Julian Dorey Podcast - 🫢 #72 - The Story Behind 4 Hackers, FIFA's Global Operating System, & The FBI; The Future of the Metaverse; Zero Days & The Looming Great Software Security Threat: Nick Castellucci

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Nick Castellucci is a software engineer and hacker. In 2013 and 2014, Nick and 3 partners successfully hacked into EA Sports’ FIFA Operating System to generate FIFA Coins at an exponential rate –��� making millions of dollars along the way. Following an FBI Investigation, he pleaded guilty to Wire Fraud and served no prison time. However, upon further review, the case appears to be a prime example of massive government overreach –– and the “crime” doesn’t seem to have been a crime at all. In this podcast, Nicks tells the story behind how it all went down. ***TIMESTAMPS*** 0:00 - Intro; Defense Attorneys and how they impact cases; NICK TELLS THE STORY OF THE FIFA HACK; How the FIFA Coin System worked; Nick’s earliest days as a hacker; How Nick and his fellow hacker team built bot accounts; The Law that the FBI used to charge them: CFAA; Julian wonders what about any of Nick’s actions was even illegal; The first way the FBI found out what they were doing; The difference between FIFA Coins and FIFA Points 46:39 - Why Nick left the hacking project behind a year early; Nick talks about how he and his co-conspirators opened up an LLC and hired an attorney right after starting the scheme; Nick reveals the second way the FBI found out about what they were doing (this will blow your mind); The difference between American Law and International Law as it pertains to this case; Nick explains why the case was very profitable for the government to take on; Why Seizures are such a windfall for the US Government; Nick describes the day the FBI came for him 1:03:56 - Privacy and Government capabilities to circumvent it; The Conundrum that is Jack Dorsey; Warrant Canary; Revisiting Facebook and Cambridge Analytica 1:21:58 - Facebook and the move to the Metaverse (under the new name, “Meta”); Nick explains how he believes the Metaverse will work; How will traditional real-world value like land and real estate work in the Metaverse?; Describes what a VR World will look like 1:39:04 - Nick and Julian debate Simulation Theory; The Ultimate Evidence to build The Simulation Theory Case: The Fourth Turning; Nick explains why there might *not* be meaning to life; Genghis Khan and X* J*nping; The subjectivity of good and evil; Laws packed with stupid add-ins; What Nick’s case and other circumstances say about the over-complexity of the law 1:57:16 - A society run by people who don;’t want to be sued; Nick explains the definition of “spin”; Nick and Julian watch a video from Australia and discuss what’s happening to their society during the Pandemic; The Left Right Position shift is in the midst of happening again? 2:26:14 - Nick explains what a Zero Day is and why Zero Days are the holy grail of hacking; Zerodium and white hat hacking payouts; Nick explains what Pegasus is and how some mobile malware is practically unbeatable once its distributor has your phone number; Julian brings up Sandworm by Andy Greenberg; Could Tesla be hacked?; Bitcoin talk; What if Satoshi was actually a government and Bitcoin its ploy?; Nick and Julian discuss whether Bitcoin is a currency or a store of value 2:56:20 - The end of Nick’s FIFA- FBI Case and where everything stands today ~ YouTube EPISODES & CLIPS: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

and then FBI comes knocking mm-hmm how'd that all go now it wasn't cool but imagine that was a morning they came they didn't kick my door down or anything but there was a lot there was a lot of them there just basically took my stuff said I'm not under arrest but they have a warrant so they had a warrant to search president take your hard hard drive all that so the computers things like that so once that happens you're looking at all the money bank accounts car yeah everything drove off with the car so you you knew where this was going oh yeah once they had gone in there yeah so now What's cooking everybody? I am joined in the bunker today by Mr. Nick Castellucci. Nick is a software engineer, a computer whiz,

and somebody who successfully hacked FIFA's global operating systems when he was 20 years old. More on that in a second. As a quick note, the second half of this podcast we talked about a variety of topics including the metaverse now we recorded this podcast about one or two days before facebook changed their name to meta and so for the first 60 seconds of that conversation when you hear us joking about well i wonder what facebook's going to change their name to that's why so besides that everything should be clean back to the main point though which is the whole fifa hack thing which is nick's wild backstory that was covered for the

entire first half of this podcast and i don't even know how to put this but just listen to what happened in this case because it became a federal case he was found guilty in federal court and what i'll say is that i thought i knew what he did before he came in here. Seemed pretty straightforward to me, like, okay, yeah, that's a crime. I did not. He explained it in its entirety. I made him go back a couple times to make sure we all understood it. But for what it's worth, my opinion clearly is that he did nothing wrong. I've talked to several people since I recorded this podcast getting worked up about it, and they agreed.

They're a lot smarter than me at this shit too. And it's a prime example of the government coming in and overreaching because they can. They used an archaic law that you'll hear about called the CFAA. And if you really look into that law, they can convict pretty much anybody who profits off of something on the internet that's violating any sort of terms of service of some sort of entity. Which, by the way, a lot of people, a lot of you listening right now have done in some facet. So that to me is crazy, but Hey, you guys listen for yourselves for yourselves. Is that a word yourselves, right? That's cool. Yeah. Listen for yourselves. And if you hear something that I don't let me know, I mean,

I could be wrong wrong but that's how I took it so I really thank Nick for coming in and sharing this story really really enjoyed this conversation I also am picking up this podcast maybe like 40 minutes in because we ended up talking for a very long time and I want to keep the podcast to around three hours so maybe I'll put up that bonus content on YouTube at some point. I'll figure that out because I thought the beginning of the conversation was really good too. But I wanted to make sure we got pretty close to the case to just get right into it. And yeah, hope you guys enjoy. That said, you know what it is.

I'm Julian Dory and this is Train Fire. Let's go. This is one of the great questions in our culture. Where's the nuance? You're giving opinions and calling them facts. You feel me? Everyone understands this, but few seem to do it. If you don't like the status quo, start asking questions.

I didn't know I wanted to do it, but I wonder if it was Tor that actually turned them on to it yeah i'm i'm not sure in that example but it makes sense because i read a story about government took down a pedophile ring um a bunch of people involved all these people go to court and their defense was like how'd you get this information and i think they got it from like it was like nsa or cia zero day type thing and the fbi the nsa or the cia i'm not sure which one it was told the fbi you gotta drop the case this is too valuable this is too valuable to us it must be so valuable that they were able to let 40 50 pedophiles in some ring go which is insane but this stuff does happen see and that's these are powerful tools oh that's so hard man yeah because on something like that we can all

agree that's disgusting oh Oh, my God. We know those people are out there. These are unwell people who do some of the most damage, disgusting damage you could ever do. But the collective precedent of that, unfortunately, on a grand scale across hundreds of millions of billions of people, potentially even outside this this country where our legislation could come into play for various reasons yeah it just on what i heard right there i have to actually look at that case but just on what you're saying right there yeah they they have to do that because the precedent of allowing a government to throw people in jail for something done illegally can't do that yeah and that that's just my recollection of it i might be getting some of the details wrong i did read that they had to drop the case i heard the fbi was actually upset about it i would think so like of course so yeah it's not

like they were like oh well we're just gonna keep this a secret and we're cool with it now they think that that was like very upsetting to them but i know it doesn't doesn't law and prosecution have some sort of term i think it's called like parallel construction where basically they find they'll find the evidence however they need to find the evidence in some cases and then they'll figure out how they could have got there legally and present that in court all right so parallel construction i'm reading off google occurs when the government learns of criminal activity through one source but then gives the information to a law enforcement agency to quote unquote reconstruct unquote the investigation so that the origin of the second investigation is different from the original source i think you just explained that perfectly yeah that legalese definition i think is we'll

find that we found this information maybe not above board or maybe we got it from somebody and they're not reliable of a witness or whatever let's figure out how to get this and it had a like diagram this in a perfectly rock solid legal way now that second one you just gave though that's fine where it's like oh we don't know about this source so let's try to back that's fine but it's also like i flew a drone over an american's house maybe and i mean i don't know if they do that they probably don't do that the first i'm sure they do the first the first end of it though that example that's where it's not right there. There's a huge, huge line there. When you are invading people's constitutional rights, okay, no good.

If you can, though, legally find a way to say, okay, we found the end result, but if we just took this asshole to the stand, they're going to say, well, he's a 12-time felon who's killed people. Why would we listen to him? Right. We need to find another way in. Then you do it, and you at least now have it's it's deductive reasoning you now have you know what the answer is it's out it's algebra now you solve let me figure out the equation to get me this answer i already have the answer yeah it's so it's so murky it's so murky murky in general in my like my opinion like i think uh

like as far as like all your when you're if you're if you need a defense you're hiring somebody that is just the best arguer there's an art to it more than an actual rock solid like like there's it's almost like who can tell the best story wins and it's like that's that's gonna make things by default not even across the board like if you don't have a lot of money if you're come from a poorer background it's just going to be harder to keep your freedom which is uh is pretty crazy to think about i have my friend jim diorio in here who is coming back in again who's had a crazy career he was a lot of different things he was high up in the fbi and his he was a case builder but one of his expertise was also interrogation he did a lot

of that internationally for the fbi called into stuff but he talks about the whole defense attorney thing and he's like dude i have sat there and made cases for five years on a motherfucker have him dead to rights and he's like he'd use one attorney as an example. He goes, this fucking guy gets in there. I listened to him in open court for an hour. And suddenly I think the guy might be innocent. And he's not, but he's like, that's how fucking good some of these guys are. Whereas you get some jerk off public defender.

It's like, yeah, good luck, fend for yourself. Yeah. The new Mitsubishi Outlander brings out another side of you. Your regular side listens to classical music. Your adventurous side rocks out with the dynamic sound Yamaha. Regular you owns a library card. Adventurous you owns the road with super all-wheel control. Regular side, alone time.

Adventurous side journeys together with third row seating. The new Outlander. Bring out your adventurous side. Mitsubishi Motors. Drive your ambition. Yeah, it's insane. It's all based on... It's like, I don't know, people complain a lot that rich people get off on crimes and things like that. That's how it's set up. Maybe it wasn't on purpose, but that's how it's used now i mean maybe when they invented these laws it wasn't they didn't foresee that or maybe they did but that's how it is i don't know what the solution is it's weird for me as a defense attorney and again it's like

a slippery slope kind of thing it's like well what's the nature of the crime there's certain things where you can look at a client who might be innocent it's like a good or might be guilty but it's like a good person and the crime's like not that bad it's like you're probably not gonna feel that bad getting them off like if you can but then there's other things like if you're representing a pedophile or something they have a right to defense that's why the legal system works and it's your job as a defense attorney to defend them yeah but like if you're an attorney with two daughters or something. How do you feel about somebody's clients?

Oh my god. I can't imagine. It's crazy to me. And I would love to talk to one about it. But some of these great all-time defense attorneys. I don't know. Did you see that recent doc on Netflix? It was like a miniseries.

It was another Cocaine Cowboys one. I might have caught an episode or two. Was it like a mini series it was another cocaine cowboys one um i might have caught an episode or two was it like a limited series type thing yeah yeah i think i might have seen some of it it was it was great i i made sure i watched that because i love that i love the original cocaine cowboys and everything but they had in there like the legal case that they were explaining where the two kingpins in miami when they went on this very public trial they had the greatest legal team of all time i mean they paid this team tens of millions of dollars and the one guy who was a very famous attorney who like he just died but you listen to him talk and you could listen to the guy talk all day he was john goddard's attorney among other people now he didn't get him off but he got

a lot of other people off right yeah yeah well there were a couple times he did i guess but at the end he didn't but you listen to this guy start breaking down how to argue this case and in this case he's talking about one from 20 years ago there were these two guys who were clearly drug kingpins and he's just got like that new york draw and he's brilliant and tough and he's just like so you mean to tell me that they did not report here on the on the first of march 1996 but you stand here in front of us saying it was march 7th do you see the problem and it's like you listen this you have to listen to him and you're like if i'm a jurist or a juror, I'm like, I like this guy. That's awesome.

They're innocent. But it's like, then again, that's one where it's like, well, yeah, you want to see those guys go to jail. Because they're bad people. They're doing bad shit. You know? So it's like, where do you draw the line? I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know. Because it works the same way the other way, too. Some prosecutors might be a lot more understanding than others some just want their conviction rate to be on 100 that's most of them not caring about the actual person involved in the case so i'd rather i'd rather have the money to pay for that defense attorney than than anything else i'm glad i'm glad there's a little pushback and you can, especially if you didn't kill anybody. Especially if you didn't kill anybody. I think if it's a crime where, you know, one-off thing.

I'm mostly speaking about myself, I guess. I was going to say, you have a lot of credibility to speak on this subject and actually i i like the whole story you had because you're a quote-unquote person who committed a crime where it was that kind of situation where if you're the defense attorney you're like all right this kid figured something out don't fucking do that again let's let's go argue this case but let's just get right into it because it's it's a wild fucking story and i know what i know from some press clippings and stuff but you and i obviously know each other through anthony and riley and baker and them yeah and I obviously know each other through Anthony and Riley and Baker and them.

Yeah. And I've just been, this is my first time like sitting down with you to talk about it. But if you don't mind, walk people through exactly what happened involved FIFA, but like what went on, who was involved, what your role was,

when this was just like general details. Yeah, sure. Um, I'll talk, I can talk about most of the stuff that I was involved what your role was when this was just like general details yeah sure um i'll talk i could talk about most of the stuff that i was involved with certain things i don't want to talk about because people died like you know there's a couple things i don't want to get into sure okay but i will say what but just very quickly and if this is something you can't touch don't touch it but like when you say people died yeah like they were killed as a result no no um it was like an accidental overdose before a sentencing and stuff like that okay so there's

other people yeah just out of respect for other people i don't know i'll get up but i could talk about me at least okay um yeah fifa that was i think i was i was still in college i think I was still in college. I think I was like a sophomore. And I was always involved with Xbox. That's how I got into programming, like video game, modding games, and things like that. What do you mean, modding games? Modding, yeah, like hacking Call of Duty to get all the guns. People would buy that when I was like 13, 14.

People would buy that stuff from you on forums and stuff. That's how I got into this. How do you do that? Back then, there was a way to edit the game. So if someone joined your lobby or whatever, you could use them up with all the... unlock all the stats for them through the game code. And you're doing that obviously through the computer connected to you're not doing that through your things you can do with your controller

in the game it's more like using your computer to upload modified code to xbox or whatever that's what we were doing back then yeah okay all right continue so anyway so then um that stuff was interesting i was i was still pretty young and then um i came across fifa and i was like well this doesn't make much sense i was like i seen that there was these websites where people were selling all these coins for fifa and i also like i was playing the game and i was like well i could play against the computer and it'll give me coins i don't even be playing against a person so i was like that's interesting like let's wonder if we could automate this oh so you only did I hear that right you could only get coins if you played

against other people no you could play against the computer and get coins so I thought that already is well no that's how that's how you got coins in the video game okay so like you would play the game against a computer they give you 500 coins but like i saw websites selling coins so like these coins clearly have some sort of intrinsic value i know they have no value in the ecosystem because it's not a rated m game and they can't promote gambling and things like that right so there's but people do want them to basically you go in the you get these coins you go in the store and you could buy like a messy for like two million coins it's like what was the thing when it's like a market like a stock market type thing ecosystem in the game what was the thing i'm and now i'm

blanking out how the fuck do i not remember the name of this game what's like the famous game everyone was fucking playing not oh um it was basically how they created nfts without calling them nfts you know i'm talking about yeah the game where there was like land starts with an f i think i can't think of it man fuck i'm sorry i should know that but there was they had skins that's what it was and people would buy the skins and so later when crypto kitty started in 2017 is like the quote-unquote first nfts yeah it was fortnite that's it oh they took the fortnite skins idea which i guess i'm trying to draw the line it's similar to what you're talking about here with fifa where you could just buy accessories or things like that to help you in the game they

had they had something called it was called fifa ultimate. That's what they had. Thank you. They had something called FIFA Ultimate Team where you could create your own team. And when you first started, you had shitty players. You had to build up to it. So you had to keep playing the game, keep getting coins, or keep opening packs of cards and getting new players but there was also a

market where if somebody like pulled a messy card out of a pack they opened they can list messy on the marketplace for whatever anybody was willing to pay so someone might list a messy for two million using that these sites came out where they would buy i guess fifa coins in bulk from people resell them on the marketplace and the way they would sell them is let's say you wanted to buy a million coins from me you list a shitty player that you have that you wouldn't get more than 500 coins for you list them for a million i buy them now you got a million coins and you paid me for basically the coins wait hold on that just twisted my brain yeah start from the i'm sorry to people listening but i gotta make sure i understand this for us to go on they had they basically

had a marketplace built into the game that you could use to move coins around okay so that's how people would get coins. And you said that there was like a messy card, for example. Yeah, or some great player that once you got his card, he'll be on your team when you play against other people. So like it's an advantage or whatever. But it was supposed to be like luck of the draw to get him in a pack. If somebody got him, there might only be like four messies in the whole ecosystem. So he'd be a high-valued player.

Somebody could put him up for two million coins and like it's like an auction yes then whoever had that many coins could buy them so these sites set up a system where if you wanted to buy a million coins from me you pay me then you list a crappy player for a million coins and i buy them now you have a million coins. So they didn't make, that's what I thought it was. So they didn't make it a straight shot because it was operating as like a third party system. They had to do it as like a wink wink underneath the table system.

Yeah. For the, for these third party sites. Yeah. So I want messy, messy cost 2 million coins. Now you need 2 million. Do you have to,

you need, I have zero. Yeah. You need 2 million coins. I have zero. So you go to these, you go to one of these sites, you pay them for the 2 million coins. Now, you need 2 million. Do you have 2 million? I have zero. Yeah, you need 2 million coins. I have zero. So you go to one of these sites. You pay them for the 2 million coins. You list a player in the marketplace.

Because they can't send you the coins on the site. They have to do it in the game. Okay, got it, got it. Yeah. You would tell them what player you listed, and they would buy them. Got it. So that's how that worked. So between seeing that you can make coins basically just by

playing against the computer so you don't have to be playing against other people and then a million coins was like 180 dollars for a million so that's it for a million coins yeah at the time um how easy is it to get a million coins in like by actually playing the game yeah that took probably months and you were only selling it for 180 this is what the websites were selling that's crazy i was selling them for eight dollars a million we're making a million coins a second yeah at the height of it okay so we just skipped ahead so that was how you guys did it so you guys started out slower than that but it got more efficient as time let's go back so here's you were saying that you had to play against the computer do it so you guys decided that you were going to go in and figure out that process. Yes. And how you get the game to give you the coins.

Okay. So eventually figured out like a proof of concept, went with, where there was three other people involved, went, went to one or two of them. And then the three of us ended up making the process more streamlined and efficient over time,

over like the course of like six months to where finally because initially we actually we had to make so basically basically we figured out that the more accounts we had the faster we could generate coins so like if every we had the advantage that we could start and end the game start and end the game in a second on one account and get like three four hundred coins because the idea of playing a game is just a construct based on how long the game takes we weren't playing the game so we would say hey fifa we started the game hey fifa we ended it so every time we started we ended it every time we would start and end it we would get coins they just pay you coins for playing the game yeah and three or four hundred coins yeah per account

so we figured all right if we expand horizontally we start making accounts i would just make accounts all day when you say you add them to the software and the software would play on them oh so you created a bot a bot it's all yeah it's a bot and so the bot was playing on xbox but were you playing on xbox through the computer because you created we wrote software that ran on the xbox wow yeah so you wrote software into a microsoft system yes what's what's the term for that besides bot uh had a modded xbox so the xbox was able to run unsigned code which is our code can't the server detect that when we first started there was no security then they started adding security to it they start like adding sign in the request so you had to figure out the crypto, you know, encryption and all that,

which then you had to captures. If you sent too many too fast, you'd get a capture, which aren't supposed to be able to be solved by software, but it wasn't a good one. That's where you have to get, like, the picture, and it says how many cars are in here. There was just, like, a little jumbled math equation,

like, 82 plus 36. You had to put the answer picture and it says how many cars there's just like a little jumbled math equation like 82 plus 36 you had to put the answer but it wasn't like it was like a gradient background it wasn't like a complex scene so like it was easy to extract the numbers and the math how do you develop code to do that uh that was that's like a graphics problem i'd say so it's we just had to just develop some code to id the the numbers in the in the uh little capture but that was yeah there was and there was some we had some good programmers working on it it was there were some smart guys how many people four and how did this all come together like were you guys just all friends on xbox and we're like oh fuck let's do it yeah we used to do the call duty stuff uh together i got into

gaming and and programming from halo we used to modding halo was big back in the day when i was like eight or nine um but you were modding at eight or nine that's when i modded my xbox i was eight yeah you figured out how to do that to your xbox at eight yeah i yeah it was it was tough but i figured it out i've just always been like curious that's amazing yeah man what was so like when you were eight or nine what was the let's talk in real idiot julian terms here what was the number of lines in a code that you were modding like how many it was more like i was finding mods online and using them okay so you weren't actually making them yet no i wasn't i was gonna say that's like that's insane no i no yeah i didn't get i'm i'm still not the best programmer

in the world but i'm pretty good so you then you found those things and then you're like all right let me teach myself how to do this too yeah yeah, I probably started programming when I was like 12 or 13, I'd say. But before that, I just thought it was cool and I wanted to try and figure out how people were doing it. I found websites where people were hosting their mods. You can download them and use them. So that's how I kind of got into the whole software engineering stuff. So then you've been doing this.

You've been doing it all legally per se and then in college for you guys total who all play call of duty together you're like oh shit this coin system on fifa's fucked we could find a way to we're using like an ec2 instance to do it or what was the what was the deal it was code it was running on the xbox it was just straight up your code initially eventually oh it was our code yeah initially it was straight up code that ran on the xbox eventually figured out how to get it to run on a server and yeah then we ended up doing that so when we moved to playstation because that was a whole they all the markets were different i know we were expanding like we were a startup company. That's fucking hilarious. Stupid in hindsight. Okay, though.

It's a good story now. You were starting it just on the Xbox, and then you said you were going to the server. Does that mean that when it was just on the Xbox, you had to be at all times doing it yourself and running it yourself because the server is not running it automatically the Xbox was we just launched the program and it would just start going through it just sifted yeah it was just go through the loop

that's fucking crazy yeah it was cool yeah I was I thought it was interesting So how long before you moved to PlayStation? So I was involved with it for about, in total, it was like summer of 2013. We started working on it. And then by fall of 2014, I was out of it completely. Oh, you left. A year early, yeah. You just totally left. Mm-hmm.

Advice of counsel. That made me leave. Okay, hold on a minute. Let's of counsel. Made me leave. Okay, hold on a minute. Let's back up. Yeah. So you did it for like 14 months, 15 months, something like that? Mm-hmm. It was on Xbox.

And then how many months on PlayStation before you left? Probably like five or six. Now when you did this, let's go back to the system. So the system was it would play all these games at a high rate to collect coins. Yeah. Then where did the coins go? Did they go to one account? Guys, use that link in my description along with the code TRENDIFIER at checkout.

That's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R. And get your own 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover. It is an absolute game changer. My bed's a queen. So I ordered it in queen size. You can get it in King. If your bed's a King size, it essentially goes right on top of your current mattress. And it ties in directly to eight sleeps proprietary app, which measures things throughout the night, including your BMI, your body temperature, and a whole bunch of other stuff that, as I always say, you don't want me talking about because I'm not qualified, but it is absolutely incredible essentially throughout

every single night we have different stages of our sleep you and I don't know what they are because we're busy trying to sleep but as those things happen and progress you can get deep sleep or you can get light interrupted sleep eight sleep helps adjust as those stages change to make sure that you stay in a deep sleep and you don't get up in the middle of the night or feel restless. And when you wake up in the morning, most importantly, you feel like you slept eight hours, even if you only slept six. So use that link in my description along with the code trendifier at checkout. Again, that's T-R-E-N-D-I-F-I-E-R and you will get $100 off your own 8 Sleep Pod Pro cover today. Check it out.

You won't regret it. Yeah, so at the end of the day, so what would happen, and this would happen even right after we first started, because there had to be abnormal activity that they could see, like this guy played 8,000 games today. That doesn't make sense.

They would start banning the accounts after 24 hours. So we used to have accounts that we generated all the coins on, and then we had one main account. At the end of the day, all the generator accounts would kick everything over to the main account. So it would send the coins. The same process that they used to sell the coins on these third-party websites, we basically did. Oh, you did that yourself. Yeah, the main account would list X amount of player cards for however much money each account had in them and we kick it over how many total accounts did you guys have at the height uh we're running about what about 4 000.

I think it's big and then I'm just doing a little math in my head because eventually we got the software to create accounts automatically. And then once that happened, it exponentially kind of grew. It's big, but it's not big enough to not be caught. Because if you're doing that every 24 hours where there's a massive sending of coins and irregular buys, so to speak, where prices are like, yeah, it's a lot of whack, and it's the same account stealing it same accounts doing it i don't know four thousand is enough in the context of the global fifa community to not be able to say wait a second there's a real small percentage focused in this one niche right there you know yeah i mean we also like we weren't really trying to hide it either like we

had an llc and i paid taxes like pay like 650 in taxes that year did you so I mean did you know that this was like were you looking at it like this is illegal or were you looking no I was looking at it like no one's ever been prosecuted for it before and it has happened so I figured it had happened there's been like botting and yeah software botting and things like that I mean if you look at like sneaker industry the ticket selling industry there's bots everywhere i don't yes and and even in even in certain i was there was things from years ago there was botting i did years ago where botting wasn't in the terms of service so the company had to pay out like there's been instances of that so i was like okay i'm i'm aware that i'm

breaking the terms of service of ea sports i was aware of that but i didn't think it was anything i can go to like jail possibly for or get charged criminally i just thought it was like i got i got like a cease and desist from activision over call of duty yeah i thought i was gonna get one of those and i'll be like okay that's it's it. All right, wait, wait. Real quick sidebar. Cease and desist for Call of Duty. What did that consist of? Meaning like you're not allowed to play this game anymore?

No, stop hacking it. Basically, yeah. Because now I'm actually thinking, and we're going to get to it. Like this is a real interesting timeline. So we're going all over. But I want to make sure I actually understand. I apologize for that. No, no, this is good.

It's like a complex thing. But at the end of the day, we can make it simple. So I want to make sure. I apologize for that. No, no. This is good. It's like a complex thing. But at the end of the day, we can make it simple. So I want to make sure we do that. Yeah. I'm actually kind of wondering now how this is illegal. And I've never thought about that when I thought about this story. Because you were breaking the terms of service. The terms of service are not law.

Exactly. They are the terms of service of terms of service are not law exactly they are the terms of service of that private entity which if you break them they reserve the right and absolutely can tell you to off and you're not allowed to play this anymore but how can they in a system that already exists technically like the whole selling on the secondary market of coins how can they prosecute you or go to the FBI and say prosecute these guys if you're technically just getting paid coins by a computer using a loophole it's not like how is that against the law so they there's a big law that came out after uh during the bush administration the cfa no the computer fraud and abuse act no yeah a computer law during the bush administration that's the big one that

one is like it's a felony to log into someone else's facebook it's a very general broad law really oh yeah yeah it's just like they don't catch 99 of the people that break this law because it's broken probably a lot but they were ea sports didn't go to fbi it was the other way around there was somebody who told them about what we were doing and they got tipped off to that and then they went to ea sports with it like hey this is going on someone told the fbi what you guys were doing yeah no it wasn't one of the four no so who the fuck knew what you were doing a guy we were giving coins to that um he was selling some of them in the very early stages of it and then he got he got in some trouble and i guess

it looked bad because he was having all this money and then he was getting paid from china and he got trouble hacking so they and he was like 17 18 years old so i could see why he'd be like no it was fifa coins it wasn't what you think it was oh so he got in trouble himself and had a legal shit storm yeah and so he then said i have information let me snitch right okay i'm still trying to wrap my head around this though because i what was the name of that law again the cfa the cfaa the computer fraud and abuse act a law let's see here computer fraud and abuse act we are literally going to wikipedia people so do your own research on this because sometimes this isn't exactly right. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 is a United States cybersecurity bill that was enacted in 1986 as an amendment to existing computer fraud law.

I'm not going to list off what these laws are called, which had been included in the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. The law prohibits accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization. Prior to computer-specific criminal laws, computer crimes were prosecuted as mail and wire fraud, but the applying law was often insufficient. The original 1984 bill was enacted in response to concern that computer-related crimes might go unpunished. The House Committee report to the original computer crime bill characterized the 1983 techno-thriller film War Games, in which a young teenager from Seattle breaks into the U.S. military supercomputer program to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war and unwittingly almost starts World War III as a, quote, realistic representation of the automatic dialing and

access capabilities of the personal dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer holy shit they used a movie as grounds to make a fucking law i mean it's not in a way it's not crazy but still that's fucking nuts that that happened right so i guess what i'm understanding now it's it's really the second sentence i I believe. Which one? The law prohibits accessing a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization. So the terms of service... Excess also, it seems like it's at their discretion. That's what I'm saying. Do the terms of service identify excess? I couldn't tell you.

I knew I was breaking the terms. I didn't think I was breaking the law. Because I looked at it from the standpoint of usually when you commit a crime, especially white collar crime, there's like a restitution based on who was hurt and how much they lost financially and things like that. But FIFA coins didn't have any value. They were just traded in the game. And there was no, the people set the prices on it, not EA Sports. Like EA Sports, you can just trade them, trade them up. There was no actual dollar figure associated with it and they didn't get me for that either even when i was

prosecuted all right we're gonna get there i just have to pick apart each little thing here because there's parallels to it yeah so you creating these coins it's like a currency system when currency when they print a lot of fucking money suddenly a dollar is not worth nearly as much. It's inflation. So effectively, based on the fact that these coins that you had that then were sellable on a secondary market and then were brought back into the game by people to be able to buy things within the game, they created a much larger supply of coins. So to fault FIFA here, they set up a bad system because they created a system where all people had to do was participate and it printed more money. So coins – the price of coins was exponential. Yeah, but they also don't – they don't sell the coins themselves.

And these third-party sites I guess are technically also in violation of some – probably copyright. It shouldn't be allowed to sell FIFA coins. EA Sports sold FIFA points, which were points you could buy. And it was like a point was equivalent to like if a deck of cards, like a pack of cards, you could buy like card packs. They'd have players in them just like going to like the store and getting them. If a pack of cards was 10,000 coins, it was like 200 FIFA points. So you could buy FIFA points just like you buy nba live points or

you buy whatever from them or this or game stop or whatever there's like there's little cards that you could buy to load up your accounts they sold fifa points i was dealing with fifa coins which are just a games currency they sold points which basically were a stronger version of the games currency that they could sell because they if they could just sell coins i would think they would all right i i got you and now it makes sense but still fuck fuck the points for a second yeah let's stay with the coins yeah because when people use the coins to buy like them by messy and let's keep using that example as you did that is a a value in the game. There's an intrinsic value to that. They are willing to pay for it. So even if the coins are only sold for

monetary value on a third-party market, and therefore FIFA doesn't put a monetary value on them, there is an intrinsic value to them. And there's also a value of it took time to earn them. Yeah. So you had to spend a lot of time. That's money in a way. For sure. But the thing is, how do you prove in a lot of time that that's money in a way for sure but the thing is how do you how do you prove in a court of law how much they of one fiva coin equals to in value you don't which is why i thought i was good because i and they weren't able to do that that i had i had restitution it was way less than what was made during the thing like they

weren't able to do that they weren't able to prove it oh well you cost us x in damage they the damage that they said i caused was based on how much they paid engineers trying to fix it not how much coins i took to fix their own flawed product yeah which was never fixed but that's all right and there's so much there's so much there's so much here like for example they said they said they spent like 66 000 dev hours i said you have were people working on this on a time machine in a time machine how many years is 66 000 hours it's like what do you mean how many years is 66 000 oh god i don't even know it would be one year is what 24 times 365 i guess my math is fucked right now but all right call one year it's not but call it 24 times 365 is that why am i like totally blank i'm just gonna do it real quick yeah thank you 8,760 8,760 on here and you60 hours. Yeah, one year.

And you don't think they spent 66,000 dev hours on it? Considering I was only in business for eight months or a year, I don't think so. Well, think about it. They must have had, if they had whole teams on it. Yeah, if they, you don't think they'd have a team of 10 people on that minimum working on it for working on anything that could be related to it for a year? I don't know. I think it was fixable. I think you're underestimating your work. I think it was fixable too. on it for working on anything that could be related to it for a year i don't know i think

it was fixable i think you're underestimating your work i think it was fixable too but i think you guys found a fucking brilliant system that they just had never considered which they should have and this is my point with saying put the points aside for the second and focus on the coins which technically have no monetary value but because you were cheating time you then you printed more coins into the system at a rate that was so ridiculous that if let's say you started the system on january 1st right by july 1st if on january 1st a messy was selling for 2 million coins based on the amount of coins that you are putting into the system on a daily basis and i'm just guessing here inflationary right that same messy thing is going for 4 million coins by july because there's so many more coins but that's the thing

though they no one knew how many coins are in the system it's different it's different to at least with at least with other forms of inflation you can can say like, oh, Ethereum added X amount of coins into the ecosystem and we can see this based on the ledger and mining and we can see how many coins are in play. Couldn't see that with FIFA coins. There was no thing that said like there's currently 20 trillion coins in circulation. There wasn't any of that it was just based off of how many people had you didn't know how many other people had that was the whole thing you didn't know how many coins other people had supply and demand though so that messy example you were saying there could be like four that fifa has total in existence right so

they cap supply on that if someone's selling it for 2 million coins here before your system starts and they don't get a ton of offers and then they finally get one through. Now, if there's a lot of coins in the ecosystem, there's more people who are going to have more and they're going to be able to make offers. So as the offers come in faster in the future on something like that, the price goes up. So then someone says, fuck it. I'll sell it for five and it gets sold. I'm with you. I'm with you now. Yeah.

And after a while, that happened to an extent because it was the coins that were being sold on the site started to go down in price. So I saw that. And that was because I think that was because they had so many. So like the sites start getting, having too many coins to deal with. The sites actually used to have a function where you could sell coins to the site the same way you would buy them.

And that's what we did in the beginning when we were at like a lower scale. You could sell a million coins to the site for 120. They would sell them for 180. So you can go both ways with it too and then that started dropping and dropping and eventually they cut selling out because they didn't need them because they were just getting them well we ended up just dealing with one single person who was buying four billion a day holy yeah it got to and he would supply all the websites

i'm still trying to think about how this is. What do we see in society all the time? Someone legally, not an insider trade here, right? Someone legally figures out something. Let's use the housing market guys from like 06, 07 who made the bet. They saw what was happening. They access data that's available and they use that data to profit the only difference i can spot here is that you guys broke a terms of service

of a company again that's not a law i'm still very and this wasn't yes you were selling it on a third party market that they don't regulate unfortunately I still can't find the crime here now the crime was the CFAA law that says we what's that second sentence say it says the law prohibits accessing a

computer without authorization or an excess of authorization we didn't have authorization to build our own client to interface with their software. But do you see – That's their argument. I think it's kind of murky, but that's their argument. When you say someone logs into a Facebook, for example, and that's a felony underneath this law. Yeah.

You don't have the authorization to log into someone else's facebook i could under this law yeah because when you first said that i panicked for a minute and then i realized anytime i've done it was with somebody i was working for where i had authorization where they type there's a trail of it they text me here's my account here's my password please go in and post this whatever okay so that's fine but if i figure out someone's password which i've never done but i guess people can find a way to hack and do that and i log in that's fine. But if I figure out someone's password, which I've never done, but I guess people can find a way to hack and do that, and I log in, that's a felony. That makes sense to me. You are invading – it's like invading someone's virtual house in that way.

You are seeing things and you can change things and access things that should be solely up to them. When you are just using something to your advantage where it was not it also wasn't they had nothing to stop it they they set up nothing to stop it they also had clearly nothing in the terms of service that directly pointed to this instance they may have had broad language in there that said you can't do x y or z which is fine they could throw you out for that but you just found a hole in the system to profit off of yeah i'm not saying that like this is morally the greatest thing to do i'm not sitting here calling you like the second coming of the pope but i'm saying yeah in the grand scheme of things like i i thought it was relatively harmless they and you gotta think too there's money comes into play and everything.

So, and this is as far as I know. So I stopped. I stopped early. I won't get into that yet, but I stopped early. But I got hit with a certain restitution fee. It's like $507,000 I had to pay. Now, how much money did you make? Like $1.4 million. So you made out profit.

Well, they took everything when they came anyway. That's what I was about to say. I owed EA Sports $507. My guys that kept going ended up owing, I think, $2 million in total. But $20 was made. So EA Sports got $2 total. And the FBI keeps the rest. So I get it. It's money talks at the FBI keeps the rest. So I get it.

It's money talks at the end of the day. It's a profitable case. We were doing everything above board, paying taxes, showing where the income was coming from. But that was all just ammo for the case. It was an easy case. I mean, it's just money talks i think is the the reason why it's illegal is because they made out pretty well off it in my opinion dude this is this is not

this is not where i thought this was going i'm just i'm like really i'm sorry i'm very tongue tied on this right now because i was i was just thinking about this entirely wrong like I was just saying. But I think maybe the best way to go about this to get me better understanding exactly how this went down and how they used this law was when you started to be like, oh, fuck. And then – because I didn't know this part either. You voluntarily removed yourself in the situation like a full year before these guys left so yeah you said it was summer 2013 into fall 2014 and so call it 14 15 months you then abruptly leave after hiring counsel i think you said how did you make a decision to hire counsel and what

put your guard up going holy this might be something that they could charge us with um my lawyer was a federal he's canada county federal prosecutor for about 25 years so he knew he knew how that stuff worked on the other side what's his last name uh ciprone okay it's not i was thinking of somebody else but okay go ahead yeah um so yeah he at his advice i i left early but how did you retain like what made you decide to retain him um the so even from the very beginning uh the guy who i talked about earlier got in trouble was something unrelated. The kid who gave you guys up?

Yeah. He had my bank account linked to his PayPal. So when he would sell coins, he would just withdraw. That's how we were doing it in the beginning. He would withdraw to my account and the other three guys' accounts. Wait, he would withdraw money directly from your account? Yes, I think back then on PayPal, you could just link whatever banks you wanted to the PayPal account. So he was just...

She gave him access. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Made an account, gave it to him just for that. That account got frozen when he got in trouble. That's how you found out he got in trouble? I got counsel, yeah, because he went ghost. Once that happened, and this was, like, within the first two months of us starting,

I got counsel back then, so end of 2013. Just because I was nervous about not wanting to be involved in his stuff. So he got caught early. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Early into our process. So he didn't give you guys up for a long time. I don't know. I'm assuming that the wheels of justice are just slow.

So I'm assuming it took a few years. What they do, too, is they'll sit and just let the money go up, too. Makes sense on their part. You don't want to catch a drug dealer after his first weed out sale. You want to get him when he moves up to pounds. You know what I mean? That's the same philosophy. Okay.

So he gets caught early on. You see that account freeze. You get an attorney. Did you tell him everything you were doing at the time uh yeah i believe so but you still continued doing this for nine ten months whatever yeah was he telling you from start stop um i talked to a few people about it including him uh most people honestly it's not no fault of their own i mean a lot of them didn't understand really what was going on because this is an area that's relatively new even to lawyers

you know especially if that's you don't do cyber security law specifically most uh i'm assuming most defense attorneys don't wouldn't have known maybe back when this happened maybe they're more you know up to date now on things and also no one was ever really prosecuted for this before you didn't look for a cyber security expert defense attorney though no okay no i uh i was happy with somebody that was on the other side of the fence for okay many years um and he honestly looking back everything ended up working out okay for me personally but yeah um no and i didn't it was funny though like we would one of the guys retained a lawyer for the business like a cyber security guy um he reached out we reached out to the fbi saying like like in the early saying like yo

if this is an issue let us know no way oh yeah many times so we never got a response though they said they're not in the business of informing people when they're committing crimes what that's what they told me but that's like walking into a police station and saying i am considering going to do x we're already doing it we're already doing either way yeah this is starting can you please tell me if i'm doing something wrong and then them being like no we'll tell you if if we decide it's wrong later yeah yeah i – That's fucked up, man. Holy shit. Yeah. This did not go how I thought this was going to go. This whole – wow.

Yeah, I wasn't in the basement with the hood on. No. Typing away. It wasn't like that. No, this was like open – this was literal open source. Like, hi, hello, we are open for business. Can you please tell us if our story looks good? Yeah, I mean we also – it's not like we were exactly putting ourselves out there, but we were in circles in this FIFA coin industry talking to websites and things like that. And you got to think too. In a lot of other countries, there's no jurisdiction for this. No. And the government – even the government here is not going to waste time trying to extradite somebody over a video game so not did other governments though have an issue with your case when it came up and asked for justice

on their own homelands too no no anybody that was outside the U.S is fine on this there's people in the UK and obviously China oh wait so there were other outside of you for coin coin buyers buyers were fine. Yeah. I would think buyers are fine. They're just buying what's available on the market. But if one of you had been located in the UK... But if buying is fine, why isn't selling fine? I agree.

But I think... Because they ended up squashing all of it. I know they got us for the generation of it. That's what I'm saying. And how we were acquiring them. Yes. But the whole thing ended up being shut down. You'd be hard pressed

to find a reputable site selling them now how do they even shut that down if it's outside there oh because people basically were like oh let's not with this it might have been that because i i remember hearing that the one of the bigger sites at the time when fifa 2014 came out so like we got done this process right at the end of 13 fifa 13. i think that i heard the guy made like 2 million on launch day on fifa 14 that ran one of the bigger coin sites so he made it was very profitable and he made a rake obviously like every deal that goes through, he gets a small percentage. That kind of deal. No, it was people buying coins from the site.

Oh, because he collected all the coins. How was he collecting the coins? There were several different vulnerabilities. So he was using that. Or he knew people were supplying him that were using it. Yeah, there was like an item duplication glitch i remember we weren't using where you could do things a certain way sell the item it would appear back in your in your inventory and then if you said if you did that 10 million times you'd have millions of coins and people were

automating stuff like that and no one else ever got prosecuted for this to your knowledge um not not directly some of the people involved in that other case with the person that um informed the fbi on us but he was some people were doing that in fifa 11 fifa 12 and it was just a part of this story it wasn't like the main story but they said that i read that like they, oh, he's doing this and that. They were doing this FIFA stuff back in FIFA 11, FIFA 12. Different to how we were doing it, but nobody directly I didn't see. They didn't get prosecuted. No, no, not before me.

What the fuck, man? Holy shit. So I wonder if the coin site you were talking about, however he came into possession of those coins, whether it was him doing the actual breaking terms of service or he was just buying off people who did that he therefore has no liability for because he doesn't know how they got it. He's just buying it. That's where I think the buyer thing is a little different, whereas if you're selling it and you produced it, you knew what you were doing relative to the terms of service. But maybe the people there who supplied him, if they were indeed caught, maybe they never were. But I would assume it was catchable unless they were going way above and beyond what you guys were doing. If they were caught, maybe they live somewhere else and there isn't a law like this. Yeah, that's likely what it is.

I mean especially in places like China, intellectual property law is very different from here. There's fakes out there for everything and they're legally sold here. So I know that IP law is a little different out there and that probably applies to a lot of these places, these other countries other countries the law isn't the same this is a very broad law that you have up on the screen behind me were you guys using to do all this were you using like a vpn and stuff um i think eventually but they also had like chat logs and stuff yeah so i mean it's not great nah they all they had all that kind of stuff so you early on you i'm just going back and around here this is like a lot to handle so listeners just stay with me but early on you get the attorney you're in it once again for

nine ten months after that that's when it got exponential like the money started going up as you went along and then eventually you did decide to leave and you decided to leave relatively speaking very early compared to the other people who stayed in so what made it change for your attorney to go get the fuck out this is against the law um don't really want to talk about it okay some uh some information came up okay fair enough yeah okay so whatever it was attorney tells you to get out did you have the conversation with the other three where they then tried to get you to stay in or were they just yeah but at the same time it's like oh sad to see you go but now we'll chop your 25 up wow so i mean i nah but it was we left on good terms so it wasn't anything like that did you live in fear of this after that before it i mean as soon as the other kid

got in trouble early but my my thing was i really didn't think this i didn't understand how everything worked back then um you're 20 years old yeah i didn't understand how everything worked back then. You're 20 years old. Yeah, I didn't understand that about sitting on it and letting it grow. And then I didn't know a huge percentage of federal fundings from seizures, like seizing assets. I didn't know any of this stuff back then. So I was still concerned, not living in fear, but I was concerned. But I also didn't think over a video game at the time that this would become a big legal problem. So a year goes by after you leave.

That's what it was? It was almost exactly a year, yeah. And then FBI comes knocking. How'd that all go down? It wasn't cool. I would imagine that was a morning they came they didn't kick my door down or anything but there was a lot there was a lot of them there just basically took my stuff said I'm not under arrest but they have a warrant so

they had a warrant to search president take your hard drive all that so the computers things like that so once that happens you're looking at all the money bank accounts car yeah everything drove off with the car so you you knew where this was going oh yeah once they had gone in there yeah so now because you didn't serve any prison time or anything like that like what did you did they just want you to rat on the other guys or they already had that though yeah they had it and everybody else um besides my one buddy who passed uh everybody else took the deal the plea deal so right away it was just like all right here's the deal we got you red-handed it was also as you said earlier a good case for them because they made money so it's like and when and you know like when they come for you they already got you it's not no most people don't most people don't fight

fbi cases and most people don't win at federal cases so once they come there's any any lawyer should tell you like don't don't attempt to don't attempt to fight them that's what jim said he's because i asked him about that i said what about these you know your job is to make a case they don't hand you something and say all right see if the guy's innocent like yeah your job is to make the case do you how much do you stay up at night worrying about what if we're just making a case and this person's innocent and he said in the fbi i worked in not that long yeah not that much not that much and i said why and he said because frankly once it gets to our desk it's it's more than where there's smoke there's fire it's like there's a fucking fire burning down the forest here just fucking make the case right so again i know

there's exceptions to that but still i guess technically and i haven't read this law nor am i the guy who needs to read that and interpret it. I'm not a lawyer. But I guess it sounds like the way you're explaining it, they did have some sort of quote-unquote loophole explanation within this very broad act, we'll call it, that they could put something here on you but what it seems like to me is is once it was brought to their attention to fifa's attention a the fbi had already decided oh this is quick easy money and b and maybe they didn't think like that but it was and b then once fifa saw it they just wanted blood period because they're like we just feel wronged and so they were incentivized to say whatever you got to throw at him throw at him and you guys were prosecuted for something to me that in my mind as i'm now looking at this is not a criminal offense it's it's again it's not your ethics aren't exactly

like the greatest but you know you're a fucking 20 year old kid doing something funny and you didn't you technically didn't i don't think you hurt anyone besides fifa who had to spend those pay for those hours to fix this when in the first place they should have had it fixed ahead of time that is literally what and we'll talk about hacking culture too if you don't mind we'll get there but like that is literally how this works. You see a lot of quote unquote, I guess, white hat hackers, they call them. Yeah. Their job is to go out there and they make it their job to go out there and identify flaws in a system. And then they go to the company that has the flaws and say, look here.

And then what do they do? Do they say, you know what? Out of the goodness of our heart, we're going to fix it for you. No, they don't. They charge them to fix it or the company hires a full team to fix it they pay money that's what it is how is this different i don't see the only difference here is that you guys didn't go to fifa and say you have a flaw here you just fucking profited off of it yeah it's that's i guess the uh the morality part i have done responsible disclosure disclosure since then

though in a limited capacity there's there's websites like hacker one where a bunch of businesses are signed up and they have a whole terms you can try and find flaws and this this this this this and then they pay out for those flaws based on how severe they are so you do that yeah i haven't done in a few years but yeah wow now i mean like the people you were involved with, you met them all online? Mm-hmm. So you didn't know any of them in person? No. And then that's pretty much how this culture works online with what you just talked about, too.

It's not like, oh, you know, me and my buddy are going to go hack together here. You go find people that are interested in the same shit you are, wherever they are in the world, and you work on it. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm so curious about this world. I'm so curious about this world. I'm so curious about this world, man. It's like I didn't, I was never in it.

I was never anywhere close to it. I never coded. I took a coding class junior year of high school. I mean, I think he gave me an A just because he gave everyone an A, but I had no fucking clue what I was doing. You know, it's just like to be curious at a young age like you were and use the resource of the internet in the 2000s too and it's not like you're using it today where there's fucking everything yeah it's awesome but yeah and that

was an interesting place when it when it first came out i'm trying to think of the first time i used it maybe maybe in the 90s i was like it was yeah i guess if i was seven or eight when i did the xbox stuff it had to be before that yeah internet's a cool place it is you can find whatever you want now especially nowadays like you said and that's the whole thing it's like where do they draw the lines around this stuff one thing we kind of ignored and i don't we'll see how long this goes because there's so much to unpack here for people listening right now i don't know where i'm going to pick up this podcast maybe we'll pick it up right from the beginning if we go for a really long time i

might pick it up like a half hour in you know so that's not like a four hour podcast or anything so if this didn't come up on the actual podcast you and i were at least talking about like hinting around that 2000s and the the government agency access that started to happen there and the things that like edward snowden unpacked which had to do with stellar wind and basically privacy the internet has given the ability for people like you to hone skills like this and profit off of it to me the line between where profitability is legal and illegal to say nothing of different jurisdictions and different and places countries that you're doing it from where it's all different but the line between what is legal and not legal is so fucking blurry. And also our government and none of the governments in the world follow it themselves at all.

Yeah. You know, I have a guy who I can't, people are going to have to take this at face value of a fucking he said, she said, because I can't say where he is or what he does. But it's a guy who would know, who discussed something similar that you were talking about where he said there is literally a button it's not that simple but call it a button where anything that is needed that the government wants to get from these companies in data they can get it any like all these things that you said all these things around us that listen to us our phone alexa whatever anything you've ever said is technically available he said where it is not applicable is in a court of law so they can't bring it that way but they can use you were talking about like that parallel what was that reconstruction yes they can use that to then try to figure out so if people

and we've all by the way the amount of data that they have of people saying something that could be taken out of context, it's every single person on planet Earth. So if I'm sitting here right now and my phone's on airplane mode, so maybe that exempts it, but my computer's not, so it's listening. And I say, in this podcast studio, we're building a nuclear bomb. Right now, that just heard me, and that's in the system forever yeah but like if they ever went to look at that i mean it's provable that that's not what was happening here i also am going to be putting this on the internet so you can go watch the full contest of the podcast but people who aren't it's probably provable it's still scary that they can do that and so like i even look at a situation like yours where you're quote-unquote hacking

into a system against terms of service and i'm wondering if the government was making this case and you hadn't told them about it because you guys were even open about it and asked them for it but like let's say you hadn't like what they could have used to just openly go in there and it's slam dunk and no one questions it in court yeah i mean i guess it all depends on how well they can search through that amount of data too i'm curious about that part of it i know they collected a lot of it but i don't know i don't know how easy it is to sift through what about machine learning though yeah you can probably have but you gotta think it's every person in the country

it's like that's a lot it's a lot but like you need a strong computing back end to the process every person's every day like audio for example that's i don't even know i don't know if we're i mean i'm sure if we're there they're the closest to it if we're almost there but i don't know if they're quite i don't know if they're quite there yet. So forget the mics. Just think of the mic on the computer right now. So not our mics, but this one right here. Yeah.

When I say this sentence, I just pronounce that somewhat normally. Yeah. When I say this sentence, you're saying that the technology is not in a place where it can – the AI reading that can openly read that sentence and no i just 100 said that no i think they could do that i think that you'd have to extrapolate the computing power you would need for every person in the country for them to be able to process this in any reasonable time frame the thing about if they like they think about getting every audio feed that they have access to every single day

they might not find out you said that for months you know what i mean but they might eventually though yeah it all depends on how these if these systems are already in place and how they work i know that that's probably their goal if somebody my goal if i was them if someone was sitting at the nsa though right now i know they do have this power, and if I'm wrong, tell me, but from what I've researched, they do. If they happen to be typing in keywords right now and they typed in nuclear bomb – That's what they – I saw Snowden, that documentary where they were doing that. Yes. Yeah.

So they could do that. They can do that. So it's not – what you're saying is like if they're not actively in there right now searching for this thing and you don't happen to be saying that thing they're searching for okay but you said in the past that's a lot to go find that yeah i think maybe it's more of like if if you were either one of their targets or you were like another agency like the fbi's target and they went to the nsa and was like hey you got anything on this guy and then they go let's pull up his let's pull up his file and process it and see what's in there and that's what i'm more concerned about because like the average schmo who doesn't come in the crossfire of anything that the government would

be interested in you know it's the principle on privacy right and what could happen if like someone wanted to target target you but for the people who are getting targeted like when you hear people make the argument why do you care about privacy if you're not doing anything wrong it's because wrong is subjective and they they have these means like you just talked about to look at you even if you're not doing it yes that's the problem if they have something against the way you think what just an opinion you have that's not a crime and there are certain people that decide we want to in the government and they're like we want to suppress that this is where people put on the tinfoil hat with the cia and stuff and like i can't look at them and say hey you're

definitely wrong i mean they're probably when they go to certain scopes that they do like that they're responsible for fucking everything yes that's probably not the case but yeah could i could i see diversion tactics being used for that sure do i wonder about who goes behind the scenes man in a black hat and says certain things i do like i look at jack dorsey i'm a i'm a moderate fan of jack dorsey yeah That said, and I'll give context here. When I saw him in front of the congressional panels last year in front of a guy I don't particularly like, Ted Cruz, I watched Ted Cruz body bag him and I was rooting for it because I'm like, he's got him. He's spot the fuck on here. What was the context the context was when they were it started with like the whole Hunter Biden story with the New York Post where they suppressed that on Twitter

and we've seen unconscionable censorship on all these platforms agreed and Twitter as well and I see Jack Dorsey in that situation sitting there he's a smart guy clearly knowing he has no case to argue against Cruz other than by by the way, they are technically allowed to do this because the laws allow them to do it. They're a private business. Right. And someone like Ted Cruz, by the way, runs into a hypocritical argument here because his whole stance is like a streamlined Southern conservative is government nowhere.

Well, how would you fix this? You would fix it by using the government. You'd have to loop them in. So which one is it here, Ted? Right. So that's where I'm like, well, that's the flaw flaw in your argument but the argument itself about suppression of speech he's killing dorsey on this and yet jack dorsey is the same guy who openly sits in front of the bullets and takes them and he's he knows he knows he looks bad in there yeah he's the same guy who allows his

platform to de-platform all these people and censor speech that goes one way that they don't particularly like and it's not ridiculousness and yet he's also the same guy who advocates and has been since fucking day one almost things like bitcoin from a libertarian perspective a liberal libertarian perspective of open-source tech for people to utilize to take control of their own life and he's also advocating and trying to build blue sky here which solves all those problems and would take away his quote-unquote I'm gonna put that in big air quotes I'm landing the plane here his power to de-platform people on a platform like Twitter by creating a better one where he can't do That he's doing all these things that fly directly in each other's face.

It's like hypocritical. Yes. And he's doing it openly. And he knows people can see that. And so this is where I put on the tinfoil hat and go, man in the black hat showing up to his door and going, knock, knock, knock, Jackie boy. Hey, guess what? You're taking Trump off Twitter. Hey, guess what? You're going to do this right now. Hey, guess what? You're going to do this right now. Hey, guess what? We don't like this. This is off.

And he has no decision power because, by the way, he's a public company and there's a lot of money behind the men in the black hat who are doing it. And the men in the black hat are the CIA. That could definitely be a possibility. Yeah. And what do you do about that? I don't know, man. That's like – that's tough. That's's so multi-layered because you're right he's doing all these things that and a lot of the things he does yeah points to like freedom but then censorship on his platform it almost does make you wonder a little bit right

i think he's trying to tell us that that's where i give him credit and i understand if people people are like, fuck Jack Dorsey right now, fuck you and your opinion on this. I understand that I have to accept that some people are going to think that way. But I am looking at this, I try to look at actions. I try to look at actions and I try to imagine the burden and weight that could exist behind those actions that have nothing to do with the person. And I have seen the actions I listed about like Bitcoin, about trying to build blue sky, stuff like that, which hasn't happened yet. Maybe that will get shut down, right? I see these actions and I go he's trying to – It sounds like more good than bad. Yes, he's trying to be that guy. Yeah. He's trying to be that guy. He also – I don't know if you ever saw this, but he went on Joe Rogan.

This is like two and a half years ago now. You ever see this? I don't know if you ever saw this but he went on joe rogan this is like two and a half years ago now you ever see this i don't know if i watched jack on joe rogan i don't think so it's amazing he goes on rogan they have a nice conversation rogan doesn't press him on all the censorship stuff because they were just talking rogan gets ripped his fans were coming at him like how dare you do this without asking him about that? And he's like, oh my god, I didn't. It was totally unintentional. And so Jack, Tim Pool, who's like a guerrilla journalist, friends with Joe, is flipping out. Joe brings him on, on his own episode. Does three hours flipping out on Jack and censorship.

And Joe's like, I wanted to give it a platform because I failed, whatever. Jack then reaches out and says, now heard tim pool tim pool's at least an intelligent guy he's making all these cases and on the censorship front he's got a winning case right he reaches out and says would tim want to do a podcast with you and me and i'll bring in our global head of whatever like security or something like that and they're like yeah yeah and they did it and i'm not gonna lie tim pool didn't even in my opinion perform that. And they're like, yeah, fuck yeah. And they did it. And I'm not going to lie. Tim Pool didn't even, in my opinion,

perform that well when they did it, but he won the debate heavily. And Jack knows that. What kind of guy who wants to control everyone openly walks into the bullets that he knows he's going to take? Yeah. Now you have a point.

I agree. I bet a lot of these companies wish they could tell us some of this behind-the-scenes stuff that probably does happen. Are you familiar with a warrant canary? Warrant canary? No. A warrant canary is something that newer companies, especially newer companies that start blowing up,

put in their terms of service that says, to this date, we have not been asked by law enforcement to give up data on any of our users. When that disappears out of their terms, that's how they tell you without telling you.

In like a day. So all the biggest sites, you can look probably historically that they used to have that phrase in there and now do not i know reddit's one of them now somebody i can't say anything i just said about jack about i don't think for the most part i'm sure i'm being a little bit of a hater here but for the most part i think i'm pretty good on that argument is zuckerberg zuckerberg doesn't do any of that shit he wants all the data yes i mean there's like i said there's

positive uses for it and then there's there's there's things like the election misinformation stuff that's like what is the mo here what do you mean by that like what why like like all the all the stuff with that cambridge analytica stuff and back in the last election um before this one a lot of that was on facebook i think yes yeah it's like that was like entirely facebook's fault some some of the things i wonder like how much do you really know about what's going on on your own system they had to right like they had to know that this stuff was they they had to know in some capacity this stuff was taking place i'm sure they have ways to filter content and and they probably have even language models in place to detect like hostile speech and things like that

and see see what's going on in some sort of way or maybe they don't but you would think they would they had to know the possibilities of the loopholes within their own system they did i mean i know you don't always know you i mean you obviously don't know all of them not all of them but you have to know when certain things are like this seems abnormal when you are asking permission for everyone's full data for them to click allow that you can then package that data up to be able to use for targeted advertisements that other entities third-party entities are going to have full access to even if some of the individual data of who it is is protected i don't even know how much of that even was but you have to know that psychographically that is going to be used in the

free market for whatever the they want right and that is what that case was a while ago but for people who forgot it or weren't familiar with it there is a documentary on on netflix that they did a pretty good job i forget what it's called but it's on cambridge analytica and what happened there but cambridge analytica was hired by the Trump campaign to understand how people think. And it's down to the color used on the left edge of a picture that is put out on a political ad. It is insane shit. And it's also not Cambridge Analytica, but other entities that were foreign governments in this case, like people have talked about Russia. that's what they did man they figured out like and the lady renee di resta has done like every big podcast in the world and go

find it on any one of them i i saw her on sam harris a while ago i think it was and she's and then she did rogan as well but she's phenomenal she walks you through exactly how they did it they would get themselves into they would create accounts long term like in this case she's talking about russia but there's no way it was just russia this is there's a lot of like china is definitely one that got away with a lot of this but they would create accounts in fucking 09 and let those accounts live over time so maybe they would do one where it was even like a page, like a classic cars page is an example she used. And so for five, six years, people get –

they create a bunch of these in little pockets, and people, they get 20,000, 30,000 followers. And then out of nowhere in 2015, 2016, they start very carefully dipping political points into their posts. So they might say, as a lover of classic cars so the fan who's reading this page and likes this page and follows the content every day goes okay that's me we would never stand for hillary clinton's oh yeah fuck that what's she doing and then suddenly two more come like that and then another one comes and goes as a fan of classic cars what donald trump just said about blank we love that yeah you know we do

yeah now you start that confirmation bias loop and they did this cambridge analytica did it you know i guess it was in a legal way based on what facebook had available the same type of thing sounds like they did did it faster. Yes, it does. They did it very quickly because they did it in a span of like – They were hired for it and it executed. Yes, and Facebook's system allows that to happen. And now do you know much – I'm actually ashamed to say I don't know a fuck ton other than the broad nature of it. But like how much of that targeting is

even permitted within their terms of service now i think they did clean a lot of that entry point up about it was something with they had access to not only not only the people who they've deployed some some kind of service through facebook's api or something and it also gave them access to not only the people they they targeted but their followers as well so it's like this chain reaction of you know you i follow you and then i have access to all your contacts then i have access to everybody from after you go too many layers deep on that you got everybody so i think it was something like that that they patched up to make it harder to exponentially reach all these people.

But I don't know the full specifics, though. I wonder how much of that, and we were talking about this at some point, too, but I wonder how much of that can catch, like in Facebook's lifespan now with the data they've collected, can catch them up to a Google from a machine learning standpoint even though they were nine years behind the curve or five years behind the curve the Facebook as a social media platform is not the only thing Facebook does

though Facebook is deep they're deep on VR AR they're they have Facebook reality labs that they they spent a lot of money in these research fields okay so let's go there right now i'm glad you said this because i'll even and correct me if i'm wrong here but i'll take it a step farther they are literally trying to get rid of social media altogether they they are not tomorrow they're going to make their money on it because they want a new one right yeah they want they now because they're changing their name and this is coming out i saw that i didn't read about it though what are they calling themselves i don't even see it this podcast is coming out next week so this might be like right it might already be released by the

time we're talking but they've kept it very close to the chest there's people betting on it in vegas what it could be called that could be called fucking anything and it's it goes directly in line with what anthony and riley when they were in here hinted at a little bit in the podcast and then especially when i had baker in here he talked about they're going there full-blown that may be the second time anthony talks about that too but they're they're trying to become a vr company they want to go to the next to internet they want to do the metaverse yes is what they're trying to do yeah and zuckerberg's hugely bullish on that on that idea it's an interesting concept what gives them the leg up on google with that or is google just because they're just not trying it i think it all depends just on how how much resource they're putting into it at this time

compared to other companies and we also don't know everything that google's working on or microsoft or any of these companies but publicly it seems that facebook's investing a lot of time into uh into vr ar i know they just dropped those ray-bans smart glasses we've talked about that yeah not that long ago um but they have they invest a lot of a lot of money into research on these in these fields publicly um but i think i think it's a it's a situation where like a lot of the big four big eight tech companies in the world if they they all seem to work on things and like at a similar pace even too it's like they'll facebook will buy startups companies and so will google and microsoft and they'll they all put out

similar products i know it's rumored that apple's putting out vr glasses facebook has vr glasses like they're all these companies are dipping into a lot of the same areas that they think will be profitable. But the Metaverse one is interesting because that one is like, by definition, that's going to be a whole world. And how are you going to police such a place? And how is there going to be more than one? It's all very fluid to me. I'm going to ask you the same thing that I'm sure I'm going to ask a million times to other people who come on this podcast. I know I asked Anthony, and we talked about it extensively when he was on.

But it's so wide that this can go anywhere and totally away from anything we've talked in the past what is the metaverse to you and i'll even clarify that and say if you want to start with what is the quote-unquote metaverse to facebook in their mind that they are trying to create right um as far as what the metaverse is to me because i really don't know what it is to facebook um but i'm sure a lot of what it is the facebook is has more to do with control of it than anything like any big tech company that creates one if it's going to be the one and one of the big tech companies like owns it that isn't really what the metaverse is to me metaverse to me is like no ownership it's a it's just a right you have to use because that's like a person that anyone could go into and do whatever they want just like

the real world and that's the good the bad the whatever is it unlimited in size and scope i think so so how does and this this is like a land grab question but how does pricing work and something like that like how could if and i want to get to like what that looks like too but just as like an exact question right now if i want to buy a mansion in the metaverse what's to stop me from buying a mansion if i could just build one in my sims world right there yeah so i think the i think the building tools that you have are going to be important too like a lot of stuff needs to be fleshed out i think a little bit or else or else if somebody's one there's going to be a hack that like enables people to really take advantage

in that world so like a lot of the groundwork has to get laid out and i don't know i think uh who sets the groundwork yeah right is it a committee is it a vote it can't probably shouldn't be one person um but yeah i mean who's to say like we won't be i've actually read a story recently somebody bought a house virtually it's like 800 000 that's what i mean like who's to say someone doesn't just build a house like yeah but like but like or they bought a plot of land or something like because it's early in that world like so like that's what i'm saying like there's we're gonna spend real world money in this in these metaverse worlds that's what i'm saying though like land here on earth is finite right now we can get to the next level of we're going multi-planetary in the next century and now there's going to be more land and then like well how does that change value you know

even if they like found a lot of gold on the next place we go how does that change the value of gold is it all relative planet to planet or is it interconnected i don't know but in the metaverse as we look at it there is no finite ability and so it's not treated the same like we can't think of it like if i buy if i buy an acre in iowa yes it's a lot less than buying an acre in New York. And that's supply and demand because the proximity at this time of that land to a center place of business or whatever is still far more important. And there's more demand there. However, an acre still has a price whereas if there's just fucking acres everywhere and there's an unlimited amount of them people will just create land because it's all you can travel

from you could travel like let's i'm gonna put miles on it i'm getting complex but fuck it let's put an image on it let's just say in the metaverse there's a new york city and in the metaverse there is a i don't know albuquerque new mexico i won't even name like a small town but i'll name something way smaller and far less expensive than new york city those are what? Like 2,000 miles apart? Something like that? 2,500? Let's say it's the same space in the metaverse, but in the metaverse, I can transport from one place to another by snapping my finger. The value of time that goes into travel and inconvenience that goes into travel to go from Albuquerque to New York in in the real world is brutal you have to get on a flight you

can't commute to new york every day right from out from albuquerque if in the metaverse you can and it's the same if it's 5 000 miles away too who's to say yeah relative price of land across areas and it's infinite yeah you could travel 93 million miles away like i think that's the length of the sun in the metaverse and still snap your fingers and be 93 million miles away. Like, I think that's the length of the sun. In the metaverse. And still snap your fingers and be 93 million miles away in the metaverse. I think that's why there's going to be multiple. Multiple metaverse eye. Yeah.

Because they're all going to have different ground rules, I think. It's like, maybe in one, it's an exact replica of... Like, I've seen some things. I can't say too much about, but I've seen some things where somebody was working on a 6,000 kilometer real-time rendered world and you could build on it. It was blank. It had some topography,

but nothing, like cities or anything. That was the plan. People go in, they can start building whatever they want, and it all runs in real-time multiplayer. It's pretty insane. And you had to walk around Are you wearing the goggles to do this? At the moment it was a desktop app, but I think that would be the idea Yeah

To get be a beamed into it now if you're being are if you're beamed into it Is it like the real world in the sense that you have to lift up a piece of wood to build or can you click? And or go like this with your finger and you hit a button and a code editor pops up and you code stuff directly into it while you're in it it's pretty interesting so I'm wearing the goggles and yeah and this

and that it'd be hard to code with the goggles on that's what I'm saying yeah but if you were to hop on your desktop you could build there as a developer and then go in yeah so but that's that's the thing we're like i believe in that world like at the time you could you could change a variable and mod your walk speed or something so you so like that didn't apply but people are

gonna want people are gonna want certain certain rules and or if you want to say laws of physics in their metaverse so like there's going to be a bunch of them i think and it might even involve the metaverse has a bunch of spaces or a bunch of worlds that each have their own rules on it like who knows how it's going to be set up this sounds like savage city man it's it sounds like it's going to take a long time to to come to fruition but because i mean a similar way to look at it in the supply and demand of value within there that would make a counter argument to some of the ones i was just making about well you could be 93 million miles away and have the same value if i build a perfect

social platform today on the internet right and nobody fucking uses it don't matter it's worthless and i think if you look at like an nft clearly value is defined by the beholder yes and what people are willing to spend on it so maybe that land maybe maybe the first planet they make in that metaverse is an earth-like one i bet land will still cost more there even if you could travel anywhere instantly because it's just about the location of it i think some people will still rather pay more to be there than on the mars version of the world or vice versa and that's what i'm saying yeah so if they can't encourage other people to see the same value in the eye that they do they're whereas like in the nft community people can decide that a certain nft project is great and if if enough of

them get into a quote-unquote discord community or discord community or twitter community and then enough people come in there and then they start creating price action there and creating demand and creating noise they can drive demand for that market yeah so you could hypothetically do the same and that's how every market ever has worked just minus the internet, like even the 49 gold rush to San Francisco. There was gold there, so there was a carrot at the end of the stick, but enough people started going that other people followed, and it created a community. It's anything. America founded because people sailed across and said, fuck it. Here's land.

Let's go, and then they brought people over. It's like anything else, but still the speed and scope at which this stuff can be built is not relative in time if people can just quickly code something and build a fucking city we're gonna have this shit pop there's gonna be an unlimited number of them so it's even more than the internet like the number of social media apps that are created that are dog shit are insane right and it's not even insane it's probably a hundred thousand maybe something like that two hundred thousand in a year there's knockoffs in every industry that's what it's like there's always like one like a couple good solid projects and then everything

else that are like want to be second rate you know but here if so many people are just creating at once and they all have access to code and they're just creating different looking shit that all looks cool yeah it's like what's the difference just think of it this way your family and preferred location relative to your personal life aside if you're stand and language and culture aside if you're standing in new york city or you're standing in fucking tokyo what's the you're looking at great buildings they're built different they look different they're built differently but they all are hundreds of floors not all of them but you get my point it's a full city there's a thriving base here there's different communities what the fuck is the difference the difference then becomes what are they known for so if you have millions of these popping up

every day in this gold rush of this new world who's to say people aren't just moving spot to spot because they fucking can they don't have to get a moving truck to do it snap your finger make a code boom you're moved. Yeah. Yeah, so it's going to be similar to the real world and different at the same time. So, like, it's going to be similar in the fact that over time certain worlds are going to stand out and become popular. And that's going to provide that intrinsic value to these worlds but it's also different in the fact that if travel time's instant price will not be based on travel time and and and how close you are to the action

it'll be based on something different but i think there will be value we just don't know what that what's going to bring it that value but it's it's probably going to be it's probably going to be similar to the reason why some people want to live where they live today and the relative cost of that like the cost of living in like in la or new york compared to anywhere you know it's just the just the there's a there is a reason for it i mean i don't know exactly like even like i i don't personally like going to new york i like la area but new york is too many people i don't see why people want to live there but you know i couldn't agree on that i'm sure um but regardless of how i feel about it houses are used i still can't buy a house in a

really nice neighborhood out there financially so like people have value there's other people had declared that value so it's like even if it's something me and you might not be able to understand why like sometimes i have trouble understanding why a certain nft costs so much money it's sometimes it's gonna be the same in that world yeah you know what i mean and it's probably gonna be stuff that by the time it happens we're gonna be like why is it cost 500 000 to live on this virtual beach? You know what I mean? But somebody else would be like, well, you just don't get it. It's the same thing how I feel about some other things.

But I think there will definitely be intrinsic value on things. I'm just not sure what the reasons are yet. Can people invent fake societies in these things? So this is a supply and demand question. If people create billions of metaversei, I'm using that term. That's my thing. I think I invented that. I don't know if that's real.

I don't know if it's metaverses or metaversei, but we say metaversei in here. Anyway. Yeah. But if people invent billions of them, there's 7.5 billion people in the world, so billions of them are basically going to be uninhabited maybe by only the person that invented it. But if the person that invented it blurs the line between reality and what's not, are they able to invent a world where they interact with other people who are coded into there to be who they are just like they're living in the world now and they meet all new people within it do you mean like npcs like fake virtual people or yeah or other people like other actual people no fake virtual people yeah i guess it all it all depends on how compelling the i don't know how long that like into the future before we get there but depends on how compelling these worlds are

those are the worlds that are going to survive there are people who are already being satisfied enough with sex dolls out there in this world where sex dolls are no you're right that seriously you're right you're right that is true so how long until they're satisfied with a perfectly coded environment where they can't where they forget they go like a westworld scenario Yeah, they go into it and I don't know much about that But I think I understand the connotation is I never watch that show But they go into a world where they inherently know that the people that are there that are created codes But it's sentient in a way. Yeah

Yeah, I know you say you never saw Westworld that's that's basically it's a real place but there's robot people that they designed and they're like indistinguishable basically so this would be a similar situation just virtually yeah yeah it's i i could see that happening for sure i really do wonder sometimes i don't know I wonder sometimes about like life and it's like the whole meaning question because you know

when I look at what we're doing right now in tech and in greater society in response and in accordance with that tech it does make me start to really wonder about simulation theory i'm i'm a big proponent of that one and even a believer yeah i am but i know there's no real evidence yet the only evidence i would say is like it's not even evidence it's just if you think about

if you think about our human race right or you think about any civilization that's possibly ever lived in america or not in america i'm sorry on earth or anywhere else uh would you say it's possible for the human race to eventually develop a vr simulator that was a whole world just like we're talking about with the metaverse but on like a universal scale like how so so just like we said the metaverse is going to be a bunch of different worlds right hypothetically hypothetically in the far far far future like thousands of years from now we might have the computing power to be able to generate some replication of our existence earth mars like that on just some computer like some super super computer in the future i think

that's a possibility my whole thing would be if you if you did think that what are the eyes that that's that's the first time it happened i think zero i think we'd be not the first ones to do that almost zero the closest thing to zero you could get which is infinite but so this computer in my like in my hypothetical, this computer that they built simulated the Bing Bang Theory. And they could speed up time and fast forward and eventually we'll get here. Size, time, and distance are all completely relative. Yeah, and if you're controlling the computer, you can speed it up. That's the idea behind it.

If they create this virtual world, they'd be able to fast forward through it. Well, who's to say that if they were actually able to do that, that it hasn't already happened? That would mean that this was a simulation. And obviously there's no evidence for that. So you say there's no evidence for that. It's just a statistics thing. How you define evidence is a subjective thing yeah i would say there are pieces of evidence that could make the case that that is a possibility and i would even go to subjective

judgments that turn into an objective case when you look at the context of history. Right. Are you familiar with The Fourth Turning at all? No. What's that? It's a book written in, I believe, 1997 by two historian sociologist types. And one of the things that they did very, very well, that very few historians do, ironically, is when they went to predict the future, they didn't take the subjective leap of their own understanding of the past to make predictions that stray from it instead what they did is they said we have spotted patterns in human history we are not going to try to recreate those patterns we are simply going to lift those patterns into the next two three decades

to make a prediction in accordance with where society and technology is at this time okay and then what happened was they basically laid out exactly how things were going to go without saying like the word coronavirus or something like that but they they what they had done was they broke down society into generations of call it 21 years or so and these generations come in force everything comes in force and so like think about patterns in life this is where everything ties together where i get subjective evidence in life a lot of things we do come in threes but when we make the argument the threes come in the three points of evidence and the fourth thing is the fucking final line.

So bum, bum, bum, bum. Right? Think about all the things you said in your life where that's how it ends up going when you made your cleanest case. Yeah. So they took that and they didn't say that. I'm drawing that conclusion. But in life, it works that same way in generations where the final turning is the bump that comes at at the fall so they broke it into it's like a build-up yes

yeah they broke it into four generations four cycles of society and i think there was four something else but i'm spinning in my head right now the four generations each follow a pattern there's like a i forget what they're called but it's like prophet something hero and artist i forget what the second one is they exist in oh this was the third fourth the third four things they also exist in certain periods so it's every 21 years is each generation but each type of generation exists at a certain age, during a certain time that the second layer lives. And the second layer is what each turning is. So there's like a rise, an awakening, and I'm changing names here. A rise, awakening, crisis, and aftermath.

Something like, or lead up to the crisis and crisis, and aftermath. Something like, or lead up to the crisis and crisis, right? So, I'll use an example to put this in English now because this is complicated. But they do a way better job explaining it. Read the book, people. But the hero generation, which is the third of the four types of generations came to age coming to age is 21 to 42 roughly during a crisis which was world war ii the next fourth generation that's a hero is the millennials who are in the 21 to 42 age during a crisis which in this case has started as the quote-unquote global pandemic and whatever's

coming out of this over the next five years the ones before world war ii who were the heroes coming of age in america came of age during the civil war oh wow before that the revolutionary war now take this around the world and this is where i forget some of it but you can see some of the same patterns across society. Okay. So what they identified is that we clearly exist in these seculums, right? This, which means something in Latin, but it turns every 80 to 85 years across four generations, four periods of time where something different happens, and four different types of ages where each of these generations are. So like the artists who come after the heroes, they always always come of age or they're in their childhood during a crisis it's like Gen Z was in their childhood the heart of Gen Z was in

their childhood when this crisis is happening they're not 21 years old right the oldest ones are but you see what I'm saying yeah so when I look at this and I see that it's written they trace this back to like the period of like Jesus Christ and I see that over and over again on proven history, these things happen. And then I see the humans follow these patterns that we can't explain where we have things in certain numbers. There's numbers to explain all of it. We make a good argument. And then I trace this across a whole bunch of other stuff. And then I trace what similar people were saying in a similar field at a similar time but 80 years ago to now. And I see patterns like the stock market, 1929, the bottom of our market here, housing, 2009, 80 years.

World War II, Revolutionary War, Civil War, Coronavirus, all 80 years apart. How do these patterns work if it's not some layer of math that's causing it to happen and some form of simulation that takes human nature and makes sure that it follows over each other and empires rise and fall in similar time periods or at least in similar ways across different generations by doing the same mistakes over and over because human nature resorts back to that in a different way because technology and innovation and geography and everything changes over time but it happens in the same patterns that's a mouthful i just gave you but you see like when i talk about evidence that is a piece of evidence to me because it's mathematically explainable to the inexplicable my my that that's really interesting so like

as far as as far as evidence of a simulation what i meant by that more was i also don't know if there's a when we talk about like what's what's the meaning of life and what are we all here for there might not be one and that's just i think just as possible as any other any other i believe for idea that you could have but it might just be that when a organism gets sufficiently advanced it creates a simulation and then when an organism in that simulation gets sufficiently advanced, it creates one. And it just spawned this chain reaction. Now, I do think what you said about human nature and that history repeating itself.

Yeah, that might just be how we're coded. There's like where it just turns into that wave of like there's a conflict and like there's a part of it where the wave's about to crash and there's an aftermath and we wait for the next problem and there's always like a problem like type type flow to how and and i think i think maybe that's something to do with humans how we come together during a big conflict that's why like um like humans like three like 75 or more percent of the world tried to team up against the axis during world war ii um you had people teaming up with each other for the covid pandemic pull that with you yeah sorry about that yeah people uh coming together during covid whole countries working together to solve problems a lot of

these big historical events feel like that's what it takes to overcome a lot of them uh doesn't really apply to the civil war as much since that was like a 50 50 battle but um i still i still think that so are you saying there might be a something driving the these giant human life altering historical events maybe over this like is that what this pattern is kind of saying yes so like i'll add another layer to it and this is my own it's not from the book but why do the same types of people exist in different environments, completely different environments. Why are people like Alexander – well, maybe that's a bad example. I'll use the worst example for this one. You'll see where I'm going.

But why does someone like Genghis Khan exist in a time where humans – there was no printing press. Humans had limited capability to communicate, limited resources, limited technology, and it was just great evil. And then in a time where we have all those things and more, a guy like Xi Jinping exists. They follow similar psychological patterns in completely different root environments and understandings of their surroundings but they both still exist and they both still do evil and to be clear as much of a problem as i have with xi jinping and all the things that happen that are at his hands and his government's hands i mean mathematically he's not a gang as con i mean gang as con killed like a fucking third of the world population or some shit like that so he's not a Genghis Khan. I mean Genghis Khan killed like a fucking third of the world population or some shit like that.

So he's not there. But the patterns of evil are both there. How does that happen? How do you not learn? Yeah, I think sometimes it's hard to admit, but that is a subset of human nature that manifests it in such a terrible way but it is it is something that is is in a certain subset of people that are that are human it's it's it's interesting to think about like human human nature good and good and evil or it's a it's a spectrum almost and it's all it's all in based on who you ask like if if you if you ask hitler

about how those two guys were yeah he probably wouldn't have too many negative things to say and and so here's how many people were like these guys that were even more prevalent historically sure you know what i mean we phase that out with with the construct of society and how a vast majority of us don't ever want to see that these kind of dictatorish things pop up. So we kind of weed them out. But that might just be a part of human nature.

A lot of these things we call evil. I don't know. It's a very interesting point because we should be able to look at Hitler. We should be able to look at even Xi Jinping now. We should be able to look at Hitler. We should be able to look at even Xi Jinping now. We should be able to look at Genghis Khan. And as a human fucking being who believes in the right of other human beings to play nice and live, it should be like – and this goes back to something we were talking about maybe before camera or on camera.

I don't remember. But it should be an actual situation where it's like no no no that's bad anything that's not that is at least relatively speaking good and better but then it comes back to that point of everyone thinks they're good when they're doing what they're doing so who's to say it's not it's a weird thing and then i'll even drag it to you when you're in court taking care of this and at least like you had a streamlined scenario, which I don't know if we even got to that. But like, you know, it was like open shut book and it was like you were able to make out, frankly, from the situation. It didn't go nearly as bad for you as it could have and actually probably catapulted you to where you are today, which is cool. But you're in there, you know, and I'll agree.

And I think the average person would agree all right this isn't a bad guy this was like kind of funny you know he just he used a loophole in the system whereas when a pedophile is standing in that courtroom that is not what we think and we go lock that guy away and fucking swallow the key yeah it's subjective you know because someone could technically look at you in that courtroom someone out there i'm sure didn't say what a scumbag lock them away and throw away the key oh yeah and who are who are you even sitting in the seat to say they're wrong i think they are you think they are yeah but i mean it's subjective though yeah you're right it's all subjective i mean i'm sure people there's some people who will call the

cops on you for jaywalking yes i did it yesterday you know what i mean yeah so i i don't all that all that is subjective you just got to try and design the laws in a way to give fair punishments for that fit the crime but that's also subjective who defines crime who created the cff whatever the fuck i know why did they do it who paid them to do it that's the other thing about law too so would for some reason it's legal to shoehorn completely unrelated things into bills that have nothing to do with the bill like do you know in the covid relief bill was the alien bill for the ufo footage or whatever it was or the advanced military footage who who knows what the hell that actually went down but yeah snowden's snowden's

point on that is he did it the best i've ever heard someone do it and i use it all the time if a law has a name that sounds too obvious or too good to be true that one's the worst kind of law like they all have loopholes in them they're all fucked they all have some bullshit in them but he's like the patriot act people's fucking sirens should have gone off like that's probably the worst thing ever created sounds too nice it sounds it sounds like you're saving humanity like yeah if someone comes out with the saving humanity act tomorrow they're probably gonna call for genocide yeah in the bill like that's probably what they're doing you know it and it's so fucked because there's stuff that's common sense right my whole thing was if i was told a rule and the rule made sense great i follow it you tell me

hey you know what julian you're not allowed to kill me for no reason you know what that makes sense to me i'm not going to do that if i do it i'm face fucking consequences i'll go to jail now if you try to kill me and i have to self-defense that's a different story right like that's simple but when people start putting these little statutes and that's where it starts. It starts with a section A and section B, which then turns into fucking numbers and then fucking numerals

and then the fucking squiggly lines that I don't understand. And it gets deeper and deeper and deeper to the point where the average person has no fucking idea what any of this means. It gets to a point where I average person has no fucking idea what any of this means it gets to a point where i see people in court for stuff and i'll even use yours as an example now that i understand it where i'm like did they even know and like are they even negligent for doing that like they say negligence isn't a defense what if it requires paying a fucking lawyer a hundred

thousand dollars just to try to understand the law. Right. Yeah, it seems like in law there's the expectation that every citizen is supposed to completely understand it, and that's just not even close to the case. It's impossible to. That's why lawyers even will only practice certain areas of law because how the hell are you supposed to be an expert on every area of the law and then you're expecting a normal citizen to have that knowledge too it's i mean yeah i don't think it's possible and that even highlights another problem though too

because as the world gets more complex it becomes more and more litigious. So people, the number of laws and the scope of laws, like they don't remove laws at the same rate that they add them. And resources arequote empire of the world, it falls under the weight of its own rights that are used against it. So like in this country where everyone's worried about getting sued for shit, if you are a foreign nation who's trying to sow discord and distract from your own gains and means whatever those are and obviously i always point to china as an example of this because that's just the natural one china is not a democracy they are a communist country they have their own set of ideologies that i completely disagree with and find evil but again subjective guess, if we're going to say that and continue the arguments we've been saying, so I'll at least put that, but I'll call it evil. And they can use fear to drive us and our litigious open society that allows people the right to use litigation for things to drive us mad under the own weight of who of how do i want to put this under the own weight of what the repercussions of things are so like when i look at covid and i have a very moderate opinion on covid that you don't hear on the internet because the extremes win i firmly believe that it is a huge problem and something

that is dangerous i also firmly believe that the people saying fucking shut down everything mask forever you know endless fucking pandemic that's crazy too but reasonable people who think that and are in positions of any sort of power and i include the owner of a small business in that let alone a corporation nobody wants to be sued right so you can if you are interested in spreading that type of ideology and spending the money to do it through media and things like that, and let's say a lot of this ties back to Chinese money and other interests, but let's say... What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.

A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. It does there. You can spread misinformation through the lens of some accurate information too. So you can say this is a dangerous thing. We're trying to figure it out. You know, we're working through the vaccine as they were working through that, whatever. And then also like, but we don't want even one person to die.

You lead with the fear and get everyone to fall in line because no one wants to be the school that has the kid die who got covid in school no one wants to be the office place who had the worker die because he got sick at work and then his family can sue and so you talk about like people not knowing the full extent of the law and therefore not knowing if they're breaking it which you can speak from a personal place about but there's also the act the the idea that the law is so wide that people can use it as a fear tactic at the snap of a finger at every level and then it gets into groups of people to where then if you dare to disagree you're going against the safety of the group does that make sense that makes sense yeah i don't i don't think that just applies to places like china either no i think any any source of misinformation or or knowingly knowingly

spinning something it's we talked about dave chapelle earlier i think he had something talking about the age of spin where these yeah and i think the best way to do that is to lead with fact. You lead with fact and then a scary fact. And then you start delving off into your own interest after that. My whole problem with the whole thing, though, was who wins if businesses are closing and we can't do anything and the economy is not getting stimulated by anybody i i know i know online services win like amazon and stuff like that but there wasn't being driven by people at amazon so unless it was behind the scenes or whatever conspiracy but i wonder i wonder what the end goal of let's keep everybody in the house for years who does that help depends how realistically or unrealistically you look at it i think the answer is in the middle like and it became political too like after a short

period of time and then it was almost like were people sticking to that viewpoint just for political reasons maybe but why is the average everyday person... Is it because they're really scared of COVID? I guess so. Here's another simulation theory evidence point. You just walked right into it. What I would call an evidence point. Political ideologies over time.

They're a circle. They're not a line they even flip flop correct the left becomes the right and the right becomes the left yeah prime example i always use is look at hitler and stalin hitler and stalin hated each other and the reasons they gave was because they were political opposites one was a communist one was a fascist left right Now look at all the actions both of their governments took over the sustained period of time that they were in power There's no difference. They just slapped a fucking name on it. There's no difference I mean you get it someone who's a historical scholar will point out a couple like Fine-tuned point examples of where they may have had a different way of running business in the economy or something. Fine. But there's no difference. They hated each other not because they were opposites. They hated each other because they were the same fucking guy. ideologies i'm here's a good example right here let's look at australia in australia where

admittedly from what i understand the conversation around policing and race especially there where there's less of you know not white australians as opposed to here where we have a diaspora of people and minorities etc etc there was maybe less debate over the quote-unquote evils of policing than there was here certainly still a global issue things like George Floyd spread globally in a way yeah you look at what's happening in Australia right now and I'm generalizing but you have the left wing of people whoever is left on the left wing in that country at this point, who supports all these lockdowns when they have like no COVID deaths going on. And I don't know how familiar you are with this, but they're basically holding people hostage in their home, the government. I'm not aware.

Oh, it's fucking – dude, it's fucking crazy. And so you have the people who quote-unquote support that who i guess in the covid era are left-wing individuals who are all about the lockdowns for whatever reason and then you have the people who are opposed to it including people who have now developed an opposition in australia to like the the vaccine not all of them but some of them on the right side what you have is the cops brutally and if you haven't seen these videos you got to check them out they're fucking insane the cops and the government basically cracking down on anyone who even wants to go outside and doesn't get permission from the government and those people happen to

sometimes lean more right wing and so now you have protests happening where the cops come out to break it up and say go home. And the people just overpower the cops. And the people screaming fuck the police are on the right side at these protests. Those are more people who are definitely right-wing. Not far right-winger evil people. I'm saying like just regular conservative individuals who want freedom. Yeah. They hate the cops now and the cops who have largely been right wing around the world are now supposedly put onto the other side and who is supporting the cops in this situation the left

wingers who are at home okay with the lockdown i have not seen this happen a fuck ton in america yet no but i'm watching this closely because in america especially 16 months ago left wing hates all cops right wing loves all cops generalizing but we'll call it what it is yeah is that gonna shift if things go down the road of permanent lockdowns and now are the cops gonna who a lot of them are right wing because of naturally they were getting called the police from the left right are they gonna just take orders from the government and now be the boogeyman there's just one very extreme example but you see it over time you see it in this country where the Democrat Party shifted to the Republican Party and back on and back on and it's like they just jump from whatever the main issue of the day is and they make that their thing and then they fall into line with everything else. And it's like this domino effect. And then other laws start to fall where they start to feel opposite and so on and so on. And pretty soon they're each other like i don't look at the democratic party in america today as liberal at

all they're controlling i also don't look at the republican party as conservative in many ways they're like i don't even know what to call the republican party at this point it's very weird like post-trump but it's like opportunistic maybe is the word i would use and now it's like are we at that shift where it's starting to turn over and is that yet another example of how humans follow these patterns and shift without realizing that they're completely shifting their ideology? I think it's almost like it's a human nature thing to pick a team. It's a pack mentality. So it almost doesn't even matter what the topic of debate is. Like you've said, in America, I think it's funny. Like my grandfather, my mom's dad, he's a lifelong Republican.

And he's in his 90s. So it's funny that that party has switched sides over the last however many years with the democratic party but he stayed a republican so these beliefs and and i know and it's also that people's beliefs over time should change i think you should you should see the opposite side of of an argument but i think for the most part this just boils down to that's my team and i'm gonna root for my team and take their side on things and it becomes like a pack mentality thing to me because otherwise how would these how would these whole ideologies flip-flop every couple decades it's it's it's interesting it's just like to me a team thing and there shouldn't. And there shouldn't be a conservative pissed off because you have

stupid beliefs or you're too far right and you can't get them out there yeah i started to see early because i'm a firm believer in free speech where that was going and so i've been open about it since the beginning of the podcast what a problem that is things like the aclu who in most ways continue to be a great beacon for free speech, they're created from the traditional left wing. They're created from the liberal ideology. There probably wasn't a person in the ACLU voting Republican when that tend to more be on the right because they're the ones that outside of like Fox News and shit have very little representation in the mainstream. And so you're now even seeing this flip where now the right wing are the people at least speaking about the free speech thing and the left wing are the people cheering it when the sitting president think what you want of them and that's absolutely fine to think negatively the sitting president gets taken off all the fucking public squares who by the way are public organization or private organizations public companies but private entities who can do that right but they are the public square now so it's like that that and that's the First Amendment.

If ever there's been a prime example of that, like you had the right wing saying that people who were talking about civil liberties in some ways that didn't jive with conservative culture 40 years ago saying you shouldn't talk about that. They were the anti-free speech, and now they're the ones saying everything goes. Let's go. That's fucked up to me. And your grandfather, to lived through all that as did mine yeah mine's that i would describe my grandfather the same way as you and yet you kind of you have your team and you stay along with you stay with your team and i guess switching teams would imply to many people that they were wrong. And depending on how much conviction you have in politics, nobody wants to admit when they feel like some of their core beliefs are wrong to switch sides. So it's like even if I don't fully agree with this talking point, I'm going to ride with them type thing. You know?

Yeah. I'm going to play this video real quick yep this is uh this is just an example of what i had on the australia thing let me just change up my audio here so we got it in our ears we're good to go hit this but they've been there's videos like this all over the web on different measures of whatever but here's one where they read a social post so they go to this guy's house and they say did you post this on a post yes did you post this on Facebook six months ago is that you in that blurry picture does that depict you at a protest. Were you there? Well, does it matter? You're handing me paperwork saying I've sent a photo.

I'm not handing you anything. I'm asking a question on my own. Well, you've got the photo, don't you? That doesn't... You've put a photo on Facebook doesn't actually confirm whether you were there or not.

So I'm asking you where you're at. So if I say no, you're not going to give me the paperwork? You're going to go home, are you? There's no paperwork here. This is my information.

Okay, so what are we here for? Are you here to serve me or... Okay, what part did... No, no. Intimidation. Yeah, I know. It's here to... It's pretty laughable. It's I know. It's pretty laughing.

It's loserish. It is like sad. What is this humanity? Where are we going in life? There's cops coming around here to tell me that I've been in a protest six months ago. To ask if you have been. Who gives a fuck? How illegal is that?

Which part? Going to a protest. Which part? Why are you guys here? Why is the police on my doorstep? He should just close his door. About a protest. Yeah. Why? Because it's illegal. Black Lives Matter protests are fucking two weeks before that.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that illegal? Are you knocking on their doors? Maybe. No, you're not. Exactly. It's clearly so imitating. Why are you working for this corrupt government? What are you guys doing? Who are you serving? Are you serving us or are you guys doing? Who are you serving? Are you serving us or are you serving the corrupt government and health officials?

I want no good for you. They're not there for you. Now, you have seen – That's wild. Here is an example in America that I should have said. Yeah. What did you see with videos even that started by the end of 2020 where it was in america where it was small business owners screaming at cops and getting them out and let's generalize here and let's say small town

anglo-saxon small business owners tend to be more republican a lot of those videos you're watching are like the quote-unquote pro-law enforcement and the police are there with the health services maybe not because they want to be but they have to quote-unquote enforce the law and they're not thinking for themselves and they're enforcing this law to keep their job that is fucking killing this person right that is totally unfair because you already told them at that point they could open up and now you're saying no you can't anymore or subjectively we just got sent here and decided this isn't up to code and it's like you see those people flipping out if this continues that kind of shit are we going to see that shift and is your grandfather still going to be a republican yeah he will yeah i'm

sure that at least and so he'll go from june 2020 saying hey that guy shauvin was very bad but this isn't fair to say all cops are like this i'm very pro law enforcement i'm putting words in his mouth but just the average person like that is going to say that to maybe two years later saying all the police right and no one asks a question about that yeah yeah i i don't know how what what paradigm shift there is going to happen with that but like you said and it's it seems to be happening in other countries already right as far as what you showed me in australia and how the the parties are switching teams versus what they endorse i mean it's happened here like we've said i'm not sure the specific reasons why but i'm sure they'll repeat themselves just like we talked about earlier how everything else everything else seems to repeat itself so i don't know man it's uh i think i i still think we're going to be on this path for

a while though as far as the how the police force feels and and their political stances i don't know i don't know if stuff like this is going to change that in the near future. Because in our country, we seem to be amped by racial things more than all. And there's still a lot of divide there between law enforcement and minorities and things like that. And even beyond what I went through, I don't hate law enforcement. I have friends in law enforcement on multiple levels but I get it from a racial perspective I've never had to deal with any of that so I can't even really speak on it

but I don't know if that's going to be solved anytime soon so I don't think there's going to be that shift in America at least although we see it happen like you said in other places well they they pick these things to divide us on and they pick things that may oftentimes have a clear element of truth to them like with race and and specifically within the whole race argument with within law

enforcement and profiling and stuff it absolutely happens we we can see it does and the numbers prove that but they make it out to be horrific like and by horrific i mean the worst it's ever been worse than it's the safest time to live is right now exactly and so it's like to me there's a balance with it but now they even do it again you want to talk about another shift like call it what it is i respect different people's opinions on the vaccine i have friends who are for and friends who are against me too i it is what it is i got it didn't care one bit i'd get it again i'd you know we'll see how much it it does but that's just my opinion that said the same people advocating for all the Black Lives Matter protests and racial justice and that who now happen to be in a political position where they're mandating this stuff in different places to live and then therefore trying to separate out society. And to be fair, this is mostly in places like New York and San Francisco.

It hasn't spread everywhere, but that's a big start. Those same politicians are doing it in places where, for whatever reason, and I could probably go through some reasons why that are fair and I'm not going to argue with, you have a lot of minority communities who are highly unvaccinated because they do not trust the government to provide them with healthcare resources due to things that have absolutely happened in the past. In the past, yeah. That I am not going to sit here and say, you're wrong for that. Nah, I don't blame them. Who the fuck am I? I don't blame them. So now the same people are pushing them off by the numbers when they were advocating for them in the streets a year ago now they do something

well it's not it's not aligning with their goals anymore correct yeah yeah now that's that's that's definitely something that happens yeah i don't know man and i don't know if uh i don't know if that stuff will ever stop do you think it will no because i think human beings are because within these teams and these two sides there's factions of smaller teams correct so even though we're on this uh like we're on the same side for this oh but now you're not you're you're going against what i'm trying to do now what us couple guys on this half of the of the pie are trying to do now we're not aligned anymore and we don't we don't need to help you and you don't need to help us 14 months ago kairi irving was getting destroyed by the

right wing for not wanting to continue the season and focus on racial justice issues and advocating for black lives matter and stuff like that and was holding up the league and i'm paraphrasing here but they all they called him a fucking baby among other things and ridiculousness and woke and all this shit fast forward 14 months later he doesn't want to get the vaccine and the lee it is a private entity they are whether i agree with it or not they are allowed to mandate it if they want and so they therefore then aren't his team decide not to let him play because he's Playing in New York where he can't even fucking Play because of the laws there. They're pretty strict up there same people. He's a hero and it's like

Which one is it man? And maybe it doesn't have to be either. you can just say it's i don't think it is that's the point yeah maybe you can say it's one situation to one situation and stop making people gods or devils just say i agree or disagree with this you're a guy when you're helping us and you're a devil when you're not yes and it doesn't matter who the individual is it's just whoever could help us at the time i think they operate a lot like businesses with bottom lines political affiliations and especially the news organizations you don't think they are they i mean they absolutely are but but the people that that get super sucked into politics i don't know if they look at it like that because what people like anyone who's a diehard democrat or a diehard republican the the outlet you're getting all your information from

is biased i don't know if does everyone see that i don't know if they do or not they're they're a customer i don't know if they realize they are they don't that's sad that's the customer yeah same way that people didn't realize what they were giving away to facebook for a long time that they became the product facebook didn't say hey guys you're the product now yep you had to figure it out later people in politics are too emotional to figure it out you're the customer you buy what they're selling you vote red you vote blue yeah i'm sorry but and i've done both in my life you bought them yeah even if you're not heavily advocating for where that vote went but you just made a binary decision you did buy it and that doesn't mean it's bad doesn't mean that doesn't mean that at all but if you're like the extremes that you're alluding to and then i can't

stand as well yeah you're you're an unwitting customer of someone a system that is trying to distract you from the real problems that actually bring people together rather than separate them out onto team A or team B. I don't know that that message will ever get through on a grand scale to answer your question you asked a while ago. I don't think so. It's kind of a shame too

because it translates into real world issues and real world physical damage and and problems i mean like the it is pretty strange how if you think about and it's funny because i i like to try and stay in the center as possible but nobody respects anyone who don't take a side welcome my world you know it's it's kind of it's kind of weird in that regard uh but i think it's funny how um race the racial issue almost almost completely went away in the public eye after biden was elected you know why do you say america i i i think the the racial the racial it was bubbling when trump was when trump was in office to a point where and maybe covet helped with it and died down a little bit after even before even before trump left office but it was still bubbling while trump was in office because covet exploded it at first yeah people were home had nothing to do we saw what happened to george floyd holy shit we're angry

let's get in the streets yeah so so it seems like right after trump left office cnn kind of stopped pushing that out as hard as they were before because they were they were blaming trump for for not not taking this not really making much comment on the george floyd situations and things like that but then it just they just bombard every day with with rhetoric that that then causes riots from both sides there was damage caused on on both sides of these of these events that took place it's real world real world uh issues man real it turns into real damage i don't know another thing jim diorio said in here that when i put it as a clip online a lot of people took it they didn't understand what he was getting at but he was talking about media narratives. And I love this example because it's like it makes you think.

He said the summer before 9-11 into right into not literally like the day of an enormous news story was rampant shark attacks across the country, down south, even up on the northern seaboard. And suddenly the planes hit the tower and the sharks stopped biting that's kind of what i was getting at with with my you're saying it beautifully just how he did he put the visual on it there but that's the truth a lot of people said yeah because a real fucking news story happened i said yes you're right but then you're also implying that this was a fake news story that we've been pushing for however long to scare the fuck out of people yeah it's like so shark bites and i'm throwing random numbers out there these are not real numbers but shark bikes were at a hundred for the summer by september 1st as opposed to the average of 85 okay it's a 15 increase but it's fucking a hundred people

it's a slow news it's a hundred people yeah there's 330 million people in this country so like they do that and they can add the noise to it and they they've done that repeatedly with these news stories throughout the endless pandemic here and it's both sides yes oh i wasn't trying to single one out oh yes it's both but they both do it absolutely they both act like only the other one does it yes which is just annoying and it just makes it harder to for an average person to get the truth out of things it's now a mainstream thing this used to be a lot less common like a decade ago but these different channels show montages of the opposite type of channel

on their own channel they give it free promotion to then and they know what they're doing to then draw people to go over there and hate watching and get pissed off and come back come back and keep them in an endless cycle yeah and it's like we've now turned all these personalities into the story they've turned themselves into the story right and we've bought it and it just it's i used to have this game before the pandemic i don't do this anymore i can't because it used to be kind of funny where when i went to do cardio in the gym cnn fox msnbc on the three channels in front of me just to watch and you know like prime story completely different delivery watch how they would do this and you'd laugh your ass off and it's like oh my god like this is fucking crazy but

that's what they do yeah it's it's it's bad it is yeah it is and until there's a law that prevents it it's never going to stop because it generates so much traffic and interest and all that you know it's clicks and it's money i want to go back to zero days though totally off topic because we touched that maybe at some point but then didn't really go into it and i think it's so fucking interesting and there's also a great documentary people were telling me about that i have to watch literally call it like zero day something something like countdown it's on netflix i think yeah i think yeah yeah so i i gotta check that out people google that around. If you haven't checked that, I'll take a look too.

But I was really compelled by the zero-day scenario with something else you and I were talking about either before camera or on camera about like how they did it with Iran. The U.S. did. Finding it within – it was within the microsoft operating system and then how russia did it for example in one instance with ukraine shutting down their power system essentially the way i understand it is that within say microsoft or mac which are separate types of operating systems that exist on grand software that is used across all different types of devices there is a code base. That is put in there. And the code base is long and extensive.

And it not only creates the UI UX. And how things go. And the if this then that. But it also creates systems to defend. Against things that can be evil. Or bad. Or not supposed to be within the ecosystem. Like viruses that come through ransomware.

And phishing and shit like that when people who are bad actors in this case in the example i'm using can find holes in those systems that basically allow them to get in the middle and create something unstopped because nothing in the system prevents or defends, is designed to defend against it, that is a zero-day, as I understand it. Is that correct? Yeah, zero-day is basically a vulnerability that you can use on the latest version, production version of software. Okay. So, which means that as soon as you discover it, everybody on the latest version of the software is vulnerable to it. What the flaws actually are under the hood, there's a vulnerability in the logic of the code. That when they figure out how to pass certain data to that routine that has a vulnerability

in a certain structured way, it gives them access, privilege escalation and access to do whatever they want so for the average person out there wondering about this if i have mac like i do i use the mac operating system if someone finds a zero day in there that allows them let's, to access any computer using the system, like a ridiculous zero-day. Hypothetically, they can do that completely uncaught unless people are setting up systems to actually catch them because the software will not. And even if you set up a system,

how do you know about a vulnerability path that doesn't exist yet? Until it's disclosed, if you don't know about it, you just don't know about it. It's very hard to do that until it's disclosed if you don't know about it you just don't know about it it's very hard it's very hard to do that unless it's retroactively now how many people out there what is the volume of white hat hackers who are working around the clock to find this and work with the companies like microsoft and apple to fix them versus the volume of people who are just looking to find them and use them for either personal gain or the worst of the worst to fucking rule the world. So what's interesting about zero days is that it is completely legal to develop an exploit based off of a zero-day vulnerability and sell it to whoever you want.

So, for example, there's a website called Zerodium-e-r-o-d-i-u-m i think you'll find it interesting z-e-r-o-d-i-u-m.com okay i'm pulling it up so zerodium if i was to discover a a way to jailbreak the latest ip, for example. And I could execute it by just sending you a text. And it not only would pop up on your phone, but now I have access to your phone. Those have existed. And an NSO group actually had one for iOS 14. Do I have to click a link when you send that text?

No. The second they send it, they're in. So if they have your phone number, you're burnt already. You're done. Yeah. If you go over to bounties. Bounties. Scroll down a bit.

Okay. There's your pay table. Zerodium payouts for desktop slash servers. So let's see. Over here, up to 1 million, and it says that the thing you can do for that is win RCE zero-click. Yeah, so it's a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability,

which means if you scroll down a bit to the mobile section, you get up to 2.5 for an Android zero-click, and FCP means full code persistence, which means it persists even if you restart your phone. Up to 2.5 for an Android zero-click. And FCP means full code persistence, which means it persists even if you restart your phone. So you get up to 2 million for... If I restart my phone, like turn it off and turn it back on? It's still there, yeah. I would have thought it would have...

It would have anyway? Yeah. A lot of it needs to happen after the phone's fully booted the there's a secure boot process basically in a lot of these mobile devices mobile security is extremely strong even though it seems like every day somebody has a zero day for it it's a very complex system there's going to be there's going to be holes in it and these people are also super talented but that same two million dollars that zerodum will give me app app will give me like four hundred thousand Who's paying the two million dollars on zero neum zero neum Spain who the fuck are they they'll sell it to the NSA for 10

or the CIA or whoever That's how they stockpile these vulnerabilities. So they try to be the middleman by beating the bounties of the price. They are. So, right. Yeah, they are. They look at the bounty that Apple's offering on X, and they say, all right, we're going to offer a bigger one. I think it's based on actually what clients need. Their clients.

Yeah. Yeah, so like – So Apple could be their client. Apple used to be at the top of this list. What do you mean top of what list? It used to get up to $2.5 million for Apple, and Android was below it. Now there's so many iOS vulnerabilities that they probably have that they dropped it a little bit.

They don't need them. Wait, so there's more vulnerabilities now? I'm saying they probably have so many iOS vulnerabilities, they dropped it from $2.5 million to $2. Oh, right. They need Android vulnerabilities. That vulnerabilities, they dropped it from 2.5 million to two. Oh, right. They need Android vulnerabilities. That's why they're offering 2.5. So like this, this will change.

This chart changes. So because Apple has so many different bounties to hand out, they're handing out less per. And so Zerodium then changes their chart to reflect that. No, no, no, no. I mean, the NSA has too many iOS. They don't need them if this company doesn't report to apple i know but on the other side more they pay so much more

just so you give it to them instead of apple right android or but then do they go back to fucking two-time the corporations too or are they just selling it to the nsa i don't think i think part of this is you're not allowed to you're probably not allowed there's some kind of there's some kind of uh so the NSA non-disclosure agreement so this is serotium is fully like an NSA conspiracy yeah I don't know I don't know I don't know that's the funny part I don't know who their clients are but that's the reason why this stuff has to be legal because government three-letter agencies need access to this stuff, the best of the best of these vulnerabilities. They basically just pay a lot of money to stockpile them.

They also have teams of extremely intelligent people that build this stuff for them too, but with stuff like this, you'll get the world's best that just want the payday. So your question about white hat versus black hat, it's considered black hat to sell as erodium. But I bet there's a lot of people selling as erodium over reporting it to Apple or Windows. So this isn't legal? This is legal. It has to be. But it's black hat. I would consider it morally or ethically gray so maybe in between black and white

but they might use this stuff to target people like in other countries you know this is the show this is what they use against journalists and stuff like this kind of stuff what do you mean you like other countries use like target journalists who they don't like that are talking bad about the sa. Yeah, yeah. Saudi did that. They use stuff like this. So the NSO Group, I think it's Israeli. I could be wrong.

The NSO Group is a company. The NSO Group uses – they buy exploits. They had something called Pegasus. Yeah. That's Israeli, right? I think it's Israeli. Yeah, I think that was developed by NSO Group. They just a company in israel they they shared a stuff with law enforcement with israeli law enforcement with or whoever's paying so they did they shared it with other

yeah yeah yeah i don't i don't and i'm sure all these countries have their own like i know north korea is very good in computer science which is crazy but yeah yeah um but a lot of these countries are um and that's this is what they do i believe saudi used pegasus to hack into jeff bezos's phone i believe that's what it was yeah i'm not sure on the specifics if i'm not mistaken there may and i could be mistaken on this there may have also been something where prior to them executing jamal khashoggi in the turkish consulate or in the saudi consulate in turkey they use pegasus in some way to get access to things that he was saying i could be wrong about that i might be misremembering that but yeah yeah that's yes but it's funny like

just looking at the table like it's so interesting to me because like it's everything we all use is on there what's the most what's the highest bounty you ever won like a thousand nothing crazy no i didn't i didn't really do it full time yeah this is the kind of shit you need to be working on yeah this stuff isn't on those bounty sites either this is stuff like give me a team of people in like eight months type thing or or i've i'm somebody who's been working with this system kind of like how we used i used to work with the xbox like i knew the whole system in and out these people know how the iphone works just as well as the developers who make it. These kind of people exist. And these security firms, they'll just target the higher-priced ecosystems on this page.

Cyber security firms. And then some of them report or sell directly to government agencies. They probably don't use this. But I'm guessing if you're like a gray to black hat type guy, you'll make 10x your money just giving it here. So it's hard. The children of the 50s, 60s, and 70s had at least a slight understanding of potential craziness and potential quote-unquote end of the world scenario with a nuclear problem you know they had to do the drill in school where they went down below their desks or if they had a bunker they went down there they maybe some people had it their houses too and there was the worry

and the fear that we had seen what kind of devastation that could be with nagasaki and the places in japan there was the worry that there would be a back and forth and just nukes going off and people getting incinerated instantly so there was an end of the world type fear the cuban missile crisis was another time where that was at an all-time high right i find myself walking around now and going holy fucking shit looking at all the things out there that are a part of a centralized server that can be hacked and when i read sandworm by andy greenberg it totally rocked my world because suddenly every single thing around me down to the food that was in my fridge i started to realize this could get fucked any day they have the capability to do it software is so complex all you have to do is have a smart person find a little small nook and cranny in there and you can shut down a whole power system you know

and those power systems are built in the 80s and 70s and 60s yeah that's running on ancient and security became a thought honestly probably after a lot of these systems were built in the first place i know we have great tools on our own here but just imagine if tools were built strong enough over a long enough period of time where they just took down our power grid for a month and then they took down changed the world yeah do you know how many people would die millions if they took down all the things around that too like all this stuff i can't even verbalize right now they take down satellites yes take down take down the flow of information

is what they'll take down autonomous cars driving around and at the same time they take down the system and suddenly they all start doing whatever they want that's instantaneous that's like a bomb going off instantaneously cars right into each other that's even that's kind of a worry if somebody figures out how to upload like fake

firmware to a like a Tesla or something fake what like fake firmware like the like a Tesla or something fake what like fake firmware like the code that drives the car to a Tesla or people have already hacked other other companies I don't know if they ever did Tesla but to take control of the steering wheel like by hacking into the Bluetooth somehow like and you're in your radio like there's there's ways to that people have figured out that there's already flaws and a lot of stuff we use I mean this chart shows you that there's a lot of the stuff well there's there's ways to that people have figured out that there's already flaws and

a lot of stuff we use i mean this chart shows you that there's a lot of the stuff a lot of there's a lot of flaws in everything we use and it's impossible to make no code is 100 secure doesn't exist see any company that has that happen their company ends that day it will it will end that day so like i really wonder about because elon's always sounding the alarm on shit like this, I wonder how much he sees it as an inevitability that Tesla will end because there's a massive hack and maybe thousands of people die. Yeah, I mean, that's not to say that there's not... They might have figured out a way to make it so they couldn't be mass hacked.

But, like, if you got physical access to the car, like, or proximity-based access or something, like, maybe you can take one car over. But I don't know. That's like if somebody was – nobody's ever hacked that we know of, hacked into iCloud to get everybody's text messages, right? So that's not to say – there might might be lower scale levels of attacks that happen but it might be it might they might have some of this stuff locked up pretty good that's what i'm saying though it's locked up based off of the world we know not the world we don't yeah so you're right in that regard yeah for sure the day that someone brought an automatic rifle to a fucking war field for the first time guess what the other people didn't consider the

fact that an automatic rifle was going to come in there and they're firing they're firing their one bullets suddenly that doesn't matter too much yep so like i look at this and i go like and now i'm getting way out of my fucking territory here but like quantum computing and i think about this a lot with like especially bitcoin and stuff with the whole blockchain decentralization scenario on any of that technology. There's the whole concept of blockchain putting it on individual nodes that then as the bigger the community is, the more powerful it is in the sense that you'd have to hack every single node able to do that now what happens though when someone gets to the full quantum computing first and now quantum computing can do it in a instant out of nowhere yeah i know i know a lot of a lot of the crypto algorithms are if they're not already a lot of the big ones are in the process of becoming quantum resistant algorithms.

Which means that they're designed in such a way that those huge benefits you get from quantum computing don't apply to those algorithms. There's only a subset of algorithms that they do apply to. But that's the point. How do you defend against something that doesn't exist yet?

I think if you understand it theoretically, you could defend against it so they know the math behind why a quantum computer would make this would make this so easy to crack they can build around it they know the limitations of the quantum computer so like before someone creates the quantum computer we're gonna know exactly how it works on paper right we already do kind of we've we've developed quantum algorithms that we've probably yet to run on a real quantum computer but we we already wrote them out now you're getting into the same territory though is like super intelligence nick

bostrom shit where he talks about how we can simulate this shit like he's simulating it in in words all day but there's so many decision trees that happen once it exists that you can't account for yeah and i don't know why that would be different like they may be accounting for the theoretical base and have a very good i'll even call it deadly accurate version of what that'll be for quantum computing but if there is one thing that is developed within that quantum computer once it's created and is thinking for itself and is in possession of someone who hopefully can – well, maybe not hopefully depending on who it is – can still control it to an extent, it then learns that one new thing that makes everything else that defends against the base irrelevant. You can't predict the future. Yeah, to an extent, I definitely agree. I just think specifically with quantum computing, they know on paper exactly, probably exactly to the second how much faster it'll be to crack Bitcoin, for example. the creator of bitcoin and we don't even know who it was but that blockchain is pretty future-proof

as far as what we know today and from its inception to now what we know from now to the future still seems to be pretty locked down pretty smart guy or guys i of the assumption it wasn't one guy i think it was maybe the government i don't know but it's very it was very well thought out and someone was smart enough to not reveal their name on it too so gives it like a legend like figure that even created it it was like the perfect storm of how to launch something that you want to be world changing i do think that if we ever figured out who it was that would be the end of bitcoin i'm a huge bitcoin proponent but i think that would be the end that's why it was such a good idea i think it's something when you're

talking about the life form of everyone outside of oxygen whether it's taboo to say or not is irrelevant it is money oh yeah it is money like when you ask people what the two most important things in their life are the average person is going to say family and health. What pays for both? Money. What pays for both? So outside of literally breathing air, which is how you are alive, money is the most important thing. system and subject that anything that challenges the status quo that people have at least learned to accept over a long period of human history the minute it starts to go in the hands of a human being that's a burden no matter Mother Teresa couldn't handle that burden in in the PR life cycle of anything the best people to walk this earth would not be infallible to people assuming that they are evil that's what we do i mean we've even talked and fed right into it today and probably correctly in some facets but it's like we assume all bad on stuff it's probably not

but that does mean there are people within there that are bad yeah right who are they i don't know with any system and so like with bitcoin the fact that Satoshi is unknown is the number one asset to it and what scares me about what you said. And there's nothing that's guaranteed in life. I may be the biggest – one of the big Bitcoin believers and I am and I'll put my name behind that. That's okay. I am still willing to be wrong in the sense that there are things that could be unforeseen and a scary Unforeseen thing in there is that if and I think about this a lot if a government created it and if if they Tested this very carefully and whatever government that is including our own

Could be using it for all the fucking wrong reasons and if I were betting I don't think it's our own because I think we are so far – like our government is – and maybe this is part of tactics publicly to fucking deflect. But they're so far behind the curve with being involved with it, and they're trying to fight it as well. It could also be who has access to the level of knowledge of – if it was a government thing they might the senators might not know lawmakers might not know so those laws those that pushback would still be there unless somebody higher up said yo don't don't fight this but yeah i'm not saying i i know for sure anything like that but it's it's a possibility it was it was a group of people it's very very well thought out whoever did it was very smart if it was one person like extremely it's some fourth turning

too because it rose it it was released on october 1st 2008 and started trading january 3rd 2009 which the idea released right after lehman brothers crashes world starts falling to and starts trading shortly before the bottom of the market in march and it's like the phoenix from the ashes kind of deal crazy timing it's just it's unbelievable it's so heavy man like i really bitcoin for so many different reasons is another thing that keeps me up at night like wondering and i and i own it i've owned it for a long time i believe in it but it's like there's so much that could be wrong and there's also so much that's like holy shit this is like the best innovation ever made yeah still not perfect yeah i i think uh i think too many people right now are not treating it like a currency though they're treating it like gold like they're just storing it do you

think it's a currency i think that was the goal of it to be a decentralized currency i don't truly think it is though i think other people have since come and done that a little better you might be right about that i i would disagree but i also can't come at you off the top of my head with hard evidence to disagree with what you just said that the intention what do you think the intentions was like or where let's get to intentions in a second i think the point of bitcoin as the public has now gotten it is absolutely not currency when i hear some of the big bitcoiners argue for that i think they're fucking crazy i think it is a store i think bitcoin is the sun it is a store of value and the planets are based off of that source of energy it is the energy that supplies it so if i'm a

betting man i believe that a currency on another blockchain system and right now very unconfidently but leader in the clubhouse type deal I'm betting on maybe something like the ethereum ecosystem will create some form of stable coin that cannot be created yet because Bitcoin is too volatile and too early on in the curve but as it stabilizes there will be a stable coin quote-unquote that's created as the currency beneath Bitcoin that is based off of the Sun itself Bitcoin similarly to how fiat currency was originally based off of gold. I think that's what it would be. If they created this to be currency though.

Like if that's what Satoshi intended. Maybe he did and I'm just not remembering the evidence. I don't think that's plausible. Because whenever you create something that is not dysflationary. It is literally. It's finite. It's finite. It's finite. It is capped. Yeah. I thought that was the original intention of it. I could be wrong.

That's a land grab. I think it spawned the idea that we need that worldwide. Yeah. Because, and then as far as stable coins go, it's tough though because what do you back it with? A government's currency? That's like the opposite of what you want. No, I'm saying that it will be backed and I don't know. I fully admit I haven't conceptualized exactly how this would work.

I think it's backed by Bitcoin. I think it's backed by that system and then how do you even determine then who has it? Price and how much it's worth. What is it worth relative to once the supply is capped and that's the other problem with it a huge problem that keeps me up at night about this system is it's all about personal responsibility which in a lot of facets i like but humans are imperfect this requires you to have a password to not get it stolen there's no fdic there's no back

like all the things we hate about the government we also love myself included love having the guarantee of if you're wronged it can at least to an extent be made right we like that we have insurance on stuff you don't have that with this it's you either fucking have your key if it gets hacked too bad if you forget the password too bad if it's gone it's gone yeah there's 21 million bitcoin that will be in circulation but it's estimated conservatively that three million of it is already gone satoshi's wallet satoshi's what his wallet he had he that's how he probably he basically verified the security of it yeah even his he that he had a few million coins in a wallet that's like the genesis wallet and

like it was like off the first block of bitcoin and that's but he's basically like trying to get in it here's the wallet and nobody's been able to so and the ones that have been lost that's like the federal reserve of bitcoin basically is his wallet because the if someone breaks bitcoin the first thing they'll do is i mean if they were smart they probably wouldn't go in his because that would tank the that would tank it they probably hit like whales on exchanges and stuff but yeah that i think that was set up that way like for reasons you were saying he outside of his wallet though there's also people have literally lost it yeah i wasn't even talking about his wallet but add that to the add that to it yeah

you probably only have three-fourths of the 21 million or whatever it's going to be i think it's 21 and i'm always afraid of the rebel becoming the establishment too this was born out of a rebellion against the established system that fucks over a lot of people in order to do that it has to become religious that is the nature of it there's a there's a role that you and i even play in that believing in it but also what about the fact that you know there are people who own and there's a lot we don't know about too but there's people who we openly know own a percent or two percent the whole fucking thing what makes that different from the system that allows certain people like the federal reserves and central banks and governments of the world to control our current currency what's going

to make that different when we put it in the hands of a private individual who doesn't even have the checks and balances that a government might actually have i think about that too it's like you take good and bad yeah at least in bitcoin's case i think there's obviously it was the brainchild of whoever created it but is there like some committee that votes on things no not that i'm well they have to define the protocol though there's people that work on it it wasn't just left by there's been upgrades to bitcoin the lightning network things like that there's definitely been updates to it left by, there's been upgrades to Bitcoin, the Lightning Network, things like that. There's definitely been updates to it. There's some sort of voting governing group. But not in the general.

That validates the protocol. They don't handle the financials. Yes. Yes. And that's what I focus on. They don't affect the supply. But they make decisions based on security and things like that on the protocol. Because somebody has to work on it

that's what's tough too but i mean they're i don't know if i don't know when something is going to overtake bitcoin as being the most popular one though it could be years it's branded too it's also one of a kind it's the only thing that is completely untraceable to a human being. We don't know who Satoshi is and it exists completely on a decentralized network. Do you think anyone knows? Governments? If it was multiple people, yeah. The people who are still alive. If it was one guy. Maybe not, but the cynic in me. The cynic in me is afraid because the cynic in me says the foreign government made this not even the u.s government a foreign government made this i think i think if that was the case i wonder if our government would even know about it no i don't

think they would that's a big secret it's a huge secret and that's the nature of conspiracy the more people that are involved in a conspiracy the less extreme the conspiracy in my opinion usually can be because the number of people who have to either by force or coercion or by volunteer stay quiet is insane yeah it's since i could see things like aliens stuff like that even that though thousands of people would have to know about yeah yeah and even yeah you're right even that even that stuff but when people talk about some other stuff it's like with aliens there's some sort of aligned interest across all humans who don't want to be killed by aliens including governments who hate each other yeah with other things there's not because it's strictly on earth

i don't know but i actually never asked you just one last thing on the end of your case yeah when that all came in so you guys you go to court it was already pretty much predefined you were like on lightning round because you had been prepared for this for like a year and you were like you were kind of ready to roll so you guys just pled out you didn't do any prison time and then paid restitution and then that was kind of the end of it yeah yeah for the three of us for you yeah for that and i won't go the other thing is you didn't want to touch that but was there i mean has anything happened beyond that like at all or that was it open after after that yeah that was that was basically it man fucking wild yeah it's fucking wild thankfully linked up

with anthony and riley and justin and them and we've been doing pretty good we didn't even touch that today i know we might have to save that which is great too because there's a lot we didn't touch like within the stuff we were talking about. But also, we've had a lot of Soar stuff on here, too. I like to spread that out a little bit. So it was nice to kind of get another explanation there. But yeah, to be clear, you're one of their lead engineers, which is like, you said you found them early days or something? Yeah.

Yeah, I've been there for a couple years now. Upgraded the co-founder. We did a lot. That is fucking co-founder. We did a lot. That is fucking wild, man. We did a lot from when I got there. So yeah, it's been a cool ride. It's amazing. No complaints. It's amazing. Well, your story's nuts. And also I have a way different, not that I like, coming into it, I thought it was just kind of cool. I'm like, ah, you're just committing a

felony when you were 20, but doing cool shit and you can brag about it and use it to get a great job which you have but like now i i don't i think that's i think you got fucked yeah that part wasn't all gravy either i got lucky to link up with some people that looked past that but but definitely missed out on some opportunities because of it sure but in the world you're in for your skill set as long as you're not somebody who's like persona non grata doing evil shit right oh my god it's something to brag about and like now i feel much more comfortable i've never even spoke about this before i mean i look i'm not you i didn't go through it myself i'm not a coder i don't understand that world like you do but to me i'd be fucking talking about this left and right

and also taking a dance and not a dance but like the fuck is wrong with the fbi like to me i mean obviously like you made out pretty well and you just lost the money you you went through but you didn't have to go to prison or anything but if i'm the fbi i'd have fucking hired you guys i would have said all right fellas no court case you work for us for five years like that's insane to me that they didn't do that yeah i mean they also have pretty strict hiring requirements nowadays too you see the remember the whole weed thing with they couldn't hire anyone that's ever smoked before and they had to they claim they reversed it and all that stuff i don't know if that's still all the case. Hiring requirements. That implies that the public knows about the hiring.

Yeah. That's true too. They can do what they want. Fuck the FBI. Forget the FBI. Hand it off to the NSA. Hand it off to the CIA. The guys we're shitting on today.

Make your... Some guys that do... They work pretty high up in certain areas. That's what I'm saying. You guys figured out... You demonstrated. You figured out you demonstrated you figured out some shit that even shouldn't have been illegal that was on a very mainstream thing that caused a shit storm that's 10 you fucking young you got no idea what you're doing

you're just doing yeah it's talent that's like hr dream thanks well it worked out for you so i don't think you're complaining but but still. I'm not complaining too much. Whatever, man. Listen, Nick, thanks, brother. Thank you, man. Good having you in. Yeah, you too. We'll do it again, but this was –

It's good to meet you. Good to meet you too, finally. But this was – said a similar thing to Baker. This broke my brain a couple times today. So hope the listeners can follow along. But I think we simplified a lot of complex stuff and then also stayed really complex on like some meta shit, no pun intended. Yeah, man. Next time we get into what we're doing, we're doing it sore.

So it would be cool. Would love to talk with you about that. Would love to get your perspective from the engineering side. I did a little bit with Baker but not a ton. So would love to do that. But thanks, man. All right. Thanks for having me.

All right. Everybody else, you know what it is. Give it a thought. Get back to me. Peace.