Silk Road Founder Released + DeepSeek’s Big Moment for Open Source AI + Scam Complaint Lines to Nowhere

Speaker 1: This call is being recorded and is subject to monitoring.

Speaker 2: There aren't many recorded interviews with the Silk Road creator, Ross Ulbricht, AKA Dread Pirate Roberts. But there's this one. It's from a prison phone, so the audio isn't great. A publication called Bitcoin Magazine got a hold of him in 2021.

Speaker 3: This is Ross Ulbrich calling you today from prison from, a maximum security federal credit history.

Speaker 2: The story of Silk Road is one of the most significant chapters in the history of cybercrime. It's this moment when, the dark web, cryptocurrency, law enforcement, all kind of collided in a way that thrust it all into the mainstream. By now, it's a very famous story.

Speaker 4: Very famous.

Speaker 3: I have lost my freedom. That's what I wanna talk to you about today. I want you to understand what it means to lose your freedom.

Speaker 2: In 2011, Ross Alberts, a libertarian with his vision for a decentralized anonymous marketplace, launched Silk Road, a website hidden on the Tor network where users could buy and sell almost anything, mostly drugs, using Bitcoin. There's this experiment in online black markets, and for over two years, a pretty thriving business. At its peak, Silk Road processed hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions and operated beyond the reach of traditional law enforcement.

Speaker 3: Silk Road was a website I made when I was 26 years old. More than a decade ago now. It used poor and Bitcoin to protect people's privacy. I called it an anonymous market. At the time, I thought, if Bitcoin makes payments anonymous and private, what are we waiting for? Why are we sitting around talking about it? Let's put it into action.

Speaker 4: But There's a but. Always a but. Why is there always a but?

Speaker 2: There's always a but. It'd be a short podcast if there wasn't. The anonymity that protected Silk Road also made it a pretty big target. The FBI, DEA, IRS, Homeland Security, they all work together to unmask the man behind the alias behind its operation, Dread Pirate Roberts. Their investigation led them to Albrecht, who was arrested in 2013 in a very famous scene in a San Francisco public library. He was caught with his laptop open, giving the agents direct access to the marketplace's inner workings before he was able to slam it shut, encrypting the contents within.

Speaker 4: That's impulsive.

Speaker 2: That's a 26 year old who thinks

Speaker 3: thinks she had to save the world before someone beat them to it.

Speaker 2: His trial was swift. The sentence pretty significant. Albrecht was convicted on multiple charges, including conspiracy to commit money laundering and narcotics distribution and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Speaker 3: I had no idea if silk road were quarks, but now we all know it caught on it. It was used to sell drugs. And now I'm in prison.

Speaker 2: Now in 2025, Ross Albrecht is free, granted a full and unconditional presidential pardon, his release reignites this whole discussion. We got a whole bunch of stories to get to here, Scott, too many, you could say. Deep seek also just kind of came and went since since It didn't went.

Speaker 4: It's still here. It's still very much here. I'd say it's actually more here now than it was, like, two weeks ago.

Speaker 2: This is probably true. We gotta talk about all of it. So we start here with the Silk Road, the investigation that brought it down, and what Ulbricht's release kinda means.

Speaker 4: Hey, Jordan. Yes. Do you know how he's titled if you Google his name by Wikipedia? No. American enterpriser. I mean,

Speaker 2: where's the lie, Scott?

Speaker 4: Where's the there's no lie there.

Speaker 2: He is American, and he did enterprise. We gotta get into it on this episode of Hacked. Dial up sounds. Scott, how you doing?

Speaker 4: Good. Thank you, Jordan. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: Doing good. I'm keeping busy. Feeling good.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Too busy, Ian.

Speaker 2: You could say.

Speaker 4: I'm also keeping busy. You could say that I'm too busy. Big news. Yes. The YouTube channel Yeah. Crossed 6,000 subs today. Look at us go. And, we're a partner. We're officially a YouTube partner. So thank you to everyone out there who has supported us. The new micro journey of of YouTube is going well. Yeah. Excited by it. It's something new, something interesting.

Speaker 2: And I'm getting

Speaker 4: a lot of positive feedback from the old episodes, which always tickles tickles me in the heart. So It's

Speaker 2: true. We're trying to do more hacked stuff this year, more different kinds of hacked, which is a pretty good transition to something we should, we're pretty excited to announce. We love making hacked. We wanna make more of it. We wanna share it in more places. And then we met Push Security.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. Something like that.

Speaker 4: If you have any questions to why we decided to partner with these guys, listen to that episode and you'll understand.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, half of our episodes, and I'm being conservative, are about vulnerabilities and stories that start somewhere in an Internet browser, and that's exactly what Push is tackling. They're a browser based security platform. They help companies stop identity attacks. We hear all about it. So we talked to them. We became pals. And,

Speaker 4: And now?

Speaker 2: And now they're coming on as our title sponsor.

Speaker 4: Yeah. It's pretty exciting. We have a title sponsor.

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Speaker 2: Very exciting. But but right now, we've got cybercrimes to talk about, Scott.

Speaker 4: That's true. We do.

Speaker 2: So Silk Road, when we talked about this story prior to this, you mentioned that you had read I think the book is called American Kingpin.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I read this back in, like, '20 I wanna say this like, I'm gonna be stretching today to remember the details, but I think it was, like, 2017, 2018, which is what, like, seven, eight years ago? Yeah. So, yeah, it's it's been a minute since I read the book, but I did read the book. Also Mhmm. I haven't seen it, but do you know that they made a movie about it?

Speaker 2: A documentary or, like, a No.

Speaker 4: Like a No. Like a like a Hollywood fictionalized drama called Silk Road. I think it came out in, like, the early twenty twenties.

Speaker 2: Oh, by gum, they did.

Speaker 4: Weirdly Shouldn't have been a shocker.

Speaker 2: No. It's not shocking at all. And I actually had seen this I think I saw trailers for this year years ago, and it fully

Speaker 3: how do I how

Speaker 2: do I put this in a nice way? It sure didn't come up while researching. They need to work on their SEO. I wonder how it is.

Speaker 4: But but I will say the book, American Kingpin, was a good read. Like, I remember when I read it, I, like I have two things with books. I either get I either read a 100 pages and never pick it up again Yeah. Or I read the entire book in, like, forty eight hours. Yeah. And this was one of those where I read the whole book in forty eight hours. Just because it is such a fascinating story. Story. It was such an interesting time in tech, and, like, it talks about his entire lineage and lead up to how he wants like, why he did what he did. And all the dude wanted to do was, you know, buy mushrooms and sell mushrooms.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And

Speaker 4: that's where it all started.

Speaker 2: It's, it's like an interesting it's an interesting story about a guy and an interesting story about a moment in tech history, and that that that's always a really nice sweet spot. And now he has he's he has been released. So this seems like about as good a time as any to just sort of take us through that story again. So Ross Alberts was born in 1984 in Austin, Texas, like, stable middle class household. He's a good student, got a scholarship to university where he studied physics. He ends up pursuing a master's degree in material sciences and engineering at Penn State. So it's getting a little bit disillusioned with academia. And he starts getting into, like libertarian economic theory. This guy Ludwig von Mises, and the idea of algorithm, which is like a market based anarchist philosophy, which is the normally the kind of indicative should

Speaker 4: have been indicative where the stories go.

Speaker 2: And more often than not, like the politics of someone while they were in university isn't really that instructive of where they go. It's extremely informative to what happens next, in this case. So he graduates in 2009, kind of dabbles in a few different things like a lot of people do when they get out of university. He's like, he's trying day trading. He like kind of starts dabbling in video game design. He starts on like an online used bookseller called Good Wagon Books. None of it totally sounds very Austin Y. It's very good. None of it takes off. The one thing he does latch onto that does, let's say take off, is he gets fascinated with Bitcoin, decentralized currency. Everyone's familiar.

Speaker 4: Of course, libertarian political theories, decentralized currency. These go together.

Speaker 2: They all go into the same pot. In 2010, he sketches out the concept for this like anonymous marketplace using Tor and Bitcoin. The initial name for it that I found interesting because Silk Road has become like part of the canon of cybercrime stories. It was originally called underground brokers, which is also a pretty good name. But so crow does an, I would say an even better name.

Speaker 3: Totally.

Speaker 2: In a different timeline. Guys got a name and stuff.

Speaker 4: Get him in the marketing.

Speaker 2: Get him into marketing. And as you mentioned, he'd been cultivating psilocybin mushrooms. And when he builds the first version of this, the first product listed on the Silk Road is Ross Ulbricht's magic mushrooms. Twenty eleven, January, Silk Road officially goes live and it starts operating. It is kind of from day one, an eBay style marketplace for illicit goods where all the transactions are anonymous.

Speaker 4: Fully libertarian. You can buy and sell anything. Anonymous currency. I'm gonna use quotes here for anonymous.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 4: But

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's an onion service on the Tor network. Server locations are all hidden. It's using Bitcoin for everything. You can rate vendors. You can leave reviews. It's just like a little itty bitty crime eBay. And it blows up into the popular consciousness. There was a Gawker article in June 2011, a huge traffic surge. And the important thing to know here is that Albrecht had adopted this alias of Dread Pirate Roberts, DPR. You're gonna hear that a lot throughout the story. For anyone that is unfamiliar, that is from the motion picture, The Princess Bride. And that character in the story the whole idea here is that it's it could be multiple people it's an alias that multiple different people could be wearing is the idea behind the name Dread Pirate Roberts

Speaker 4: I can't I feel like you tease it with the Princess Diary reference there. But, like, the the character in The Princess Diary, if I recall, it wasn't it always, like, a changing? Like, there was always a Dread Pirate Roberts, but the person who was the Dread Pirate Roberts would change it. That's why the the alias shift, kind of works.

Speaker 2: Which is,

Speaker 4: I'm by no means a princess diary expert. I've have seen it probably two or three times in my life, but

Speaker 2: I haven't I've seen it two or 300 times. I only have part of it tattooed on me. And this is foreshadowing too for sort of where not to spoil things, but, his criminal defense comes up later on the same same subject.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 2: I think what's interesting about the Silk Road is that it was sort of the initial instance of a dark web marketplace, and the story of dark web marketplaces was you can buy and sell literally anything there. Drugs, yes. But assassinations, fine. Weapons, fine. Silk Road isn't actually indicative of that stuff that allegedly came later. There were rules about what you could and couldn't sell.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: We'll talk about them a little bit later. People weren't ordering assassinations. There were explicit rules regarding anything that even resembled human trafficking, and child abuse material was, very, very not allowed on the Silk Road.

Speaker 4: Ethical libertarian marketplace.

Speaker 2: Like anything, you're trying to run an eBay entirely anonymous with people selling illegal stuff. Like, it just became a business at a certain point. Like, you were trying to, like, solve customer service disputes, fraud instances, technical vulnerabilities.

Speaker 4: You start to find call center and a help desk.

Speaker 2: Like, basically, he has to expand. One of the administrators, a guy named Curtis Green, aka chronic pain, comes up later in the story, but would have joined around then.

Speaker 4: Just for scale, like, did they ever release what the gross volumes of revenue that went through the site was? Like, I had seen in that, like, just the drug side of it was over, you know, a few $100,000,000. So I wonder if there's actually, like, a because they sold all kinds of other things. It wasn't just drugs. Even though Yeah. I think it it was largely known for drugs. Like, I remember being around when this all came out, and, I knew people that had bought stuff from the Silk Road.

Speaker 2: I, I I also know a couple of people that maybe had, I don't know, a book with some pieces of paper slipped between the pages of that book that if you popped one on your tongue, you'd have a heck of a time. I knew a few people. I genuinely didn't. I was not savvy enough with with the Bitcoins back then. But, I knew some folks that dabbled. That dabbled with the coins. That dabbled with the coins. And on your question of how much money was flowing through this, there's one number that seems quite relevant. So in 2021, I'm gonna, we're gonna go nonlinear for a second here, like over a decade later, essentially, the government, seized 50,676 Bitcoin, which was $3,360,000,000 at a time from a hacker who had stolen them from Silk Road that were used to pay Alberts $183,000,000 restitution.

Speaker 4: How many was that again?

Speaker 2: It's, 50,676 Bitcoin.

Speaker 4: 676 BTC to US.

Speaker 2: Crunch them numbeys, which, I wanna learn a little bit more about this because keen ear listeners will note that $3,360,000,000 in Bitcoin recovered from this, the hacker who stole it from Silk Road is significantly more than $183,000,000 in restitution. So cha ching payday.

Speaker 4: Do you wanna know what the current value of 50,676 BTC is? No. But yeah. What is it? $58,900,000,000. Goddamn, Ross. He's on that, like, like, that's like Bill Gates money. Like, he's in the Bill Gates sphere of money.

Speaker 2: That's pretty remarkable. And, again, that, I think, was hacked from the Silk Road quite a while ago. Yeah. So it wouldn't have been worth that much. But it was recovered in 2021, which meant, whoever stole it sat on it for a very, very long time.

Speaker 4: And they sat on $59,000,000,000. That's a long time to sit on it. And who gets to keep it? I assume the Treasury Department?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: When it's been seized by the government.

Speaker 2: I imagine it just all goes into the same coffers at a certain point, like, just general revenue, but I don't know the answer to that.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Me either.

Speaker 2: What I do know is that to jump back to sort of its early days after that Gawker article in 2011, basically the entirety of The US law enforcement apparatus went nope. FBI, DEA, IRS, Homeland Security, Secret Service, they all start independent investigations of the Silk Road. A DEA agent, Karl Mark Force four.

Speaker 4: Karl Mark Force four?

Speaker 2: This is my

Speaker 4: The fourth?

Speaker 2: Yeah. He is. Because he then goes to jail for seventy eight.

Speaker 4: Wait. Just a smaller bridge here.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 4: If your last name is Mark, like, almost Marks, Do you name your kid Carl?

Speaker 2: And then he gets embroiled in a in an anarcho libertarian. Yeah. Oh, wow. So Carl Markforce, call him Karl Marx for short. No. Karl Marx Force is sort of his own fascinating, very, very weird story. He went undercover and infiltrated Silkguard under the alias Nam. He was later sentenced to seventy eight months in prison. It's a really big mess. We're gonna skim over that a little bit. 2012 FBI cybercrime agent Chris Tarbell launches operation onion peeler, which is a task force that was dedicated to unmasking Silk Road's infrastructure. And the way that this all kind of eventually unravels was that investigators discovered a misconfigured Silk Road server leaking IP addresses, giving them their first sort of major breakthrough into this.

Speaker 4: The just for anybody that doesn't know, like, the dark web, quote, unquote

Speaker 2: Quote.

Speaker 4: Is based on Tor, which is like what they call, like, onion routing. So it's like layers of routing and you're kind of so the Tor browser and the Tor client, like, kind of puts you into this onion layer based network virtual network, essentially, just to try and make traceability things. So whenever we say Tor, that's what we're talking about. When we talk about onions because if you look at the Tor projects, like, primary logo is like an onion.

Speaker 2: It's a cute little cute little purple onion. It's good. I like it. Something that people always talk about when they're talking about this story is the series of text messages, where Dread Pirate Roberts is allegedly talking about having an assassination done. It was one of the major things saying this is more than just a website administrator. This is organized crime. But that all kind of kicks off in 2013 when Curtis Green, the guy that I mentioned earlier, one of the first people to kinda join this project, gets arrested in a sting operation following that IP address leak. In messages from the DPR account, Fearon Green might become an informant. They started discussing the idea of arranging a hit on him, paying $80,000 to knob the undercover agent who we discussed a moment ago. Folks are messy. DPR also allegedly plotted other assassinations, including a used to username friendly chemist and a Hell's Angels member. There's some stuff there with who was actually operating the DPR account and some pretty good evidence that it was multiple different people using it. Those charges were at a certain point, I think they were dropped or they were rejected with prejudice by a judge. But that's not while that has always been part of the headlines, it isn't actually part of why Rosalbaert is in jail.

Speaker 4: Well, he's no longer in jail.

Speaker 2: This is true. Speak for Steve. Yeah. Spoiler.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think I think when I read the book I'm gonna be stretching for facts here. I remember there being a lot of complexity around the fact that there was so much virtual untraceable money floating about that, like, it became really challenging for police people.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And then you had people using shared accounts.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It's it's all quite murky. 10/01/2013, the FBI executed a sting at Glen Park Library in San Francisco. It is quite a famous story at this point. Agents staged a fight nearby to distract Albrecht, getting him to turn away from his computer, giving an undercover agent enough time to grab the open laptop before he could shut it and encrypt it. It's a it it is quite a remarkable story. I get why you would write a book about it and make a film about it. The laptop contained chat logs, transaction records, like, a personal diary detailing Silk Road's operations. Like, they they had them, like, dead to

Speaker 4: rights. Yeah. They had him at the admin screen for the actual Silk Road. So that was open on his screen, I think, when they got the laptop. The the actual tale, and I won't ruin it, but you should read the book. I've maybe watched the movie. I don't know. I have no recommendations on the movie, but read the book. The the way that they track and, like, isolate where he is and like, because apparently, he had, like, a number of places where he would go use open Internet. So they kind of triangulate and have to monitor all these locations. They kind of triangulate where he probably is residing based on anyway, it's just a it's a good story.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Recommend to read. Recommend to read.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's it's this fascinating thing of, like, what happens when again, almost every major law enforcement organization in The United States points itself at kind of one person versus one person with a laptop.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: And it it is like, if you look at the timeline, it's like one person with a laptop got away with it for years. Mhmm. It's it's quite it's it's fascinating. And it kind of foreshadows the world that we live in a little over a decade later, where major operators of cybercrime outfits can kind of go uncaught for years at a time. Like they are standing on the shoulders of the giant that is Dread Pirate Roberts. A metaphor that will come up again later. February 2015, Albrecht is convicted on seven counts, engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to distribute narcotics via the Internet. He sentenced to double life in prison plus forty years without parole.

Speaker 4: I think you this becomes one of those discussions about, like, transitive liability in a short Sure. It's like how I don't know. How much can you glue to somebody based on the actions of their website? Something that I'm sure we'll we'll see in our lifetime for the social media companies potentially.

Speaker 2: This is true. Yeah.

Speaker 4: And so

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's, as we discussed, like, the court case itself is its own whole story. There's a bunch of different layers of defense here. Not that he had nothing to do with it, but there's the argument that he wasn't the only person using that DPR account. Mhmm. The prosecution argued that Albert was the sole administrator of Silk Road for the purposes of their case from start to finish to the moment he was arrested. There is a counterargument to that. HSI special agent Jared Der Yegean initially believed that other figures such as a guy named Mark Carpels and Ashley Barr were also running Silk Road. And then a week after Ross was arrested in solitary confinement with no Internet access, there were folks logging into DPR's account. We already spoke a little bit about the multiple assassinations claim that was dismissed with press prejudice in 2018, meaning it can't be refiled. It's really hard to know.

Speaker 4: We are talking about $59,000,000,000 in today's current value.

Speaker 2: Like, you kinda lose it in the whole thing, don't you? But it is a really cartoonish amount of money.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. You keep chatting, and I'm gonna look up market capitalizations for publicly traded companies around

Speaker 2: So you can just pepper in. You're like, oh, it's a GM. Cool.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Exactly. Ford Motor Company. Wow.

Speaker 2: There was talk of a ten year plea deal. That one's not quite as interesting. The written deal was never made. He so basically the argument is that he rejected this ten year plea deal. The the plea deal left open life as like a possibility, so they were scared that they were gonna push for it anyway. There's the sort of headlines that went out that this was a platform where you could buy truly everything, and there were, it was called the seller's guide on Silk Road that banned, what I'll what I'll call worse stuff than drugs.

Speaker 4: Just so you know. I looked up GM just because he said it. 47 and a half billion, so he easily could have purchased GM.

Speaker 2: From a laptop. Right. Yeah. That's the story in tiny, tiny part of Ross Ulbricht, this guy who is either a drug kingpin or a website administrator or something kind of in the middle.

Speaker 4: I feel like in reading the book, you get the picture that he is a philosophical person who believes strongly in his philosophy and is executing and manifesting his philosophy in the real world Mhmm. By allowing libertarian, you know, freedom of choice, things like that, and and creates a system to allow for the trade of goods that the regulatory system doesn't allow. And the judicial system punishes for that, and he got punished for it. It. That's the it really comes across that he's like a at least it's the way that I took it. It's that he's probably, like, an alright guy, like, somebody that I'd have a beer with and, like, just somebody that, like, really believes in a specific set of the a philosophy like, a political philosophy and is motivated by it. And then, like, I could say the same thing about dozens of my friends. You know? I have an Arko Kami friends. I have hardcore capitalist friends. I have environmentalist friends. And it's like they all just have really rigid deep beliefs in a specific silo of of philosophy, and he's one of those people.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I I again, I I haven't read the book, and I haven't met the guy. I can't speak to his character as a person. But I don't get the sense that this was an exercise in how much money can I make and how fast? Every record says that he wasn't he didn't do the Lambo thing. He didn't do the thing where you make all the money and spend all of it. It seemed like a a project. And, well, to borrow his phrase, quote, he said this later, quote, Silk Road turned out to be a very naive and costly idea that I deeply regret. And as though it while it was a very pure expression of a of a man's personal philosophy, he had literally every major law enforcement body coming down on him. And it it was in that sense, like, it was a naive concept to do this.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: He wasn't doing it for the reason that a lot of people, I think, thought he was. Both can be true.

Speaker 4: Well, the like, a few things, like the Lambo thing. So he, like, lived with the rupees. Like, when he was when he was arrested, he was, like, renting a bedroom in a flat in San Francisco. Like, he was not, by any means, outliving it up. Like, you would see in today's, like, crypto rug pull people and things like that. Like, very different motivations. The other thing I would say is that, one of the reasons why I think he got so much legal attention aside from what he was doing and what was happening is that, truthfully, I think the dark web and cryptocurrency

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: Probably scared the shit out of political or sorry, out of, judicial bodies, like like the law bodies. Like, those are two things that are like, okay. They now have a shadow currency that we can't trace, which actually changed a lot in this prosecution. Like, so in the in the pursuit of DPR, they actually broke down and figured out how to trace crypto, I believe. Mhmm. It all kind of was in this one case.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Right.

Speaker 4: Same with, like, Tor. Like, there was, like, two massive technological shifts that could have been leveraged really significantly for illegal terrorist actions, things like that. And, like, Ross Albrecht's Silk Road marketplace was, like, the shining star of both of them.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: And I feel like that's why it got so much legal attention.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 4: Like, I think those same things kind of exist today. You know, often they're selling Visa card numbers and login credentials, but ransomware, malware

Speaker 2: No. There's a parallel. I see what you're saying.

Speaker 4: But it's, like, just the the time and space that which which he was popular, like, flew a big flag and a shining star that the legal system was like, oh my god. What's going on over there? We have to do something to figure out because this is one bad use of it, but it could get way worse if we don't figure out. So at least that's that's my theory. You know, if you if you've come here for my theories, there's my

Speaker 2: There it was. I think I would agree. To wrap it up, 01/21/2025, he was, issued a full and unconditional presidential pardon, setting government overreach. He was immediately released from USP Tucson and is now a free man.

Speaker 4: Lots of dot time packing their government overreach. I don't know. I don't know if I agree with that, but I'll take

Speaker 2: it I'll take it on a just, may maybe start releasing nonviolent drug offenders. Maybe maybe that's a cool idea.

Speaker 4: Good luck with that one.

Speaker 2: I'm shooting for it.

Speaker 4: The the war on drugs is coming back. I don't know if you're if you've read any of the news lately.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Not well, not if a Libertarian National Convention likes you. But anyway Of

Speaker 4: course. So funny enough, like, so Trump, like, kind of forebowed this in his speech to the Libertarian National Convention last year during his campaign. He said he was gonna release Ross and did.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Which

Speaker 4: is crazy. Ross, if you wanna come on the show

Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. Like, please come on. We would love to chat with you. Yeah. We have heaps of questions. I think it'd be a fun conversation. I think that's the Silk Road.

Speaker 4: That's the Silk Road.

Speaker 2: Has anything else happened since the last episode that we should talk about? Any anything at all in the world of AI and technology?

Speaker 4: Well, it depends if you're an investor in in NVIDIA or not.

Speaker 2: But Oh, why? Did something happen to the stock price? Let's get into it. Deep seek.

Speaker 4: Deep seek.

Speaker 2: Deep seek.

Speaker 4: Deep seek. Fascinating. Interesting. I like the DeepSeek story for me Mhmm. Is more about the investment thesis piece of it. It's actually, like, the well, there's some interesting sides to it on the other side where it's, like, all the finger pointing about, like, your model only works because you stole it from our model.

Speaker 2: Oh, you stole something from the people who stole everything.

Speaker 4: That seems to be the common the common thing. The,

Speaker 2: It's it's it's I I don't wanna be glib, but it's hard to muster too much sympathy on that front.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. So the DeepSeek, if you don't know what it is, a Chinese hedge fund, bunch of brilliant quants, I think for fun, built an LLM.

Speaker 2: That's a good good term for it.

Speaker 4: And, they rumor allegedly used open AI's chat c p t platform to train their LLM, but they actually did some brilliant technological changes that apparently OpenAI hadn't done. So one of the things that I've read that they did so let me go back in time here. So one of the big shocks for DeepSeek's AI is that, apparently, they trained it and built it for, like, a fraction of the cost. And when I say a fraction, it was, like, $5,000,000 for all the processing to load and train the model.

Speaker 2: And that importantly wasn't all the money they'd spent to get to that point in development. It was the specific cost of training the most recent model. So it wasn't $5,000,000 in and out, but it did cost $5,000,000 as opposed to, I think, 500,000,000 for one of them or something like that for one

Speaker 4: of the most recent three. The Yeah. Chat OpenAI is o three or cloud. OpenAI. Anthropix cloud. So what are cloud cloud?

Speaker 2: Cloud.

Speaker 4: Cloud. The one of the things that's was the biggest shock that rocked the stock market was the fact that they because they're Chinese, they don't have access to all of the most recent NVIDIA superchips because it's all under government lockdowns and stuff and trade. You know? I don't I don't know the exact details, but the United States government doesn't want Chinese companies having all of the superchips.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Shortly after, if I remember right, I think this is, like, a year and a half ago, there was a an embargo on selling chips to China as part of kind of this, like, AI trade worry type thing. And it was basically it is it was presented as an umbrella policy, and it was just basically everyone looking at NVIDIA and being like, cut that shit out. So this operation was using is it older? Yeah. Age eight hundreds. Like an older generation of them and far fewer.

Speaker 4: Yes. Far fewer, older generation. But what they had done is instead of using NVIDIA's, like, programming interface, they actually jacked in and used the machine code and coded directly to the chips, bypassing any of the framework overheads, which was apparently the big takeaway. Like, oh my god. Why didn't we all do that? So, like, that was their gift to the AI community is like, hey. You know, quit using the the development frameworks and start just jacking directly into the chips with the machine code. Cool. And you'll increase your processing potential for less, like, less time, less power, less everything. So that was the big big technical takeaway from it.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah. The way I kinda come to understand so for the last few years, the way that these different companies have tried to scale this technology has just been like, what if we just throw throw more compute than god at this thing? We have unlimited money. We have a trade embargo. That means we're the only companies basically on Earth that can purchase this hardware. Why don't we just buy a ton of it? I guess invest in nuclear to power all of it and then just throw compute. So every single time that you're talking to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, any one of these things, they're booting up this entire model with all of this compute behind it to answer to rewrite your email. Correct. And the way that I kind of understood DeepSeek's differentiating feature was it was an architectural shift towards something called mixture of experts.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Traditional LLMs, and stop me when I biff this, but this is my understanding, was the traditional LLMs use every single parameter in the model for every single task. So if you ask it to rewrite an email, it's kind of also checking, like, code tokens, basically. Like, it's checking the whole dataset. Deep seek r one, the model that blew up and got all this pressed, uses this mixture of experts. So instead of engaging the full model, it activates specialized little parts of the model. So instead of using all 671,000,000,000 parameters, if it just needs to do something language y, it'll just activate 37,000,000,000 of them, with giant energy consumption gains and lower inference costs.

Speaker 4: Yes.

Speaker 2: I am learning.

Speaker 4: One of the other things that I did, like, the DeepSeq did is they would Yeah. Show you its rationale for its the prompt before the answer, which I think is from a user interface perspective. So I've been doing a lot of, like, API interactions with Python. So, like, writing a lot of little scripts for things. Like, I wrote a podcast summarizer for our YouTube video descriptions. And, like, I've I started building on these little Python apps that interface with different models. Yeah. And one of the big things that I have a hard time with is, like, getting the prompt right and making sure that it knows exactly what I'm asking and exactly what I want for outputs. So I think that that's a brilliant user experience step that they made there that we'll probably see

Speaker 2: I think,

Speaker 4: immediately replicated across the ecosystem.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Honestly, none of this aside from the efficiency gains really rises above the level of a feature in one of these other platforms. The thing that's remarkable about DeepSeek isn't that it's vastly vastly better than ChatGPT or Cloud or Gemini. It's that it's a lot more efficient. And also then sort of the meta narrative that it came out of this Chinese company that managed to do it while these embargoes were in place, blah blah blah blah blah. It's the efficiency gain that's fascinating, and that's a nice little feature. I really like being able to see it think through what it's doing before it presents the answer.

Speaker 4: Totally. Yeah. It also helps because, like, if I need to refine the prompt, ask it again. I can see where it's judgment misstepped and be like, make sure you're, like, you know, maybe wrap it in a tighter Yeah. Domain being like, only think about it. Only think about, you know, novels from 2015. Yeah. Like, you give it give it a tighter dimension. But the yeah, I think that so the the big hit was to the stock market, obviously. NVIDIA went down 20 some percent the next day losing I wanna say it was 500 and some billion dollars in market cap.

Speaker 2: As it bounced back, I feel like it DeepSeek, in a very weird turn, kind of, like, entered and left the news cycle since like, by the time we're recording this, it almost feels like a a thing of the past, which is really remarkable given Game and What was it? $500,000,000 in value was wiped out, and this is how fast the news cycle moves right now?

Speaker 4: It's not it hasn't bounced back the entire week. It's about 50% retraced. Okay. But, yeah. I agree with you. But I think largely what had happened is that their infrastructure got overwhelmed.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 4: So in all of my muddling with LLMs through Python, I've been trying to get a deep seek key and actually just got it today. So I finally their platform side where you can jack into their API came back today. So I think they were largely just overwhelmed. Like, their infrastructure wasn't set up for the volume of of requests and chats that they were receiving. So I think they're probably in a very active scaling, situation right now.

Speaker 2: Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fascinating story. Efficiency cost it. AI rapidly became an energy consumption story. And like I sort of alluded to earlier, there's been a massive investment in nuclear, which honestly cool, from a climate perspective. And this sort of disrupted that part of things. Maybe this can be done a little bit more efficiently. And then maybe, also importantly for the economic state of these large companies, the argument up until this point has been that, like, the reason you shouldn't even try and come at us is because the moat of the training cost of creating these models is so unfathomably high. Why would you even why would you wanna come at the king? The moat is so big and so deep. And it's like, well, that little $5,000,000 kayak managed to get across that moat. And, yes, it was sitting again on the shoulders of giants of some of these open source models. But so is your model sitting on the giant of some tech that had come before that, and then it's just giants all the way down. That's Maybe the boat's not that big.

Speaker 4: You just touched on something really interesting too, which is that all the deep sea code is open sourced.

Speaker 2: It's open source. Yeah.

Speaker 4: You can go on GitHub. You can clone it. You can muck it. You can branch it. You can run it. I saw right when it came, like, the day it was the big splash, people had set up, like, Mac mini farms, and they had, like

Speaker 2: Dude, that's kinda dope. Maybe I just like the new I like the new hardware, but I like that.

Speaker 4: They had, like, DeepSeek running on, like, 10 Mac minis, and that was this, like, processing farm. So it's like it's people have it up on, hugging space?

Speaker 3: Hugging face?

Speaker 4: Hugging face? I should know what it's called because I use it all the time.

Speaker 2: Even even deep in knee deep in the hallway.

Speaker 4: Yeah. The, yeah. So it's up on hugging face. Like, they have the whole training set too. Like, the hugging face kind of has a a training set that they've compiled. They anyway, this really cool, really interesting shift in the democratization of

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: Of AIs. So

Speaker 2: Yeah. It I remember a year and a half or two years ago, whatever it was when Facebook announced Llama. And, obviously, that's a complicated situation because, yes, here's this open source foundation, but they also have closed source models that they're monetizing and using. So Facebook is meta, I guess, is it's not quite, you know, a a bastion of open source tech. But that story never really took off. People didn't do that much with it. This felt like a really big moment for the open source side of this. It even got Sam Altman to acknowledge that, like, their tactic of an incredibly closed off ecosystem probably wasn't super smart. You could argue that that's a, a stock price saving play. Doesn't mean it's not true. Mhmm. This tech clearly can be operated open source. This model, you can run it on the server farm made of Mac minis. And I guess just to very briefly touch on it, that wave of press, DeepSeek is a Chinese company. They're subject to all, like, Chinese laws, which involve things that you can and cannot talk about, Tiananmen squares and the like, and this product is Taiwan's, and this product is, totally subject to those rules. You can also run it locally if you want a version of it that isn't subject to those rules. So do with that what you will.

Speaker 4: Well, the I think it was you that pointed out to me right when it launched. Yeah. When you ask it something controversial, it'll actually spit out the response, and you'll watch

Speaker 2: shot. Yeah.

Speaker 4: You'll watch it talking about Taiwan, and then all of a sudden it goes tok, and it's gone. And then it's like, we cannot discuss this.

Speaker 2: Yep. The model's totally capable of crunching that number. It is, a sort of, like, final gate check based on those those regional laws that they've they've they've put on this. And that was honestly there was about a week where that was the only headline was just look at what it can't say. And I was like, totally. It's not like the other ones can't say stuff too, but it is it is interesting and it is relevant. Mhmm. Yeah. I'm fascinated that you can run this thing local. I think that that's that's very, very different than the other ones. That's that along with the efficiency is maybe the biggest part of this story. Like, you you're not you're not running GPT four locally.

Speaker 4: I think the the beauty of what they're doing at Hugging Face is, like, giving that kind of, like, that community their own playpen. Yeah. And it's like, I think there's gonna be some really interesting like, the improvements that we've made on the technical side here, I think we're gonna start to see the open source community start making those. It's gonna be really cool when and I I wanna use Wikipedia as an example of this. But, like, when there is essentially a large open sourced version of one of these models that's very cheap to use and by donation, things like that. Because I see that future for it. Yeah. Yeah. Probably not much Microsoft wants to hear about their investment in AI. But

Speaker 2: No. But I like that. I like the idea that a university could have its own LLM running on some servers in a basement somewhere. I like the idea that a company that isn't just trying to ride an AI bubble

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: That wants to use this technology for some other independent purchase. They're not monetizing AI models, but they wanna use AI models to do something else. Doesn't just sort of have to pay like, it's essentially like it's it's a rent that the industry was barreling towards. They'd be like, oh, you wanna do anything with this tech? You just have to pay us rent. You gotta pay for our tokens. And it's like, well

Speaker 4: I pay for

Speaker 2: our Nvidia chips. Maybe you don't. Maybe you can run it yourself, and that's kinda cool.

Speaker 4: Well, I think and the the thing too is, like, the more like, not that API tokens are expensive. DeepSeek, actually, their API tokens are, like, shockingly cheap. Like, it's essentially would be would take more time to set up your own version of it than it would just be to use theirs. But but if you look at, like, product expansion and AI integration into other products

Speaker 2: Exactly.

Speaker 4: Like, I had a meeting yesterday. You know, Jordan and I work in in advertising.

Speaker 5: I

Speaker 4: had a meeting yesterday with some consumer information, consumer data companies, and they're building AI driven chatbots that have all of the market research data for everybody in the world loaded into them, and you can just query it through prompts. Hey. We're doing a campaign about this in this region. You know, what marketing channels are the best to reach the people that are most interested in? Oh, here you go. AI digs through the data, comes back, spits you out a response, and it's like, those are cool little features. Instead of me spending four hours looking through tables of data Yeah. A robot can do it in eight seconds.

Speaker 2: I've had positive interactions with LLM based chatbots never times. And if you insist on making one, I'm glad you don't have to tithe money to another company in order to do that so so idea. Like, I would I would rather it be cheap.

Speaker 3: If it's

Speaker 2: not gonna be good, I'd rather it be cheap.

Speaker 3: I wrote the

Speaker 2: most Environmentally too. Environmentally too.

Speaker 4: I wrote the most budget AI chatbot.

Speaker 2: K.

Speaker 4: So So I wrote a Python library that I can just jack into any, Gradio Python apps. This means nothing to lots of you, but it might mean something to somebody out there. And you can essentially just say, here's a text entry box that I'm gonna use to take a prompt in, and it's a button. It creates a button under it called refiner, and then it pops up in AI chatbot where you have a discussion with the AI to tune your prompt.

Speaker 2: The prompt.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Because it just like, that's the thing. It's like, I feel like, you know, everybody's running around seeing, like, prompt engineering is gonna be the next thing and, like, how good are you at prompts? And it's like, the robot's way better at it than any human is. So just be like, this is the information I'm trying to get. Here's the prompt I was thinking about. What else should I add to it? And it's like, ping. Add these 12 things. And you're like, here's that data. And it's like, here's your prompt. And you're like, thanks. And it just dumps it back in the prompt box. So

Speaker 2: Interesting. Anyway,

Speaker 4: side sidetracked.

Speaker 2: No. I like it. Shall we kick it over to some advertisements?

Speaker 4: Advertisements. Shall we? You know, one of the fun things about hosting a cybersecurity podcast is that we get weird stories about hacking, tech, AI, you know, these kind of things, but we also get to see into this ecosystem. We get to see the new tools and and and companies pop up, come and go. Some of them stay around. Some of them get acquired. It's a pretty interesting world. And, I mean, we talked to a lot of them. You know, we saw a bunch of Defcon last year, and some of them have cool ideas and great solutions. Some of them just have solutions that are looking for problems.

Speaker 2: Sometimes one of these things comes along, and we have a moment of, like, damn it. Why didn't we think of that, Scott? It's it's obvious in hindsight someone was gonna build this. This actually happened for this product. You did say those words.

Speaker 4: Yeah. When I first heard about this tool and was first talking to to Adam, I was like, why didn't I think of this? This is so obvious. It makes so much sense given the way that identity theft is going and and how many attacks rely on coming through someone's identity. This just makes so much sense. So push security is one hundred percent one of those tools.

Speaker 2: So the problem that they're tackling is identity attacks. Phishing, credential stuffing, session hijacking, account takeover. That is basically the number one cause of breaches right now, and their approach, it's very interesting. Instead of trying to lock everything down at the infrastructure level, they start where people actually work in the browser. They They built a browser extension that observes employee credentials, creates corporate identities, and logs into the work apps, which when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 4: And because they've got this visibility, they can see exactly how the identities are being used. Are people using stolen credentials? Are they reusing passwords when they shouldn't? Are they skipping MFA? Have they found loopholes? Are they using local accounts when they should be using single sign on accounts?

Speaker 2: And when they do find those vulnerabilities, they can automatically enforce controls to fix them, all right there, nice and clean in the browser.

Speaker 4: But it's not just about protecting the identities. Push are also monitoring them too in real time for attacks using adversary in the middle tool kits, clone login pages, stolen credentials, phish kits, stolen session tokens.

Speaker 2: The way we kinda describe it is, like, it's it's endpoint detection and response, but but for the browser. It's very cool.

Speaker 4: The team, though, is super smart, has a lineage in red teaming. They've done killer research into identity attacks. They recently put out this this blog post on cross identity provider impersonation where attackers can essentially completely bypass multifactor authentication and single sign on by just setting up their own identity provider for the same domain.

Speaker 2: Yep. That one's pretty wild, honestly. You gotta see them demo it.

Speaker 4: So, yeah. Push Security, super smart, great team, interesting research, really great people to work with, and we've become close friends with them. Check them out. Pushsecurity.com.

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Speaker 4: And

Speaker 2: and we're back.

Speaker 4: We're back.

Speaker 2: K. Is Cash App is Cash App like Venmo?

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think so.

Speaker 2: We're Canadian for anyone listening. That's like, how do you not know what Cash App is? Cash Cash App is like Venmo. Cash And Venmo is e transfers, but easier.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think I think the big difference is that I think and this is again, we're not Americans. We don't use these things. I think Venmo is a collective between all the major banks in The States, and Cash App is an independent company. So it's kind of like Venmo is what our equivalent to Interact would be ish. Like, it's kind of used by all the banks. They're all partners and stakeholders in the project. And then Cash App that. And, yeah, and then Cash App, I believe, is, like, just cashapp.com.

Speaker 2: An independent company. You can sign up. You can send money through it. And, it sounds like they might have to return tens of millions of dollars to people?

Speaker 4: Yeah. So they have and this is like a funny little side story, but I was just reading through the news a couple weeks ago, and, they have to pay up to 9 figures to settle a fight with federal regulators all because of their customer service helpline.

Speaker 2: So they they had a phone number or a web they they had a portal where people could submit complaints regarding, I I guess, identity fraud, stolen accounts. And those complaints, were just sort of I think the way I likened it when we were talking prior to this call was it's like food coming in one window of the car at the drive through and then getting just thrown out the window on the other side of the car.

Speaker 4: Yeah. So I think allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Speaker 2: Allegedly. Allegedly.

Speaker 4: Is, they're, like, fraud line and, like, in person helpline, which I think they were by requirement supposed to have. Literally was just by all takes a recording being like, thanks for calling. Please log in to the app and go to the support section. Click. And that, therefore, violated, some regulations for the industry in which they found themselves working in, notably finance.

Speaker 2: According to the agency, filing charges the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. They sort of, like, shirked, for lack of a better word, their legal responsibilities to look into, like, complaints by customers who claimed that their accounts had been taken over or that they'd fallen kind of victim to some other type of scam and that they, inappropriately, like, kinda blocked off requests to refund on these unauthorized charges. Quote, and this is from c CFPB director Rohit Chopra in a statement. Quote, Cash App created the conditions for fraud to proliferate on its popular payment platform. When things went wrong, Cash App flouted its responsibilities.

Speaker 4: Well, I think the one of the big kicks for it was that when people would try to call in, they would assume there was another number. They would go hunting for another number and eventually end up on the phone with the scammer.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 4: You know what I'm saying? Like, you're like, I I can't get a hold of somebody. I need to keep digging. You know, I've got an issue. I'm being defrauded. Something's happened with my Cash App account. So I'm googling, and then all of a sudden, I'm like I find another phone number on some fake site, and then all of a sudden, I call yeah. I call some fraud scam center in, you know, Nepal. And next thing you know, I'm Cash App ing money to new scammers.

Speaker 2: Right. You you have a platform where fraud takes place and you don't have, an outlet for those complaints or some system by which people can seek recompense, they're gonna end up seeking it elsewhere and might inadvertently end up getting scammed a second time. Oh, that's insidious. It sounds like this is sort of also just a problem across all of these. There's a similar lawsuit I know against Zelle, which another is another one of these things. And then, so a day before this announcement came out, this came a day after the parent company of cash, which is Block, agreed to a different $80,000,000 settlement with, like, financial regulators for failing to oversee or, like, failing to address money laundering happening on the app. So just like a very, very bad bad week for, for Block.

Speaker 4: You're mentioning of the word Zelle there Mhmm. Made me remember that it's not Venmo that is the partner like all the institutional finance partners. Zelle. Zelle is the partnership one. Venmo must therefore also be just another third party company.

Speaker 2: Got it.

Speaker 4: I believe, but Zelle, I think, was the one. I got the two confused. And for that, I apologize. Please roast me in the comments.

Speaker 2: I was trying to, get someone back for, I was a donuts. I want to say over the weekend, I went for a hike and we got donuts after I was trying to send it back. And I was like, wow, it's seven clicks for me to be able to send you money through my banking provider. It's a lot of clicks to send someone money. And everyone talking about Venmo and how these services exist down in The States. I wouldn't be mad if we had one thing like that up here. I know I Apple with iMessage was, like, doing in app transfers of of money, and I'm like, I would be great with that. Like, I meant $20 in two clicks.

Speaker 4: Yeah. I think the the big thing here is, like, our just our financial regulations in Canada are so much tighter. And to like, there are very rarely no new like, new banks don't just show up in Canada. And the problem is is that to create a system like that, you need to partner with a bank who pays tons of fees, and then you have to pay them tons of fees. So, like, a single transaction to send $3 for doughnuts to your friends actually is gonna cost the back end, like, a dollar, which is just, like, unfeasible. So

Speaker 2: We were talking about moats earlier. It's like we have very intense financial regulations and a very small cohort of banks that basically control the country that are super cool about. It's good stuff to wrap up. So we've talked about pump fun. New story. We've talked about pump fun on this show before.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: It's a Solana based meme coin platform.

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: If you've heard stories about meme coins over the last six months, give or take, they were probably created and largely sold on, pump fund.

Speaker 4: I feel like everybody's heard about Everyone's heard about certain coins in the last six months, the Hocktua coin. Like, come on.

Speaker 2: That that actually comes up in this story. So, this this one's there's

Speaker 4: a lot of there's a lot

Speaker 2: of allegedlies floating around in this one. This is why we're ending on it. So there's a class action lawsuit against the Solana based meme coin platform, Pump Fund. And it's taken this kind of weird turn when, so some some researchers did it like an on chain analysis that linked the law firm behind the suit to a very controversial token. Like, it's called language warning, a dog shit 2 token, which is a meme coin that surged to 23,000,000 before collapsing 90% of value. So this legal action, filed by Berwick Law and Wolf Popper on January 30, alleges that tokens created through Pomfon constitute unregistered securities, and that the platform had amassed about $500,000,000 in fees for selling these unregistered securities. Court documents reportedly, however, contain wallet addresses that connect the law firm to Dog Shit two, leading to speculation that the firms were in some ways financially involved in the same speculative market that they're now litigating against. It's a, this one's just interesting. It's just a fascinating story that, if you want evidence about how many folks are involved in meme coins, potentially, so is a lawsuit that is suing the meme coin platform.

Speaker 4: In Standard Scott way, I sidetracked and saw if the hack meme coin and what the market cap of it is. And the market cap is currently zero. So maybe we should buy all of that meme coins.

Speaker 2: No. We should not. I'm nodding and shaking my head. No. I may it stay at zero.

Speaker 4: By the way, we have no affiliation with the hack We

Speaker 2: genuinely don't. And I I don't wanna speak for you, but I think, neither Scott nor I are very fond of of meme coins.

Speaker 4: As a form of investment vehicle. If you feel like burning some money, then why not?

Speaker 2: But Yeah.

Speaker 4: If you wanna burn money, join our Patreon. Patreon.com/hackpodcast.

Speaker 2: Not this way.

Speaker 4: Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's an interesting one. Okay.

Speaker 3: Do we

Speaker 4: have anything else we wanna talk about?

Speaker 2: I don't think we do. I think we could probably stick on this for a little bit longer, but we're pretty close to the end. It's been about an hour. Hopefully, everyone that was driving somewhere while listening to this has arrived at their destination, and, I feel like we can probably put a pin in it.

Speaker 4: K. Well, I think, another shout out to our YouTube, youtube.com/@hackedpodcast. Store.hackpodcast.com if you want to grab some merch, some gear. Patreon, patreon.com/hackedpodcast.

Speaker 2: And then, I'm just gonna give a one big final shout out to our new presenting sponsor. Again, we're very, very excited to have them. That's Push Security. It's a super smart approach to a really big problem. If you wanna lock down, identities in the browser of your organization, check out pushsecurity.com.

Speaker 4: And to tag onto that, I will say, listen to the next episode that we released with Adam and Bush because it's really good, especially if you're technically inclined. He's he's very smart, and you can tell. And he lives and breathes this ecosystem, and, yeah, it's worth a listen. Definitely check it out.

Speaker 2: Yeah. We, just to peel back the curtain a little bit, we didn't need to have him on as part of the sponsorship. We just spoken with him enough times. We're like, this is the kind of person that we would just have on the show. This is gonna be a cool conversation. We think our audience might genuinely like it. So, yeah, that that's some spawn con right there, but we did it because we think you might like it. So Totally. Hope you check it out. Until the next time, however, I think that's another one in the bucket. Take care. Catch you in the next one.