Both co-hosts are out, so Lucy “forges forward” alone with a guest whose résumé stops the room. Every quote below plays the exact moment from the broadcast — just tap it.
Why this episode exists
Lucy frames the premise she returns to every month: a family's ability to thrive physically and economically is tied to their confidence, access, and attitudes around connectivity. She is careful about the hat she is wearing.
Your ability to thrive physically, your ability to thrive economically, is all tied into your confidence, your access, and your attitudes around connectivity. But it's a scary world out there, right?
I am not in any way, shape, or form representing a medical hat. I'm simply a Main Street Mama, and I like to bring on my special guests and friends who are experts in the space.
The guest: a Pentagon IT manager on 9/11
Scotty Ward entered IT with the U.S. Air Force in 1990. He now teaches cybersecurity at Pima Community College and runs a mentorship program with his wife across three continents. His introduction lands hard.
My claim to fame is that on nine-eleven, I was Donald Rumsfeld's IT program manager in the Pentagon when someone decided to fly an airplane into our office building. So it was an extremely long and traumatic day. But you learn from the good and the bad.
He rejects the two options most people think they have.
A lot of people think you have two choices. You either withdraw and live on a mountaintop, or you face the lions in the lion's cage. Well, you can become educated and be safer, be smarter online.
The tips that actually matter
The heart of the hour is a practical run of fifteen items. Don't just delete spam — mark it as spam or phishing, block the sender, and forward it to reportphishing@apwg.org. Report fraud at reportfraud.ftc.gov, which feeds the FTC's Consumer Sentinel system used by thousands of law-enforcement agencies. Ward's reason for bothering is not abstract.
So you marking something as spam or phishing may save somebody's mother or somebody's cousin from losing their life savings due to these malicious actors. They can be stopped, but you have to be part of the force that discourages them.
Then the one nobody thinks about: the box on your wall.
And the thing that most people don't realize is, this device is on the Internet — and this device can and has been compromised in the past.
Unplug and reboot your home modem every few months. Abandon short “complex” passwords for long passphrases — Oak Street Fire Hydrant — and the math is not close.
Longer passwords are trillions of times safer than complex, shorter passwords. Trillions of times safer.
Forward scam texts to 7726 (Lucy tests it live on air and gets a confirmation back). Freeze all three credit bureaus. Close old accounts rather than deleting the icon. Turn on passkeys and phishing-resistant MFA. And never, ever click “unsubscribe” on a fraudulent email — it upgrades your address to the premium tier scammers resell to each other.
The part for parents
Ward closes on kids, and it is not the lecture you expect.
So these kids that are learning to hack, learn to hack — and to them, they don't know the boundaries. They need ethics.
Have a wonderful, wonderful holiday, however you choose to celebrate. Be kind, be a force for health, stay safe online, protect your assets.