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[Music] amu american military university is proud to present protect and secure [Music] welcome to protect insecure i'm your co-host lesion crannic today i'm joined by my co-host and the program director of cyber security at american military university dr kevin harris hi kevin great to be with you how are you thanks lisa and i'm really excited to be here we're so honored to have such an outstanding guest today lieutenant general vincent stewart welcome sir and thank you for joining us today good morning everyone it's great to be here i'm looking forward to a lively and entertaining session so thanks again for taking the time to share your expertise um before we get started i really just wanted to give our listeners some background about your impressive career so lieutenant general vincent stewart served for more than 38 years in the u.s marine corps he served as the deputy commander united states cyber command one of the 11 combatant commands of the department of defense with military and civilian personnel stationed worldwide prior to that assignment he served as the 20th director of the defense intelligence agency or the dia where he oversaw the global defense intelligence enterprise which supported customers from the president of the united states to the troops deployed around the world he was the first jamaican-american and the first marine to hold that position currently he serves as the chief innovation and business intelligence officer for ankura which is based in washington dc we're also very proud to note that lieutenant general vincent stewart is a member of our university's board of trustees and that his leadership and career experience can help guide our university in providing outstanding and relevant academic programs so thank you again sir for joining us and thank you for your decades of service to our country thanks for that great introduction my mother would be proud my mother-in-law would still be wondering when i was going to be a success so we'll keep working at it well part of that success that you know we heard about and as your career you're the first jamaican american to be the director at the defense intelligence agency and served at some of the highest levels of u.s marines including delivering briefings to the president of the united states and other members of national security staff do you mind discussing that journey and how you first got interested in cyber security let me start this way i've been asked a number of times if i had a book in me and my response is generally no i don't think anybody would be terribly interested but i do have a couple of chapters and and one of those chapters is the opportunity to brief president trump shortly after he took office and that that was quite an experience so let me back out from that before i get in trouble i don't know if everybody knows a story often times i get asked hey good morning sir how how are you doing and i'll generally say i'm living the dream and i don't believe everybody really understands how deep that response is i came to america at age 13. we came here with nothing my mother and father came a year ahead of us we stayed with our grandparents in jamaica for about a year and then we came to america landing in new york first and then going on to chicago and uh we came to america with the idea that the america was the land of opportunity the place where dreams get fulfilled so at age 13 we landed we got the first part of culture shock think about landing in new york in november going on to chicago from a tropical island to the wind coming off the lake in lake michigan but we had nothing i don't recall having luggage even i believe we had what we had on our backs at least as far as i can remember we had no title we had no great wealth set aside somewhere we were just coming to america on the hope of america to then be able to go from the hope of america to a free education at western illinois university the home of the fighting leathernecks and many people don't realize that the western illinois university actually owns the rights to the fighting latinx it's not the marine corps so i've been a leatherneck my entire life my entire adult life so i went to western illinois on a football scholarship and then decided to serve our country my adopted country to give back and as a result joined the marine corps with the intent of doing three or four years and then getting out of the marine corps and doing something special and i had no idea what something special well the marine corps turned out to be that something special so i fell in love with the marine corps i fell in love with the people the marines the men and women who helped me to be so successful and the marine corps continued to challenge me step by step year by year until i woke up one day and discovered that i'd been doing it for 38 years and i probably ought to grow up and do something else much of my career was spent in the intelligence community i spent a good bit of time in the signals intelligence community both doing the protection of our networks and exploiting other people's networks and i'll stop leave it there and so that got me into the future so when i started in the in the second world it was high frequency manual morse intercept all of that translated uh over time to networks built by men built around routers and servers and switches and and so it was a natural progression into defending the modern network and so that's how i got to cyber security and cyber operations and i've been doing that really for about the last 10 or 12 years no thank you a lot of great info there and when you talk about some of the opportunity that you know you were afforded throughout your career and just of you know how that helps you when we talk about the cyber field what are some things that you think in your opinion can help make it attractive to diverse individuals of all types and backgrounds well the reality is regardless of whether we want to or not we are all part of the attack surface if you have a smart device a watch a phone a refrigerator a tv that's connected to this future this internet of things this is the space for the future all of our information all the data that is important to us will ride along this network and it is a multi-trillion dollar enterprise to build resilient networks protect them and protect the data that rides in that network and so whether we want to or not we are part of this and we may think we're insignificant and no one's interested if you have a bank account someone's interested someone who picks your pocket for five dollars in your wallet you know now can do this electronically because i can touch your network if you have medical records that you want to keep private someone is probably out there looking to see how they can exploit the things that are in your medical record if you work for a corporation someone is interested in that data that rides on this network the phrase was coined a few years ago data is the new oil i think that's a great metaphor for the future all of our data is interesting to someone whether it's interested in it from a nation-state standpoint or for a criminal standpoint someone is interested in that data the folks who can take advantage of how we build networks protect that data and make it resilient and recoverable will be incredibly valuable going forward this is the 21st century when you talked about the medical records and iot it kind of brought up our situation that we're in now with our pandemic with covid how has the threat landscape changed and been impacted with covet 19. so one of the things there are a couple of different things one is there's now the competition for who solves the kovid problem so if i'm either a criminal or a nation state i want to steal intellectual property that goes into this is the solution to the covet 19 crisis because now i can monetize it i don't have to invest in research and development i can go to those organizations let's pick pfizer who is doing some working in this vaccine space and if i can get into their network and take that intellectual property and simply turn that from research and development into production on mass scale and distribution on mass scale i get a decided advantage because i can steal that information and i don't have to commit any resources to research and development the second part now is we are now working in a dispersed way in one example i would have x number of people operating in a building i could kind of monitor their activity inside the building i can build all the real firewalls around that one structure so now take let's say i'll make up this number let's say there are a thousand people in this building and now a thousand people are working from a thousand different locations rather than just from one building well let's i'll even simplify it i'll say not a thousand there's five hundred but regardless of the number i've now increased my attack surface i can now increase the vulnerability to the network because the network is as strong as the individual points on that network it's as strong as the weakest link so if someone fails to do the right thing that we prescribed go behind the virtual private network make sure your uh malware detection and mitigation is up to date make sure you're using good strong passwords and i and maybe i have a way to monitor that maybe i don't but the reality is i've increased the attack surface i've made my entire enterprise more vulnerable because in most cases the vulnerability to our network comes from an insider and not because an insider is malicious but because an insider has poor cyber hygiene what do i mean by poor cyber hygiene we tell all of our folks do not click on links that you don't recognize hover over the link see where it's coming from no matter it seems regardless of the amount of training in the organization does about four to five percent of folks still click on the link to the point where i've said i could even put in the subject line do not click on this link any percentage of folks will be interested enough that they will click on the link and that's just a simple link that's not even any not even a socially engineered link because now i can track the things that you're interested in and i can design a link that you will be interested in clicking on you like fishing in montana in april i can send you something specifically tailored to fishing on x river in montana in april aren't you interested and i'll get some people interested with that you know with the scene you know we've got that wide threat landscape that's changing that you talked about what are some uh recommendations you have for cyber professionals as other that's in the technology field to kind of help combat that well it starts with education the major breaches that i've looked at over the past several years i am absolutely certain that those folks believe that they were doing all of the right things to prevent the major breach but if you're not doing some fundamental things you're not updating your operating system regularly whenever it's outdated if you don't have a malware detection and loss detection program you're putting particularly the malware detection and mitigation program if your enterprise isn't using uh strong passwords it is stunning to me that months over months year after year now the most commonly used password is the word password now some people get clever and they use a capital p and they put one two three four on the back end if i'm a brute force hacker guess where i'm going first i'm going to those standard poor x password and again we made it as an industry really hard we say you got to have 15 characters uppercase lowercase a number etc etc and it doesn't have to be that complicated it has to be long it can't has to be something other than vin stewart is a great american because folks will figure that out fairly quickly but if you can come up with a passphrase that is long that is 15 characters it is just as effective as uppercase lowercase uh numbers as special characters etc so you've got to do at least three basic things your operating system your malware detection your password and i'm okay with the password program because with a password program that generates a strong password i only still have to remember one the master password i can even write the master password down at home because if you really want to get me you got to come to my house you got to break in you got to find where i wrote my master password and i'll take my chances there you want to do multi-factor authentication whenever you can so that if someone attempts to log in you get a notification you can make a determination of whether uh yeah that was me or wait a minute that's not me but we have made it so difficult industry and even in the private sector i've got 37 different accounts i've got to remember 37 different passwords that's almost impossible those are the big things i think i think that came close to answering your question if it didn't come back to me no that was perfect actually it kind of led me into something else you mentioned private things that users can do the industry and all so it kind of made me start thinking about collaboration with it not being just one area when we talk about international collaboration in the cyber field how important is that international collaboration yeah it's it's important at every level uh quite frankly uh how we do the right public-private partnership where we can share insights we can share threats and we can do it at uh multiple classification level and that sometimes is the biggest challenge the things that the intelligence community has that is highly sensitive is awfully hard to share with our commercial our private partners but i tell our private partners don't worry about that so much because probably 85 to 90 percent of the intelligence you need to defend your networks is available you can buy it you can buy it from fireeye you can buy it from crowdstrike you can buy it from any number of vendors who can give you that direct intel and very rarely is there so much more exquisite that the intelligence community can add to helping you to defend your network so at the local level at our level the right public-private partnership becomes really important then you go to the international level and what you share becomes even more challenging because the activity may be taking place in the international space i don't know an attacker who goes directly from vince to kevin the attacker is going to go from vince to bob to shirley to janice to and ultimately get to kevin well if part of the attacker's network is in an international partner space how do you deal with that and oh by the way the international partner is looking at us because some of the attack is coming from palo alto there might be a server that is running in palo alto that might be the key threat vector so you got that coordination thing that you've got to do and you've got to be able to do that at the speed of the network so it's not you know there there's a plane inbound to europe and it'll be there in six hours it's going to be there in three milliseconds you know someone hit send execute and it's there so how do you do that coordination at network speed becomes an increasing challenge how do you do that in a different set of privacy set of rules how do you touch people's data how do you handle people's data how do you store people's data and so now you not only complicated the the problem by network speed but you complicated it by privacy and security implications this is so different again this is why i tell folks i don't know how you not get excited about this face because you go back to when the united states declared its independence someone had to write something down on paper give it to a messenger who got on a boat who went across the atlantic and delivered it to the king today i can do that with one piece you know i i type slow so take a little bit of time but the average person types really fast and can hit send very quickly and in milliseconds it's global i saw an email the other day uh this is just going to be internal we don't want it to go to everyone uh around the network uh because this is about the u.s and not i go i just need on person who just said you know what i need to share it with uh with shirley and off you go and you put in the subject line do not disseminate further and someone still disseminates it so trying to do the key partner uh private public integration in the united states is challenging i talked about classification but also talk about proprietary microsoft may not want google to know their secret sauce so you got a whole nother set of things that you've got to work through and then you're going to do that to our partners and international partners different standards for privacy different standards for sharing so yeah this is this is not easy work and we need the smartest minds in our country to help us think our way through how we do this more effectively and you talked a little about sort of the international partnerships that are necessary to kind of protect the whole network and identify some of the folks who are you know bad players in the space and i'm wondering just throughout your career have you seen those collaborations really improve among international players do you see countries you know reaching out and working closely i work a lot in the law enforcement space and i know that there's been a lot of great work with interpol and and just trying to really come together to fight a lot of whether it's human trafficking or other things that are are happening over cyber connections now one of the things that i often talk to folks about is who are the best players in this space and i think the united states is the best player in the space followed probably by russia and china in terms of great powers but one of the things that the united states has is an alliance so we know that we can count on the brits the australians the canadians new zealand israel so we have an alliance that not only have some i i didn't i didn't add israel in terms of uh the best players but they are among the best in this space and so when we can lean on a variety of key partners who gives us great insights and we share we collaborate uh we coordinate very effectively what i always wanted at the u.s cyber command was multiple pathways if i wanted to get after a target multiple authorities that i could use that's most effective at the time of need and the diversity of tools and so now the fact that i have these key partners and allies who've worked with us for many many years we are stronger as a group than pretty daggone good is number one top of the pyramid when we bring our partners in the way that we've shared and collaborated there isn't anything that we can't do in terms of understanding the threat encountering a threat in this space and i'm just curious do you feel like there's a pretty good idea of where these bad players are in the world like do you know that you know the majority of attacks are coming from certain areas and that's what everyone's kind of focused on collectively if you're a ban attacker then you're leaving your footprint uh you're leaving you're leaving fingerprint behind it can be traced the the good actors uh make it very difficult to attribute very difficult to to track but even so there are some techniques that allows us to attribute uh to particular actors because we've seen it enough times and seen it before and so we have a sense of who the players are for the most part i'm sure there are organizations and countries who are keeping their most sensitive and best capability for a time of crisis but for the most part we know who the persistent threats are we know how they operate we've been able to do enough good reconnaissance on on those threats and have mitigating strategies for some of them we're talking to lieutenant general vincent stewart today we'll take a short break and return to protect and secure i'm your host dr kevin harris the cyber security field needs versatile professionals to keep up with new and constant cyber threats at american military university you'll acquire vital certifications foundational knowledge and the cutting edge skills to protect and defend your organization from harm start making a difference in the world of cybersecurity today apply now at amu online dot com welcome back to protect insecure with today's guest lieutenant general vincent stewart wonderful so you talked a little bit about the public private partnership and i wanted to just dive into that a little bit because this is a new space for you was it a kind of a shock for you to move into the private sector were there things that surprised you or what was kind of your experience in that transition probably the biggest transition is uh someone someone called me a couple weeks ago and they said um if you turn me over to your staff we'll get this coordinated and i told them i am my staff so the the the number one challenge is i no longer have a chief of staff i no longer have a staff i can't you know in the past i'd go you know i think i want to do it blah blah blah blah blah and they'd go off and write blah blah blah blah and turn it into something real now when i want to do a powerpoint presentation i've got to go okay which button do i push to make this powerpoint thing happen so the loss of a staff has been an interesting challenge probably the the other thing that surprised me and maybe it shouldn't is how litigious we are i grew up in 30 plus years on handshake hey bob i'm gonna be here i'm gonna do x uh and you can count on me here's my handshake in the private sector you have to cover that handshake with a document a piece of paper where everybody agrees that the handshake will happen on friday and this is what it means and if you don't you're subject to be sued it is amazing i knew i knew we were a pretty litigious society but that really is has come home the rest of the things are pretty much uh translate leadership is leadership it is not one size fits all leadership you still have to know how to lead individuals and lead organizations made up of individuals so the idea that you can be firm with everybody as a leadership style will probably not work some people need firm and respond to that some people need more hugs than others and we'll respond to that so it's not one size leadership all but it is about leadership it's about knowing the people understanding them getting inside and this will sound uh more negative than i mean it to be but inside their heads and unfortunately sometimes in the the private sector you don't have enough time to get inside people's head and it's even more compounded now with covet 19. i've been with my new firm ankara for about four months now i've met one person physically in the four months everybody else i've met from the the chest up in one of these conference calls i think i know them i hear what they're saying but they could quite easily be saying something and i'm missing the body language of what they really mean and i find it exhausting by the time i get to the end of the week because i've spent enough time on a video conference but more importantly i'm spending time trying to think what is she really thinking i i can see that she's smiling but i'm not quite sure and the other part of this first workforce working from home you have this wonderful thought interesting idea and under normal circumstance you'd run down the hall and say hey i've got an idea what do you think and you'd have that dialogue and you kind of work your way through it now you have to schedule a zoom or skype for it and two weeks later you can finally get it scheduled and you don't remember what the heck you wanted to talk about general alexander would say that he'd get in the back of his suburban and wonder why it wasn't moving because you no longer had a driver we've all had to discover that we have to park in the parking lot and walk to the building instead of being dropped off at the front door you don't have a security detail and so you're wondering why that car seems to be following me but most of the other work and the other principles are translate very well to the private sector when you talk about some of that translation from the military to the private sector what about the military mindset just you know how much do you think that comes into play in the private sector and you know how that's kind of helped you become who you are yeah there are a couple of things that um the demand for excellence i had an awful lot of things over the course of my career that were no fail so you have to be very good you have to be well trained you have to be well positioned your timing had to be right those things still translate also to the private sector and sometimes that's stunning to me where someone will say that's let's have a meeting with the ceo and you think okay someone's going to set that up today and three weeks later you get an email oh yeah we're gonna set something up with the ceo so the timeliness the responsiveness sometimes is challenging but demanding excellence translates in everything you do you know sometimes folks get annoyed with me because i see a small thing on a powerpoint presentation that's not quite right the alignment of text the uh simple misuse of a word and folks go why you why are you worried about that that's that's not the big well if it draws my attention it's going to draw the attention of somebody else away from the context and so demanding that things be precise and be excellent and be timely are things that i i spent 38 years of my career thinking about challenging assumptions you know we make assumptions and oftentimes we don't go back and you know okay so why did i make that assumption and and how does that impact as the environment changes how do i how do i understand the environment so that if i build a strategic plan two years ago i'm at least looking at it and thinking oh wow when i did that we didn't have cobit 19. we didn't have it the environment has changed so have i adopted and adapted to my environment one of the things that's in my title is a chief of innovation what is innovation how do we think as an organization about innovation is it just technology is it process is it fill in the blank how do you come up with a coherent definition of innovation without fear because often times most people think of innovation as change change means something that will impact me personally i'm going to lose my parking spot i'm going to be demoted because i'm no longer needed i'm going to lose my office and so you start talking about innovation and change and immediately the antibodies emerge to innovation but if you're not innovating uh like i think we did in the marine corps you're gonna be obsolete you know and often tell a story about kodak who invented digital photography and walked away from digital because we got this wet film thing and we're dominating the market as a result kodak went bankrupt and is irrelevant this is one of the things i loved about the marine corps we are always adapting we're always innovating we're always going okay how do we use this airplane how do we use these boats how do we and if you can do that in the private sector and many organizations do this i'm not saying not idiot but but if you're not doing that then you're on your way to obsolescence i mean gosh i would have loved to have been the guy who thought of uber can you imagine when someone first said you know what i think if we just let people drive their car and we'll kind of put an application around that and anybody can order up a car and and somebody probably said oh that's really stupid they're not gonna do that so creating this environment where urgency and innovation and excellence and timeliness and strong leadership translates very easily across the private sector and if you can do those things it is stunning to me to see organizations who have no idea what the vision is for their organization so if you haven't defined the vision and then you're organized uh for that vision and you you're structured the leadership of up and down the or you're you're risking failure and those are things that i i translated from the marine corps you have a mission you've got a vision you've got the organization you uh test your assumptions and and you execute and i miss some steps but uh the marines in the audience will correct me later thank you if you'll buy me uh asking one more question about the transition as you know a lot of our students are military students what advice would you have for someone that's transitioning away from the military into civilian life a couple of things um you'll have to have multiple resumes you're going to have to have one that translates if you want to stay in the military and in the government because we use language that's unique to the military and the government but if you don't have a resume that translates to the private sector i mean it's cool to say i was a platoon sergeant or platoon leader what the heck does that mean in the private sector you know so you got to have that document that resume that translates to the private sector translates to the audience that you're going after but spend time with your resume spend time building your network you know i i grew up in the intelligence community and you know i i didn't want to do social media i i did have an account that uh with facebook that i never used for 10 years i still don't use it but linkedin i used linkedin i was signed up for it i dabbled in it but i didn't accept any connection but build that network because that's the network you're going to leverage and lean on to get your resume out to tell your story and even if you've got uh michael quinn is one of the real experts on linkedin he's got some really good ideas on how you put your linkedin profile together to make it meaningful and get you people looking at your linkedin site so build your resume build your network be prepared you're going to get one shot at an interview in order to get a second interview in order to get that final interview so you've got to be ready to tell the folks that it will interview you what is your why in the world should they hire you what's your value proposition to them because in the private sector one of the things that i discovered also is that you know for many years i got to execute a budget someone said here's x million x billions go spend it in the private sector you better make money in order to spend money so you're gonna have to tell the story about what is your value prop how are you gonna help that company make money i never thought about return on investments i never thought about margins well guess what almost everything that i do today is how do i get the best return on my investment how do i get that t-shirt built for dollar 98 and sell it for 20 bucks because i need margins to cover overhead and cost of running the business and payroll and and and so you're selling yourself to that uh customer that that employer that you're gonna add value and you're gonna help them to get the best return and you're going to help them with margins and you're going to help them with strategic planning etc etc so you've got to have your story wired and ready to tell that story in order to get the second interview and if you're really pushing for a higher level job you're gonna get an interview or someone uh you know the senior vice president of human resource or something will start the conversation and that person will determine whether you get a second interview with the ceo or the president and that person will determine do i get another final interview so you've got to be ready with your interview uh and that's got to be wired pretty tightly the adage you never get a second chance to make a first impression that really becomes important and i think those are probably the three big things i tell folks to be ready get your resume get your network get your story i think that'll be so beneficial to a lot of our military students who are considering transitioning to the or are in the process of transitioning to the civilian workforce and i was hoping that you could put on your your leadership hat at the university we obviously encourage private businesses to hire veterans i was wondering what would you like all human resources to know when it comes to the veteran population in terms of employees are there specific support to help those folks comin into the civilian workforce or any other recommendations yeah you know i tell folks that we do a really good job of honoring our veterans you know we have veterans day and we we put out the flags although far too often veterans day become big shopping sale day rather than about the veterans but when i tell organizations i i want them to do more than honor our veterans i want them to care for our veterans i want them to actively recruit veterans i want them to make sure that the veterans they take full advantage of what so many of our veterans have to offer they got good strong leadership you know in many places in the in the private and in government sector also they don't talk about leadership until you get fairly senior into the organization they're looking for technical skills and so in many cases it isn't until you become a government employee in the gs 13 14 15 that they start going hey you know we ought to want to talk about leadership and how you might lean on well we talk about leadership on day one from boot camp or officer candidate school we're talking about leadership and followership so our veterans know both they know how to follow leaders and they know how to be leaders we've entrusted some of our veterans with multi-million multi-billion dollar capability i remember as probably a young major briefing a fairly senior official in japan and he turned to me and he said these kids are like 17 18 years old and they're doing stuff that's going to the president in the next 10 minutes so we've exposed these young men and women to an incredible amount of capability we've given them strong leadership opportunities we trust them to make decisions and then we hire them to stock shelves and so my argument to the private sector is take full advantage of what we do with these young men and women take full advantage of their leadership take full advantage of their decision-making skills take full advantage of the fact that they are focused on mission and if you're focused on mission and you have the tools they're going to help you to be successful and so that's the message i give to the corporate sector go find them go recruit them give them jobs that's commensurate with their expertise i very rarely take on an organization that doesn't have the veteran in mind and some of them are starting to realize that the first thing they got to say if they want me to be part of their advisory board is that they're strong supporters of the veterans so for our veterans who are going out there know that i'm demanding from corporate sector that they fully utilize you beyond just checking the block and the expectation is strong leadership strong decision-making skills and a commitment to excellence which is what we preach in our military thanks i'm sure all our veterans really appreciate your continued advocacy forum in corporate america when we talk about in the tech field a lot of times soft skills questions come up what about some of the soft skills that are required and the importance of having those tell me a little bit first about what you mean by soft skills ability to present material whether it's orally or in written format and be a team player working with in groups or other members of a team both managing up managing down the first thing i thought about was communication skills whether oral written communications is so important folks are judging immediately what comes out of your mouth and how it comes out so again this goes to part of what we learn in our military about preparedness and i'll get this quote wrong uh it's it's something to the effect that it's better to keep your mouth shut than presumed to be an idiot then open your mouth and confirm that you are and that's a paraphrase but i want to make sure that when when you open your mouth to say something people lean forward get their notebook out and are ready because you are going to present verbally something that's powerful impactful meaningful it changes the dialogue enhances the dialogue if what you're going to say is going to be gobbly goo then just shut off don't say anything when i was uh first at the pentagon secretary rumsfeld was the secretary of defense and uh the guidance basically was if you're sending a memo up to us it has to be one page times new roman 12 font and you got i i i can't get all my stuff on one page well think about the secretary of defense uh 1.3 million uh men and women in uniform another 800 or so thousand in the national guard and reserve 700 or so thousand civilian if every one of them sent him a one page okay let's just say ten percent of them sent him over that's an awful lot of reading so you had to be very clear and very concise and get to the point here are the issues here's yeah how the assumptions we made here's the decision you need to make now there's 600 other pages that go behind it but that's the job of the staff officer then to capture what's in those 600 pages and get succinct powerful written communication that helps decision makers i used to ask my mentees and i don't do this as much as i used to i used to ask them to write 800 pages 800 words on something every day i was driving down the road and i saw yellow volkswagen and here's 800 words about it it's like any other muscle or any other activity the more you do it the better you get at it and as you get to saturday and you start reading what you wrote on monday you're like oh this was pretty horrible but hopefully tuesday was better and wednesday was better and i often asked my mentees that they've got to be reading all the time i don't need you know if you're in the cyber security of space you got to read about cyber security read something different every day i've got a 700 page book here that i hope to get to read it's uh it's the latest obama memoir i didn't realize how thick volume one was i might not have bought it but i want folks reading and writing and thinking about how to communicate every single day i mentioned body language it is really important to think about what you're communicating 70 percent of communication is body language so what what message are you sending with your body as you interact with that with people probably the most important skill soft skill i think and i often say to folks god gave us two years and one month to listen twice as much as we speak listen to people i mean really listen to them don't you know someone's going to start talking and they're going to hit a word that triggers some emotion and you're going to spend the rest of your time thinking about that triggered emotion and you will not have heard why they use that word listen twice as much as you speak especially if you're the leader in the organization uh you've got to be listening you've got to be watching body language with the folks you interact with and you've got to be ready to communicate completely you get into one of the things i used to do is i get into the staff meeting and and you know you got the the key leaders at the table and you got some folks on the back row i loved looking at the reaction to the folks on the back row you know and they they're they're going oh that's really stupid i can't believe they just said that and i'll call one of them out and go so i what are you thinking and that of course will shut up all the people at the front table going why is he talking to folks in the back row i heard you talk about reading and writing there and also just when you're talking about some of the things you work with your mentees on writing and learning looking at what they were doing just kind of had me think about the importance of being a lifelong learner your role on the board of trustees with education just what's your views on the importance of education a well-rounded degree at the end of the day we can't see every part of the world and every event that has occurred when i was a young boy we got the encyclopedia britannica and then you got your annual update and it was like the world didn't change for a year so where we are now is i want to know a little bit about egypt and i want to know a little bit about bioterrorism and i want to know a little bit and so creating that inquisitive mindset about knowing and finding organizations that encourages that kind of learning and knowing just makes you a better person makes you a better citizen we take for granted some of the great opportunities we have in this country and one of the reasons i tell my story is that no other country on the face of the earth could my success occur and i mean that to go to a country at age 13 get an education get opportunities able to take advantage of most of the opportunities and rise to be a three-star general in the greatest fighting force the world has ever known and to have the opportunity to be a director of it of an intel agency and to to to be the deputy commander u.s cyber command to have the opportunity now to do what i'm doing with the transition team there is no other country where this is possible and so all of that is underpinned by knowing some stuff being educated on some stuff being the expert on some stuff and that doesn't happen by just going to sleep at night and getting eight hours sleep and then having breakfast it means you're in the books you're reading you're looking for advanced degree that will challenge your intellect and i do mean challenge and i use that word because it's not just about oh i i like russian history and that's easy so i'll just do russian history do russian history that challenges your intellect and drives you to to another level where you are in fact the expert in this space so i can't speak enough for continuous education continuous learning continuous driving the development of your intellect because i think that opens up all the doors that are possible in this country i just want to say wow thank you for being an inspiration to many appreciate it thank you for sharing your expertise and experience across the wide areas including cyber security and thank you for your continued contributions to our university it has been a pleasure and i wish all the folks who hear this this podcast the very best drive for excellence drive for commitment and it doesn't matter what state you come from we're all united states uh americans and so keep that in mind in this very very difficult time thank you all again and god bless thank you very much sir and thank you to our listeners for joining us please subscribe to protect insecure to be notified when new episodes are released be well and stay safe for more information about our university visit us at amuonline.com thank you for listening amu [Music] american military university