Rick Bates – June 24, 2025

00:00:00 Doug Camin: Welcome back to today’s episode of dissecting popular IT nerds. I’m your host, Doug Camin, and today I’m talking with cybersecurity program manager and former CIO at Zeiders Enterprises, Rick Bates. Welcome to the show, Rick.

Rick Bates: Thank you so much, sir. I really appreciate being here.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So so Rick, we’re talking before the show started here. And we have we have connections between us like there’s there is it’s we are not unknown when we’re unknown to one another. But but we are we are only separated by by two degrees, I guess is the best way to put this. So. So you’re in, uh, you’re in the the Northern Virginia DC metro area?

Rick Bates: Yes.

Doug Camin: And you you work for. You work for his company, Snyder’s enterprise. But in the past, you worked for a company that the CIO of, uh, the American Registry for internet numbers. Aaron. Uh, he and you work together. So we have we have this, uh, kind of like I would call it a random connection, because it’s not I don’t I don’t know if any of these are random, but we have this connection.

Rick Bates: Yeah. Yeah. I worked with John Curran, who was the CTO at Server Vault, uh, back when Server Vault was a thing. It’s been it was purchased by Carpathia Hosting and in Carpathia was purchased by BTS, but JK and I worked together for. I want to say about seven years, uh, 6 or 7 years. And, uh, he’s a great guy. Uh, you know, the the word imposition is not in his vocabulary. And, uh, if there was any way I could circle back with him and work with him again, I would. Just fantastic people.

Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, I get to interface with them through my role as a, you know, advisory council with, uh, Aaron and, uh, he is he’s a he’s definitely, uh, one of a kind and and worth the like, like he’s so valuable to have at the helm of such an important organization, uh, as Aaron, with all the work that they do around the basically, I’ll say around the globe, I know Aaron’s region is Aaron’s region is the North America and most of what we call the English speaking Caribbean. Uh, but he has responsibilities that extend globally.

Rick Bates: Yep. Aaron. Aaron’s role as well, which is it’s pretty, uh, it’s pretty cool. Pretty cool connection there.

Doug Camin: So. So you’ve. Now I’m totally putting you on the spot. You’ve done some hazing before here. This is hazing.

Rick Bates: I have I have done some business hazing. Um, the, uh, the the layout at Server vault was very, very open. Um, if you can imagine, the the building itself was basically a cinder block cube. And then inside of that cube, we had, uh, lampert’s data vaults, um, and then over them. Well, then there was another area kind of the core area that was also, uh, like a cinder block floor. And then above that was the, the living area. And uh, JCS cube or JCS office was nothing more than a hole in the wall. Um, you know, we went into this area that was kind of like a closet and it had some shelving around it, which we turned into a desk and such like that, the previous CTO had had planned it all out, and Jake made the mistake of going on vacation for just over a week. So my, uh, facilities, the vice president of facilities, and I, uh, went up to Home Depot. We got some sheetrock and some two by fours and an extension cord and a wall plug. And he dug up some cove molding and some paint, and, uh, we sealed off Jake’s office, stole the whole damn thing. Uh, ran an extension cord to a plug so that we had a plug in the wall. And we put a little table with a little Zen fountain on it that was, you know, running water and put his picture up and a plant, and his office was gone. This is so you mentioned this is an important detail here. You worked with the director of facilities. So this was fully sanctioned at this point.

Doug Camin: Absolutely. This the CEO was not too happy about it, but, you know, um, he understood a good joke. So, uh, yeah. So Jake came back from his trip, and, uh, if you you walk down this this, uh, alleyway. Couldn’t call it a hallway. And all the cubes were to your left. And my office, Mike’s office and the JCS office. And he walked right past it and kept walking until he hit the break area. And he was staring at the refrigerator, going, where’s my office?

Rick Bates: So I want to tell you that I didn’t finish the story when we were talking before. In typical JC fashion, uh, he goes down into Mike’s, uh, like his little tool area that we had and pulls out a sawzall, comes back up, punches through the wall, cuts himself an opening and crawls in and gets right to work. So, uh, yeah, that’s how we stole his office.

Doug Camin: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I appreciate you sharing that story. That is. That’s an amazing story. We’ll see if JC appreciates it. I know well, I’ve got to see him in two weeks. So when we’re recording, this episode will come out at long after I have I see him, but, uh, right now, here we are in the middle of April, and I’m going to Aaron’s Erin’s public policy meeting in a couple of weeks, so. Oh, cool. Okay. I will be able to talk with him about it.

Rick Bates: Great. To people who are listening now, this will have occurred a couple of weeks in the past.

Doug Camin: Gotcha. Okay. Uh, but anyways, we’re here to talk about you and your leadership journey. Rick. So, uh, tell us a little bit about you work for Zeiders Enterprises. Zeiders. Thank you. See, I knew I would get that wrong. So I work for Zeiders Enterprises. And you are the former CIO or CIO for a long time. And you you shifted into being on the cybersecurity specialization and management role. But tell us a little about your history, how you came to be in leadership and all that type of stuff.

Rick Bates: So the the leadership story really starts a long, long time ago. Um, I was, uh, I was I’ve been in DoD slash government contracting for, uh, I would say most of my career, the ten years I was with server Vault was the only real gap, uh, in that, uh, even when I had my own businesses, I was dabbling in, um, in the federal space, you know, a little bit here or there, that sort of thing. But, uh, I was on a defense contract at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and, um, I just I was one of those people that, um, if you saw a gap, you filled it. So what I was doing, because I’d wait for my clearance, I was burning in PCs and stuff like that. Uh, but then they moved me up into, uh, what was the old Soviet Union and East Europe Division office, where I put together a 120 node Sun Microsystems uh, network, um, all by myself. It was just me because I claimed to know Unix, which is a little bit different from Solaris, but that’s all right. But then, honestly, that, um, that job kind of petered out. It was like everything was working. So I went to my director and I was like, hey, um, I’m just being an office boy now. I, I don’t want to do that anymore. And he said, well, as it turns out, uh, the individual who’s running the hardware support desk is, uh, leaving us. How would you like the job? I was like, great, you know? Wonderful. So, uh, that’s where my leadership journey started. It was a trial by fire. Um, because there were two gentlemen down there who thought that they should have had the job. And so, uh, you know, I thought about, do I want to sit down with them and kind of smooth things over and such? And I was like, no, you know what? I’m just going to go down there and perform. And within about two weeks, Dennis and, uh, Paul pulled me aside and said, uh, yeah, you’re the right guy for the job. Um, so you’re in the respect.

Doug Camin: That’s great. Yeah, yeah. And and one of the things that I always feel is very important is that as a leader, you have to be your crew’s firewall. Um, you have got to stand between them and management. And you’re the one that takes the hits. You don’t let them take the hits, right? You turn around and coach them up. Unless it’s something obviously really egregious. But you turn around, you coach them.

Rick Bates: And that’s what I did for my crew. You know, I was like, guys, just if you run into a situation where, uh, the customer is not being, uh, professional, not being courteous, you don’t react. You just say, hey, uh, I got to go talk to my supervisor. And you come get me. And, you know, I’ll do the, uh. I’ll do the firewalling for you. Um, so just kind of progressed in that. And when I got to Server Vault, I was actually brought on just to write, uh, the intranet. Uh, at the time, I had just come off of a stint with my own job where I programmed an active server pages and good old Macromedia ColdFusion, ColdFusion, and ASP pages.

Doug Camin: Yeah, yeah, I had a time when I knew a bit about ColdFusion.

Rick Bates: Yeah, I, uh, I like ColdFusion so much that if somebody came to me and said, I want a cold fusion, you know, uh, site, I was like, great, that’s $95 an hour. Uh, if they came to me and said active server pages, I was like, no, that’s $120 an hour. I don’t I’m not playing in Microsoft World. Um, so anyway, I was doing that. But, you know, what we were doing is we were taking orders from customers and setting up solutions. Um, and there really wasn’t a process. It was the salespeople would go out and do salespeople thing and things, and then they’d come back and the provisioning crew would jump through hoops, and they were like, well, what are we supposed to be doing? There wasn’t any clear here’s the assignment kind of thing. And then worse yet, there wasn’t even any in the very early days. There wasn’t even any gateways, gates on what you could sell. So we actually got an order. I was like, here’s the order, make it work. And the dude wanted a sun Sparc 2324. I don’t know, something like that. One of the smaller ones. But he wanted it to run Mac OS.

Doug Camin: Oh, no, that’s not going to work.

Rick Bates: Um, so I jumped in and, uh, we, uh, we put together a, um, a solution set we put together, uh, you know, how we’re going to jump through these hoops, and it just made life easier on the entire crew. Um, the sales folks knew that they had somebody to come to who was reasonably friendly. Um, not too grumpy most of the time. Uh, and, and and say to him, yeah, you can do this or, you know, no, you can’t. So I think that that, uh, if there’s a point to that story is that Stories that leadership is not a niche thing. You have to be a leader to everybody, right? Uh, you can’t really go and say, these are, you know, I’m only going to be nice to my my people. I’m not going to be nice to your people. No, you you have to be professional and help everybody along. Otherwise, the organization just doesn’t work.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Um, and then when I walked into Zaida’s, um, they had just won two large contracts that were very tech centric. And, uh, at the time, most of their it was outsourced. And we just brought those people in because that the, the company that they were working with was a little wobbly. Um, so we scooped them up and brought them in. And, uh, one of the big things that I tried to do, uh, throughout my, my tenure as their, uh, as their supervisor was, um, you know, you really look at where are their interests leading them, where are their skill sets that maybe they don’t even see?

Rick Bates: Um, and kind of coax that out of them, as I had one young lady who’s working for me, she was on the help desk. But, man, she could diagnose network problems. Yeah. And so I got together with my senior systems administrator, my lead system administrator, and I was like, you got to you got to talk to her. And so, sure enough, after about six months of coaching, um, we moved her over to the Sysops network side of the house. And then I started watching her there, and she had a real penchant for cybersecurity. Um, I mean, like, it was it was the most natural thing to her I’ve ever seen. So moved her along in that direction. And, uh, she was really, really good because she got snatched away from me. And that’s okay. That’s okay.

Doug Camin: You know, I just I appreciate you sharing your journey here. And I always there’s a couple things that stuck out to me. So I’m going to jump backwards a little bit. But you mentioned about the importance of being the person that takes like I call it, taking the arrows from you for your team as a leader. And I, I share your, your viewpoint, um, very, very, very much and very deeply because that’s how I view the same thing. Like if I’m leading the team, my job is to be the interface to management, not a block, not not some sort of like, like, you know, impediment. But I’m also the filter that says like, okay, well, management doesn’t necessarily understand what needs to be asked here, but I do, you know, so I am the translation matrix between management and the team and how we get things done. And also if there’s a problem, if we have those, you know, if you got external customers that are being fussy or just people outside your, your department like that handoff. I’m the one who’s going to step in. I’m not going to ask you do the most uncomfortable situations of dealing with the uncomfortable people. They pay me more, if you will, and they pay me in the position of relative authority to step in and say, hey, look like this is, you know, we’re not going to talk to my staff this way or we’re not going to do this this way. We’re going to do it this way. And like, that’s a that’s a hard leadership skill for a lot of folks. And I think that, um, to be honest, I think a lot of folks who end up in leadership, they not everyone actually understands it in that context because they see their they see like their, their, their version of leadership is being like like a version of, of I’m going to hold everybody accountable on my team, which, I mean, I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but the way they hold them accountable is essentially to like, punish them and take the side of everyone else around them instead of backing their team.

Rick Bates: Yeah, yeah. I think that if I had one leadership fault, it was it is not was. But is that, uh, I will coach somebody for probably too long. Um, before I just before I just let you. You’re you’re in the wrong position. You’re in the wrong company. Uh, whatever. Um, that has worked for the most part. I am blessed that I have not had to, uh, other than layoffs, I haven’t had to cut that many people loose. Um, but even when I did, it was there was only. I can only think of one instance where it was like, no, no, you’re you’re done. You’re you’re just

Doug Camin: I would call that like I refer to that as managing by exception. So like the way that I manage like teams and stuff is, is I’m like, look like I’m going to trust you to do the job. We hired you because you’re smart. You don’t micromanage your life and your day. But if it does get to the point where I have to step in, you’re probably I’m going to say you’re not going to like it. It’s not like a threat, but like it won’t be pleasant. Like, you know, you don’t want me looking over your shoulder and breathing down your neck. Um, but, you know, same thing. Like, I’ll want to give them a time after time after time. And I think that that that style it has. And there’s different styles for different people and different leaders and stuff. And even different companies require different sets of management. Like, you know, I think just like you, I’ve been very fortunate to be in companies that that style of management and that style of leadership is very effective. Um, but there are other companies with that style of leadership would probably get you, you know, canned within six months, you know, like, yeah, they’d be like, no, no, you need you need to be like, aggressive with these folks. You know, you need to get, you know, every minute you waste as many minutes were losing money or whatever the case, you know, whatever the statements are. Um, but that style of management, every, every style of management leaves you vulnerable to a certain type of criticism. And in that particular one, the vulnerability is that you can be accused of, of, um, you have to wait for the problems to surface in order to, to really address them. I mean, not that you don’t try to be proactive in nature, but you you want to trust your team to do the work. So you need to let them fail at some point before you truly step in. Unless, of course, it’s some egregious thing where you’re like, absolutely not, don’t do that.

Rick Bates: Yeah. You know, and that’s that’s really interesting that you say it that way. One of the things that, um, I don’t want to steal the thunder of your segment of tell us something that people might not know about you. See, I have listened to your podcast. I appreciate that. Right. Um, is, uh, I was a scout leader, uh, for way too long. Uh, honestly, I, I overstayed my welcome, I think. Um, and not so much in Cub Scouts, but in Boy Scouts. And we are talking a couple of decades ago. We’re not talking the current iteration. Yeah. Um, but one of the hardest things that as a scout leader, you have to learn is you’ve got to let the boys fail you. You scout boy scouting was a boy led, boy managed, or I’ll say scout led. Scout managed organization. and as a leader, you know, you kind of sat there on the sidelines and you’d say, no, that’s not going to work. Whatever they’re doing is not going to work. Now, if it got unsafe, of course, that’s where you stepped in. But if it’s just like that, that is, they are not going to have dinner until 10:00. Well, they didn’t have dinner until 10:00 as long as the fire was in control and nobody was, you know, putting their hand on a hot Dutch oven, you had to let them fail. Um, and in I think that to some extent not as much, but to some extent that can be true in the business world, that you just have to look at them and say, I’ve told you, this is, you know, I’ve been around the block a few more times than you have. What you’re about to do isn’t going to work. And unfortunately, people are. People will go off, lock themselves in their cube, and they’ll do it their way. And just. All right, now, you want to try it my way? Okay, good.

Doug Camin: And some businesses instances are very amenable to that style of learning and things. And some businesses are very much like like, you know, we hired referring to yourself, like we hired you to be the leader, to stop these people from doing this, you know, and, um, you know, I would maybe classify those as more of a high pressure situation and stuff. And, um, some people really enjoy that type of environment. But I do think the one thing that I think is really advantageous for that style of leadership is, um, is that it? It acknowledges the human condition component of this, which is that people will make mistakes. Um, you know, versus I think some of the other ones, I think one of the big one of the biggest gaps in, in say, like the, the I want to manage everything and manage against all failure is that that’s not always realistic. You know, like people are just going to fail. Sometimes they’ll screw up your, your, your sysadmin will will not run updates for a day. And you know and and be off schedule or whatever the case, you know, whatever has happened, you’ve got to deal with and you need to be able to adapt to that. Um, effectively. And the more draconian you are, the less likely they are to. Want to go above and beyond? I always feel like that’s a hallmark of teams that I’ve always led, is that they they have the ability or they’re willing to go above and beyond when, when the, you know, when the proverbial crap hits the fan, if you will, that they’ll they’ll jump in and help. Um, but I’ve seen on other teams where the leadership structure is more, you know, more. I won’t call it stringent because it’s not like I’m not strict, but, you know, more draconian, I guess. Um, yeah. In those scenarios, like, the people will help, but it’s very grudgingly and it’s very like, like I’m doing my time and I’m out. I’m not here to finish it until it’s done. Like, I’m, you know, this is the minimum I’m willing to give you. And I’m the hell out of here now.

Rick Bates: Yeah, yeah. Uh, I did have a manager in my early days that, uh, when I showed up and all I was doing was writing web pages. I mean, it’s not like if if I, you know, missed something. Um, it was going to end the world. But man, he was. When I showed up in the morning, he was in my cube, and he was like, I noticed yesterday you were having problems with this. Here’s a book. And within like two months, I had this library of 30 books. And are these mine to keep? Because I really don’t want them. Um, but, uh, you know, there’s there’s also two kinds of mistakes or errors, whatever you want to call them. There’s the there’s the kind where, you know, you’re doing everything the way that you think it should be done, and you’ve done the reading, you’ve done the research. It says, do this, this and this and and it’s your hands not necessarily on the tiller. It’s not necessarily on the speed, but something goes wrong and it’s like, okay, well let’s back it up. Then there’s the kind of error where your hand is on the wheel. Your hand is on the accelerator. I’m thinking of a boat here for whatever reason. And you drive that boat straight into the rocks. And you knew the rocks were there. You knew you were going too fast, and you knew you weren’t steering out of the way. Um, that’s the kind of error where you just walk up and say, no, we’re. We’re what? What is it? We tap you on the shoulder, and, I don’t know, there’s a whole bunch of different, uh, things that you could say there, but, um, but really, most people, the error is the first one. It’s it’s I in my entire career, I’ve had one person where I just looked at him and I was like, you knew what you were doing. You knew it was wrong. You did it anyway. I

Doug Camin: yeah, yeah, I think about that as the, um, I’m trying to think of the I had a, I had a phrase for it. About what? Oh yeah. Well, the idea that you can do everything right and things can still go wrong. And that’s that part is that can be lost in a lot of executives, uh, especially like business, you know, I’d say line of business executives, you know. So, um, but I’m not suggesting that, like, every CEO is somehow unfeeling and uncaring or anything else like that, but it’s not uncommon for them to feel for business leadership, to feel that the way to drive success is to is to, like, run kind of like roughshod over the folks that are doing task based work, you know, like, let’s get the IT team. And if it’s not exactly right, let’s, let’s, let’s I’m going to come down on, you know, the IT director or the CIO or whomever and just berate them as opposed to trying to figure out how to, you know, like, let’s, let’s, let’s work constructively through this. Um, and, and I think that, um, one of the areas of it where that is so true is in cybersecurity. I mean, you can

Rick Bates: I was I was speaking with a of and the name of the company escapes me, but I probably shouldn’t say it, you know. Uh, anyway, because I don’t want, want to be accused of advertising. Um, but, uh, basically they, they run a, um, a SoC. They’re an MSB, they run a SoC, and, um, he, uh, he was like, yes. All of my clients that I have to go into and research a breach, uh, contain the breach, eradicate the breach, that sort of thing. Every single one of them was fully compliant. And that really hit me. I was like, wow. Uh, like, right now I’m cross walking our our system security plan against, um, NIST 871 and Cmmc. And it’s like, you know, checking all the boxes. Yes, we’ve got all the boxes checked. And yes, this refers to, to whatever. Um, and you can get through all that and still just be. One patch away from getting popped. And it’s not that you weren’t going to apply the patch, it was just like, but today’s Monday, the patch comes out tomorrow, but it’s already being actively exploited. And do do what you can, do what you have to. But but those situations are just going to come up.

Doug Camin: Mhm. Yeah there’s there’s um you know I was so before my current role you know I’m CIO at a mental health nonprofit. But I was a CIO at Municipal counties for almost ten years. And one of the things I would tell the legislature when we would talk to them would be like, oh, so what have we done on the cybersecurity front? And, you know, what protections do we have? And all this other stuff? And I’m like, okay, I want to be clear that, like, even though we’ve done all these things, look at we still get breached, you know, like something can happen. Somebody can, you know, the people are still our weakest link. And as those things cascade, we could still have problems. So our job is not to prevent all the breaches. Our job is to make sure that we have effective plans for for mitigating as many of them as we can. So we have to deal with only as few as possible, but also having effective plans to deal with the problems that arise for when one does happen.

Rick Bates: Yeah, I’ll tell you now, it’s not a it’s not an if, it’s a when at some point something will happen and we’ll have to deal with it. And so but that’s also just I mean I have to say that to say it like cynically, but you know, reminding them that if something happens, they’re not like, you should have protected this. And, well, I remember I was at an Isaca conference, um, it was pre-COVID. So it was a while ago. Um, but one of the things that just I knew it, I knew it intrinsically, but one of the speakers got up and said, for every one of us sitting in this room, for every one of us good guys, there are a thousand bad guys. And you know, when you think of those odds, it’s it’s you might as well just call us the 300, right? I mean, that’s that’s really where we are in the good guy side of the cybersecurity and basically and basic you know, general it that’s just where we are. Um, and you are and you also touched on something else. That’s absolutely correct. Your keyboard is your front line. If you can’t educate, equip and organize your frontline staff and make them understand that was a bad term. Um, help them to understand and bring them along on the journey of cybersecurity. They’re just going to treat it as, oh, you know, the CIO is saying this, or the CISO is saying this or whatever. But if you if you walk them down the path of if this happens, then this happens, then this happens. And, uh, I’m a big believer in you. Don’t just tell somebody, do this. I mean, unless it’s important, unless it’s, like, completely urgent, then you’re well within your realm to go up and say, just do this. I’ll explain later. But if it’s not urgent, we have to do this. And here’s why. And people buy into that. They’re not, um, you know, I’m sure there are people out there that are just plain old stubborn, but for the most part, folks want to come along on the journey with you.

Doug Camin: Yeah, I have 100% agree. So I’m going to shift us a little bit here. And. You alluded to one of the things that I always ask folks I have, I have a variety of different topics that I try to ask our guests, depending on what, uh, what their backgrounds are. In your case, Rick, I would love to know how what was what was your first computer and your computer experience?

Rick Bates: Yeah. See? See? My first computing experience was a green bar paper impact head teletype. So I want you to imagine a a printer that’s about, uh, 3.5ft wide and about a foot and a half deep. It’s got a box of wide green bar paper under it that you feed up through a tractor feed. It’s got a keyboard and you. And then you go over to this thing called a desk set, and it’s a telephone, and you pick up the handle and you dial the number, and you slam and wait for the robot to scream at you, and you slam that handle into the acoustic coupler, and you’re connected to MIT. That was my first computing experience, and that was back in in high school. And we had a self-imposed limit of 20 minutes on per session, and if you didn’t get off the session in time, the next guy would walk up with a pencil and whack that handset, and that would break your connection. And you were done.

Doug Camin: So. So what did you do on this computer?

Rick Bates: I played Star Trek. Star Trek, all right. Um, uh, no, really, we were we had a basic programming course, and it you’d get an assignment. Um, anything from, you know, just print out Hello world 20 times to, uh, one of the one of the biggest, one of the best assignments. My dad was a a a little bit of a pioneer in computing in the Navy. Um, he was in naval intelligence, and he had a heck of a time convincing the higher ups that teaching these sailors how to program a tic tac toe game was incredible, because it taught you a raise. It taught you the peek and the poke command. It taught you, you know, how to do iterations. But anyway, um, so that’s the kind of things that we were doing on that. Now, my first in-house computer was a Commodore Pet 2001, and I hope that your your audience looks that looks that up. It was an all in one thing. Um, the it was steel case kind of looked like a little pyramid. The keys on the keyboard were the size of Chicklets. Hopefully everybody knows what a chicklet is. Um, and the the mass storage was literally a RadioShack cassette tape player that they had jammed into the, um, into this case. And so you you read and wrote to cassette tapes and it had a whopping 4K of memory, which we, uh, upgraded to eight K, um, and in there. Yeah. And just to give you a, uh, a sense of how small that is. And I know I’m going to I know I’m going to put the decimal point in the wrong place. Um, but if you just fire up a word document, you don’t type anything in it. You save it. Just save a blank word document. I think that word document blank is 35 K. I think that’s where it starts. I did that experiment once, so that was my first, uh, computer.

Doug Camin: And are you serious that you played Star Trek on the Commodore? Or on the, uh, on the, uh, the the the teletype?

Rick Bates: Yeah, it was Star Trek. Huh. Did they they really have a Star Trek game? They did. It was, um. It’s really, really hard to explain. There is an emulator out there that will run it. Um, but it’s one of these things where you were given a giant grid and you were given. And then when you entered into one of the cubes of this giant grid, there was a smaller grid. Agreed. And basically you you took a guess as to where the Klingon was. And so you’d type in, you know, like P for photon torpedo and then two comma seven, because that’s where you thought he was. And you’d fire your torpedo and it would, you’d waste a lot of papers. You watch the torpedo go, oh, this.

Doug Camin: So I just looked this up. This has a Wikipedia entry. Star Trek, it’s a 1971 video game. You know, on to a couple different platforms. And, uh, yeah, they’ve got a screenshot on there. It looks just like what you said. It’s got, like, the quadrants and the you have a number of torpedoes and the energy. And then it’s like, you know, your condition and stuff. And then yeah, you get to pick where you shoot. And then you would type when you got low on torpedoes and energy, you had to find out where your nearest starbase was and limp over there and get repaired.

Rick Bates: and all that kind of fun stuff. Well, if you’ve listened to a handful of my episodes of the podcast, you might know that I am a big Star Trek guy. So, okay, so you and I are on video.

Doug Camin: Yeah. So, uh. Oh my God. Hey, look at that. That’s a great prop. It is. It is a Bluetooth handset to my phone. Uh huh. And, um, I don’t know if your audience can hear this. I think the noise suppression. Noise suppression might be stopping some of it, but. Okay.

Rick Bates: For the for the for the folks at home, because it’s an audio only podcast, I’m being shown a Star Trek like, flipped communicator, like, from the original series of Star Trek. You know, Captain Kirk’s like, you know, flip flip communicator. And then here is my type one phaser for you folks at home. It’s the little handheld one. Unfortunately, the company that made this doesn’t make didn’t make them to last, so I can’t play the sound. But what would a type one phaser be without a snap in type two. So there you go. And the company that made these, uh, just announced that they’re. And for the audience, I’m using the air quotes. They’re working. Tricorder is starting to ship.

Doug Camin: Wow. This is pretty cool. See, I have a couple of Star Trek accessories sitting on my desk. I have I have this I have this Mr. Worf Pez dispenser. That I have, I have this Mr. Spock USB drive.

Rick Bates: There you go. You know, quite logical. That is. The USB drive came in handy a couple of weeks ago, so I’ve had it for years. And of course, we kind of, quite frankly, who uses USB drives that often nowadays. But, uh, my, my wife, uh, was on a job interview and, uh, they’re like, oh, show up with a, you know, a flash drive with your stuff on it. And I’m like, she’s she’s a school principal. And, uh, I’m like, you’re going to take the Spock. spot because. Because that’ll be a conversation piece. And sure enough, somebody was like, is that Mr. Spock?

Doug Camin: There you go. There you go. Uh, and then I also my my, my wife was like the day before. So that’s a USB, uh, what do they call it? USB-A, whatever. You know, the big old old. Yeah. And I was like, you know, laptops today. It may not have that may only have a USB-C on it. So I gave her an adapter, uh, to do, you know, adapt USB A to C, and it was like, make sure you bring that with you. And sure enough, one of the laptops did when she walked in and the staff was like, I’ll be right back. And she stepped right out of the room, which we’re back, got the adapter and came back in. And that’s, uh, that’s that’s how you impress people right there. You know, she was like, well, guys like, wow. That was uh, she got she got comments about how well prepared she was.

Rick Bates: Beautiful. Beautiful. But yeah, so. So, yeah. So your Star Trek guy, too. Uh, this is this is awesome. It’s always great to talk to another fellow Star Trek fan. My, my, uh, older son particular is a big Star Trek fan. We’ve been working our way through all of the series. We are. We are currently on, uh, the original Star Trek, which. That one’s a little bit. I always enjoy watching it, but it’s a little bit of a trudge for an 11 year old. He’s a little like. Like, okay, if we can get through this, maybe we’ll get to Voyager. Um, yeah. You know, although we started with Deep Space Nine, because Deep Space Nine, I’m like, this is the best. That’s why.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Uh, I was my, uh, my wife’s an interior designer and does some other things. And when she would go off to High Point Market and such like that, um, I forgot which which channel it was, but they were showing the remastered, uh, original series. Oh, yeah. And, uh, I was just stunned by what they had been able to do, uh, cleaning it up and, and such like that. So, um, yeah, I did, and I did just like you. I started with episode one and walked all the way through and, uh, you know, it was just amazing how they tackled, um, uh, cultural things in those, in those episodes. And that part of it was so subtle that you could watch it just for the science fiction, but then go back and say, oh, wow, they were really talking about this.

Rick Bates: Yeah. And I think the subtext, the subtext is, has been sometimes lost to time. Unless you’re, unless you’re I don’t call you. You have to be like a deep student of history, but you have to be at least familiar and and like I, knowledgeable enough about like, what was going on in the 60s and those types of things that I generally know the context of why something was brought up, you know, oh, this episode happened because, like, you know, the year before there was like this, this thing happened in the Vietnam War or something like that question about this thing. So as a result, they wrote an episode that was topical to that. And, uh, while the lessons, the underlying lessons typically are able to be seen like the rationale of why it was done and the subtext behind it is not always apparent in some of those episodes.

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, I’m old enough that, uh, I’m fairly certain I saw some of the original broadcasts of Star Trek. Uh, my dad was stationed in Coronado. Um, and I just remember, I’ve got a couple memories of flipping through the channels because it was in the rec room, and I was in there playing with Lincoln Logs or something like that, and I was like, oh, this has a spaceship in it. Cool. And and of course, it would be the one episode, uh, where Uhura is basically in a bikini and my mom walks in and goes, what are you watching? Oh, geez. Wrong. Wrong day. Right?

Rick Bates: I can tell you. I can tell you. I had to rewatch, though, that there was a regular series of of with it in what amounted to bikinis. Oh, yeah. In the original series of Star Trek. Yeah. It was, you know, if there was ever a whenever there was a woman character, she was either wearing extremely covering, flowing dresses or extremely small, not covering much what amounted to like. Like bikinis. Yeah. They pushed the limit. They really did. Especially if she had green skin. Then it was all over, right?

Doug Camin: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, like in some. Yeah. Some of the things that in like the context of the show, you know, you don’t think about. Now of course I was also a fan of different TV show and not science fiction, but the TV show Mad Men. Oh, yeah. And just that, that depiction of the 50s and the 60s through the early 70s and stuff, and just the the mentality about how people approach things like we’re, you know, I know you, you know, you’re older than I am. So you, you lived a part of this a little more than I did. But the, There’s a very different set of cultural norms around how how what was considered acceptable and how we put things on TV and stuff. And it’s interesting to think about, even though today, people if you put like a TV show that’s up today and you transported it back to the late 1960s, they might be like, oh my God, they did this. But the, you know, a lot of the, um, a lot of the, the groundwork for like pushing the boundaries was all done back then.

Rick Bates: Mhm. Oh yeah. Yeah. And, and you think about um, not this has anything to do with it, but whatever. Um, you think about even shows like Monty Python and Benny Hill and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. Oh, yeah. I used to watch that at Nick at Nite and reruns. Yeah. I mean, you look at those and you think back to what they were talking about back then. They were really pretty groundbreaking. And then you say, okay, well, now let’s try and do that today. Uh uh. Nope.

Doug Camin: Yeah, the the humor. The humor can definitely is definitely different at times. Um, I do enjoy watching a good rerun from that era, though. Yeah. So I’m going to I’m going to drag us back into, uh, conversation. We’re coming up to the end of the podcast today, and one of the things I, I always make sure to ask our guests is, and you’ve touched on some of these as we’ve been, we went through, like your career journey and your background and stuff. But advice do you have for people that are coming up and are new? So like if you have, you know, somebody asking you, Rick, you’ve been in this business for, you know, 30 years, 40 years, what’s the best advice you’ve got for people?

Rick Bates: Okay. Well, yeah. If they’re brand new like just out of whatever, uh, community college, whatever it is, uh, do your time, sign up for a help desk, sign up for the knock. Sign up for the SOC. Sign up for all that kind of front line stuff because you’re going to get a broad, broad exposure to, um, everything. That is it. And if you get in with good people, um, they will teach you. And if you want other resources. And here I am going to throw out a couple names. I hope that’s okay.

Doug Camin: Absolutely.

Rick Bates: Um, the Sans Institute actually has free courses to get you started in ethical hacking and, um, uh, threat hunting. Yeah. Um, it has great courses and, uh, communities that’s built around, uh, GRC, um, and leadership and such like that. So glom onto those. Um, and, and I keep forgetting to look this up, but somebody out there, it might be Khan Academy. It might be somebody else. But. But they’ve got a free setup where you can go in and do threat hunting on real data, and but it’s in a sandbox, so you’re completely safe. You’re not going to let anything go, but you’ve got to seek out those kind of resources. But you’ve got to do your time. You’re not going to walk out of college or trade school or whatever and walk into a senior management position in the comfortable six figures. You’re going to have to work your way up, and as you work your way up, find yourself a mentor, somebody who has been through the fire, somebody who has, you know, who’s taken the knocks, quite frankly, and, and is willing to share those experiences with you very, very honestly. You can’t find somebody who is like, oh, I’m a victim. You know, my boss didn’t understand me. No, no, you got to find somebody who says, yeah, yeah, I screwed up and I took a hit. And here’s what you can learn from it. Yeah. And then I think the third thing is, is that, um, the your career path is not going to be a traditional architectural staircase. It’s going to be something drawn by M.C. Escher. Um, because, you know, you can be like at, at server vault. I was a vice president. Um, they got sold. Uh, I outlived my contract. Uh, got turned loose. Um, started my own business for two and a half, three years. Uh, got picked up by Zeiders, but I got picked up as a director. Right. Okay. So what, um, you took a step. You know, a lot of people say it’s a step backwards. No, it was a step sideways. Uh, yeah. My staff wasn’t as big. Yeah, I didn’t have, I don’t know, 75, 80 servers under my belt or anything like that. But it was, uh, It was still, it turned out to be a big step forward. So I think those would be the three things. Do your time. Get a mentor. Don’t expect your career ladder to go straight up.

Doug Camin: That’s that’s some great advice. I’m really glad you got a chance to share that. And I know our listeners appreciate it was a long history in in the technical and IT space. You know, coming on the podcast and giving us some of that feedback. So Rick, I want to thank you so much for investing your time with us on the podcast today.

Rick Bates: I’m I was thrilled to be here. Uh, you know, your your folks reached out to me and I went back and listened to some of the pods, and I was like, I really like these guys. So, uh, yeah, it was fun. It really was.

Doug Camin: Well, that’s a wrap on today’s episode of Dissecting Popular IoT nerds. I’m Doug Camin, and we look forward to coming to you on our next episode.