So What? Taking A Closer Look with Nicolas Chaillan, Former Air Force Chief Software Officer

Carolyn:

Welcome to Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. I'm Carolyn Ford. Each week, Mark Senell and I talk with top influencers to explore how the US Government is harnessing the power of technology to solve complex challenges and improve our lives.

Carolyn:

Hi, thanks for joining us on Tech Transforms. So what? I'm Carolyn Ford, with my co-host Tracy Bannon with MITRE. Hey, Trace.

Tracy:

Hola.

Carolyn:

It's good to see you.

Tracy:

It's great to see you. I hope you had great holidays.

Carolyn:

I did. Did you?

Tracy:

I did. Very relaxing. Ready for the next round.

Carolyn:

No kidding. Re-entry is so hard after a long holiday, so it's good we've got another one coming right up. I'm already amped because, as you know, today's guest is somebody that I've wanted to talk to for over a year now.

Carolyn:

I'm so excited. We've got Nicolas Chaillan, and he is the first former Chief Software Officer for the Air Force and Space Force. We're going to get his insights on government progress over the past year.

Carolyn:

Welcome to Tech Transforms. How are you, Nic?

Nicolas:

Very good. So excited. Thanks for having me. Very exciting.

Carolyn:

Well, it's exciting for me. It's very exciting for me, because just almost today, September-ish a year ago, you were quoted in Air & Space Force Magazine stating that you realized pretty quickly we're very behind in cyber. That was a tag on that article. I think it was right before or after you left your position as CSO. Do you recall?

Nicolas:

It was right before. I remember that got me a little bit in trouble in the building, that article.

Tracy:

Wait a minute. Do you mean speaking truth but not in a damning way?

Nicolas:

You don't go outside of the family. That's not allowed, okay? It's only in the family.

Carolyn:

Okay. Well then, I have a question. Was it that article that sparked your... I call it your manifesto, which I loved that you put on LinkedIn, where you just spoke your truth. Was there blow back from the article that inspired you to speak your truth?

Nicolas:

No, I think it started before that. Honestly, it was maybe the cherry on top. I think the new leadership with the new administration, honestly, unfortunately what you've seen... I don't want to get political, but the fact is they pick people really based on... I guess I'll say gender or checking boxes, however you want to call it.

Nicolas:

Honestly, I don't care about gender. I don't care who you love, and what race you are, and whatever you want to do with your life, but I do care about competence.

Nicolas:

When you start hearing people asking, "What is a cross domain?" and basic things like that in DOD, at the very top level of the department. That's concerning, particularly when you start hearing for the first time the wrong things.

Carolyn:

Right.

Nicolas:

What I heard for three years in the building was always the right things to do except there was no action, but at least the words were making sense. That's always great to hear it.

Nicolas:

I would rather see it in action, but at least hearing it is great. But then I started to hear the wrong things, and entire general mentality, and really, people just didn't know any better. I don't think the managers are just incompetent.

Nicolas:

By the way, I'm not talking about Secretary Kendall. He's a great person. I think he's doing a great job in the department. But I can tell you, at the lesser rank under him, it's a pretty big issue where you see people not able to really get things done.

Nicolas:

Honestly, the momentum already had died a little bit when Dr. Roper left at the end of the administration. Then, I was pedaling in the wind. I was pretty good at still moving forward, but at some point, it's exhausting to keep pressing the same buttons and raising the same alarms.

Nicolas:

I felt like I would do a better job if I was able to actually really fully disclose how bad the situation was. We were running out of time. When I saw my kids, when I say I had no kids, and then I have three kids under four years old, and I was like, "We can't. We're not giving them any chance of winning 20 years from now against China."

Nicolas:

I felt it was the right timing. I think three years was what I had negotiated with my wife anyway. Although, we had negotiated first a year and then I extend another year, and then the third year, but that's okay.

Tracy:

That's pretty sweet negotiation if you're able to take it from one to three years. I'm just putting it out there, Nic. Right?

Nicolas:

I'm pretty good at it. Yeah.

Tracy:

Okay, at least [inaudible: 00:04:56

Nicolas:

Although, at some point you're just doing it. Then, I also didn't get to see the kids growing, and missing that is a pretty big deal. I had a two-hour commute each way, so that's four hours in the car every day to get to the Pentagon. Funny enough, I missed the building. It's kind of funny. Everybody complains about the building, but it's such a special place, right?

Tracy:

It is.

Nicolas:

Anyway-

Tracy:

It is. Well, in other pieces of that, if I think back to the manifesto, and you and I met before the manifesto. You and I met-

Nicolas:

Oh, yeah.

Tracy:

...while you were still CSO-

Nicolas:

In the job.

Tracy:

...in the job. There was another piece of it that folks don't often talk about, and that was you being pulled away from the very thing that you love.

Tracy:

In addition to family, in addition to your time at home, in addition to being a part of your community, you're also being pulled back from technology. You are not being able to stay as close to it because of those Sisyphus moments. If you're pushing that boulder up the hill on a daily basis, not getting that same time to invest, I remember you speaking very articulately about missing that.

Tracy:

Do you feel like in the last year you've been able to reacquaint yourself, dive right back in where you left off?

Nicolas:

Yeah. I don't know if I'm ever articulate, but I appreciate the kind words. But in this case, when I saw the velocity of ITM and the time wasted on explaining the basics of life of IT really, I wasn't even getting into the real me. My whole career, 20 plus years, 23 years. After I funded my company, I was 15. I'm 38, I guess. I've been-

Carolyn:

Did you say you were 15? One five?

Nicolas:

I was 15.

Tracy:

Yeah, 15.

Nicolas:

One five. Yeah, one five.

Carolyn:

All right. Sorry, go ahead.

Nicolas:

Yeah, so it's been a long time. 450 people, 12 countries, all the good stuff. I think I was always at the top of the curve of technology, maybe sometimes too early too. You learn from that too. But the issue with the department is quite honestly, you go back 20 years in time, and then even when you're pushing the 10 legacy stuff, you're still pretty hard. So I went all the way to modern times. We pushed some of the most innovative technologies to this day, and that was great.

Nicolas:

I can tell you it's actually pretty healthy for people not to stay too long in the government. I would argue having a back and forth, couple of years outside, go back to industry, and come back. By industry, I don't mean just the defense industrial base. I think it's actually very important to go outside of it because if you had to send most of the leadership of the Pentagon to even two weeks at SpaceX, I think their head would implode. So that's something to keep in mind.

Carolyn:

Well, you actually accomplished a lot while you were there. Progress with Platform One, you led the creation of an enterprise wide DevSecOps. I mean, you did a lot, and you left with a lot of frustrations. I want to zero in.

Carolyn:

Do you feel like, in the last year, progress has been made? And if so, where and what? Do you think it's gotten better?

Nicolas:

nk it wasn't fair. [inaudible: 00:08:17

Nicolas:

nlap, Jason Weiss. [inaudible: 00:08:54

Nicolas:

You see that happening, and honestly there's no replacement. My role is still yet to be filled. Funny enough, they were talking to a few people I had introduced the Air Force two. That same person just got appointed to become the duty CSO. You know Rob Meyer?

Nicolas:

Then, the Air Force leadership was so surprised that that person didn't wait for 14 months for the interview to be over for them to accept the job. They were just about to give him the job when he took the CSO job allegedly.

Nicolas:

That shows you the lack of basic human understanding of life. This is just... Who waits 12 months for a job with no discussion in between. It's not even like these ongoing conversation. It is just nothing. Silence. Sometimes it's just mind boggling. The building is even functioning.

Carolyn:

One of the comments you made that got you in trouble I think is that... Well, I don't know if it got you in trouble. You said, "We're very behind in cyber." Do you feel like we've regressed in cyber too? Have we made any-

Nicolas:

We don't Regressed. They never really did very well anyway, so I don't know how bad it could become.

Nicolas:

What I've seen both on the duty side, but more importantly on the critical and infrastructure side at my 18 months at DHS, I can tell you the grid and the water system. The cybersecurity is at the kindergarten level.

Nicolas:

If tomorrow China decides to attack Taiwan, I wouldn't be surprised. The first thing they do is they take down 40% of the US grid. I'll be so busy trying to fix it that we're not going to be able to help anyone else.

Nicolas:

It is just very concerning when you see the lack of basic cyber hygiene. They're connecting Windows 7 machines to team viewer to get remote access because we don't have enough people to maintain the networks for the grid.

Nicolas:

We demonstrated through studies at DHS that within 10 days people start kidding each other if there's no power.

Nicolas:

So it's a pretty big deal. I think everybody would argue that losing powerful for more than a few hours is already a big problem. It is just very concerning to see the lack of investment in critical and infrastructure.

Nicolas:

People say the election... I don't care about the election. I don't think there was any issue on the cyber side with the election. But then when you hear people say the cybersecurity of the election systems were the most secure ever, I mean sure anyone can make that statement. Most secure doesn't mean secure. It just means it was better than before.

Carolyn:

Maybe more secure than it was before. Which-

Nicolas:

But I can tell you when I assess those systems, it's Windows 7 boxes, not patched for four, five, six, seven years. If someone dare to even say the world's secure alongside election systems have yet to understand the basics of cybersecurity.

Nicolas:

y that was used in any way in: 2020

Nicolas:

It's very difficult, because when you look at it, each state and each company when it comes to the grid, you are dealing with 200 plus companies very difficult to go and interact and train all these people and fund all these teams to do better.

Nicolas:

What you realize pretty quickly, particularly with the grid is a lack of resiliency. If a piece of the puzzle goes down and you've seen it again, two days ago in Maryland when a plane, a small plane crashed into a tower, took down a hundred thousand people's power. You would think there would be... It's just one tower. It's not even an important piece of the puzzle here. It's not a great station or anything like that.

Nicolas:

It is just very concerning that we have really zero resilience in the grid system when it's literally enabling everything we love and do every day.

Tracy:

I want to pull back and tease into one of the comments that you made because there's a lot to unpack there.

Tracy:

In my work with MITRE, I get to see a lot of the research that's being done around cyber secure supply chain and there's quite a lot that's being done. There's a interesting to see what's being doubled down when it comes to water, when it comes to the grid.

Tracy:

I agree with you that call to arms is interesting that it happens. There are warning signs. The Nic Chaillans of the world, others raise their hand and say, "We really need to think about this. Hey, your blood pressure's pretty high. You're overweight and you're not eating right. That could be a bad sign." And for whatever reason we tend to wait until they're in the emergency room and the heart's palpitating to start to bring in that healthy behavior.

Tracy:

Something you said early on is that you feel like we've slid backwards. Do you really feel we've slid backwards or are we in the same place having made no forward progress? I want to just tease that out with you a little bit more.

Nicolas:

It depends for what... I have to say, the new leader at DHS, Jen Easterly is just awesome. She's done a great job. She's been pushing a lot of top innovations and zero trust.

Nicolas:

million plus employees in: 2021

Nicolas:

Literally, he is the person that single handedly prevented the nations to become secure faster. That was his job and he did the opposite of what he was supposed to do.

Nicolas:

But that tells you, right? What's going on in the government. I think DHS is doing very well. New leadership, pushing zero trust helped a little bit there with the White House executive order.

Nicolas:

I think that's a great progress. Although it's paper. We do a lot with paper weight. I can probably fill my new plane of weight. We're very limited in a small plane with weight and I could probably print all these paper and completely fill my plane. Not sure it really brings security to the world, but at least we are headed the right direction.

Nicolas:

Meyer as the duty [inaudible: 00:15:17

Nicolas:

It is good because he is a courier guy. He's used to the building. It's bad too because he is not like me where he is going to make as many waves. It might be fine, but you one like me too because otherwise the status grow as tendency to go... In fact, with me leaving and all these people leaving, what you've seen is the revert back to what people know. The courier guys obviously will go back to what they've been used to doing for many years.

Nicolas:

It's a very sad story because you end up in a situation where all the progress and all the momentum... I mean, you still see some of it, right? It's not completely gone, but I would say, at the very least, 50% of the momentum has been completely gone out of the window.

Tracy:

Something else that I've observed is that there's the turning over of a generation. I know as much as people don't want to hear this, there's muscle memory, there's a lot of muscle memory and the further along you are in your career, the stronger that muscle memory.

Tracy:

It's not that people are nefarious, it really isn't. It's not that they're truly complacent. It's the change is really hard. As we're seeing a new generation of leaders, Nic Chaillans of the world. As we're seeing a new group of leaders coming in. I think that we're seeing some of that friction of old guard and new mindset thinking. I think that that's actually a part of what's going to help us are the Austin Bryans. They're coming up through the ranks things and he's taking his tour right now.

Nicolas:

Well technically is a... Yeah. I mean that's the issue, right? Austin is a perfect example. He is a awesome guy. He should have been the next generation of generals, but he had to leave the department. He's a reservist I think now, but it's not the same. I mean, he's doing-

Tracy:

It's not quite the same.

Nicolas:

It's not the same at all, right?

Tracy:

Right.

Nicolas:

We lost probably one of the most important leader. They refused to put him in charter Platform One. I had proposed it. It was a rank thing. It didn't check the boxes. Instead, you have to pick from a short list of material leaders that doesn't went through a special training, which is complete outdated training by the way of managing programs in a way that's complete around waterfall capability.

Nicolas:

You're very right by the way on the generation. Those are people that were raised with technology. It's pretty shocking when you go to the Pentagon to this day. You end up in a building where you're probably the least likely to know if there's an attack on US soil before CNN gets you a notification on your phone because we don't have cell phones in the building.

Tracy:

I will say that the first time that I went into the Pentagon and I had to lock two phones and laptop and I was so proud that I had managed to make sure that everything was minified, so I was carrying the least amount possible. It's a long walk.

Nicolas:

No watch. What was your watch?

Tracy:

Oh no. I had to take that off too. I was so happy that I had managed. No, it was the electronic disrobing that you needed to do.

Tracy:

I can understand the pros and the cons of it.

Nicolas:

Yeah.

Tracy:

There's smart things on the horizon. The question is how quickly can we make those things happen to a point you often make?

Tracy:

I want to track back to something that you touched on in just in one sentence.

Tracy:

It's actually hard for us to get past policy and not just the humans and their mindset shift. We've got policies in place, we've got acquisition and contracting structures and people just don't know. There's a whole lot that they've actually changed that can be done. It seems to be. It seems to be.

Tracy:

I like your opinion on this. Is it really that we have to get more mentoring, more help for these folks so they can actually use the tools that are at hand?

Nicolas:

Yeah, there's definitely all the tools there. That's not a policy and governance issue any longer whatsoever. In fact, even during the software study when I started the first year, we already demonstrated there was no blocker other than people that didn't use the capabilities given to them.

Nicolas:

The issue I guess is you have no reward for all government employees to take risks. In fact, they're probably more rewarded to not take risks.

Nicolas:

It's very different from a company where you have the opportunity to get a promotion and bonuses. Usually, the people promoted actually are the people that are the least capable. Honestly, the higher in the rank the more concerning it gets to. There are exceptions of course, but the fact is the good ones end up leaving of frustration and that's concerning.

Nicolas:

I can tell you, I did a pretty good job going to all these different teams and trying to find the gold nuggets of people at... No matter the rank I put in charge E7 in shot of things that they would never even be allowed to even talk about let alone run as a team.

Nicolas:

That's a pretty concerning thing that you see all of these guys leave and not being replaced. I think that's the biggest part of the problem is the good ones are leaving.

Nicolas:

t is they're not competent in: 2022

Carolyn:

I want to go back to something that you guys have both touched on and you've both said that policy is not necessarily the problem. I'm thinking about software acquisition.

Carolyn:

Tracy, you and I have talked about this before, how slow it can be. We've got the old boots and buckles, rules in place for software acquisition. To me, that's like a policy that would be getting in the way. Is it? Or am I just uneducated? Have things changed with software acquisition? Is it easier, faster?

Nicolas:

No, there are different pathways in software and the one that we actually release. I helped during my time in the government with ANS and there is definitely a software pathway that's supposed to be more agile and removing the software, it's never done removing sustainment, all the good stuff, creating a special color of money. It's just not very well used. It's there.

Nicolas:

The other aspect is the real appointment is Congress. Not only we should have term limits because it's just the right thing to do, but more importantly, having to...

Nicolas:

he building, I was working on: 2029

Nicolas:

I think Congress' fear is the fact that they have to provide that oversight of how the money is being spent? And is it spent wisely? And what kind of return of investment are we getting from the money?

Nicolas:

I can tell you the way the system is orchestrated right now is actually creating more problem that it's solving because we are ending up wasting probably 60 cent on a dollar on bureaucracy that just slow everything down and until you're not delivering outcomes to the war fighter and the taxpayers.

Nicolas:

Some of the thing we've done and demonstrated is if you actually give real-time visibility to the work being done, Congress is very less at risk of showing up to criticize work. Then, they're able to give you a little bit more leeway to address the problem and be more flexible.

Nicolas:

The other issue is you add agile, want to be agile teams. Honestly, I'm not going to give names because I don't want to do that, but they are pretty big famous teams that'll just... They call themselves agile and honestly they have no real agile background, let alone do it at that kind of scale. They became so bloated and wasting so much taxpayer money that they wonder why now Congress is talking about oversight again for these teams.

Nicolas:

Well, the fact is you're spending a billion of taxpayer money with very little to show for it, and all you tell people is, "Don't worry, we're agile.

Tracy:

We're agile.

Nicolas:

Don't have to show you anything. No planning, no reporting, no nothing." The world doesn't work like this, right? I've done agile my whole life and it was never like that.

Tracy:

name is Linda Northrop. About: 2015

Nicolas:

Right.

Tracy:

It doesn't mean there's no planning, of course you have to plan doesn't mean there's no architecture. It means that I decide the big things that can't be changed upfront and everything else can be decided later. It was that balance. You see people in the name of agility, a name of being agile, I'm going to do agile.

Tracy:

Carolyn has heard me rant as have you Nic, about people who want to... They're going to do agile and they're going to do DevOps. How about we focus on delivering software to whoever it is at the pace that they need it, and these are techniques that we're going to be using? And no posturing. No posturing, no labels.

Tracy:

Show it to exactly your point. What are the qualitative and quantitative measures? Show me the measures, show me the measures. Not all of them have to be numeric. Some of them can be more binary nature, but you're spot on with that, Nic. You are spot on with that.

Tracy:

I want to ask a really a baited question. I think I know where you're going to go with this, but it don't.

Tracy:

Recently, there've been a lot of layoffs and in Silicone Valley there's a lot of things going on with big tech and at the same time I'm seeing a big uptick in the DOD in the public sector side, non DOD, and treasury and such, where they're raising their hands to say, "If you want to have life, if you want to do something that's meaningful, might not have the same amount of money, but if you want to do something meaningful, come to the government."

Tracy:

Open-ended question. What do you think of the concept? Do you think we can lure that kind talent?

Carolyn:

Yeah, VA's got a big push trying to get Silicon Valley.

Nicolas:

Well it's tough, right? Because there's a couple of issues there. There's two bubble, I call it the incompetence bubble, that's the Pentagon and I call it the Kumbaya bubble, that's the Silicon Valley. They don't really meet very well. Quite honestly, a lot of these guys live in a parallel universe.

Nicolas:

When I used to give a lot of conferences, I remember the Cuba Con where we announced, we put Cubans on F16 jets, pretty the largest by the way attendees in history of the conference. I had a lot of people waiting for me to shake my hand on whatever at the end of the show. Probably six or seven of the 200 plus people waited to shake my hand and I give them my hand and then, "Oh, I don't want to shake your hand. You kidding babies with jets. You have blood on your hands."

Nicolas:

They don't realize that the freedom they enjoy and the life they have now is thanks to the sacrifices of the war fighter. I was surrounded by war fighter and it just makes me pretty upset. I remember it took a lot of self-control for someone like me not to go nuts on this. It was the first time I got to see that nonsense already at that scale. It wasn't just one person. Then, she ended up saying also that she had to go to the puppy room to calm down because of course conferences are so scary they have to go have puppy rooms, but now they talked about it, and because that's not good enough, they also have a kitty room because you don't want to discriminate.

Nicolas:

The world we live in nowadays... People are participation trophies. We're raising kids in a way that's not going to be the success story of tomorrow. I'm very concerned by this. Those kids have no education.

Nicolas:

Remember one person telling me the Queen of England came from Egypt. I mean, the amount of nonsense those kids are able to talk about.

Tracy:

[inaudible: 00:28:28

Nicolas:

I don't know how you get to bring... I'm not saying all of them are like that, some are not, but the fact is it's a scary majority. Way more than we think.

Tracy:

So you've-

Nicolas:

Most of them wouldn't want to work for the government. Tell you not DOD by the way, maybe treasury and stuff like that. But I think they would probably not want to...

Nicolas:

In fact, many companies I tried to convince to come and help the Department of Defense, they would push back and say, "Oh, I don't want to do weapons."

Nicolas:

They were fine taking money from DOD when it was about business systems. I would remind them that the DOD is not here to do business stuff. We're here to do weapons to protect the nation and have the deterrence aspect of it. We don't want to use them, but we need to have them, right? China has them and we don't want to be the one without them.

Nicolas:

They would push back and say, "Oh, we'll do business stuff." I'm like, "Oh, so you're okay with taking that money, right? So you only pick and choose the kind of money you are accepting, right? It's just funny how you... Why don't you just walk away? What you have to take the programs you're going to be walking? Just leave."

Nicolas:

I wouldn't even want to do business with these people. It's just complete nonsense. I just can't even understand how you get to that conclusion. But I guess-

Tracy:

I didn't quite have the same experience as you Nic. But I can say that in working on analytic services and meeting with big companies, big Silicone Valley companies, there were a number who didn't want to be involved. We weren't talking about weapon systems on the front. We were actually talking about using analytics to figure out which war fighters, and you didn't have to be a frontline soldier looking for trends to help identify if somebody was at the risk of suicide or depression. I thought-

Nicolas:

You think everybody would jump on that one?

Tracy:

You would think that everybody would jump on that, but because it was DOD adjacent, it was adjacent to... For some reason-

Nicolas:

It's scary.

Tracy:

Yeah. It's very scary.

Nicolas:

That [inaudible: 00:30:19

Nicolas:

I think first we need to fix our schools because that's where the problem is. We're teaching kids to hate America. If you think they're going to come and serve the country for a country they hate for the wrong reasons with no understanding of what other countries, you either-

Tracy:

But that's not coming from home, Nic. That's really not coming from home. Don't you think that that's coming from a lot of really big outside influences right now. I look at social media personally.

Nicolas:

Yeah. Social media.

Tracy:

I'm somebody who partakes of social media and yet I keep it at arms length.

Tracy:

Yeah. You and I have some interesting opinions. I'd like to hear your thoughts, especially around TikTok. What can we do? If we're talking about helping to change mindsets in the United States? What role do our own US-based media and social media companies have?

Tracy:

Then, talk a little bit about TikTok. Because I got to tell you, the number of vids that I get sent to me as a text message on my personal that I'm like, "Okay, delete. You're not getting anywhere near me." Talk to me a little bit about that risk.

Nicolas:

Honestly, the monopoly of companies nowadays, whether it's Apple and Google, Apple has no problem doing business in China and just actually disabled the airdrop capability for more than 10 minutes to prevent the Chinese protestors to share files and pictures and communicate.

Nicolas:

Clearly, you see American companies completely owned by the CCP. Social media companies were effectively blocking American people to talk about the origin of the Covid 19 virus. Despite us in the government being convinced with very little doubt that it came from the lab. I mean there is no proof of otherwise.

Nicolas:

It's just very concerning to see the power of these companies. But then if you also look at TikTok, right? TikTok is effectively the dream come true for the CCP in term of intelligence web. Not only to capture data and raise still everything you know and love and your face prints and your fingerprints, all the way to effectively everything you like, talk about, who is engaged with you. It's a great tool for social engineering, for hackers so they know exactly what to talk to you about, to get you excited, right?

Tracy:

Mm-hmm.

Carolyn:

So what do you say? I think, I know what you're going to say to this, but what do you say to the people that say, "What do I care if they're monitoring me? What do I care if they're collecting this data? I have nothing to hide." And you were going towards this path of what we can do with the collective, but-

Nicolas:

Right. Yeah. First it's not a one person. I mean it, for sure, if one person wants to do that, it's one thing. But the fact is, the issue is a volume and what you end up doing with it.

Nicolas:

First people work for companies, companies can be targeted. It's not just people being selfish here, but it's also the amount of information they end up gathering.

Nicolas:

Look at the payment system in China. They pay with their face most of the time now. We gave them all face prints. Now, they could do deep fakes. They can do pretty much anything.

Nicolas:

What you're going to want to do in 20 years. What if you want to run for Congress in 20 years? Are you going to be okay with someone being able to make your face and make a fake video of you saying that you love Hitler or whatever stupid nonsense like that.

Nicolas:

You never know first how that data is going to be used. That's number one. It's not about something to hide, it's about privacy and controlling your personal identifiable information. When you start touching fingerprints and face prints, but more importantly, you untie family.

Nicolas:

By the way, the fact that Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok is limiting the use of TikTok to 40 minutes a day for kids under 14, and of course we have no limit here because, by the way they call it in their Chinese report addiction as bad as fentanyl, which by the way is also sent to us by China. How funny is that, right? What a coincidence. The fact that they are making us weaker and dumber and pushing dense videos when they're promoting educational and science projects to their kids, they're not stupid. They know exactly what it's going to do to the other nations' next generations.

Nicolas:

By the way, we talk about a weapon of misinformation when effectively 40% of kids or adults and they're 24 years old, use TikTok as a search engine.

Tracy:

As their search engine now.

Nicolas:

Search engine have the ability to control everything.

Tracy:

Their search engine.

Carolyn:

Wow. Well, it seems like a very effective tool for social engineering in mass.

Nicolas:

Oh yeah.

Tracy:

All social media is. This is in the hands of the enemy. That's the problem.

Nicolas:

Right. The CCP will copy of all the data. That's the thing.

Nicolas:

Look, Facebook, I'm not a big fan of Zuckerberg either, but the fact is at least it's in the US.

Nicolas:

I'm not saying by the way, we shouldn't do some reforms also on the US side of things. I'm pretty excited about what's happening with Twitter by the way.

Nicolas:

tion. We already knew back in: 2016

Tracy:

It's massive.

Carolyn:

Yeah. I want you to go back to what you just said about Twitter. Why are you excited? Unpack that one.

Nicolas:

I'm just excited that people get out of the way of trying to control people's star and feelings and everybody is just incapable apparently of making decisions and we don't have any critical thinking. If you don't like somebody, you block them. It's not rocket science. You don't want to hear about someone just block me. Why do I care?

Nicolas:

I have so many people on LinkedIn and other platforms tell me, "Oh, you cross the line. I'm going to stop following you." I'm like, "Great. Why do I care?"

Tracy:

Great. Why not?

Nicolas:

"Why are you telling me this? This is not relevant to me. I have hundred and thousands-"

Tracy:

Wait, it didn't hurt your feelings? It's not personally making you feel sad and you're not mourning that on the daily basis?

Nicolas:

Please everybody, like I told you is, if you're not having some people upset about things, you're not doing anything, meaningful. The fact is, you can't-

Carolyn:

You're winning Nic. You're winning.

Nicolas:

Right.

Tracy:

But not like a Charlie Sheen kind of winning.

Carolyn:

Yeah. Right.

Tracy:

[inaudible: 00:37:02

Nicolas:

Yeah. You don't have to go... I mean, you want to stay on the 60, 70% of people that likes you.

Nicolas:

Look, there's people liking things for different reasons. The fact is that there is also a lot of people that reach out to me privately and say, "Hey, I can't say anything because I don't want to go in public, but I really appreciate what you're doing." That's great.

Nicolas:

around the defense [inaudible: 00:37:31

Carolyn:

Can we go back-

Nicolas:

Do they not like me or they just don't like efficiency and saving the taxpayer money? I don't know which one it is.

Carolyn:

I want to go back to TikTok, because you know me Tracy, I like a boat on everything. I like it nice and wrapped up for me.

Tracy:

Right. Yes, you do. No ambiguity for Carolyn.

Carolyn:

I think I heard you say that TikTok is a cyber threat. Can you address what you think government agencies should do about it just within the agency?

Nicolas:

ttle while because [inaudible: 00:38:24

Carolyn:

We want to be China? That was scary.

Nicolas:

I get it, right? I get it.

Carolyn:

Okay.

Nicolas:

re is massive. The [inaudible: 00:39:10

Tracy:

As you talks about these, still all of those people getting laid off in the Silicone Valley. I just tying that together for you Carolyn. Putting on them.

Nicolas:

Oh, let's see. The education system is, it's so biased on every side, right? It's too politicized. There's a lot going on right now. Anyway, it's just very scary.

Tracy:

Can I get really personal and ask what you do for your kids for school?

Nicolas:

Well, my kids are only four and two, so it's easier. Although, I can tell you we had a tough time finding... Either we had school that were pushing critical race theory, which is a real thing by the way, including in Virginia and it's not a myth. People like to pretend because I've seen it firsthand talking to teachers. In fact, people got to see it because of covid because they could actually hear the classes. It was always part of the more or less, but always a little bit part of the puzzle.

Nicolas:

Then, you have the other side, the craziness here too, where you have people anti-evolution and we didn't come from monkeys. It is just very scary stuff.

Nicolas:

I'm like, "Can we just have a middle ground, just normal common sense schooling and we focus on science and STEM and normal stuff?" People don't know how to speak. They don't know how to read. We have the basics of life not taught anymore. Instead of spending time on social studies that'll rate available in time of their value to get a degree and then get a job.

Nicolas:

. That sounds like [inaudible: 00:41:01

Tracy:

I'm going to track it back. I'm going to track it back. I'm going to track it back.

Tracy:

You don't have to yet make a decision. Two and four. You have that luxury right now.

Nicolas:

Yes.

Carolyn:

Your four year old's preschool.

Tracy:

But preschool's a bit of a choice for some families.

Carolyn:

Fair enough. Fair enough. All right. All right.

Tracy:

But if I play it forward, so my father was a school superintendent, so I'm the child of educators and my father would say, and I wanted to homeschool, lost the battle with my husband. Long story I think. We'll do a-

Nicolas:

I try my wife and no. I tried my-

Tracy:

But that's where I was going to go with this is that my father would say that you could enter somebody into public school right now and you could have them there for only a... to compress everything into less than four years, and then we get the same amount of value in a condensed four years. His opinion changed after he retired and as he got to see what was happening with the education system today.

Tracy:

My question to you Nic is, are you thinking about private schools, private tutors, public schools, homeschooling? Where's your head out if you don't mind sharing? That's really private.

Nicolas:

Yeah. Yeah. We looked at the public schools here, it's a disaster. First, they don't even have teachers. They literally ask parents sometimes to show up and be the teacher. I have never seen that before.

Nicolas:

Here, where I live, I live in the middle of nowhere, so of course that's going to be more common here. But the schools, the public school are non-starter here. I mean, you don't have a choice, so I guess you end up private.

Nicolas:

I was pushing for homeschooling. My wife was completing... I get it also in term of making sure the kids get to see the world and see people and talk to other. I mean, you could still do some of that but it's just harder. It's a lot of work for my wife too by the way, with twins and a four year old on top of that.

Nicolas:

The vision I had was to do Elon Musk did actually where he created his own school. It's actually something I'm still looking at. It is just tough because not only it's super expensive, but it's not just the money, it's a ton of work. It might be worth it because what's more important than the future of my kids' education. It's tough to do it alone and I'm in the middle of nowhere and honestly no one would really have the money to really participate in this. Unlike him, where he did it in California, obviously that was pretty easy to find the 18 other kids there.

Nicolas:

It's interesting but it's a very big concern. Like I said, we had schools so Catholic and stuff that didn't believe in evolution, all the way to critical Ray theory stuff and clear, including at four years old, which I was shocked. They were separating playgrounds. There was a black playground and then a white playground.

Carolyn:

Wait now?

Nicolas:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tracy:

Okay.

Nicolas:

It's real.

Carolyn:

Yeah.

Nicolas:

People keep thinking... I actually went physically to see the stuff because I don't believe hearsay. I can tell you what I've seen, looking at seven schools was shocking. Only one was actually even acceptable. The rest were very concerning between either the people... I always look at the stickers on the calls. It's a good insight looking at the stickers.

Tracy:

If we see all of the mom and the dad and the dog, 14 dogs and 17 kids, you kind of look at that and look at all the bumper stickers and see where they're at.

Nicolas:

Yeah. Exactly. I like the family.

Carolyn:

If you decide to do a school, let me know. I used to be an educator for a very small time.

Nicolas:

Here we go.

Carolyn:

I loved it. I'll tell you, there's a lot of the same problems that we talk about in government-

Tracy:

Mm-hmm.

Nicolas:

Oh, yeah.

Carolyn:

...in the education system.

Tracy:

Sure.

Carolyn:

Before we run out of time, I want to stay personal and I want to know why you ever got into government.

Nicolas:

Well, it started actually during the ISIS attacks, including in Paris when I knew a couple of people that died. I had sold my 11th company and I wanted to do something else and I thought, "Hey, why do another stupid mobile app or whatever, let's try to make a difference." I reached out to people but I wasn't a citizen yet. It was an on starter and then I became a US citizen and literally within 30 days I was in the job at DHS and doing the cyber.gov stuff, zero trust and assessing all the grid and water stuff. That's where I started to realize, "Wow. This is much worse than I thought."

Nicolas:

It's funny because you watch all these TV shows and you see all this technology and all this stuff is fake obviously, but for some reason people believe it. In fact, I would probably argue if you ask most people how quickly do we age a face of someone or how quickly we take fingerprints or DNA, they would think, "Oh, it's just 10 minutes or whatever." It's days.

Nicolas:

I've seen stuff that really got me worried. In fact that's when I started to become a prepper here to get a generator from my house and getting water and stuff. I'm like, "Oh, we can't survive. This is going to be bad." I didn't care before this, honestly, but I'm pretty good now. I could probably go upgrade for two years and be fine.

Carolyn:

You got into government which got turned you into a prepper.

Nicolas:

Yeah. Yeah.

Carolyn:

I grew up in Utah, so I grew up that way.

Nicolas:

You grew up [inaudible: 00:46:23

Nicolas:

I always lived in big cities and I guess you never thought about it. I don't know. I never really particularly paid attention to it. I decided to lose fire a little bit and then you start looking at the cyber say and you're like, "Wow, what happens if this happens?" Then, you start doing the exercises and you start to do the study of how quickly people go nuts if they lose power and stuff.

Nicolas:

It's concerning. That's where I became a prepper and then DOD came. That's was actually even more exciting because honestly those people... I mean, the sacrifice of these people, right?

Nicolas:

That's why I get frustrated honestly by the bureaucrats, the civilian side a little bit more because, and the top generals maybe too because they lost touch with the actual real life of war where people end up killed for their mistakes and you have to live with that. I think the lack of accountability and the complacency in the building is pretty despicable when you send people to risk their lives. It's pretty concerning.

Carolyn:

Yeah. You just touched a heart string there. I grew up a military kid. My dad, Colonel, national Guard.

Nicolas:

Yeah.

Carolyn:

Before we end, I would love for you to talk about some of the things that you've got going on because love you or hate you say stuff that makes people think, right?

Nicolas:

Yeah.

Carolyn:

You get the conversation going and you tell it like it is. You've got a couple of things going on your life too, your newsletter. Can you talk about them really fast?

Nicolas:

Yeah, we have those show every Tuesday, In the Nic of time, and it's fun. We have always new guests. It's always a lot of great-

Carolyn:

I've watched you.

Nicolas:

Tracy was there. We had a lot of fun.

Tracy:

Me too.

Nicolas:

We keep bringing new people every week on Tuesday at 1:00 PM Eastern. Then, we just launched Learn with Nic because again, back to education, that's why this cool thing has been in my head for a while because honestly, it's all interrelated. You look at IT education is to disgrace. I had universities reach out to me to create a DevSecOps training, but they were like, "Oh, we're going to charge to Fulton and make a bunch of load of money and you're going to get a big cut, you'll be very happy. But we don't want to date the curriculum more than every five years." I'm like, "I'm not going to put my name on this if you don't keep up with the place of relevance."

Nicolas:

I wanted a year, I even proposed three years to try to settle and they didn't budge from the five years, and so I walked away and said, "You know what? I'm just going to do my own thing."

Carolyn:

Is that what you do on Learn with Nic?

Nicolas:

Yeah, that's what we do.

Carolyn:

You're training them SecOps or do you tackle different topics?

Nicolas:

Yeah. Every week we have a new video. This week, I just finished the recording this morning of the video about web assembly. Every week we have a different topic. Sometimes it's very technical. Sometimes it's about culture. Sometime it's about acquisition, contracting. Then, more exciting we just released this week the first metaverse of Cloud Native Metaverse where we have a whole universe completely free to use by the way, no cost, where we have dozens of companies from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Linux Foundation promoting their releases as software, the innovation. We have a whole world where you navigate and go learn. There's different rooms, so about different topics. One of them was very-

Carolyn:

This is your Metaverse?

Tracy:

Mm-hmm.

Nicolas:

Yeah, it's my metaverse. It's called the Cloud Native Town. What I love with this is bringing back people together, particularly with Covid and people being remote.

Nicolas:

I think it's a real problem by the way, being remote. Very tough to create a rapport between people. Completely underestimate. I think they're going to realize pretty quickly you cannot succeed be completely remote in a bigger organization and keep moving fast.

Nicolas:

I think you get stuck in time and it's very difficult, particularly if you have turnover. If you knew the people, you can get away with it a little bit for a year, whatever. But I think not me being able to meet people over coffee or whatever.

Nicolas:

We are trying to bring back this kind of universe. I mean, it's the next best thing you can do. There's a lot of content, a lot of videos, and people can send us content and we put it there for free and we are creating it. We'll make sure it's not biased for one cloud provider, one company. It's created and it's... We also committed to updating the curriculum every six months. It's never going to get too still.

Carolyn:

We can find all this on your LinkedIn profile?

Nicolas:

Yeah. My LinkedIn and the Metaverse is on cloudnative.town, .town is a new domain name.

Nicolas:

or mobile yet, but [inaudible: 00:51:07

Nicolas:

We're trying to really educate people and make sure they have the time to learn. We used to give an hour day to our people to learn in my team. First to catch up and then keep up and people completely underestimate what it takes to keep up with IT. Invest in yourself is my slogan. So, invest in yourself.

Carolyn:

Yes. I love that. I love that. Well, thank you very much Nic. This has been a very fun conversation. Very enlightening.

Nicolas:

Yeah, thank you for having me. This was very fun.

Carolyn:

Yeah.

Tracy:

All right.

Carolyn:

All right and listeners, please share and like and we will talk to you next time on Tech Transforms. So what?

Carolyn:

Thanks for joining Tech Transforms, sponsored by Dynatrace. For more tech transforms, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.