The Team House - You're Being Watched: Inside Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance | Carlos Garcia | Ep. 352

Episode Date: June 14, 2025

Ubiquitous Technical Surveillance (UTS) refers to the pervasive and continuous collection and long-term storage of data about individuals from various sources like phones, online activity, sensors, and cameras. This data is then analyzed to create detailed "patterns of life" and connect individuals to other people, activities, and organizations, often without their direct knowledge or consent.Find Carlos here:https://theutsguy.com/Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/houseFOR 10% off! Mando ⬇️https://shopmando.comPromo code "TEAMHOUSE" for 40% off your starter pack.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/TheTeamHouseNew merch, patches, and stickers! ⬇️https://theteamhouse-shop.fourthwall.comSupport the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse___________________________________________________Subscribe 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 - Defining ubiquitous technical surveillance and the GCCD cycle.55:05 - iPhone Data Tracking1:14:25 - TikTok's Dangers1:27:01 - Digital Self-Defense1:33:55 - AI, Data & Geopolitics1:43:33 - National Interests in Tech1:48:54 - Q&A & Final ThoughtsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Hey, folks, welcome to episode 352 of the Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave and our guest tonight in studio. We're very happy to have Carlos Garcia here. Carlos currently works for the United States government. It's about as far as we're able to say at this moment. He originally came from Nicaragua, escaped communism, and came to the United States, works for America now, obviously, and is an expert in ubiquitous technical surveillance subject that we'll get into in depth here. Carlos, thank you for joining us.

Thank you all for having me here. I'm grateful to be here, excited to chat with you all. So let's talk about your origin story, which I think is very interesting, has its highlights and low lights and everything in between, right? Tell us about how you grew up. So growing up, really weird, man, was born in Nicaragua, late 70s, early 80s. Picture this, every single straight out of central casting character you can think of in the world of communism and rebellion in one place. It's like a most icily canteena except in Central America. You have the great power competition using Nicaragua as a proxy so much so that I had uncles that went to Russia to study petroleum engineering and other stuff.

They came back with Russian wives. So I got cousins named Katerina, Basilis, and all these. other weird names. And similarly, we had people go to the U.S., come back to be foreign exchange students. Then my grandparents got taken to Cuba sometime in the 70s. And when they came back, they were a little alarmed at what they'd seen. My grandfather was an academic. So he came back and said, hey, I think we've seen this story. And put this frame it as a way, it's tough to frame because there's no internet. There's barely long distance service. There's no TV. A book was printed 10 years ago. So he comes back and becomes an anti-communist.

which of course doesn't go over well. What year was that? Late 70s. Oh, sorry, mid-70s. This is late, late 70s, mid-70s. So there was like, if I recall correctly, there was like two revolutions or coups sort of in Nicaragua. There was the National Guard and then the...

Yeah. La Guardia in la Contra. They were like, it's like a revolution, then a counter-revolution. And so I'm just trying to like place that how your family was smack in the middle of that. Yeah, so they were in the middle of that because there were, in our place,

it was the Partido Christiano Socialista. I was like the, I'm not sure how to translate that accurately, but the revolution, the first one, was actually a bunch of small factions coming together to overthrow the dictator at the time. But then after they overthrew him, some factions are like, cool, we're in charge enough. Wait, wait, I thought we were, I thought we had said that I'm, no, no, we know. And there's a saying that any two Nicaragans make three factions. That's kind of what the saying was down there. So that's what happens.

And then, you know, we're on the wrong side of things. And of course, my grandfather is helping the Americans. I got uncles who helped the Americans. And I got pictures of Uncle Tony. I can show you. Love that guy. He was a pilot, and then he defected. And he ended up serving in the U.S.

for 20 plus years, military service. Of course, it's useful if you know the flight envelope of the MIG you're trained on and all these other things. And I suspect Uncle Tony did some other work. And I think one day I'm going to sit down and talk to Uncle Tony and say, hey, buddy, listen, can we just finally have a talk here? So grew up with that. I might as well have grown up with a picture of Ronald Reagan above my crib. So I understand the biases I were introduced, but nonetheless, it doesn't mean that I didn't face the reality. Your family were Contras?

They were, I guess, against the Sandinistas. Right. Got you. Right. And the Sandinistas might have done some good things, some bad things. At the end, there's so much gray. And one thing I finally learned in my adult life is that a lot of things are shades of gray, man. Sure.

And it's so hard to accept that, especially after being early indoctrinated. But throwing people in volcanoes, pulling out of people out of their houses and killing. them, bad idea. So we had to get out of there and leave. And I'm getting pulled by my mother, crossing the border into the refugee resettlement camps. And then thanks to, I believe, my grandfather's assistance of the Americans or whatever other connections we may have had, we're able to be resettled in a third country. So our whole family was resettled to different corners of the world. We wanted to come to the U.S. But at the time, there was no path. So we said, all right, wherever it is, it's not here, we're good. So I'll get a picture early 80s

at this point. You don't know what this country is. You don't know the language, but all you know is that you can go there. So we, I remember one of the, my core memories is the 747, and I'll explain why. When we were leaving, we left from Nicaragua, well, Costa Rica, we crossed the border. From San Jose, we went over to Mexico City, Mexico City to L.A. And from L.A., we were going to take our final flight to the third country to safe harbor. They opened this window, and I see this giant, massive thing that looks like a spaceship. And to me, that's like, oh, my, what the hell is this? I'd never seen a picture of a plane like that. Then when we get inside, I get a tray. And I immediately reach for a pudding or a jello cup. I forget what it is. I remember distinctly this foil I reach for.

And then they tell me, no, no, the whole tray is yours. And then my mom's crying. And later in life, I ask her, why were you crying? She said, I hadn't eaten grapes in two years. And that guys is what communism does. That is what it gets you to where you have someone crying because I haven't eaten grapes. Some little kid automatically, this has to be shared. This one's mine. Right. And, you know, we had an overnight layover in L.A. We wanted to be in the States, but we knew that, you know what, this is not the way to do it right now. We went to our third country. We waited there for quite a while. I'm talking years and years. Eventually there was a path to resettlement, and we came back to the States. What third country did they send you to? So with that one, I'm keeping a little private for now. Just a lot of my

concerns to with my family and everything else. I still have family living there. Sure. So I want to just kind of protect them a little bit. But we're at that third country where we get over here and that process was not easy. It was a lot of lawyers, a lot of stuff. But I already knew that all of this was the fault in my view as a kid of the communist and I need to give back to this country. Yeah. So I've always wanted to give back to the U.S. and I'm trying to find any path I can to give back and that includes my everyday job. Yeah. It's interesting because we, you know, Rick Prado and others who have come from Cuba, you know, families, you know, we see a lot of that, very, that patriotism that's been instilled from knowing what the other side really looks like.

Absolutely. So tell us about, you know, your early days in soccer, how that came about, and where that came about. Just, so I was getting in trouble in high school. Again, poor kid, because we had no money. when you come from another country, even if you were a petroleum engineer like my uncle, he was driving cabs because that doesn't translate over here. And in order to go to school, get your degree, learn English, it was hard enough for him to learn these terms in Russian, then in Spanish,

and how to translate them. It was really hard, and we had to spend all our money on legal fees, but that's what we did. So for me, it was a lot of hustle growing up. Hustle, hustle, hustle, you get in trouble. Sometimes when you take computers apart and make them do things that they weren't supposed to do, such as, I don't know, go into where's servers. You probably know where's.

You're probably a geek like me on that one. And the mass mail is getting all the registration codes. Your guidance counselor at some point stops you and says, you're going to get in trouble. Let's channel you to something else. Ooh, here's a ball. How about soccer? So I got into sports and I saw that as, you know,

a way to a vehicle to do some stuff. And while I was in high school, I still kind of resisted. I started doing startups. and one of the things that we did, which this was the straw that broke the camels back and made me go really strong into soccer, was we'd probably be in jail if we did this today. I can get you, my friends.

Oh, I'm glad to curse on this. Yeah, you can curse. Yeah, yeah. I kid you not. We were working on this game called Doom. Do you guys remember Doom? I recall. There was this file called the Wad file.

You remember the Doom Wad file. You could modify the graphics. You could modify all of the stuff. We modified the monsters. To be the teachers, we modified the doom thing to be the school. And we sold this for five bucks at football games. That's awesome. Needless to say, at that point, even back then, they intervened.

And they're like, all right, okay, cool, cool, cool. And this is, you know, pre the, and I'm certainly not making light of these things. It's terrible what's going on. But this was pre-Columbine. Right, right. It was a joke. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So we did. We were just kids. We thought it would be funny. We're like, oh, this is pretty neat. And, you know, the explosions were all like goo or whatever it was. It wasn't, like, really bloody. But then, like, you need to do sports.

Just stop. No, kid, you need to stop this crap. So then I jumped into soccer, and that's how I kind of got to go to college. And the journey sort of took a little bit of a turn at 9-11. We can jump into that or skip that and go into soccer. No, no, take us through it. 9-11 hits. I'm playing college soccer at the time.

9-11 hits. November, I'm at a recruiting office. Like, hey, enlist, let me go. I don't even know what's what. I didn't know the difference between someone between the term Islamic and Muslim. No idea. I don't even know who did it at this point. Just let me at him.

Let's go, let's go. I say I was full of pissing Mountain Dew Extreme. Just like, let's go do this. The recruiter tells me, listen, we got a lot of people right now. I guess they were making quota left and right in those days. So he suggested, given my resume, given that I was already in college, he said, why don't you go and join ROTC? Your school got an ROTC, go join, so I'm knocking the door, let's do this, and the way ROTC works,

I'm not sure if it still was now, but it's just a course. You just sign up, you know, whatever ROTC, 201, or 101, whatever the heck it is. So I signed up, go through that, and I show up day one right after cutting my hair, because I had hair down here. So I cut my hair and my dumb ass shows up with, like, my hot topic gear. I'm not sure if I still had my Jencos and, you know, my fingernail polish, but they immediately, immediately zero in like, okay, buddy, all right. You're flight leader.

You are flight leader now. So I guess everyone takes turns, but they made me, I didn't even have a uniform. So I came in in the spring of 2001. Sorry, spring of 2002, spring 2001, everyone already been there for a semester. So coming in mid-year, everyone's got uniforms except this moron. I'm wearing one of those cool metal chains that had like little balls. It looks like the curtain pull thing, except they're really big, right? So I'm showing up looking like a moron.

miraculously, I don't fail out, and I do pretty well, hand over the lead to the next person. And as I'm going on towards the end of that semester, we do our advisory meeting or whatever. And I wasn't a citizen at the time. I was just a permanent resident. And the guy talks to me, he's like, hey, we can't pay for your schooling. Look, you're already doing this and this. I'm not sure if this is the best thing for you. You could go through all the training, but then if you don't pass this, you got to enlist.

And there's all sorts of things. And he just said, hey, it might not be the right fit right now. And me, I'm just there like, nobody wants me. I can't enlist. I can't do this. But if you're making quota left and right, you know, what do you need another one for? But as I'm going in, a lot of these pieces, a lot of these things make me sound like a moron. And I am, but I was absolutely oblivious to anything.

And I say this as a preface because some of the things that I might say going forward might seem obvious to the audience and to you guys. But please remember, I am 21 years old, however old I am, 20 years old not knowing anything about the world. Right. So then I'm leaving and that's it. I go out and I start trying to keep my soccer career going and I'm playing at these parks and these rec leagues and I'm not sure if you know much about these rec leagues but there's all sorts of gambling, drug trafficking, stolen goods trafficking, all sorts of stuff happening at these. And I'm playing and knowing some seedy people and I was really good so they'd all want me on their team because then I would help them win when they're doing whatever it is. And through that course of that, that summer my career takes a big turn. I meet a guy who claims, and I apologize for not sharing names, but you guys trying to do my best to tell the story, but also not. His name was Bob. Bob. Yeah.

So I meet Bob, and he says he's my distant cousin. And we always have cousins that didn't make it out, and you thought were dead or died in the war, he haven't heard from, because you just, you don't hear from people. They go away. He says he's got an inn with the Nicaragua national team. He says, oh, yeah, I know this dude. Yeah, yeah. I know Flore. Flore's going to help you out.

okay cool he calls the guy and he's like you got to try out what cool he got to try out so I go and I like this guy I like Bob because Bob gave me something to aspire to he was out of place in the ghetto he was an engineer by trade he had a normal car nothing nice or flashy he spoke English which was a big deal and it was something like wow you were professional you went to school and you're being nice to me you want to set me up with a tryout cool I go down to south central America and I think I'm going to get kidnapped because the guy who picks me up, I'm landing at the airport. Remember, Nicaragua early 2000s, the saint kind of how it is now, even now, it's still not great, but it was different 20 plus years ago. Some guy picks me up. You ever seen that movie Delta

Force? The original Chuck Norris. Delta Force. Remember the van the priest was driving or when they're pretending to be a priest? Dude, yeah, that's what he picks me up on. It's like manual transmission. He has to get out and like crank something to make it start. And he's got like a bunch of boxes of like bootleg stuff in the back and I'm there, you're the guy. You're right. For the national team. Bob told me to pick me up. So then he takes me and I'm there with like my bag and everything.

Like, oh, God, okay, what's going on? But it turns out he was legit. So I spend the next month there training with them. And they had a company called Parmelot had done some work down there and there was an Italian coach that was there being the coach for the national team for free because they didn't have anybody. They had no money. This place was absolutely.

barren. I'll show you pictures after we're done here of what the training facilities look like. There's a horse taking a dump on the field where we had to go. Like, we were drinking water that was white because they used chlorox or chlorine to clean the water. So it wasn't really filtered or anything like that. This guy was hustling too. As soon as I get there, he's trying to sell me jerseys. He's like, you got a jersey. I got this one. It's only two bucks. And then as I'm leaving, hey, when you come back next time, can you bring me the following? what he wanted to do is he wanted to make different logos and stuff like that,

hey, can you bring me these letters that I can iron on stuff? Can you buy this stuff for me? Because he couldn't get it. And I'm there, you're the coordinator? He was the equivalent of, like, manager of soccer operations or president of soccer operations, the equivalent here. So I'm down there. And then it goes fine.

And I continue to go down there. And on one of my trips, I am staying at this dump hostel. The hostel's locks were, let me tell you, the lock is the lock you use on a shed. like the master lock. It just clothes. It latches. It's a regular lock. And it had a communal bathroom, communal, a little living area. I meet this guy who says he's a white guy, speaks English. And of course, me, as much as I'm Hispanic, it's my first language and all this culturally American. I don't know how to connect. I don't know the jokes. I don't know the songs. Any of that stuff. This guy says, oh, yeah, I got out of AOL. This is right after the dot com, by the way. So there were a lot of people who made money and who lost money. He said, yep, I was with AOL. I was with AOL. I made a bunch of money. We got bought out. It's great. I'm just chilling around Nicaragua.

I understand. Now I do ask the question, what was someone with millions of dollars from a buyout doing in the middle of this crap hospital? You don't tell people in Nicaragua, I made a lot of money. I have a lot of money, dude. Yeah, exactly.

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Then he says, oh, I got some blood. that you should talk to. I think it's great. And then during training, I start meeting these guys that I think are reporters. By the way, down there at the stadium, the stadium doesn't exist anymore, but it was called Crenshaw Stadium. It was wide open. It's not like here where you say there's a stadium and nobody can go in. You could go and do whatever you want. There are people walking their dogs. There are people doing stairs on the stands. And these guys would come in and just kind of talk to me and ask me stuff, hey, can we buy your jersey? Hey, what's going on? Hey, who's that guy? What's that guy? I'm thinking they're reporters, and I just, you know, befriend these guys and opportunities kind of continue to present themselves in terms of trying out with teams overseas.

I'm able to find an agent in my career just kind of keeps evolving. I end up in England, Poland, Korea, playing throughout Latin America. And that sort of leads me to befriend the president of the Federation because I was the first non-homegrown player for the national team. I'm proud to say that now. everyone else was native-born, working the domestic league. I'm coming from playing college, coming into here.

He saw that as an opportunity. And the president of the Federation's name is Julio Rocha Lopez. He was in the FIFA indictment in 2015. And you see the list of everything that he was alleged to have done because, of course, the trial never finished. It was alleged.

I happened to have pictures of all of that stuff or letters signed by him. Right. Right. And to this day, we're still Facebook friends. even though I don't use Facebook or, you know, an account that I had back in, you know, O2, we're still Facebook friends or O3 whenever it was. We're still on there.

One of the funny things I think I sent you guys the picture, there's a bus. It looks like the crappiest bus with bags like tied on top of it. There was the entire 23-man roster plus technical team in that bus made for 20 people. And if you look at some of the FIFA stuff, they were giving them $2 million a year for this thing called Project Goal, like Project Gold. They were supposed to up the training facilities, help us fly to places and all of this crap. This dude was taken our,

he's alleged to have taken our jerseys and our training material and started selling him at a sporting goods store that he was running. And he would tell FIFA that we flew somewhere. But I'm like, I got pictures of us on that bus, bro. Right. I had the camera that miraculously did not get stolen.

So we were on a bus for all of our games. And I had to borrow my own jersey. I still have some of my jerseys and I had to make sure to borrow those after the game. So my soccer career kind of evolved through that. I did get some stepping stones thanks to the national team. So I'm extremely grateful for my time. The dudes worked their tail off.

I met some amazing people. It was really, really phenomenal experience. And then at some point, how did you find your way into music? Like, was this sort of the next divergence in your career path? Yeah. With the music thing, it was interesting. I had some run-ins during my time with soccer. in music. I ended up, and there's a lot of weird stuff that I always tell people, if I didn't have

pictures and video, I'd be like, you're making this crap up. I somehow wind up playing on stage with Green Day. There's another picture of me and Billy Joe Armstrong from Green Day on stage, jamming out. I'm able to hook his crew up with tickets. I knew a guy when I was in England at the time. I was always doing minor league stuff in England, never got Premier League. I was never that good. I was good enough to get the try out, you know, get at decent enough level. So I hooked them up, and I guess they hooked me up. I still have the guitar. He let me keep it.

It was a really cool experience. That sort of got the bug going. Then I ran into this band called Newfound Glory. Their drummer Cyrus was a soccer fan, and I just kind of met him randomly in like a media thing. I was doing soccer. They were doing the band. I gave him one of my jerseys,

and this dude had no idea who I was. But man, he was so nice. Looking at it now, he should have just been like, go to hell, just go away. But, man, props to him being super nice. There's even a picture of him holding my jersey, all nice about it. So I got to see behind the scenes a little. I saw there were a lot of parallels with soccer to music. Punk rock kid all my life loved music. I decided, why not? Let me start a band.

So when my soccer career is done, I go to grad school. And then I'm like, eh, let me start a band. Let's do this. That was it. Just let me start a band. So tell, how did you literally put the band together? So I put out an ad on Craigslist. Hey, dudes, you want to play cool music. Let's do this. I went through a bunch of people. And then I serendipity hit again. And somehow I end up getting booking a studio that belongs to Kyle Cook from Matchbox 20.

Like the actual matchbox 20, the band. And I find two guys in the band that we say, we don't have enough to gig out and play live. Let's at least record a record. So we start recording this record. And one of the funny things is we get there, he's got all the stuff hooked up. And I know a lot of people, when they meet people who are more important than them, basically me, everyone I meet is more important than me, but I expect this dude to say, yeah, who the hell are you? Go away. Don't mess with my stuff. He's so apologetic. He's like,

hey, I hope you guys don't mind. I already had all this stuff set up. I know you brought your gear. So give us a second. We'll tear it down. I mean, unless you don't mind using the gear, we already got set up. Oh, wait, wait. So we have two options here. We can use the piece of crap stuff that we have. Or we can literally play the same stuff that Matchbox 20 is recording their album with, you know, just for you. We'll just do you the favor of not making you tear your crap down. So we record a pretty good record and we need to do some retakes and then we end up working with Jay Stanley. Jay Stanley was also a former member of Matchbox 20. This is just not on purpose, nothing. It just happens. He listens to her stuff. Jay's like, oh yeah, I like your crap. Let's do

something. So we work something out. We record something pretty good and we just put it out there online, on MySpace, gigging out, doing stuff. And then we get a call from some guys putting something all called Kids All Access. Kids All Access is sort of like a fantasy camp for kids. It's partnered with Radio Disney. They rent out a big stadium and they have different stages where the kids or booths where the kids get to do rock star makeup and they get to pretend like they're in a red carpet. They get to pretend like they're doing like a press conference. They pretend like they're on stage. And we were just supposed to be the band that had the look and the professionalism to show up not high on time.

And we had... Right. Right. And we had... Camp counselor. Yeah. Yeah. And we had like a good enough product to where the song sounded good. So we got a little bit of play on Radio Disney, which was nice.

But get this. The company that's putting it on about two weeks before it's supposed to happen. Hey, guys. FYI, that check's not going to clear. We have folded as a company. So nice meeting you. So the whole thing just folds out of nothing. thing and we're in our heads, was this a laundering?

Did we just help launder money? What the heck is going on? It's a fry festival kind of. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was like the first iteration of it. Then that, though, at least puts us on the radar. Because everyone in the scene was saying, how the hell did these guys, out of nowhere, record with the dudes from Matchbox 20, get on this radio Disney partnership in all this crap.

So we start gigging out as much as we can. We do some charity things. one thing leads to another, we're playing Vanilla Ice's block party. That's awesome. Yeah. And again, for everything everyone says about Vanilla Ice, dude, he shared his stage with us. He was nice enough. But the funny thing is, I will tell this story about Vanilla Ice.

Hey, you guys ever argued with someone whom you're agreeing with? Yes. They won't take yes for an answer. Yes. So we're arguing about the drum set and how somebody said something. He's like, you don't understand, bro. That drum set's not going to move. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's not going to move.

It's not going to move because they can't because I'm like, yes, I'm agreeing with you that it would be stupid for this to move. Well, great, I'm glad to you agree. Good. I'm also glad we agree. Like, oh, man, but nicest guy again. I know he's had his issues and troubles, but man, I judge people by the way they treat me, right? And he treated a bunch of idiot kids with respect, with kindness that he didn't have to. So we're getting these weird gigs all over the place.

People come out of the woodwork, and then we get, a sponsorship. We get a sponsorship from a manufacturer of memory and USBs. They're trying to launch a, and everything in the, dude, we got ripped off so many times in the music industry. Everything in music is money laundering, drug dealing, trafficking, some sort of scam, right? I think Mike Benz, this guy that's talking a lot about stuff, talked a lot about a lot of weird stuff that happens in the music industry. And I can confirm a lot of weird stuff happens in the music industry. So we get sponsored by this company. And then the next thing we know is say,

hey, you guys want to go on tour with the backstreet boys? Not like Los Backstreet Boys or like a trip back. No, no. The Backstreet Boys are like, yeah, like, yeah, well, it's in Russia. You'll be going to Russia and, you know, other Eastern European countries, former Soviet bloc countries. And what you'll be doing is you'll be handing out these MP3 players and giving them out to people.

and we're like, yeah, no questions asked, baby, you're giving us all, let's do this. Carlos, before you tell the Russia story with the Backstreet Boys, I do got to ask you, what was the name of your band? Where can people, like, if they want to find you on the YouTube or wherever, where should they look? So right now what they can go to is more than just memory.com, more than just memory. There's a lot of stuff with using the band name and the old masters, as you could see with the Taylor Swift thing that was recent where she didn't own her music. Your stuff is copyrighted.

She didn't own her name. working through that making sure that it's all at the end flushed out. Yeah. For now, they can go to more than just memory.com. And that's kind of our handle. That's sort of what we're doing as part of the relaunch. Because this is a bunch of old guys. We thought it was kind of neat to put that out there. A lot of the guys have kids now. And they're like, you know what? My kids don't know anything about this. So why not put this stuff out there and just a positive story that at the end, music isn't it. So many people don't make it in, like me, I didn't make it in sports. I didn't make it in music. but there's an amazing life to be had afterwards.

And that's what some of the guys want to do. They want to say, you know what, there's life after this. Don't be a pissed off, bitter, failed musician. You guys actually cared about the music, and you actually did it, too. You put it all together. Yep, absolutely. Now, while you're doing this, though, you are in grad school at this time also. What did you go into grad school for?

I went to grad school for computer science. And I got what's called graduate assistance in areas of national need. Someone from the government saw some research I was doing, and they just came up and said, well, part of the research was music. So what I did is, as part of our music thing, I guess I left this part out is there were a bunch of online contests at the time. Everything was either MySpace contest or sign up and vote now on Total Request Live MTV or whatever it is.

We were getting a lot of traction in person, but I didn't see anything translate online. I'm like, what the hell, dude? We're not getting any votes and nothing's happening. I start digging in. I'm going to leave out exactly how I dug into the systems. but I found there was rampant fraud. I started looking at IP address blocks coming in. I started looking temporal proximity between different activity and all this.

So I alerted the companies. What kind of reaction do you guys think I got? Yeah, they don't want to hear it. Don't want to hear it. So some of them threatened us or threatened me. Other companies said, thank you for alerting us, completely unrelated to you alerting us. How would you guys like to play these gigs?

It was sort of kind of... Like a bio. Let's call it a bug bounce. Right. We're call it a bug bounty. Right. And that's actually, I think, how we got the traction with the memory manufacturer was the fact that we then started playing these bigger gigs. We played the Warp Tour.

We were number one on an MTV, you know, campus music chart, like the college music charts. How do we make this problem go away, Carlos? Yeah. So they made it go away. And then that's when we got the USB company thing. And that was part of what my dissertation was. Was there was another competing thing at the time called Truthy out of the University of Indiana. there's some controversy with truthy, and I personally think that there might be some merit to the criticisms of the algorithm analysis being skewed towards one way or another.

And that's certainly what we can talk about in the later portions. But I was on the ground floor of this. Like early on, I was saying there are bots, there's manipulation, there's all sorts of stuff here that we need to look at and we need a handle. But it wasn't really taken into consideration. But when the government said, we'll pay for your PhD, we'll pay for your research. just you owe us some time afterwards. I'm like, wait, I got a guaranteed job after this. Like, let's do this.

Yeah, you wisely had a backup plan in case the rock star thing doesn't work out. Because you know that always works out. Right. Okay, so back to it. Tell us the Russia's story. Yeah. And picture this again. Everything that you see on TV,

I hate to tell you, a lot of the stuff is smoke and mirrors. I know I'm breaking your hearts. The music industry really works a certain way. you pay what's called a buy-in when you're going somewhere on tour. Nobody's going to let you be on that stage and just say, oh, you don't have to pay insurance, you don't have to pay the roadies, you don't have to pay anything. We were lucky enough. We were able to pay for the buy-in using some of our sponsorship money, but then we had to come up with everything ourselves.

So we were working two, three jobs. We were taking out loans, asking, you know, friends and family to do all this stuff. We were on a shoestring budget. And now we leaned into like how comedic it was, but they are on tour buses and all sorts of this other stuff. we are flying coach middle seats on a random van with some dude who's been up all night you know like got chew in his mouth and all this kind of crap have you seen the movie euro trip that's what it was for us when they get to bradislava that's exactly what this was for us and we're we have some funny video which we we started to put it online because at first when

you're trying to make this you are embarrassed about it you're just like oh this sucks man I wish we were making it but now we think it's funny that we were taking pictures in front of the big bus and then immediately getting in front in our little, I think I told you guys, kind of like that van from the Delta Force, the Chuck Norris movie, the one the priest is driving. That's just like the guy in Nicaragua was driving. We got one of those through Eastern Europe.

So then we have to schedule the logistics of the tour on our own. But behind everything is this thing called a Carnet, an international Carnet, which is like a passport for goods. You have to serial number. Oh, for all the guitars and drums. Yeah, and everything. Because it turns out, I don't know any of these things. Russia is very strict.

on what you can take. What frequency does this transmit on? What frequencies can this listen to? What is this model number? And here's an awesome thing. Once we were announced to be on the tour, we had sponsors coming in, because we also did, I forgot to mention,

we did like the Macy's Parade, we did a Today Show tie-in, we did a bunch of other stuff. So we have sponsors, but it's not Marshall or PV or any of these, like, Fender, any of these big brands. It's like, you know,

Homeboy makes amps in his basement.com, and they're all giving us like this gear hey you get a discount for this discount for that so imagine this carnet filled in with a bunch of like random like electronics where they're like what is the frequencies on this like I don't know Was your amp made by CIA.gov

Like you need to know. I would love I still have some of the gear I am open to someone tearing that up and be like what is in this crap because at the end of the day I don't know anything I'm some kid so as we're going through dude, I remember this to this day. Have you ever guys, I'm sure you have in your work,

and I've certainly had it in my professional and in my personal life, the pucker factor where you get like those goosebumps and you're like, whole, what's going on? We are getting to the airport in Moscow. And then we are carrying all of this gear. And they're looking at the carnet. We don't know what it's going to be like because we went to the Baltics. There was nothing.

You go in and out. Who cares? Good to go. They were at the time, I think, eventually looking for EU membership. So we've had a great experience so far. Dude, they give us, like, they put the big lamp on us and everything. What's this? What's that?

They take our tour manager aside. They're like, you wait here. They take this dude aside and he disappears and I'm there. And they're motioning to the thing because it's a paper that had at the time, I'm sure, digital now, carbon copies of everything. And I have it. And I get it. Some crap was scratched out.

There were some sixes that looked like nines and some other weird stuff. And half of these brands, nobody knows. And some of them is just. Pelican cases because the guys and I've had a good laugh, you know, having a drink and a barbecue, we're looking at this stuff. We're like, okay, I could see why. Okay, objectively, I could see why. So then he disappears and he comes back. And when he comes back, he's just like, okay, guys, we got to just go, go, go, go, move, move, go, go, go, go, go. So we go and we're through. All right, holy crap, we're in. What yours is this, by the way? This is 0.8.

Okay. So this is another thing. You can look all the stupid stuff up. We played a show. show in Moscow, May 21st, 2008, the same day as the Champions League final was being held across town. So we are at the Olympi-Olympi-Iskia. It's the Olympic Stadium in Moscow, big 40,000 seat like Astrodome type thing. Across town is Luzinski Stadium. I'm not pronouncing it right, so I apologize getting the pronunciations wrong. The Champions League finals held at the same time with every world leader imaginable is there at the Champions League final. And we're at this thing. And, you know, this is when I'm telling you, I'm not realizing this stuff until 20 years later, I'm there. Okay, I get why they were paying to us because the cops were following us around.

People were with us 24-7. You had people looking at her tapes and at her cameras being like, turn that off. Let me see. Let me look all of this stuff. And at the time, we had tapes. So it wasn't like a memory card or anything. We'd have to stop, rewind, and they didn't even have a thing to play the tape. So we'd have to play it with our camera or whatever.

So we weren't really scared. We thought they were being annoying at the time. But in retrospect, I realize that there are certain countries that I should not go on vacation to. Not because of anything I've done knowingly, but, hey, sometimes weird stuff happens. Yeah. So we play that show. And at that show, I remember distinctly, so we had a bunch of kids who were rich kids. Rich from like oligarch parents, politically connected, you know, they come backstage.

We're their monkeys. We are the dance for my amusement, right? They get the meet and greet with backs greet. Oh, thank you. The picture. but with us, they're like, we're going to hang out with you because you guys are here. We're up here. I get it.

And we're there, getting the MP3 blare. It's a good gift. It's a gesture of our gift. And they're thinking iPod in their heads. Right. I know, like, they're thinking iPods. And then I can't tell you their faces are ingrained in here. And I'm like, and they're like, thank you.

Like, it was the biggest face of disappointment. man ever where they're like kids unwrapping their Christmas present like this isn't what I asked for and it sucks because it wasn't even a zoon yeah it was some like other like company that they're like we're trying to break into the mp3 thing yeah but that wasn't our worst thing our worst thing was we at one time we're sponsored by a lawnmower company so we'd have to stop in the middle of shows and do lawnmower I think I forgot something what'd you forget I forgot to mow the lawn well if you had the world's fastest lawnmower blah blah blah I don't want to say the name of the company. They're like, well, you would have been done.

Oh, I'll remember that for next time. And if you say, you know, whatever it is, get 20% off of this thing. So we'd stop in the middle of our show for lawnmowers. That's amazing. I get it, man. We're capitalists, bro. Yeah. That's how the music industry should work.

I think a lot of people in music think that they're above it and they're like, no, dude, you're gigging. You're moving your own amps, your own material and everything. We're not ones to judge. We sell dick pills and mattresses on this show. Dude, I'd be doing the same. I'm a capitalist, baby. Nothing wrong with that at all.

Yeah. So then, you know, we do those shows. What else was cool about that tour? A bunch of, we got chakes down the street by horses. And I'm only limiting the stories the crap that I have video of. Because any other stuff. Just people on horses or just like a roving gang of horses decided you guys were from the wrong side of the barn? That was in Nicaragua.

And I have pictures of that one. But this was people on horseback went through the barricades. we're chasing our little van down. Wow. Knocking on the windows just to say hello. Wow. That's awesome. So we had a pretty neat impact.

Our translators, of course, had PhDs and whatever it was, highly educated, beautiful women, right? All of our translators. But we had an amazing time connected with the whole lot of people. And there's something to be said for, we always joke and say that free CDs and MP3 players averted a war. But the more of this stuff that you do, the more you interface, the more things. the more things you have in common,

the more you build those bridges that I think are all too important that make people more hesitant to immediately dehumanize somebody and say, screw it, F you're them, when you all realize, well, we like the same crap. We're all just as dumb.

All we want to do is eat drink and be merry most of the time and sometimes different things get in the way and I understand. If there's time to fight, there's time to fight. Hey guys, our show is sponsored by Ghostbag. Check them out. Please, they make awesome mattresses,

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Shout out to our brothers in Canada. They rock. Check them out. I love Ghostbed. Thanks, guys. But a lot of these things, I think the cross-cultural changes that we were having at the time with those countries, dude, it's not even barely 20 years

removed from the fall of the Iron Curtain. Right. And that's not even a long time because if you think 9091, it took them 10 years to finally get their crap together. And this is barely eight years after that. So I think it was a significant thing that bands like us and others, and especially Backstreet, we're doing. Yeah, I mean, 2008, that's only what, six years removed from the initial invasion of Ukraine

in Crimea. like it's that's an interesting period of history that yeah you've got it you got in there i i have i mean i remember thinking like talking to some uh siops people and uh public affairs people in the beginning in the gwatt and i was like you need to get like satellites in here and pipe mtv to all these villages and see what effect mtv has you know it certainly affected east germany the elders may not care but the kids like they grow up on mtv they're not going to I can tell you, we did that. We got mobbed at a McDonald's.

We almost shut down an airport because we part, this is another thing that I should mention. With my PhD stuff, I put it into, I tested it. Not on the U.S. I did not test it anywhere within the borders of the U.S. When we landed, by the time we landed in Russia, we were celebrities. Uh-huh. We were mobbed. They were waiting for us with signs and everything, like drawn caricatures and posters.

they would mob the bus the whole thing. So this stuff works. And remember, I have nothing to do at this time. I don't know anything. I'm just some idiot that says, you know what? I think this could work. Let's do it. Because you do guerrilla marketing.

Back in the day, it was flyers. Yeah, sure. You dump the flyers, you know, put up the posters on the wall. Sure. So my dumb ass thought, let's try this. And, guys, it worked. And I do think a lot of these kids who otherwise would not have heard of us because you didn't have our contemporaries going there.

You didn't have, and not anything to say bad about them. It's just not... Did you guys find... I'm sorry, MySpace to be helpful at that time? Oh, yeah. Well, MySpace wasn't helpful in stopping bots. Just like most social media sites now, they love the bots because during their quarterly meeting, they can go to their investors and say monthly active users, right?

Or monthly user acquisition is at this rate. Right. But it was helpful in that it allowed us to get our music out for free. Right. The biggest thing that we did compared to everyone else is we just said free. Forget it. It's free to everybody because... So our drummer was, again, South American guy.

Everyone was either, you know, basis Cuban. Everyone was from some sort of different country. We had a couple of white guys in, right? We had to fill our quota with you guys. Right, right. But everyone, and they were poor and humble guys. So they knew, hey, man, these guys in Russia, they don't have money for it. So why make them pay because they would pay for it?

So we just gave it to them for free. And what happened when you came back from Russia? Yeah, so we come back, we finish those shows. The best time to come back is during an economic meltdown, which is great. We get back. We're like, all right, we're going to go. Sponsors are like, yeah, we are, that MP3 player didn't work out. We are kind of going broke, closing a couple lines of business.

All other businesses closed down, record labels. Yeah, no thank you. We don't have any money anymore. But I get back from back street, and I'm finishing my research and all of this. And waiting for me is an unsolicited envelope from Washington. in D.C. And I, with a reading list, and I think I call local federal authorities tip line, hey, I think someone is impersonating this.

I call another agency's tip line. I think someone's impersonating this. And then they tell me, no, I think you should just do whatever it says. You know, I look at that. I know I have a service commitment. I see it's a good avenue and I follow that. And two years later, I'm a federal employee. Why do you think they reached out to you?

That type of recruitment is fairly rare in this day and age, I sense. And I don't know. If I'll tell you honestly at the time, I don't know. They think you have access to Russia? So at the time, when I'm doing all of this stuff, I'm just a kid thinking, oh, this probably came from my research, probably from something that I was doing. And as someone who's now read a whole lot, somebody who has talked to a lot of people and done a lot of other things personally and professionally, things start clicking. in my head. And I don't want to create a story that doesn't exist, but everyone who I've shared the story with friends, they all look at me. I get the same reaction. They're like,

you're a moron. You didn't see any of this. And they've traced it back. They say, you tried to join the military. They didn't get you here. Then you meet this guy in the summer. And after this, you connect with people. And then all of a sudden, you get a fellowship, you get these sponsorships, and you go over there with this magic thing. And I'm there. I don't know, guys. Yeah. I don't know. All I know is that I had a service commitment.

I've been doing weird stuff for almost 10 years. One thing that I have started to see is that I wasn't a citizen all this time. I became a citizen pretty late and the paper came after I became a citizen. And I wasn't stalling it or anything, but I just, you know, I was doing the national team. I wasn't a citizen at the time. It wasn't something that I was looking, even eligible for. Because as I explained the process, when you're in a silee, that's not quick. That takes 10 years or it takes quite a while at the time.

remember there's nothing no digital anything like that so after that you got to wait five years so you get your um asylum set you're good you get the stamp on your foreign passport that says you're good to go then you get your green card the physical card then five years or whatever it is later you can start to apply for citizenship and then there's another year in that so it was quite a while so i can get my citizenship and i think that sort of might have helped trigger something what are you allowed to say about working for the united states government i know it's pretty sparse Yeah, so I'm just trying to make sure I stay with everything all the requested of me. I'm a U.S. government employee.

I proudly serve our country. I work alongside some of the most amazing humans I've ever met. People who do extraordinary things every single day, and I don't think deserve a lot of the criticism they get because they are working their butts off, putting their lives at risk, trying to help us keep this republic going for another 200-plus years. I do a lot of, I say there are certain certifications that I've earned, certain things I've done, which I'm proud of, and I will probably talk about at a later time.

But I want to make sure that I say right now, I work for the U.S. federal government. I work a lot in very unique circumstances. And if anyone's ever seen one of my talks in official capacity, then they'll get an idea of what that is. Let, you know, let's talk a little bit because you just said something interesting to me. You said, you know, keep the country strong or whole for another 200 years. What does that look like under, in a free society, when there is UTS, when there is influence campaigns, when there's all these things? Like, how do we balance the liberty that we espouse and combating influence as it

stands now, influence and technical espionage? I think one of the, that's a great question. And one of the biggest things that we can do is make sure to educate everyone and allow us to educate ourselves. Because if you know what you're looking at, so in the third world, something that we learned right away is how to spot propaganda, how to spot the sources of propaganda, how to spot propaganda in many different forms, whether it's television, whether it's music, whether it's a flyer, whether it's a book. And I think what we have done a lot is prevent people from having that skill because we immediately say things like, I am the science closed book.

Like, this is how it is. And I think that people are smart enough to think for themselves. And we're not going to come to the same conclusion, guys. We are absolutely not. And that's okay. I think the openness of discussion with people that we disagree with is the key, as opposed to just saying, this is it. Shut up, you're a moron otherwise.

People in like a country like Poland or Estonia or Latvia, I mean, these types of countries seem to have like more of anoculation to that type of material. Like they understand what they're looking at and they're able to distinguish between it. But like as Americans, we still have this like attitude that like all information is equally valuable or equally true. No, you're absolutely correct. I don't know what that is. Maybe it's because I grew up with my grandmother talking. nonstop about the communists and how bad it was. There's even interviews funny about me.

I told me my grandfather's an academic and a journalist. So there's interviews of me as a three-year-old kid. Communist are bad. A lot of it might be they grew up with it as well. Even if it's three, four generations removed, they grew up with this. They see it. They're able to spot it. But I think the faith that we put in certain institutions that are profit-based is what

drives us. Again, I'm a capitalist. Nothing wrong with profit. I also think that we should look at everything at face value and we shouldn't take everything or anything really as gospel without really asking questions. Do you think that we need to come to terms with our government, not necessarily as an institution, but the individuals that make up our government are also profit-based and subject to, not only ridicule, but subject to like examination?

So that's something that's beyond outside of my lane. But what I can tell you is if people are not, it's not that they're not smart enough to see through it. If they don't have enough bandwidth to dedicate to seeing through it, then there's not much you're going to do. Because it's open right now. You can tell, there's all these websites that tell you who invests in what and when. And you can look at, you know, the correlations are like, okay, this happened two days after this, this happened two days before this. This is where the S&P 500 tracks. This is where this person tracks.

Right. Here's where the best fund manager in the world tracks. We all know this. It's open, but it's just something that some people don't have the bandwidth for or they let themselves get emotionally carried away with. And now what you're talking about is the problem of humanity. Yeah. It's fascinating. And so what about to not talking about internal threats, let's talk about sort of external threats, which kind of translate a lot of times. Like let's look at Chinese or Russian influence operations in the United States. before we dive like too deep into the I do want to go there but there is I think there's one more story we might have glossed over about Korea oh okay Korea does that like follow in the timeline yep towards the end of my soccer career as I was transitioning from that soccer

into music I'm finding sports agents and you just spray and pray you just email everybody or at the time I was faxing actually FIFA had this list of registered agents and you could fax these guys so I faxed them but then buddy mine randomly gets in touch with me and says, hey, dude, we're putting this team together, going to Korea. There's this thing called the Interreligious Peace and Sports Festival, if you've ever heard of this. It's a... No, I haven't. Nobody has. It didn't really do too well, but it is this idea of having teams of different

athletic disciplines representing not just a nation, but a religion. You had the American Christian basketball team versus the UK Muslim basketball team. This was run by a guy, I'm going to butcher the name, Sung Young Moon. Oh, yeah. The Moonies. Okay, you guys are familiar. Okay, you're familiar. This, yeah, oh my gosh.

So this thing is run by these guys. It's at this, I mean, they rent out, and then he's running this thing called the Peace Cup concurrently. The Peace Cup is where he'd bring in big Premier League teams like Tottenham Hotspur and all these other guys and to play some Korean teams. But what they would do, which was interesting. And first, before I get into this, I'm not really. ridiculing anyone's religion, the people I met there, were the nicest, most wonderful people. I wish I could say like, oh, they were cultish jerks. Dude, they were nice. Let people believe whatever they want to believe. Were there some kooky things? Yeah, I do kooky things, right? But they were so

nice, so awesome. I didn't see anything untoward. I'm not saying it's not happening, but I saw everything kind of neat. But here's what they would do, which is funny. They would hold the games in a stadium, but right before the game, they would bring out these different ceremonies. And I got one of these handycams, or I took video of all of this stuff. How old was I? Maybe was I 20 at this point, 21? And I was young and dumb. And video cameras were a thing at the time, so I would carry it with me. So I've snuck it in. They didn't like me having a video camera, by the way. They did not like that. And I would film how they would bring in a bunch of people wearing like these uniforms and all of this stuff to do this big ceremony with Sun Moon kind of being up there, doing this is

before he passed, doing his thing and whatever. You know, look at me and all this kind of stuff. And they're chanting and it appears like it's a stadium full of followers. It's not. They're there for the game, but they're doing the ceremony right before the game. Right. And then they just, you know, shuffle everyone off. It's sort of like what we used to do. We were the opening act for a lot of big bands. We opened for Finger 11 and all these other guys. So we would, of course, take the picture of us in the crowd. I'm like, dude, you're the opening act. The crowd isn't, yes, you're in front of that crowd that is you, but you're not the crowd. Like when they hand off like a charity trophy at the beginning of a game and the stadium is clapping, just polite clapping.

Yeah. So they would do that. And I have a picture. So first, I got invited as one of the players, I guess, to let go. You're on the Nicaragua national team. Whatever, you're Catholic. Let's bring you up. And I've got a bunch of interviews with me talking.

I have no idea what the lower third says. No idea, but they're asking me questions and I'm answering it. All I know is there's a video out there somewhere, me spliced saying, hail, you know, my allegiance to whatever. They just propaganda. Yeah. Or they just, they dub it over with something else. So I did that.

And then there's this picture, too, that I have. Because I ran into people, again, they're like, oh, hey, it'd be good if you got pictures with one of the agents. It'd be good if you got pictures with him. Could you get pictures with this? So there's a picture of me with who they call the Blessed Mother, his wife. And we're just there. And I'm wearing, like, I look ghetto as hell, man.

I got, like, my hair all gelled. And I got, like, my stupid necklace I told you about. I think I'm even still got my best. black fingernail polish at the time. I'm there with her like this and there's like a big group of people. So I went to Korea, hung out with them for a while. They brought me even back to their media offices here in the States and worked with them a little bit on some other nonprofit endeavors.

I find myself in weird places, which is why, again, I'm always glad I have some sort of camera or picture because that would just sound weird as hell. Yeah, that's awesome. Dave, you had a question about external stuff? Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, basically identifying and encountering. Because, well, first off, let's talk about UTS right off the bat and define what that is. Yes.

So UTS is a term called, it's called ubiquitous technical surveillance. It's a term that describes the study or collection analysis and study of data for the purpose of connecting people with places and events. who did what, when, where, and possibly with whom. It's a term that was coined by the U.S. government, but it's now a broader field of study. I've been studying the technologies that encompass UTS from before it was even a term. I've been studying this stuff from back in the botnet days that I told you guys for music and understanding how frequencies work. By going to Russia and learning all this frequency stuff, man, that was an education in UTS technologies initially.

Why don't they want us to broadcast on that? oh, in Russia, this frequency is used for this, and if I pulse my little guitar wireless thing, it's going to mess with all these kinds of things. So then that discipline is now applicable across industries. I'm working with friends in sports and music, even sometimes heads of agencies, friends and people in higher places, to tackle this because UTS, all of the vectors that make it up and the underlying technologies, have an impact on your bottom line, on your safety, on your privacy, on everything beyond simply an operational context, right?

And so for, for like normies or people who may not be connected in sort of the, you know, national security field, they might think of it as the algorithm of Facebook or to know which ads to send to you, right? It's like the CCTV cameras are everywhere, therefore the biometrics are. Right, right. Perfect, perfect segue. Yeah. So, yes, so starting out with just like an algorithm, but then it grows to even.

Oh, it's worse than that. Let's get into it. So here we go. Have you or anyone listening out here, I'm sure this has happened, have you ever gotten an ad for something that you haven't told anybody about? You haven't Googled. You haven't emailed. You just thought about this thing. And all of a sudden, you're starting to see ads.

Has that ever happened to you guys? Where you're just seeing something. And, of course, you guys aren't normal here. humans, obviously. Not that I've thought about, but conversations I've had. Conversations. There you go. Yes, yes. Conversations I've had. That's what I should have said. Yes. That it's never been in the digital sphere. Correct. But you've just been like, I talked about this. Yes. How in the hell. Yes. Your microphone is not listening to you. It's not listening in that way. They're listening in different ways, but that's not how it happens. It happens because of what I call the marriage of

Skynet and the Matrix. Let's talk about Skynet first. Skynet is a series or system. Skynet. It happens. It happens. It happens. It happens. It is a series or system or series of explicitly and implicitly interconnected systems that gather all sources of data, everything from implicit to explicit data, which we'll talk about in a second, telemetry stuff that you put in. It gathers everything from everywhere that you could possibly think of. All that comes together and is fed into the matrix. The matrix is a series of explicitly and implicitly interconnected algorithms that take completely disparate data sets, seemingly completely unrelated events, and then spit out. out eerily accurate predictions of human behavior. Those predictions can be leveraged with other things

that we can talk about a little bit later to completely manipulate, and I call incept you. It completely incepts you. And all of this is based on what I call the GCCD cycle. It's a cycle that goes, that I talk about. It's government commercial consumer DIY, GCCD. It's a cycle. Technologies are born in the depth of government research labs. All of a sudden, the government's like, cool we're done with this let's license it out to a commercial entity right drones all of a sudden the commercial entity's like dude let's make a consumer version of this now you got influencers buying these drones flying around them then some nerd obviously me i'm affectionately saying that right some nerd says i want to go faster further carry more and do something it wasn't intended to do

carry grenade you're yep there you go and now that same modification gets applied by government so it's this cycle right all of the technologies that underlie uti that enable SkyNet, that enable the Matrix, follow that cycle, which is why where we're at now. You want to take a peek into the Matrix, into SkyNet? Yes. You got your phone, an iPhone? Yeah.

All right. And everyone at home can follow along if you feel like it. If you wonder what gets collected about you, this is one of the few things that you could see. So I want you to go to your settings on your iPhone, then go to Wi-Fi. After you're at Wi-Fi, there's going to be blue letters on the top right-hand side that say edit, tap edit.

You might have to unlock your phone. But once there, don't read the names of anything you see, but what do you see? Describe it. All the networks that I've ever connected to that I've said that remember this network. Yes. Most people say, I've got 100 networks. Wait, that's my kid's gymnastics facility. Wait, that's my nail lady.

Wait, that's some hotel I stayed at. I've had some people say, wait, that's my ex-wife's network. If you keep scrolling all the way down to the bottom, do you see a different kind of network there? I see managed networks. That is your carrier. Do you remember putting those managed networks in? I do not. You do remember, though, connecting to the others, correct?

Yes. So there's a set of networks that you've connected to, and there's a set of networks that you have never even known existed. What your carrier does is they pop those managed networks in there so that you can connect to their hotspot. Let's say you don't have any kind of reception at some point. Their choices are, let me build a tower so I can give you reception down in the basement somewhere

if there's like a really crowded place like a stadium. I could put a tower by the stadium. It might get best-case scenario. use 52 times a year if it's once a week. Even then, it's not really worth building the tower. Let me put some Wi-Fi hotspots on there. So those networks, if you have your Wi-Fi on and it's enabled, the Auto-Connect is enabled, you will automatically connect to those networks unknowingly. So if you don't know you're connecting to those networks, you're none the wiser. But look at all those other networks you have. What I can do first is with any of those networks,

I can conduct a simple man-in-the-middle attack. And you have a lot of people that are demonstrating this stuff. Man-in-the-middle attacks with that. But more importantly, What I can do is I can go to wigel.net, Wigle.net. Wigle.net is a project started by hackers a long time ago. Major props to the guys over at Wigel.net, they do a really good job. You can input every one of those networks and the identifiers into Wigle, and it will spit out a map with a dot on top of where every single one of those networks is located. I now have a map of your pattern of life. Do you like that? No. I know where to wait for your kid.

And one of my big goals with being an evangelist with all of this stuff is I'm I'm not. I know, I'm I want people to better protect themselves, their families, their friends, right? I want everyone to be knowledgeable of this stuff. So that way, some idiot doesn't show up in front of your house. Right. How do you protect yourself from this type? From this particular one, what you want to do is forget all of the networks that you don't have any use for. So don't leave 100 networks.

Just connect to the ones that you are actually connected to. And then give your home Wi-Fi network. Don't give it a cute name. The last thing you want to do is give it a cute original name because then every, everyone knows that's the only place in the world that that networks exist is there. Yes, I know there's some geek watch. I'm like, what are the BSS IDs? Yes, I'm happy to jump in and talk out about the 802.11X series of protocols and its particulars, but let's just stick to normal people's stuff, right? What you want to do is name it something normal, cafe, coffee shop, you know, whatever it is Starbucks.

So that way, if someone's looking at you on Wigel and they're not really keen to hardware identifiers, they're going to see that same network pop up in a million places. The other thing you want to do is just keep your Wi-Fi off if you don't need it. You have unlimited data. You're in the U.S. We've got 5G everywhere. Just keep the damn Wi-Fi off. That's one of the best things that you can do to prevent this.

Because what I could do right now if I wanted to, you could do this with different software like Kismet. The guys at Kismet, again, major props to them. I am not a pioneer in any of this stuff. I'm more of a pioneer in applying this the way I'm applying it. But there's some dudes who wrote some awesome software called Kismet, which lets you see into all of this. I would get the names of your networks. I would conduct a man in the middle attack.

And then you guys know that meme with I am the captain now. Look at me. I am the ISP now. Right. I control you. And even if you're encrypted through TLS, I know there's a bunch of getting other geeks right now. Well, what about TLS encryption? I don't care.

I can just still see what websites you're going to and from. I'm your DNS resolver. I know exactly what websites. That's enough for me. I don't have to see content. I can see duration. I can see kind of how many times you're on that website. So that's UTS in a nutshell now is Skynet plus the matrix is UTS.

So SkyNet was the this part. The series of systems, yeah, that is part of the gathering of all of them. Right. And then which part is the matrix? That is now fed into Apple. Okay. And it is now fed into, and this talks about two different types of data. As we can get into, so all the two types of data that Skynet collects are explicit and implicit.

You guys ever seen men in black where he's like, old and busted, new hotness? Old and busted is explicit data, which is what you're used to, which is the data aggregators, your name, your social, where do you live, all this kind of crap, voter registration, browsing history. That's old crap. I don't care. I'm not going to, I'm fine with that. The new thing that they collect is implicit data, which they're doing aggregation across

different apps using SDKs. They're getting the telemetry from your phone. Your phone these days knows when you go to the bathroom. I'd rather have your browsing history. I'd rather have your phone's gyroscope than your browsing history. I'll tell you why. Check this out. Your phone has barometric pressure sensor, magnetometer, humidity sensor, all sorts of this stuff.

The regular phone pattern for somebody at the office is, the phone is laying face down. Cat meme. Okay. Inappropriate tweet. At some point, they pick up that phone and that phone starts walking. I know how tall you are. I know whether you're male or female. I know whether you're walking with your left, holding with the left hand, the right hand, both hands.

At some point, that phone's going to walk. It's going to detect a door opening and closing through the barometric pressure sensor. Then it's going to detect a second door opening and closing a stall. Different type of barometric pressure change. It's still a change. Then it's going to change altitude and it's going to be used at 45 degrees with two hands for a certain amount of time. Then it's going to get put down. You're going to clean up.

It's going to get picked up again. Then it's going to have that first barometric pressure change again. It's going to sit next to hopefully the faucet. Hopefully you're washing your hands doing your thing. And then you know what it does? It's going to feel that second door open. It's going to walk back. sit at your desk. If you do that too many times a day, not enough times a day, if you spend too much

time in the bathroom, not enough time in the bathroom, I'm going to alert the matrix and say, this person or the matrix is going to come to the conclusion and say, I'm going to send you IBS medication, metamusal, I'm going to give you constipation pills, etc. Do you want to know if someone's sleeping or not? What do people do when they have insomnia or they're waiting for their alarm? Oh, it's 5 a.m. Oh, it's 6 a.m. They're turning their phone around. All we need to know is who turns their phone around more. That's where we're at with the explicit versus implicit data. Metadata is explicit then? Yeah, that's mostly explicit because you are taking that knowingly and willingly and creating that. Right. Right. It might be gathered surreptitiously,

but it's a data that's resulting from your explicit action. You know what you're doing when you produce this. When I make a call, I know that I'm producing a to and from. And the implicit is more like how they can establish your circadian rhythm by seeing like when you access the phone. Yep. The way I look at it like when you're traveling, your explicit data is your PNR. I have my passenger name record. I did this. I did this. The implicit is, so I was recently in Zurich, and in Zurich, I actually put this in a video of mine,

they scan your boarding pass when you're buying something, when you're on Wi-Fi, when you're going anywhere. So the implicit data gathering is you just bought water. You went to get Wi-Fi. So now we're on the Wi-Fi, all the ads are you got water? Would you like some salty chips? Right. You didn't know that was going on.

It's not like you're saying I'm scanning my boarding pass. I thought I was scanning it because it's duty-free. You have to know I'm going somewhere, so you scan it, making sure I'm leaving the country with my duty-free. That's all the implicit stuff that you don't know is being gathered. There's facial recognition being gathered everywhere. Look at the history of Clearview AI. Are you all familiar with them? No.

Okay. Clearview AI is the world's most popular commercial facial recognition service. These guys are run by, I think, think a Vietnamese-born Australian citizen fashion model out of New York who became the CEO of a company that for decades was gathering facial data from all sources and then now sells that facial recognition database. So when you were doing something like getting your picture taken out of a wedding, going to a photo booth, all these things, you didn't know they're selling it's a Clearview AI. Right. So that's how they got. That's implicit data. You had no idea, but all that's being gathered up and

that's how they are able to feed the matrix in all sorts of weird different types of data that you didn't know was out there. So all these things that your phone is collecting, you're saying that it's the software development kits. It's the apps or whatever that people can load on your phone. They can read all that and report all that back. Like how are they getting that data off your phone? So it's a multi, a lot of ways.

The first way is, of course, the operating system. The person who runs the, you have hardware manufacturer, operating system manufacturer, app manufacturer. That's like the layer. That's the stack that we're going at. The person who manages the hardware. In Apple's case, Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system. But if you look at some Android phones, you have LG Android phones. Google makes the operating system, but LG makes the hardware. So you have ways to track it through the hardware. Then you have the operating system, but there are some apps. Have you ever wondered why the flashlight app needs your Bluetooth? Why AllTrails is asking you for all sorts of access to everything. These apps that you download

that are free are not really free. There are companies that go to these apps. app makers and they're like, hey, bro, you're making this whatever astrology app for five cents a user. Can you put these six lines of code in there? And those six lines of code are the ones that feed back in. So we don't have to have the exact same app on our phone. We just have to have three different apps that feed the matrix through the same pipeline, which are these companies that go to them and say, we will pay you for your user data. Right.

How many steps per day? Right. Yeah. And, you know, often like when you're... you go to download a new app in the iPhone store, I don't know how it is with, you know, with Android or whatever, but it says this app collects this data. Are those accurate or not accurate? I have found that they are technically and legally accurate, but you can infer different things, which is why a lot of these companies, the way they get through it, get through GDPR and other stuff,

is they are technically correct. And as my favorite bureaucrat, Hermes Conrad, says, technically is the best kind of correct. It's a featureama reference. Right. Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Some nerd out there that's watching your show is like, yes, I got that one. But they're technically accurate in saying we're collecting anonymized data, only usage

statistics or we are anonymizing it in the following ways. But man, you could deanonymize stuff like this. Right. Right. There's only so many people that do all three things at the same time. And that's how these advertisers are getting through stuff. I'm big on privacy and kind of staying out of the system. but I've had to find a million different ways to counteract it

because it is good, man. We don't know why this thing is about to, with AI, the next thing that's going to happen is your phone is going to say, bless you, you're going to say, what? And then you're going to sneeze. Yeah. So then what is the answer? It's like pine phones and these secure phones that are coming out

where you're not, where you don't have the convenience. I need a Nokia. We're like you don't have the convenience of the apps or what? That's a great thing that you bring up in. there's a lot of fud around UTS. I am a capitalist. I love people who make money, do their thing, do it. But a lot of the fud around it is around a lot of these devices.

I see people who I respect doing these demos, but when they do demos, they are making it seem like what is possible, or what is possible for a very narrow subset of people is probable for everybody. We got to live in the world of the probable, not the possible, and we each have distinct use cases and decisions. distinct threats against us. But what a lot of these devices are doing is they are protecting against

a very narrow possible and still not addressing the wide probable. And the other thing that we have to ask ourselves is, what are we really defending against? Right. I hate to say, I'm personally not important enough for someone to spend $5 million on a zero-day exploit to get my stuff. Right. Moreover, the guy in Minnesota, the iPhone bandit, proved that there are many, many, ways that you can do things a lot easier. So they did is this. Imagine somebody wants to get into your iPhone. Right now everyone's thinking the flavor of the day of everyone who's trying to sell anything is Pegasus, Pegasus, right? Dude, this guy just waited until people left their phone unlocked at a bar grabbed it and ran. If I wanted to get your messages, if I wanted to do something, I'm not so

worried about, oh, Pegasus. So if I'm Joe Schmo, which I am. I'm Joe Schmoe on the street. I'm going to hit you in the head with this monkey wrench if you don't give him. That's it. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to go out there and say, oh, I need to buy these special phones or this. My favorite is Instagram crap. I see these different things where I know the hardware platform that they're using. And I know they just change the color on an old piece of crap thing. Right. And then they're loading OpenWRT.

Another big shout out to the open source developers at OpenWRT. It's a router operating system. But there are these Instagram ads of people saying, custom one of a kind, dude, that's OpenWRT. and I saw that thing on Alibaba for five bucks. There's no special sauce. Again, not against anything, but don't sell me garbage and tell me that you've made this one.

Don't think I'm stupid enough to do that. And what I hate is people I love falling for this. People that I care about. One of the most impactful things I did is I still work a lot with people who do much more important in things that I do. And one of the guys told me, he's like, hey, man, I need a secure thing

to talk to my kid before I go do my thing because that's the most important thing to me. I bought this thing from the internet. Like, my heart sank. I don't want to be like, dude, you got taken. What the hell? And I do, sorry, I get a little bit worked up about it. Sure.

But that's not cool, dude. Like, this person is buying this, having faith in you. Right. That this is the most important thing, and you're screwing them on. I want to talk to you about, like, operator per sec and opsec and how they're kind of the same thing. And I know you're not really here to promote a product, but is there a minimalist cell phone that is not measuring biometric pressure around me that I could potentially go out and get?

Yeah. So what I tell people is, especially with operations and all of this other stuff, where are you trying to protect, right? I just don't want anybody to show up at my door. I am realistic in knowing that if I'm using a Google-based phone, if I'm using an Apple-based phone, Apple and Google have my stuff. But then I ask myself, how far would some idiot have to go to show? show up at my kid's softball game or show up at my house.

Okay, they'd have to hack Apple, then they'd have to do this, they'd have to break AES-256 encryption, then they'd have to find a zero-day. They've got to, that's not going to happen. So what I encourage people to do, lock down your phone to the best degree possible. I personally, I don't endorse anything. If you're asking me what I use, it's no secret that I use an iPhone. I love lockdown mode on the iPhone.

I love all the data privacy stuff that comes with it. They're making their money. Obviously, they're taking my data. They're making their money. but I've looked at the packet capture of an iPhone. I've compared it to other phones. I've looked at the operating systems. I've tried to break them myself.

I've tried to see other people that break them. And I feel that is the most secure, not most private. There's a big difference. Security and privacy, very different things. That is the most secure thing for me that balances a level of privacy that I want. I have these guides that I give out for free. Again, I'm not doing a product or anything.

I have these guides that I make for friends and I've just started giving them away now that kind of go down the list of how I set up my stuff. I know there's always somebody who says, well, if a nation-state adversary or if the government wanted to look at you, I hate to tell you, dude, if someone's got your number, my opinion, they got your number. I'm not here to advise you on how to prevent the KGB from doing this, this, and that. Right. I'm here to advise you how to make it so that some idiot doesn't show up at your kid's house so that you feel safe. So when you are downrange, doing your thing, you can know that at least that thing is taken care of and you can read the sign relief there.

I mean, it's kind of remarkable that, like, you know, because like you hear about these celebrities who are whose social media accounts get hacked. And the idea that they don't even have a, their phones aren't even SIM locked, you know, so they can't be, you know, hijacked and stuff like that. Like, basic things that your phone offers, but if you don't know, you don't know. Well, I'm working with a friend of mine now who still runs an agency out in L.A., and I'm working with her to try to put a little something together just to give people. In 2014, I got a bunch of calls. And mind you, I'm already working my job now. But I have friends and they called me up and said, hey, my pictures are out there. So I kind of advised them how to do that.

So they got a little more wise. But I think that sting of the fapening, if you will, is what it was called. The sting wore off. So they're starting to forget all this stuff. I'm a big advocate for helping them. So I just help people for free. I do that stuff through my networks. I think everyone should have this.

I mean, yeah, I'm a capitalist. But you know what? Right now, this is my way of giving back. So help me take advantage of me. Yeah. I'm an independent researcher doing this. this stuff. If everyone else is safe, I think that makes these companies up their game as well. Right. I'm okay with them making money collecting, but at least make it so that it's the

companies, not some random hacker or some idiot who's trying to mess with your kids. So let's talk about companies real quick because, you know, there was this big row, or there was this big row about TikTok. And, you know, and a lot of people are like, well, TikTok, it doesn't matter. It's TikTok or Facebook or, you know, Twitter or whatever. Why are we targeting TikTok? and of course China wants a very successful like influence campaign where people are you know where people are like

ah you know it's this is against the youth it's anti yeah why you know why is a nation state controlled asset like TikTok more dangerous or if it is more dangerous to something like you know a Facebook or

Instagram or Twitter and why does it matter if it's on the phone of a 15-year-old kid. Got it. TikTok is orders, in my opinion, based on my research. It is orders of magnitude more dangerous than any other social media site I have ever seen. There are three books that I recommend people read or just lines of research to look at. The first is, and I'll get to the answer, I promise.

I'm just trying to set the fundamental basis because I'm always big on citing things. I'm only opening my phone to take notes. You're good. I'm always big on citing things because I don't just want to be some dude that just spurts out stuff. B.F. Skinner did some initial research back in the day on intermittent reward. So he was trying to train pigeons and rats to pull a lever. Every time to pull a lever, they get a treat. He got bored. These treats he was making were like crushed up bone and all this other stuff. So he stopped giving it to them every time they pulled because it was tough for him to make the treats. What he discovered

was instead of them getting bored and be like, oh, every time I pull the lever, nothing happens. I'm done. It made them more compulsive. The fact that they didn't get every time made them pull the lever more and more. What does that sound like to you guys? Are you guys starting to visualize a way to do this to humans? Intermitt reward. So then there's other work that happened in 2008 called Nudge. Nudge was a book that started talking about how you can subtly influence people into making better decisions. I am very scared of that term because it reminds me of, are you making the decision that's right for the other comrade? Right. And they talked about, as I recall from that book and that movement, was like we don't want to give people too many options.

We want to limit their options. We want to narrow them down to like... Illusion of choice. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then that hit addicted by design in 2012, which exposed a lot about the gambling industry. And I am an American through and through where if you want to gamble,

heck yeah, go and do it. Do whatever you want to do. No problem. I do have a problem with something being disguised and marketed to kids. Where your brain isn't even formed yet. So what happened is TikTok pulled off all of the guardrails that all of the other social media companies had put into place. If you look at the social dilemma documentary, so I went to school in the Northeast in Massachusetts, and my school was one of the first ones to do Facebook.

At the time, it was called college Facebook. And decisions were made to make it scroll up and down or sideways or whatever, just like, you know, web pages sometimes scrolled sideways, scrolled up and down. Buttoned, all of these interfaces started being sent, started co-house. around a slot machine because this is just so captivating to us. It does neuro nudging because there are these weird things. The feed. Yeah. There are these weird things that we can't help. So there's something called neuromarketing. There's a great example of two advertisements side by side with eye tracking. A baby was placed next to some words that you want the people to read. Add one, the baby was

looking straightforward. Add two, the baby was looking at the words. You realize that we as humans make eye contact. It's the first thing we do because are you a threat? What are you? I can look at your eyes. The eye tracking showed that people went directly to the baby's face and the advertising company said, no, we don't want them to go to the face. We want them to go to the ads. They tilted the baby's face to look at the ads. All of a sudden, the heat map is red exactly where they wanted it. So that goes into nudging and neural marketing. That is what TikTok started putting in. Something as simple as video. Video is expensive to transmit. Anybody can tell you video or data transmission when this first open costs money so why would I start a

video do you remember when Facebook wouldn't start the videos automatically you'd have to press play on it you guys remember that that's because they didn't want to mess with your data they didn't want to mess with their data they didn't want their bandwidth or your band with they get clogged up TikTok's like we don't give a crap we're not even a for-profit company get my opinion based on my results of my research I say this because some people have given me veiled advice if you will. So I will quote Representative Kathy McMorris-Rogers in saying that TikTok is a weapon developed by the Chinese Communist Party to influence future generations and manipulate what you see. I paraphrased it, but that is a quote from Representative McMorris Rogers.

What they did in 2020, if you look at Cloudflare, I know that statistics can be skewed anywhere. I learned when working on my PhD, the research funding determines the conclusion. But I trust Cloudflare statistics in this case makes sense because there's no real skew that I was able to see. In 2020, Cloudflare releases the DNS records of the most popular sites on the internet. I'm not talking WWW. Visiting it on the app also counts. TikTok goes from nowhere to number seven. In coincidentally, summer of civil unrest and COVID are happening at the exact same time. The next two years, 2022 and 23, look at the Cloudflare usage report. TikTok, TikTok, number one, no contest. I'm talking more than Google, Facebook, YouTube,

Apple, Microsoft, anything. 2024, they changed the rules to now make TikTok number three. They say, we were combining these services because of whatever. With that, if you look at all the research I did, and I challenge anybody to do the same, pretend to be a different demographic. Anytime I try to be a black kid from the inner city, kind of poor, immediately. Drive-by shootings, gangster stuff, fights, liquor stores, you know, twerking videos, nothing but that.

just throwing it at me. If I'm some kid, I pretend to be a white kid from rural America. Immediately, it's these people's fault that you're poor. It's this. I mean, I have the videos. I saved the videos for a lot of this stuff. And everything is violence, violence, violence. If you are, there was this thing, this experiment that I did where I had four phones.

Mom, dad, daughter, son. And you know, you reboot them. You change the experiments that were done. Yeah. Every time I changed it up, I focused in on one thing, on one issue, and that was the Johnny Depp Amber Heard. At first, it broke them along gender lines. Mother, daughter, pro Amber Heard, father, son, pro Johnny Depp. Reboot again, reboot again.

It would then split them, mother, father, daughter, brother. And it would split them up and send them the same video, but it would just really freaking spread them out. Same thing. Divide and conquer. every social issue that you can think of it would divide them and the videos they were grotesque it's stuff that i could not find on any other social media site this is what i do i can find these things right i can't find any of them i found videos how to make guns how to make bombs one of the interesting ones that i got when i was um the black kid from the inner city was the or b's challenge and you see

the videos do you guys know what type aci plugs look like type acy plugs are used in mainland china Those are old school monitor plugs, right? They were like these weird like angled plugs, not the regular ones that we have, the three-pronged or whatever, like these five-pronged weird things. Okay. I see those in the background. The guy is demonstrating this Orr B's gun that looks like a straight-up AR platform gun. Like straight up.

It looked to me. I'm like, is that an M-4? I go, oh, right? It looked legit. He's wearing gloves. The windows don't look like American windows. You guys have traveled overseas. You know how everything is like slightly different and weird?

Yeah. these videos look like they're to me, like they're made in mainland China or in a place that has these plugs. This app is not allowed in mainland China. Shooting this thing all over the place in mainland China from everyone I've asked is not something that they would be allowed to do. But it's specifically marketed at me in my account as I am a black kid from an urban neighborhood to shoot a cop with it. It's really interesting you mentioned that because there's some stuff I've never talked about publicly at all. but like ghost guns you've heard about that about people who go and buy kids at gun shows and then bring those to the inner city and sell them and you make them into an untraceable weapon some of the

people who are doing that are Chinese nationals and you know I could not prove it I could not prove for a fact that that is part of a destabilization campaign but that these folks are selling ghost guns to inner city black kids makes you wonder. And then when you compare it to TikTok and China, which is called Du Yin, patriotism, STEM, family, you are just getting, it's genius though, because one of the key differences that you'll notice is when you go to Twitter or X, you can go to the trending feature. What is everyone talking about? You go to Instagram, your friends.

Add, ad, ad, your friend, ad. So it's a mixture of people that you have explicitly said, I like this. and then an ad, same thing, Facebook. TikTok uses the for you page. Their idea is they're using this compulsion that we have as humans. When we were hunter, this goes all the way back, and I've researched this to all deaths. When we go back, we have this compulsion which helps us survive, which is this OCD compulsion. Barry, another one.

This one wasn't good. Maybe the next one will be good. So we're just compulsively doing this. That's how the videos are. This one wasn't good. Maybe the next one. It's that intermittent reward. You only intermittently.

get a video that you like, but that intermittent reward makes you more compulsive. It's proven in BF Skinner's research. They implemented this before anybody else did. And when they did this, my experiments in the videos that I have saved show that none of it is constructive. And when I say constructive, I'm trying to be as objective as possible, given that as long as it is not something that is going to make you do something that breaks the law or make you go into a downward spiral, then it's okay. I couldn't find those videos. Amnesty International has done some great stuff talking about how they were showing a lot of suicidal ideation stuff to people in the service, how they were taking people down this dark spiral and just amplifying it

because they don't care. Yeah. I know that like when the Osama bin Laden and the UBL letter was being read, that was strictly a TikTok phenomenon, that wasn't happening on with that. Twitter. That wasn't happening on Facebook or Instagram. It was strictly TikTok. Well, another note to that. And I say everything is a result of my research. These are my own opinions based on my thing, not anything to do with my employer. But if you look at that specifically, you know that they were able to take down during the Uyghur unrest. Girls had to start

doing fake makeup tutorials. They had to start their video with, okay, the lipstick goes here. And then the Uyghur camps are real and this is they're doing slave labor because TikTok was able to, at the time, based on these reports from the Guardian, a British publication, they were able to almost censor everything in real time. Any comparison to Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh censored in real time. So the way I look at it, when I was watching that congressional hearing, and the CEO is saying, oh, we're a small company, we can't do anything about this. And you have members of Congress saying, this showing on the phone,

this is on your site right now. I think that sort of opened it up to everyone. So they've probably done some things in the background. I think more can be done. I don't accuse anybody there of being complicit or purposely taking down America. I think this is happening from the PRC, from the Pellate Bureau at the highest levels. And there are very few people who have access to that. So I think as Americans, we should be wary of that.

We should be supporting American companies. So let me ask you about, you know, the sort of like, as it pertains to this, you know, program, operator security, that we have clandestine personnel that we deploy internationally to safeguard U.S. national security interests. Ubigitist technical surveillance is obviously changing the game for them between the security cameras, the biometrics, you know, everyone's taking your pictures and your fingerprints and every other damn thing when you go through customs. How can we protect our personnel as they go about their job in this day and age?

Yeah. So what I'll say is I like giving this advice to anybody who works in a Fortune 500 company, anyone who's working in music when they go on tour, any of my friends who are working in public service who go abroad to, they have everything they need professionally. Professionally, they're getting taken care of. They're doing all of that. On an individual basis, I think what people need to understand is that they're not going to escape it. We are who we are.

I am an employee of the federal government. We are who we are. You're a human being. But what they need to do is make sure that they close up every point. probable vector for themselves and back home because when they're overseas, they're not just subject to professional harm in their personal lives. You have organized crime rings. You have this pig butchering stuff. They could be getting a call from their kid, a deep fake call from the kid. Daddy, Daddy, I'm kidnapped. Right. Right as they're about to go and do something for work.

They get a deep fake call from their kid. So what they can do first, education, education, education. There are, and not plugging this because, you know, I make no money. But I'm putting videos out left and right because I have calls with friends all the time. So I put these videos on my YouTube and I say, go watch these for free. Just basic digital self-defense is the first level because what's happening is people are checking open doors. Just lock your door. All they're doing is checking the doorknobs. If your doorknob is open, they're going to go in.

So just make sure that you lock your digital door and close your digital windows. And they can do that by taking basic digital self-defense. And I don't want to go into a two-hour thing on it, which is why I make the PDFs and have the videos out there. but what they got to not do is fall for the fud, spend a bunch of money on crap that they don't need. They don't need to buy a special $1,000 or $2,000 or pay for this service. Everything is a holistic approach. The first thing that I say everyone should do, of course, is get off that sim.

Because if you've heard of Baby Al Capone, right here, Long Island. Do you guys know about them? Hellarious story, this kid, 15-year-old, exactly what you think. Like curly hair, hoodie, Long Island kid, got the accent. and everything. This kid's pissed off at a Bitcoin influencer. Right? The Bitcoin influencer is like,

I'm going on my private plane to Ibiza. You know, because you guys ever had that dude who deployed and came back with an accent after two weeks? Right, right. So you got to say Ibiza, otherwise you're not allowed. Right.

So this guy's going to Ibiza, and he's on his private plane. What do you not have when you're on your private plane? You don't got reception. Right. So Baby Al Capone's like, all right, dude, let's see what's up, some stupid online beef.

Sim Jack's his phone by paying a guy who he met on LinkedIn, 300 bucks. Doesn't know where he's got his crypto. He starts just enumerating all the accounts. Boom, boom, boom. Eventually he gets a password reset. Where's the password reset?

Go, baby Al Capone. Right. Boom, steals $22 million. Right now it's in court civilly for $250 million because the guys like my Bitcoin would be worth that much. So that's how easy it is. So the first thing to do is just, and this is all in my guides, is get off that SIM.

You can port your VoIP numbers and keep your number. You can do two-factor authentication through the authenticator app. then get your family on encrypted messengers. Yeah. Use WhatsApp, dude. Use Signal. You don't have to go all the way to signal. I know that's not as cool.

Get WhatsApp with your family. It's clear. It's better. It's going over data. Then, sure, use a VPN as well. I like using a software VPN. But if you saw that Apple VPN leak that came out two years ago, dude, I was on that three years before that.

Because I pack had captured all my crap and I know that it leaks. But understand that the leak isn't too big of a deal. Use the VPNs. Get your family on encrypted messages. apps and for God's sakes don't be doing something dumb like taking your phone to work right i'm not doing that kind of dumb thing and then back home it's all about your data it's all about making sure that you pay for the data removal service i do both i pay for the data removal but i also do other things which are in the guides like use a private mailbox right you don't have to go as far as i did i may or may

not have purchased a one acre piece of land in the middle of nowhere with about a hundred yard driveway behind some trees and there may or may not be just a mailbox sitting out there and that may or may not be my address. Right. So you can go that far down the rabbit hole if you want. But what I'm telling you is those tiny little things like, you know, changing to encrypted apps, going on VoIP, doing the data stuff, which is all in the guides, that makes you not be the unlocked door.

And that's the best thing that you can do because you're not that easy of a target. And, you know, if anyone wants to talk to me, you know, on the record professional, they know how to reach out. I interface with a lot of people because my goal is, again, I am not any longer or whatever in danger on a daily basis. We all are. We live on earth, but you know what I mean. Right. But I empathize with the people who are, and I want to do my best to pick up where all of the other safeguards stop. Because there's a gap. And now, I mean, you don't have to be some high-speed operator. I mean, just like in the last, like, few months there have been, I don't know what the exact number is now, but there,

it was up to like 22 or 24 swats of like attempted swats of, you know, conservative pundits or, you know, influencers or whatever. I'll say it again. I reached out to those people on X. I did. I'm not sure if they thought it was spam. If they're watching this, the offer still stands. I'm happy to help people kind of get through that because it is not right.

It is scary. I don't care who you are. Right. It doesn't matter what your politics are or whatever. And they're doing this. It's first they send a pizza, you know, to validate. And then they send the SWAT. Yep.

There are ways around that. And it starts, again, with using a PMB, a private mailbox. So that way nothing goes to your house. You can go all out. Start putting your house in a revocable trust. You've got to do all. There's all sorts of neat things, which I don't get into here. And it's not because I don't want to share it.

I just don't think it's the forum for it. And that's another thing. I think there are a lot of people who, when they go all out there and they're online now, they're influencing, doing stuff, demonstrating a lot of this stuff. I think they give people either a false sense of security or they make them go down rabbit holes that they don't have to go down. Right. Every case is unique.

You decide what it is for you. The tools are out there. They are free because let's face it. We're government employees, dude. We're not rich. A lot of people have kids in school. They got to pay for different things. So I don't think it's fair to make someone scrounge their pennies up and pay for all of these

things. Again, hey, I'm a capitalist. Hell yeah, if you have the money, make a good thing. Right. But I'm putting it out there for a free. So that's something that... Do you think that America, because I've heard arguments for and against, you know, some people say no, because it'll hurt like AI and blah, blah, blah. Do you think that America should have something like the GDPR? I don't think it'll do much good. Okay. I don't think it'll do much good because just like you see in Europe, it's a false sense of security, the right to be forgotten. GDPR is a global data privacy regulation. It's a framework that was put in place by the European Union

that is behind a lot of their information governance, which basically says you can get fined. What is it, like 2% of your gross? Massive, yeah, yeah. If you don't handle the information properly. And for the individual, it's basically like information portability. You can tell them, hey, you know, send my data to this person, you know, to these people.

It's a right to forget, like, get rid of all of my data. So I could, in Europe, allegedly, you could go to Facebook and say, delete all my data, everything you've ever collected on me, delete it. So, you know, but you don't think that it's really. What Facebook has already done is, Dave, as is evidenced by the Cambridge Analytica stuff, they've already sold it to third party after third party, and your stuff is sitting on a server in Nairobi now.

Right. And there's no way to get rid of that stuff. Right. The internet doesn't forget. I think, you know, the best we can do is learn how SkyNet works, learn how to mess with the matrix, but one of the big important things you brought up with AI is this is kind of evolving, that is going to be one of the biggest things of our time, because right now you have a generation of people who don't have an attention span beyond 30 seconds who are relying on this. Right now,

in corporate America, I know this from my friends, there are conversations that are happening that are fully AI. This person writes the reply, AI changes it. The person who's replying has AI change And what happens there is subtle changes in language and in tone make us more susceptible to inception from foreign adversaries. Right. Think about the movie Barbie Barbie from the whole Taiwan thing with the Barbie movie. You look at Pacific Rim 2. Who saved the day in Pacific Room 2? Oh, it was the Chinese startup that you thought were bad guys.

But no, it turns out they're great. In Godzilla, who saves a day? Oh, it's the Chinese scientist that saves a day. Mission Impossible 4. Look how awesome Shanghai is. and the CIA polygrapher in Mission Impossible is a Chinese national. Look at this. We're great.

That subtle influence that we've seen in art and culture or attempts at it are now magnified orders of magnitude greater when you incorporate AI and UTS. How do you think, just since you mentioned the movies, how do you think Top Gun Maverick avoided the whole Taiwan thing? I don't know. What did they do at the end? Did they change the flag or not? No, they kept it.

They changed it back. They changed it and then changed it back. They kept it to the original. We're not going to be released in mainland? There's an interesting thing that's happened. So some of the films you mentioned was when Hollywood was really trying to make inroads into China. China started up their own version of Hollywood and they're making their own feature films now. And so they don't really give a shit about Hollywood so much.

So I think that's sort of like why that may have happened. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting with AI also because you have hallucination, you have drift, you have all these other things that, if stuff like that isn't monitored, you don't even need like, hostile foreign intelligence or hostile foreign actions. AI can go down the same road.

I had a very interesting conversation with chat GDPT about like the Hunter Biden laptop case and how it said I can only assess things. Like these are the mistakes I made with COVID with Hunter Biden with these things. I can only assess things to the information that I have. You know, it cannot reflect on the past. Now, what you've done is what I recommend everyone does. But this has been a problem with UTS and stuff from the beginning. Like, there's someone that I know, and she'll know who I'm talking about,

so I can call her this, this blonde chick that works out in North Carolina with a bunch of dudes. Big shout out to someone like that who took the initiative, do kind of like what you did. And to her detriment, she kept getting like, you're raising the alarm, chicken little, whatever it is. but she kind of kept at it, and now people are bought in, and people are safer because of it. And I think what you're doing is something to everybody else, that what you did, what she did, we all have to do. Because I've been working with all of the models.

I've been working with one, two, three. And if you remember, Tay AI was, you know, chat GPT or Open AI's thing that Microsoft was running before in stealth, this, like, Twitter bot that was supposed to learn to speak. Yeah. It went from Hello World, three days, race war now, and all this other kind of crazy stuff, because it was looking at human-creative.

stuff. Yes. Lama 1 trained on human. Lama 2 trained on human plus Lama 1 plus Lama 1. Right now what we're seeing is that the bulk of the content on the internet before long is going to be produced by AI. You combine that with the bot farms. I have footage of all of the bot farms. The stuff that I used to see in the music industry that I warned about that I wrote about is now just a TikTok channel. There's literally a channel on TikTok saying here is how you make an influence bot farm. Combined that with AI, with deepfakes, with these people that look, feel, sound real. Guys, we are in for it if we don't start listening to people and doing things like you're doing.

So I advise everyone. Something simple. Have a parole. Like, if someone calls you, you're going to prevent that kidnapping deepfake. If your kid's like, Daddy, Daddy, help me. All right, what's the magic word? Not just that, but more in-depth, sort of. All right, when you were three and you pooped your pants, who did you go ask for help?

Yeah. Something weird like that. Basically, it's, uh, what do you? the placard that we used to fill out for recovery. What's it called? Oh, isop-prep cards. I mean the stuff that you never remember. I don't remember any of the kids.

Basically an isop-prick card for your kids. Here's a tip for the elderly, because I'm very concerned, passionate about how the elderly are taking advantage of. I had someone in my family. We were almost 30 grand in until we found out like, no, no, no, I'm not asking you for gift cards. If you're on the phone with somebody, easy thing to tell your elderly relatives, have them open the fridge.

Have them open the fridge, turn on the TV, go outside. Probably not going to be an American fridge. Probably not going to be an American TV channel. They open up, it's going to be, you know, wherever the heck it is, the middle of whatever country of those Myanmar pig butchering farms. Yeah. So if it looks like me, if it sounds like me, that ain't enough, grandma. Open that fridge.

Yeah. Interesting. So you spend a lot of time educating corporations doing these, like, talks in different places about UTS. So can you tell people like where they could find you, where they can procure your services? Yeah, so I have no services to procure whatsoever. I'm just some guy and if you want to give me a place to talk like you guys did now or if it's a stage, a bar or a couch, I'm willing to do it. I have, I run the UTS guy.com. That was my nickname, the UTS guy.

I do a bunch of other weird websites just for fun, but the UTS guy is my main thing. I got a YouTube channel with that. is just one big academic experiment because the way I look at it is I'm terrified to come on this podcast. I'm terrified of all of this. But unless I do the things that I'm advising people on, I have no place telling you anything. You guys ever had somebody who, as you're going down range says, you need this, this and this? And you're wondering, so how many times have you ever done this? So I can't tell people how to live in a UTS and connected world unless I do it myself. Because you're not going to be invisible and we're not invincible. So what we have to do is manage.

all of our vulnerabilities the best we can given the probable threats. And where can people find you? Oh, the UTS guy.com. Okay, awesome. And then you have a YouTube channel based off that. Yep, at the UTS guy on YouTube. And I'm always willing to help out whatever they want. Like companies get a hold of me.

I've done stuff at churches, elderly folks' homes. I'll be hanging out with friends who are, again, in sports or entertainment, and it'll become like an ad hoc symposium. Oh, hey, dude, I got this guy coming over. So it's a bunch of people on a couch eating pizza. So whether it's that or whether it's a stage, I'm happy to try and just help people. Because I'm not trying to prevent data collection.

I'm not trying to stop any company for making money. I'm trying to help people better understand this because, guys, I'm not kidding you. We are never going to get to Mars with people who have a 30 second attention span based on CCP propaganda. Right. And I need this country to keep going for another 200 plus years because I've been on the other side of it. And anyone who's been on the other side of it can tell you, we got it best.

Who was it that said? This is the worst form of government except for all the others. Right. Do you feel, that's probably a political question that I shouldn't ask you. Because I'm curious,

we don't want to give up our civil liberties. We want to be, you know, our Bill of Rights should be psychosynct. And yet, not only with, with, like,

influence operations, just with straight up espionage of people walking out of, you know, a college, a college laboratory with the plans to the next thing. Is there a way in your vision in which we preserve our liberties and yet lock out the foreign influence? I think, yes, this is just my personal opinion, is that America is for Americans. We should not have a foreign entity owning the majority of the farmland around our military bases. Right. We should not have the majority of our spaces at research universities taken up by foreign entities who are not going to give back to the United States.

There are tons of different kinds of Americans. We come in all shapes, sizes, colors. We come from every corner of the world. We believe in every possible thing. But we are all Americans. There are people who are trying to become Americans. There are people, though, that come with the explicit purpose of taking, taking, taking, leaving, and then using it against us.

Right. And we have to start being clear about identifying that. When I was at a research school, I was the only, when I got my fellowship finally and I became a citizen, I was the only citizen in my research group. And most of those people didn't come back. Right. That's kind of what we have to start doing is treating everything as it should.

America is for Americans, but understanding that Americans come in different shapes and sizes and Americans are at different stages. Some Americans are just starting their journey. Some Americans are just here as students, but that's what it should be. Yeah, it's fascinating. How does that boil out in like reality though?

Like do you like have quotas? Like only so many Indians, only so many Chinese can go to school here? Easy. Service commitment too. Start doing service commitments. This is just me. If you are going to come here, first, if your uncle is chief general in the PLA, maybe we should take that into account in like letting you in.

Right. And that's what happens a lot of the time. Right. If you look at people, high ranking people, I just don't know how we haven't done it. I don't comment on anything politically. I'm simply talking about if I'm a university and I truly care. Sorry? They can buy their way.

Yeah, absolutely. If I'm a university, I should be talking the talk, sorry, walking the walk instead of just talking to talk. Right. If I'm a college and I'm all about educating people and all of this stuff, I should not be in a position where I'm saying, we're just going to overlook your genocidal father's work over in, you know, whatever, badistan, and just come on in. Right. And then I want, there are questions I want to ask you, but I don't want to put you on the spot because, because of, you know, because you are employed by the U.S. government.

So I won't, I'll ask you after the show. You know, when it comes to, like, international organizations that refuse to acknowledge the sovereignty of a certain country or things like that, but I'll skip all that. Anything else? Have we missed anything? Are there things that you want to talk about? Man, no, I just, like I said, I'm a newbie and all of this stuff. I'm just hoping that I get you more than two viewers, right? I don't bore you guys to know.

It's fascinating. I feel like we could go hours and hours. There's a lot of, I mean, there's so, so much stuff. But what I tell people is, I know somebody is going to hear something that I say, take it to the next level. They're smarter than me. They got more time. They got more resources.

And hopefully they make it better for us. It's all about educating and demystifying stuff. because like they say any advanced enough, I guess, there's a thing that say we confuse magic for science. Yes. And I think what we confuse is technology for conspiracy. I think when you say certain things like the algorithm is influencing people and stuff, oh, conspiracy. But when you break it down and you look at the work of BF Skinner, the work of Nudge, the work of Addicted by Design, and then look at, you know, look at it from just pure empirical evidence.

you're like, oh, that's just how the system works. SkyNet and the Matrix aren't a conspiracy. It's just that is how the system is designed to work. The idea that any advanced technology or any technology is advanced enough appears like magic or whatever. I can't remember who said that. Isaac Asimov. I think you got it.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's hit him up. From Corbyn. How do you feel about trends in LLM occultism? Oh, are you talking about the, it's a simul. This is the simulation or the primals. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, or like a ziz, all those like weird cults that are springing up around it. So this is fascinating. Art sometimes or science imitates art a lot. Do you guys remember the movie Akira? Yeah. Yes. This is reminiscent to me of the cult of Akira. Like, it's so paralleling all of this.

There's a lot of science fiction where it's like the Church of the Machine God. Yes. Do you guys remember Johnny Nomonic? Yes. With the guy that had like... I just watched that a month ago. It's fascinating too because. with that the cult there, the guy, you know, worship the borgs, whatever they were called,

the guys that got all the cybernetic implants and stuff, analogous to what's happening now, where some people are, whatever AI is, this is the God, this is the thing we've been waiting for. You look at the shakes from the black shakes from Johnny DeMonic. Now we're seeing that a lot of this RF spectrum that's getting really crowded is starting to have neurological effects on people. Yeah. We're seeing, I don't know, potential allegations of microwave radiation being used on employees and stuff like that.

So a lot of this, I think it's fascinating. I don't really have an opinion one way or another. I just do find it fascinating that we are seeing science imitate art in this or maybe art predicted or influenced. Maybe we got incepted with it. But it's fascinating. That's all I got for you. From Patrick Hall, given the scale of sophistication of UTS,

especially by near-peer adversaries, has the window effectively closed on the viability for new knocks, particularly the people with digital footprints or foreign travel histories. If not, how is the IC adapting? So I cannot talk about anything at all when it has to do with NOx or the IC or any of this. But what I'll tell you this is, when's the last time you went up to someone at a bar and you're like, cool, my name's Bob. And then they immediately went back to the data ecosystem. Right. When I sent next to people on a plane, like I'm not telling them, yeah, I work for the government or whatever it is.

Yeah, my name is Bob. I don't care. leave me alone. Yeah. That's how we should handle it in life. Right? Don't, even though UTS knows who you are, I always say I'm trying to prevent the crazy person from showing up in my house.

Right. So that's how I look at it where even if UTS, I don't want to comment on Knox or I see or anything like that. But if I were terrified enough of UTS to think that everyone had those little glasses that said everything about me, now I'm totally screwed. But as of now, I think we are still human to some degree. So as long as we live like humans, we could still be relatively unaffected by UTS. How do you think as UTS goes from digital and cyber into biological, such as

Genet, 23 and Me, you know, selling their information or the pregnancy testing labs being owned by China and sending back the biological data, the DNA, like how will, how do you see that incorporating in the future into the UTIS. You got my real answer before you kick me out of here? Yeah. Someone somewhere is making a clone right now, and they are figuring out a way to freaking make it come to life and take your place. Yeah.

I'm talking maybe 50 years from now, maybe 100 years from now. Yeah. But someone is trying, my opinion, someone is trying to figure that out right now. This has nothing to do with work. This is legit. Just one idiot's opinion is I would be flabbergasted. if someone isn't right now funding a startup to do exactly that. You've seen the sixth day with Arnold Schwarzenegger?

Yeah. Dude, there's probably a startup out there right now figuring out how to turn your brain into a computer, how to grow different organs and different parts using your clone. Yeah. And it's probably Chinese because they have the data. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't care about scientific ethics.

Yeah. And which opens up another thing to me. To me, again, like I said, I'm a big freedom guy. I am not telling China how to live. I don't care. Do whatever you want. China. I don't care. Just don't do it here. And if I lose, let's lose fair. Do something awesome. Because if China does something awesome, I'll be the first one that's like, take my money. You ever seen

that Futurama meme with crime shut up and take my money? Yeah. Dude, China come up with something good. Here, take my money. I don't care. I'm not telling other people how to live. My gripe is coming in here and trying to mess with the way that we are living our lives. Right, right. Who is in your MySpace, top eight and why? That's awesome. So we had a the MySpace top eight, which at some point they turned into like the top 16 or whatever it was, right? Yeah. So our top eight was always the band members and then whoever we were opening with or however we were playing with at the time. So that was an easy one.

But whoever that is, if I see you at a bar, I owe you a drink. Yeah, that's M. Corbyn. One more, JD. This is a sobering and candid conversation that everyone needs to listen to. As always, thank you. Thank you, J.D. No, you are too kind, man. That's very humbling to hear, especially from your audience, man.

and not no BS dude but when I say thank you for your service man to you and everyone who listens and who served that's not bullshit dude like I recognize like what it takes which is why I decided to jump in and do it myself so thank you to you guys for working hard on this thing and everyone for listening well we wouldn't be here if it weren't for people like you willing to come in and share your time and your story so we appreciate you man you the show's about you you make the show hell yeah man well it's about America let's keep that going yeah for sure well yeah stay in touch we'll have you on again sometime. Cool.

Appreciate you coming by, being in studio, making the trip out here for it. It was really cool. No, thank you guys. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. And everyone else,

we'll see you guys next time. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks for your questions. And we'll see you then. Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show if you've been watching it,

enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this. You can check out our Patreon. It is patreon. com slash the teamhouse. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of the team house ad-free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad-free. And you support the

channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business, survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going, even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's going to be a link down in the description to that Patreon page. And there is also going to be a link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers. And we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month, we will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop.

And additionally, they got T-shirts up there, water bottles, tote bag, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.