Speaking
DIGITAL SAFETY IS PHYSICAL SAFETY
How the Four Principles of Jiu-Jitsu Protect You Online and in the Real World
The line between digital safety and physical safety no longer exists. When someone steals your identity, tracks your location through spyware, or hacks your home camera, they are not committing a digital crime and a physical one separately. They are committing one crime. And the principles that protect you on both sides are the same — because they come from the same place.
In this keynote, cybersecurity expert and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner Yesenia Yser draws on over a decade of incident response and eight years on the mat to show that the techniques that keep you safe in both worlds are identical. Through real stories — a domestic abuse survivor tracked through spyware on her own phone, a 10pm incident response call where staying calm saved the company, a brilliant engineer phished after a fourteen-hour workday — she walks audiences through four principles they can apply immediately on both sides of the threat.
The talk opens with a 2024 breach of Tea, an app built to help women warn each other about dangerous men. The metadata in leaked photos led strangers directly to women's home addresses. Women who were trying to stay safe received death threats at their front doors. A digital failure became a physical danger. That is the world we are living in now — and this talk gives audiences the tools to survive it.
What Audiences Leave With
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A new framework for understanding personal safety in a world where digital and physical threats are the same threat
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Four actionable principles drawn from cybersecurity and Jiu-Jitsu
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One concrete step per principle they can take within the week
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An understanding of how habits — not systems — are what protect you when it matters most
Best For
Women in tech conferences and ERGs, women's leadership and empowerment summits, cybersecurity awareness events for non-technical audiences, general public keynotes
Length:
Keynote - 10 to 15 min
Talk - 30 minutes plus Q&A
KNOW YOUR THREAT
Why Generic Safety Advice Is Leaving Women Behind — and What to Do Instead
Most safety content — digital and physical — is built for an average woman who does not exist. A one-size-fits-all approach to protection assumes everyone faces the same threats in the same way. They do not. A domestic violence survivor hiding from an abusive ex-partner needs completely different tools than a female founder with a public-facing brand, who needs different tools than a woman navigating a hostile co-parenting arrangement, who needs different tools than a content creator with a large online following. Generic advice does not protect any of them — because it was not built for any of them.
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In this talk, Yesenia Yser applies the first principle of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu — position before submission — to personal safety for women in leadership. You cannot defend yourself until you understand exactly where you are. Real protection starts with knowing your specific threat profile. Not someone else's.
Yesenia walks through five distinct threat profiles she has encountered in her work, each with a real story, a distinct set of risks, and a different set of tools that actually help. The talk includes a brief self-assessment so every woman in the room identifies her own primary threat profile and leaves with something specific she can act on — not something general she will forget by Monday.
What Audiences Leave With
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A clear understanding of why generic safety advice does not work — and what to ask for instead
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Identification of their own primary threat profile and the risks specific to it
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One protective action tailored to that profile to take within the week
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A framework they can use to help the women they lead, mentor, or support do the same
Best For
Women in leadership conferences, women's executive summits, ERGs, organizations supporting women in high-visibility or high-risk roles
Length:
Talk - 30–45 minutes plus Q&A
Workshop - up to 3 hours