Talks
Strategic keynotes and sessions on systems, security infrastructure, and operational signal.
Signature keynotes and team sessions designed for conferences and offsites.
Security, history, and organizations through a single lens.
From Roman logistics to modern cloud security, the same patterns repeat: incentives drift, feedback loops break, and complexity hides failure until it’s too late. This talk connects systems thinking across centuries and shows how designing for failure, not perfection, changes outcomes.
Best for
Keynotes, founder retreats, engineering leadership offsites.
Why identity, incentives, and failure modes matter more than topology.
Zero Trust is often sold as a networking solution. In practice, it succeeds or fails based on human behavior, incentives, and operational reality. This talk reframes Zero Trust as a strategic systems problem—and explains why many implementations increase fragility instead of resilience.
Best for
CISOs, platform teams, product/security leaders.
Deception, incentives, and overconfidence at scale.
Napoleon didn’t win at Austerlitz with brute force. He won by shaping information, incentives, and tempo—causing opponents to make “rational” decisions that led to collapse. A masterclass in systems failure and strategic misdirection with modern parallels.
Best for
Leadership audiences, strategy sessions, cross-functional teams.
Why smart people make terrible decisions under risk.
Engineers assume rational actors and symmetric risk. Humans don’t work that way. This talk explains loss aversion, misperceived risk, and why teams repeatedly choose worse outcomes—especially in security and incident response.
Best for
Engineers, SREs, security teams, decision-makers under pressure.
Why high-performing teams don’t work faster—they work with clarity.
Autonomy, clear decision ownership, and narrative matter more than hours worked. Inspired by ideas from Smarter Faster Better, this talk shows why the most effective teams optimize for agency rather than speed.
Best for
Managers, founders, engineering orgs, team offsites.