SecurePod: From firewall to trust, building security culture at scale

The seventh episode of SecurePod features V.Jay LaRosa, a cybersecurity leader with over 30 years of experience spanning incident response at EMC-RSA, program-building in government, partnerships with DARPA, and security leadership at TikTok and now Cisco Meraki. In conversation with host Nick Kelly, he speaks about what it actually takes to build a security culture that sticks. V.Jay traces the arc of the industry from "five guys and a firewall" to today's sprawling, AI-assisted programs, and makes the case that information sharing, once treated as a liability, is now a trust-building necessity. They explore the tension between compliance and genuine security improvement, why market certifications can be both a resourcing lifeline and a culture trap, and how red team demonstrations succeed where fear-based messaging fails. The conversation turns to supply chain trust, the limits of vendor certifications, and why "zero trust" always rests on some trusted foundation somewhere in the chain. V.Jay closes by unpacking his framing of the CISO as a "business protection professional" rather than a security person, and raises a pointed concern about AI: what happens to human judgment and technical acumen when teams start trusting AI outputs they no longer know how to verify.