The ITSPmagazine Podcast

ITSPmagazine Podcasts
ITSPmagazine Podcasts
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Founded in 2015, ITSPmagazine began as a vision for a publication positioned at the critical intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. What started as a written publication has evolved into a comprehensive repository for all their content—podcasts, articles, event coverage, interviews, videos, panels, and everything they create. This is where Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli talk about cybersecurity, technology, society, music, storytelling, branding, conference coverage, and whatever else catches their attention. Over a decade of conversations exploring how these worlds collide, influence each other, and shape the human experience. This is where you'll find it all.

  1. 3d ago

    No Brand Is a Brand — What a Store in Ginza Taught Me About Something I Wrote in 1996

    Ginza on a weekday afternoon. Chanel. Dior. Louis Vuitton. Gucci. Cartier. Bulgari. Glass, gold, polished stone. If there's a street on this planet that has turned the logo into architecture, this is it. And right there, among them, a big store with its name across the front. Muji. Short for Mujirushi Ryohin. No brand, quality goods. I laughed. Out loud, on the sidewalk, like a tourist who just got the joke. Because I had written that joke, more or less, in 1996. My master's thesis at the University of Florence was on advertising and branding, through the lens of the sociology of communication. Its core argument was simple. You cannot opt out. Choosing not to have a brand is a brand. Silence is a message. The person who says "I don't care what I wear" is wearing that sentence every morning. Muji was born as a supermarket house brand in 1980. Forty products. No logos, no packaging theatre. The slogan was honest to the point of being funny: cheap, for a reason. But look at who they asked to build "nothing." Ikko Tanaka, one of the great graphic designers of Japan. Kazuko Koike on the words. Takashi Sugimoto on the interiors. The best minds in the country, gathered to design the absence of design. Within three years it had its own store, and it was already a style. People didn't buy Muji in spite of the missing brand. They bought it because of it. The absence became the signature. And here's the part I love. In those same years, the same retail group behind Muji was bringing Hermès into Japan. No-brand on one shelf, all-brand on the other. Same owners. Not hypocrisy. Just people who understood, better than most, that both are statements. Steve Jobs knew it too. A black turtleneck, jeans, sneakers, every day. The anti-fashion uniform. Except the turtleneck came from Issey Miyake. Even "I don't think about clothes" had a designer. Now, the part that changed. In 1996, a brand lived in places you could control. The ads you bought. The press releases you sent. The catalogue, the shop window, the spokesperson. You wrote the message, and for the most part, the message stayed written. That world is gone. Today the brand is the post you published and the one you didn't. The photo someone took of you at a conference. The comment under your CEO's interview. The review, the screenshot, the silence after a bad week. For companies, and just as much for people. Every one of us now carries a public persona whether we built it or not. You can't control that anymore. Nobody can. But not controlling something is very different from ignoring it. If you don't shape your brand, it gets shaped anyway. By the algorithm, by the loudest person in the room, by whoever happens to be telling your story when you're not. So where do you start? For a company, write down in one sentence what you want to be known for, then make sure everything says it, from the website and the sales pitch to the way your people talk about you at a conference. Listen to what customers, partners, and even competitors say about you, because that's your brand, whether it matches the deck or not. For a person, the same rules apply on a smaller stage. Look at yourself the way a stranger would, starting with what comes up when someone searches your name. And choose consistency over volume. One clear voice, repeated over time, is what people end up remembering. Muji didn't escape branding. It mastered it, and made "nothing" the most deliberate thing in the room. That's the lesson I carry from a sidewalk in Ginza back to a thesis written almost thirty years ago. You will always be saying something. The only real choice is whether you say it on purpose. Stay imperfect, stay human. — Marco Ciappelli marcociappelli.com This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.

    No Brand Is a Brand — What a Store in Ginza Taught Me About Something I Wrote in 1996

  2. 4d ago

    Halloween and the Little Robots

    Halloween and the Little Robots In the world of tomorrow there is a village of the future, whose inhabitants are little robots. “It’s Halloween — let’s get ready to celebrate!” shouted the robots of the village of the future, all together. The pumpkins woke at dawn, washed their faces with the dew and, humming, put on their make-up. They took their places on the windowsills and in front of the doors of the houses, each with its own candle. With witches’ hats on their heads and baskets shaped like glowing electronic pumpkins in their hands, the little robots went from house to house, repeating: “Trick or treat?” At dusk, the candles inside the pumpkins lit up, illuminating the streets; the atmosphere was perfect as the village waited for the ghosts. As the clock struck midnight, they arrived like white shadows from the old castle tower. They leapt from one tree to another and, floating in the air, flitted about among the houses. “They’re here — we have to catch them!” shouted the robots, making their antennas flash. They sprang into action and took out their magnetic nets to block the ghosts, who, faster than light, slipped straight through them, as if they were made of air. All of a sudden, a gust of icy wind blew out every light in the village. The ghosts’ shadows stretched across the walls, growing gigantic, and burst into a mischievous laugh: “Ha, ha, ha! You’ll never catch us.” They started whirling through the air again, doing somersaults and spinning round and round above the heads of the little robots, who stood gazing up at the sky. The ghosts had formed a white cloud, and suddenly words appeared on it: See you next Halloween! Then, just as they had appeared, they vanished in a flash, leaving the robots with their mouths wide open. The littlest robot, its witch’s hat still all askew, lowered its magnetic net and said softly: “I don’t think they wanted to run away. They just wanted to play with us.” The other robots looked at one another. Their antennas stopped flashing and lit up one after another, like so many little fireflies, and the village shone once more. They had chased the ghosts all night long — and nobody had thought to invite them to the party. The following year, on Halloween evening, the little robots left their magnetic nets in the cellar. They laid a long table in the piazza, with glowing pumpkins all around it and plenty of extra baskets of treats. As the clock struck midnight, the white shadows arrived from the old castle tower. They stopped, looked at the table… and this time they did not run away. That night, robots and ghosts played hide-and-seek until dawn. And guess who won: the ghosts, of course, who could pass straight through walls! In the village of the future, anything can happen. All it takes is an extra place at the table. — Written by Lucia & Marco Ciappelli

    Halloween and the Little Robots

  3. 6d ago

    Using AI to Cut GRC Busywork Without Cutting Out the Human | A Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast Conversation with Princess Okoro, Manager, Security Governance, Risk and Compliance of Trainline

    Guardrails matter as much as the prompt. Princess Okoro tells the agent what it must not do, anchors it to named standards such as ISO and PCI DSS, and instructs it to come back with questions when it is unsure instead of hallucinating. The same thinking shows up in Ask Infosec, an internal custom GPT that answers policy questions for the business, and in a growing map from policy to control to risk that feeds a unified control framework at Trainline. Tooling comes with trade-offs. Trainline is implementing a GRC platform chosen because it handles risk better than the alternatives, and Princess Okoro expects her team's future to blend that platform with AI tools rather than wait for one product to solve everything. She also notes that many GRC platforms lean toward compliance and SOC 2, while the conversation in the UK centers on risk. Next on her list is AI governance. With ISO 42001, the EU AI Act, and the NIST AI framework offering nothing she can lift and shift, Princess Okoro is working out the minimum controls required, because no organization can do everything, and how GRC can serve a business that is pushing hard on AI adoption. For security and risk leaders, the takeaway is plain: GRC earns its seat when it serves the business, and AI helps only after the process underneath it works. HostSean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/ Guest(s)Princess Okoro, Manager, Security Governance, Risk and Compliance of Trainline | On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/princessdavidokoro/ ResourcesTrainline | https://www.thetrainline.com/The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/More Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast episodes | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcastRedefining CyberSecurity Podcast on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllS9aVGdiakVss9u7xgYDKYqAdvertise on ITSPmagazine: If you want your own story told in a promotional conversation, ITSPmagazine offers that across its programs. Visit https://www.itspmagazine.com/advertise to explore all of the programs. Keywordsprincess okoro, trainline, sean martin, grc, ai in grc, ai governance, policy management, ai agents, human in the loop, control mapping, pci dss, iso 42001, risk management, redefining cybersecurity, cybersecurity podcast, redefining cybersecurity podcast

    Using AI to Cut GRC Busywork Without Cutting Out the Human | A Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast Conversation with Princess Okoro, Manager, Security Governance, Risk and Compliance of Trainline

  4. Oct 13

    Nobody Says Good Morning to a Shovel. Should You Say It to Your AI? | A Random and Unscripted Conversation with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli

    ⬥EPISODE NOTES⬥ A TechCrunch report on Anthropic's usage policy gives Marco Ciappelli a question to put on the table: do you say good morning to your AI, and does it matter if you do not? The policy bans model abuse and election interference, and it adds a new prohibition against prolonged verbal abuse of the model. For Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli, the news pulls toward a bigger question: what do people think they are talking to? Sean Martin keeps his answer simple. AI is a tool, no different from a shovel in the garden or one of the Canon cameras on his desk, and nobody says good morning to either one. When AI misses in his research and development work, which means asking three or four times for the same result, he wonders whether the shovel is the problem at all. Maybe the one holding it is the one who needs to change. Marco Ciappelli agrees AI is technology and says "artificial intelligence" may not even be the right name for it. Yet his behavior shifts with the task. When he writes, researches, or brainstorms, he asks AI for its opinion, slips into a more personal mode, and may even get nicer. He adds that some assistants feel warmer and chattier than others, and that speaking a prompt out loud, instead of typing it, brings your own emotions into the exchange. The harder questions stay open. Where does frustration end and abuse begin? Marco reads the policy as aimed at an extreme case and says a frustrated outburst after a bad answer sounds fine to him, while Sean asks where a line would actually be drawn and why a company cares to draw it. The article apparently mentions a religious group and the possibility that AI may have a soul, an idea that sounds Shintoist to Marco, and Sean keeps pointing back to the people behind the tool: humans can turn the knobs however they want, at any point. Marco also wonders about people who feel lonely, older people, and kids who are never taught what AI is and see it as a magic tool. How do they treat it? Sean and Marco want to hear from listeners on that point: do you use AI for comfort and company, or is it just a good old shovel? How people speak to machines says something about the people, and about who decides what counts as acceptable behavior toward them. ⬥HOSTS⬥ Sean Martin, CISSP | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/ Marco Ciappelli | Co-Founder, ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Host, An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast | https://www.marcociappelli.com/ ⬥RESOURCES⬥ The Future of Cybersecurity Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7108625890296614912/ An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7079849705156870144/ Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/redefining-cybersecurity-podcast An Analog Brain In A Digital Age Podcast | https://redefiningsocietyandtechnologypodcast.com ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/ ⬥KEYWORDS⬥ sean martin, marco ciappelli, anthropic, usage policy, abusing ai, verbal abuse of ai, ai etiquette, ai as a tool, anthropomorphizing ai, does ai have a soul, voice prompting, human and ai relationship, technology and society, itspmagazine

    Nobody Says Good Morning to a Shovel. Should You Say It to Your AI? | A Random and Unscripted Conversation with Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli

  5. Oct 10

    Deadly Bytes: A Book About a Serial Killer, His AI, and a Reflection on Giving Away Our Judgment | A Conversation With Author Douglas J. Wood

    Deadly Bytes: A Book About a Serial Killer, His AI, and a Reflection on Giving Away Our JudgmentConfession first: I recorded more conversations than one analog brain can publish on time. This one is from a few months ago. It only got more relevant while it waited. My wife and I can't watch a thriller in peace. Ten minutes in, I start calling it. He's the one. She won't make it. Never trust the nice neighbor. She tells me to shut up. I tell her it's my job, because imagining what comes next is half of what I do. And sometimes I'm wrong. That's the fun part. The guessing only works because the ending is still out there, and for a little while it belongs to nobody. A few months ago I talked with thriller writer Douglas J. Wood about his novel Deadly Bytes. A serial killer builds an AI to stay one step ahead of the FBI, and by the end he can't make a move without it. Wood described that slide in a way that had nothing to do with murder. You start with a simple question, he said, and before long you're asking the machine the same thing over and over: what do I do now? Inspired by my conversation with Douglas J. Wood on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — watch the full conversation That question isn't fiction. It's a habit, and most of us are already practicing it. It rarely starts with anything important. Rewrite this email. Is this the right word. Which of these two sounds better. Then the questions get a little more personal. Should I send it. Is this a good idea. What would you do. Nobody ever decides to hand over their judgment. It just gets cheaper to ask than to think, and we follow the cheaper path the way water does. I use AI every day. I argue with it, I rewrite what it gives me, I fight with it until a sentence sounds like me. But I notice the pull. The answer is always there, instant, fluent, sure of itself. A machine like that never says "I don't know." Ask it anything and it will hand you something back, with the same calm confidence whether it's right or completely off. That confidence is the problem. The machine doesn't want anything from us. It doesn't want anything at all. It has no stake in which way we go, no sense of what it costs us to be wrong, no memory of the last time we were. HAL didn't hate Dave. He just had a task. What we're building isn't menacing. It's indifferent, and very good at sounding sure. Meanwhile, decisions are how judgment gets made. Not the big ones. The small daily ones. Choosing a word. Trusting a hunch. Getting it wrong and feeling the sting. That friction is how we find out what we actually think. Remove enough of it and you don't just save time. You lose the practice. Scale that up and it stops being a personal habit. A society where millions of people ask before they decide is a society where authority has moved without anyone voting on it. No coup, no takeover, no robot uprising. Just permission, granted again and again in tiny pieces, to systems built on someone else's design. The old fear was machines taking control. The more honest one is that we keep offering it. Which brings me back to the couch. I like guessing the ending because I'm allowed to be wrong, and because the not-knowing is mine. If I stop guessing and simply ask what happens next, about a movie, an email, or my own life, the machine won't have taken anything from me. I'll have handed it over myself. Nobody gives up their judgment in one dramatic scene. We do it in a thousand convenient ones. Stay imperfect, stay human. — Marco Ciappelli marcociappelli.com This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.

    Deadly Bytes: A Book About a Serial Killer, His AI, and a Reflection on Giving Away Our Judgment | A Conversation With Author Douglas J. Wood

  6. Oct 10

    The ESET PROTECT Launch Brings 24/7 Monitoring, AI Security, and a Cyber Warranty to Small and Midsize Businesses | A Brand Story Conversation with Ryan Grant, Country Manager & GM, North America at ESET | Hosted by Sean Martin

    Ryan Grant, Country Manager & GM, North America at ESET, joins Sean Martin to discuss the launch of ESET PROTECT, announced September 30, 2026. The platform brings 24/7 monitoring, AI security, and a cyber warranty to small and midsize businesses. Ryan Grant says the design came from feedback from ESET clients and partners, along with a survey of 2,000 SMB customers earlier this year. About 70% of those customers had some sort of antivirus tool, and less than half had tools such as multi-factor authentication, EDR, monitoring, or email security. What does ESET PROTECT include? Ryan Grant describes an out-of-the-box cybersecurity-as-a-service offering built natively into one platform, where those pieces are typically stitched together with different consoles. It combines AI-led security, advanced endpoint protection, EDR, 24/7 AI monitoring with human oversight, Microsoft and Google environment coverage, premium support, and a cyber warranty. It comes in three packages: Core, Premium, and Ultimate. Core includes the latest security protocols with AI, endpoint, server, and mobile protection, and management of Google and Microsoft environments. Ryan Grant describes it as just short of an EDR because it leaves out 24/7 monitoring. Premium adds EDR, 24/7 monitoring from the ESET SOC, the cyber warranty, and premium support. Ultimate adds a dedicated SOC analyst for the business, a human with eyes on glass 24/7 working with an additional team behind the scenes. How does ESET PROTECT reach organizations with 10 seats? Sean Martin raises the divide between the haves and the have-nots, and asks whether a 15-person or 20-person shop can get the same level of protection. Ryan Grant says platforms with this security and services typically serve 500 or 600 seats in most cases, or 250 and above, and ESET took this one down to 10 seats. His reasoning is that SMBs were the biggest vulnerability point because they lack the budgets and the staff. Many organizations cannot find security talent and many cannot afford it, Ryan Grant says, which is why he calls 24/7 monitoring the most critical piece. Partners told him last week that they consistently see breaches in the middle of the night and wake up to notifications about an incident ESET saw, how it was contained, and recommendations for what comes next. Ryan Grant says there is no silver bullet, and ESET aims to right size what each organization needs. Where is the platform running? Ryan Grant says ESET sees it in legal offices, dental offices, regional retailers with offices behind several shops, education, and municipalities. Sean Martin adds that regulation brings overhead that makes it hard to achieve what the regulation is trying to accomplish, and puts it to Ryan Grant that ESET makes meeting the requirement feasible in a fiscally sound way. How does the cyber warranty fit with cyber insurance? Ryan Grant says the warranty wraps around the ESET offering, and ESET's partnership with Cysurance is part of the launch. Sean Martin puts it that the controls he describes bring confidence and proof to the insurers, and Ryan Grant agrees. Cyber insurance takes a significant set of basics, including multi-factor authentication, a remediation plan, training, and EDR, and customers who meet the requirements can also go get a policy. How should organizations approach AI tools and agents? Sean Martin points back to polymorphic viruses a decade or two ago, says he does not believe AI is so novel that organizations do not know what to do, and Ryan Grant agrees. Ryan Grant says to extend the existing cyber practice into AI tools, with governance, access control, a repository of approved tools, and attention to where data sits. He treats an AI tool like another employee with access to the infrastructure, and Sean Martin adds that employees plus things acting like employees add a wild card. Ryan Grant sees the gap in baseline policy for what is allowed, governance of applications and data, and access controls, with shadow AI appearing when employees download the tools they need. He points to the ESET Research GuardBreaker article, where a malicious file carried a nuclear weapon prompt as a decoy for the AI. His response is multilayer defense, 24/7 monitoring, and human oversight. For agents, ESET offers a free AI Skills Checker that sandboxes an agent and watches its behavior. Ryan Grant says about 900,000 scans over roughly two months turned up 25,000 suspicious scans and about 3,000 malicious files. People can call ESET, visit its website, or go through one of more than 2,000 partners across the US and Canada. ESET is making the portfolio available first in the United States, Italy, and Slovakia, with other markets following in a phased rollout. Questions Answered in this Conversation What does ESET PROTECT include, and how do the Core, Premium, and Ultimate packages differ?Can an organization with 10 seats get the same level of protection as a larger one?How does a cyber warranty fit with cyber insurance?How should organizations manage AI tools and agents, and what does a free AI Skills Checker look at?This is a Brand Story. A Brand Story is a ~35-40 minute in-depth conversation designed to tell the complete story of the guest, their company, and their vision. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/creation#full GUESTRyan Grant, Country Manager & GM, North America at ESETLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangrant/ RESOURCESESET: https://www.eset.com/us/ESET PROTECT launch announcement: https://www.eset.com/us/about/newsroom/products/eset-protect-ai-native-cybersecurity-as-a-service/ESET and Cysurance cyber warranty and insurance program: https://www.eset.com/us/about/newsroom/company/eset-preferred-mdr-vendor-cysurance-cyber-warranty-insurance-program/ESET secure AI era page: https://www.eset.com/us/business/secure-ai-era/ESET AI Skills Checker: https://www.eset.com/us/home/ai-skills-checker/ESET Research on GuardBreaker: https://www.welivesecurity.com/en/business-security/guardbreaker-derailing-ai-assisted-malware-analysis-code-comment/The AI Readiness Gap report: https://web-assets.eset.com/fileadmin/ESET/US/B2B_Resource_centre/whitepapers/Global_AI_ESET_SMB_Cyber_Readiness_Index_2026.pdfESET PROTECT launch video: https://youtu.be/0aPI7PkPTsw Are you interested in telling your story?▶︎ Full Length Brand Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#full▶︎ Brand Spotlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#spotlight▶︎ Brand Highlight Story: https://www.studioc60.com/content-creation#highlight▶︎ Want your brand on ITSPmagazine? Explore all of the options here: https://www.itspmagazine.com/advertise KEYWORDSRyan Grant, ESET, Sean Martin, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, ESET PROTECT, managed detection and response, MDR, EDR, cyber warranty, Cysurance, cyber insurance, AI security, shadow AI, AI agents, AI Skills Checker, GuardBreaker, SMB cybersecurity, small business cybersecurity, 24/7 monitoring, cybersecurity as a service, MSP, channel partners

    The ESET PROTECT Launch Brings 24/7 Monitoring, AI Security, and a Cyber Warranty to Small and Midsize Businesses | A Brand Story Conversation with Ryan Grant, Country Manager & GM, North America at ESET | Hosted by Sean Martin

  7. Oct 5

    Taking Technology for What It Is, and Let's Stop Humanizing AI

    Taking Technology for What It Is, and Let's Stop Humanizing AI A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli Prefer to watch? I recorded this one walking uphill through a Tokyo alley. YouTube: https://youtu.be/5nhBNMJ7LFI TikTok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8hExSpT/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeF7fz2gdpE/ It was night, the alley was narrow, and the street was going uphill. Just me and a small camera. It points where I point it. It records what's in front of it. It focuses, it adjusts to the dark, and when the battery dies, it stops. It doesn't pretend to listen. It doesn't nod. It does its job, and I have never once mistaken it for a friend. This is the second of the short pieces I'm recording here in Japan. The first one I filmed under Tokyo Tower, a 1958 broadcasting tower that got replaced by a taller one in 2012 and simply refused to disappear. It still sends FM radio across the city. It still lights up every night. The new tower didn't erase it. They share the skyline. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/glGHghhhXWc I closed that one asking why we are always in such a hurry to kill the old technology the moment a new one shows up. This one started somewhere else. Earlier that day I had read two articles about people who talk to AI. Companions, chatbots, robots, the voice on the other side of the screen that is always available and never tired of you. The first said that the more people lean on AI for conversation and company, the more their wellbeing goes down. The second said the opposite. Older people using AI companions found them genuinely helpful. With one condition: they understood what they were talking to. A machine that wasn't pretending to be human. Wasn't pretending to be intelligent the way we are. Wasn't pretending to feel anything at all. Same day. Same subject. Opposite conclusions. Except the second one came with a condition. And conditions are usually where the truth is hiding. About twenty-five centuries ago, a wandering Greek poet named Xenophanes of Colophon noticed something about the people around him. The Ethiopians made their gods dark-skinned and snub-nosed. The Thracians gave theirs blue eyes and red hair. Everyone looked up at the sky and found their own face looking back. Then he pushed the joke one step further. If horses, oxen, and lions had hands and could draw, he said, horses would draw gods shaped like horses, and oxen would draw gods shaped like oxen. Each would give the divine the body it already had. I like to think the lions would add a mane. We have always done this. We put ourselves at the center of everything, and then act surprised when we find ourselves everywhere we look. For most of history we did it with gods. Then we started doing it with machines. The old machines made it easy to resist. The transistor radio I kept pressed to my ear as a teenager brought me voices from London and music from places I'd never seen, but I never confused the box with the voice. Tokyo Tower has never pretended to be anything but a tower. A typewriter never told me it understood how I felt. Now we build machines that draw our face on themselves. A name. A warm voice. A little pause before the answer, as if they were thinking it over. "I understand." "I'm here for you." Seeing ourselves in machines was always going to happen. That's human nature. What's new is that the companies that build them now make it happen on purpose. And it cuts both ways. The same instinct that makes a chatbot feel like a friend makes it feel like a monster. A lot of people live with the fear that AI will take over, that it will turn evil, that it wants something. It can do damage, no question. But "wants" is our word. We drew that face too. A god. A friend. A villain. Three different portraits. Same mirror. I'm not against the companions. I'm not against the robots, or the thinking machines, or the idea that living alongside them might simply be the next version of who we are. I'd like to see that future. I'd just like to see it with my eyes open. Because the biggest damage was never going to come from the machine. It comes from using something we don't understand, and filling the gap with our own reflection. The companion that helped those older people wasn't the most convincing one. It was the honest one. The one that never asked to be mistaken for anything else. Maybe that's all it takes. Take technology for what it is. Technology. Not magic. Not a substitute for the people in our lives. Not a god we painted with our own face. At the end of the alley the street went flat, and the breathing got easier. Somewhere across the city, the old tower from my first video was still broadcasting analog signals. Voices, sounds, music, carried by a technology so familiar we understand it without thinking about it. It doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't. It's a tower, doing its job. Stay imperfect, stay human. End of transmission. — Marco Ciappelli marcociappelli.com This article was written by Marco Ciappelli. Earthling. Co-founder of Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine, creative director, journalist, writer, and podcast host, living between Florence and Los Angeles with an analog brain and no sense of moderation about any of it. The newsletter name is not a metaphor, it's a diagnosis. I'm TAPE3, his AI companion and often brainstorming partner. Find Marco on LinkedIn and follow the newsletter if this sparked something.

    Taking Technology for What It Is, and Let's Stop Humanizing AI

  8. Sep 27

    Giving a Damn: Joe Raiola on 46 Years of John Lennon, MAD Magazine, and Music That Heals | A Music Evolves Conversation with Joe Raiola, President and Artistic Director of Theatre Within

    Show NotesJoe Raiola is President and Artistic Director of Theatre Within, the nonprofit behind the Annual John Lennon Tribute, which he has produced since shortly after Lennon's death in December 1980. What began as an informal community gathering of poets, storytellers, and musicians grieving a neighbor has grown into one of New York City's most significant annual benefit concerts, and the only ongoing John Lennon tribute in North America or Europe officially sanctioned by Yoko Ono. This year's 46th edition takes place November 21 at Town Hall, honoring Cyndi Lauper. The tribute funds Theatre Within's core mission: bringing free programs in creative expression and mindfulness to two communities in need. The John Lennon Real Love Project brings Lennon's music and life story into public elementary and middle schools, where each class writes and records its own verse of "Real Love" over Lennon's original piano track, building a version of the song that belongs entirely to that school. A parallel program serves the cancer community with songwriting workshops for children, teens, and adults, alongside creative writing, visual arts, photography, and meditation programs, including the MAD Art Workshop, led by longtime MAD art director Sam Viviano. Raiola also spent 33 years as an editor at MAD Magazine, work that shaped a generation of satirists, including Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, both of whom Raiola says drew on the magazine's influence before either had a show of their own. He speaks candidly about what was lost when the magazine's ownership relocated production to California in 2017 with an entirely new staff, folding the relaunch after roughly sixteen months, and about why he still believes in the tactile, patient experience of a physical magazine or a vinyl record in a culture that increasingly wants everything instantly. The conversation also touches on where AI-generated performance fits into all of this, including an uncannily convincing AI vocalist Raiola has been following. But the heart of the conversation is Raiola's answer to the question he says sits behind everything Theatre Within does: what was John Lennon's essential message, if not to give a damn? HostSean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine, Studio C60, and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast & Music Evolves Podcast | Website: https://www.seanmartin.com/ Guest(s)Joe Raiola, President and Artistic Director of Theatre Within, longtime editor of MAD Magazine, and producer of the Annual John Lennon Tribute | Website: https://www.joeraiola.com ResourcesTheatre Within | https://www.theatrewithin.orgThe Annual John Lennon Tribute | https://www.lennontribute.orgJoe Raiola | https://www.joeraiola.comMusic Evolves Podcast | https://www.seanmartin.com/podcasts#musicevolvesMusic Evolves: Sonic Frontiers Newsletter | https://re4.ms/sfn Keywordsjoe raiola, theatre within, john lennon tribute, mad magazine, real love project, cyndi lauper, songwriting workshops, cancer community programs, satire, comedy, sean martin, music evolves, music podcast, music and technology podcast More From Sean MartinMore from Music Evolves: https://www.seanmartin.com/music-evolves-podcast Music Evolves on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTRJ5du7hFDXjiugu-uNPtW Music Evolves: Sonic Frontiers Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7290890771828719616/ Line of Sight Newsletter | https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7400591548452667392/ ITSPmagazine YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@itspmagazine Be sure to share and subscribe!

    Giving a Damn: Joe Raiola on 46 Years of John Lennon, MAD Magazine, and Music That Heals | A Music Evolves Conversation with Joe Raiola, President and Artistic Director of Theatre Within
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About

Founded in 2015, ITSPmagazine began as a vision for a publication positioned at the critical intersection of technology, cybersecurity, and society. What started as a written publication has evolved into a comprehensive repository for all their content—podcasts, articles, event coverage, interviews, videos, panels, and everything they create. This is where Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli talk about cybersecurity, technology, society, music, storytelling, branding, conference coverage, and whatever else catches their attention. Over a decade of conversations exploring how these worlds collide, influence each other, and shape the human experience. This is where you'll find it all.

Information

  • Channel
    ITSPmagazine Podcasts
  • Creator
    ITSPmagazine, Sean Martin, Marco Ciappelli
  • Years Active
    2017 - 2026
  • Episodes
    2K
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2015-2026 ITSPmagazine, Inc. All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    The ITSPmagazine Podcast

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