Goat Security

Stake and Rope is a satirical roundtable podcast about working in technology — the part that involves pagers, post-mortems, vendor calls at 3 AM, and explaining to non-technical leadership why the thing that broke this quarter is the same thing that broke last quarter, in slightly different shoes.

Every week, three of five rotating panelists sit down with the Host to react to a real piece of tech news. Not breaches that hurt people, not ransomware in hospitals — those aren't funny. The show targets vendors who screwed up, executives who said something ridiculous, hype cycles meeting their data, licensing changes that nobody asked for, and the slow ambient absurdity of an industry that keeps rediscovering its own historical mistakes.

The panel rotates by article. A supply-chain compromise pulls in the Paranoid CISO. A self-inflicted outage pulls in the Burnt-Out SRE. A startup pivoting to enterprise after the seed money runs out pulls in the Founder. Anything with a clear historical analog pulls in the Legacy Sysadmin, who has almost certainly seen this before. The Goat Farmer is on every episode. He sat in those chairs once. He got out. He has a list, in his head, that he wrote over years while the pages came in. The list is 118 reasons goats are better than computers. He interjects from it when something reminds him.

The show is for working sysadmins, SREs, security folks, and anyone adjacent to that work. The voices are recognizable because the audience has worked with all of them. The show doesn't explain its jokes — if you've been there, you'll get them. If you haven't, you might still find it funny, but the show isn't pitched at you.

There's no recurring sponsor read. No "thanks for listening, please subscribe." No interviews with hot new founders. No coverage of breaking AGI rumors. The show goes after one specific piece of news per week and sits with it until the panel has worked out what's actually going on, what the post-mortem will say, what nobody will fix, and what the historical pattern this is rhyming with.

Episodes run roughly 15 minutes. New episodes weekly. The title is from the Goat Farmer's list — Reason #50, "Goat security is applied completely, thoroughly, and with all the features you'll ever need, using a stake and a rope." If that joke lands, you're probably in the audience.