 Okay, ladies and gentlemen and various other beings. So this is closing out our S.E. Village speaking track. I've got another funny story for you. You may have... oh yeah. We've got a pineapple pizza lover here. We should stone him publicly. Right? It's disgusting. It's disgusting. It's disgusting. It's not Italian. It's not Italian, okay? You're in my village. There's no such thing as pineapple pizza. No. I'm taking all that as support for me, okay? But that's not Perry. What we did is Perry, we invited him to give a speech here in the S.E. Village and then we did a really stupid thing. On the schedules you have, we made his name Penny. Yeah, that's a big blunder when you print 5,000 of those things and then hand them out to everyone in the first two days. And then when the first 2,000 are handed out, you look down and you're like, oh crap. So if all of you were coming here thinking you were going to see, what did you say? Some socially awkward hot chick, right? You didn't get that, okay? What you got was my good friend Perry Carpenter. So if you would, help me in welcoming Perry to the S.E. Village. All right, so I am not the cute socially awkward girl you were hoping for, but this is going to be weird for me. So I'm the kind of guy, I actually do talk for a living. I'm the chief evangelist and strategy officer for Know Before and I'm going to talk to you about something that I kind of revealed for the first time about two or three years ago, which was, you know, throughout my life I've always just kind of felt a little bit strange and awkward like an alien that's looking at the world and the people around them and saying, what makes these people tick? Why do they do the things that they do? Why do they act the way that they act? Why do they believe the things that they believe and so on? And about four years ago I kind of realized after I read a book called The Journal of Best Practices and people have given me indication of this before that I probably fall somewhere on the autism spectrum and I went in and got the diagnosis and then I started to share that with childhood friends and they're like, well no duh, we've known that for years, which made me feel great, but if you were to flash back at my life kind of in high school I was hearing comments from friends, really good friends actually, but things that were difficult to process a little bit it's like, you know, Perry has the emotional variability of a robot, you know, those kind of things and at that time if you knew me I spoke in monotone, I was very rigid about the things that I said and the opinions that I held and all that and over the past 70 plus years I've really been trying to go over and over and over again and figure out how I can improve myself and how I can fit in with society and those kind of things and I am happily married, I've got two kids, I have a good job, I've kind of had an interesting evolutionary path to get through all that and I'm going to try to trace through some of that today and so the reason that I'm even talking about it at all because it is hugely uncomfortable is that one day I made an off-handed comment in a presentation that I give all the time about deception. So my life really has focused around deception and influence and things like that for a long time because I am so interested in humans and what makes us tick. So I was presenting this slide, it's a slide that I know Eric has sold for me before as well and presents, which is I'll make the statement that there are two things about human nature and humanity, two disturbing truths is that everyone is a master deceiver and we are all very easily deceived and I made the statement about the mask and the fact that throughout life I've gone and taken off various masks to fit in whatever role that I need to fit in at the time because of social awkwardness and because of and I even mentioned Asperger's syndrome at the time and that was kind of a throwaway comment, I didn't even know why I said it but it just felt relevant at the time and then after I finished that speech which was obviously very well received like all mine are, I finished the speech, ended it and a stream of people came up to ask questions and I thought it was the normal stream of people asking questions about deception and influence and social engineering and all that kind of stuff but it was parents that had kids on the autism spectrum that were saying thank you, you've actually shown me that my child can potentially have a future in society contributing to society, making money and all those kind of things and they were moved and behind them were people that had been diagnosed and are on the spectrum in their early 20s and starting their careers and saying thank you, you've kind of shown me that I might be able to learn how to open up over time and figure out how to fit in and do things like lead meetings and speak in front of people and have a family and all those kind of things and so it made me realize that maybe even though it's hugely uncomfortable because I can talk about security all day long because I can dissociate that, maybe it makes sense every now and then to mention this aspect of my life and so that's why I'm doing this and I actually published a book a few months ago on security awareness and driving secure behaviors and in the introduction for that book I mentioned my diagnosis and the way that I've looked at behavior and all those kind of things and it was one of those things that immediately when I sent it to my editor I wish that I could take it back because I do believe like a lot of people that have a diagnosis like this there's a little bit of just awkwardness and almost shame that you feel whenever you talk about it because it is considered autism in a lot of ways and a lot of forms is considered a disability and so it can be uncomfortable to mention that disability when you've been figuring out how to blend in your entire life. But at the position that I've found myself in now when I actually do have the ability to go out and talk to hundreds or thousands of people at a time maybe it does make sense to go ahead and be a little bit more open so that we can start to change the culture. And there's good news we're seeing that change as we see all these different diversity movements around the world right now we are talking more and more about neuro diversity and being able to capture and leverage the different perspectives that people have whether they're on the autism spectrum or whether they have ADHD or Tourette's or other things like that and you're seeing in organizations like GCHQ in the UK they've got a neuro diversity initiative where they're looking for people specifically on the spectrum and with other interesting unique ways of viewing the world you see other large tech companies doing the same thing and so there is a move to try to figure out how we can contribute to the world and do things in the most effective way possible. So let me just outline a little bit of my history because it would give you an idea of the journey that I've been on. First of all this is me, this is the standard slide that I usually use when I'm talking about no before. My fascination for a long time like I've said is related to psychology and human interaction and misdirection and all those things that I'm going to talk about in a second how all those fit together but this is me. I started out in my career really actually not knowing what I wanted to do. I went and got a degree in religious studies. I had another degree in philosophy. I had a minor in Hebrew. I thought I was going to go into linguistics. I went to law school instead decided I hated law school so I got, went into computers for a while, got hired out of that, ended up being hired by Walmart and wrote the email system that was used in all the stores and clubs in the US for about five years. Went on from there into a company called Altill that was bought by Verizon and as I was kind of figuring out my life and my path from there ended up going to Gartner and I'll trace some of this in just a minute but for those of you that aren't familiar with some of these terms Asperger's syndrome has a few different things that it's characterized by. This biggest one is of course some social awkwardness and then there's this whole idea of restricted interest and so you'll frequently see somebody with Asperger's, they've got tunnel vision, they'll lose time in one type of activity and they'll become subject matter experts in like if it's a kid, they'll be the world's foremost expert on trains and schedules. Luckily for me I was able to start to shift a lot of those into the security world and that's served me well and that would be one of my takeaways is if you find yourself in that kind of spectrum you'll figure out how to use these things as almost a super power and find competitive advantage in it. Now there are a number of negatives that come with it in that things like showing emotion, talking about emotion, reflecting emotion back, connecting with others all of that's really really hard and can affect your career and can affect your home life. I've done really well leveraging and finding the right mask to put on to boost my career. If there's one area that I always struggle with because you can only wear a mask for so long it's keeping being present at home and so that's been a big focus for me over the past few years as well and my wife is my champion behind all of that as well so she's with me a hundred percent. Those of you that suspect that you might be on the spectrum and don't have a diagnosis and you're married if your wife is in a helping profession like a teacher or a nurse or a speech pathologist or somebody that that pours their lives into other people to help them it's probably likely that that you're there because we tend to attract those types of people because they want to understand and they want to be helpful. So here's my journey I talked a little bit about some of the discoveries that I had but my big thing is that I started to find connections and all things so if you were to meet me in college I would actually all through my life I've been really interested in magic in misdirection and those kinds of things so I was the guy in college I had like six packs of cards with me all the time and trick cards and straight cards and coins and everything else only to realize it actually doesn't make you all that popular to be the guy that has all those cards and yeah might erase some social awkwardness for like five minutes while you do the best thing that you know how to do and then but people don't like to be assaulted with your cards and and so I've been able to grow that a little bit and weave some of that into security because when we're talking about social engineering of course deception and misdirection are key to those things but I've actually elevated it I went for specialized training and things like street hypnosis so I actually did that here in Las Vegas it's the perfect place to hypnotize people on the street if you want to because people are looking for cool things to do and so if you go out to Fremont Street there's lots of lights lots of sound you say hey you interested in and trying to to be hypnotized and see what's going on first time I tried it I went the whole route name amnesia pretended that I was invisible had somebody forget how to speak all you know all of that kind of stuff and and again you see the tie-back why do people do the things that they do why do they believe the things that they believe because that's all hypnosis is it's a casting of a belief and then reinforcing that and building a cycle around it and so it's all framing stuff stuff that Chris talks about all the time so it's framing and then throwing that out and reinforcing it I've done training in pickpocketing again you see that the tie in there I've done basically anything that you can think of doing and to the to the point where like the other Chris that spoke earlier I spent a lot of time working on cold reading and mentalism simulated mind reading all that stuff and actually went to London and did a whole presentation as a psychic and then I have kind of spun that and do a security related presentation where I I go simulate a bunch of mind reading and then make it look like it's all scientific based with well some of the pseudoscience like NLP but also eye movements muscle movements micro expressions all that kind of stuff and I asked people at the end of it how do you think that I you know knew this factor knew that factor knew which hand a coin was in or which side of a die was up and then I talk about how I used pseudoscience and misinformation to lead them along a garden path and everything was just little little tricks but everybody believes the scientific explanation because that's the one that I threw out first and our minds like to take little little shortcuts and believe the explanation that's given because it takes effort to think of something else same thing with social engineering and then of course all that works out digitally as well and so I've spent a lot of time looking at cybersecurity how we move cultures and populations and and everything related to that and that's moved me from a really weird career path so I've seen all those linkages and I got to the point where I knew that if I was going to improve because I was at the type of coder that would unplug all the lights in the office I wouldn't speak to anyone I would lose 10 hours coding and it felt like five minutes people were were pissed at me because I wouldn't interact but I was a really really good coder and most of you know if you're good at something you get promoted to your point of incompetence and so I got promoted to to be a team leader and I was the crappiest team leader you can imagine because I didn't really care about the people that were there again this whole emotional reciprocity thing was hard it felt uncomfortable to interact at that level and luckily I was working for Walmart at the time and when you get to be a manager or team leader actually got elevated to manager even though it was a crappy team leader when I got to be a manager they send you to Dale Carnegie training which is a 12-week kind of immersive thing and you have to learn how to speak in front of people and all that and I got voted the most changed person by the end of that 12 weeks because I threw myself at it knowing that I would have to if I want to break a barrier and where my career is going to go and reap the results personally in my own life and with my family I would have to do that well and so I threw myself into that and that worked out well at the same time when I went to to all tell and started to also figure out how to transition and and to working at Gartner there's a whole story there and how I actually accomplished that which was building a backlog of research and publications and meeting a few people and so on but when the time came I actually put myself at a crossroads where I was having to present every week and spend probably 25 hours on the phone giving consultative advice with Gartner because I took the job at Gartner and at the same time at my church remember I mentioned that I had a degree in Biblical studies the pastor had a failing and had to leave and so the church was facing we're either going to have to close the doors or we're going to have to have an interim person step in until we can find somebody else so I actually became a pastor of a church for about a year and a half so again a guy that doesn't really know how to talk doesn't know how to socialize and now I'm in a position every week I have to create this was the format of this church was 40 minute talk I had to connect with people and I literally had to walk through the wreckage of people's lives with them as they dealt with marriage problems and child problems and all the mess that we all face and so that helped me kind of understand humanity a little bit but it's only because I threw myself in and then at Gartner I was having to do the same thing but at a technical level I was having to deal with people peel back problems and at least simulate empathy and all those kind of things but there's a lot of interesting little cold reading techniques that come into that as well and so I had to learn through immersion I had to also realize that a lot of talking because with the way that my mind works an interesting presentation has the most facts available that you can give the world doesn't like that they kind of like infotainment so I realized alright I need to consolidate down to a core message of maybe three things and then just try to make it as memorable as possible and same thing in the church world right you have to come down to basically a single message and reinforce that over and over and over because I'll tell you my first couple of speaker evals at Gartner were pretty brutal but by the time that I left I was consistently one of the top speakers ever rated and so over and over and over again it was 4.5 out of 5 and above types of ratings that I would get and other people were looking to me for advice on how to do this and it's because I intentionally modeled after speakers that I liked I figured out how to put on that mask over and over and over again what speaker do I like what Ted talked to I like what pastor do I like the way that he or she addresses the room and then I learned how to mimic the things that would in my mind still feel authentic to me and project that out and like I said before I learned how to simulate emotion but I also learned that people make decisions based on emotion and then back them up with logic later on and so I had to figure out how do I infuse whatever message I'm giving with emotion even if I don't necessarily feel it connected to that message I have to find a way to somehow bring that up and project it forward and so that took a little bit of work and I'll talk about how I accomplished that in a second too and this top figure is actually one from my book called Trojan Horses for the Mind it was all around how I can use or how anybody can use words and story, emotion, visuals and so on in order to communicate a message that actually implants and so I brought a lot of that type of thinking as well how do I bring all these things together in the way that a social engineer would or in the way that a religious leader would or a let's say a speaker that's trying to help you achieve personal change would in whatever context I'm in whether that's a religious context or a security context or just in life in general so here's a couple take aways I had to find a way to deepen connections with others now I'll give a caveat here what I'm about to say may sound cold and calculating it's not meant to be but a guy that a writer I respect summed it up pretty well this is Neil Gaiman he's the writer of Coraline and Sandman and Good Omens and actually not Good Omens yeah Good Omens and Neverwhere and others and he says all fiction has to be as honest as you can make it because that's what people respond to and so any time that I was trying to connect with somebody I wouldn't just you know if they were happy but I wouldn't just try to emulate happiness or sadness with them I would like an actor try to find a time that I was happy in my own life or sad in my own life and bring that forward because I felt like it was my social responsibility to reflect that back to them in a way that was as genuine as possible so yeah maybe that sounds a little bit calculating but where my heart was at that time was that I wanted to to give them whatever was most authentic as I could and so there's this term that most people in here probably haven't heard it's called elexithymia which means that whenever somebody with actually about 10% of the people in this room have this if you were to ask me directly how do you feel about that I get essentially writer's block I can't bring it forward it's like I'll try to describe how I feel about something and it just sticks here that's the only feeling that I can give is it sticks here and I can't articulate it and so that's something that really really sucks especially in relationships and as Chris knows there's a lot of and most of you know there's a lot of emotions that are very universal the only problem is that they're coarse grains so I can say I'm mad or I feel mad or I feel happy but in human relationship there's actually a lot of nuance that we have to bring to that if I just every time you ask me how I'm doing I say I feel happy or I feel okay or something you're going to feel like there's not a genuine relationship there and so I discovered that there's actually a lot of complexity behind emotions and so now I'll look at a list like this and I'll actually try to match what are the combinations of emotions that I might be feeling and how do I bring that forward as well so that I can more accurately describe it to whoever I'm talking to and I've got lists of these resources at the end if you're somebody that struggles with that as well and then things like there's a concept of theory of mind which is all around being able to understand that other people aren't having the same thoughts or perspectives as you I think we suffer from this as a nation right now and we get pissed at each other all the time but that's maybe the nation is autistic a little bit it definitely is diagnosable you know so I mean the first step for me was just to realize that other people had different perspectives on things as stupid as that probably sounds is that they're not going to see the same world as me and as I do that it means that I have to pivot around and try to see things through their eyes as much as possible which is another good thing that you can do if you're a social engineer because you need to be able to emulate as much as possible the thoughts and feelings of your target so that you can figure out alright if I want to have this person do this what would somebody maybe say to me if I were in their shoes to do that and you have to be able to figure out how to get in their mind as much as possible which takes a lot of effort you can also I already mentioned this simulate empathy by thinking of a time in your own life where you've had something like that happen or you felt that that emotion I mean you might tell me that your cat died and you're distraught over it and you might not be able to get there with you because I mean it's your cat and actually I'm a cat lover I have lots of cats but for those of you that are not you know what I'm talking about but I do feel like it's my social responsibility if you're engaging with me as a human to try to figure out how do I make it to where you're coming away from that relationship or that five minutes spend with each other you're coming out rewarded for that in some way and I've heard other people say this when they do pen tests or when they actually Chris says this all the time he wants to leave people better than or situations better than they were before he got there and I think that's an ethical duty that we have as individuals we should leave every situation better than before and we have to understand of course that's where we are just a couple more things to hit and then you know even if we don't express emotion deeply we have to realize that it is there we feel really deeply like when somebody in high school said you're like Mr. Robot and you don't express emotions actually I did feel that I just couldn't respond to it which is weird to be trapped in your own head that way I don't know where it was so here's what I do for tactics on how to get past this first thing is I started to understand concepts like reciprocity and the power that oxytocin release in the brain has if I give something to you you're more likely to feel invested if actually even if you give something to me you're more likely to feel invested I got into understanding people connected by let's say if I want to build a connection in a short period of time I actually want to meet with you multiple times in the same day in different places it's a pretty interesting little trick but now you have three different memories say in three different locations and it feels like we've known each other longer so I'll use little tactics like that I'll look at things like cold reading skills we've already talked about that today I'll talk about or get into studying others to find something that they generally appreciate something that I appreciate in them and try to reflect that back so that I can build connection as well and then lastly this whole idea of framing and understanding their world views and being able to define some point of commonality there and so even though that can sound cold and calculating here's another Neil Gaiman quote you know what you're doing is lying but you're using the truth to make your lies convincing and true and you're using them as seasoning so you're using the truth as a condiment to make otherwise unconvincing narrative absolutely credible so yeah I might be bringing things in in a different context but I'm trying to weave these things together in order to bring as much credibility as possible alright and then the last little bit here this is all about knowing yourself so you want to know if you have restricted interest you want to figure out how those can connect together and then how you can start to leverage that in a career setting so mine were psychology and magic and misdirection and everything else and they weave together really well in a security context um for you it might be very similar or it might be coding, branching into something else but you do want to find different branches that you can leap from and you do want to approach life in your career like an escape room so as you learn one thing what are maybe three avenues that that unlocks if you can combine it with all the other things that you know and are fantastic at because that's going to give you a pathway to continue to go so I was able to use all of these things and finally end up as a C level person that works around the world giving presentations to large groups I work with a guy named Kevin Mitnick as well so some of you know I work with great guys like Eric and others and I see myself as actually having done some pretty good for the community also and so I'll leave you with a few resources I've run out of time for questions um but if you have questions or thoughts I'll be happy to chat with you over there um here's some articles uh I do want to call your attention to Chris's book um and I've aptly returned the favor so with that that's me I'm done thank you so much