From The SimSpace Summit 2026 – KB On The Go | Rushell Hopkins and Stanley McChrystal (Part 2)

Karissa Breen [00:00:10]: Welcome to KB On The Go. I’m coming to you from my new place of residence, Orlando, Florida. And today I’m being hosted at the SimSpace Summit. Cybersecurity is hitting a breaking point, compliance checklists, tabletop exercises, and confidence claims. Aren’t enough anymore, especially as AI accelerates both attack and defense. This summit is about something different, proving readiness under real pressure, real tools, real teams, real-world chaos. Today, I’m speaking with leaders and former US government officials pushing cyber training testing and validation out of theory and into reality. Because when the next incident hits, what matters isn’t what looks good on paper, it’s what actually holds up.

Karissa Breen [00:00:57]: Stay with me, we’re diving into the conversations that matter. This is KB On The Go from SYNSPACE Summit 2026.

Karissa Breen [00:01:04]: Let’s get into it. Joining me now in person is Rochelle Hopkins, Professor, Computer Science and Cybersecurity at Florida Southwestern State College, and today we’re discussing the future of cyber workforce. So, Rochelle, thanks for joining and welcome.

Rushell Hopkins [00:01:23]: Well, thanks for having me.

Karissa Breen [00:01:24]: Okay. So Rochelle, I’m really interested in the work that you do. And when we were talking before, you were sort of describing like how things are nowadays. And I think it’s really interesting to explore that a little bit more. So I want to start perhaps with your view on the growing concern about cognitive atrophy in the younger generation. And what are your thoughts here?

Rushell Hopkins [00:01:46]: Absolutely. One of the things I also didn’t share with you is I’m part of a cohort or consortium called the AAC&U, which is the American Association of Colleges and Universities. And I’m in this cohort where we’re trying to bring AI into higher education and kind of look at what that’s going to do. I share concerns with many of the educators in what they’re calling cognitive offloading or cognitive atrophy in our younger generation. In cybersecurity, I tend to have really remarkable, creative, compassionate, and technically advanced students. But what I’m seeing and the shift that I’m seeing is that these students are using AI at a level where it’s eroding their patience, their deep focus, and their willingness to wrestle with the deeper problems. And learning, especially in cybersecurity, requires discomfort. We have to think outside the box.

Rushell Hopkins [00:02:33]: It really requires us to sit with something, and if we don’t understand it, we are breaking it down and we’re building up that mental endurance, right, to solve it. And when their answer is just one click away, right, to these problems, that muscle greatly weakens.

Karissa Breen [00:02:50]: This is where I think it gets really interesting as well, because I’m a millennial, and even when we were learning things, it’s still fundamentally different. Doesn’t feel that long ago. But when you’re talking about what you’re describing versus when I came up through the ranks, it’s not that long ago, but it does feel a lot longer. So I’m curious to see What does this sort of mean now for how people are actually learning things? You mentioned before 15-minute to 20-minute blocks before you had to say, right, we’re gonna get up, go for a walk, we’re gonna do something else. That’s a very short period of time when you think about it. How, what’s going on here?

Rushell Hopkins [00:03:32]: So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of things. People are starting to do a lot of research on attention span, right? And I don’t wanna go down too much that down that road because I don’t have any degrees in psychology or, you know, I teach computer science and cybersecurity. But I’ve watched a lot of content, and I don’t mean social media content, I mean research, where shows like Cocomelon, right, that we put our kids in...