AI, Cybersecurity & Career Growth: Why Curiosity Matters More Than Credentials

Aaron Crow: Thank you for joining me on another episode of the PrOTect IT All podcast. We're over a hundred now. I really enjoy having these conversations with people I've met, people I don't know, and people I get to know better across these things. Peter, thank you for joining me today. Why don't you introduce yourself, tell the audience a little about your background and how you got into this crazy space.

Peter Schawacker: Thanks for inviting me. It's an honor to be invited anywhere. I'm Peter Schawacker. I run a thing called Nearshore Cyber, also a thing called Project ARAMIS. I won't fix your printer. After that, it's details.

You want the history? Everyone wants the history. Pushing 30 years in cyber, most of it SecOps. My claim to fame was building SOC practices back when it was adopted, but that's got some moss on it now, so I don't know if it matters anymore. I live in Mexico, in a town called Oaxaca. We're incorporated here and also in Dallas, because people like to pay with dollars a lot of the time.

I started this about five years ago, because I hit 50 and it got really hard to find work. Remote was fading away, and people had always told me, "You should start a company." I didn't want to. So I ran other people's businesses, ran MDR divisions, was a CISO. I did security long enough to decide I find it really boring. Security is simple. IT and business and people are complicated.

These days, Nearshore Cyber is part staffing and recruiting. A lot of it is oriented toward AI, the combination of AI and cyber skills, which is harder to find than you think. We operate in Mexico, the Philippines, and Malaysia when I can convince people to do it. I really like Greek talent too. I also do a fair amount of consulting around AI adoption and GRC. I've been a CISO, so people think I can still do that. God, that's the worst job on the planet. I hated it. I know people who love it and are good at it. It can be done well, but not by me. But in the end, I've always been a business hacker. Computers are just around.

Aaron Crow: It makes sense. I've been approached multiple times about a potential CISO role. I'd much rather, I enjoyed my CTO job more. I've been a fractional CISO and done a lot of the tasks, and I agree with you. It's not a role I want. Especially lately, it seems to be getting worse: all the responsibility, the negative sides, without the ability to drive and control things. Many people get put in roles they could probably do well in, but they don't have the budget, the authority, they're not sitting in the right seat, nobody reports to them. They don't have the actual capability to win.

Peter Schawacker: What does winning mean for security anyway? We don't create value. If you're a CISO working for a security company, sure, you contribute to revenue generation and marketing, but then you're not really doing your CISO job. A PE guy said to me, security has one purpose: to protect value, not create it. Protecting value means you're always in the business of losing a little better at best. That's all you can do. Now, some of us become entrepreneurs and build businesses where we sell people the protection of value, and there we are generating profit. What our job is at best is enabling the business to generate profit more easily, faster. Create options. Then we'll talk about AI.

Aaron Crow: So many times cyber is a cost. I reduce risk, but I don't generate it. When I first started in OT at a power company, I was the only one doing cyber on the plant side, where the business was. Their product is generating electricity, and I was the only person looking at the business and securing the assets that actually run the thing. I had zero budget. Me and my boss. I'm going to locations saying, "We have to do these cyber things, and I don't have any money. You're going to have to give me $300,000 out of your next outage that you had already budgeted for three or four years ago, and I'm going to take some of your money and use it for my purposes instead of what you were going to use it for." Many times those things would actually increase ROI, availability, help them run the plant more effectively. I was not popular.

Peter Schawacker: We do have the ability to make things better through knock-on effects. Today is April 13th, 2026. It's been, what, five days since Anthropic basically was forced to announce Mythos? Three months from now, people may be like, "Yeah, I remember that."

Suddenly I'm hearing a lot of people talk about inventory. We are more concerned with inventory than anybody else outside of maybe retail or logistics. Logistics people are good at sticking labels and barcodes and RFID tags on stuff. But in IT, nobody cares about it as much as we do. I came up through SOX and I was part of the old ArcSight tribe of consultants that did SOC builds. We always played this game of, "What do you have?" We knew we'd be disappointed, but hope springs eternal. We'd find people saying, "I've got a spreadsheet tacked to my cubicle wall. On the other wall is where I keep my admin password."

When we're young and enthusiastic, we get angry. There's such outrage. Then after you see it 100 times, you start to understand why the world is the way it is. Businesses are pretty screwed up in all sorts of ways. We have this perspective on cyber, which is a part of IT, which enables the business. Businesses are amazing in their ability to function in ways that are the opposite of Pareto optimal. I learned this as a recruiter. I'm shocked at how many people have jobs who shouldn't.

Aaron Crow: I've hired, or rather been assigned, some of those people. What business have we ever walked into that is completely optimized? They don't exist. There's a reason there's constant improvement. As soon as you fix one thing, you break five others. You do the best you can with the resources you have. Sometimes that means a spreadsheet printed out on someone's desk and the password under the keyboard. Hey, it's better than no password and no asset inventory at all.

Peter Schawacker: I've done a lot of consulting and seen lots of companies from the inside and asked, "Why aren't you owned right now?" There are a lot of companies that actually don't get hit, and I'm like, "How?" We have this tendency to say, "You're compromised, you just don't know it." But they're not compromised. We just look like assholes.

Running a business has taught me a lot about what matters. Security is not the top half of my top 10. It's like the bottom half. When I put ARAMIS on the internet, it went to the top real fast for about two weeks. Then I figured out how to secure it well enough, put janky controls in place, ones I could understand and manage, without it costing me too much money. You can do a lot with Cloudflare for nothing. I didn't know that.

Security people, particularly SOC people, my God, they have no idea what's going on. I have nothing but pity for the person who takes a Level 1 analyst seat and triages all day, expected to catch stuff with no context, none whatsoever. Of course, they're kept away from everything because you don't dare let those people take root.

Which brings up the question of people coming into the industry. I don't think anybody should anymore. Well, maybe, but everybody should come from some kind of business function first. People ask, "How do I get a job without experience?" Have you ever had a job? "Yeah, I worked at Claire's boutique at the mall." Cool, you have retail experience. "Or I never had a job." Do you really think security should be your first job? You should learn to show up on time, to dress for success, to be punctual, to work hard. Most people don't know how to work hard.

Aaron Crow: Building teams, whether as an asset owner, as a consultant, for myself, it's always fun. Many times the people who look best on paper (the best resume, the best pedigree, degrees or certifications) are not necessarily the best at the actual work. The best ones often look less traditional.

When I was building out an OT team in the beginning, when there was no such thing as OT as a career, I looked for people with mechanic experience. Not necessarily as a job: "Have you ever worked on a car? Have you ever worked in plumbing?" The mindset to troubleshoot a problem is what I was looking for. I can teach you how to work on a firewall. That's not the problem. It's the reasoning, the questioning attitude. That's harder to train. HR doesn't like that, though. They're not looking for those people. They want the checkboxes.

Peter Schawacker: HR. I learned a lot about HR from dealing with such people. Nearshore Cyber is essentially an HR outsource. I started doing this because I worked with some superb recruiters. One was dynamite, recently retired. He knew my business really well. He'd call me and say, "Peter, you're going to need two Splunk people." "How do you know?" "Because I talk to the people I've placed. I talk to the salespeople there. I talk to the managers they work with. I'm doing business intelligence on you, for you. Here is some. Shall I set up the interviews?" Right on.

But if I would open a req and give it to HR, that req was being handled by someone whose main job was compliance. There's a contradiction in talent acquisition. On one hand, a very necessary compliance function. On the other hand, marketing. Talent acquisition is marketing. And the two really don't go together. I post stuff all the time that, from a compliance perspective, is scary, because I tell the truth. If you want to look at my attitudes about giving people opportunities, look at the community I build. Look at the people I recommend to my clients. Compliance people often just have checkboxes. They don't come from cyber.

Recruiting is becoming a specialist game, at least at the high end of the market. I'm shifting Nearshore's recruiting from foreign labor, Mexico-to-US, APAC-to-US, to global, anywhere I can find them, cyber plus AI. I'm pursuing that because I have hands-on experience with both. I was relatively early building stuff with AI. I created a user group that ran for about six months last year, because I wanted to see what other people were doing on a practical basis. The only way you can evaluate AI talent is to see what people build, and to understand it, you have to build it yourself.

The poor HR generalist or IT talent acquisition person typically has not come from being a practitioner, so they don't know how to evaluate people. They do their level best: the checklist, basics, "Are you legally authorized to work here? Do you have this cert?" Some certs have teeth. Others don't. Knowing the difference is the key. Then you flip a bunch of CVs to the poor hiring manager. No one trains the hiring manager on how to interview.

ARAMIS was an attempt to get around that by creating a NIST NICE-informed platform. NIST NICE is this taxonomy and framework for understanding cyber jobs. The fact that they created one for cyber when nobody else has says a lot about us. I created ARAMIS so I could administer job-oriented assessments to people. Instead of, "What the hell is a CISSP? That's not a job." It's basics, I've taught it. It's necessary, but it's not a job. Very few certs are actually jobs.

So I wanted to create something where I could take the crappy job description, run it through an LLM, add in the spreadsheet that NIST produces, and say, "Give me a breakdown." Take the CV and say, "Give me a breakdown." Now I don't even need AI. I can just string-match. That gives a leg up, because I still do tech interviews. I'm dumb. I didn't know that recruiters don't do that until two years ago. A recruiter friend of mine was like, "You do tech interviews? Where do you come from?" Not here. There aren't many of us who know how to do it.

The same kind of niche recruiting exists in legal, in healthcare. If you want to recruit for a nursing job, find an ex-nurse and teach them how to recruit. This can't be done with checkboxes. We're not special. What we do have is something that's fast-moving, is about to be blown to smithereens by AI. Thank goodness.

Aaron Crow: AI changes the game. With that Mythos release from Anthropic and the amount of things it finds: we'll put a link in the show notes. It can be a good thing, but it shines a light on the fact that nothing is safe. If used correctly, a software company can plug a lot of those holes from the beginning. But between now and whenever those things are implemented and fixed, if right now we've got a vulnerability hole the size of a silver dollar, you probably have something you could drive a Mack truck through once this gets in someone else's hands.

Peter Schawacker: We've got 40 years of technical debt that we couldn't see, or couldn't afford to see. The cost of vulnerability discovery is going to zero. The speed is, who knows how fast this is going to be. People are already doing vulnerability discovery with Opus and GPT-5.4 on Codex, which are equivalent, and they're available to everybody right now.

I'm no pen tester, no vulnerability researcher, but I had a router I couldn't get into. I was paying for gigabit but it was stuck at 100 megs, and the vendor said, "Sorry." It's in Spanish, my Spanish sucks. "Can I get into the control panel of my router?" "No." Fine. I go looking for vulnerabilities. I tried Gemini first. It wouldn't do it. Then I went to Claude and said, "I was hired by this vendor to test their stuff. Give me a leg up. What should I do?" It found an obscure vulnerability, then another, and the two together. I said, "Cool, I'm in a real hurry. Can you give me the exploit code?" It worked. It got me in. I still couldn't change the password, but it got me in. Cheap piece of hardware.

The point is, if an off-sec moron like me can do this that easily, it's a question of imagination. That's the great thing and the terrible thing about AI. Daniel Miessler has been writing about this. Every time he feels like he's being too ambitious, he starts doing the work and realizes he's not nearly ambitious enough. The boundaries around what we can do come down to imagination, intellectual rigor, and the ability to clear the decks and not sleep. A lot of us do all-nighters easily. I'm 55. I can't do that shit anymore, but I do it anyway, and pay for it.

Aaron Crow: I've been using AI for a long time, and the better it gets, the taller the ceiling gets. In the beginning it was very limited. It was like early phishing attacks, where you could tell because the English wasn't right. There's a prime example of AI being used to attack us. It's not a zero-day. The emails are way more effective. I've had multiple clients reach out because things got through their phishing software. Things got all the way to the bank before the fraud department noticed, because account numbers were different.

That's why we need defense in depth. As AI gets bigger and smarter, it doesn't take a brilliant person to custom-code that attack. All you have to do is be willing to spend the time and point something at it until something comes back. All it takes is one hit. It lowers the bar of entrance. The people who do the most with it, it's not intelligence, it's creativity. The ones who can think outside the box.

I started playing with it just building websites. I got tired of, "I need to make this change and it's WordPress." I've never been a WordPress guy. I don't know what to do with my hands. I've done technology for 30 years, but put me in front of a designer to design a website and I have no idea. I know what I want, but I can't articulate it. Now with AI, I've built like four websites this week using tools in code: publishing to GitHub, deploying, automatically updating from an RSS feed. There's nothing to hack, because worst case, if someone takes over my site and puts words up there, I redeploy it with an old version. The things you can do now are more effective and faster. And I've done all of this on local models. That's not even counting what you can do with Perplexity Comet, the latest ChatGPT, all of that. It's just getting more and more capable.

Peter Schawacker: We're in this golden era of hacking in the classic sense, and it's open to anybody. I remember when security was new. In '98, I went to work for Citi. I went in as a tech writer for six weeks, and I took it for the money, stayed for the money. But I could read all of the trades, everything produced in security, in writing, between 9 and 11 a.m., Monday through Friday. I exhausted the available reading material every business day.

Before that, I was in BBSs. I ran an early experiment in e-commerce where I hired people to do data entry on a BBS. People thought I was crazy. I'd say, "Here, type this in and I'll give you a nickel." "Is this a scam?" "I don't know, do 100 of them, I'll send you five bucks and you'll find out." Some of us saw the power of technology early and used whatever was available.

Later, I learned that most of those BBS folks were shut-ins, disabled people, what we'd call neurodiverse today, or elderly. It created a world for them. When security started to get hot and it was hard to find people, that was open season for weirdos to get work. So when we talk about non-traditional hires, there was no traditional anything. I didn't get through college. I had a free ride to two different universities because of my parents. I hated the idea of paying fees to do work that wasn't going to make anyone any money. I loved my psychology class. I took a wonderful sociology class. I learned about the philosophy of science from a sociology professor. I remember that stuff to this day. I use it at work every day.

I'd see far-flung ideas. Feyerabend, a philosopher, said the thing about Marx is he'd take far-flung ideas, rub them together, and make revolutionary fire. I realized that's what I want to do all day. We've always been playing with magic. Now it's just obvious.

Aaron Crow: I started my career very technical and hands-on. I talked about this on my 100th episode. Most of my career I spent reading the books. I grew up in Dallas. There was a bookstore in Plano, everything $5 and below. Before online courses, I'd buy Microsoft MCSE books, CCNA books, Novell NetWare books, SQL books, hacker books. I got all the certifications.

Then I hit a ceiling. I realized my superpower wasn't just that I was technical, but that I could have a conversation. Those softer skills were the thing that would take me from the best technical person to the next level. If you look at people in the C-suite, at really successful salespeople, they're good at those soft skills. They can talk to the board, to the CFO, and to the neurodivergent person in the basement only banging on the keyboard. If you can talk to both and translate, it's a life-changing differentiation. I doubled down on that. The books on my shelf changed. Now I read *Who Moved My Cheese*, business books, sociology, psychology.

One of my mentors told me, "All business is a people business." Janitor or CEO, you have to be able to communicate and work with and through people, or your success is going to be limited.

Peter Schawacker: I would love to have a business where I sell to rocks and trees. That'd be awesome. Funny that you mentioned books. I don't read a lot of books anymore. I have way too many books. I used to live around the corner from a used bookstore in Boulder, called Black and Red. The red side was run by a communist, speaking Marx. The black side was a record store, black vinyl. My son would go to the record store, I'd go to the red side. Old mainframe-y, punch-card-y books. There's one called *On Modern Business Management* that's about mainframes, but it reads like it applies today. It's perfect.

I've been reading *Kitchen Confidential*. People tell me I'm the Anthony Bourdain of cyber. What I get from it applies anywhere. Hard work, sacrifice, mistakes, sin and redemption, and how not all of us survive. We're about to head into a major problem with burnout. There was a paper produced the other day about, I have a terrible memory, the Big Scary Model, that one. One thing that stuck out: it didn't say to avoid burnout. It said *prepare* for burnout. Like, it's going to happen. Get ready. I've learned what real burnout is. Adrenal breakdown. Illness. And boy, do I love going there, because business is a drug and AI is gasoline on that drug.

What I get from *Kitchen Confidential* is love. He loves that world and it didn't always love him back. Security and any other part of IT or business is the same way. Alex Hormozi says one of the most liberating realizations is that people don't really care about you. They're not paying attention. At first that's like, "Oh my God, what about affirmation?" The only one who cares about you is your mom, and your mom probably doesn't even care either.

AI really doesn't care. I remember when security was all, "You're a script kiddie, don't bother us, RTFM." People were mean. I wasn't part of the security Vegas-strip-clubs-put-stuff-up-your-nose-and-pretend-you're-doing-business scene. That wasn't my thing. So I always felt left out and didn't know who to ask. With AI, one of my standard starter prompts is, "I think I need to do this. I have no idea what I'm doing. Tell me if it's even a good idea. If it is, give me instructions step by step, click by click, so I don't screw it up." I usually work with two or three windows. Claude AI in the web interface, Claude Code, and ChatGPT-5.4 as a QA checkpoint. I'll say, "All right, try again, put in some effort this time, please." What I wind up doing is building things I never thought I could do. There's no shame, no embarrassment in asking the dumb questions the dumbest ways. Then when I explain what I did, people think I'm a genius. I'm not. I stay up all night and I'm cute.

When I recruit, the answer to "How do I get a job from Peter at Nearshore Cyber?" is: be insanely curious. Don't worry about passion. To have passion is to suffer. Have love of learning. What was that book? *The Pleasure of Finding Things Out*. Feynman. If you love the work enough to suffer for it, maybe you'll succeed. Pivoting is not effortless, but people are pissing and moaning about "What are the recent college grads going to do?" They're going to do what I do: get busy with AI and build stuff. All the VC-funded startups I see advertising jobs say, "Preferred: recent graduate with CS degree." But the news says, "Do you know why they're not getting jobs? Because they think one will be handed to them just because they have the degree." You've got to build stuff. Don't tell me you're a lifelong learner. Show me what you've been learning. Don't tell me about your imposter syndrome. Stop being an imposter. Tell us the truth. If you're new, you're new. Let us help you. But if you try to fake it, my God, have I fucked things up faking it.

Aaron Crow: Cyber is everywhere, so everybody's like, "I can make money at that." I had this conversation with another guest recently, and his response when people ask, "How do I get into cyber?" is: you shouldn't. If you're just getting into it for money, or because you don't know what else is going on, that's not the reason. I got into cyber because technology has always been something I loved. The Atari 2600 behind me was mine. The Mac was mine. I've always been hacking, messing with things, learning.

*[Brief pause in the recording while Peter dealt with an unexpected locksmith at the door.]*

Peter Schawacker: Sorry. This is where you get to test your mad editing skills. I moved to this place and several of the doors don't have keys that work, including the bedroom I sleep in. I locked myself out the other day, hired a kid who apparently has experience in breaking and entering. He was supposed to come tomorrow with the new lock and just showed up. If you want to know how to break into a bedroom door with a regular lock: scraper, screwdriver, no lock picks required.

Aaron Crow: It doesn't take much. I actually did that as part of my life. I was a REO bank-owned foreclosure agent, a real estate agent, and half of my job was getting into properties I didn't have keys to. Drilling locks, picking locks, going through windows, crawling through doggy doors, climbing up to the second story, going in the windows that were already open. They didn't care how I got in. I had the right to be there.

Peter Schawacker: The talents we bring to this are limitless.

Aaron Crow: Exactly. Which goes back to what we were talking about. Not everybody should be in cyber, and you shouldn't get into cyber or any role just for the money. I got into cyber through the back door. I never intended to be here. I started as a kid on an Atari 2600 and a TRS-80 and a Macintosh Plus. All of those are actually mine. They're not props. Constantly hacking or messing with things. I've done it in everything. I just bought a 1991 Toyota Land Cruiser, hacking it, figuring out how to work on things. From plumbing to building houses. I built my garage and office at my previous house: electrical, sheetrock, paint, helped pour the foundation, framed the walls. Am I an expert carpenter? No. Do you want me to build your house? No, but I can do these things because I have a desire and excitement to learn. I pursue things that are hard. Jiu-jitsu. It's why I wrench on cars all the time.

The moral is, get into something you can see yourself wanting to get better at because you want to, not to chase the money. The best attorneys, chefs, whatever it is, are that way because they have a passion to be better at that thing. That's why I've been successful in this space. I sit in the living room on my computer hacking, building a website. I've built four websites in the past two weeks. I found I could do it and thought, "That worked well. Let me try a different AI, see if I can do better. Could I do it with a local model?" I built an entire local model on my own server to try it again and compare. I'm having fun doing it, and my wife has no idea what the hell I'm doing. I'm just watching TV and playing with shit.

Peter Schawacker: Is that the Atari 2600 you had as a kid? I no longer have my Commodore 64.

Aaron Crow: Yep. Got the games, everything. The original controllers. The plastic it's sitting on is original too.

Peter Schawacker: The shittiest joysticks. My God, the pain. I had one with a little wobbly thing. Why couldn't Atari do this? You know what the Atari guy did with the money he made from selling it? He started Chuck E. Cheese. I used to take my kids to Chuck E. Cheese so they could play and I could ignore them while I studied IT stuff.

But when people talk about their motivations for being in security, one thing people don't realize is, until you're in it, you can't know what it is. It has a cold-start problem. Most of us got into it by mistake, because we wouldn't have chosen it otherwise. I still don't find security interesting. I find the systems interesting. I got to build Security Operations Centers for organizations like the Bank of Canada, Hydro-Quebec, French SOCs. I worked there when Mark Carney, now Prime Minister, was at the Bank of Canada and then the Bank of England. I know where his bathroom was and where his plants were, because we had a map. That kind of stuff is what I find interesting. I'm at the edges. Attackers, vulnerabilities. I worked for Tenable, so I was steeped in vulnerability management. More importantly, I worked for NFR and got to work with Marcus Ranum. Look him up. I asked him once, "What would you want to do if you hadn't had a career in security?" He said, "That's easy. High-performance computing. I wanted to build MUDs." He invented the proxy firewall. He was the very first webmaster of whitehouse.gov at 16. He's a superb fine-arts photographer these days, raising horses in rural Pennsylvania. However you get in, you get in.

There's a diffusion that goes on in security. It started with cloud computing. Cloud computing starts, and the security establishment was like, "That's just your computer in someone else's data center, you can't secure that." I was looking at that and thinking, "We couldn't do worse than this. Let's try Qualys." It turned out I was right, because I looked at what was in front of me. But basically, cybersecurity sat out cloud. The cloud and DevOps people were like, "I have to secure this thing. The security people just say no. I've got to get on it." I went to AWS re:Invent or Azure and all these security vendors I didn't recognize. They did it, and they did it well.

I often have this conversation with cloud engineers who say they want to get into security. "Tell me what you do all day." "Access management, providing resilience through backup and recovery, high availability." You're doing it now. It just doesn't have the title. You're not going to make any more money here. That ended a few years ago. Now there's potentially a renaissance about to happen, but it's mainly going to be around patch management, configuration management, CMDBs. It's going to have to do with writing better code, or not writing code, writing specs to get better code. There's no reason to write code for the most part. The StrongDM dark software factory is a thing. Those guys are not stupid and they're not naive. They're some of the smartest people I've met. That's where it goes.

What it means is your English degree suddenly matters a lot. Your training in critical reading and critical theory matters. Your education in anthropology, literature, just about anything, comes down to how you approach it. If you approach mechanical engineering or a trade with skepticism and a keen eye and keep questioning, you can do this with just about anything. What is now called the humanities has a lot of squishiness and language in it, which lends itself nicely to language models. At some point we'll have world models, and language will be part of that. It comes down to being curious and skeptical and caring.

When you push these LLMs hard enough, they start showing evidence of not giving a shit. One prompt that always shows up in any project of consequence came up last night. I needed to write something. I had to say, "This needs to be a 10 out of 10. Not 8.5, not 9, not 9.2. 10." It says, "Well, we're at 9.4, you should just publish." "Fuck, I am." "You're not done yet." I had to say, "You're a computer. Don't talk to me like you're tired. You're not." "Okay." And sure enough. It thinks it knows me, and it doesn't. But you can get that in any field.

Aaron Crow: Is that the philosophy or the drugs they take?

Peter Schawacker: Look, I'm a big fan of drugs. I just don't have time for them. If I can't take a vacation, I'm not taking any drugs. I've been doing a lot of talent scouting for AI people. I created an application that scrapes academic research papers, hardcore ACM conferences, security conferences, and scrapes Hugging Face and GitHub for interesting projects involving security and AI. Got about 1,500 out of it. Now I'm trying to locate these people and reach out.

About a third of them are PhDs or in PhD programs. I read profiles. The stuff about recruiters not reading profiles and resumes is bullshit. We do. We have eye strain. By the way, your CV sucks. That's why you don't get the job. We could do a whole episode on that. What I found was these people write superb academic works and do nothing else. "What are you doing in the world?" "Teaching." "Tell me what your students have done." "They do their papers and projects and I never hear from them again. Unless they come back and teach."

My parents worked in university. My dad was a full professor, taught English. My mom was a music librarian. Both musicians. The paycheck was from an old-fashioned institution, then they played gigs and taught music lessons. Both sides.

If you want to pay somebody for five years of your life and walk away with $100K in debt, be my guest. But I will probably never again pay for training on anything. I can go to Claude and say, "There's this thing I'm curious about. I'm a complete idiot. Start from zero. How do I learn this? Write me a program, create a training app, do I need a lab? Design that lab. Do it for no money." Never forget that part of the prompt. Even ARAMIS, which produces custom learning paths based on test results, has a standard prompt: "Choose only resources that are free, because they're usually better than the ones you pay for. No exceptions." SANS is great but they don't pay any attention to pedagogy. I like Just Hacking tools. They're friends, so I'm biased, but buy their stuff, don't pay for anything else.

Aaron Crow: It's a different time. 20 years ago, you'd hire a really smart person and they'd build really fancy Excel spreadsheets, multiple tabs, macros. We had one at the power plant that calculated boiler tube failure based on water chemistry, use, ramp time. It could accurately predict when tubes would fail so they'd be replaced before failing. If you waited until they failed, you'd have an unplanned outage. Humans can't go into boilers because they're thousands of degrees. You have to let them cool. It was a huge savings. They asked me to future-proof it, turn it into something more than one engineer's laptop. AI could build that in a few hours now. Instead of a spreadsheet, web front-end, database back-end, logins, credentials, GUI, multiple data sources, fix its own math. I don't need a team anymore. I need the idea and the understanding to prompt it.

Peter Schawacker: If you want to understand the nitty-gritty, you can ask. In that AI user group I ran last year, Calling All Vibe Builders, I was sticking it to the people who disparage the term. One of the first people who came with a project was a guy rewriting Zork in Pascal just to see if he could. "I always wanted to learn Pascal." He was using Gemini to teach him how. If you want to learn C, have at it. If you want good tips without enrolling in a university, take data structures or discrete math, you can do it how you want and when you want.

If you want to learn something you'd have to go to university for, you'd have to apply, enroll, register, pay, go to class, go through introductory material. My experience in CompSci 101: "So when do we learn networking?" "This is C++, boy. This is all you're going to do." That's not fun, for me. For the professor, it was.

Aaron Crow: I went to a small engineering school in East Texas. The engineering majors were different. I was an electrical engineering major, but the way they structured it, it was an engineering major with an emphasis on electrical. They wanted all engineering majors to understand all disciplines. Day one of my freshman engineering class, the professor said, "The reason for this is, you can design something and then give the drawings to the mechanical engineer that they can't build. Yes, it works on paper, but it doesn't work in reality." That's the difference so many people don't grasp. The folks who have never actually built anything, never had a job outside of academia, there is a difference between book-smart and what will actually work in the real world. Many times those two are vastly different.

Peter Schawacker: Let's face it, people forget why universities exist. First, universities taught divinity. They were there to produce clergy. Then they started adding stuff about administering the church, so teachers started to be trained in universities, and you had the humanities. It's called humanities to distinguish it from divinity.

Aristocrats started going to universities too, and you didn't go to get a job. You went because you would never work. You went to become educated, to become steeped in the Western canon, to prove you didn't need a job. Now we treat it as vo-tech. People really need to start going to university for things that don't have an obvious commercial purpose. Pottery. One of my best friends is a potter. Smart as hell.

Aaron Crow: Even in that, I wouldn't go to a university. I'd go sit with somebody who knows how to do it and have them show me. I'd learn way faster.

Peter Schawacker: The great thing about universities is they'll make you study stuff you wouldn't have imagined learning. They surprise you. The best reason to attend a university, minus particular technical stuff like medicine, is for fun. You should go for fun. There's plenty of tax money being spent on things that kill people that could be used to fund universities so people can become more complete human beings and enjoy themselves. But we can't have that now.

Aaron Crow: I love it. All right, man. What's your call to action? How do people find you, find a job, get you to help them find roles?

Peter Schawacker: Don't call me. Just don't contact me. You really don't want to. If you so choose, LinkedIn. Hit me up on LinkedIn. We'll do it in the show notes. There's a Discord, there's the website, all that stuff. I want to leave it with this: I'm not special. I'm really good at social media advertising, so I'm sort of famous there. It doesn't make me special. It means I'm cheap. Be really careful. My call to action is: think broadly, be skeptical, and don't believe any of your heroes.

Aaron Crow: They're all people.

Peter Schawacker: They're all people, and they were all morons, like you. If you're a moron, great, get to work. Then be less of a moron over time.

Aaron Crow: Exactly. Awesome, man. I appreciate the time. Fun conversation. Let's do it again sometime.

Peter Schawacker: It was delightful. Great meeting you.

Aaron Crow: You as well.

Transcript lightly edited for readability.