Better Than Yesterday with Osher Günsberg

Checking in, December 6, 2019

Featuring the amazing Dan Ilic!

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Dr. Craig Costello is a Senior Researcher in the Security and Cryptography group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA. Where his job is to keep what you want secret a secret - basically using some very complex mathematics.

He is among a formidable group of cryptographers who’s life’s work is to protect the internet against adversarial code breakers (aka cryptanalysts), both those that exist today in our classical computing world, and those that will exist in a quantum computing future.

Needless to say - he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to the security of you and your data in an online world.

Craig is a Queenslander, and a listener to this very podcast - who reached out to me and told me that he might have some interesting things to talk about and he was not wrong.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s two types of people - those who have been hacked, and those who haven’t been hacked yet.

Unless you’re really careful, it will happen to you.

But soon enough, as quantum computers come to wider usage - the passwords that you and I both use now, even the 64-character randomly generated ones, will be as easy to crack as running through the banner at an AFL match.

Recently Google claimed that the Quantum computer they built was able to solve a problem in 200 seconds - a problem that the world’s currently fastest super computer would have taken 10,000 years to solve.

So Craig and his team are working hard to stay ahead of this.

Even if you’re the kind of person that uses Passw0rd1 as your password for everything - this chat is an important one because I feel it’s important to keep an eye on what developments are happening in the world of data security.

And it’s not just your FB account. It’s your email, it’s your bank balance, your health records, your GPS data - and as we get more and more connected, it is more and more risky.

So it’s important we know the risk.

It’s not all fear - in Australia we drove cars without seat belts from 1897, and people were getting gruesomely injured and killed before we figured out Seat Belts were a good idea finally in 1970.

So don’t worry. We figure it out eventually.

But hopefully this chat with Craig will help you and me figure it out a little quicker.

A note here - would you believe that when I recorded this, I’d done 297 episodes of this show, and had only lost three recordings - either due to battery failure of my recorder, a Hard Drive glitch or a software error.

I thought I’d lost the whole first half of this chat - and even sent the corrupted file back to Craig to see if there was anyone at Microsoft that he know who could salvage the data on the file.

No luck. I thought this podcast was going to be 32 minutes long.

Until Andy Maher my epic producer somehow managed to salvage the file.

So if occasionally there’s an odd chop in the cadence of the conversation - it’s because Andy had to slice out the unsalvageable data - but for the most part he resurrected this file from what was a zillion garbled ones and zeros.

If you like what you hear - you can find Craig’s excellent Ted Talk online.

Enjoy this conversation with Craig Costello.

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Rebekah Giles is one of Australia’s top lawyers and non-executive directors, an Ambassador for the Fertility Research Clinic at The Royal Hospital for Women Foundation, a mother, and a survivor of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.

15 years ago, on the 26th of December 2004, a rupture along two tectonic plates - the Burma Plate and the India Plate, caused an undersea megathrust earthquake that shook the earth for a staggering ten straight minutes.

The resulting Tsunami waves were up to 30m high and some traveled up to two kilometres inland destroying everything in their path.

Millions of people were displaced, and over a quarter of a million people were killed.

In the aftermath, a global outpouring of support and compassion followed - the world putting politics aside and rallying around those affected by the most devastating natural disaster in modern history.

In the days and weeks that followed, looking for some good news out of the seemingly near ending horror of the situation, stories of heroism and survival started to filter through.

Rebekah’s is one such story.

She came to my house a while back, and even though she’s a partner at a law firm, gave up hours of her time to share her story with us, and the lessons she learned along the way.

I’ll let her take you through it - however I’ll tell you this.

I hope you and I never, ever have to experience what she went through - however what she has to share about living now, living the life she got back to live again - it’s something I now carry with me every day, and I hope you do too.

If you like what you hear, let her know on IG @rebekahgiles

Enjoy this conversation with Rebekah Giles.

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Ryan Holiday is an author, marketing genius, father, farmer and swimmer based in Austin Texas.

Though I didn’t know it at the time, I first became aware of his work when he was in charge of marketing for the now largely defunct clothing brand American Apparel.

It was only later when I read his brilliant book “Trust Me, I’m Lying - Confessions of a Media Manipulator” that I gained a scope of how easily what we see and hear and then feel can be so easily dictated to us by outside sources under the guise of legitimate news.

Ryan has long had a fascination with Stoic philosophy and his best selling books, “The Obstacle is the Way”, “Ego is the Enemy”, and now the #1 NYT Best Seller “Stillness is the Key” opened me up to a different way of thinking about the world that I often struggle with as you no doubt are aware.

Via his daily updates on The Daily Stoic and now his excellent fatherhood email The Daily Dad, Ryan is a prolific writer and thinker - someone who’s wise beyond his years and a person that I definitely aspire to emulate when it comes to a calm way of observing the world.

This is a podcast years in the making, so I have to thank both US serial entrepreneur Maneesh Sethi and Australian entrepreneur and author Pete Williams for forming a two-pronged connection that allowed me to get back on Ryan’s radar around the release of his new book.

If you’ve never heard of Ryan Holiday before - strap in. His wisdom and depth of knowledge is staggering. His way of speaking and constructing a rational view of reality devoid of emotional distortion is something to behold.

I couldn’t be more grateful for his time.

To dive in deep on what Ryan’s all about, RyanHoliday.net or @ryanholiday on Twitter and IG.

Without further ado, please welcome, live from Austin Texas - Ryan Holiday.

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Beau Ryan is a former professional Rugby League player, who has since transitioned into a successful career as a TV and Radio presenter. 

He’s currently hosting “The Amazing Race Australia” on Network Ten, and has notably been a star of Sunday Night Takeaway, and The Footy Show. 

Beau’s career and personal life has not been without controversy, and his commitment to have a long hard look at himself, and reapply his energy to an unflinching focus on family and hard work is nothing short of admirable. 

You can find Beau on twitter and instagram @therealbeauryan

We caught up at the Betoota Advocate studios last week, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with Beau Ryan

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Erin Brockovich is probably the most famous name in Law in the world. Making a name for herself when she went up against utility company Pacific Gas & Electric and helped bring together the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history on behalf of the people of Hinkley, CA who had been affected by polluted water.

Erin went on to become instrumental in numerous other high profile cases, usually up against massive corporate entities who are using their size to get away with either polluting the environment or otherwise neglecting humans basically. 

Erin was out in Australia doing work with Shine Lawyers - whom she’s been working with for over ten years now, in particular around the issue of PFAS, a toxic chemical contained in firefighting foam used widely in Australia between the 1970s and 2000. The substance was sprayed over defence force bases, shipping ports, and regional firefighting stations for decades. It leaches into the soil and surrounding waterways, causing contamination. In 1987, American authorities wrote to the Australian Government to warn about the dangers of PFAS but nothing was done. Research in the United States has linked exposure to PFAS to cancer and a dozen other diseases. Residents in many Australian towns, including Bullsbrook in Western Australia where Erin visited last week, say their dogs have been riddled with cancer and die young. They can’t drink the tap water. They bathe infants in bottled water. There have also been reports of birth defects. Unfortunately, it is difficult to prove in Australian law causation between exposure to this chemical and disease. 

The people at Shine reached out to me to ask if I’d have Erin on the show, so of course I said yes. 

I’m terrified to speak about this kind of thing, so I know enough that backing away from it is not the path to freedom - I have to lean into it. 

So I flew my self on a carbon-offset flight down to Melbourne to speak with this incredible human being. 

Erin is as you would expect. Incredibly Clever, Blisteringly Fast, Tall, Powerful, Passionate and a Firehose of Fury.

I get why she’s good at what she does. 

Because if you’re going toe to toe in a boardroom with a company that’s got political donations protecting them, you’ll want to have a secret weapon up your sleeve - and that secret weapon is Erin Brockovich. 

This one blew my socks off. 

Find her on instagram @the_real_erin_brockovich, let her know you heard her here. 

And come now to the beautiful Langham hotel in Melbourne to sit eye to eye with one of the best legal minds of our time, and one of the most ferocious environmental activists you’ll ever encounter. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Erin Brockovich.

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