George Kamide
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
George Kamide’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, gesticulate wildly until you get through it. Exactly.
Love it.
I'm going to give this gaijin the largest pile of wasabi I can muster.
George Kamidi. I am head of community and events at the CISO Society, co-founder, executive director of Mind Over Cyber, which is a nonprofit and co-host of the podcast Fair Knuckles and Brass Tacks, with another George who is a CISO. And... Yeah, lucked into security by way of many side doors. And I also had, we discovered a food background.
I'd written my undergraduate thesis on deforestation in the Amazon frontier, which was the result of large scale soy farming. And yeah, I think when I entered undergrad, I would not have guessed that I would be writing about like industrial agriculture.
I didn't really have a lot of connection to that naturally, and I didn't really know a lot about it, but I was an anthropology major and I was interested in how I could get back to Brazil. And one of my professors directed me toward this research topic. And it was interesting because from an anthropological perspective, what you're trying to do is learn how different groups see land.
I think the debate is obscured like Oh, it's deforestation. But producers, that's what they call themselves instead of farmers. You know, if they say produce, that's the universe they see and measure everything in. So it's about yield. And it was just like a very interesting way to explore how people are thinking about things. And then I had been also in a number of environmental studies classes.
And that's when I think I really got enamored with the complexity and the precarity of the food supply. And I was like, oh, this is very different than what I thought, which I think like most people, my exposure to the food supply was the grocery store.
And, you know, my dad had an extensive garden, so I wasn't so unaware that like carrots come from the ground or that stuff has to get dirty and then get washed. But I just didn't see all of the systems. I didn't see it as like a linkage of many chains and things. You know, should one go down, that's a big deal. And then when I was in Brazil, I mean, this was circa 2004.
And even then, we're talking about farms, the likes of which most Americans have never seen. Yep. In terms of technological advance and size. So Brazil is measuring farms in hectares. I saw farms hundreds of thousands of acres, like hundreds. As far as you can see in any direction toward the horizon, a crop, cotton, soy, whatever. And then they rotate. But monoculture. Yep.
You know, you'd have to drive more than an hour to get to the other side of the farm. And this, again, 2004. So I want to emphasize where people might think Brazil was at that time. But these farms were run by like five people. Yeah. And they had laser guidance systems on the posts, you know, and the harvesters would just follow this grid that was being projected.
So that was my introduction to the level of technology in industrial scale farming and also just the amount of software involved in order to get the gains that they wanted. Like, you can't farm that much land with human labor. It's just kind of impossible. Yeah. And so... Yeah, just kind of considering that cycle, like how is it dependent on technology?
Why technology is like literally the only way it can be done. And of course, its role in the economy of Brazil at the time and also its role in the larger world economy. So these soy farms were growing soy to feed pigs in China. So you see all of this. And I think, again, as someone who had minimal exposure to this, you think, oh, you are growing this for people.
Like, how much soy could anyone need? And I thought maybe it was soybean oil and some of the stuff that was being used in processed food manufacturing. And it turns out, no, it was like harvest the soy, get it on the boat. Insatiable hunger for it from China as China was growing its middle class. Middle class social demands for meat meant, in China's case, pork. The pigs got to eat something.
So it's just like grain. We were just growing food grain. I don't know. That was all very eye-opening to me. And it's sat with me ever since.
And also like that number of pigs or chickens just wouldn't naturally congregate in groups that large.
It would be terrifying. Oh, yeah. Terrifying for sure.
Yeah, I also think that that's interesting and worthy of discussion is when the war broke out in Ukraine, let me rephrase, when Russia invaded Ukraine, it destabilized prices in such a way that even these aggressors could come to the table to negotiate like wheat exports. Because while the U.S. does not rely on Ukrainian grain, many millions of
people do across the Middle East, like Oman, Yemen, which is also suffering from horrific conflict. So like this one thing here could create a famine, you know, tens of thousands of miles away.
Yeah. It's also so multifaceted, right? Like, so after I left college and I really wasn't working with industrial agriculture, my next touch point with the nexus of technology and farming was like the right to repair or as sick codes work was just being able to hack into systems like remotely controlled Harvard, like all the technology.
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