really like those people, either. They annoy me a lot because I'll bring something up. I'll even offer an olive branch of like, "Yeah, I hate that Trump guy. But he did a good thing right there." I'll offer it as an olive branch.

Robert Hansen

Chris Gerritz

If the decision could be yours.

Robert Hansen

If the decision would be mine. Not to say I would ever actually do this. But as an exercise, to know more about my own position, I had to assume that eventually, I might come to a place where I had to make a decision. And if I had to, which decision would I make?

I don't think enough people spend enough time thinking about that specifically. If you actually had to flip the switch and turn off half the country, and just say, "You don't get to vote anymore because we can't trust you to vote because you're doing bad things to people." Which side would you pick and why?

I think I'm a better person because I expose myself to other opinions. Some people are like, "I'm tribal, I'm blocking you if you don't agree with me, we're at war. This affects me." I understand that. I have friends that some of these decisions, like the abortion decision, that are very core to their safety don't affect me as much. I'm allowed to have more diverse opinions, but I have more diverse opinions because it's not a personal situation for me. I haven't had to make any decision like that.

At the same time, I've gone back and forth on this: should I care more and listen to the people who are impacted by it, and adopt their opinion? Or should I maintain my neutrality because I'm not involved, and listen to both sides and figure out why they believe what they believe?

Robert Hansen

I think, initially, neutrality is the right answer. But over time, obviously, you're going to learn things about both sides and have opinions. You mentioned abortion. This is a topic that is super sensitive, and probably not one that two guys should be having. But not because we can't have opinions. But because I'd rather have a woman in the room who can also have her opinion at the same time and inform us idiots who have never gone through anything like that or even considered having to go through that personally.

But it's not that I don't have opinions. It's not that I haven't had very complex thoughts, in fact, probably more complex than a lot of the current narratives are, from what I can gather anyway. And confusing narratives. Things that, in my mind, lead me down paths that I wouldn't have expected to land.

When I started the exercise, I would have thought I'd end up somewhere different. Maybe someday I'll get into all that, but I don't think it's worth this conversation to do that.

But I think that all of these things that we discuss, you should be prepared to end up on the other side. If you're not prepared to end up on the other side, you're not doing it with an open mind. I really like that about you as I think that you are one of those people who can end up on the other side.

Chris Gerritz

I find value in it. I've gone back and forth a lot. I've asked myself the question, is neutrality good? Is that a virtue? In some cases, it's not. There are cases where bad things are happening and your neutrality is causing those bad things to continue. But in other cases, especially in complex topics, I tend towards neutrality. Not neutrality, but I tend towards wanting to understand both sides and empathizing with why they believe that, especially if it's too strong of an opinion.

If it's just an oppressor beating down a slave, that's an obvious power mismatch. But when it's two groups that appear to be equally powerful disagreeing on a topic, in those cases, I want to be the neutral party and figure out why they believe what they believe, so that I can understand both sides. I think that is an advantageous thing to be, and not just choosing a side.

I've also gone back and forth on that. Like, when would I choose a side? When would I look at both these cases and be like, "Yep, I'm not going to sit on the sidelines. I'm going to take my banner, and I'm going to fight for one of them"? Even though I know there's a little piece of right on the other side, let's ignore that. We're going to war. When would I do that? Under what criteria? That's an open question I have.

Robert Hansen

Robert Hansen

I like this topic. I personally don't care about a single statue anywhere. I don't care if we're getting rid of them all. It doesn't matter to me whatsoever. But I know that other people would care. That's why I care, I guess if that makes sense.

The answer that I've heard that I probably resonate the most with is some researcher or maybe a journalist of some sort. He was basically saying, whether you agree that the statue should be there or not, the context you're missing is that someone at some point thought that this was something that needed to be commemorated, from their perspective.

What you're really doing by honoring this thing, whatever this thing is, not to say that you agree with the person or like the statute or whatever, is that whoever put it there felt the need to do that because it was so strong within them and their community or whatever.

What you're really witnessing is a point in time, where they were willing to pull the resources together and literally remove functional real estate from the world and leverage that to say something to history. What you're really saying is I don't want to learn whatever they want to teach me.

Does that make sense? If the answer is yes, then go ahead, and get rid of it. But if you want the knowledge to still exist, it's very similar to a book. You could get rid of the book. You could burn all the books, and then you wouldn't have any of those books that had that one bad idea in them. But whoever wrote that was trying to have this thing echo through time.

It's your choice, whether you read it or not. You don't have to read it, or you can hate it, or whatever. But is it worth getting rid of these things? Trump, for all of the bad things he's done, one of the good things he did was say that if you take down this one statue, you're going to start seeing people take down presidents as well. I was like, "No, that's crazy. You're crazy." And of course, they did.

I think everybody who had any sense about them knew that that was going to happen, actually, but a lot of people really wanted to believe that there was no way that would ever occur and this is all hyperbolic. That was one he definitely got right.

I think the reason I knew it was going to happen for sure is sort of the same reason we see the Shia Muslims taking down statues. It doesn't fit their narrative. It doesn't fit with their sense of the world. The more you can remove your opposition, the better.

Chris Gerritz

We've talked about this culture war we're in. History is a large component of it and our heroes are a large component of it. If we want to change the culture, and we're in this war whether we should change it or we should go backwards to a better time, or should we progress to the next phase, and we have to blow up the old to usher in the new.

That's this cultural war we're in right now. That has a heavy component with history. If we want that change to occur, if one group wants that change to occur, then they have to go take down the statues of the people we used to claim our heroes. We have to downgrade them, they're no longer our heroes. These are our heroes because this is what we want to be.

Whenever you think of your heroes, or statues, or even historical figures that are really important that we want to go and frame and put a picture on, I think we've done something wrong by trying to take them apart and say, "Well, we learned this bad thing about them. Therefore, we shouldn't laud them as heroes." There are bad things about everybody.

Robert Hansen

Absolutely everybody. I've hacked into enough people's emails. I can guarantee it.

Chris Gerritz

I think that there's a reason why we make statues of them, and we don't add them at 4k resolution. The busts are made more perfect than their actual skin was or the narrative we write doesn't have the blemishes of real life. We do that for a reason; because they're heroes. Because we don't want to laud them for their bad parts.

So we remove the bad parts from history so that we can then make them heroes and aspire to be them without convoluting and having our kids look at this bad thing that they did and say, "I need to be like him so I need to do the bad thing too." Let's just remove the bad thing from the histories and love them perfectly yet they weren't.

Robert Hansen

Also, the bad things, in many cases, are totally irrelevant to the major historical thing that they were involved in. It's like they went to the restroom too. I don't care. It's irrelevant to the fact that they won some battle.

I think this is a fairly silly conversation. It also means that so many things are going to have to get rewritten, like literally the entire language is going to have to be rewritten.

Chris Gerritz

If that's our standard that they have to be perfect in order for them to be heroes. Even on the far left that wants to change out all of these statues, they have heroes that are not perfect either. Che Guevara; all these guys had some crazy stuff going on. Should we take that same lens?

Everybody has heroes. I believe that you should remove the negative aspects of our heroes after a certain amount of time so that we are propping up the traits and attributes that we want to idolize.

Robert Hansen

This is where Hollywood gets involved. So now you get to say, "I'm just going to make up this idol with no character flaws. It's going to be perfect." And it's boring. I mean, if they have zero things ever, no conflict whatsoever, it’s honestly not fun to watch.

Chris Gerritz

It's why we like Batman. He's not perfect.

Robert Hansen

Or the Punisher; extra is not perfect. From your Facebook feed, I went back and looked at one of the more recent comments you made. You make some very good sort of provocational comments sometimes. I like reading it. I don't comment on them, but I like reading other people's comments.

I do like watching people's replies though. I learn a lot about people and how they're going to react. I'm a lurker on many channels because I actually enjoy seeing how people interact with one another. And yours, in particular, is a high one on my feed.

This is paraphrasing a lot because it's a long post. You said, "I see the Elon Musk's Twitter controversy less and less as a left versus right division. It's an authoritarian versus laissez-faire thing, a free speech versus content policing thing, moderates versus extremists."

And you see this in Europe. The European laws are like, you can't be laissez-faire. You're breaking the law by allowing people to talk about whatever they want. I'm like, is that right? From their perspective, they're like, you are enabling people who are bad people to say bad things and incite more bad things against vulnerable groups.

Okay, I feel that. I don't want that to happen. But is that moral ground that we have to police this content on a very large network?

Robert Hansen

Well, I certainly think that we probably should stay away from censorship because it's got a chilling effect. I don't think I can come up with a single example where absolute censorship has ended well, for whichever country has implemented it.

Chris Gerritz

It actually pushes people into more extremes, which causes more conflict.

Robert Hansen

It also leads very quickly to authoritarianism and oligarchies and all kinds of terrible things. I think you're right on the money here with this comment. So, how do you see this going? How do you see this conversation, and I don't mean this specific one, these sets of conversations going? How do we have this conversation at a more global level and get people thinking more in the context of both sides might have something to offer this conversation?

Chris Gerritz

These conversations happening on a personal level, and at Thinkers and Drinkers meetups at a local level, one of the things that makes those conversations tend to be more successful is by reframing. When you get to the national level, framing is everything. We're going to frame this as this versus this or red versus blue, and we can't have conversations outside of that context because the national conversation is propagated.

I don't know the answer, but I do know that our biggest problem at the national level conversation is the fact that it's propagated so fast, and that the framing has to be very simple for a large audience. Outside that frame, it's too complex.

There are disruptors that come along and help us change that framing. What is the national conversation happening? Someone comes along with a new idea or a loud enough message, or a big enough broadcast, where they can change the national conversation and the framing of that to be something else. I think that's more powerful than trying to figure out who's going to win, left versus right.

Robert Hansen

Sure. Well, maybe it can be your next question for your next Thinkers and Drinkers. How do we reframe it? I remember talking to a couple of very right-wing leaning, I would say, halfway right anyway, about this topic. They were like, "Well, we're losing the culture war. I'm like, "Your memes suck. Your memes are terrible. You think they're funny, but the left doesn't think they're funny at all. You've got to cross the aisle."

They're like, "Well, how do we do that?" I'm like, "Do you know what they think? Have you talked to them? Have you actually sat down with anybody in the left in the last year, let's say?" They're like, "Well, I don't really have any left friends."

Well, there you go. That's why you're losing because you don't know what the other half is thinking. I would say the same thing about the left. If you're talking about taking away guns, you should probably know what a gun works like to talk to somebody on the right and say, "Well, I don't like that specific gun. What kind of gun is that?" It's scary. The language is all messed up. They just don't know what each other is saying.

Chris Gerritz

Just to take it back to that Twitter thing, when you institute censorship, it pushes people into a network of just their people. When Elon took over Twitter and banned those journalists, which was a terrible decision in my mind, they said, "We're being censored now. We're going to go to Macedon, our network."

Basically the same. Clouds, riffles, marching, getting rained on. But it's been really awesome to see that because I came out of the military having significant skills in cybersecurity and IT and I was able to transition very well. Watching some of my friends who did not have that training, who were in these careers that have no civilian equivalent, that makes it very difficult to get out.

In fact, even right now, the economy's a little bit tough. A friend of mine retired from the military. He sent out, over four months, probably 100 different applications. He had 23 years of military experience and couldn't get a bite. That's tough. That experience doesn't translate over. In fact, the jobs that he was getting...

Robert Hansen

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