The best thing about attending events around the world is the people you meet. Annie-Mei met Jadon at a DEFCON after-party in 2025, where Jadon was struggling to get the bartender's attention for a beer. Nothing bonds people like needing a cold beverage. Jadon is the founder of New York-based Maro, a tool he describes as a security buddy that helps employees actually follow policy. Maro is a cute flame character that intervenes in real time when someone's about to paste sensitive data into an unapproved AI tool or fall for a social engineering attack.

Jadon took an unusual path to cybersecurity. At Yale, he studied books so that he'd be able to understand what people were talking about at cocktail parties (which, to be fair, is a useful skill to have) but then he ended up going down the computer science path. He got the attention of a salesperson who he cold contacted and managed to get an internship at Threat Stack.

The three of us discussed a lot of topics including AI regulation, sovereign AI, cognitive security and so much more. Make sure you endorse Jadon for 'tequila' on LinkedIn!

Jadon’s LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadoncm?utm_source=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=member_ios

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When life gets overwhelming, more and more people are turning to AI chatbots for emotional support, and it's not hard to see why. Traditional therapy remains out of reach for many due to cost, stigma, and availability. But what happens when the tool you're leaning on was never designed to hold that weight?

In this episode, we chat to Dr. Rachel Wood. She's a cyber psychology PhD and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective. Dr. Wood helps us untangle the growing relationship between artificial intelligence and our emotional lives. She explains the difference between the general-purpose 'omnibots' millions use daily and the clinically grounded, human-supervised tools actually built for mental health support. The difference, she argues, matters more than most people realise.

We explore how AI can be genuinely useful as a rehearsal space. A low-stakes environment to practise empathy, work through difficult conversations, and build social confidence. But we can't rely on it too heavily because that comes with costs like cognitive offloading, emotional dependency, eroded critical thinking, and the subtle but significant loss of what she calls 'failure and repair' in human relationships.

We also get into the design choices that either protect or endanger users, and why sharing your most sensitive emotional data with an AI platform carries real privacy risks.

The takeaway? AI is going to continue to be used but it'll never fully replace other forms of mental health support. As Dr. Wood puts it, nothing protects us from over-dependence on technology quite like investing in high-quality human connection.

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Policy. Diplomacy. Cyber. Three words guaranteed to clear a room (or so you'd think).

But cyber diplomacy matters and we provide real-world examples like the 2007 cyber attacks on Estonia, the Medibank breach and Australia slapping sanctions on Russian hackers and the infamous Stuxnet worm.

In this episode we break down what cyber diplomacy is, why it matters and what Australia is actually doing to strengthen ties across the Indo-Pacific (with a healthy dose of Mean Girls references and Harry Potter nostalgia thrown in).

(P.S. Anika called it 3 Days in Mariupol - it's 20 Days in Mariupol. Still haunting either way)

Australian Volunteers Program:

https://www.australianvolunteers.com/

20 Days In Mariupol:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/11/20-days-in-mariupol-documentary-oscar

Why is it called the Quad?

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/the-real-significance-of-the-quad/

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