The Team House - From Army Intel in Iraq to CSO of Coinbase | Philip Martin | Ep. 398

Episode Date: February 21, 2026

Philip Martin is a former U.S. Army counterintelligence officer who spent years hunting threats and protecting forces in Iraq before transitioning into the private sector. He now serves as Chief Security Officer at Coinbase, where he applies military tradecraft to securing one of the world’s largest crypto platforms against digital and physical threats.Today's Sponsors:Blue Chew ⬇️https://bluechew.com/Get 10% off your first month of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL"GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 25% off! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics...JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouseTo help support the show and for all bonus content including:-live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video-early access to shows-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________PRE ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️https://a.co/d/0eOl8czUSubscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured__________________________________Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseSocial Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample"Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio"00:00 Start25:17 The No-Win Job of Catching Spies26:21 Finding Targets Without Addresses43:06 OpSec Failures and Kidnapping Risk45:22 What Palantir Actually Does59:29 Crypto and Economic Freedom1:10:06 Can Crypto Replace the Dollar?1:12:26 Inside Coinbase Security1:26:00 Southeast Asia Scam Compounds1:27:32 How to Stop Scams: Education FirstBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey, everyone. I want to tell you about my new novel, The Most Dangerous Man, Out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa. And when he wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game resorts. in Africa. I took that and I took a century-old short story, the most dangerous game, and modernized it. And the product is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today. Thank you and please check it out. The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park. In 94 of The Team House, I'm Jack Murphy here with our

guest tonight, Philip Martin. He served in Army Counterintelligence with deployments to Iraq and a few other places around the world. And he is currently the chief security officer at Coinbase, which is a crypto company, crypto wallet company. Crypto company. Crypto company. And we'll get in all of that in this interview. Philip, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely, man. So, you know, the first question I always ask people is about their origin story. And yours is a little interesting. Tell us how you kind of grew up and what that path was that took you towards the Army eventually. Yeah, sure.

So I've, I mean, I think for me, a fairly unique story of how I got here. So I was, before I ever went in the military, I was a software engineer. You know, I was that nerd in my parents' basement. Our group in Northern California, I'm going to have basements. It was a metaphorical basement. But it was a basement nonetheless. and taught by top to code, you know, loved everything about computers and the internet and all of it. Ended up, you know, starting a few small businesses in high school, went to college, got super bored, dropped out, joined a startup.

And then 9-11 happened. And there's this confluence of me being pretty burned out with the, you know, what was at the time, sort of that just post.com bust era. and then, you know, attack on our country. And there's a bunch of family history there. I didn't mention this when we were talking before, but, you know, with the exception of my dad, who's a minister, there's like the entire history of my family is involved in service in some way, shape, or form, right?

Both my grandparents were in World War II. And, you know, my mom got in genealogy at one point and she went like full ham. But we can go back. There was a, we weren't called the Martins at the time, but there was a Martin in the Revolutionary War in every major conflict sense. So it was something I thought long and hard about.

Like this is an opportunity for me to do something that I might not ever get a chance to do again. And the, you know, you mentioned the sort of tail end of the dot-com era. Like this is like pretty well before social media and all that stuff comes around. So it was like, was you working with like the Netscapes and the Yahoo's. Yeah, actually, I worked at Netscape,

Briefly. Yeah, Netscape, Netscape, NetSenter. Yep. I, I, I, um, only people our age even know what that means. I know, I know. They even know there, right? I actually interviewed at Yahoo back when it was still Yahoo. Um, so yeah, it was a fascinating time to be in the valley for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exciting times too, right? Yeah, I, I took down Netscape, Netscape, NetSenter by accident for a good five minutes at one point. Oh, that was you. Yeah, yep. That was me. That was me. My fault. And what was kind of your role? Were you a coder?

Yeah. Software engineer. Okay. So, yeah, you were in the thick of it. Yeah, absolutely. It was a lot of fun, right? Like, you know, I got to participate in, like, a huge boom cycle in the Valley and, you know, see a lot of stuff, learn a lot of lessons. Sure.

That are, that have served me well, right, over the course of my career. That's really cool. So you get burned out on this, and being a software engineer, 9-11, half. happens. What was kind of like your approach? Like where did where did you go first? Yeah. Um, so I went I went army first. There was the only thing I really ever considered. Um, uh, I'll tell you my edible crayon story later. Sure. Um, about my, my Marine Corps colleague at Coinbase. But, um, yeah, Army is all I really ever considered. Um, and, you know, went into the recruiting station, right? It's like, I want to join. Um, I went through the guard,

rather than go full active duty. And it was in my mind. Maybe I want to do it later. I never ended up going full active duty. But looked around, I'm like, I don't want to do anything that has to do with computers. I'm sort of over that. You know, did my ASVAB, all that sort of for the merit testing. They're like, you know, you can sort of do what you want.

So like, what do you want to do? And I was like, this counterintelligence thing looks interesting. It's like, yeah, it's about people, which is like half true and like half not true. and it's complicated, right? Right. But it was the best choice I think I could have ever made. Loved every second of it. As I then sort of went in and did basic Fort Leonard Wood,

and then down into Fort Wachuka for AIT and then language school for Arabic. It was a long time. It's like a two-year training pipeline. Yeah. I mean, DLI alone is like a year, right? Year and a half for Arabic. for the cat four languages all year and a half. And you told me before you were a 3-3.

I maxed out at a 3-3. I graduated at a 2-2-plus, something like that. That's super good. And then after my deployment to Iraq, where I spoke Arabic a lot, I did another, I did my next annual test, and I was a 3-3. And the way they do these testing is like there's one test that goes up to 3-3, and there's another one that goes 3-plus, 3-plus, up to 5. So I maxed out the test that I took.

You just actually never ended up taking the other test. So for people listening, don't understand, like being a 3-3 in your target language in the military is considered fluent. Yeah. There might be some, like, technical jargon and stuff you might not know if you're a 3-3, but you're pretty dialed in at that point. So 3-3, I believe the rubric is you were considered a high school graduate. You were fluent to the equivalent of a high school graduate. No, in that. And like a 5-5, which is the max the scale goes to, you are the equivalent of a college-educated.

professional. Yeah, you're writing poetry in Arabic. Yeah, correct. After you finish DLI, what is the training course for a counterintelligence agent? Yeah, so it's called something different now. It's called Sysak, the CI Special Agent course. And it is a, what was the time that I did it, a 22 week, if I recall correctly, maybe it was 26, 28, somewhere in there, 20-something week training course down on Fort Wachuka, Arizona, which is about as far south as you can go in Arizona and not be in Mexico. And, you know, it's really about getting a bunch of kids, right? You know, because it's mostly 19, 20, 21-year-olds that are going in there to understand a little about how the army works and a lot about how espionage work, right?

How and why people choose a betrayal country, how and why we investigate them, and then sort of the broader universe of CI as well, because a lot of people think about CI and you think about, like, I don't know, maybe like NCIS. Right, right? Where they're like, it's not CID. Right. And like there's this huge world of CI that includes things like,

like, I don't know, TSCM, right, which is like bug sweeping and technical, technical surveillance countermeasures. And there's a bunch of cyber stuff, right? Investigations in forensics. There's human-related stuff, right, for force protection operations. There's, like, disinformation campaigns around sensitive secrets, right? Exactly right, right? Because, like, people ask me all the time, like, what does CI do?

Like, what do you guys do, right? We know what intelligence does. And I say, well, look, if intelligence is about you defining like your view of your adversary. CI is about you defining your adversary's view of you. Yeah. Right? In a way that's advantageous to you.

And it's maybe worth mentioning to the viewers. You know, you mentioned it briefly. It's called the special agent course. CI guys are also bedged special agents. Yep. You want to explain that distinction to folks? So, I mean, it's a lot of, it's a lot of nuance. It's actually even more nuanced than that because not all CI guys are like the go to Fletsey,

the federal law enforcement training center. Some of us do, but not everyone does. And so like you're, if you don't go to Fletsey, you're not a full federal agent with the Rets of Powers, right? But you're a badge credentialed CI agent. So you do have a lot of law enforcement adjacent sort of ability. especially on Army reservations. But, like, for example, as like a normal, everyday CIA agent, or at least this is true when I was in,

I couldn't arrest somebody. I could have the MPs do it, but I couldn't do it directly. The way I could if, like, you know, you'd gone to Fletzee and were in a billet that had those powers with you. But that badge and credentials gave you a lot more access and a lot more ability to sort of get things done than you would otherwise. And the arrest power is because part of the job field is your spy catcher. Yep. Correct.

Part of the job field, in fact, I mean, the core of the job field, really, is about hopefully preventing the loss of national intelligence secrets, but at the very least, you know, detecting responding. So you're in the California National Guard qualified as a counterintelligence special agent. Tell us about the run-up to your first deployment. Was that something you volunteered for? Yeah. Oh, no. That was something I individually volunteered for as soon as I could after I got out of DLI.

I think it was like, I don't know, three, four months, tops after I got out of DLI before I was sort of in the run up to that deployment. So I deployed with a, actually a Louisiana Guard Battalion, the 415th. I want to say out of Baton Rouge, although if I'm wrong, they're going to murder me.

They'll just like all come up and whatever. Baseball bets and Maxinebles. Correct. And delicious food. And so I joined them over in Fort Dix, New Jersey, for our workup. And I mean, it was interesting. I always think like some of that stuff feels like, you know, someone saw a movie about a combat deployment and designed the workup because of that.

Some of it feels very relevant, right? So it's always this weird, this weird mishmash. Well, you mean like some of the training felt like anachronistic? Yeah. Why are we entering and clearing a trench line? Correct. Yes. That's a good example.

Or, you know, we did lots of like, you know, scenario role-playing stuff that was nothing like what we actually encountered in country. And like maybe it was like, you know, because I was there, you know, call five, five to seven. And so maybe it was more applicable back in 2000. two, or I guess we weren't there in two, but like 2003, right, during the initial invasion. Well, you say you were there from five, you mean literally you're there from 05 to 07? It's a very tail end of 05 to the very, very beginning of 07. Okay, so like 14 months a bit. Yeah, something like that, yeah.

All right, so tell us about, you know, deploying to Iraq and sort of where you were and what your job was. Yeah, so I was in a little spot called Bob Kalsu, which is right on the Sunni-Shiya divide in Iraq. So for those, for folks they don't know, Iraq is, is loosely, obviously is not a sharp line, right? But loosely segregated, or again, was into a Sunni population and a Shia, the two different sects of Islam. And they didn't like mix a ton. But right on this line, they did. Because, you know, they were adjacent similar communities. And there was always a lot of conflict around them because of that.

It was also Iraq's a very tribal place. A lot of the Middle East is, but Iraq's a very, very tribally organized. And we were on the lines of a couple of different local tribes. So it was a very interesting, like high conflict potential area to be in. And sort of we covered a pretty good chunk of that sort of central south area of Iraq. And that was a particularly hot time. It was. It was.

We got, you know, we took Indirect Fire a lot in the base. In fact, one of my, I'm sure we'll get into war stories, but I have a really, really proud story when we rolled up the local mortar cell that had been, you know, dropping, dropping moors on the base every day, every day. We were able to get intelligence on them, roll them up. And it just stopped. Like, talk about seeing impact from your work, right? We hit their little munitions cache, right?

Got, you know, the little mortar primers, like shotgun rounds. Got all that, got all that stuff. And it would just overnight. Yeah, let's jump into it. How did you go about, you know, dismantling that network? How did you develop the intelligence for something like that? You know, what's really interesting is a lot of intelligence to me is very serendipitous, right? And it's like, you know, luck is timing meets preparation, right?

It's one of the old sayings. I think it's sort of a similar thing in intelligence operations. But, you know, one of the things that you have to do in a scenario like that is you have to get out there in the community and meet people and be, like, helpful and be a human and have conversations because, you know, most, the vast majority of a population in a place like that just wants to live their life. they're not connected to an insurgency. They don't want to be connected to an insurgency. Their concerns are, is their local, you know, livestock healthy? Yeah.

Right? And these guys are making problems for us, making problems for them. They don't like it either, but they frequently feel they don't know how to go about it. They don't know who to talk to. They feel threatened if they might do it. And so it's creating those opportunities for someone to come to you and say,

hey, like, I saw something weird. Or for someone to go to someone else and like talk, right? Oh, God, that, you know, whoever he was, I saw him over there that, that at the time. It's super weird. I think they're doing something. And for that to make it way back, back to you, right? Requires roots in the connection in the community. And so, really it was about talking to people, building relationships, being a reasonable person. Hey, their generators broken. Let's go to all civil affairs. Can they get like, can they get something out here to help them out? Hey, there's, you know, there's a, there's, you know,

Some kid is sick. Hey, is there like a local medical assistance thing we can, we can engage with building that goodwill? So we did that. And all the time, right, we're taking indirect fire. And it's from these guys that would like, you know, pull up somewhere in this, in this, in the old Toyota van. And they pop out, set the mortar up, pop off three or four rounds, throw it back in the van, run like hell. Right? They couldn't hit anything.

reliably, but it was a big fob, so they'd hit something. And, you know, most of the time it hit something, somewhere unoccupied, somewhere in the base. Sometimes it would hit, it would hit, it would hit, close to home. There's one time when they hit right outside the Chow Hall an hour before lunch. Like, an hour later, there would have been a line of soldiers outside that, and they would have, they would have hurt a lot, a lot, a lot of people. And so we had been, you know, really, they had been a target for us for a while, right? How can we get lines on them?

What are their ingress, egress, egress routes? Like, wherever we think they're staged. How can we build connections there? How can we find people but might know who these people are or where they're based? And we had developed a little bit of a targeting package on them for us and for our local. You know, at the time, it was 4 ID and a team from, I think it was the fifth group that was there on Fob Kausu. And we knew their names. and we knew where they, in theory, lived, although they were never there.

We'd hit their houses multiple times on like tips that, oh, he's back visiting his wife or whatever. And, I mean, you know, it's in the middle of the night in Iraq, the sound of a Humvee carries quite a long way. Right. It is really hard to sneak up on someone like that, especially when they have connections in the community. And so we could just, we could, we had a really, really hard time nailing them down. until and the other thing you do in intelligence operations is you want to help people help you

right you're not just out there you know glad handing saying hi you're like hey and like I'm glad we're able to help you you know we'd really love to help you by making this place safer and calmer if you see any of these things you know we'd really love to know to know about them you see someone

you know messing around an abandoned house that you know no one lives there. You see someone, whatever it was. And it was actually that one that caught us, this tip, is someone that we had helped in a local village, was driving, I forget why he was doing this, probably to and from somewhere we were selling something or whatever. And he's like, I saw these guys in a white van in this house that no one lives in. It's like, it clearly, they had never finished building it, right? It had just been a bandit at some point. And they were digging. And like, you know, I kept driving and then I called you guys.

And like, you'd want to know because this is the kind of thing you're interested in. I'm like, yes, it is. So, you know, we go to the platoon that covered that area and we're like, hey, we got this intelligence. Like, let's talk it through. Could be them. Maybe it's not them. We don't know. And so, okay, great.

We plan a raid. We go out there, I think it was the next day. No one's home. No one's anywhere around it. But we had brought a, canine with us and they had brought the metal detector's whole nine yards so the canine starts going around the place and alerts in this little area sort of beneath the tree where they had they had dragged some like palm fronds and whatever you know um eUDs out there they cleared the whole

thing um and there's clearly been disturbed dirt right where they had dug we we we went down after that we discovered an old like um a couple of old ammo crates like you know you come talking about Like AK crates, basically, right? Pulled that out. And it was their entire weapons cache. It was their mortars. It was their mortar primers. It was their mortar rounds, RPGs, whole nine yards.

Oh, man, they stole their toys. Stole their toys. Took them home, put them on the wall, actually. Not home, home, obviously. But, you know, back to the house. And after that, the mortar attack, stopped. This was like maybe three or, no, this was like five months before we rotated out. We had five months of getting no in direct fire. That's pretty cool. Yeah. I've heard stories about

the Brits doing stuff like that to the IRA where they'd like replace the plastic explosives with like clay. I had this conversation with the platoon leader at the time. I'm like, guys, instead of taking this, hear me out. Yeah, yeah. Can we like booby trap this? No, sir. Nope, nope, nope. How about we How about we see if we can leave And like leave behind an observation team Can we do that? No, we can't because

What if something happened? Re-supply extraction, blah, blah, blah. Like we hadn't planned for it, whatever. I'm like, fuck, I want to get these guys. Yeah, yeah. No, it would have made sense to put the snipers out there and wait until nightfall, see what happens. Yeah.

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See site for details. And thank you, Ghostbed for sponsoring the show. Please check out the link down in the description and support our sponsor. And I should also mention, so we've been talking about how you're a counterintelligence guy, but now in Iraq, you're very much in a human role, which was pretty common, I think, for CI guys when they got deployed to war. It was common then, and this is an interesting, because there weren't enough, so there's a whole different MOS, right? This human intelligence collector, right?

At the time, it was 97. They got renumbered after I left to the 35 series. But that's actually their job, right? They're supposed to be out there on the human intelligence teams doing the collection like this. There just weren't enough of them. And so they had pressed CI guys into doing this because it was skill adjacent. Needs of the war, yeah. Right.

And so a lot of CI guys in that time period ended up on the tactical human teams doing this work. Can you talk at all about some of the CI work that you did do during that time frame? You mentioned force protection was a big. Yeah. So, so CI has a bunch of emissions, right? And I'll tell you, you know, a lot of the traditional CI work I did at the time was around like on base security, right? All the bases in Iraq had a huge local national workforce. You know, they would come and be part of, you know, maybe like a local market that was established.

They'd be the people who were setting up the Hescos and all this stuff. It was a huge local national workforce, even bigger in Baghdad, right? That was where it was enormous. They were doing all the trash collection and everything else. And pretty obviously, if you're an insurgent, one of the things you want is intelligence about what are the Americans doing on their base, right? Who's going there? Where are they? All the stuff is gold to you as an insurgent.

When are they leaving? Call us when you see the, you know. you see this. And so a lot of the traditional CI work I did was around that, right? It was around, hey, I've seen this person, this local national, like, on his phone a lot. And they seem super interested in or very commonly, hey, this guy was asking me a lot of questions about where we go, where I'm from, what we do, all that stuff. And so it was about like running investigations related to that, trying to figure out, like, is this guy just a curious person who's trying to sell this soldier a blanket or a bootleg DVD and like trying to strike a conversation? Or is this actually an intelligence gathering operation that we need to be concerned about?

Really hard to tell the difference, honestly, in that theater. But like, and it's still really important work. remember there was one one guy who there's a there's a there's a there's a soldier um i think it was a supply guy and again he comes to us and says like hey like i think i think i've seen something because we would go out and do briefings right like um about counterintelligence the indicators if you see these things whatever come talk to us i've seen this guy he works in the mess hall and like I forget what it was exactly that he was doing I think he was like I think I've seen him like pacing out the mess hall right trying to figure out how long how far from here how far from there

and like he's out there every day doing this stuff I'm like very concerned I was very concerned about this so I go over there I interview him the the soldiers doing the report talk to him like you know when where what why whole nine yards um and document the whole thing, go up there and watch this guy for a few days. Like, what's he doing? In my opinion, he wasn't doing anything. He was taking a smoke break, right? He just paced around us.

He just paced around with a smoke break, right? But, like, that's, unfortunately, that is both the most annoying thing about CI, and it's where a lot of legitimate leads come from, these walk-ins. Right, right. Right. And it's it's just absolute hell to sort through all the wheat from the chaff, the chaff and wheat. And the double-edged sword there, of course, is, you know, if you're catching spies, it's like, well, why didn't you catch him sooner? What the fuck? But if you're not catching spies, or why aren't you catching spies? Correct. That's an impossible situation, right? You know, statistically, there's a spy.

Statistically, someone in that population is doing something that's really espionage, right? So yeah. Otherwise, it sounded like you were pretty busy over there supporting 19th group, fourth ID. Can you tell us about some of the other, like you said you were outside the wire? A lot, yeah. Pretty close to every day. So a lot of the work that we did with the guys that with the, you know, the Infantien Special Forces was we would using our sources, go out and help positively identify either the house that we were going to hit because there are no address. street addresses.

Yeah. Right. Like, there aren't even numbers. Right. They're barely even street names. Yeah. Right.

And so it's very easy to hit the wrong house. Very, very easy. Or positively identify the targets of, of the raid, right? Because there's not necessarily a world where you have pictures of, of your target always, especially in like these lower level situations where I mean, you're trying to roll up a local cell leader. Yeah. We brought the source in the Bacalava out on target a few times. gloves

right like you know change him into an American into a American uniform put the whole

thing yeah absolutely did a bunch of that eventually we transitioned to like I don't know how much you were you did with like

the IEDs and that stuff but you know the the EFPs right that they were making they would hide them in this expandable foam right to make them look like a rock

oh like spray foam right well eventually because like, you know, taking a source out on a PID is incredibly dangerous to the source, right? It's, you try your best to make sure there's no identifying marks, but like, maybe they, they walk a certain way. Or like, maybe they say a word that shouldn't, whatever. It's very easy to get a source burned that way. So we don't want to do that.

So we made these little, our own little rocks, and we put these little IR blinkers in them. The little ones you have like a 9-volt battery. A little IR lights. A little IR flasher. And the foam was open cell. It's open enough that you can, the rock will pulse in IR. And we'd just have them go and like, drop the rock in front of the house we were supposed to hit. So we didn't have to have them come with us or maybe, or if we did, they were way back and nowhere near the actual raid.

And we'd like bring the people out one by one, you know, Humvee here, headlights on going that way. Right. Sourcing the Humvee. Bring them up. Is this the person? Yes or no? just the person yes or no, like almost zero chance of anyone identifying the source at that point. You know, as you're saying this reminds me of some other incidents where bringing the source out

on target and they, for the life of them, cannot identify. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Maybe they don't want to. Maybe they don't know. Maybe they were just scared. They're trying to cash in. Who knows? Yep.

But, man, I remember this one time. It wasn't exactly that. It was different. We had geared up for a raid. It was a whole inventory company going out. A big target. Big target. Like local, I forget what they were.

I forget who the actual company was geared up. It was 2 o'clock in the morning. And my source isn't there. Right? So like we were supposed to, to, he had a specific way he was going to meet us. And he wasn't there. So I had this infantry company, like, they were ready, right? Music was playing.

They were ready to go. And I had to walk over there and tell them, like, we can't do this raid. Like, my guy's not here. We can't I need the house. We can't I need the target. Like, we can't go out here. And so this infantry captain, right, I'm an E5 at the time, right? Infantry captain comes up to me and he says, where's your source live?

We're going to drive by and pick him up. Right? And my asshole puckers, right? I'm like, I'm sorry, sir, we can't do that. We can't do that. And he's like, no, we're going to do it right now. We're going to absolutely do this. We're going to drive by your source of house.

We're going to pick him up. We're going to go hit this target because my guys are ready. And I told him, no, we can't do it. That's going to endanger my source. You're going to get him killed. And eventually, he drugged the S2 out of bed and is like, make this guy tell me. and the S2, thank God, back me up. It's like, absolutely not.

No way are we doing that. That is the opposite of how you run sources and handle sources. But I'll tell you what, I have never been more scared than I was in that moment. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's an interesting scenario because there's a tremendous amount of pressure on you to get them to yes, to get them on the X at this point. Yeah. It's the same you hear from even like guys who are like jags working in targeting cells.

Yeah. Like there's a tremendous. and it's a amount of pressure to be like, yes, this strike is lawful. Yep, exactly. And you might have to stand up to your commander and be like, no, sir, you can't do that. Yep. And that is, that is never comfortable, especially at 2 o'clock in the morning with these guys, like, hyped to go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Half a can of dip in the little. Oh, yeah, half a canad dip. Dricking ripets. Three ripets in the back of the Humvee. They're like. So did you ever run down that source? Yeah. Yep.

Yep. I forget what is. He had some excuse. I forget what it was. Um, but like, he's carpet shopping. What, yeah. It was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was, it was a dumbass excuse. And like, he was useful. So we kept working with him. Like, he had good information. Um, but we'd never put ourselves in a situation again where we had to depend on him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you ever feel like one part of your job is like being like a social worker? Oh, absolutely. Not even one part. In CI, it's a huge part, right? Especially if you're out there. Come on, buddy. Yeah, correct. Like, hey, here's, it's like a social worker, but it's also, you know, helping them understand why the thing that you want them to do is the good thing for them. Right. Right. And sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't. Right. But like, it's still the thing you want them to do. And how did things kind of like change from early 2005 to early 2007? Did you see kind of kind of, like, change from early 05 to early 07? Did you see kind of, kind of, of like the a.O. change, the battle space change? Yeah. Um, you know, I think it calmed down

over that time period. So the surge starting to kick in? I think the surge was like a little bit later than that. Okay. You may be. I think the surge was like eight or nine somewhere in there. You may be right. Um, but like we had done, we had done several big, not we, I was not involved like several big operations. I think Second Fallujah was during that time period, if I recall correctly, like a bunch of big operations in the AO. And it seemed to me to be calming down a little bit.

But I mean, these things are cyclical, in my opinion. So like, I don't know if that was actually true. Yeah. And sometimes it's the frustrating thing is like it can feel like you're being very successful. Yeah. Like you're out there recruiting sources, you're hitting these targets. It feels like you're winning.

And then you see how the war turns out. It's like, oh. Right. Exactly. What was the... Actually. Right. Right.

Did it actually make a difference? Yeah. And, you know, it's... I'm sure some of it didn't. Some of it didn't. It's the small wins to me that stick around. You're an E5 counterintelligence guy. Like, they're all small wins.

None of us are generals or... Yeah. None of us are generals. But the things I look back and I'm like, yes, I did it made a difference. Are things like... Interditing that more. sell. Yeah, yeah. Right. That could have over the, over the next, and I don't even know how long, maybe they didn't get back operational, right? I have no idea, but that almost certainly saved

at least one life. Yeah, definitely. And then talk to us about like transitioning back home. You're in the guard, so you're literally going back home, right? Yeah, yep. So in the guard, come back. And, you know, one of the good things about the guard is that you have the opportunity to an extent pick and choose where you engage the missions you go on. And so I went back, started working at Amazon. The Mighty Zon. The Mighty Zon. And I'm a very happy Amazon customer, more so than I would probably care to admit.

But I discovered, you know, after my experience in the military, it was just not satisfying. The mission of Amazon, in my opinion, at least, is to ship more boxes to more people faster. And that's a real mission. It's important, right? It's about enabling people, logistics. It's about, and it does a bunch of good stuff,

but it's not exciting to me. It doesn't sort of scratch that. You're not a logistics guy. No. No, not logistics guy. And so I, you know, continued, did some cool missions, some stuff in Uganda, some stuff in the Caribbean,

mostly on sort of a force protection, liaison capacity, some other, other similar stuff, mostly in Africa, Middle East a little bit. But also was discovering that like,

hey, the military has actually changed me quite a bit in terms of like what I want, what my goals are and what's ultimately satisfying to me. And so a buddy line that I served with had gone, had also gotten out

and had gone to work with Palantier. One day, as I'm sort of complaining about all of this, he tells me, look, come on, come over an interview. They're hiring some, like, cybersecurity people. You should really think about it. So I did. I met the team. I was like, oh, wow. Like, this feels like a mission, right?

Bringing the war fighter technology from Silicon Valley. And like, look, a bunch of stuff that's invented in Silicon Valley is not. is not useful, it's experimental, is like vaporware, fake-lety-make-it, whatever. That's a real thing. But I had worked with the systems that Palantir was replacing. And the first time I was able to log into the platform

be like, holy crap. Like, I wish I had this when I was deployed. Just the ability to integrate query, model, visualize information, right? To associate things with each other, It'd be hard to associate if you were trying to do it by hand. I was hopefully one of the last generations where when I went through CI school, I learned like association diagram plotting by hand.

We'd do link charts with like literal yarn and like the push pins and like, right, which is bonkers in this day and age. And like, yes, we had, we had analyst notebook. Analyst notebook too. Yeah. But it's just not good, right? It was not useful. It was not really fit for the mission.

And especially on this day and age, when information is so much more, so much larger. But in any case, I got really engaged by the mission, the product, the people, and went over there and just had a great time. Yeah, before we get into Palantir, I just want to hit you up about, you know, Uganda, Jamaica, some of those other things that you did before leaving the military in 2012. Yeah. Those are kind of, I don't know what I say irregular, but I mean, interesting, you know, some parts of the world that you went to. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, one of the interesting missions for CI is, as you mentioned before,

force protection, right? And so the things that we, you know, are asked to do, Uganda is a great example where the core mission was training local Ugandan forces in air mobile and aerial resupply operations, right? I have no experience in any of that. But we were also in sort of northern Uganda, which far north Uganda is where a group called the LRA, the Lord Resistance Army, was active. And probably, I don't know if they are still or not, but was at the time active. And so, you know, as we start, and there was a bunch of like, you know, Islamic extremist

groups in that area, broadly speaking of Africa. there's a lot of like ways that there could be non-mission risk to forces on the ground. And so my job and the job of any CIA guy in that context is to, you know, work with local nation security forces, intelligence forces, as well as, you know, use our own eyes and ears to figure out, build relationships with, you know, local community members, leaders, whatever it is, to, you know, First of all, spot necessity any risk that might occur to U.S. forces in the area to build relationships necessary for that someone knows to come to somebody when something happens and that we're responsive or helpful or engaged and to make sure that we're working with those local national security intelligence forces to, because they want us there to train their people in something they couldn't get otherwise. They want to keep us safe, right?

But they don't necessarily know what we care about or how to contact us or if something is happening. like, you know, what to do about it necessarily. So it's a lot of that work, which is really interesting, right? It's about building relationships and getting you know people and, and spend a lot of time, you know, away from the main body talking to, the locals, talking to, you know, local officials and, you know, you build interesting and fun relationships and get to see, get the executed mission that's fundamentally about, like, protecting the force. Did you find any, you know, legitimate force protection issues, anyone that was targeting Americans while they were deployed there? Nothing that developed into anything. But, like, you know, the point of doing that mission well, in my opinion, is you take action before the threat's real.

Right. In many cases, before we can even know if the threat's real to say like, hey, hey, we see, this is a specific example, we see the, the, in, I forget which town this was in, probably in Tebe, no, Kampala, sorry, this was in Kampala, which is the capital of Uganda down south. We started to see these cars, you know, soldiers were there when they were not up north in the bush, and they would rotate back down and rotate back up and whatever. We'd see these, and they had, oh, wait, no, I'm crazy. I'm talking about Jamaica. Yeah, Jamaica was a very different mission.

In Uganda, I'll get to that one in a second. Sure. In Uganda, it was about understanding where the local Islamic population was and what their attitudes were toward us. We were in the very far north of the country. It was bushland. In fact, the U.S. military paid to renovate a motel to the soldiers could stay at, adding, you know, clean water, new mosquito nets, that whole thing.

So it was about, like, being clear on what was on and off limits where people couldn't, couldn't go, like that kind of thing. Jamaica was interesting because, similar, we were in Kingston, and we were doing some missions in the interior of the country around, you know, local medical aid, building a veterinary clinic, building a human clinic. in some disadvantaged areas. But we would see these SUDEs pull up to the hotel we were at every night. And we'd see these, you know, soldiers, clearly, it's a blue clothes, go, like, hop in and do whatever.

They had the freedom to go in and out. They weren't restricted. We realized, and this was obviously concerning to us, we realized the local strip club was sending cars for soldiers so that they could go attend the club. Now look, you do you. I'm not. Stop cracking down on our phone. I'm not judging anybody for their extra criminal activities. But it's an interesting question of if I was a bad guy and I wanted to get a soldier in a compromising spot where I could potentially kidnap somebody.

Right. That's a damn good way to do it, right? Is to create those relationships. Hey, come on. Get on the party bus, guys, right? Have a great time. And it's not the first or the second or the tenth. It's the 20th time that, you know, you have the operation in place you execute and you snatch your target.

And so we unfortunately had to crack down on this to say like, hey guys, like, you can't do this, right? You're putting yourself in a really vulnerable place. And, and like if you get taken, you're going to, it's not going to be bad day. So they had to self-drive to the strip club after that? No, no. We told me we went and told the commander who was not happy at all about what it's old. You guys are such narks. Such narks.

Such narks. We really are. But that was, that was quickly resolved. Like, we have a friend of mine, a civil affairs guy, this story where he deployed to Kinshasa, they were in the Congo, and the squad leader, it was really just like three CA guys, and one of them was the squad leader. He didn't last but 24 hours there, like alcohol hookers.

And the DIA was like, he's at it. You got to leave. You got to leave. Sorry. Come collect your, come collect your person. Yeah, come collect your boy. Yeah. Happens all the time. Yeah, no, you're right. I mean, it does.

2012, you get out. You should work for Amazon and then going to work for Palantir, which sounds like it was a better fit for you. So Palantir, be real with us. Is it the Illuminati? Should we be afraid of this company? Absolutely not. What do they do for real? For real, it is about the core thesis here is,

and it's expanded a bit from this since I left because I was there. I was there for about five years. But the core thesis is there's too much data in the world. Humans cannot effectively access, visualize, engage with it. It's true. It's too hard. But at the same time, we have to. Because in that huge amount of data lies real insights that are necessary for national security.

And so it is about being able to ingest. process, slice, dice, and present data to a human in a way that they can engage with much larger amounts of data than they could necessarily on their own, right? Analyst notebook, you brought that up, which was the bane of my existence, is that's like the idea, right? You're bringing in data sources, you're sort of putting them together and starting to build diagrams. But the analyst notebook is very constrained in terms of how much

you can get in there and how you can query that data effectively, how you can, the ways you can present it, whereas Palantir was not. So it's about allowing humans to access the data that exists in ways that they can actually interact with it, visualize it, present it productively, to get insights out of it. And that's still, I would argue, the core of Palantir. I think with the rise of AI, we've seen Palantir among other companies, and I have no special insights. at this point. I've been gone from there for almost a decade. But we've seen it, you know, incrementally evolve into a data platform that allows for not just humans, but tools to operate on that data in a sort of a unified way across a business, which is hard at a business of any scale.

And they also work with the Defense Department a lot. Oh, a ton. Yeah. They work on both sides, right? Defense departments, they work on the Intel side. They work, and they work extensively with commercial organizations. And you were there for five years, and I imagine your kind of background was a little unique in counterintelligence, but also as a software engineer. Is that why that you got picked up there? Yeah, I think so. I think it was a combination of understanding, you know, of mission alignment, which is so important, I think, when both hiring and choosing a company to work in and skill set. For sure.

And you did security for them also? I did security for Palantir. I did, when I was at Amazon, I was doing security in IT combined. But yeah, it was the second or third hire on it, on a Palantir doing security. We still very, you know, I think we were 300 people at the time Palantir was. Were you guys getting into like red teaming and that kind of thing? Oh, of course. Yeah.

Yes. That's always been a big component. of the security programs I've been involved with because if you can't think like your adversary, you don't understand where your weak points are. So you try to hack into your own systems, you try to break through your own doors, that sort of stuff. Absolutely. And when we, you know, when we look to bring in new software or new tools, new whatever, also poking at that, right? Like what vulnerabilities might this introduce into our systems that we, you know, we don't know about. And in many cases, the manufacturers

don't know about. Any cool stories from that phase of your life that you want to talk about? You know, there was one, it tickles me to this day. Sure. We were installing a security system, like an alarm system at one of our executive's house, houses. And we got a sample in of the system, right? They'd set it up in like a Pelican case where we had the head unit and all that stuff. And they're like, you know, this is this, it was top of the line.

It was what, you know, everyone had at the time. And so they're like, you're not going to find anything, but like, go take a look at this. And so we, you know, we took a look, took apart, poked at it, product at it, and figured out that we could actually brute force the pins, the alarm system pins remotely. And so all we had to do is figure out the IP address of this thing. And they were, they were on the internet. And just run the four digits. Run the four digits and get in there, no problem every time. And it wouldn't lock us out.

It wouldn't because it would on the keypad, right? On the keypad, if you went, you know, eventually it would, it would tell you, oh, you've tried to any time. Right, right. Like, delay you longer or whatever. And it had this, like, silly web interface that, right? If you use that, it'd do the same thing. But if you just sort of went under the hood of the web interface and poked at the API directly,

no limits at all. It was great. So we could have broken into celebrities' houses or whatever, as long as we had just known the IP address out there. So that's interesting you mentioned. Like you were also doing security for like the chief executives or people who would may, it was the idea of people who may bring corporate proprietary information home with them? Not just that, but like even then Palantir is pretty controversial. And so we wanted to make sure that, you know, when we were, and we do the same thing at Coinbase, right?

Like when we have people who buy, you know, association with the company of the brand are at additional risk, either from at the time it would have been activists, you know, targeting, targeting Palantir, most likely, that we provide them like a level of additional safety, right? That's commensurate with the risk. And so, you know, we had all physical security team that was responsible for like the physical pieces of that. But we worked together very, very closely. So when they were considering new hardware like that, they would run a pass. us just to see like, you know, what's what, make sure this, make sure this thing's okay. And tell us about, you know, jumping on with Coinbase. How did that come about? Yeah. So about five years into my tenure at Palantir, my boss left and to go on to bigger

and better things. And I, you know, I think working at a company, it's about the mission. Yes, it's also about the people. And you have to enjoy both. And so, you know, with my boss, And I'm like, you know, I'm sure they're going to replace him. I don't really want the role. But at the same time, maybe I should look around and see what's out there for me. And ended up getting connected to the team at Coinbase. Coinbase was very, very early, right? So this was like, this was 2016.

And 100 people in an office in SF, you know, Bitcoin was very young at the time as even a concept. And the fascinating thing to me was there were really security challenges at play there that people hadn't really solved before. Now, I'm a big advocate that like most problems in the world, it's not the first time the world has seen the problem. Right. So like if you do the research, if you work at it, you'll find either a solution or a partial solution or you'll find pieces of solutions you can put together. to make a hole. And so, like, you should do that. You shouldn't reinvent the wheel. Coinbase, there were, like, very rarely that I encounter even pieces of solutions to, like, the problems that we had, right? How do you protect private keys, which really just short strings of data that, that by themselves, control access to hundreds of millions then, and now hundreds of billions of dollars?

Because it's such like a nascent technology that it hasn't. Correct. Or, like, look, managing private keys is not new. The NSA does it on an incredible scale. But it's different, right? It's not, they can, they have different safety. They don't always have to use these things. They don't have to be on internet connected systems.

They don't have to be as necessarily available or accessible as, as ours do because they, in the case of Coinbase, right, I need to use those keys when I send funds or when customers send funds. And so the challenge was like very, very different. But very exciting. So just to back up for one second, I mean, Coinbase is a crypto company. I mean, what does that actually mean? Do they run crypto wallets? Do they make crypto coins?

I don't know anything about this stuff. So the answer is yes to all of it. So Coinbase is a, you can think of us as like a fidelity in that we provide an interface for you to interact with, in our case, the crypto ecosystem, in their case, the stocks and bonds and that ecosystem. So there's like a retail brokerage, if you will, component, although we're not a brokerage. There's an exchange component, which is where items get traded, right? So in the context of like stocks and bonds, that might be the NASDAQ or the NYC, things like that.

It's a place where buyers and sellers can meet and a transaction occurs. We operate in exchange. We operate in an institutional business. So instead of you on the retail side, we might be a fidelity, the institutional business, maybe we're a J.P. Morgan or someone like that who's offering what's called prime brokerage funds and VCs and other banks or other businesses like that. And products and services to help them interact with the crypto ecosystem the way they want. We're also a custodian. So if you have $100 million in crypto, you get to ask yourself where do I want to put that? right and you know you're you're you're you're you're you're you're you're safe in your basement is probably not the right answer um but it's private keys it's not a bar of gold you want to store a bar

gold you go to you know malk up meat or you go to uh you know one of the other major uh sort of companies that specialize in this kind of thing how does that work for you guys and again this is such like a new world i guess in general but it's specifically new to me banks hold on to your money and using what's it was called fractional reserve banking they're able to invest that money and make money off of your money while it's chilling in the account. Correct. Bitcoin or a crypto coin is chilling on a data center that you guys own. How do you make money off of that?

We don't. Really? Nope. We make money on, in the context of a retail investor like yourself, we would make money on fees when you buy and sell. Okay. Gotcha. It's like a sales tax.

Yep. Sales tax. And then fees and other kinds, you know, there are other kinds of transactions, staking, things like that. we would take a fee on what you overall earned. But we don't do fractional reserve. We don't lend out customer assets to make money on them. Can you even do that yet with crypto?

I mean, it's a complicated answer to that question. Yeah. The basic, like technically, potentially, but philosophically, absolutely not. And we were talking a little bit earlier. And I mean, I'm not totally a dismissive of crypto, but I'm also kind of skeptical about it. But you were making sort of an interesting case, I think, for crypto in what it can potentially do that current currencies, including the reserve currency, the world's reserve currency, maybe can't do for people. So there's a bunch of interesting stuff about crypto. And like, look, I'll be the first to admit crime occurs on crypto.

Sure. Right. Crime occurs in the dollar. Crime occurs in the yen. Probably in livestock transfers, right? Like crime is everywhere. Skames are everywhere. And so, like, it's a big deal to us that consumers are become educated and really think through protecting themselves.

But there's also a lot of positive aspects to crypto, right? So let's take a maybe a Ponzi scheme as an example, right? And so in a Ponzi scheme, right, the bad guy is tempting people to invest with. them and they are essentially paying returns to people by taking money, people are giving them and just paying it right back out, right? And they're just trying to accumulate more and more money. Eventually they think they have enough and they just run away with all of it. That's a very simple version of a Ponzi scheme.

And there are certainly Ponzi schemes in the context of crypto, just like there are Bernie Madoff, right? Sure. Biggest one ever in the traditional financial system. The difference is when you go to trace that money, right? And you look at, okay, in the traditional financial system, maybe it's run through a couple of shell companies. Maybe there's, you know, an overseas link somewhere, which makes things harder. And it's incredibly hard to track that money down.

A boggling percentage of the FBI are accountants for this exact reason, right? Because they have to build to follow the money to make the case. in cryptocurrency, by and large, with a couple of exceptions called privacy coins, those transactions, there's no way to hide or obfuse get that really. We can talk about mixers and things like that. But those transactions are there on the blockchain for anyone to look at. You're not going and auditing books of a company. The FBI doesn't have to subpoena you to do that? Nope.

It's just public information. Now, they would have to subpoena us to connect that, assuming it was a coin-based user, to connect that address. to an identity, right? To say, okay, this transaction occurred, A, paid B, you know, a Bitcoin. And this is the guy that owns the wallet. Who owns A. Okay, gotcha. Assuming it's our customer, if they subpoena us, then we could tell them that.

Not unlike, you know, a bank has similar records. Right. That they would, they would. This is a little bit different when you talk about self-custody and self-custodial wallets, and we can go down that rabbit hole. Crypto is a huge wide ecosystem, right? There's a very deep topic to get into. to get into. But the core of it, the really big difference is those transactions are there. They'll be there forever. There's no hiding them, deleting them, obfuscating them, getting rid of

them. And that is an immense benefit to law enforcement when they go back and try to figure out what happened. And I mean, that's like just in the last like 10 years really, that that's become like a field, right? Yes. So Bitcoin was sort of invented in 2009. And I think really started to gain momentum maybe 2012 when Coinbase was founded in 2012 as well and is obviously blown up in the past call it five six years um in before yeah I'll circle back around on that but uh some of the other uses of crypto that you were mentioning was um you said some of the challenges to economic freedom especially that people in third world countries have how how would that type of person use crypto. Yeah. So

going back to mission, right? Like what is Coinbase's mission? Why did it engage with me? Coinbase's mission is to increase economic freedom in the world, right? And what does that mean practically? It means that if you're an entrepreneur

in Central Africa somewhere and you come up with a great idea, you should be able to raise money, to accept payments, to pay your vendors, to do all of the things that we would take for granted here in the U.S. And you should be able to do it globally to be able to take that amazing idea and really bring it to life, right? People, good ideas don't know borders.

They don't know boundaries. They don't know race or creed or anything. They're just good ideas. And it really does all of us, I think, a disservice to say, if you have a good idea, and you're over there, well, good luck with that good idea. You're never going to be able to do anything with it. But if you're over here, you're fine. And you actually have all the tools you need.

That, to me, is insane. There's a bunch of other stuff in economic freedom about property rights and, like, people shouldn't be subject to arbitrary seizures. And they should, you know, be able to control their money and their value and their assets they've earned and a bunch of other stuff in there as well. And so that mission really resonated with me. And crypto is a very interesting way to improve economic freedom. Because it is largely global, borderless, in the world of cryptocurrency, it doesn't matter where you are, whether you're in the U.S., whether you're in Uganda.

You have the same access to cryptocurrency. You have the same ability to transact. It doesn't matter if you're in Argentina and your currency is being hyperinflated. right um you have access to a stable store value in that case maybe it's like us dc right you a u s dollar backed stable coin where you can put your hard in hard hard hard money and not have it inflated away by the central bank of that country right right um and so it's it's really about bringing um i think strong financial tools to a world where they don't always exist bringing strong property rights, you can't seize a Bitcoin, broadly speaking, right? You send, you send

Coinbase a warrant and say that's the fruits of crime. Of course, we're going to freeze those assets. But like in a self-custody wallet, for example, where you control your own keys, there's no mechanism to freeze a Bitcoin that you control without your consent. There's no mechanism for the government to say, that's my Bitcoin now. I'm going to take that away. It doesn't exist. Do you think it's coming? to Bitcoin, no. Absolutely not. So Bitcoin is really just software at the end of the day. Sure. And it's written by a community of folks who are very dedicated to Bitcoin's core ideals, right? And so I could not see a world where Bitcoin, as an example, would introduce that kind of government. They would see it as censorship effectively. Yeah, I mean, I just bring it up because, I mean, there was a time when Switzerland had bank privacy laws and it was the place to go for private banking.

Yeah. That's kind of over now. It is. I think it'll be a very interesting, you know, future for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, right? Because in the context of Switzerland, there was a government. Right. There were banks. There were institutions that could be targeted and leverage that could be had of those institutions.

Bitcoin is software. It's written by humans, obviously. It's just a bunch of dudes working around the world. Right. And you can't, you can't force them to, even if you could, right? Say, sit them down, write a back door to Bitcoin. Okay, well, that's all open source.

Everyone can see the code that gets added. And so they're just not going to, they're not going to run that software. They're not going to deploy that code. It's a useless tactic. Right, right. I see what you're saying because the system's transparent. Correct.

Yeah. Dollar-backed stable coins. And the other thing you mentioned to me that I thought was interesting was when we threw all those sanctions at Russia when they invaded Ukraine. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, post-Ukraine this time around, you know, we threw the book at Russia. in the context of sanctions in a way that I don't know that we've ever done before to another country. Maybe Iran, possibly.

And I think in this at this time, though, the world, a lot of the world set up and took notice and thought, wow, we didn't necessarily understand or think the U.S. was ever going to use that power or that we were giving them that power. And like, you know, maybe we're friendly with the U.S. now, but are we always going to be? And we should really start to think about our exposure to this, the power we've given over. And we saw a number of central banks explore ways to sort of not de-dollar rise, but like decrease their exposure, right? We saw countries like Iran, China, Russia start to trade not in U.S. dollars, start to settle transactions, not in U.S. dollars between them, which is, I'm not kind of say unheard of, but like a big departure from historical norms.

And it's a concerning trend, right? Because if that continues, if the dollarization continues, the U.S. loses one of its biggest soft power tools, right? The ability to enforce sanctions. At the same time, you know, we see the rise of, you know, we see the rise of, you know, dollar-backed stable points, right? And so the dollarization of international, you know, of, of international trade is a decision that governments made and make. Governments in central banks, right? Because it's, it's trusted, it's available, it's, you know, it doesn't have the kind

of currency controls. We don't see it being, you know, inflated the way other countries have inflated their currency for also. So it's, it's the most stable. option that's available. They can also make a different choice potentially. It's going to take a lot of work and a lot of years to do that. But there's a different side to that, right? That of the individual consumer in these countries. I mentioned earlier Argentina, right, because they've had an episode had or having an episode of hyperinflation, right, where their local currency is getting devalued by their government for a bunch of reasons. It's not unique to Argentina that's just a top of mind country. A bunch of countries have done this over the years. And the citizens of those countries

get screwed, right? Because suddenly their currency is worth less and less and less, and they have no control over that. It's just happening to them. With Dollarback stablecoins and the global accessibility of cryptocurrency, they can actually make a choice now that they could never make before. They can make the choice to say, actually, I want to keep my funds, not in my local currency, but in a dollar-backed staple fund. They can effectively, you know, dollarize their own personal commerce, their own personal trade, and, you know, and mitigate the risk of their country's central bank or government creating an inflationary environment and the values their work. And that's almost a re-dollarization from the other direction of commerce.

How does that change, like, as far as the political action on the back end, like, that becomes interesting. Yeah, I imagine like Weimar, Germany, what if those people were able to dollarize their currency and didn't have to, you know, burn, as we're told, piles of money in the street, to stay warm, whatever, like, like, what does that look like for a government? Well, I mean, it depends on the goals of the government, right? Like, it could be something that is that the government really doesn't want. And then that becomes a whole separate issue in conversation, right? So, okay, now the government, in a world where this freedom exists, how do they stop that?

Well, maybe they, you know, try to restrict the Internet. maybe they pass laws about, you know, what funds can be used in commerce or all sorts of things. But, you know, the history would tell us that a black market would emerge. Yeah. Right? That the ability to trade that hard goods, hard currency will show up. I think in Germany it was probably gold and silver, right? It was the hard currency that was used.

And I'm sure the government seized all that stuff or put restrictions on the juice. it was still probably used in the black market in a world where they don't have the ability to seize it, right? Maybe it becomes a crime to possess in a country like that, but the transactions could still happen and the commerce could still go on. And it would insulate that population from the impact of that and therefore decreased control of that government on its people, which is fascinating. Right. Yeah. I mean, there is a bit of like anarchist philosophy behind it that I can appreciate. Yeah.

But I do wonder, like, for instance, so what do you think this means for like the dollar as the world's financial reserve currency? I mean, nothing is going to dethrone the dollar in the short term. It's just not going to happen. Yeah, yeah. Right? And or the medium term or probably even the long term. But, you know, there's been experiment, you know, the,

The IMF and I think the WTO have talked for a long time academically about, hey, should we establish a basket of currencies as the, the, the, the, that is sort of like pegged to one another. Right. Right. And that by doing so, does that mean, can we like create more stability? The mechanisms for that are incredibly complicated. Right?

When you get down to brass tax and exchange rates and like has all that work. You're basically getting into like world government at that point. Right. You basically are. In theory, a cryptocurrency could solve that. Much more neatly and simply. Right. And I think any other solution that's out there today.

Whether or not that's going to happen, that's a whole different conversation in question. Yeah. So you're currently the cheap security officer at Coinbase. Tell us a little bit about your, job there. I mean, you told me you deal with everything from insider threats, physical security, anti-fraud. Yep. We deal with everything from bomb threats to our executives, all the other side, to people trying to break into coin-based user accounts. And everything, everything, literally in between. There's a really fun, you should look it up on some Brian Armstrong as our CEO.

He has a pretty significant presence on X. And just an example of one of the random things that we deal with. He was recently gifted a bottle of tequila. He didn't know it was coming. It was from the guys at the All In podcast. And they have a new tequila. I haven't had it. Brian says it's very good.

And they were sending some to sort of friends. He'd been on the podcast previously. They were sending him a bottle. We screen Brian's mail, right, like we do for executives and other office locations because crazy people do crazy things, right? Do you have a tequila taster like Putin has a food taster? No. What we do have is an x-ray machine. And interestingly, that bottle of tequila is backlit. So it's shipped in, you know, a box, right? Okay, gotcha. Right, right? When you open the door to the box, there's a, there's a magnetic door sensor.

that you open and it triggers a little controller that lights LEDs behind the bottle to provide backlight. The controller is, you know, the liquor, right, is in a bottle with a cap on it and it's very obviously. What do you think that looks like on an X-ray? Just like some dynamite tied together? It looks like a bomb. It looks like a textbook picture of a bomb. Oh, because it has a trigger mechanism. It has a trigger mechanism. It has a little controller. It has these wires from the controller going to like places around the the liquid filled container in the middle, right? So we look at this. We're like, that's a bomb, right?

Because it was delivered by a courier service and it was like the whole thing was super shady. And I'll show you a picture here if we have if we have time. And we, you know, we look at this. We're like, okay, great. Let's call the LAPD. They're bomb squad. they come in, they look at it. They're like, that's a bomb.

Like, okay, what do we do? What's our strategy going to be? How do we deal with this? They were on the way. The bomb truck was rolling out to the house at the time. The robots coming out. In fact, the robot was there. It was already there.

And then, like, we keep looking at it and, like, blowing the image up on the X-ray and we're like, there's a logo on that circuit board that's in there. That's the controller for the lights. And we're looking at it. Does it say all in? Why would it say all in? We start Googling and we realize,

and the whole story like unfolds in about, you know, five minutes. Five minutes. Like, oh shit. This is a bottle of tequila. But LAPE doesn't know that. And they're not going to take our word for that. And so we spend probably 20 minutes talking them out and blowing up Brian's bottle of tequila.

And like a controlled detonation. They have like the big like sphere that they're going to put it in. Yep. Get the robots and take it into the sphere. They're going to control detonation. It was going to be amazing. But we did successfully save Brian's tequila. And he got to drink it.

And he actually gave it to the security team that did the response. Because he's a good guy. It's apparently a good bottle. I know the insider threat thing is like a huge issue that corporations deal with. And obviously the government, too, like that, you know, we found out with numerous moles and leakers and so on that the insider can do a tremendous amount of damage to the organization. Absolutely. How do you guys kind of deal with that organizationally? It's tough, right?

Insiders are, I think, one of the toughest threats to face because by definition, they're supposed to be there. They're supposed to be there. And in many cases, they're supposed to be doing a lot of the things that they're doing. We've had cases in India, Philippines, places like that of, you know, Baghdadist offering insiders very large for the region's sums of money to become insiders. We did a big public thing about this earlier this year about a criminal group that have been targeting Coinbase customer support agents. Interesting. based in India, offering, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands more of dollars to them in exchange for taking actions, like, you know, sharing customer information.

So the criminals could then use that to go steal from the customers or try to at least. Gotcha. Right. And the hardest thing about that is, well, what were they asking the customer service reps to do? We'll go in and look at the record of a customer. what is a customer service record supposed to do go in and look at the records of a customer right the difference is maybe it was not a customer they were supposed to look at or they were looking at more than they should have things like that right but you know we do we do a lot to try to both prevent and detect this kind of stuff obviously you know the systems we build

have to have the right level of auditing and logging like we need to know what everyone's doing at all times. That's that's that's basic table stakes. Um, but we, you know, we, we, we, we have a very robust insider threat program that's both, you know, defensive, um, and offensive in nature that is like, we want to know who's coming after us. Who are these guys? What are their tactics? What are their techniques? Right. It's going to ask you, do you think you guys get targeted by foreign intelligence services? Is this kind of, that's a really interesting question. I'm, I'm sure so to some degree. Um, it's more likely that they would be targeting our customers.

Right? So, like, I don't know that, you know, the MSS and China cares about Coinbase per se, but they do care about dissonance. Sure. Right. And to the extent that a dissonant is using cryptocurrency to perform activities, right? That's how we would get looped into that targeting, most likely. And they're more likely in that context to probably go after.

the dissident themselves, right, to steal their credentials. Makes it. Rather than come after a coin base writ large. What we do see, though, is, like, transnational crime groups, right, are our biggest threat group by far. Like organized crime. Organized crime around the world. You mentioned it.

So it's like this new form of crime we've even had it happen here in Manhattan, where you know, hacking into somebody's crypto wallet is probably very difficult to do, I imagine. But you can go to the guy's residence and say, I'm going to hit you in the head with this monkey wrench. Sure. If you don't get the access to it. Like, we've had that happen here in the city. Absolutely. What do you make of that, like, kind of like a merging form of theft?

That's what it is. And, like, how do you, I mean, now you need to, you need physical security as well. Yeah. I mean, it's really, it's interesting because, you know, Traditionally, you think of that with people who had, I don't know, watches or some other valuable collection of items. Like, if you can, like, I'm pretty sure in the city, you know, if you're like, say, a diamond merchant and you're carrying $100,000 of diamonds, you can get a concealed carry permit to protect, you know, yourself from being robbed. Probably. I mean, that sounds very logical to me.

Yeah. And so I think it's the same advice I give someone who has, who's like been collecting baseball cards their whole life and their collections worth, you know, a quarter million dollars. Well, my suggestion is don't put that on the internet, right? Opsack first. Opsic first and always is be smart about what you're publishing. And as criminals are are mostly opportunistic. Right. Right.

They're out there saying, oh, you know, this guy posted about all. all their baseball card or their Bitcoin or their watch collection or whatever, can I find them? And if the answer is yes, you're much more likely to be involved in that kind of crime. This includes, you know, bragging at parties.

Don't go, don't go to the bar and loudly brag to the pretty girl. Look at my crypto coins, bro. Exactly. Right. There's, there have been literal cases of that,

um, that I've seen where people do exactly that. And, and yeah, they get jumped after the fact. So, like, in the same way, don't, um, both don't make bad choices, right? Don't, don't walk down the dark alley at night alone, counting your money, right? These are, these are choices that we understand in the context of the physical world, right?

We've all learned them. You know, you and I learned them a lot in the military, but like everyone grows up, you know, don't count your money in public, turn your, when you're going on vacation, pause your mail, right? There's a hundred different little things we learn. We never learned that growing up about the internet, about social media, about this new form of security and OPSEC. We all need to start practicing more. And it's a real problem because criminals, whether they be people trying to scam you or take over your account or verge into the physical world, are using that lack of awareness and lack of knowledge to execute their crimes.

And I think it's on all of us to educate not just ourselves, but those around us. right? Because I don't think, you know, you and I probably don't need a refresher on the tenants of OPSEC. But, you know, I'm sure we both know someone who does. And other types of like the other anti-fraud operations that you've been involved in, what are some of the other kind of like fraud or scams or things that you're seeing in crypto that you're having to deal with as a security officer? Yeah. I mean, is something I believe strongly, there are no new scams. Right? It's all old scams. Yeah. Right. They're just, you know, you slap a new coat of paint on them for the new circumstances you find yourself in, right? So like, there's a thing that was very popular, you know, in the last, over the last year, year or two called pig butchering, which is a style of romance scam. What distinguishes it is, and it comes, it's actually has it has the name is Chinese and it translates to pig butchering. But the principle of it is like you fatten up the pig before you.

you take it to slaughter. You spend, in this style of scam, you spend a lot more time building the relationship and convincing the victim that you are there for, you know, mostly it's a romance type scam. It can be an confidence scam. It's a confidence scam, right? And then before you execute whatever your actual scam is, the actual way you steal the money, right? But it's a romance scam, it's a confidence scam, and these can vary in detail, but really,

really are, they don't vary in substance. Other than that, you know, we have, we have all sorts. I think probably right now what we see a lot of is, and you probably get those, those like spam text messages right about like, yeah, sure. Hi, hi, hi, Ginny. Are we still on for golf tomorrow, right? Yeah, yeah. That's normally an entrance into a confidence scam of some sort.

There are other more nuanced things, but like a lot of people are seeing that right now. And who are like the actors behind these scams? You know, have you like unmasked some of them and where they are? So I'll tell you what, and this is really, really sad. Yeah. They are largely human trafficking victims working out of scam compounds in Southeast Asia. I've heard exactly this. Yeah.

And it is truly horrific. They are abused physically, sexually, mentally, emotionally. they are, you know, confined in these in these camps. There's a great person. Her name's Aaron West. She was formerly a DA in Santa Clara County and runs a thing called Operation Shamrock. And she was actually over there in the Southeast Asia not too long ago. At no small risk to her personally, working with people to locate these centers and to film them and figure.

out, hey, how are they getting internet? How are they getting power? Is the local, like, those, the local government aware of this? Can we? Yes. Right. And, and, and, but, but how can we then bring pressure on those governments to make these scam compounds untenable? Um, and so, like, she does a bunch of great work, uh, cannot cannot, cannot praise her highly enough for that. But it's, it's, it's an incredibly sad story. Yeah. And I, and so these, these, You know, women are like calling sad dudes. Not just women. Men too.

Men too, yeah. Cross the board. Yeah, calling up little old ladies, like help us save the orphans in Ukraine and, you know, this kind of stuff. They do those scams. They do, you know, meeting lonely people on dating apps. They do, you know, those kind of mass text messages that we just talked about. They do the whole scam, the whole board. Yeah, I heard about one in Thailand that got blown out just.

recently where the Thai government like came in and it seems the dude's assets and he runs and yep but I mean and I'm not going to discount that that's that's amazing great outcome there are 10 more where that one came from yeah yeah they're all over the place and they're all over Southeast Asia yes I think I think there's a bunch in in Thailand there's you know there's they're they're really all over Southeast Asia you think it's really working with local governments that, you know, that the FBI would be able to really mitigate that? I think, I think there's two choke points. Really, it's about how do they get the supporting services? That's the choke point, right? Because those scam compounds, they need computers, they need

internet, they need power, they need all of these supporting services that, and they need, you know, the humans to do it. But like, the supporting services are where you can really cause damage to these, to these operations. So getting local governments to intervene to, even if they don't raid, right, putting pressure on the internet service providers that are giving them internet by publicly nending and shaming, oh, hey, this scam compound is served by, whatever. Like, you know, that doing the same thing with maybe like utilities or with other supporting services, I think can be very impactful in this context. even if the local governments, for whatever reason, don't want to engage. I mean, we're coming to the end of the list here for me. I mean, is there anything else that you want to talk about that you're passionate about as far as crypto or security or cybersecurity that you think it's important for listeners to know about?

I mean, the big thing, and I would just reiterate this, is we're in a new world of personal security right now. And your listeners probably don't need a reminder about OPSEC. I probably don't need a reminder about, you know, getting spam text or spam calls or whatever. But I bet every single one of your listeners knows someone who does. And the thing I would encourage anyone, everyone to do is do not let the first time a potential victim hears about a scam. Don't let that be from a scammer. Let it be from a friend. Right.

Have the conversation up front. So that person, you're like, gosh, they're, they're, they're, they're older and they love everybody and they'll answer every phone call and whatever. Oh, gosh, they're, they're, they're, you know, lonely, disconnected. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're reaching out for for community. Hey, they're, um, you know, this, this, this person, maybe they don't, they don't, they don't, they don't, they're financially insecure. They don't know much about this new, whatever it is, whatever that risk factor is, um, the thing that prevents people from getting caught up in scams is education. By far the best preventative.

And so I'm a huge advocate of like, you know, I can do what I can do from the context of Coinbase. And we put a lot of content out on YouTube. We do a lot of stuff on Instagram. We do blogs. We work with other brands. But I'm never going to be able to reach everybody. And I'm especially not going to reach the truly vulnerable people.

Yeah. Right. Right. It's the, it's the. Grandma. Correct. It's the most infuriating thing is like, I can shout from high heaven about this. And the audience I reach is... They're not watching this podcast, yeah.

I mean, but everyone here has a grandmother. Right. Right. Everyone here has friends. Everyone here has those people in their lives that they can ask the question. Have you heard about this game's going around the internet right now? And if you haven't, can I tell you a little bit about them? Because they can really cost a lot of damage.

Yeah, yeah. Right? Have those conversations because people out there. there need the information. Okay. So if I have decided I want to become a crypto bro now. Yeah. Going all in.

Where can I find Coinbase? What do I need to do? Coinbase.com. Okay. Right. And it's a very straightforward sign up. It's basically the same as opening a bank account, right? We'll make sure you're you.

Make sure you're not a sanctioned individual. Make sure you're not otherwise, you know, not a nice person. Open your account. You can connect it to your bank account so you can move funds over. And just like that, you're able to buy cryptocurrency. Now, the question is then what should you buy? Right. Right.

And so there is a ton of educational material out there. There are also a lot scammers out there. What I tell people is stick with the big names to start. Bitcoin, Ethereum are the two biggest names by far in the crypto space. Right? Get a little bit of exposure to that. Not much. and certainly in the very beginning, you shouldn't put more in there than you would put on a sports bet.

Yeah, a friend once told me, like, when dabbling in cryptocurrency, he was like, don't put anything into it unless you're prepared to just set that money on fire. Yep. To start, because you don't know enough, right, to really, to make, to even understand what the choices are, right, or what the tradeoffs are. Right, sure. But like a little bit of exposure, now you've got skin in the game, right? And so that is sort of the gateway to starting to learn more, right?

And then go out there and look at CoinBases, YouTube, look at the blog, look what we're talking about. We try to share great information with consumers and engage on all of our socials and sort of slowly branch out from there, right? Doing like you would any other hobby, right? You want to go learn to barbecue meat, right? Okay, great. Like, let's start from, you know, from a few trusted sources. I've learned the basics. And then let's start to go out there and read the message boards.

Yeah. Well, yeah, and the next thing you know, you have saltwater fish tanks. Right. In a D&D miniature collection that you've been painting. That's how it starts. It is. It's how it starts. But, you know, you wouldn't have known what miniatures to get and how to paint them

if you didn't take that first step. Yeah, yeah. And it's totally true that, you know, I would have no idea how to go about some of those hobbies if it was not for the internet and YouTube and these sorts of things that diffuse and spread that information. Really amazing. Yeah. Anything else we haven't talked about here that you'd like to mention?

No, I think it's a great conversation. Okay. Well, thank you, Philip. We really appreciate your time. Appreciate you. Coinbase.com. And thank you everyone who joined us and watched this interview. Appreciate it.

And we'll see you next week. Hey guys, I want to tell all of you today about a new newsletter that we're launching that encompasses both the Team House podcast, the Eyes On podcast, and the High Side News outlet, which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on Aizon and the Team House and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're going to get. So this is a once a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have, you know, the greatest hits of that week. It's really good. Checking it out.

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