David Weinstein - CTO at NowSecure

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to David, the CTO at NowSecure, and we discuss their mission to save the world from unsafe mobile applications, what CTOs should know about security, and what the future looks like for distributed computing. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(David at 00:00:32) Hello? Hey, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) David.

(David at 00:00:36) Hey. How's it going, man?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:38) Good. Good. Good. Life is good. How about you?

(David at 00:00:42) Great. I've been looking forward to this all week so far, so this is my time to relax and have a nice chat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:49) Yes. I am pumped. I was actually checking out your Twitter. You were building something in quarantine. I want to talk about that.

(David at 00:00:57) Yeah. Well, what about it? I guess you're pointing out some little gadget to do social distancing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) Yeah. Yes. Yeah. What inspired you? You made a social distancing prototype, right?

(David at 00:01:11) Yeah. I was just messing around with a little microcontroller and wanted to see if I could make something that was kind of like a theremin that when you got too close, it would just make some strange noises. And I kind of got pretty close. You know? I got the theremin working, but the part about it's supposed to get louder as you get closer didn't quite work right, so I had to invert it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:34) So you were just sitting around in quarantine, and you're like, I have these parts around. Let's make a social distancing tool.

(David at 00:01:43) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like technology can play a role in kind of a fun way for some of these things. And I just thought I could make a little device. If somebody got too close, it would give them some warning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:58) Man. All right. So I am pumped. I'm very excited. I love what you were doing with the device. Did you have a lot of experience with these physical, developing physical systems? Because I know you're mobile security, right?

(David at 00:02:13) Yeah. So my background is actually in signal processing, like, my original background. So I was doing hardcore software-defined radio stuff back in the day. I was working on GPS signal processing. That's kind of really what I came out of school doing, but I'd always had kind of a hackery gadget, love to build things kind of person. And so I just keep that going with a couple little hobby projects. One of those things, what you saw on Twitter, I guess.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:40) Do you get into the Raspberry Pis at all?

(David at 00:02:44) Not as much. I mean so when I was first messing around with this stuff, I was playing around with the Beagle board, the original Beagle board, and something like these gum sticks devices. So they're literally the size of a piece of gum. And there were specific applications that I had for work. But yeah, on the side, the hobby Pis, I do mess around still with some Beagle boards. And I do have a Raspberry Pi, but I don't get much chance to spend much time with them too often.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:09) If you had to choose a technology, like physical technology like those boards or Pis to build something with, like, a 10-year-old, you know, at home, just kind of show them, hey. Look. We can make the LED go on. We can make the LED go off just to get them this concept of that. That is, by the way, I think that's such a benefit. Like, the fact that I grew — I was looking back at the benefits I've had. Right? And I think the fact that my dad was an engineer and, you know, those boxes, diodes and LEDs and all those things in them, and there's a soldering station. Like, that was actually really beneficial because it got me just comfortable being around it similar to how, you know, you grow up around your parents and they're musicians, you get comfortable with music. And so, yeah. I want to know what sort of system would you suggest to be one-on-one intro to physical systems.

(David at 00:04:06) Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, you know, there are a lot of options these days. You know, Arduino is super easy to get into, and they sell lots of kits that give you different additional boards that let you do specific things. Like, maybe you want to light an LED up or if you want to do RF communications or infrared stuff. And I think there are so many different modules and components these days that Arduino is a good place to start. And, you know, you're basically doing some low level programming potentially if you want to, but they keep it pretty abstract at the same time. So, yeah, I'd say Arduino is probably the easiest way and the Raspberry Pi probably something after that. I'm sure it's gotten way easier since the last time I looked at it, though. With the Raspberry Pi, you kind of, because you're really running a Linux kernel, you have a lot more things to worry about, but they can also abstract that away. So I feel like the Arduino is just the right amount of complexity to kind of be able to understand what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:59) And then do you get to do any of this at your day job, or is this just side project fun?

(David at 00:05:04) Yeah. Mostly side project fun. Although we do use some embedded systems actually to basically remotely control physical devices. So we have a bunch of mobile devices in a data center type of environment, and occasionally we need to be able to reset them remotely. So we have this really cool enclosure that is able to remotely, and it's using something like an embedded system to remotely press buttons on the device, physically on the device. So that perspective, I didn't actually build it. Somebody on the team built it. But yeah, we occasionally get some fun projects like that too that are still related to work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:40) Nice. So you guys primarily do — I want to give a quick overview for context. Company is called NowSecure. You're the CTO.

(David at 00:05:49) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:49) And NowSecure does mobile technology, mobile security.

(David at 00:05:54) Yeah. Yeah. So our mission is to save the world from unsafe mobile applications, and we do that basically by helping uncover risks and vulnerabilities and privacy issues, specifically mobile apps. So we started out in mobile. We've always been a mobile company since 2009. Our founder was into forensics, mobile forensics, and we kind of changed our focus a little bit over time, but it's always been a mobile focus.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:21) So why do people come to NowSecure? What are they looking for?

(David at 00:06:26) Right. So our customers are generally looking for a way to make it easier for their development teams to write safer applications, or they're interested in using applications in their business workflows, and they want to understand what the risks are using those apps. And so we have kind of two different perspectives that we provide. We proactively go out and test all these applications that are available, or we plug into a software development life cycle into the CI/CD process and help developers test their apps before they get to release because it's a lot cheaper to fix the bugs as we know, you know, from our learnings in QA and DevOps. But it's a lot cheaper to fix, and faster to fix those issues before they get to production.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:08) So if you're using a CI, you would be an add-on app within that?

(David at 00:07:12) Yeah. So we have a bunch of integrations between different CI/CD things. So like Jenkins or if you're using something like Azure CI/CD to do things like that. So basically, you know, we're API first, and so we're designed to plug in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:26) I got to interview the maker, the founder of Jenkins, like, a year or two ago.

(David at 00:07:30) Yeah. He was so cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:31) I think the one takeaway I remember is he was scared on stage of like, he had a dream that when he would go out to do public talks, he was naked or something. Like, that's the worst thing. It's like, I know the Jenkins guy, and I talk to them a lot about it too because public speaking is hard. You know? Yeah. And but then it's like anything else. You get into a routine of it, and all of a sudden, it's just commonplace. And have you been doing a lot of speaking lately? Or...

(David at 00:07:59) I used to do a little bit more. I enjoyed speaking about very tactical topics. And, you know, when I feel extremely well prepared for it, I always get a little bit more comfortable. But generally, I would say I shy away from any kind of general abstract talking, you know, when I'm not really sure what the topic's going to be. So kind of like this, actually, I'm a little more sat. But yeah, I'm trying — like I said, this is a fun activity for the week. So I've definitely been looking forward to it. I also watched your interview with Parker Harris.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:27) Oh, man.

(David at 00:08:28) Parker's awesome from Salesforce. And, you know, he recognized that, you know, not everybody is a bubbly personality naturally, and you've got to work at it and kind of just keep practicing and doing talks. And, yeah, so I enjoy when I'm sort of sharing and imparting knowledge.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:42) Yeah. And I find that, you know, I went through the process. So I went from quiet and introverted to being able to communicate. And the interesting takeaway there for me was I believe that when you're doing that detailed work, it puts you in a different state of mind. So for a while in the startup, I was programming and then also doing the podcast, and I found it very, very difficult. Now other people say, no. They don't have a problem with it. I find it very difficult to be doing deep thought task and then go publicly communicate in the same day or energy block. So I separate them. I have the days where I'm doing public speaking, so I'll do some lightly cognitive work, things like that. But I — and then I started meeting more scientists and engineers. And it's almost like, you know, I bet you when we know more about the brain later in life, we'll find out that this act of going into this deeper conscious place to solve a problem and all the mental models you have to build to solve it. I used to talk about engineering. I'd sit down to solve a problem, and I build up all these mental models to understand and visualize it, and then someone comes and interrupts me. It's like, now I have all of that energy just to get back to the place where I could reason from.

(David at 00:09:56) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:57) But yeah. I think it affects more than just engineering. I think it affects deep thought task.

(David at 00:10:03) Right. Yeah. I mean, popping things off the stack of, you know, the brain is pretty hard, and getting the context back just like a computer is pretty difficult because you've got to align everything perfectly. I mean, luckily, these days, it's I find that at least the work that I'm doing today doesn't involve as much deep, like, long, prolonged thought, and I know that I miss that sometimes, and that's kind of why I have my hobby projects. But these days, it's more about connecting business to strategy to technology, and I think that's also a really interesting domain where you can really have a deep thought, you know, over lunch or dinner and then bring that to the table and have a really casual conversation in a business context. And, you know, I think that's a lot different than what I was doing before when I was just focused on writing software. I think both are really interesting challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:54) Life is interesting. And the dynamics of the challenges we get to solve, I mean, I don't know. I'm just in a place right now where I'm on an up. Like, I'm really excited about life. I'm really optimistic. I think a lot has to do with the difficulty in the past couple months that we've had with the lockdown and all the uncertainty. And now things seem to be on upward trajectory, and I'm feeling pretty good. How about you?

(David at 00:11:23) Yeah. Yeah. Pretty good. Now you're based right now in Florida. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm actually in Fort Lauderdale, not too far from the East Coast and I'm here on the West Coast. And things here are pretty sunny. And, you know, it's hard to realize that there's so much pain and suffering that's happening, but you've got to be reminded of it. And but, yeah, it's really easy to if you're not in a big city to remember that there's all this happening. But I think it's really important to acknowledge that, you know, it's not a simple situation. There's a lot of stuff going on, and you've got to just keep on top of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:02) Yeah. And, you know, I go principled with these types of things, and one of my favorite principles is you get what you focus on. And so I'm saying, you know, I'm going to intentionally focus on things that bring me joy and energy because there are, you know, you have to understand that there are things that you can't control. Like, you know, like, when you learn about the concept of consistency, like you can't just brute force it all the time. You know, you have to find a consistent way of programming or engineering. And so for me, I'm like, all right. If I get too wrapped up in the outside world and I notice, okay. I look at myself like a computer. I'm like, 60% of my processing is figuring out the crap that is going on with other people. I need to not bury my head in the sand and black it out. I need to reduce that to 5%. I mean, 95% of the time doing good things in the world and pushing myself and, you know, my team forward, and then 5% of just monitoring, you know, do we need a gun today? Sorry. We live in Florida, right? So I don't know. That's the approach I've been taking to get through these last stages here of the quarantine.

(David at 00:13:18) Yeah. I'm curious. So in addition to this show, what else are you working on outside of the show? Because we had a chance to connect a little bit, but I'm curious. What else are you spending your time on these days?

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:30) So the show, and then also, we had or we have Leaderbits. So that was leadership development for technologists where you take good insight and chop it up. People use it for their leadership programs to other tech leaders. However, the podcast in the past six months became more successful revenue-wise. So we have our customers at Leaderbits, but our current sales team is focused on Modern CTO. So what we thought was, you know, when the coronavirus happened, all budgets shrink across the board, period.

(David at 00:14:09) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:09) Right?

(David at 00:14:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:10) And so leadership development was one that got cut pretty quick. So every, our entire pipeline was, don't talk to us. We doubled down on the podcast with all of our resources on the podcast, and then that started to grow. And now we're looking at it and we're saying, you know, this is at a point where it's becoming really successful, and how do we reinvest the capital to make it more successful. And then our current plan right now is that in September, October, we go back and rebuild the Leaderbits sales team because we'll have enough cash from the podcast to keep growing it and it be its own thing.

(David at 00:14:54) Awesome. And then we can boot up. Because I think the work we're doing over there, helping people become better leaders, is super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:58) Yeah. Yeah. I agree. It's awesome. It's good stuff. What does your team look like today?

(David at 00:15:01) Yeah. So my team is, we've always been remote and distributed. So my team, I have basically folks in Norway, in Spain, in Italy, all across the world, basically. And really, they're specialists in a particular domain, so in security research. And so we sort of pick and choose the best and we can find them wherever they are.

(David at 00:15:23) And so I guess what we're doing is helping to move the product forward by focusing on those key domain areas where we've just got a lot of experience and want to keep moving that forward. So it's kind of what the team is doing is basically continuing to stay up with the most recent WWDC. You know, that was an hour-long or two-hour-long event. How do we consolidate that down into some actual items that are actually going to impact the business from a security perspective? Like, what are the implications of all these new features? And that's the kind of thing that the team is pretty good at.

(David at 00:15:56) It's like, hey, we watched this video. We can trace down a couple of the nuggets of information that it laid out. And maybe we're beta testing something and we're really starting to get a sense for where development is going, and we can start to see, hey, you know, there's a pattern here.

(David at 00:16:09) There have been security issues on this type of software, this type of workflow in the past. How do we detect it in the future in an automated type setting? So that's really what the team is pretty focused on right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:20) Did you watch the remote keynote for Apple?

(David at 00:16:24) Yeah, I did. I watched a good chunk of it, and I thought it was awesome. You know, the actual silver lining of not doing a live event was that they were able to go in-depth, I think, on a couple of areas that were really high-quality video, prerecorded things, and a couple of things that were live. I think they really did an awesome job with that.

(David at 00:16:41) So, you know, from a silver lining perspective of both these changes to how we host conferences and stuff, I think that's actually one of the cool things. They're able to reach a much wider audience. And it was super cool to be able to do that from my house without having to travel a long distance and be there for the conference. I'm sure it'd be awesome to be there too, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:59) What was the thing that you liked the most about this year?

(David at 00:17:03) Yeah, this year so far, I mean, the big announcement was the move from x86 chips to ARM, Apple's own silicon for their MacBooks. And that's super interesting because now there's unification of your mobile device architecture and your laptop architecture. And what they've done is they've made it so that you can run a lot of your mobile applications on your laptop. You know, you can just transpile, basically take the same code, get it to run universally across both platforms, which is super cool.

(David at 00:17:32) And it's definitely not new in the sense that Google has done something similar or other companies have done something. But it is very interesting how they've been really smooth at doing this in the past, and I'm very excited about some of the things I saw to that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:46) Nice. I haven't got to watch it, but I was waiting a couple days for someone to chop up some highlights of it.

(David at 00:17:53) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) Yeah, and I get some newsletters that actually condensed some of the information. So I was like, oh, this is pretty cool. The ARM thing was pretty neat.

(David at 00:18:01) Yeah. The other thing I saw, I'm pretty sure it was there or maybe it was in the lead-up to it, this feature called Clips where it's kind of like Android instant apps where you can kind of start to use an app without actually really installing it. So you can maybe go to a web page or even walk up to a QR code and actually start to get a much richer experience from using your mobile device without having to go through the lengthy process of installing that from the app store, vetting, and all this stuff. So that's also interesting from a security perspective. It's like, what's going to be possible from that new capability?

(David at 00:18:34) You know, are you going to walk up to a QR code and suddenly it's going to get all your contacts and your GPS location, all this great stuff? I'm sure that Apple's looked at that, but we definitely want to understand what the implications are of using those new features.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:45) The future is crazy. But I think you guys are in a really good spot because you provide this foundational need for companies. So I think long-term, you guys win.

(David at 00:18:58) Yeah, hopefully. I would like to think that this was, for the most part, not a space that was really something you could measure. Like, can you measure the security and privacy of the applications? You know, it's really hard to do that.

(David at 00:19:12) And it's something that I've been striving for is, like, what are the things that we should measure? How do we collect the data about these applications? How do they run on real devices? And how do you make that information useful to developers and people who are interested in the risk and privacy issues so that they can consume it and make some—perform an action in response to remediate or make a decision? Do I use or not use?

(David at 00:19:35) You know, do I encourage a developer to kind of change the way they're doing something, take less risk? But I want to do that in a way that doesn't interrupt the creativity and drive that is putting out new features, because that's really what this is all about, is giving people new capabilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) I know you guys have the security news on the website, but I'm curious for you, what are some of the cool talking points—I guess not cool, but security breaches, like fun facts that CTOs and CIOs should know about security? Let's scare people. No, I'm kidding.

(David at 00:20:16) Yeah. So the kind of things that still kind of bug me are the types of issues that I think a 101 class would probably teach. So there's still a lot of applications out there that use plain text communication to basically send your data out over the Internet. So they're still using HTTP colon slash slash and they're sending your login credentials, username and password, in the clear out over that network connection. Those are simple fixes that, hey, if you just use TLS, you know, use SSL to send your data—that's a 101 thing that you definitely want to just fix.

(David at 00:20:50) It's just something that's basic security hygiene. Another thing that kind of can get in the way is this misunderstanding of where do you place trust and trust boundaries. So when you have code running on somebody else's computer, in this case a mobile app, you don't want to make security-related decisions about the back end in the front end. And too often we see something that's like a logic bug where it's an assumption that if the client did this, then the server should do that. And that really has to be something that's generally handled server-side or validated—the content has to be validated, or the logic actually has to live on the server in a different way.

(David at 00:21:33) That kind of stuff is still out there. Kind of crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:36) Do you have any good articles? Maybe after the show we can link to, but like the 10 things to—like, 10 most common things. Those are one or two of them. I think that might be a good checklist for somebody to take a look at.

(David at 00:21:49) Yeah, so we do have, I think it's called the 42 Plus Best Practices for Mobile Security that we publish for free on our website and on GitHub. It's open source so everybody can contribute to it. And we basically have listed out the most common things that we see, mistakes made, and have snippets of sample code, the things that you can do to improve basic hygiene of a mobile app. And I think that's super helpful.

(David at 00:22:14) We also do security training and that sort of stuff. I love going to the security conferences and talking to security analysts that are trying to basically scale. You know, there's a lot that they're having to do for these companies. The scale of development is like a hundredfold the amount of code that they can really look at manually. So they're really looking at how can I build tools and automation to basically keep up? And so it's really cool to see how much influence, I guess, we've had from that perspective to make available all these open source tools and capabilities and see people start to use them.

(David at 00:22:52) It's pretty interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:54) Can you give me some perspective or context on the size of NowSecure?

(David at 00:22:59) Yeah, so we just passed the 100 mark. So we've grown quite a bit. But yeah, I mean, we're going at a pretty good pace.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:09) And so do you have an open source or a free SDK-type offering?

(David at 00:23:16) Right. So part of our technology uses open source technology. So Frida and Radare are two open source projects that have been around even before NowSecure. And I was lucky enough to get those two maintainers of those projects on board at NowSecure almost five, six, maybe six years ago. And so that's played a large role in the way we build our tooling. You know, part of it open source, contributing back, and part of it is the community that comes along with those open source tools.

(David at 00:23:47) So yeah, that's really one of the really great things that we—it's really never been difficult for us to hire for our more challenging, what would normally be a challenging role, just because of that open source nature of a lot of things that we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:03) Do you guys do any consulting? Like, people, they want to know about security strategy. I know you have your products and the tools, but do you do consulting?

(David at 00:24:11) We do have a services team, and about 20% of our business is services. And we occasionally do some one-off things that could be something like that. But our bread and butter is really on the product side for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:23) That's exciting, man. It must be so much fun. How did you come across this company? How did you join?

(David at 00:24:29) Yeah, so I started just over seven years ago, maybe seven and a half years ago. And I came over as kind of a security analyst. So I was doing reverse engineering. I was writing tools to basically detect malware, that sort of thing.

(David at 00:24:46) And over time, just kind of continued to move up and take additional responsibilities. And what was originally kind of a forensic-focused company, we turned into a security-focused company, and always again with that mobile focus. But basically trying to find ways to automate the different things that we as analysts were doing and trying to scale that out. So every time we added a new tool, it was a question of, like, how's that tool going to help us scale so that we can test—there are millions of apps that are coming out there.

(David at 00:25:13) It's just a tsunami of apps and code that we're trying to look at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:19) I'm excited that there's good people out there like you helping protect from the people that want to attack. What would you say—what's the thing that you think about most? Like, what occupies your time most with all your experience you have in security?

(David at 00:25:37) Yeah, I mean, the critical thing for us, I think, and for anybody in this kind of industry, I guess, is what can be automated. And there's certain types of things that just require a human in the loop, because we get really creative with our mobile applications in terms of different workflows. So if I want to order a taxi, that's a pretty involved, complex workflow that involves business transactions, moving money around, all these different things. And how do you see enough of that workflow with our security instrumentation to actually make some sense and capture enough information to make decisions about the security challenges in that workflow?

(David at 00:26:15) So the thing that kind of keeps me interested is, like, how can we push the envelope of what can be done with automated testing? Because everybody knows that you can always use a pen test. You can get humans to go look at your app, and there's some really good companies out there, including our team, that can go in and manually spend a week or two looking at an individual app and really come up with some really crazy attack vector that nobody ever thought about. But the truth is that in the DevOps world, you can't wait for an assessment that's going to take two weeks. And so it's really about the challenge for us is figuring out what's the right combination of what you can do with automated testing and still get enough coverage of the different security vectors, like the attack vectors that are potentially out there.

(David at 00:26:54) Because, really, I mean, the customer wants us to find every possible vulnerability and risk and privacy issue. But to do that at scale, when you can turn it around in 15 minutes or even 10 minutes or five minutes in a CI process, that really puts a strain on what is possible to find with automation in a security context. Because there's just a whole class of bugs that just involve specific things that are business logic-specific. Anyway, so there's a lot of complexity that you're trying to basically simplify down to automated tests, which in some cases just isn't possible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:28) Man, I am pumped up. How are you feeling?

(David at 00:27:31) Pretty good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:32) Feeling pretty good? Yeah.

(David at 00:27:34) Is this your first podcast?

(David at 00:27:35) This is my first podcast. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:37) This is so exciting.

(David at 00:27:39) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:39) How's it going so far?

(David at 00:27:41) Pretty good. Yeah. I guess, like, what were you expecting to talk about? Did you have anything in mind, or—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:49) No, I want to talk about—well, I want to talk about NowSecure because I like the look of the site. I like what you guys are doing. I've been doing—I've been taking some notes for cybersecurity. So I invited the head of cybersecurity for the FBI and the CIA and some other big-name cybersecurity people on over the next couple months.

(David at 00:28:09) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:09) And I'm just trying to really wrap my mind around, like, what's going on in that world and where are they spending time? Where is their pressure? Where is their attention? I did the same thing with quantum computing. So I got to have—yesterday, well, I think it was yesterday. Yesterday, the day before, we had the CTO of Quantum Computing for Honeywell. They just built the world's fastest quantum computer.

(David at 00:28:34) Yeah, I saw that article.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:36) So—you did see that press release?

(David at 00:28:39) I saw something about it. Yeah, I mean, the details are pretty interesting. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:42) It was a big press push. That's actually I think that's how I found them. I saw the press on it, and I was like, let's talk to that guy. Yeah. Because I don't understand quantum computing at all.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:52) What's your level of understanding there?

(David at 00:28:55) Yeah. It's one of those things that's kind of a potential blind spot in the sense that, you know, if you're not doing it day to day, if you're not playing with it, you don't really know how real some of this stuff is, how much of it is hype, how much of it is real physics and mathematical certainty. And I think that's one of those things where if you're not really doing it day to day, at least personally, I have a certain degree of skepticism in terms of what are the capabilities. But I know that there's some really smart people looking at this stuff, and, you know, certainly something where we have some computing that is already proving out to be extremely useful. So I have no doubt that it's going to revolutionize the way we think about everything in terms of computing.

(David at 00:29:37) So, you know, whether it'll change that we're writing Python code and C and C++ and whether we use some other different language that's quantum-specific, I don't think so. But it will certainly have some impact to everybody here in the software development space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:52) Yeah. I was trying to get to the bottom of it. Right? Because I've been writing code for, like, close to twenty years now, and I was trying to figure out, like, is there anything I could do that's useful today? Like, show me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:03) Like, show me what it can do. Like, how do I—like, half the articles I read are like, oh, you can do this, but I can't find it actually happening anywhere. I can't find one example of someone actually doing something with it. And so I went deep down the rabbit hole.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) I took a course on linear algebra. So, yeah. And because they said at the beginning of this article, like, quantum.country is like a website, and they try to explain it to you in, like, a couple hour document. And they said, before you start reading this document, for you to even understand anything about quantum—like, quantum programming is for people that understand quantum physics.

(David at 00:30:41) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:41) Right? And so you have to have this understanding and, like, apparently, the most core concepts are rooted in, like, linear algebra. Like, to, like, go understand vectors and all these things over here and all this terminology and cats and all this stuff, and then come back and read the article. So I did, and I was, like, it really helps shed light on this concept of everyone's, like, it's a one or a zero, but it can be everything in between. You know, that really didn't make sense to me as a—I would call it a quantum fan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:10) Like, I was a quantum fanboy for, like, my whole life. Right? And then a couple weeks ago, I was like, I want to actually understand, because I felt like it's like the computers back in the day when they filled a whole room, you know. And you couldn't really do anything except for run a calculation to make the nerds happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:28) And if I were in the business sector then, I would look at it and be like, that's pointless. It takes up a whole room. It's really expensive, and all you can do is run some stupid math formula that does nothing business-wise. What are you guys wasting the time on? And then, like, that's exactly what's happening.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) So this is our—we're, like, in the nineteen-thirties or forties of computers, and I need to understand this on a one-oh-one Hello World level where, like, I've actually written quantum code, and I understand how it works.

(David at 00:32:00) Yeah. Yeah. So do you have any crypt notes, uh, you know, cheat sheet notes on what you learned on that? Because that's super interesting. I mean, did you get to the bottom of it? Is it, you know, something where you can just use a Python API and ask a question and you get a result? Or there's probably a lot more to it at this point. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:16) Well, like, okay. So I did this example specifically off, like, a medium ad or a document. You know, Medium, like you can read stuff. It's like, "Ten-Minute Quantum Computing, Roll the Dice," and you roll the dice and you write it in Python, and it connects to a quantum API, and there's a QVM, a quantum virtual machine, so you can use the virtual machine until you want to actually process. So the thing is, today, there's cloud quantum computing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) So you can actually go on and send a request to it and get something back. So that is real, which is exciting in itself. Right? Okay. It's like, I can't—I don't want to buy one and, you know, operate it because it'd be ridiculous right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:54) But, sure, I can definitely do that. So that's pretty cool. The second thing is, like, there are companies that are building the interfaces and the libraries that allow you to communicate with it. Specifically, there was this one called Forest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:09) And I'm doing all this off memory, so I apologize if I mess it up. But, uh, it's called a Forest API. But what I got to, and the value I got out of the conversation with Honeywell, was this concept that the language you would program in, these lower-level machine languages you would program in back when the computers were early, are pretty much exactly what it is now. So, like, we're waiting for the abstraction so I can speak to it really well in English.

(David at 00:33:37) Yeah. The thing that comes to mind for me on that is kind of like GPU computing. Right? Like, once you have the translation that turns it into a kernel that can run on the GPUs, then you're going to get all this speed-up and we get transferred a lot faster. But ultimately, you still get it back into your code on the, you know, non-quantum computer, and you've basically managed to use it for, like, some really accelerated calculation or, you know, some results, but it's ultimately like an API and, you know, the magic is something somebody else figured out.

(David at 00:34:04) And yeah, I'm waiting for it to get to that point where it's, you know, just like GPU, kind of scalable computing kind of thing. That'll be super interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:14) I think there's more magic in life. I think we're going through this—I remember seeing a long time ago on a TED talk this concept where they tried to, like, model life in an algorithm, and it was essentially this graphic and things would start to boom and take over, and then they would contract. And then, like, all these little things would come and then go, and, like, that's a cool visual representation of, you know, something being ephemeral or boom and burst or something. And from that, I was like, I think we were, like, back in the day, we had, like, the mad magicians, you know, type people or the witches, and, like, we had all the craziness. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:51) And then science came along and we got scientific method and it started. Now, you have to prove it or I don't believe it. But I think when it's all said and done, that things will be much more magical than we see now. I think the future is getting better. Like, I see the—like, I believe before I die that I'll have the ability to upload my consciousness.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:15) Like, I think that that's going to happen. I think I'll be able to—and the reason why isn't because it'll be created in sixty to eighty years. The reason why is I believe over the next sixty years that there will be enough things that'll allow me to prolong my life, like, through artificial replacements that have become way better. You know, like, right now, you need kidneys, you're on a waiting list. We can print them, we can manufacture them, we can do all that, but it's just held up by FDA stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:41) But, like, that progress of life, I think we'll be able to extend life, and then I think I'll be able to live to a point where that happens. And that, for me, is exciting because you see projects like Neuralink and different things out there in the universe, and it's like, this stuff is actually possible.

(David at 00:35:59) Yeah. Brain-computer interface stuff. Pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, when I was at school, there were some pretty interesting projects around that stuff, and here we are, I think, you know, a number of years out.

(David at 00:36:10) I would hope that it's progressed. But, yeah, I agree with you that, you know, building mind and machine is the only way to beat AI. I think that I kind of side with Elon Musk on that, you know, in that he—that's one of the projects he's working on. I think that's that Neuralink project where it's like, basically, we need to augment ourselves to keep up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:28) Yes. Exactly. I am a hundred percent on that train because, yeah, I think quantum computing will be useful there too. I think there will be a whole world of useful things that happen with quantum computing, and I think there'll be very narrow use cases.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:42) Like, I don't think it'll abolish classical computing. I think, like, you know, it'll be a part of it. Like, you will have things that need to run on quantum jobs. Like—

(David at 00:36:55) Right. Yeah. That draws me back to that GPU kind of analogy. It's like, you know, you get a sudden speed-up because you're ultra-parallelized on all these different cores. And so it's just like—I'm sure, you know, somebody is going to send me a message later.

(David at 00:37:07) Like, you're totally wrong. Like, it's nothing like that. But, you know, that's got probably an abstraction that, you know, probably will—hopefully will will line up in the end, because it seems like a really natural way to look at it is that just massive parallelization at a scale that, you know, we just can't really imagine because it's able to go through so many different states so quickly and instantaneously versus something that has to, like, transition literally physically. The actual, like, transistors have to transition and therefore, they take time. Whereas, you know, with this other model, it'll just be that much faster.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:40) I agree. Yeah. And to answer your question about, like, digging to the bottom of it, I think I said it was, like, part nonsense. And I didn't mean it, like, in a bad way. I think I meant it in a way that's, like, I don't think it's ready for, like, the business-level logic programmers of today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:01) Sure. But that doesn't mean it's not, like, a valid thing to be thinking about. I guess I was just disappointed because I wanted to be here.

(David at 00:38:10) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:10) And that's an interesting thing, you know?

(David at 00:38:12) Yeah. It's interesting to think what is the first, like, real business application for quantum computing? Is it going to be, like, you know, search? Is it going to be, you know, like, cars? You know, where is it really going to be applied?

(David at 00:38:23) And that's where the innovation, I think, will happen. You know, it's where you'll see it take off. And I guess if you can predict where that's going to be, that might be, like, where you want to start looking is, you know, who are the companies that are playing within that domain where you really think there's a good blend of, you know, business use case and actual, like, needs requirements that are going to drive practical usage. So I'm curious, like, in the Honeywell interview, did you get to the bottom of that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:47) So here's what I—here's another thing I got out of the Honeywell interview that was really useful. So there's all different types of quantum computers, and it's not decided yet, like, which is the best type. So they—like, just because you have, like, a qubit, like, the origin of that qubit could be different things. Like, you could have ion trap, like, type qubits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:08) There's, like, different ways of doing it for lack of a better term. So I actually Googled after the podcast. I thought there's, like, twenty different ideas or ways people are doing that. And so, and they all have, like, pros and cons to their different styles and ways. So I think that'll condense.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:26) At the same time, there are a handful of companies that are working on the API layers to make it so I can send data and have quantum things run. But the main use case right now is people doing quantum physics. People who are doing quantum physics, running quantum calculations, and quantum computing, and that's useful. So the people are actually doing that all day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:51) I did not get to the bottom of there's two or three bullet points that bothered me in almost every article I read. So I'm saying, oh, it's going to be really good for, like, GPS coordinates, like, to find out the quickest path to get from A to B.

(David at 00:40:04) Oh, interesting. Yeah. Traveling salesman problem. Does it help to solve it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:08) Right? It did. Yeah. That's the example they gave. So apparently, they explained how we do it now, and the classical computing uses these specific rule sets because it can't evaluate all possibilities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) So it does it this way. And then they're saying this way would actually be faster and it would evaluate every single possibility. That was the general theme I received from after reading the article, and I'd seen that appear multiple places. I'd also seen that there's this concept called, like, Grover's algorithm, and it was, like, the first search algorithm for quantum searching and invented in, like, '96, and it became reality. When they made the computer, they tried it and it worked.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:46) And it's basically, like, searching a database, but I couldn't get to the point where I'm, like, show me the dataset and show me that you're searching it and show me the input and the output.

(David at 00:40:59) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:00) Because until I can see that, like, some code and a video, something that I can—I don't believe—I've yet to see one business case start to finish happen on quantum computing.

(David at 00:41:19) Yeah. Well, who knows? I mean, there might be some government lab that's already, like, using it, and they're very happy that nobody's actually realized that it's so useful. But I know there's a lot of spending on this area. Right?

(David at 00:41:31) So there's probably some use cases that we're not aware of, but I kind of agree with you. I haven't—I'm still stuck on, like, the blockchain. People are—that that one came and went, and so, like, yeah. I guess, is this the next one that's coming? Is the next hype? Is it going to be quantum?

(David at 00:41:48) And it is exciting. I mean, I think it, you know, it's kind of like that next industrial revolution type thing. It's the thing that's going to change everything. Right? And so it is really exciting to, like, really understand it and see where it's going to take us.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:02) My next area of research is loading up my brain with our limits of computation. So I want to know what—like, I was talking to somebody and they said, oh, yeah. We run this report at our company, and it costs, like, $380,000 to run this report. And I'm like—and it's like, a processing data because of the amount of energy to process data in the servers. And I was like, whoa.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:25) That's that's unbelievable. And so I'm trying to figure out, like, where are our limits right now on a, like, a large level so I can be fluent in, like, speaking and reasoning about them. And then how can that help with, like, quantum computing? Because it's always about finding that that white space or that margin where you can leverage what exists today and bring some value to the marketplace with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:47) So I guess I'm just deploying patience. I'm just deploying patience, playing with the code, waiting to see—but here's some hope. Here's some hope. The Honeywell guy told me this. He said that they actually have trained machine learning algorithms on quantum computing with, like, shape recognition, and they show it happening on a classical machine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:09) And they show it training—oh, this is a square. This is a triangle. This is whatever. And they show it happening on a quantum, like, it being the data being processed by a quantum machine. And I said, where's the video? So he's going to give me the video, like, apparently, their partner—they work with a couple partners. Like, our partner made it, and we'll give it to you the moment it's released. I was like, because you need to see it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:29) And the next thing I'll ask for is the quantum code. Like, show me the quantum code.

(David at 00:43:33) Yeah. I know that this stuff is real because I have a former colleague that literally his full-time job is to worry about this at a very large, you know, FAANG-type company. And he's a principal engineer there, and this is his full-time job is to think about what's the implications of quantum on crypto and specifically the use cases. Like, how is it going to impact the cloud infrastructure? Who's going to be able to get access to their data.

(David at 00:43:57) So it's definitely—it's real. It's close. I just haven't seen, like you said, you know, what are the business implications.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:04) Yeah. You've got to give me his name after. I want to talk to him too.

(David at 00:44:07) Yeah. Will do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:08) Yeah. We're trying to do, like, the Quantum Series. We got—because if I keep bringing it up in the podcast over time, we'll learn more about it. And then it kind of, like, lets everybody stay up to date with what's going on, because I really do believe it's, like, the next thing. It'll just—it's just going to be slow to unfold.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:23) I mean, think about going from, like, the forties to the sixties in computers. I mean, like, that's so slow. It's twenty years, and—but, you know, nonetheless, computers became insanely fast and small.

(David at 00:44:37) Actually, I'm curious. What got you into computers initially? Was it games or, you know? Because it's just, like, a couple of design patterns, if you will, for how us people get into the computers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:47) Yeah. So my dad is an engineer, and, you know, growing up, he did freelance. So he went to the Air Force first before I was born. So he was in the Air Force, and they were putting the GPS units, the first GPS units, into the B-32 stealth bombers.

(David at 00:45:03) Oh, that's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:03) And that was classified until, like, 2000—I think he told me in, like, 2010 or something. But it was, like, classified from, like, the eighties to 2010. He's like, "Yeah, that was a project," because when they were doing it, that was, like, before GPS was in any of the planes or whatever it was. And so they were—that was his team. They were figuring out how to get it because the bomb already existed. They needed to get it into it. So he had a lot of experience with GPS. After that, he, you know, finished his career in the Air Force, and then he came to Florida. And so he's out in Las Vegas and then came to Florida, and, really, like, multi-generation people from Florida in our family.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:42) So I started raising the kids. I have an older brother, and I have a younger sister too. And so my mom would be like, you know, "You're freelancing. We're poor, by the way." Like, and so my mom was like, "Oh, you're freelancing. You know, take Joel with you. He likes kind of the computer stuff. Like, take him with you," so I'd only have to watch two kids. Right? So I would come home from school, and then my dad would swing by and pick me up and take me out to his job and then get home. And I'd do that on nights and weekends. And so he started giving me, like, projects, like, everything from moving bits around in memory to understanding that type of stuff to playing with lasers to soldering. "Oh, hey. Solder this." He'd just give me all these little tasks to keep me busy so he could get his work done. And then I ended up, you know, sitting at a computer one day, and I remember this guy came over and he was like, "This is so cool. It's like a 10-year-old writing code on the computer." And I was just following some book thing that was at whoever's desk. I would just sit at different people's desks. Be like, "Oh, today we're doing AutoCAD."

(David at 00:46:48) You know? Right. Today? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) Because it had the cool mouse with, like, the grid and, like, it had this little plastic thing where you'd have to aim on the grid. It was interesting. So I'd play with the different tools and play with the different things, and then they all thought it was cool. So the weekend people that would be there on the weekend would be, like, very encouraging to me. And, you know, one of them took me Wi-Fi hacking once in his car. It was, like, really cool. And so that was a lot of fun. And I just—so I got around it, and then my parents ended up getting divorced. And, like, around age 13, my mom remarried this guy who was in real estate. And so I spent a lot of time at the real estate office after school. And I saw these people having problems there from, like, you know, 13 to 18. And, eventually, I was just like, you know, "I'm gonna build some tools to, you know, solve their problems because I know how to use the computer to do it." And, you know, did that. In there, I got other interesting things. I got, like, hit by a car. I was in a wheelchair for, you know, a year or two. So I got out of school, and I got to spend a lot of time programming then because they just sent me, like, a workbook every week that was a joke, and I just filled it out. And so I got to spend a lot of time programming. I built some really cool stuff. Started doing, like, freelance engineering. And there were sites popping up, like ScriptLance and stuff like that. I remember one time, my parents—they got—they opened a piece of my PayPal mail, and they saw, like, that I was making a lot of money. And they were like, "Are you scamming people?" I'm like, "No. No. No. No. I'm not. I'm just doing, you know, projects on, like, ScriptLance and different sites, and then they pay me through PayPal."

(David at 00:48:28) Super cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:29) Yeah. And so I just did that, and then I ended up building some real estate software. Then somebody came along and saw the real estate software and was like, "We wanna buy this and use it." And so I said, "Okay." Did that. And then I sold them, like, part of the company, and then we grew the company. And then just kept going on. And from there, I met, like, investors and built products for them and built apps for, like, a decade and then started the podcast.

(David at 00:48:57) That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my background kinda started a little bit more with video games, which it seems to be a design pattern in a couple of people in this space. Especially in the security space, I find, like, a lot of folks got started. Like, they wanted to reverse engineer, understand how, like, a video game worked. And that was really what got me hooked was, like, okay, I could play a game, but, like, not only is the game—like, how does it work in terms of the graphics and stuff like that, but the logic. But, like, literally, where is the trust boundary? Like, if I tell the computer that I'm actually, like, at X, Y location on my computer, is that going to reflect on the person that I'm playing against? You know, if my client side basically changes my coordinates to be up in the sky and we're playing, like, some game where everybody's on the ground, you know, what happens? And, like, testing those theories about, you know, once you could see, like, you're at the—you know, once you've reverse engineered a binary and you're at the point where there's some assembly instruction that says, "Hey. Move this particular value to this particular register." And if I just change that value to be whatever, you know, value I want, some other integer, and I suddenly start flying in the game, that's awesome. And, you know, now you're in control of, like, the game mechanics and everything because all it really comes down to is, like, what's in that register at that time? What's that instruction that's doing a comparison? You know, what's the logic that's basically doing, like, a compare between two numbers and one less than the other? And if it's less than that, it does a branch. So I really loved that part of, like, computing and really being at the low level of the system. And, um, but anyway, yeah. So games is really what got me into that. And then, like, a bunch of C++ For Dummies reading at the Barnes & Noble back in the day when I was, like, 10 years old, 11 years old, whatever it is.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:38) Yes.

(David at 00:50:40) Like, the cool thing to do on Friday night. Your parents would take you to the bookstore, and you'd get to look at all the books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:46) Yeah. Yeah.

(David at 00:50:46) So had to unlearn a lot of stuff from that. No. There's some good design pattern stuff in there from back in the day. But, yeah, it was good. But video games has really been my hook. I think it can be the hook for a lot of people, and I think embedded systems, like you mentioned earlier in the call, can be a good hook for today. Because if you look at a phone, the phone is not gonna expose its details and, like, the secrets to you today. Like, you're gonna write software at so high level, and you're not gonna get exposed to, like, assembly language or any of that good stuff that if you were programming C, C++, or some of the lower level things, like even writing your own assembly, back in the day, you would—you'd get exposed to, like, raw memory management and so many different things that today you just really don't have to think about when you're programming in a high-level language. But the challenge, I guess, the trade-off is, like, we just have way more complex software today. So you're able to build way more complex things without worrying about some of the details, and that's also the trade-off. It's pretty interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:44) Yeah. The complexity and how it compounds and goes through different levels is interesting. One day, I was sitting at the computer, and I was like, you know, you could see the pixels on the screen. And I was like, "How does it light up the pixel?" Like, I've been sitting here staring at the screen for my entire life and I have no idea, like, if the power goes out—or I think it was, like, during a hurricane or something that inspired me. I was, like, I just—one day I got this question in my head. I said, "I keep seeing this concept of energy can't be created or destroyed." Right? It could be transferred. But there are power generation stations and that just didn't sit with me. And I'm a curious person. There was a conflict there and I was like, "I need to resolve this conflict." And I was like, "How—first of all, how do I solve that? Like, what is the answer to that? Are they not power generation? Are they, like, power conversion, you know, stations?" So my goal was to understand how, you know, an electron essentially travels from the power plant, how it's created at the power plant, and how it travels to ultimately emit light out of my computer. And that was a multi-month research exploratory part of my life, and I got to the point where I feel good about it.

(David at 00:53:07) Yeah. That seems like a really interesting, like, interview question, like, job interview question. Can you explain to me how this pixel lights up on your screen? Because often, like, those interview questions are like, "Oh, you know, how do I get—like, what happens when I type something into a web browser?" But, like, getting down to, like, the electron level, that's definitely pretty low level, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:24) Yeah. Well, it's because there's—I was trying to do it at first from, like, an engineering standpoint, like, because I know—I was, at the time, I was programming in Ruby. "Like, alright. What's under Ruby?" And, like, "What's under that?" And then—but then I got to, like, "Okay. Then you get a microchip." Right? And then, like, I went to always, like, old stuff because it's way more simple to see the raw components. Like, when it's old and they're big, they're the size of a room. Right? And so I was trying to understand, like, chips and pins and, you know, everyone says it's all ones and zeros. Like, what does that actually mean?

(David at 00:53:57) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:57) Right. And then I just figured, "Okay. Well, why don't we—like, ultimately, this is electricity. Like, it's electricity." Like, that it's illuminating this thing. And so how does electricity become this? You know? And that was my goal. But I'm a curious person. What have you been curious about recently?

(David at 00:54:18) Curious about recently. I am constantly, like, watching the distributed computing space and I'm really excited about the things I'm seeing out of Elixir and the Phoenix framework and that sort of stuff. The blending of Erlang with a high-level language like Elixir with Ruby-esque syntax and all these good things that kinda come along with a language designed around concurrency just seems like a really awesome combination. So maybe it's, like, super mundane right now because maybe everybody's already latched onto it. I don't think so yet, but it's definitely interesting to me. So, you know, just really taking the agent concept, you know, to the nth degree and using that in more practical applications, at least right now in my hobby projects, I think is kinda where I'm spending my time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:08) Explain distributed computing to me like I'm a three-year-old.

(David at 00:55:12) Well, I mean, really what it comes down to is who has the state. So I guess from a three-year-old perspective, it's like, you know, when you tell somebody to make a sandwich, who has the knowledge? Can you ask the sandwich to make itself? Can you ask the jelly to put itself on the sandwich? And distributed computing is basically saying, "Hey. Every piece of the sandwich has some logic that could actually make a decision and potentially do it itself." So maybe the sandwich makes itself by telling each individual part of the sandwich to, like, take an action versus, like, one person doing every single step from a script. I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:48) That's beautiful.

(David at 00:55:48) First thing that came to mind.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:49) That's perfect. So help me understand—and by the way, I don't know the answers to these questions. So I'm not like—there's no, like, gotcha or fact checking it. I'm just genuinely curious. So let's take—is my—is the Mac that I'm talking to you on right now, is this a distributed computer?

(David at 00:56:08) Um, I mean, you're definitely taking advantage, like, of distributed computing. I think we all are right now because, basically, we're all using resources that are coming from somebody else's computer. So bandwidth is being used by Zoom to kinda, like, send data across the Internet. So yeah. I mean, we're all doing distributed stuff. But I guess in the more normal usage of it, it's like basically something to speed up processing or to spread out, and scale out, like, logic across many systems, multiple nodes. And, you know, where it basically bridges multiple computers is where I would say you're, like, at that distributed computing stage. Like, you're trying to actually execute something across multiple nodes, not just, like, one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:48) Okay. Got it. That would be—because in my mind, I'm building a picture. And on the left, there's a universe where the computing is prior to the word distributed and computing coming out. And then there's on the right, there's the universe where it's distributed computing. And where is the exact moment we go from computing to distributed computing?

(David at 00:57:12) Yeah. I mean, we're just constantly doing distributed computing. You know, iCloud, your device is syncing to some resource, and there's, like, consistency algorithms that are constantly running to make sure, like, that your data is properly synced and maybe, you know, Raft algorithm to maybe make sure that, like, some node has consistently stored your data. And because they don't wanna potentially lose your data if that one node goes down, they're gonna use erasure coding maybe to store different parts of your data across multiple nodes to make sure that if one node goes down, they can recover the data from other nodes. So, yeah, I mean, there's constantly—I mean, I think we've created, like, a super complex system just by the nature of somebody else's computer being part of the value add in our space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:59) I'm starting to get it now. It's because, like, if we boil it down to—specifically, because we've been software engineering so long, we were software engineering before this concept of "my file is everywhere" existed. Right? And so if you start to build these systems because there's demand for them and for data to be multiple places, now you're having these new methodologies, new styles of programming or new styles of structuring code. And then from those new styles, what we do is we create new language and, like, nomenclature on top of them to help refer to—like, when we're doing processes like this, we're gonna call it, you know, distributed.

(David at 00:58:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:37) Alright. I'm getting there. There's hope. There's hope for me.

(David at 00:58:42) Quantum computing, distributed computing. Yeah. You're right up there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:45) I'm trying to get there because there's so much. There's so much to wrap your mind around. I mean, CTOs and CIOs, you know, basically, like, C-level executives at a company. Like, you have your pie chart. Right? You've got your people stuff that's going on. Right? You've got your future, your vision, your relationships with your executive team. You've got your customers and what they're experiencing, future where you wanna go. We're balancing, you know, four or five different things, and we're expected to be highly proficient in each. That's—that's why they get paid—they get paid more because it's, like, the hardest job.

(David at 00:59:25) Yeah. Yeah. It is pretty difficult. Luckily, I'm a Libra, so I try to just naturally balance everything. Now I'm just—

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:33) Yes. That's—watch quantum computing, like, finds out something about that that, like, proves all of that right.

(David at 00:59:40) Right. Right. Yeah. The horoscopes, they've always been right. Because there's been a quantum computer behind all of them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:47) And then we find out we are really quantum computers. So that's what it really is. That's how we get really deep.

(David at 00:59:52) Yeah, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:53) I want them to map more of the brain, though. I think the brain interfaces—we are going to unlock so much knowledge, right? So many useful things. And then I've also invited on the show for the future, there was this documentary I saw on Amazon Prime or Netflix about these people who are actually embedding electronics into themselves.

(David at 01:00:17) Yeah, super cool.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:18) Have you seen that?

(David at 01:00:20) No, I mean, I've heard of it. I forgot what they call it. Biohackers.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:24) Yeah, there's biohackers. And they are more of the fitness, nutrition—there's a lot of fitness nutrition people. But then there's also the people that are CRISPR editing their stuff. And I saw that they're trying to make dogs glow in the dark, which is interesting. And have you seen the glow-in-the-dark rabbits?

(David at 01:00:43) No. My favorite so far has been somebody that started putting RFID tags in their nails. So they basically, you know, if you're trying to catch a bus or you're checking the metro or something like that, use that as your RFID tag for everyday things. Or maybe it's for your password. You know, it's a two-factor authentication thing, and it's built into your nail. Super interesting stuff that I've seen. Biohacking is really interesting, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:07) Let's talk about the security of that just as amateurs. Well, I'll be the amateur. You're the expert. All right. So let's say that I decide all these applications that are RFID possible, I'm like, "Hey, you know what? I'm gonna plant one right here in between my thumb and my forefinger, and it's going to be mine. And I'm going to configure it through my app so I can reprogram it as I need, or maybe multiple profiles or something of that nature." Right?

(David at 01:01:31) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:33) Anyone that tapped me with that would probably be able to copy it. But then I'm sure there's a way that they're constantly changing on the other end, so you'd just be constantly updating it, right? That's the solution for the security?

(David at 01:01:50) It's hard to imagine without a centralized location for where those decisions are made. Because obviously the chip that's built into your hand would have to make the decision about the signal that's coming in to my hand. Is it the right signal? So it'd have to be some kind of cryptographically signed thing that it could say, "Hey, this is coming from a source that I want to accept and I want to respond to." And that would require a fair amount of computing power. So I think it's a lot easier to say, "Hey, I'm gonna offload it to the phone." And the thing on my hand is kind of gonna play some role in the transaction, but it's gonna be largely done by the phone that's close to my pocket. So I'm not sure in that specific scenario, you know, how it would work out. But I can tell you that what I've seen in the past is people just use the phone plus, you know, other piece of hardware that is able to resonate with an RFID-type signal. And then, you know, they use that to validate. The phone plus that RFID thing is what really makes the whole system work.

(Joel Beasley at 01:02:51) The future will be interesting. I was just thinking about, "Should I do this? Should I put an RFID chip in my hand?" Because I talked to my—I got a family of doctors and they're like, "Yeah, we'll inject it." And I'm like, "Well, hold on a second. I want to research what I would want to do, why I would want to use it, and then how it would work." But, you know, there's something for exploring—like how we're talking about quantum computing. There's exploring it, and then there's actually doing it. And you get way more experience doing it. But I want to talk to these guys because, you know, one of them in this documentary that I saw put this box thing under his arm and for a couple weeks monitored digitally 24/7 all his levels. And I think that there's this cyberpunk future and that we're kind of headed there. Of all the futures, there's complete doom and there's complete gloom, right? But I think we'll end up in some cyberpunk matrix style where some people are plugged in, some people aren't plugged in, or you go back and forth future. And it's not my responsibility to be emotional about it. It's just acknowledging the direction which the universe is headed.

(David at 01:04:13) Right. Yeah. I don't know about you, but I'm actually pretty excited about that potential future. Right? I mean, it's also got a lot of trade-offs that we don't really fully understand, but that is kind of part of our evolution—basically fully tapping into the things that we build in our brains and all these different aspects. And I definitely get excited about that. That's pretty interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:35) Me too. You have a few more minutes or no?

(David at 01:04:38) Yeah, I think we've talked a little bit.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:39) Yeah. So the cyberpunk future is cool because it'll allow us to—we're just so close. I think you and I—how old are you? In your thirties? Forties?

(David at 01:04:52) I'm 33.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:53) Oh, dude. 32. We're right around the same age. Nice. We are close in our lifetime with—if you think about it, I was the last generation for their parents to lock them outside. Right? Drink from the hose if you want water type deal. Because I remember when I was in middle school, the kids a grade or two below me were just already on the technology, like, not going outside era thing. Because I have, you know, my little sister and everything. So I felt like I got that last outside generation growing up without too much technology. It was like a dessert rather than being around you all the time. Something special you got to play with, you know? And I think that's prepared me to reason fairly well in the future as technology expands. But it also shows me what can happen in 30 years. And to make it to 60 is, like, not that. And if you think about it, you go back 110 years, and we didn't even have electricity in common place, right? So I mean, give us 30 more years, and how would that not be possible? I mean, unless we blow ourselves up. That's a possibility.

(David at 01:06:02) Yeah, that's always a possibility. Yeah. I mean, the pace of change certainly seems like it's picking up, but also the complexity is building up. So we can't really—any one of us can't really comprehend at this point everything that happens, like you said, down to the electron. So at the same time, I wonder, is there a point at which the complexity actually overcomes our ability to really build new things? And does something get so complicated that it's just, you know, insurmountable that any one person can't work on it? And that really gets back to that whole distributed computing problem. Are we all just really distributed nodes and we're trying to all ultimately work towards a common goal, but, you know, none of us has the full answer to any one of these things? So how does the system work for some kind of equilibrium?

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:45) You just described life. What are the humans building, you know? It's like if you walked up to an individual ant, they would be like, "Oh, I'm just going about my life, doing what I want to do, following my path." But it's like you step back and look at the ants—you're clearly doing something together, you know?

(David at 01:07:01) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:02) I like how you think. I think the computer is the ultimate personal development analogy because we have these routines, these programs. We can wire them. We can rewire them. It's just so fascinating. One, I like to look at movies because I feel like the people who make movies, that's like our imagination. If we look at the humans as an organism, right? And you look at the movies, that's like the imagination of the future, and we inevitably build some variation of the imagined futures. Sci-fi.

(David at 01:07:30) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:30) I'm a huge fan. I don't watch scary stuff. I watch sci-fi, though. But one of the ideas I had when researching quantum mechanics and quantum physics was, so there's this decoherence or this coherence concept, basically, where the atoms, if I'm explaining it right, or the ions, however they work—they basically degrade. They don't stay forever, right?

(David at 01:07:54) Mmhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:54) And so you have a certain limited amount of time in order to allow the calculation or the process to run.

(David at 01:08:02) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 01:08:03) And at the same time, that idea kind of mixed with how I see it in Star Wars. And I was like, "Okay, so in Star Wars, there's machines and humans, right? And they have localized reasoning and logic and perspective, right?" And so that's an interesting concept. It's like, put those things in there. And so when I connected them, the decoherence and this concept of the future, I'm wondering if there's some limitations with consciousness. Right? So we all imagine that, okay, the AI will be able to think like this. But what if this concept of consciousness, what if it had limitations? And what if everything would end up being decentralized and you couldn't centralize it? I was like, that's a curious thought experiment.

(David at 01:08:49) Yeah. Well, I feel like the technology, though, is gonna enable tremendous potential, tremendous centralization. So, you know, one of the sad things is that we all in a distributed, competing way—we each have all these life experiences. We take all this knowledge and chaos and we organize it in our heads. And then when we die, all that is basically lost, and, you know, the organization and the structure of that knowledge graph or whatever is lost. And so if you have technology that can save it, you know, all of a sudden that organizational structure that each of our brains is automatically applying to that stuff, if it can be captured and saved and then persisted and shared, that should tremendously boost our ability to—you know, it's kind of like the humans going from nomads to, you know, basically living in a house and, you know, food being all around us. It's gonna change the potential, I guess, that we have. And so we can reach a completely different state, like you said, of existence because we have basically centralized, potentially, you know, these knowledge graphs that before we each were losing because we were dying. And I think that's the thing that bothers me the most, is everybody is spending this time absorbing knowledge, you know, organizing it. And, you know, the best we can come up with at the moment is these basic mind mapping tools and, you know, nonlinear note-taking applications. But, you know, there'll come a time, hopefully, where we're not losing so much knowledge and information experiences, and it's all potentially centralized. And therefore, maybe the complexity-type decisions that you're talking about or challenges might change a little bit. So we're not dealing with so much complexity because you can actually look at the difference between all that complexity that's now stored centrally and just say, "Hey, what else do I need to know that isn't all that complex stuff because I can go retrieve that, you know, whenever I need it?" And maybe we'll all be a lot dumber because we'll be able to just retrieve all that crap, you know, instantaneously or whatever. But I love the conversation. I mean, it's really interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:50) We'd be dumber in perspective to our current selves.

(David at 01:10:54) Yeah, I mean, like, because we—yeah, exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 01:10:56) Yeah. But we wouldn't be dumber because that would be the skills needed to operate in that universe, right? It's like what I struggle with as a parent. I'm like, "When am I gonna get my kids phones? I want them to go outside." But I'm like, "If I don't equip them to deal with the universe that'll be here in 20 or 30 years, then they're gonna be ill-equipped for it," you know? So you have to let them experience that stuff.

(David at 01:11:21) And I guess, do all kids end up with the same experience? So does your last child have a completely different experience because, you know, you've grown two kids and you've taken one—you know, maybe you were a helicopter parent on the first two and the third one is the radical one because they grew up with a completely different, you know, set of constraints. And, yeah, I just think it's—I don't know. Tangential topic, but it's pretty interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:44) Have you seen Year Million?

(David at 01:11:45) No, I haven't. Oh, man. What is it?

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:47) It's on Amazon. And they go forward a million years, or they go forward in increments over the—it's just fascinating. If you like—I just—I know after talking with you, if you, like, put that as your—make a note of that, like, Year Million. You'll watch it, and it's part documentary. They pan back and forth between talking to a physicist and then they have a—they have multiple storylines. So you're watching this family go through the changes in technology and it's just mind-blowing. It's such—you'll geek out, and it's only six or eight episodes, and it is—it's over, and you'll be so sad. And you're like, "When's season two?" And there's no season two. It's just—it's really, really good watching stuff. It's Year Million, I think it's on Amazon Prime.

(David at 01:12:41) Yep. Yeah. Yep. So how does it all relate back to being a CTO? I mean, like, the—

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:46) We could try. Let's do it.

(David at 01:12:48) I mean, like, the visibility to predict into the future is something that, you know, we constantly have to do with either the competition or the industry or whatever. So being able to fluidly go between the potential futures and evaluate them and all that stuff and make decisions and then ultimately, like, technical and then business decisions on top of all those things. Like you said, is quantum computing gonna be something that my competitor, my next competitor is gonna do? And I have a complete oversight of what the potential is there and how's that gonna impact the business. I think that's really, in my mind, how I can bridge this all back together to this role of trying to piece together all these awesome things that are happening and relate them back to business context that ultimately benefits customer success. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:33) Yes. One thing that's sticking in my mind right now as you're describing that is I got to interview John Mattone, who used to be Steve Jobs' leadership coach. He was leadership coach for a lot of high-profile people. And I read his book. It's called, like, Intelligent Leadership. And one quote from the whole book stood out to me, and it's that in this age of constant stimulation and distraction, the executives that will have the most success and demand a premium are the executives who understand the concept of focus, right? Where to place the focus. And so—I think the fact that a lot of this kind of—I love conversations how they bounce around all these ideas. That's how my mind works. And I think the way to win is the second part where you step back, you're like, "Okay."

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:24) We explored a lot of ideas in the context of maybe quantum computing, right? And you get excited where you're almost like, spend all the money on quantum computing, it's the future. But yet reel that back and say, okay, I'm gonna walk away from this conversation with a very pragmatic, realistic let's put two or three people on it for a small side project to explore.

(Joel Beasley at 01:14:48) Maybe give them a small budget for an outside quantum consultant or something. Get a small task force together to just explore is there anything useful or what is our quantum strategy? And just to check that off your list so that in six months, if there's a press release that says security is obsolete due to quantum computing, your shareholders and stuff, you're like, hold on guys, we're proactive.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:14) Here's our quantum strategy. We're aware of it.

(David at 01:15:17) Absolutely. Yeah. That's a perfect response. Agree.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:22) Yeah. So I think that the takeaway is getting excited, exploring new ideas, but then figuring out what's the result after the conversation. The result after your conversation here is not quantum computing. The result that everybody should be thinking about right now is the security of their applications and mobile technology.

(Joel Beasley at 01:15:41) NowSecure. Is it nowsecure.com?

(David at 01:15:43) Yeah. NowSecure.com. And I mean, Parker, I watched that interview last night. Parker Harris kind of said part of Salesforce's success was based on tactics, right? Individual tactics that they took along the way to or it's a longer term strategy. And I think it's always good to bring it back to the short term tactics and techniques that you used to execute and not just get lost in that strategy. And I think that's the balance that you have to strike as a CTO is figuring out the appropriate level of taking that crazy idea and bringing it back to reality and what the context is and actually explaining it to other people because now you've gone and dabbled in a new domain and you've learned new words that don't make sense and how do you describe that to people that are outside that domain. It's a lot like product management too. Product managers have to spend a lot of time in a domain before they become experts, and then they have to continue to relate that back to the organization in a way that makes sense.

(David at 01:16:42) So yeah. I mean, we're doing a little bit of everything in a way.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:45) But if people wanna learn more about NowSecure, it's nowsecure.com?

(David at 01:16:49) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:16:50) Yep. And what's our call to action? What's the thing? They're gonna be downloading. We've got a guide or a document for them, right?

(David at 01:16:58) Yeah. So sign up for a free trial and get signed up so that you can start testing your mobile applications for security and privacy issues.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:07) So you wanna go get a free trial, explore this. It's a must have. You gotta be secure. Gotta be secure.

(David at 01:17:14) Yeah. Check out our 42 best practices. There's a lot of good content there for free. Just sign up on the website.

(Joel Beasley at 01:17:20) Alright. So we'll get 42 best practices. We'll get a link to the news. We'll get a link to the other document, and I think people will be pretty good. They could forward those links off to their security people. Just, last thing, when CTOs come into your business or you interact with them, what's one of the stories you hear over and over, why they're coming to you?

(David at 01:17:44) I mean, we're in the process of kind of changing who we target as a customer a little bit. But in the context of security analysts or security people within these organizations, it's usually the same thing that happened with DevOps and QA teams. There's just more developers than QA. And so, therefore, the challenge has been in DevOps that if developers just throw it over the fence, QA gets it. They're blamed on delays in releasing a product.

(David at 01:18:17) And it's the same thing with security. There aren't as many security analysts as there are developers. They get blamed if something, if they have to say no because this particular product has got a vulnerability and that delays the release. So everybody's angry at security for saying no. And so it's really just a scale problem. If they're not part of the development team, they're treated as other, and they're treated as, hey, security is gonna worry about security problems. But, really, security has to be something that everybody thinks about when they're building the software. Same thing as you're trying to improve the quality of your software. You gotta think about it while you're writing it.

(David at 01:18:50) So it's really something that organizations that have moved to basically having dedicated security teams have that challenge. And the only way to solve it right now is technology or process, right? And on the technology side is how do I integrate into the SDLC so that more of the security things, the security functions that could be automated are automated, and security goes and focuses on the things that require human intervention. Or they make that eventual plunge to security as everybody's problem. Everybody is contributing to security and the tool that they wanna consume or use is just something that's baked into the development process. So our target audience, it's no longer security. It's really developers that are thinking about security. So I know that's a little nuanced.

(Joel Beasley at 01:19:34) No. It's not. It's important. So I'll break it down, and correct me if I'm wrong. So I'm CTO, high level large company. If I see maybe notice some resistance between my security teams and engineering teams, I might wanna go NowSecure. If I'm in the mid level, right, I'm a CTO, maybe you got a hundred to a thousand people, and you might not necessarily have a dedicated security team. You might be on your way, but you got developers who are passionate about security. They would wanna use NowSecure, get check all the bases, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:05) But if I'm a startup and I maybe got ten, twenty people and we don't have any security experts, but we definitely use a CI/CD type system, we can go just plug in NowSecure, and that's gonna help us out right off the bat.

(David at 01:20:23) Yeah. Yeah. That's the right way to think about it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:24) So those are the use cases.

(David at 01:20:27) Yep. Boom.

(Joel Beasley at 01:20:28) Either way, free trial nowsecure.com. I like it. I like your product. I really do. I wouldn't say that if I didn't actually like it. And so I'm excited. I wish I knew about something like this back when I was doing mobile app development. It would have been super useful.

(David at 01:20:45) Yeah. The truth is that part of what we do is something that developers already do with crash analytics. You know, they basically have some service that centralizes their crashes and tries to do analytics on top of that or centralizes user behavior tracking and that sort of stuff. We're really just trying to centrally manage your security findings and security vulnerabilities and really help you understand what those are and how to remediate.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:11) Well, I would ask for your next couple paychecks in stock because long term, I think you guys are gonna do really, really well. You've got a great bunch of people. I checked out the website. I got to talk with your team. The news is actually one of the more interesting things that you guys put out, security news. It's well curated, well designed, and then everyone's really smart, nice, and polite over there. So I couldn't recommend you guys more. So thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. We did it. David, we did your first podcast.

(David at 01:21:39) That's awesome. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Joel. Really appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:41) You feel good?

(David at 01:21:42) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I could totally do one of these again.

(Joel Beasley at 01:21:44) Nice. Nice. Well, yeah. What I'll do is I'll go do some quantum stuff over the next six to eight months and more security stuff, and then we'll have you back on because, man, I love it. You're from Florida. You're three hours away. When this, maybe in a couple months, my VP of sales actually lives right near you.

(David at 01:22:07) Oh, cool.

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:07) Yeah. So I was planning on going there and spending a week or two down there with him in person after this whole lockdown. So that might be a good time for me to come by and say hello. But yeah. I mean, I'm really excited to have met you, and I look forward to meeting you in person and then having you on again in the future.

(David at 01:22:17) Awesome. Yeah. Great to meet you, Joel. Take care.

(Joel Beasley at 01:22:19) Talk soon, buddy.