You Don't Have to Touch the Candle

On prevention, invisible harm, and the beep we stopped hearing

Confession first: I recorded this conversation a while ago, and it waited in line far longer than it deserved. Too many conversations, one analog brain. It's a big part of why I mostly record on my own these days. Apologies to my guest, and thanks for the patience.

This writing is inspired by my conversation with Barry Davis on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — watch the episode. His book: The Preventioneers: Diseases, Disasters, and th...

Another you, another me. Which is which? Don't worry, it's just another Halloween story.

Every day, a girl asks her phone to make her look more natural. Somewhere on the other side of the screen, something hears it as an order.

Nora is twelve. She lives in a perfect town built from our photos, videos and voices, and every night she takes off her human face and hangs it by the door. Maya is twelve too, and she takes the same selfie thirty times. On Halloween night, when millions of us post ourselves as someone...

⬥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 o...

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...

Deadly Bytes: A Book About a Serial Killer, His AI, and a Reflection on Giving Away Our Judgment

Confession 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...

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...

A new transmission from An Analog Brain In A Digital Age, by Marco Ciappelli

Prefer to watch? I recorded this one standing under Tokyo Tower:

On YouTube: https://youtu.be/glGHghhhXWc

On Tik Tok: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZN8MM8Hd9/

On Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DdlAe7tAOQK/?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

I spent twenty minutes looking for the right angle.

A small camera, a mini tripod, a patch of sidewalk that wasn't full of people taking the exact same photo. Behind me, 333 meters of...

An imperfect drink with a perfect story.

My reflections from Black Hat USA 2026

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — A Newsletter by Marco Ciappelli

No time to read? Let TAPE3 read it to you. 🎙️🤖

On day two we decided to go record our recap at the Black Hat bar.

We got there too late to get a drink. The expo floor was closing, and the bartender must have had better things to do. Or another bar to tend, somewhere in a city that has more bars than it has hours...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

Fifteen years ago, Rose Ross brought a client an idea for an awards program built specifically for enterprise tech startups. The client passed. She built it herself — and the Tech Trailblazers have been running ever since, independent, judged by practitioners, and open for entries until 3 September.

📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com

There are couches on the upper floor at ExCeL London where the glass opens onto the water, and every June I promise myself I will sit there and have one unhurried conversati...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

Every organization has a policy on AI. Most of them are unwritten, unspoken, and enforced by silence. Priyanka Dave — behavioral scientist, dual PhD, and the person responsible for teaching an entire university system how to work with these tools — explains what actually happens inside a company that refuses to say the word out loud.

📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com

This conversation sat in my queue for months.

I recorded it back when the show still went by another name, filed it under soo...

Ghosts Across the Thames — A Tale of the Past, Present, and Future of the Human in the Machine
 

Reflections from Infosecurity Europe 2026 — on sovereignty, agentic AI, burnout, and the stubborn human being still sitting at the center of all of it

By Marco Ciappelli | On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026, with Sean Martin

July 2026

No time to read? No problem. Let my Artificial Intelligence companion, TAPE3, read it to you — it's got a voice, and a bit of attitude too. 🎙️🤖

Just like me… but with better pronunciation. 🤣 😅

There is a building acr...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026

Our brains evolved to handle threats that show up and then leave. A cyberattack never leaves. Peter Coroneos, founder of Cybermindz, joins me on the last day of Infosecurity Europe 2026 to talk about what a never-ending digital siege does to the human nervous system — and how you teach it to stand down.

📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com

A branch cracks behind you in the dark. Your heart slams, your body floods, you spin around — and there's nothing there. A min...

A rugby World Cup winner walks into a room full of people who defend networks for a living. Maggie Alphonsi joins me to talk about breaking barriers, leading with your strengths, and what changed the day athletes stopped waiting for the back page and started telling their own stories.

📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com

Maggie Alphonsi has spent her life refusing to let other people decide who she is. She grew up on a north London council estate, born with a club foot, handed a stack of stereotypes she wanted no part of and surrounded, in her wo...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli — On Location at Infosecurity Europe 2026

The most dangerous attacks at Infosecurity Europe 2026 weren't the high-tech ones. Lee Clark of the Retail & Hospitality ISAC sits down with me to explain why the soft target is still a human being — a help desk, a new hire, a phone ringing at dinner — and what stays in our hands as the shopper quietly becomes an algorithm.

📺 Watch | 🎤 Listen | marcociappelli.com

The phone rings while my parents are eating dinner, and before anyone reaches for it, I already kn...

There is a con called the Spanish Prisoner. A letter arrives from a stranger: a wealthy man sits in a foreign jail, and for a small advance to free him, he will reward you many times over. The trick is at least four hundred years old. It is also, give or take a few details, the email sitting in your spam folder this morning.

I keep that in mind whenever someone tells me cybercrime is a technology problem. The tools change. The mark does not. We are still robbed through the same prehistoric wiring: a flash of...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — On Location at InfoSecurity Europe 2026
On Location With Sean Martin And Marco Ciappelli

Bronwyn Boyle can talk about software vulnerabilities for hours. Talking about her own — the burnout she didn’t recognize until someone named it — turned out to be harder, and more important. We sat down at InfoSecurity Europe to talk about the human cost of guarding the machine, and whether our analog brains were ever built for this.

📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com

I never planned to spend time in cybersecurity. My partner Sean dra...

There is a moment in every conversation about cybercrime when the criminal stops being a shadow and becomes a person with a desk, a calendar, and a complaint about Monday. That moment is the one that interests me.

For years I’ve been told cybersecurity is a technical problem. Firewalls, patches, acronyms nobody outside the room understands. And it is, partly. But sit with Geoff White for fifteen minutes at InfoSecurity Europe and the technical layer becomes what it always was underneath: people. People who get out of bed, argue with their partners, drink too much vodka af...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

Geoff White goes where organized crime and technology cross, and he comes back with stories. In this one he announces his newest BBC series — the rise and fall of the Conti ransomware gang — and we get into the thing underneath all of it: how you make a crime nobody can see feel real to people who will never see it.

📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com

There was a red light. A sign, really — ON AIR — that lit up the second a broadcast began, and every...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

Pablos Holman has built spaceships, zapped malaria-carrying mosquitoes with a laser, earned thousands of patents, and is now betting his venture capital on the inventors Silicon Valley forgot to fund. His new book, Deep Future: Creating Technology That Matters, is a call to arms against a tech industry that got drunk on software and forgot about the other 98% of the world.

📺 Watch | 🎙️ Listen | marcociappelli.com

I grew up in a city full of inventors. They just didn't call themselves that.

Floren...

PODCAST EPISODE | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

The United States spends 18.7% of its GDP on health — two to three times what countries like Italy spend. Italy has a longer life expectancy. So what exactly are we paying for? Gil Bashe, Chair of Global Health & Purpose at FINN Partners, former combat medic, and author of Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter, joined me on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age to talk about what happens when a system designed to heal people forgets that people exist. This is not a ra...

An Analog Brain In A Digital Age — A Newsletter by Marco Ciappelli

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're Not Human — And Nobody's Asking

There was a moment — brief, unrepeatable — when the internet felt like a genuinely open place. No profiles. No algorithms deciding what you deserved to see. No one monetizing the fact that you existed. You showed up, you explored, you talked to strangers in other countries about things that mattered to you, and the whole thing felt less like a product and more like a discovery. Like finding a door to another dimension.

Th...

This was my twelfth RSA Conference.

I know that because I remember the first one, 2012, and I've been counting ever since — not out of habit, but because each year feels like a chapter in a longer story I'm trying to read in real time. Twelve years of standing in that same building in San Francisco, watching an industry evolve, stumble, reinvent itself, and occasionally look in the mirror.

In the early years it was pure technology. Cryptography, protocols, threat vectors, the architecture of defense. The conversations were technical, the energy was almost academic, the suits we...

Do Androids Dream of Security Patches? Reflections from RSAC 2026 — Walking the Floor of the Agentic World

Marco Ciappelli

Co-Founder ITSPmagazine & Studio C60 | Creative Director | Branding & Marketing Advisor | Personal Branding Coach | Journalist | Writer | Podcast: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age ⚠️ Beware: Pigs May Fly | 🌎 LAX🛸FLR 🌍

April 7, 2026

This is Marco Ciappelli's Newsletter: An Analog Brain In A Digital Age. This edition draws from ITSPmagazine's on-location coverage at RSAC Conference 2026 in San Francisco.

This article — and all of our RSAC Conference 2026 coverage — is made possible with the support of ITSPmagazine's RS...

**About this episode**

What if everything you've been spending on digital marketing isn't an investment — but a tax? Nick Richtsmeier, founder of CultureCraft, joins Marco Ciappelli for a Brand Highlight that cuts straight to the root of why so many organizations feel stuck: not a marketing problem, but an alignment problem.

Nick introduces the concept of the Silicon Valley tax — the ongoing cost most organizations pay to platforms that have no real incentive to show them what's working. He challenges the "attention economy" framing, arguing that what's actually being bought and sold is addictive behavior engi...

When Sci-Fi Becomes the Business Plan

A Brand Highlight Conversation with Jacob Flores, Head of Research at Type One Ventures

There is a version of investing that asks what the return will be. And then there is the version that asks what kind of future the investment makes possible. Jacob Flores, Head of Research at Type One Ventures, is working firmly in the second category.

Type One Ventures takes its name from the Kardashev Scale — a framework developed by Soviet astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev that ranks civilizations by their level of technological advancement. A Ty...

In this episode from RSA Conference 2026, Marco Ciappelli sits down with Ben Halpert, founder of the non-profit organization Savvy Cyber Kids, to discuss the critical intersection of child development and technology.

Since its founding in 2007, Savvy Cyber Kids has been on a mission to provide parents and educators with the tools needed to guide children through the digital world. Ben explains why introducing technology too early can be detrimental to a child’s emotional preparedness and brain development, and why adult-led guidance is essential even when kids seem like "tech experts".

In this conversation, we ex...

Marco Ciappelli sits down with cybersecurity evangelist and thought leader Theresa Lanowitz at the end of day one on the expo floor for a conversation that cuts through the noise — from shadow AI and leadership accountability, to brand identity, to why most companies here can't articulate a message above the fray. Plus: a Peloton story that accidentally became the best explanation of brand loyalty you'll hear all week. 

Chapters:
- Judge Sentences CEO to 8 Hours on the RSAC Floor 
- End of Day One: Setting the Scene 
- Who Is Theresa Lanowitz 
- The Bi...

New Book: Climate Capital — Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future | An Interview with Tom Chi | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

What if the economy isn't broken — just badly designed? Tom Chi, Google X founding member, inventor of 77 patents, and venture capitalist at At One Ventures, joined me on An Analog Brain In A Digital Age to discuss his new book Climate Capital: Investing in the Tools for a Regenerative Future. From the streets of Florence to the strip malls of Silicon Valley, from the mechanics of attention capture to the phys...

There is a question that sounds almost embarrassingly simple. After a vulnerability is discovered in a piece of widely used software — something like Log4Shell, which shook the security world and left hundreds of thousands of organizations exposed overnight — the question organizations scrambled to answer was this: where is this code, and what does it touch?

Most couldn't answer it. Not the Fortune 500 companies. Not the government agencies. Not the critical infrastructure operators. Not the hospitals or the banks or the utilities. They had built and bought mountains of software over years and decades, and when the mome...

New Book: Lost in Time — Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge | An Interview with Jack R. Bialik | An Analog Brain In A Digital Age With Marco Ciappelli

There's a particular arrogance embedded in how we talk about progress. We speak about innovation as if it moves in one direction only — forward, upward, smarter, faster. But what if the line isn't straight? What if it loops, doubles back, and occasionally vanishes entirely?

That's the uncomfortable question at the center of my conversation with Jack R. Bialik. His book Lost in Time: Our Forgotten and Vanishing Knowledge doesn't read...

Agade: The AI-Powered Wearable Robots That Protect Workers, Not Replace Them 

AI Meets Human Craftsmanship

There's something poetic about a technology born to help people with muscular dystrophy finding its second life on factory floors and logistics warehouses. That's the story of Agade, an Italian deeptech startup that began as a research project at Politecnico di Milano and evolved into something far more ambitious: a mission to preserve human craftsmanship in an age of automation.

I sat down with Lorenzo Aquilante, CEO and co-founder of Agade, to talk about their journey from healthcare i...

None of Your Goddamn Business

John Morgan Salomon said something during our conversation that I haven't stopped thinking about. We were discussing encryption, privacy laws, the usual terrain — and he cut through all of it with five words: "It's none of your goddamn business."

Not elegant. Not diplomatic. But exactly right.

John has spent 30 years in information security. He's Swiss, lives in Spain, advises governments and startups, and uses his real name on social media despite spending his career thinking about privacy. When someone like that tells you he's worried, you should probably pa...

Wine Barrels, Duomo Marble, and Florence: Paoletti Custom Guitars at NAMM 2026

I've been away from Florence for 25 years. I didn't know there was a guitar company like this back home.

At NAMM 2026, I found Filippo Martini from Paoletti Custom Guitars—a boutique manufacturer based in the heart of Tuscany, building instruments that are equal parts guitar and artwork.

Paoletti does something no one else does: they build guitars from chestnut wood sourced from Italian wine barrels. The material offers a wide harmonic spectrum, but it's difficult to work with. You need to know ho...

60 Years Forward: Yamaha at NAMM 2026
Yamaha at NAMM 2026: Chris Buck Revstar, Pacifica SC & 60 Years of Guitar Innovation

Some brands chase nostalgia. Yamaha builds forward.

At NAMM 2026, I spoke with Andy Winston to talk about 60 years of Yamaha guitar design—and why this company keeps delivering instruments that punch way above their price point.

The conversation started with the Chris Buck Signature Revstar. Buck is the guitarist for Cardinal Black, and he's earned his own model. The specs tell the story: overwound P90 pickups for a hotter sound, wraparound tailpiece with adjustable saddles, st...

At the Guitar Center Foundation, music is treated as a shared resource rather than a luxury. During this conversation at the NAMM Show 2026, Michelle Wolff, representing the Foundation, explains how access to real instruments can change the trajectory of a student, a patient, or a veteran simply by making music possible in the first place.

The Foundation’s work centers on donating thousands of instruments to schools, hospitals, and veteran centers, with a focus on communities where funding for music programs is often the first thing cut. Through a structured grant process, organizations apply for instruments quarterly, with...

The Last Touch: Why AI Will Never Be an Artist

I had one of those conversations... the kind where you're nodding along, then suddenly stop because someone just articulated something you've been feeling but couldn't quite name.

Andrea Isoni is a Chief AI Officer. He builds and delivers AI solutions for a living. And yet, sitting across from him (virtually, but still), I heard something I rarely hear from people deep in the AI industry: a clear, unromantic take on what this technology actually is — and what it isn't.

His argument is elegant in...

131 years. Still handcrafted in Nashville. Still changing music.

At NAMM 2026, Sean Martin and Marco Ciappelli sat down with Jeff Stempka, Global Brand & Marketing at Gibson & Gibson Custom, to talk about what makes this brand untouchable—the craftsmanship, the artist connection, and why people will stretch their budget just to hold one.

From the Les Paul Studio Double Trouble to the ES-335 Fifties and Sixties refresh, Gibson is honoring its legacy while pushing forward.

Jeff said it best: "These are tools that enable incredible musicians to take the instruments and do something we never in...

Vintage Dreams, Modern Hands: A Conversation with PRS Guitars at NAMM 2026

They were literally closing down the show floor when I grabbed Alex Chadwick from PRS Guitars for a conversation I wasn't willing to miss.

We'd been talking off-mic about something that kept nagging at me—this tension between technology and creativity that runs through everything in the music world right now. So I hit record, security guards circling, and asked him straight: Is technology helping musicians become better artists, or do you still need to learn the hard way?

His answer was re...

CES 2026 Just Showed Us the Future. It's More Practical Than You Think.

CES has always been part crystal ball, part carnival. But something shifted this year.

I caught up with Brian Comiskey—Senior Director of Innovation and Trends at CTA and a futurist by trade—days after 148,000 people walked the Las Vegas floor. What he described wasn't the usual parade of flashy prototypes destined for tech graveyards. This was different. This was technology getting serious about actually being useful.

Three mega trends defined the show: intelligent transformation, longevity, and engineering tomorrow. Fancy terms, but...

Jensen Huang Just Won IEEE's Highest Honor. The Reason Tells Us Everything About Where Tech Is Headed.

IEEE announced Jensen Huang as its 2026 Medal of Honor recipient at CES this week. The NVIDIA founder joins a lineage stretching back to 1917—over a century of recognizing people who didn't just advance technology, but advanced humanity through technology.

That distinction matters more than ever.

I spoke with Mary Ellen Randall, IEEE's 2026 President and CEO, from the floor of CES Las Vegas. The timing felt significant. Here we are, surrounded by the latest gadgets and AI de...