TRUST AND TURBULENCE
Hey there folks I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why I started the Trust and Turbulence podcast and explain what I’m going to cover. To do that, let’s go back to March 31st. On that day I woke up (it was a Tuesday) and started my normal day by putting on the coffee. I had been aware that there were a lot of rumors of Oracle layoffs—I had read much of this on the subreddit r/EmployeesofOracle. But Reddit is anonymous and can be unreliable, on the other hand, the same subreddit had correctly predicted the last layoff in August of 2025, so I was nervous. My favorite (not) post about this was titled: “Bloodbath next week! Enjoy your weekend.”
We had heard it was going to be via email although many employees were posting about mysterious 1-1s appearing in their calendar for that Tuesday. So, after I put on the kettle (I use a Chemex for my coffee, so I have to boil water first) I checked my email on my phone. At this point my wife was already on her way out the door to take the kids to school. But when I looked I thought, “whew—of course I’m not included!” My job was about security for Oracle’s products but it also was sales enablement. In other words, without me Oracle was risking business. My team and I also were not replicated in any other organization at Oracle. At this point the kettle already was hot (I love my electric kettle, but this is not a product blog) so I started the process of pouring the water into the Chemex. Then I had a thought…. what if the email went into one of my new “filters” I had setup to sort emails that were addressed to me by a distribution list, as opposed to from a person? So, I checked the “Non-Human” inbox and there it was. “After careful consideration of Oracle's current business needs, we have made the decision to eliminate your role as part of a broader organizational change, as a result, today is your last working day." I called my wife and said: “I was laid off!! I can’t believe it.”
The next few hours were honestly a blur. I still could log in to my computer so I setup an urgent team meeting for 10am. I started declining meetings (in retrospect this was among one of the dumber things I did). I started composing a goodbye email. I didn’t think about maybe there are some work products I might want. I didn’t think about clearing my history on the browser or any other things that would have been smart. At least I had removed all personal files months before after Oracle had their last layoff in August. I was only worried about my team.
I had a good analogy for my team. I am a big basketball fan. I love the Celtics and the NBA. When I hired my sixth team-member I told him that I had five all-stars and he was the sixth man. This was an unbeatable team that I think was the envy of other organizations that had security certifications teams. I wasn’t thinking about anything else except what will these guys do without me? I got on the Zoom with them and told them I was affected by the layoff and that today was my last day. I had no answers to their questions. I could see the shock on their faces. Honestly, I teared up a bit. This was all so fast and so wrong. This was the fifth time in my career I had been laid off and each time before that I was able to say goodbye to everyone face to face. But this is a virtual world and none of my team were local to me. Meanwhile my manager refused to talk to me (I found out later that managers were specifically told not to speak to laid off staff). I slacked her and said I had questions. She said to look at the FAQs and I had not received them (that would not come until the next day). To be fair to her I had only been working for her for about three weeks and many people on her team were affected who she had a real relationship with. We were just getting started. I think I did some one-on-ones with some of my team members that day but at some point, maybe around 2pm my computer was locked out. I should have disconnected from the internet (again not so smart) so I could have cleaned my computer up.
The other thing I did that day was very early on upgrade to Premium on LinkedIn and post my change of status announcement. For some reason it was picked up by LinkedIn News that day (along with 15 or so other “significant” laid off Oracle employees). One week later my profile had been viewed 121K times!
The next day I was scheduled to speak virtually on the Common Criteria Users Forum spring workshop about what I learned at the EU Cyber Acts conference in Brussels that I had just spoken at the previous week. I decided to do it anyway despite no longer being at Oracle. This gave me the freedom to speak my mind without worrying about what Oracle management might think about my opinion. This would become my first Trust and Turbulence podcast. But I didn’t know it yet.
Once it had all sunk in that after almost 13 years of work at Oracle, I was not needed anymore I had to think about what was next for me.
What did I want to do?
Would I retire?
Would I immediately jump into job search mode?
What did I like about my job at Oracle? What did I not like?
So, I started thinking about these questions.
Likes
Managing a great team
Being a thought leader—the ability to speak at conferences and the occasional blog on Oracle.com (although many blogs were muzzled by Oracle’s incredibly conservative thought police)
Interesting work
Knowing that my work mattered
Working from home with some interesting travel
Fair compensation for work performed
Dislikes:
Overbearing management
Huge companies with bureaucracies
Ridiculous reporting requirements (only since we were reorganized into OCI in June 2025)
Executive management’s (Clay and Larry are exhibit A of this) total lack of interest in their employees
Horrible internal communication from the top
View of the Tucson mountains from the Westward Look Wyndham Grand Resort and Spa
My wife and I had a planned trip to Tucson— she was attending a conference. The plan originally was for me to tag along and work from the resort. Now my plan was to use the trip to think about what was next for me. I started to think about what to do while I looked at the beauty of the mountains. I messaged the CCUF chair and asked him was the recording of my talk available? He sent it to me. I watched it. I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. I told my wife, I’m going to start a podcast! Originally, I wanted it to be about security certifications but I recognized that would be BORING. So, I started thinking about what was interesting about the world I worked in. Why did people care about IT security? Because the world is dangerous and cybercrime was rampant. What were the threats people were worried about? Hackers, vulnerabilities, privacy, nation-states hacking infrastructure, the risks were there. There are a lot of podcasts about these topics…but had anyone tackled it from the perspective of someone who learned security on the job? My background was not computer science or security so did that mean my views on these topics would be a differentiator? Yes! And since it was my podcast, I could talk about anything I wanted. Did I want to talk about the EU Cyber Resilience Act? Sure. Would I talk about AI? Of course. Should we talk about post quantum cryptography? Absolutely. But could we cover other things? Yes! The world is turbulent and trust was a word that meant less and less whether coming from an employee perspective (can I trust that my job will be there) or simply is this software safe to use? In other words, can I trust it?
So why Trust and Turbulence? I think it’s a fun name to describe a turbulent world and how that trust partnership is breaking down. So, if you listen to my podcast, sometimes I may talk about traditional cybersecurity topics but I also plan on interviewing people who just live in this world and get their perspective. If you’ve read this far, I really appreciate it and I hope what I bring to the table is useful and interesting.
One interesting side note to all of this. This podcast is not a revenue generator for me. But as a result of starting this I was recently hired by CNXTD Events to be a host of their podcast. This is all really full circle for me. As I said earlier, I do not come from a cybersecurity or even a computer science background. My undergraduate degree is in Mass Communications, with a concentration in Radio Broadcasting. My Mom when she heard I was starting a podcast immediately commented that I was getting back to my roots. I asked her what she meant. She said, “your degree is in radio broadcasting, podcasting sounds a lot like broadcasting to me.” So, for now I’m a radio broadcaster over the internet, not FM waves. Let’s see where this goes.
Thanks for reading
—Josh