The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Concentric “Gamers’ Security Paradigm Shift” Panel at SXSW

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Concentric.io March 12th SXSW panel hosted by Concentric, the largest privately owned security firm on the west coast, will tackle. "Gamers' Security Paradigm Shift in Physical World" will discuss going “From Virtual to Reality” with Roderick Jones, Executive Chairman of Concentric; Paul Foster, CEO of Global Esports Federation and esports influencer and Pro Basketball Player Aerial Powers. The security paradigm surrounding online influencers, and specifically gamers, has evolved to a dangerous level over the last few years. Ultimately, the uniqueness of influencers’ security problem comes from their real or perceived accessibility, the bipolarization of social consciousness in today’s era, including stigma of their profession, and the ability for bad actors to hide behind pseudonyms and aliases to prevent prosecution for their actions. The dangers of online threats aren't going away any time soon. According to Roderick, “As influencers bring viewers into their living rooms and/or bedrooms during live-streams or social media stories, participants can feel personally connected to the event, even though they are doing so along with tens of thousands of fellow viewers. A crossover into obsession is enabled by the ease of information about these individuals including physical addresses, familial contact information, and “pattern of life” details such as frequented stores, gyms, and friends’ houses.” Additionally: Influencers are forced to reckon with unsolicited and non-consensual messages, and sometimes photographs or videos, due to the reachability and access users have to their following on social media. Oftentimes this puts influencers in a vulnerable position, usually not realized until it’s too late to control. Desensitization is expected from influencers when negative comments and responses are expected to be seen, allowed, and anticipated, even on a mass scale. Because that baseline of negativity is established, the threat escalation is significantly higher while also being allowed to “drown in the noise.” Virtual attacks are below the threshold of concern and no direct correlation is anticipated to evolve into physical threat, regardless of the data proving otherwise. When physical threats do occur, there is limited recourse that influencers can take. "Unfortunately, the influencer industry is lagging behind on not only acknowledging the security threat posed by their unique accessibility, but also dealing with stigma and technology limitations that prevent adequate and holistic response options for the virtual threats that are directly turning into physical violence."

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Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here.

Be sure to further show your family, friends, and relatives. See the video version of this. Go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss. All of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Especially subscribe to that LinkedIn newsletter. Jeez, that thing's killing it over there. And also our 132,000 member group on LinkedIn as well. Search for that on the Chris Voss Show. Today, we have an amazing company that's doing some amazing things on top of doing some panels at South by Southwest. If you're following the hashtag pound South by Southwest or S-W-S, or I'm sorry, S-X-S-W, X-X. S-X-S-W, I got you. It's a tough one.

Oh, that's like a whole thing there going on. South by Southwest. If you're not familiar with what it is, it's a beautiful, big conference convention thing. They hold down there in Austin, Texas. You've seen this covered over the years. And we're going to be talking with Laura Hoffner today. She is the Executive VP of Risk Solutions for a company called Concentric. Welcome to the show, Laura. How are you? Thank you so much. I'm doing great.

There you go. And so give us a plug on where do we find Concentric and briefly what you guys do. Yeah, you can find us at concentric.io. And we're a holistic security provider. So we are mostly based out of the West Coast, but we have run operations worldwide. And we do physical security security provider. So we are mostly based out of the West Coast, but we run operations worldwide. And we do physical security solutions as well as digital and virtual security. Awesome sauce. So what are you guys doing there at South by Southwest this year? So South by Southwest has a new gaming track.

And so what we've been seeing in the virtual world especially is the unique security paradigm that gamers and online influencers as a whole are facing in the security world. Their security is just not top of mind as it is with physical athletes or physical presence. And so we want to raise awareness to this unique situation that they have going on and hopefully provide some solutions. Does that include other gaming competitors that maybe lash out at you that steal your IP or there's been, what they used to call that thing, swapping people, doxing. And then there's times where they find your IP and your address, they'll call the cops on you. I forget what that's called, swatting. Yeah, that absolutely includes it. It's really just also this entire

virtual personality that influencers have as a whole and how targetable they are. Unfortunately, in the world that we live in these days, you can really find out anything that you want about someone, including where they live and how to get access to them. So where is that line in the sand of when a virtual threat becomes a physical threat? Wow. And so how do you guys assist in prevention or protecting the security of gamers? Yeah. So right now it's this awareness. That's what we want to do with South by Southwest. And ultimately we want to be having this conversation because a lot of people just don't want to engage in this because it's a tricky line going from your right to free speech. But then where does

that line stop? And you become a threat to the person that you're talking to. So freedom of speech does not necessarily mean freedom from responsibility of your actions. And so we want to engage on this. And so we had this fascinating panel that happened earlier today. We had Paul Foster, who's the CEO of eSports. And then we actually had Ariel Powers, who is not only a WNBA star and champion, but she's also a gamer. So we had three different perspectives, one being the person living it. That was Ariel. One being the administrative function over it. That's Paul and what he's doing, what responsibility those companies have for the safety of their stars. And then Roderick Jones, who's our executive chairman, the solutions that he's bringing from the security aspect of it. So we just had an engaging conversation as to the different perspectives on this security

problem set. Wow. Can you touch on some of the different things they talked about or perspectives that people should be aware of? Absolutely. So Ariel actually made a really good point that she sees more of a security problem set in the virtual world than the physical world. She engages and experiences more racism and more sexism online than she ever would personally or in person. And so that has actually switched into a stalker profile. So she had someone that was following her closely online. She wasn't really paying much attention to it because it was just online. And then they showed up at one of her games and tried to propose to her. And we all know that can quickly turn into not necessarily a nice interaction.

And so she has personally experienced that switchover from virtual to physical. Yeah. And I mean, there's been instances, I'm not sure about the gamer community, but you know, in like Hollywood and different things where someone has shown up and I think killed some people. Yes, unfortunately. Stalker stuff can get really out of hand. Absolutely. It really can. Just two weeks ago, one of the TikTok stars that we have, her father had to shoot someone, had a stalker come into their house, and he had to respond immediately. And unfortunately, this issue is just not being taken seriously because

of the perspective that gamers just aren't that influential or they don't deserve the same security protocol as people do in person. So we really need to stop that. We need to enable these people a lot more than we are right now. The Chris Voss show has always been into gaming. I think Kingston brought us back into it about 2012, 2013. We've got a pretty good size of Discord still these days. It used to be much larger when Destiny was much hotter than Destiny the game. Of course, Call of Duty, all the different things. And so I've spent a lot of time in the gaming community because we review a lot of gaming products. And yeah, the racism is out of control.

The sexism is out of control. It's kind of like when people are in their cars, how they get really ugly in traffic and stuff. They feel like, I read there's a psychology of it. They feel they're insulated because they're in a car when you're really not. If you really piss someone off enough, they're probably going to come open your door or try to open your door. But people feel like, well, I'm protected. There seems that they don't really,

I don't really know that they take their thing seriously, but we've had to combat it from such a huge level i mean i've had to have sony sony moderators come in a whole team of kids drop the n-word all through a chat and have to have sony come in and clean it up and vic people we've had that in our discord where you constantly have to be on the lookout for somebody, either porn or hate or racism. There's always some sort of attack that goes on all the time. It's a constant struggle to fight it. And trying to beat that stuff is really awful. And then of course the hate, whether it's racism or sexism, is really ugly. And people can get really ugly in chats, online communities, and it's just, it's really something else.

And what's the deterrent at this point, right? How do we get people to want to stop doing that? Or how do we follow through with them? Because right now you can kick them off the platform or you can cancel their username, but it's so easily easy to just make another username and pop right back on with that same discourse.

Oh yeah. We've had that fight in our, in our discord. In fact, I think there's several different weapons Discord has given us where they can't just go start a new account and log in or they have to

go through certain security factors of having an account for a while or something. Yeah, it's whack-a-mole on steroids. That's the exact protocol that we're trying to get the larger populace to understand that needs to be taken into effect so that these TikTok stars, YouTube stars, gamers as a whole can have that layer of protection, that their overall company that's hosting their platform has their back on that. So you're making sure that people have to have verified accounts, that they're signing a code of conduct, that they're actually holding people to and are kicking people out if they're not doing

that. But then also, what's that next step? And we don't know what that solution is yet, but we need to start talking about it and figuring it out. Yeah. One of the problems are a lot of companies don't take it seriously. The running joke is among Bungie, Destiny of the Game Players is the reports that you're pouring on people just go into some wastebasket somewhere. Nothing is done. They claim to be, oh, we've got some cheater software. I think Call of Duty came out with some cheater software too recently.

I think theirs is working. But, you know, I mean, and a lot of these, a lot of the people I have the hardest time with is not really grown up people. It's these kids. It's almost like there should be a thing like I'm reporting you to your mother sort of button. And maybe that needs to happen because it seems like Sony and these other folks, I mean, I've tracked these guys because they have to because a lot of times what we'll do is, like you mentioned, we'll ban them.

But sometimes I have to shut down either access to the Discord for a while or access to our clan groups that we have. I used to have 15 clan groups. And we'll have to shut it down for a while where no one can join because we can't fully block these guys. They'll come and they'll bomb it with whatever sort of ugliness

they have, and then you kick them, block them. But you literally track their accounts. Like a lot of them I would put into what we call the black book and track their accounts to see if Bungie or Sony or other players did something with them. Sometimes they give them like a week ban or something. We'd hear about it.

Cause they'd be like, you got me being for a week. And I'm like, you used to be banned off a platform, but whatever. Yeah. Perpetuity. And maybe they would learn.

I don't know. I mean, it seems like there's so many different gaming platforms. Do you guys talk with gaming platforms? What's the feedback from them, I guess? Well, that's what we brought in Paul because he's, as the CEO of eSports, he's got an invested interest in this. And what was so fascinating, we directly asked him,

is it eSports' responsibility for the health and welfare of the people on their platform? And he says, absolutely it is. But how we do that, we don't know yet. And he is adamant that it's okay to say that we need to discuss this and not have the solution ready to go. But ultimately, there are not enough of these hosted platforms and companies that are taking that responsibility. They're just like, hey, we're just here to provide the service. We can't do anything else. We've all seen that actually, no, you do have that responsibility to do more. I mean, Facebook has been having these conversations on the national and international spectrum in regards to what their inherent responsibility is by being this host. And so we're just seeing those ripple effects in these smaller companies.

Wow. And so what sort of companies do you work with? Who are your clients sort of thing? Not by name, but what type of people do you work with and help? Yeah, we work with both individuals and corporations, usually of the high net worth variety because they have such a unique security protocol. Not only is it that they need to have an ancillary security detail whenever they travel or even in their homes, but they have such a large online profile that people are following them and would like to interact with them either on a healthy or an unhealthy level. And so that's where we need to step in and ensure that their safety is across the spectrum, not just in the physical world. And do you guys accomplish that through software or?

All of the above, really. So we have it in person when we give them our agents on the ground, but then we also have an Intel arm that provides them with pre-trip analysis, during trip analysis, and then we are always there letting them know what's going on in that area of the world in case we need to evacuate them on a moment's notice. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so then we also have this great new program called Eclipse, and it's a digital privacy

aspect. And so what we do is really scan about 250 different aggregators to see what information is out there on you. And then we work to take it down on your behalf so that it's not as easily found out where you live, what your credit card number is, your history, et cetera. Yeah. So you guys almost sound like a secret service, a private secret service. We have a couple of prior secret service people that work for us.

Wow. There you go. There you go. I noticed on your website, the corporations, family offices, law firms, investors, government people, maritime nonprofits, all things to protect people. And I imagine the more successful you are, or if you have money, of course, the bigger the target you get for weirdos on the internet. Yep.

When I was one of the top people early on Twitter, I think I was in the top 1,000 in the first year or something. We adopted to it really quickly and then took it over. And of course, the Forbes top 50 and all those awards that I got. Yeah. When you get successful at different levels, the weirdos can come at you. And a lot of times they come out to tear you down because of some sort of jealousy or whatever the thing is. Let's talk about, I know it's on your website here, some stuff about Ukraine. Talk to us about what you guys are doing in Ukraine. Yeah, sorry. Just one more point on what you just brought up.

With our online gamers and influencers that's exactly the issue that we're seeing is that these people think that they have a very close relationship with these influencers because they're streaming from their bedrooms they've got access to their live stream of consciousness on twitter you can say whatever you're thinking at any time and so that level of connection and relationship in an unhealthy person can quickly move into the fanatical. And so these people are, of course, thinking that they have these in-depth relationships with the people that they're following. And of course, they're actually not. And so when they switch over from that virtual to physical, that's when we need to step in.

But we just need to figure out what are the warning signs before they go into the physical world so that we can prevent it from happening. Yeah. I've had gal pals online where I've seen some of their comments and I've been like, I don't know. Have you noticed that dude that's being, there's some creep factor 10 going on there. Yeah. And you're like, uh, you should, you should keep an eye on that one. That one's, uh, that one's posting some weird stuff.

And then they usually have a picture that looks like Igor from I Just Lost the Igor Crowd, all two of them. The note itself, shut down the hate mail email. But I get that, too, on a micro level. I mean, at events, we have people that run up to us screaming the Chris Voss show. The Chris Voss show.com. They love that singing part, which I can never get rid of. It's catchy. It's catchy. It's catchy.

People love it. And we tried to stop doing it, and people got upset about it. So we just have to keep doing it, I guess. But they'll run up to you at the show, and they go, The Christmas Show! And you're like in an event. You're doing business. You're interviewing or something.

And, I mean, I like it. It's nice. I like the fans. But on the flip side of it, you're kind of freaked out sometimes. She's like, you, I don't know who you are. You're well-intentioned. When they're coming up to you, you don't know what they think. They feel like they like you and they know you because I've spent so much time watching you.

And I'm like, hopefully it was online. Hopefully it wasn't through my window or something. Also, it's very one-sided. Yeah, it's really because you don't know who they are. You're just like, you. Okay. Yeah, you. Thanks for you and me.

Conversation or something. So let's touch on the Ukraine thing. Please, I would love to. So we assisted with the evacuations from Afghanistan last fall. We have a lot of our staff who were either service members like myself, who served in Afghanistan multiple times, or at least touched that problem set over the last two decades. How could you not? And so when the Taliban were taking over again last summer, we saw a unique opportunity where a philanthropic effort could be provided a solution by our world.

And so what we ended up doing is chartering the last civilian flight that went out of country before the US military fully left. So it was originally supposed to have 188 people on it. It ended up having about 360 because they just stuffed the plane. But the efforts to get those people out were truly monumental and an international solution that we provided. And so we started a nonprofit named 188 in credence to that group that we got out. And we weren't expecting to put it to use so soon thereafter. But then when Ukraine kicked off two weeks ago, we again saw our same solution. So we've been working for about the last week and a half on evacuations from Ukraine. We've got people on the ground in Lviv and then in Warsaw, over in Romania, all working networks in order to get people out.

So we've been providing solutions from a surrogate baby that was born six days before in Kiev. And her surrogate mom left her, having fulfilled her part of the contract. And her parents were in Norway. So we had to get the parent into Kiev in order to pick up the baby and then safely back out while avoiding Russian attacks. So that's one single operation of what we've been trying to do. And then we had a blind woman in Irpin, which is unfortunately very heavily surrounded by Russian forces, who we were finally just able to get out and brought her to Hungary. So getting all of these different situations, understanding their personal plight and how we can get into

them and where they want to go. It is a massive network that's providing that solution. And so it's all being done under 188. And so we've been asking for donations in order to assist with this because of course the cost of these evacuations is going up as the security goes down. I'm sure. Evolves, right. And so then we also found this organization in Lviv that is specializing for women that have been battered or subject to trafficking. And so

what money we don't spend on rescues, we're then going to send to this shelter to assist them with their efforts. That's good. That's good. It's a crazy situation that's going on there now. It really is. I'm glad that we're able to do something in order to help, but it just doesn't ever feel like enough. There's going on there now. It really is. I'm glad that we're able to do something in order to help, but it just doesn't ever feel like enough.

There's always more to do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll see how that whole thing hopefully turns out or ends soon. It's just, it's unfortunate what's going on and horrible. One man,

just one man can ruin the whole world. I thought we learned this in 1945. I know. The new people could still get us. But these are the situations where you can absolutely dwell on all of the bad things that you are seeing. And my goodness, isn't it bad? But wow, how many people have volunteered their time, effort, money in order to provide these solutions that they don't know these people. They just want to assist in some way. And I just haven't seen this kind of international coalition effort to assist the people of Ukraine or any demographic really since 9-11 has the world not been so united in this effort. So it's nice to focus on that aspect of humanity that when the crisis is there, so many people are willing to answer, ourselves included. Yeah, I'm so glad the world's coming together instead of people being like, well, I don't know.

I mean, that's what they counted on. Anything we need to know more about your company, the panel from Southwest? I think it's just that we are really trying to have this conversation be had. It is a unique situation. We don't have an easy solution. Of course, if there was an easy solution, it would have been figured out by now and implemented. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be bringing it up and talking about it. And the people who are suffering, our victims, our influencers, our YouTubers, it's easy to dismiss them because they chose that line of work.

But they shouldn't have to be targeted or even die, as we've seen, because of this line of work that they chose. Definitely. Most definitely. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show, Laura. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Give us the.io one more time. Concentric.io.

There you go. So, guys, be sure to check it out. Go to YouTube.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com, 4Chess Chris Voss. All of our groups on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and all those different places. Stay safe, be good to each other, and we'll see you guys next time.