Cyberspatial Updates and the Future of this Channel (Big News!)

Hey guys, Ricky Tan here. I wanted to give you an update on what the future holds for the Cyberspatial channel. Over the past couple of years, I've been working on a new kind of network visibility tool that builds a digital twin of your network from its underlying traffic. This has been super involved, with a ton of product and design work, business meetings, sales, and marketing material, etc., which is why I haven't been able to make videos for you guys anymore. Since the beginning, my content creation style has been more broad, big-picture ideas. It's a high-touch approach requiring a lot of research and prep work. Just look at this pipeline: from pre-production through the post-production process, writing, storyboards, titles, thumbnails, animations, editing, revisions, it takes at least 80 hours of work to do a video end-to-end. How can I continue building the company while making videos for YouTube at the same time? So after a lot of soul-searching, I figured that it's high time to bring on one of our Cyberspatial engineers to the channel and pass the torch on to him. Drum roll... Ta-da! Everyone, say hi to Dr. Steve. He's got several decades of experience working as a practitioner, developer, and teacher of cybersecurity—super smart. He's also got a Ph. D. Last month, I flew over to Steve's house, and we set up his recording studio with a plan to pump out more technical tutorials focused on network security, blue team cyber defense, detection engineering, and forensics. This may not be what your original subscribers expected—more big-picture, topical videos—but what it does mean is more frequent, regular releases to the technical viewers. So, Steve, tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your cyber background? How did you get started? Yeah, so for me, it started in 2014. I was in the Army, and I was at the end of my Army career. I had a computer science background, had done a lot on operations research, and I saw all the problems the Army was facing with cyber, and I looked for an opportunity to get involved. I had a chance to join an Army unit called the Army Cyber Institute as a researcher. That was my first real job in cyber, and from there I just kind of got hooked. I went from that job, I got out of the Army, I went to the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon. They had a group there called the Cyber Workforce Division. I was brought in as a data scientist to kind of look at data science application areas in cyber. I started to do that, I really loved it, and I've just been doing cybersecurity and data jobs ever since. What cybersecurity topics are you most interested in, and what kind of content do you want to make? Yeah, I want to make inspiring, hands-on material that people just feel they want to jump into. I like to drop students into the deep end of the pool. I have a teaching background; I always like to drop students in where they can get their hands dirty immediately. I want to do that same kind of thing but make it accessible and easy enough so people just feel natural getting their hands dirty and come along with me and say, 'Hey, I want to try what Steve's trying. Let's do this; let's do that. ' Just making things, whether that's any kind of topic in cyber, but my bottom line is to get folks involved where they feel comfortable jumping on the keyboard with me. What do you see as the gap in cybersecurity education? Yeah, so it's those on-ramps into different topics because cyber is so broad, and it tends to be very technical. I think compared to other topics, people get intimidated; they don't know where to jump in, and they do see people going really, really deep. They don't want to join them. So I think really, it's those transitions, those short videos that get people going, and those on-ramps. I think that's really where the gap is. There's plenty of material, plenty of things to talk about, but it's just getting people to feel less intimidated and more encouraged and inspired to be like, 'Hey, I can do this; I can defend myself. '" How's it been so far, learning all the studio stuff? Yeah, so speaking of intimidating, it's been pretty intimidating. I mean, there's a lot to it, right? I have a teaching background and stood up in front of a lot of classrooms and lectured with chalkboard and those kinds of things, but this world is completely different. You have to optimize for a certain style, so stylistically, it's been a challenge, but it's been fun. It's been very challenging for me to learn and trying to pick up things a lot from you, Ricky. And also, there are technical aspects to it; there's multiple cameras, you've got lighting, so it's kind of a new dimension, something for me to keep me busy and keep me inspired and interested. We've got a ton of new content cooking right now, and I'm super excited to be handing it off to Steve. See you later! That's right, see you around. So guys, while I'm not completely going away, I will be operating more in the background, in a support creative director role. My heartfelt gratitude to you guys who've been with us since the beginning. Thank you so much, because none of this would have been possible without your support and viewership. I'm super excited for getting this channel turned on again. Stay tuned for Steve, and I'm sure you'll see me someday soon.