Podcast
Tech satire for the people on call.
A satirical roundtable podcast reacting to real tech news. Each week, three of a recurring bench show up: maybe the burned-out SRE who's stopped being surprised, maybe the legacy sysadmin who's seen this before in a previous decade, maybe the paranoid CISO measuring second-order effects, maybe the founder who can spin any disaster into a thread, maybe the DBA who is contemptuous of work but not people. Others rotate in as the story calls for them. The retired sysadmin turned goat farmer sits in regardless.
About the show
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.
Each week, three of a recurring bench 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 retired sysadmin turned goat farmer is on every episode. He sat in those chairs once. He got out.
The Panel
Has been doing this for a while. Knows enough to know what the panel is talking about. Doesn't need it explained. Curious about the things that haven't happened yet, exhausted by the things that keep happening. Runs the show because somebody had to, and the panelists weren't going to.
Spent decades in the work. Racked the servers, ran the pager, wrote the runbooks nobody read. Got out. Goats now. Recognizes what the panel is describing because he lived through it, and chose differently. Has a list. The list is 118 reasons long. He didn't number them out loud, but they came out numbered anyway. He doesn't miss any of it.
Racked his first server when it cost more than a car. Wrote sendmail.cf by hand and is not bitter about it. Has watched antivirus eat the operating system in seven different decades. Does not believe modern tools are bad. Believes they are not new. Will tell you what your problem is called in the language of the system that solved it twenty years ago, if you ask, and sometimes if you don't.
Eight years on call. Has stopped being surprised. Reads status pages the way other people read horoscopes — the same way every time, with no expectation that anything will change. Currently in incident. Was in incident yesterday. Will be in incident on Friday afternoon. The post-mortem is already written; she just hasn't filled in the timestamps yet.
Reads every Mandiant report the day it drops. Has a SCIF in his basement. Is not paranoid. Is calibrated. Sees the second-order effect, then the third, then the one after that. Will tell you which threat actor cluster he suspects and why, and will be specific about what he's guessing and what he isn't. Has been right enough times to be unwilling to stop.
Raised a small seed eighteen months ago. Has a podcast. Believes everything that happens to him is content. Is mentally already writing the LinkedIn post about whatever just happened. Buddy of Lenny's. Knows a guy at Stripe. Sees the upside in literally any situation, including this one. Currently building in public.
Knows every database that mattered. Will tell you what's actually broken about your system in three short questions, the third of which is the one you can't answer. Contemptuous of work, not people. Allergic to bullshit, including his own. He's not in the room with the business decision makers and isn't going to be.
Stake and Rope is a satirical podcast. The panelists are fictional. Scripts are written with AI assistance and the voices are synthesized.
Questions, pitches, or articles you'd like the panel to react to: contact@goatsecurity.ai