Saberage and Cyber with Drew Tharp

So what are we doing here, Drew?

Yeah, we're doing a little bit of sabrage. So sabrage is the opening of a champagne bottle using a saber, and it's an old French tradition. It actually started in the Napoleonic era. Supposedly, the Napoleonic soldiers would ride through the Champagne part of France on their way to Waterloo, and they would— there was a beautiful young woman who was one of the vineyard daughters. Yeah, maidens. And they would all try to impress her. And so one guy, she handed him a cold bottle of champagne, and they would all drink the champagne on their horses as they rode. But one guy decided to pull out his saber and cut the top of the bottle off to impress her, and that's how Sabrage was supposedly invented.

Was his name Sabrage?

No, no, no, it's because saber. Sabre.

Sabre-age.

I don't know, French. French for saber shit. Yeah. Um, so what you do is you prepare the bottle, and then, uh, I'm gonna move over here. That's a good idea. It's a good idea. It will go a little ways. And then you're actually looking for— this is your this is your tie-in right here. You're looking for weak, the weak spot in the bottle. There's one place right here on the neck of the bottle, on a champagne bottle, that—

Above or below the little lip?

Below the lip, and it focuses all of the energy of the bubbles of the champagne into that one spot. So just a light tap will cause it to open.

So is this kind of like, well, you know, with cyber criminals, they're finding the one or thousand spots, and that's their way in, right?

Exactly. I can't— I couldn't cut through this bottle, but Cody, you could try.

You could try next.

One small tap to the right spot.

Wow.

And the bottle opens, and nothing went anywhere. Nothing went anywhere. That's because you properly chilled it, most importantly. I actually have done it professionally. I did it at weddings in college.

Love it.

I was expecting so much more of a—

Okay, what am I doing here?

So what you want to do is you want to look for the seam on the bottle. If you look, you'll see where the two pieces of the bottle come together. Oh, it's right here. So turn it a little bit more. See that seam where the— Oh, there's two seams.

Light's not great, is it? Oh, is it?

Yeah, you see it runs all the way down the bottle.

Got it, got it.

And so what you do is you hold it in that hand, you take this hand,. And you can see where I've got some kind of indents from where I've done it a lot. You just set the saber along the side of the bottle and slide it down. You want to give—

oh wow—

a little bit of pressure so that you pop it right there.

How much force do I need?

Um, not like a ton, but you do want follow-through. You want to— yeah, yeah, a little bit faster.

A little more?

Yeah, there you go. That'll do it.

Pickleball, man. I think like a little punch.

Don't, don't do Oop.

More force down here.

Press down more.

Okay.

Here we go.

Nope. Got it. Ah! There we go.

There it is.

A little bit more bubbly. Glad we had that tarp.

Glad we had that tarp.

Yeah, see, that's— And yours broke better too.

Okay.

I see two seams. Is there just either seam here?

I got a seam right here. You mean you see it on both sides of the bottle?

Is it a seam or a sem, Cody?

It's, well, this is a seam, also like CISO. Ah, but if it was a CISO and a SIM, then this podcast is over. Okay.

Just set it right on the seam.

Okay.

And you actually want to hold it a little bit more like that.

There you go. Okay.

With a little bit of an angle. So you're going to be hitting it right there.

Okay.

And it's just, you know, you got to give it a little bit of force, but it's not.

Is there any like good like saying you hear as you push it off? Any good luck or good—

What's that?

I—

For some reason, people always say opa, which is not— that's Greek. So I don't know what French— what do they say in French?

I'm going to ask AI.

For like cheers.

You could say bonne chance, which means good luck. Bonne chance. Or à votre santé, to your health, is cheers. Okay, à votre santé. All right, here we go. À votre santé.

Oh, there it is. Look at that. That is pretty. Well done. Well done, guys. Beautiful. Well done.

Bam.

You can break that out.

Well, hey, if you guys want to know the secret, you can do it with the back of a kitchen knife.

Really?

Yeah, you can do it with anything.

Not as fun though.

Yeah, yeah, you just need something with a little weight.

I am. Look at that. Now, if you, you've seen a lot of, you've seen a lot of bottles being broken, what are your thoughts here? Just quick, quick unbiased opinion. To myself and Aaron, who aren't competitive at all. What do you think as far as this clean one versus his last couple of tries he had?

Unbiased. Yeah, yeah.

Unbiased? I mean, clearly you did it on the first try, and that's a very clean break. So, gotcha. Okay. So while Aaron's the one who invited me, I'm going to have to go with Cody.

I don't want the results to be rigged.

To be fair though, you both beat me. Mine's a little jagged, but I like that.

That is clean.

Isn't that cool? Yeah, so this is called a brigette saber. Um, it's a, it's a small infantry hanger. A hanger means the sword that they would hang from their belt. So it would have been around the Napoleonic era, so early 1800s. Um, and it's, it's just a general issue sword, brass hilt. Um, but I really like it. It's got a nice size and weight for this, for this for this particular type of—

And then you would, this would be sheathed, or is this—

It would, it would normally, and in fact I have a leather sheath at home for it, but it's very old and leather gets very brittle and when it gets old, so I don't usually bring it around.

How much does it weigh?

I mean, if people were using it to fight.

Oh yeah, it's not as much as you think. This is actually a pretty heavy one. I have about 2 dozen hangers. I like them, they're fun little swords. This one's fairly heavy,, but it's still probably, I'm gonna say 1.2 pounds maybe. Pirates liked them. They also, pirate ones tended, or naval ones, not just pirates, all navies, liked them to be just a little bit heftier so that they could cut ropes and things with them too. They didn't have to, they could use it as a tool as well as a—

So Jack Sparrow would have had something like this.

Exactly.

All right.

So because you guys kind of gravitated that way, and I do too, I brought a nice Scottish sword from the middle of the 1700s, which is right when, if you watched the movie Rob Roy, when Rob Roy was, was at. And this is, um, I really like these basket-hilted broadswords, sometimes called claymores, and this one has a really wide thick blade. Um, they used to— supposedly the English said that a Scotsman could cut somebody in half from shoulder to hip with their broadsword.

Yeah, okay.

Um, but here you can hold this as well. It's, it— again, it's probably going to be lighter than you think and a little bit more— it's also sharp. So, okay, is this sharpened to fighting value, or would you That's about where it would probably be. Usually these wouldn't be razor sharp, and we can talk about that with, with Japanese swords, which I brought too. Japanese swords tended to be sharper, but that's because they differentially hardened, so that the edge is much, much harder than the back. The Europeans tried to get the same hardness all the way through the steel, which makes it very flexible, But it won't hold an edge as well. So it would be sharpened, you know. We have lots of examples of the British Army, amongst others, issuing orders to sharpen sabers. Like, we're going to go into battle, sharpen them, get them ready.

When you acquired these swords, they've obviously been used before. So there's chances that these swords have got some numbers on them. Oh yes.

Oh yes.

So sharpening the sword, like connection back to cyber, there are a lot of teams that are kind of just complacent in the way they've always done it. They're not practicing for battle, they're not sharpening their perimeter sword.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Like what does that take? Is it leadership?

You mentioned command, you know, we command you to sharpen your sword, we're going to battle.

How do cyber leaders, like, you know, what's the connection there?

Well, and I think, leadership and preparation, right? Because you're seeing the commanders say, "Okay, sharpen your swords, let's get ready for the battle that's going to come." But also, a good soldier should have had their sword sharpened while on campaign all the time, because you don't know when you're going to be attacked, right?

Don't wait till battle starts.

You don't know when, yeah. If you wait until the battle, then it may be too late. So I think that that's a good allegory for leadership in cybersecurity because you've got to be prepared at all times. You need to be ready for the attack to come. But if you spend all your time sharpening your saber, which sounds really euphemistic, if you spend all your time sharpening your saber at the camp, you're not going to have your artillery ready, your other things ready too. So it's a balancing act, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I've been collecting since high school, and I've got, I think I'm sitting right now at about 120.

120?

Yeah, it depends.

What does that equal in doll hairs?

Doesn't want to know. My wife, I will not say that on camera.

Good point, good point.

No, I mean, You know, it's one of those things where I've been doing it for, yeah, what, 25 years now? So you, things, yeah, yeah. Things change over time. Yeah, yeah.

And of course you bought low, they've invested, so now they're worth now.

Well, and I also buy and sell, right? So I don't know what our cybersecurity analogy there is, but I do buy.

I think it's cyber programs tend to procrastinate until they have incident, and then they try to do everything really fast.

And that's more expensive.

Swords, it's gonna be more expensive. You're probably not gonna use them all. You're not gonna even understand them all.

Yeah, if right now the collection's probably sitting at $60,000, $70,000.

That's amazing.

But that's not what I paid for it because I bought them over time, and also I'd trade one to get another one.

Oh, now we're talking. So this is what I waited for.

So obviously the infamous katana, right? Japanese, and this one in particular is one of my favorites. It is a, it's from the middle 1600s made by a maker named Kiyonobu. One of my favorite things about it is that it is made with what they call nanban tetsu, which is foreign or barbarian steel. So if— have you guys watched Shogun?

Yes.

Yeah, so when the, when the black ships came in, when the, when the traders started arriving, the Dutch, they brought steel with them. They brought iron with them that was in some ways superior to the Japanese iron. It was more pure, but, but it didn't fit well in the way that the Japanese were used to working their iron. But it became very fashionable in the early and mid-1600s to have a sword that used this steel from the barbarians that came to trade.

And so the barbarians were the Europeans or the Mongolians?

No, no, the Europeans. Europeans are considered barbarians, which is great for me. And so they would— they liked to put the steel in. It would usually just be mixed with the Japanese steel, and honestly, it provides absolutely no value or change. It's just a part of the artistry of what happened, right? So when you draw a Japanese sword, you're going to— it's, it's got a collar that fits perfectly to the scabbard. So you pop it out with your thumb, and that'll allow the sword to start to come out. You keep the back along the back of the scabbard because you don't want to rub the edge against the, the scabbard.

That'll dull it.

What's top and the bottom?

What, along the bottom. So I'm holding it along the bottom. And then when you pull it out, what you're looking at with a Japanese sword, I talked about the differential hardening. So that's the wavy line that you can kind of see go down the sword. And we can get some better— Is it fruit time?

What?

Is it fruit time? Is this the one that we will—

We will not be cutting fruit with this. I brought a replica for us to cut fruit with because this one is It's my favorite. And so, yeah, so here, please feel free to hold it.

What is this here?

So these are called manuki, and they are, they're decorative. So much like—

Much sharper.

What?

Much sharper.

Oh yeah, this is very sharp. The, the—

Shave your beard?

It will.

Quick catch-up.

The samurai would, they were not supposed to be ostentatious. That was not a, especially in the 1600s during that particular period. And so their, their fittings on their swords were something that they were allowed to express themselves with. And so that was really the jewelry of the time. So these are made of shakudo, which is a mix of copper and gold, and then they have gold inlay.

So it's like the things our kids put on their Crocs.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Only like, you know, thousands of dollars instead of, uh, yes, yes. All right, so, so yeah, so there's your, there's your true, um, antique. This is an actual samurai sword, would have been carried by a samurai. We know that because it's too long to have been carried legally by anybody else. So there you go.

You— just making sure I'm not going to hit anything. Okay. Woo-hoo!

Very graceful.

Wow. Nope.

Nice work, nice work. Well done.

Paper towels.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, there we go, here we go.

Bam! There you go.

Good form.

Form is good too. Thank you. So yeah, there you go. Apples, oranges.

Next one, we're going to put an orange on Aaron's head.

Go!

Oh, there it is, big dog!

Nice. That's going to be awesome in slow-mo.

Yeah, there you go.

Nice. All right, man.

You can play with that one if you want. That's more of a knight sword.

It does, man. It's like Braveheart.

All right, you guys have insurance, right? Um, so, so who, who wants to cut first?

Uh, Aaron, you go first.

Okay, so Aaron, um, when you do this, um, I would use one hand and I would aim right here on the watermelon. Okay, and what you actually want to do is make sure that you pull back and step through when you cut, because I don't want, um, because that's kind of where the power comes from, but you don't need as much power as you think. It's not about power. There it is.

All right, Cody, give it a swing.

All right, all right. So I'm just going to come through here.

Nice, clean, thin cut.

Yeah, yeah. Oh no, now I'm afraid.

Yeah, now you've gotten all hesitant. Yeah, yeah, which I'm sure there's a lesson in there too about getting hesitant.

Is that like, so like gun-shy? Like I took a swing, it didn't work, so I didn't use my full potential?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, if you, it has to be a sharp decisive action, but sometimes sharp decisive actions do result in cuts to the wood instead of where you're aiming.

Aaron Pritz, see if you can get that bad boy.

Well, let me see the katana.

Yeah, use the katana.

It seems a little lighter. A little lighter for this.

Really, I just hadn't cut with this one and I wanted to. Yeah, paper towels would be great.

Nice!

Very nice.

Almost peeled that thing.

A little, little zest. Just needed some.