Jeff Burt, Freelance Tech Journalist

Jeff Burt spent his childhood wandering the world with his Army dad and digging deep into fantasy and horror stories with his mom. They even wrote a few superhero stories together just for fun.

So by the time he enrolled at Keene State in New Hampshire, Jeff was dedicated to storytelling. He split his time writing for the school newspaper, where he rose to executive editor his senior year, and DJing at the school radio station. In the end, he chose writing, and after cutting his teeth at local papers in New England, Jeff joined the staff of eWeek in 2000. Despite admitting he barely knew much about tech, Jeff not only got the job, he kept it for 16 years and became one of the top tech reporters in the industry.

Now a freelancer for several titles, Jeff joined us to preview the RSA Conference in San Francisco later this month, and he gave me a chance to reminisce about my upbringing on Cape Cod, where he lives, for this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B tech.

I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media & Influencers practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Jeff. Here's our chat with him. Enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy 0:00

Jeff Burt spent his childhood wandering the world with his army dad and digging deep into fantasy and horror stories with his mom. They even wrote a few superhero stories together just for fun. So by the time he enrolled at Keene State in New Hampshire, Jeff was dedicated to storytelling. He split his time writing for the school newspaper, where he rose to executive editor his senior year, and DJing at the school radio station. In the end he chose writing. And after cutting his teeth at local papers in New England, Jeff joined the staff of eWeek in 2000. Despite admitting he barely knew much about tech, Jeff not only got the job, he kept it for 16 years and became one of the top tech reporters in the industry. Now a freelancer for several titles, Jeff joined us to preview the RSA conference in San Francisco later this month, and he gave me a chance to reminisce about my upbringing on Cape Cod, where he lives. For this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B Tech's top 200 media and influencers, including Jeff. Here's our chat with Jeff. Enjoy. Yeah, so I'm pretty sure this is probably the first and only time I'm going to have someone who lives on my native Cape Cod. I I don't think there are any other tech reporters down there, but I know we had this discussion when I was uh in town recently, but it's a great place to live, at least uh in the summer. It's a fantastic place to live. So you grew up in New England, yes. You uh you you mentioned actually your dad, you were a military brat. So where where were you born and and how many places did you live?

Jeff Burt 1:57

Yeah, uh this is kind of a usual military type of lifestyle. I was born in Virginia, and then through high school, I I lived in Virginia a couple of times, New Hampshire a couple of times, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Germany. I think I think I counted one time in between kindergarten and eight in my senior year in high school, I went to nine different schools. Oh my gosh. We were we were usually on the move every one to three years.

Dave Reddy 2:26

What did your dad do in the military? Was he a soldier or was anything did he do anything particular? He was an engineer, he was an officer. Okay, got it. So the obviously he goes with the job is. What was that like? I mean, I mean, how many how how many kids were there in your family and and how'd you make and keep friends? I've a I have an older sister and a younger brother.

Jeff Burt 2:47

And really, I mean, it was the life that I grew up with. So for a long time, I I just assumed everybody did this. Right. And we usually, I mean, we usually lived on military bases, so all all my friends did that. Right. I think the only time that I lived in a place where there wasn't a transient sort of lifestyle was the year I did in Connecticut in my high school, uh, freshman year and high school. And that was a pretty subtle community. The rest of it has always been a life of people coming and going.

Dave Reddy 3:17

Well, I guess if you have to pick one year to be in one place, freshman year of high school is not a bad place because that's bad enough as it is. So coming and going, what did mom do, or was she just a military mom?

Jeff Burt 3:27

But she was you know, my father wasn't around much because of the things he had to do. So she was a pretty good influence on me, and she was an avid reader, really smart, really smart woman. Yeah, she she was uh she was alright. She, you know, we watched movies together and and wrote things, and she was a good influence.

Dave Reddy 3:50

Were you were you writing like stories together or just articles? Or were you?

Jeff Burt 3:53

Yeah, we would just kind of write write things. I mean, we would come up with stories and you know put them down or just talk them out.

Dave Reddy 4:02

And she was uh she was pretty creative. Can you remember any particular stories that you wrote?

Jeff Burt 4:08

No, no, they usually involve you know gods or you know, superheroes and stuff like that.

Dave Reddy 4:16

Oh, okay. So fantasy. Fantasy slash superhero. I don't I can never tell which like where does where does superhero and fantasy end? So oh cool. And is that what you guys read too and watched? Were you were you like into you know those early superhero movies?

Jeff Burt 4:30

Or oh yeah, we were into all that stuff. My mother loved uh horror films, but we watched a lot of horror films and read a lot of horror books, you know, Stephen King and stuff like that.

Dave Reddy 4:39

Wow.

Jeff Burt 4:40

Yeah, we were we did all that stuff.

Dave Reddy 4:42

My mom was fabulous, but she couldn't read or watch any of that stuff. All right, what's the scariest movie you've ever seen? Probably The Exorcist. That's still a that's still a pretty wild one. I'm gonna go with seven. That kept me up for three days.

Jeff Burt 4:54

Yeah, that was a good one too, no doubt.

Dave Reddy 5:00

So you must have already had the storytelling bug, I presume, by the time you went to Keene State, which is where you went to college, and and which seems to be indicated on your your CV because you were not only a writer at the school paper, you were a DJ at what I presume was the school radio station. By the way, that's exactly what I did. Two years as a DJ, two years as the sports guy. So it was was you just attracted to media given given the storytelling and so forth?

Jeff Burt 5:28

Yeah, I mean, I went into college knowing that I wanted to be a journalist. I thought I was going to be a sports journalist, but I like sports and I knew that I wasn't good enough to actually stay in sports as I got older, so I figured I'd just report on them. But I eventually moved over to the new side of things and enjoyed that. But the DJ stuff was just a way of truthfully hanging out for four hours a few times a week and playing music that I liked for people that I knew. Right?

Dave Reddy 5:58

Yeah, you might have gotten a better time than I did, but I was the 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. shift. And I mean, there were times when I would I would throw on like you know the live version of Days Confused and take a nap.

Jeff Burt 6:12

Yeah, I had I started off with the uh I think it was the the midnight to four shift, and I would just every now and then just to see if there was anyone out there, we would play something really kind of wild to see if anybody called in about it. Just these whatever punked rock stuff I could find that was just really out there. Nobody called. So I was kind of getting the idea that I was just playing for myself.

Dave Reddy 6:37

Yeah, I had the same experience. It was it was and you had to just sort of go with it, right? I mean, it's a college state, it's a college station. Nobody in the dorms, by the way. This was this was the thing that went on. I think they finally fixed this after I graduated, but the GM of the radio station, who was a friend of mine, couldn't stand this. Nobody in the dorms could get us. So the the it just didn't work. Like if you were off campus, you might be able to tune in. But in the dorms, no one could listen to us. So obviously no one was listening to us, except in of all things, the dining hall. The dining hall had us, and there was probably some hook up there. So no one's listening to you. And I would sit at two, three in the morning, four in the morning, and I would just do dead air. And I'd be like, okay, I'm gonna stay, I'm gonna stay here until somebody calls me. And every 30 seconds I'd be like, I'm gonna stay here until somebody calls me. I could do that for 10 minutes at a time, and I would have to give up. And it was like, okay, not even my roommate's waking up to listen to me. All right. But you learn stuff, right? I mean, it's it's not so much to your point, it's about listening to the music that you like, and you're learning, and it's a very, and there's no mistakes aren't the end of the world because it's it's it's just you. I mean, it's it's actually a great way to learn in a funny way, and I think back on it, right?

Jeff Burt 7:43

Oh yeah, yeah, no doubt about it. And I was I wasn't the greatest DJ because I I'm I was always uh fairly nervous about talking sort of extemporentially out into the into the mic, but I played a lot of music. I I spoke as little as I needed to, and I just played the music, which kind of worked for a lot of people. I found out at one point that the uh college's ultimate frisbee team used to record my shows and just play it during during practice. So that's the one feather in my cap. Yeah, the one feather in my cap that came out of uh being on radio.

Dave Reddy 8:19

I was the opposite. I wouldn't shut up. And I remember the GM, of course, he was the only one probably listening, or at least he was listening to the recordings. He would, Dave, you don't have to talk after every song, and you shouldn't talk for more than 10 seconds. Never really got over that. Thus the shift in junior year to the school paper. So did you do both the whole time? Did you do both the paper and and the radio the whole time, or did you shift around?

Jeff Burt 8:39

Yeah, I did. I did. It was it worked out very well.

Dave Reddy 8:43

And you were covering sports, I presume, at at at Good Old Keen State, or would you do another thing?

Jeff Burt 8:48

I covered sports for two years and then I'm shifted over to the news editor, and the last year I was the executive editor.

Dave Reddy 8:54

You were the grand poopa. No kid. What was that? I like now I had a hard enough time running. I was my senior year, I was the sports editor, and I had my staff of six people. I had had enough time, hard enough time getting them to do what I wanted. What was it like getting a bunch of college kids? I presume none of you got paid, maybe you, right? Sometimes they gave the executive editor at college papers a stipend. Right. What was it like getting them to work for free and to get and hit deadline?

Jeff Burt 9:20

Well, it was kind of an individual thing. There were some people that were wildly enthusiastic to do whatever it is that you asked them, and some people it was like it was like dragging them around the hallways just to get them to ask questions. Overall, overall, it was fine. I mean, it's it's like anything else. You know, you've got some people that are more than willing to do what needs to be done, and some people that just were sort of out to lunch, but they were a good crew. I was lucky.

Dave Reddy 9:46

And then you stayed in local papers, which is very much throwback, and I want to talk about that because I think aside from that missing from society, I think that's missing from the profession. And you worked at papers in if I got this right, northern New Hampshire, New Bedford, and then my childhood paper, the Cape Cod Times. What was that like? I mean, so few people in America now have a local paper of that size. What was that like? Can you explain to people, you know, what the types of stories you were working on, how big the staff was, how what the cities were like, if you want to call them that, the towns.

Jeff Burt 10:23

Yeah. You know, all three of the papers that I worked at, the one in Dover, New Hampshire, which is close to the East Sea Coast, and then uh New Bedford, Massachusetts, and and the Cape here, they were mid-sized papers. So we had, you know, staff of a dozen, 15 reporters. And it was it, I mean, it was good. It was uh it was it was really good training ground. You learned that you had to be fast, you had to be accurate, because one of the things that you learned pretty quick was you're gonna write about a guy on Monday and run into him on the same streets of the city on Tuesday. And so you were gonna get an instant feedback. And so you you had to be right, you had to be accurate, you had to be fast. It was it was good training ground. In each of the papers, I started by covering a town, and that was truly it was okay. Important, it's important to do, keep an eye on the local government, but it wasn't that interesting, but at each stop I was able to grab beats that were interesting. Cops, courts. Courts was courts in New Bedford was pretty wild. It was really interesting, a lot of good lawyers, a lot of interesting stories came out of that. When I was at the Cape Cod Times, I was able to cover the Woods Hole scientific community, marine scientific community. I mean, you can't you can't go down to Woods Hole, the small little former fishing village in Falmouth, and hit a golf ball without hitting somebody that's won a Nobel Prize or something like that. And they were fascinating guys, and they had a lot of really interesting stories to tell, and they love telling them to people who weren't scientists. So they were interesting. And then there was the Superfund site at the military base here, so I was able to cover that for a while, and that got me into everything from politics to military environmental technology, and how do you how do you clean all these all these uh contaminants out of the aquifer that is used by an awful lot of people to for drinking water and for cooking and for for all that stuff. And it was it was a very good education.

Dave Reddy 12:41

I'm curious, you said courts in New Bedford. Were you there during the the trial that became the movie The Accused, or at least inspired the movie The Accused, or was that after Oh, that was before me. Okay, that was before me. If you haven't seen it, go watch it. It's uh Jody Foster won an Oscar. Her first of two. Yeah, I I think that's an one of the things I found interesting about the Cape, and you know, you mentioned that like you thought everybody lived an army lifestyle. I just figured everybody lived like like Cape Cod was like normal, and that that was the way people lived. And it is not necessarily the most liberal part of the world, although it is somewhat liberal, but it is very environmental for obvious reasons. Since you know the beach the beach is a road at you know at an incredibly fast pace. So that's interesting. So you you do all these things, you learn, and I let's talk about that for a second because out of school was as a freelance sports reporter at the Washington Post. I covered high schools. I, you know, if if they would give me 25 bucks, I would go anywhere. And I learned so much that year, particularly what I didn't know, even though, like you, I had been in a leadership position at the school paper. So I feel like that's completely lost. The Washington Post, for instance, just closed its sports department. So now I'm trying to wonder how right? So I'm trying to wonder how young reporters in the Washington area or any other place are going to learn. And I know the Cape Cod Times still still exists. Do the other papers still exist? At this point, are they like one and two man shops? Or because I just feel like there's no place, not only is local news dying, which I won't talk about, but the training grounds aren't there for reporters anymore.

Jeff Burt 14:19

Yeah, I mean, all the all these papers now are are shells of what they were. Yeah. They're just shells of what they were. They're one or two, I don't know, maybe a handful of people. The the the the you know, the news hole has shrunk dramatically. It's it's it's it's a shame. It really is. Because it's first of all, it's a good job. And secondly, like you said, it's training ground. Where if if you want to be a reporter, if you're gonna do something like that, where are you gonna go to get those skills? But yeah, they they they've shrunken. They're they're they're nowhere near what they were.

Dave Reddy 14:53

And then to your and then to your other point about how important they are. Yes, I know there's patches and or whatever it's called these days, patch, and and anyone can be a reporter. So anyone, and and you can watch the local city council on TV, obviously, in any in just about any city. But there isn't that local watchdog, for lack of a better word, in most towns anymore, because most small newspapers are just gone. So, you know, I'm not even sure if we've we quite understand the repercussions of that. Or maybe we do. I don't know.

Jeff Burt 15:27

It's hard to see. I mean, one of one of the things about not having a local newspaper is that the the local officials know that. They know that that you know they're not being watched. I'm not saying that they're necessarily inherently corrupt, but they can do things that they want to do more easily without being called out on it. And I think that's I think that's a I think that's a danger. Yeah. It's too bad. It's it's like I said, it's a it's a good job, it's a good career, it's a good job, and you you learn just a tremendous amount by by working at those places.

Dave Reddy 16:01

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna move on, but I just I I cannot underestimate the amount I learned at 18 months at the Washington Post. And candidly, a lot of it was simply learning by being there. So they didn't trust me that much, nor should they have. But by being in that newsroom, and I would go even when I wasn't working, by being in that newsroom and listening and watching and so forth, you learned just so much from these guys who I mean, heck, I when I was there, Shirley Povich was still a sports reporter and he was still working with a typewriter. So, you know, you were gonna learn biasmosis, if nothing else. Sure. So shifting, you made a big shift in in around about 2000. So you've been covering local New England politics, sports, what have you. And then you join up with eWeek. Now, we haven't talked tech yet. Is was you you you said you were a horror movie fan, a fantasy, a fantasy book fan. At what point did you get into tech, or was that simply the job that was there?

Jeff Burt 17:04

A good friend of mine, Chris Gonswald, who I worked with at New Bedford for six or seven years, very smart dude, very, very good writer, very good journalist. He he left New Bedford after I did and kind of went his own way and did things and gave me a call one time in uh early 2000 and said, listen, I work at this place eWeek and they're looking for our journalists that can write about technology. And so he told me to to check it out, and I did. And for some reason they hired me because I didn't know anything about tech when when I was being interviewed by uh Rob O'Reagan, who was the editor at the time, and sitting at in his office, and he said, What do you know about computers? And I pointed at his, I said, I know that's one.

Dave Reddy 17:51

And you still got the job, it's awesome.

Jeff Burt 17:53

Yeah. But I told him, I said, you know, I don't know anything more about it, but I can learn. And I figured, you know, I learned about environmental technology, marine science, the law. I can learn about this. And yeah, he hired me.

Dave Reddy 18:08

Right. I mean, I'm a sports guy by trade, and I've been doing tech PR for nearly 30 years. I mean, at the at the end of the day, telling a story is telling a story is telling a story. Yes, you have a lot to learn, but it the the fundamentals are there regardless of what you're doing. That said, it must have been a steep learning curve. Like like many publications, right? Was thick. It was a phone book, if I remember. And and there were hundreds of them. I remember walking into Barnes and Noble back in the heyday of magazines, and there'd be a section for tech, particularly out here in the valley. There must have been 50, 75, 100 titles, and they were all there in print. They aren't anymore. So, what was that like? You go in, you're working for what was at the time one of the biggest titles in tech. You know what a computer is, you don't know how it ticks, and all of a sudden they're asking you to talk to tech companies. Did you find yourself going, I have no idea what these guys, these guys are talking about, or did you learn quickly?

Jeff Burt 19:02

Well, I I think I learned quickly, but yeah, I I can remember probably the first week that I was there going with my editor to this some day-long event in Boston and and listening to them. And it was they could have been talking Russian for all I knew.

Dave Reddy 19:17

It was all Greek too.

Jeff Burt 19:19

Yeah. But you know, I got down, I read back issues of the of the uh the magazine. I would call up in Microsoft for an interview, and I'd say, listen, I don't know about any of this stuff. So fill me in on what it does, what it is, and why why it's important. And God love them. They were they were patient. All the people I interviewed were patient. And so I slowly sort of got the hang of what I what it was I was talking about. And then I was put into the position of covering infrastructure, and for some reason that just kind of fell into place. Chips, servers, systems, you know, PCs, eventually networking, all that stuff started making sense. And that's what I covered. Probably I was at eWeek for 16 and a half years, I probably covered that for 14.

Dave Reddy 20:08

That and that is not an easy beat, you know, given it. Well, no, no beat in tech is easy, but that that that is one of the more difficult beats. What what what in particular attracted you to that?

Jeff Burt 20:19

Truthfully, initially, I I I don't really I don't really know. All I knew is that when I got to it, there was just a lot of stuff happening. This was this was at a time when you know Intel was still the big chip company, but you know, there were now pressure is being put on uh for for power management, power efficiency. Then you started getting into you know multiple multi-core chips, and then you have NVIDIA and ARM all of a sudden saying, hey, listen, we got these new type of chips that are very power efficient. We think that they're good enough to attract people who are worried about the cost of power to use them in their data centers and watch all that kind of unfold. And you know, you had cloud computing coming in. It was 2015, I think, when you know Jason Wang got up in uh at one of his NVIDIA conferences and said, we're just going to go all in on AI. So AI was something that and it just kind of rolled from there. And it was it was it was really very, very interesting stuff. It was business, it was competition, it was the technology itself, it was what the technology could do, what people were demanding. It was very interesting stuff.

Dave Reddy 21:31

And I I I just found that that I really liked it. Yeah, I mean, and and and God bless you, because you know, I Chips is one of my specials as a PR guy, and it I I still don't quite understand it. But it it is, as you know, it has become one of, if not the hottest stories, other than of course, AI in general in in tech again, with NVIDIA and Broadcom being two of the Magnificent Seven. Well, actually, Broadcom, pardon me, Broadcom is not technically part of the Magnificent Seven, but it is, I think, the seventh or eighth biggest company in the world, largely because of its AI infrastructure. Structure chips, much like NVIDIA. That was not a purposeful tip to Broadcom, which is a client. So let's just we'll just we'll just be honest about that. It was more about just the notion that it's amazing that no matter how far we get away from where chips started when I didn't want to know how big they were in the early IBM days with Udivac, to where we are in there vacuum tubes then, to where we are now. They are the fundamental building block of not only all of technology, but pretty much everything. So you were there 16 years, you saw the highs and you saw the lows. EWeek still exists, but it it it is it it unfortunately, I mean, candidly, kind of petered out. And uh, you know, so was that the standards? Was that pretty much the story as it was with other same story as it was with other magazines at that time?

Jeff Burt 22:50

You know, I think the story arc I think the story arc was the same. I mean, it started off as a magazine, a very good magazine. But it was, you know, by the time I got there, it was kind of easy to see what was happening with the internet and with apparent changes in in the industry itself. You know, when I got there, it was just towards the end of when Comdex was was at its height. And eWeek, from what I understand, used to have these massive parties that Bill Gates would show up and you know that sort of thing. And so there's a lot of money to be, but you could you could you could feel that that was changing. You could feel that you know what what the internet was doing to advertising and to how you need to present the news. And and so probably within the first, I don't know, within three years of when I got there, you really started getting pressure, less pressure about the magazine itself and more about presence online. And for eWeek, that meant eWeek was headquartered itself in the Boston area, even though it was a Ziff Davis publication. But you could still you could feel that the shift of authority kind of shifting to New York where the online business was. And then it was just something similar that we all saw in newspapers and we were seeing in other places, which was just a paring down of the cost, which many times means the people. So I was able to I was able to survive there for 16 and a half years. I was shocked that it got that far.

Dave Reddy 24:17

It's a tremendous run in any career, at any place, particularly in an industry like journalism, which has all sorts of money troubles. So I'm gonna ask you a question that I was asked. I was on a podcast this morning, myself, and I was asked this question. What is gonna fix the money problem with journalism? And by the way, just to let you know, I have no answer, and I gave no answer. I I don't know, to tell you the truth.

Jeff Burt 24:39

I really don't know. It's a you know, it's a fairly unique sort of industry because on one hand, it's it's it's viewed as a kind of a public service, a public resource sort of sort of thing, and yet you really can't make money from it anymore. So how how do you how do you resolve all that? I I really don't know. You have some, you know, you have some papers, some uh news organizations, the Guardian and what have you, that are surviving, but still they you know they need to raise funds and and and and all that. I I don't know, I don't know how it survives. All I know is that I'm hoping it does for at least the next three or four years.

Dave Reddy 25:21

Before it's time for you to retire, right? I hear you. I I actually was hopeful, and I'm not gonna make a comment positively or negatively about Bezos or Jeff Bezos or or or Mark Baniaff or other billionaires who own media. But I thought, oh, maybe this is the answer, sort of the the the patron of the arts, if you will. And it doesn't appear that that's the answer either, but we'll see. And if we don't figure it out, we're all gonna well, we're already suffering, but we'll all we're all gonna suffer.

Jeff Burt 25:49

Yep. I agree with you.

Dave Reddy 25:51

Talk about free sort of a segue there, freelancing. So I began my career freelancing. I never really got a staff position as a sports writer. I spent eight years doing it, although I had a semi-home first at the post and then at the San Jose Mercury News. What's that lifestyle like? And I, you know, I was doing it in the 90s, it's got to be way different now. You're writing for the next platform, Security Boulevard, other titles. On one hand, you've got freedom. On the other hand, you're you got a scrap, right? You you know, for every story. What's that like?

Jeff Burt 26:20

Um well, I gotta tell you, I mean, when I when I got laid off, it was the first time I was without an employer. It was kind of strange. I remember that it wasn't a terribly good week because uh Trump got elected the first time on Tuesday, uh-huh. And then I got a call on Wednesday that I was getting laid off. And I remember telling the guy, I don't even know who it was. He called from the West Coast, and I said, you know, that's the second worst piece of news I've gotten today. And then, yeah, and so and then then truthfully on Thursday, my mother passed.

Dave Reddy 26:56

Oh gosh, and so it was quite a week.

Jeff Burt 26:59

That's she she was alright, but she, you know, it was it was a long time coming. But anyways, but what what really helped me was the people at the next platform. You know, I I got to know Timothy Prickett Morgan because of we would go to all the same things together. And he asked me to come work with him, him and Nicole and Nicole Hemsoth. And I I started doing freelance for them, and then I started picking up other freelance from other people that I knew, and I realized I can make a living doing this. And I got I got to really like the uh the lifestyle. It's a it's it's a it's a different sort of lifestyle. But I mean, on one hand, you're you're you've got a number of different people that you're working for, and you've got to make sure that each one of them gets what they need. You're also there's no paid time off. If you're not working, you're not making money. But on the other hand, I've got to really like the freedom. I didn't have to worry about taking an afternoon off and getting permission to do it. I would just tell them, I'm not gonna be around, so don't count on me. And actually I went, I think it was 2022, I did a year and a half with the register on staff, and I found that a being back on staff really wasn't comfortable, it wasn't what I wanted anymore. So I said I got a chance to go back to freelance, and I like the freelance life. I really do. It's I work I I'm working a lot more, a lot more hours. I can't remember the last time I had a full week off, that sort of thing.

Dave Reddy 28:35

Really?

Jeff Burt 28:36

But I do like it, and I'm glad I'm back at it.

Dave Reddy 28:39

And and this very well could be the future of journalism. I mean, sort of a more of an individual model, but whether it be folks like you working for the next platform, security bill of other titles, or folks doing their thing on Substack. I thought I saw that like the day after he got whacked by the post, Jeff Fowler opened up a Substack.

Jeff Burt 28:56

Yeah, but I mean it's not it's not easy being a staffer on these on at these places anymore because they're being asked to do two to three stories a day. And it's it's it's generally a very difficult time to be a reporter. I just happen to like this lifestyle that I have as a freelancer. And as I said, I'm just kind of hoping it keeps going for a little while longer.

Dave Reddy 29:18

Segwaying to RSA, I'm only half joking when I ask this question. How much is the show going to be A, about the future of AI scaring the hell out of everybody? And B, the changing geopolitics scaring everybody. Are those basically going to be the two pol two topics?

Jeff Burt 29:34

Yeah, I think you know, it's it's it's like you see with everything, AI isn't everything. AI just affects everything to one degree or another. And in cybersecurity, it's got it's got these multiple roles. You know, people security teams are are are trying to get AI into what they do because I mean it's it's it's got a lot of advantages. It can help them more quickly detect something. It can it can let them automate all the alerts that tend to overwhelm them. They can they can get rid of the what are the obvious false positives more quickly and just worry about the stuff that they have to worry about. But it's also a a tool that's being used against them. You know, you've got cybers, you know, you've got cyber uh, you know, the the the bad actors, the the bad guys, the hackers, who are using it in in such novel ways right now and really adopting it very quickly. You know, when they first when when OpenAI first came out with ChatGPT, they were using it to make their phishing messages better. It was they've they they could become more convincing because of the there wasn't the awkward language as much in it, the spellings were were good and all that. They used deep fakes, which helped along the way. And now it's evolved to the point where they're actually using AI to generate malware.

Dave Reddy 30:56

Right.

Jeff Burt 30:56

And and and and all of this is a real problem, and and it keeps them ahead of the security team. So the security industry is trying to come up with ways to everything protect identity, detect AI generated threats. They've got to deal with agents now, so they've got to figure out how they can get greater visibility to what agents are doing, where they're going, where they're getting their information. You've got the challenge of protecting, of securing large language models against prompt injections and and other threats like that. It's it's a it for cybersecurity, it's a real AI versus AI sort of arms race.

Dave Reddy 31:35

Yeah, it's like spy versus spy in the old man magazine, right? I mean, it it it it is they they can move so much faster, which means you as a as a cyber analyst, cyber hunter, whatever, you you've that means you're gonna move fast too.

Jeff Burt 31:49

It's like one you know, one analyst told me too. I said, you know, they only have to get it right once.

Dave Reddy 31:53

Yep.

Jeff Burt 31:54

The security guys have to have it right all the time. And that's and that's just a tremendous amount of pressure. So I think I think what we're gonna see in RSA is there's there's gonna be, you know, it uh talks about identity and and and you know zero trust and you know that sort of thing. But it's always gonna have that tinge of that that idea of either using AI to to do this type of thing, using zero trust and and and what have you to protect identities that are uh against AI. It's just you're gonna have that thread. You're gonna have the threat of AI through just about everything that's gonna go on at RSA.

Dave Reddy 32:29

Aaron Powell From the geopolitics sense, you know, you know, we th on our side, so to speak, we uh the you typically speak of the big four, North Korea, Russia, China, and who am I forgetting? Iran. The world is changing. Apparently we're well not we, but apparently uh the government is reconsidering our allies. Do you see that ch therefore changing who our cybersecurity allies are, or is that just too far removed from reality? Or perhaps it's the current I think it's rhetoric too far removed from reality.

Jeff Burt 33:04

I don't know if it changes necessarily who our our adversaries and our allies are. Right. But it it I think it blurs the line a little bit more. You know, it's it was it was a big deal when the Biden administration started pulling back on the ability for like uh NVIDIA to sell their GPUs, right? You know, that sort of thing, as a way of just slowing down their ability to to take this the our the technology that's that's developed by American companies and use it against us, and now that's been loosened. So, but at the same time, you you do get the feeling that the government understands that China and Russia are adversaries, and they're adversaries in the in in cyberspace as well. So I think there's of it, and I the hope is is that it doesn't get to the point where we forget about that. China's China's gonna do what China's gonna do, and they're very good at doing it, as we learned over the last several years. How how that's gonna affect what we see at RSA, I don't know. I don't know. We'll we'll we'll have to we'll have to see about that because it's hard to tell exactly where this administration comes down on cybersecurity.

Dave Reddy 34:23

Yes, I would presume, I believe Christy Noam spoke there last year, so I presume some someone from the cabinet will speak this year. That's what I'm guessing. I'm hoping so. Yeah, so we shall see. Let's go talk more broadly about AI. Obviously, it's a massive force in cyber. As you said, it's in everything. Is it a force for good? Is it a force for bad? Is it both? And and where do you think we end up here? Are we all gonna be uh is it gonna be Terminator or or is it all gonna be Kumbaya with us working alongside robots?

Jeff Burt 34:51

I don't know. It's pretty early. I mean, that's that's the that's the one thing to remember. You know, I don't think a year and a half ago people were really thinking that much about agents, and yet agents are here now. I've got a real sort of mixed mixed feeling about AI. I think I it's easy to imagine all the really good things it can do for society as far as drug research, healthcare, all this stuff. My worry is, my my biggest worry is that the innovation is happening so quickly. Things are happening so quickly that it's outpacing security, it's outpacing regulations. It's gonna have a tremendous societal impact in the coming years. And I don't know if if if society, if governments are ready for it. And I think it's gonna happen fast. That's that's my biggest worry is what sort of what sort of how how is it gonna affect society and how is society gonna be able to Right.

Dave Reddy 35:46

And when you look at what social media has done to society, and I'm not bullish at all on social media, I think what social media has done to society in the last 15 years and governments. It's hard to be positive on that, if I may say, but let's hope we've learned a lesson or two on in that regard. How do you use AI in your job?

Jeff Burt 36:05

No. No, I really don't. I mean, you know, I might go on Google and ask a question and to to get some information and stuff like that. And I'll ask it in a certain way that's more like a prompt than just uh, you know, and it works. But I don't use it for my writing at all. I really I don't use it very much, if at all, really.

Dave Reddy 36:26

Well, you know, and you know, this goes back to its early days. I mean, if I think if you're a journalist or professional writer, using AI for writing is very dangerous. AI has no soul. If it does someday, you know, then we have Terminator. But I don't think you can write without a soul.

Jeff Burt 36:42

And that's part of being human, right? Well, not only that, but I mean this, you know, first of all, I've been doing this now for more than 40 years. You know, if I if if I let something else sort of do what I do, I mean you know, what am I gonna do? You know, so I I I still enjoy the writing process, I still enjoy the reporting process, and I certainly won't don't want to hand it over to a uh a piece of software.

Dave Reddy 37:05

And yet, back to our earlier conversation, more and more outlets seem to be willing to do that to save a buck. So I I let's let's hope that changes soon. Yeah, well, my last question is always sort of fun and a little now for you. This is gonna be a really broad question because you've lived everywhere, man. So New Hampshire, New Bedford, Cape Cod, Virginia, Germany, or any of those other outposts you happen to have gone? Where, where, what?

Jeff Burt 37:33

Where what I where do I want to be? Yeah. Like I like Cape Cod. You know, I really do. I my son, my older son, who is also in the army now, moved out to Monterey, California over the summer with his family. So my younger son and I took his Jeep and drove across the country to bring it to him. We had a blast. It was two weeks of just a ton of fun, and we were hitting up different places we'd never been, and it was great seeing these places, Des Moines, Iowa, which I had never had any real interest in going to, but the Iowa Cubs were playing the triple A team for Chicago. So we had to go see that. Stayed in Utah, stayed in, I mean, it was it was a lot of fun. I miss being around the water, the ocean. And it would be very hard at this point after spending all this time minutes away from the ocean to to actually be somewhere else. So I like Cape Cod, you know, it's a it's a good place, as you know.

Dave Reddy 38:31

Yeah, I miss it. For for those who have never been there, can you can you describe in your own words Cape Cod in July versus Cape Cod in January?

Jeff Burt 38:42

I think the best way to describe that is this. When I first got to Cape Cod as a reporter, I had to go around beating people in the town of Mashby, which was one of the towns that I that I covered when I first got here. And I I walked in and I introduced myself to the police chief, and he started yelling at me. And he started yelling at me because the year before the editor at the Cape Got Times thought it would be a good idea to do a story talking with locals about how they get around during the summer with all the tours. And it's a big deal because Falmouth has about 30,000 people year-round, the town I live in, and about a hundred thousand in the summer. So they had this big story about you know all the different secret passageways, roads, and and and ways that people got around, and the outrage that it caused. What are you telling the tourists about our favorite our favorite roads? Why would you do this? And the police chief, and I just kept telling the police chief, I just got here. And he was outraged a year later. So that's what it is. In the summer, it's very crowded. It's very, there's a lot going on. It's a beautiful, wonderful place. I don't mind the tourist at all. And in the winter, towns like Foundath that have an active downtown are still pretty decent. And there's some places out farther down the Cape which are life gets pretty slow out there.

Dave Reddy 40:12

Truro and Wellfleet and so forth, as you head up. I mean, just there might be four people in each town. I'm exaggerating.

Jeff Burt 40:18

You know, rooster and stuff like that. But it's a it's a good, it's a good place to be overall.

Dave Reddy 40:24

Yeah, you you made me think of Buck Island Road in uh in Yarmouth. That's the it's probably not I don't know how how how much of a secret is, but that was the secret when I was growing up, was you didn't take 28 because uh to get from Yarmouth to Hyenus, which is about which is about six miles in the middle of the summer, would probably take you somewhere in the notion of about an hour. But if you took Buck Island, Willow Street, and da da da, you know, here I have you know the map in my head, it would only take you about 40 minutes because there's still there's still gonna be traffic, but it's not gonna be as bad. It's so that that is a really funny story. I could totally hear that. Well, thank you for bringing back to my childhood, Buck Island Road and so forth. And thank you for a uh a great preview of RSA and a and a a great uh great conversation about uh eWeak and your earlier career. I really enjoyed your time, Jeff. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dave. I appreciate it. I'd like to thank you all for listening today. And once again, a big thank you to freelance tech reporter Jeff Burke. Don't forget to join us next month when we chat with yet another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast, or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley marketing and how we identified the B2B Tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at dready at bigvalley.co. That's D-R-E-D-D-Y at BigVally, all one word.co. No M. You can also email the whole team at pressingmatters at bigvalley.co. Once again, thanks for listening, and as always, think big.