Ex-NSA Hacker Reveals Dark Secrets of Cybersecurity | Walter O'Brien DSH #553

I was forced to start the company because of something happened to me at a young age.

I had to start a company at 13.

I had a high IQ, so I thought I'd hire other people at high IQ and start a business full of geniuses.

I thought that would be a good idea, and I was wrong.

Later on, I figured out how to balance that out.

And then, over time, my customers, that some of them became billionaires, and they started asking me to solve non-technical problems.

So, that opened up a whole new area of my company: going, Well, maybe we're just problem solvers.

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All right guys, we got Walter O'Brien here, founder of Scorpion.

Thanks for coming on, Walter.

Thanks for having me.

Absolutely.

So what exactly is Scorpion for people watching this that don't know?

Scorpion, like most good businesses, is an accident.

I was forced to start the company because of something that happened to me at a young age.

I had to start a company at 13.

And then I had a high IQ, so I thought I'd hire other people at high IQ and start a business full of geniuses.

I thought that would be a good idea, and I was wrong.

Often the higher the IQ, the lower the EQ, and that's needed for business too.

So I...

I learned a respect for the whole battle between left-brained people and right-brained people.

Later on, figured out how to balance that out

so that we had a company that was a think tank for solving technical problems.

That was my cognitive bias.

I studied computer science and artificial intelligence, so I'm like, all right, I'm a tech guy.

I'll solve tech problems.

And then over time, my customers, some of them became billionaires, and they started asking me to solve non-technical problems, personal issues, medical issues, legal issues, divorce issues.

And I was confused.

I'm like, why are you asking your tech guy?

And they said, you're not our tech guy.

You are a think tank that we trust that executes military style.

So that opened up a whole new area of my company going, well, maybe we're just problem solvers rather than just tech problem solvers.

But we still solve the problem in a very engineery kind of way.

So we'll approach it and break it down, requirements.

How do we define done and what's the budget and how do we support it afterwards?

And all of these other questions that a lot of people have not been disciplined to ask when they tackle a legal case or a medical case.

But we think of the whole life cycle going 10 years from now, are we still working on this thing?

And is it documented?

And have we backed it up?

And what if one of us gets hit by a truck?

And all of these other considerations that engineers consider

standard operating procedure, but no one else does.

So that built the business up into a general problem-solving business now for all kinds of crazy problems.

So people come to you with problems and you solve them?

Basically, yeah, funded problems.

And as long as it's for the greater good or neutral um because if it's neutral we use the profits to do good

then we will help them and the interesting thing is human nature has a pattern to it so

you would think everybody's problems are different but actually after a while when you've done a volume of like 12 000 that we've done they start falling into categories well where any problem you give me kind of sort of sounds like one we've seen a few times before and we already have done the math and we have the checklist and we have the spreadsheet and we know the expert and we know who to call.

So we might be

halfway through having the tools to solve it right away just because we've seen so many.

So do you believe every problem is solvable because you've done 12,000 at this point?

Kind of.

So

usually it's about whether it's economically feasible or not.

So everything's solvable.

technically if you have enough money.

What we often run into is we come back to you on it and go, it's going to cost 10 million to solve that because it's really hard.

And then you'll decide it's not worth it.

There's no ROI in it.

So it's more likely that we would stop because there's no ROI than because we couldn't solve it.

Got it.

Now, human nature,

that's the one that you can't always solve.

Now, we have a lot of extra tricks up our sleeve.

We'll get into talking about PSYOPs and things like that, where we can affect human nature without them knowing.

And that gives us, like I said, extra abilities, but it's no guarantee.

So there are some people who are more than 50% broken and there's no way to turn that around.

Whoa.

And it takes too long, costs too much.

And in the end, you know, it's like rehab.

People who go to rehab, that's a pretty extreme circumstance, but it still has a 90 to 95% failure rate six months later of people going right back to the way they were.

Yeah.

So,

you know.

everything we do would have to be more than rehab to get better results, but better results might be 80% failure.

Interesting.

So people would be be the hardest so if 50 of people are broken is that a mental thing going on no no no i'm saying if they are more than 50 broken so we we break down people happiness habits everything else and assess how broken is this person you know if you're trying to fix somebody got it uh and it's often could be the ceo of a firm and they're just too far gone and there's no way to teach them anything and they think they know everything and they don't believe they're ever wrong and they ignore hard evidence.

Well, now, you know, other than a traumatic experience, there's actually no way to approach that person that would turn things around.

So that's narcissism, right?

It's one of the signs of narcissism, yeah.

Wow.

So they have to allow for the possibility.

A smart person will allow for the possibility they could be wrong.

Right.

And usually if they're presented hard evidence, whatever they consider hard evidence, you know, repeated, independently, third-party verified, measured evidence that they're wrong, a reasonable person would accept it.

But a lot of CEOs are not reasonable.

Yeah.

It doesn't matter how many times they fail or how many bankrupts they have or how many good people they've hired underneath them that all quit

they may still not be ready to listen sometimes that delusion is good and sometimes it's not right yeah and that's that's one of the catch-22s here because if the ceo is the one who hired us how much is he going to pay us to tell him he's wrong yeah if he is the problem that's true

yeah what were your some of the problems that stood out to you out of the 12 000 you did what were some of the bigger ones that

oh uh there's a ton i mean psyopsing a whole country and changing how a whole country thinks is probably one of the more expensive ones was that north korea i can't say

i can't say which one it is uh what i could say entirely independently is you're very good at guessing um

we also had companies with

uh up to two trillion in assets and we had to figure out you know where do you put that how do you maintain that how do you protect that and even if you're just reallocating or moving that around a little bit that's eight and a half billion a day

and a million a minute if you're wrong.

So that's a lot of pressure.

We did that for seven years.

And

that was a finishing school for me.

I learned a lot in that process about when you have that much money in that many different countries, you start understanding how, you know, wars and earthquakes and other things that would happen once or twice in someone's lifetime.

Now you just have to plan for that because it's going to happen if you're spread around the world enough.

You're going to hit natural disasters every three to six months.

And you got to plan for those as well.

So

we mitigate risk on behalf of clients.

And some clients will be very happy to be 99% risk-free.

But other ones want to be 99.999%

free of downtime or risk.

And every time you add another nine after that point, it's like 100% of the work again.

Because now you're mitigating against stuff that happens once a century.

Have you seen any correlationship between risk levels and happiness levels?

Yes, it's a good question.

I mean,

I think one of the things we're going to talk about today is I had broken down what is happiness and what is success because I spent a lot of time thinking about that stuff myself.

And

a big part of that is stability and not being on a roller coaster in life.

And to have stability, you have to mitigate risk.

And there are methodologies and kind of ways of thinking

that can start minimizing your roller coaster.

So if we did it for a personal life example, let's say you lost the keys to your car.

So the immediate lesson would be, go get keys to your car made by locksmith.

A smarter approach would be, let me make sure I have a spare set of keys kept somewhere else.

An even smarter approach is what we call sibling errors, where you step back and go, okay, me losing the keys is just a symbol of the fact that I had a single point of failure.

What else in my life is a single point of failure?

Who else in my life is a single point of failure?

And now you start backing up everything.

Now you've not only solved the key problem, but you've solved every similar type of problem to that.

And if you do that with each area of your life, you'll eventually start running out of stuff that can go wrong.

You know,

the phrase I heard that I really liked was an idiot will make the same mistake twice.

Normal person should learn from their own mistakes.

A smart person should learn from someone else's mistakes, and a genius will avoid them in the first place.

I love that.

It depends on where you want to be on that scale.

And by definition, you are a genius.

Your IQ is 197.

Genius level is 140, right?

Yeah, 140 or 150, depending on the country.

Right.

And those are the only people you hire.

We only hire above 150 for the consortium, which is the problem solvers.

And then we have to hire folks with high above 75 EQ, which are called super nannies, lovingly, because they're the ones who have to babysit the geniuses and the customers.

And they're very, very smart and very tough because they have the hardest jobs.

They're herding cats while the cats are on fire in the middle of an emergency.

Yeah, controlling a bunch of geniuses.

That must be tough.

That is really tough.

I have a lot of respect for them.

But the key was to get the geniuses to respect them and understand that someone who's a genius is absolutely useless if they don't have ability to interact with the world, the customers, communicate with people,

put them at ease, get paid, make a sale, et cetera.

And the right-brainers are pretty useless without the left-brainers because they can do all the sales in the world, but they can't deliver anything, solve anything, operate anything.

They could just do the sales.

So they had to realize that they need each other.

Do you think something like IQ is malleable?

Do you think you could raise or lower your IQ?

There's some studies that I've seen that show you can lower your IQ, usually large quantities of marijuana.

I don't think it actually lowers IQ.

What I've experienced with it is

in computer terms, there's a thing called swap space, which is like your cache on your computer.

If your hard drive gets full, your windows get slower.

So when you're thinking, there's a bit of space you use with your short-term memory.

And

marijuana and certain other drugs will kill those brain cells and make that swap space smaller.

So it makes you seem dumber.

Your IQ is still the same, but you can't hold enough variables in short-term memory at the same time.

Interesting.

Which also impacts

forgetfulness and

the amount of multitasking you can do because you literally can't think of more than three things at the same time.

Now,

raising IQ, I don't believe is possible.

I've seen no evidence of it.

Wow.

But one of the important things to, I guess, be clear on is intelligence of IQ, you were just talking about brain scans, would be the speed you absorb glucose.

So it's like the horsepower or oil consumption for your engine.

Being smart.

is how well you adapt and learn and internalize and rewire yourself.

Those are two entirely separate things.

So you can have someone with a very high IQ who's never learned to apply it or adapt it or adjust or simulate their EQ.

So they're almost completely useless.

Yeah.

Or you can have someone with a completely average IQ who adapts all over the place and is extremely successful.

Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, I believe, said he studied the most successful people on the planet and they had an average IQ of 120.

Really?

That's hot.

The billionaires.

Oh, the billionaires.

Okay.

Yeah, so 120.

So if

that's the case, then I succeeded despite my disability because anything above 120 would be holding me back then.

Right.

Well, there are studies on salary level by intelligence and the genius make less than the gifted on average.

Why do you think that is?

Depends on how you define gifted.

Gifted is 130 to 140, I believe.

Okay.

Yeah, I believe it because the lower on the IQ scale you are, the more

EQ you typically have.

I mean, think about EQ.

It's putting yourself in someone else's shoes, empathizing with them, seeing things from their point of view.

The more of an alien you are, the harder it is for you to do that.

If I see everything entirely differently than someone else does, how can I put myself in their shoes?

That makes sense.

Were your parents geniuses as well?

No, my parents were normal, very driven, but normal people.

However, my granddad was

well known for

agricultural inventions.

His granddad was normal, or his dad was normal, and then his granddad was a famous investigator, like a real-life Sherlock Holmes.

So, every other cycle.

So, it's every other cycle on the male side.

Normally, DNA for IQ comes through the female side.

Oh,

so it's usually from the mom.

Wow.

So, you got to wife up someone smart then if you want kids.

Or they end up with my looks and their brains.

You never know.

I love that.

Now, you grew up in Ireland.

How long were you there before?

I know you hacked NASA at 13.

Was that in Ireland or was that in the U.S.?

That was Ireland.

So, yes, at 13, I hacked into NASA and stole the space shuttle blueprints, got busted by the NSA, did a deal.

But because I was a minor, we had to do the deal where I formed a company because they could legally contract with a company that had a CEO who was under 18, but not directly with the minor who was under 18.

And I was outside their jurisdiction.

So in order to

sign an extradition waiver,

I needed to

be able to structure a company so they could get what they wanted from it, which is why we're still a military contractor in the U.S.

Was it easy hacking in there?

How long did it take you?

It wasn't that easy, but it took four days.

Oh, wow.

But a lot of that was frankly because back then you're on dial-up, you're on a modem, it's really slow.

A lot of it is just waiting around.

And I was able to kind of keep their system busy for a little over 10 minutes at a time before they would cut me off and detect me.

So I kept note of where I was when I got cut off.

So when I got back in, I get another 10 minutes download.

So I'd get a new 10 minutes of data each time and then concatenate that back together on my computer.

So

but it was a long distance phone call, which was expensive at the time.

So my dad got a large bill for four days of me

dialing up costs.

Everybody was thrilled with that.

And hacking's still pretty big.

I mean, the casinos in Vegas just got hit last year for tens of millions, Caesars and MGM.

Yep, I'm familiar.

You were probably hired for that one.

I would like to comment on

that one right now while it's an ongoing investigation.

But yeah, we do a lot of expert witness work for various companies um i mean there's two ways to do it if you own a casino you bring in someone like us to say okay try to rip me off like what am i not thinking of what could you do and and especially social engineering which is how they got hacked with the with the staff and how do you bump that up make the staff a little smarter so they can't do that um

so that that's one method and then if it's after you got hacked how do you prove who did it how do you prove who's negligent the insurance company will say it's your fault you'll say it's it's it's not your fault.

There's that lawsuit.

And then there's, you know, do you settle?

Do you not settle?

And then how do you stop it happening twice?

And then should you fire your chief risk officer, your CTO, or your CIO?

Like, who's the root cause problem of this?

And like all of those questions.

And then if you do go to court, you need expert witnesses who can explain things in plain English using analogies to a judge who's often 60, 70 year old federal judge who doesn't know anything about software.

And whoever explains it best often wins.

So these are all great examples of kind of reasons people engage with Scorpion.

They're like, please help us not get hacked.

Oops, we did get hacked.

Please tell us what happened.

Now we're going to court.

Please explain to the judge what happened.

And it's, it's, so people who hire us for three months tend to keep us for seven years.

Wow.

Because they just keep us running alongside them as either protection or outsourced R ⁇ D.

Yeah.

You know, look into this.

Is this guy real?

Run a background check on that guy.

Is this a dumb idea?

Can we do this?

Right.

You know, should we be having casinos based on crypto yet or is it too early?

Those kind of questions where they don't know the answers.

Full service agency.

Yeah, I think a crypto casino would be pretty risky from a security standpoint, right?

Security would be easier than it is with cash currency.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

The issue is compliance.

Out of the taxes, knowing your customer, other aspects like that.

But the I mean, there's front running the blockchain and stuff like that, but that depends on what data centers and how they run them on site.

So it depends on the size of the casino.

That makes sense.

So you helped catch the bomber at the Boston Marathon.

Our technology does, yeah.

I mean,

so

AI is pragmatically used for lots of different things, but one of them is image recognition.

And that's really useful when it comes to security cameras and stuff.

Because if you've ever watched security cameras, it gets really boring really fast.

And after the Boston bombing, there was 4,000 hours of footage between people's cell phones, ATM machines, security cameras in shop windows, stuff like that.

No,

none of it standardized.

All different angles, all different levels of quality, some of it not even high dev.

So we had to take all that, wrangle it into one format,

and then with 4,000 hours of footage, as you can imagine, a lot of that would be stuff that's not interesting or nothing's happening.

So we have an algorithm that's...

we developed for drones in Afghanistan that's really good at figuring out when nothing's happening.

Wow.

So if someone was filming us right now in this room and we're just chatting and moving a couple of inches, nothing exciting is going on so we could get eliminate this footage

but if a bomb went off and we had a system that recognized where our heads were and put a red spot on our heads we would both go under the table suddenly at the same speed get up at the same speed and then move towards whatever entrance we came in so i'd have red dots that bounce and then go in a v shape at the door so if someone over here didn't react, didn't go down, and then slowly started walking the opposite direction, that's an object of interest, non-heard behavior.

Wow.

So it's sticking out.

And then we can bring back all of the what we thought was useless footage around those time stamps to see where did he walk to?

What was he doing before the bomb went off?

Did he make a phone call?

Blah, blah, blah.

That makes a lot of sense because you see the movies where the guard falls asleep at the security room all the time.

Yeah, and you can make the AI smarter now.

So you can say, look, if anyone in the airport, when you walk out of the airport and they have the guard there, you could walk this way, but you can't turn around and walk back in.

Right.

They have a system that'll just do that.

It'll tell you someone could go from right to left on the screen, but not left to right.

Museums: Did anyone touch the statue or take this painting off the wall?

Train tracks: did anyone throw any debris on a train track?

You can program it to do specific things, and now it's going to watch that for the next 10 years, whereas a human would fall asleep.

Yeah, are AI humanoids something to fear?

You think

no,

I wouldn't fear them.

But again, I guess I'm biased.

I think they're long overdue.

I fear

the non-AI humanoids

who can do really, really stupid, greedy, predictable things.

Now, can someone very unscrupulous cause robots to do harm?

Absolutely.

Will they be weaponized and used against each other in different

activities?

Absolutely.

But what's more likely to happen to us over time, realistically, is we're becoming more and more cyborgs.

I mean, just leave your cell phone behind in a taxi and you'll suddenly realize how you're useless and you can't get anything done without your cell phone.

So there's a lot of work being done now on brain upload and consciousness upload and the ability to download it again

either into a computer or into a clone.

Right.

Now, if we're doing that, right now, ChatGPT, the corpus for learning, is the scrubbed version of the the internet the rest of human knowledge is in our brains if we can upload our brains and our memory then it can learn from that but that's ultimately then instead of being replaced by AI we're just merging with it yeah now someone with your brain your consciousness is valuable valuable to humanity if you got offered to transfer it and achieve I guess immortality but would you consider something like that already working on it already backed up my memory several times but not my consciousness only because we can't find it yet on anyone we're still working on that part okay But yeah,

prosthetic memory has been proven in the American Scientific Journal.

It's got 200 million in funding from DARPA.

It's a lot easier to Google someone's memory than, especially a terrorist, than trying to interrogate them.

Interesting.

So you were able to transfer all your memories?

How does that work?

It's just electrical activity that you back up at a neural level.

About two and a half petabytes of storage is what the brain holds.

I mean, by far, it's not perfect because

there's an issue with what we call the human decoder issue, which is

if

we backed up, you know, my memory of looking at a triangle and then played that back to me, I would see a triangle.

If we play it back to you, you will get garbage signal because your brain evolved differently than mine.

So you're Mac on PC.

Wow.

If we could have a human decoder, a box between us that knows that this is what Walter's triangle looks like, this is what Sean's triangle looks like, and it can map that, which machine learning could do, if there's any pattern to it at all,

then we could do a whole phone call without speaking.

Interesting.

It would be telepathy.

And we'd be talking at 28,000 times faster instead of right now we have two supercomputers communicating at the speed of Morse code because you have to convert it to words, and then you have to hear the words, and then convert the words back into meaning.

And then the picture in your head is not the picture in my head.

So we're extremely inefficient right now.

And that's why Elon Musk is working on Neuralink and making good progress with that so that we can make phone calls without speaking.

That'd be cool.

So Neuralink will be able to talk to each other telepathetically?

Yes.

And it could do that now.

It's just without the human decoder, one side's going to get garbage.

Interesting.

Yeah, I saw the first human got it recently.

He fixed his disabled.

Yeah, he's ever used a computer, move a mouse, play chess.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's great work, and it's part of this whole thing.

I mean,

whenever you bring this stuff up, people are like, that's crazy.

Until you break it down and go, we have heart transplants, lung transplants, arm transplants.

Why do we think this organ's so special that we can't transplant it?

It's just another organ that we haven't known how to move around.

The only difference is if I move that organ, you're no longer you.

Yeah.

You are wherever that organ went.

Absolutely.

So having zero EQ, do you think that is a liability in business?

Yes, if you don't simulate it.

So I simulate EQ in real time.

I'd say well enough to get away with it.

Obviously, I've been able to be successful in business and public speaking and everything else.

That's the only difference between me and other people with extremely high IQ who then don't adapt and don't adjust and don't recognize the need for EQ.

But it means I don't naturally have EQ.

And it means that all feelings have zero weight in my decision making.

And, you know, this is something I've debated a lot with my friends in that I don't believe that that's not optimal.

I think it is optimal to be able to interact with everyone else and read their feelings and express feelings to them.

But then when you're making a decision, have it be 100% logical.

Yeah.

And, you know, based on my life so far,

however you measure it, happiness, financially, stability, giving back, whatever, I'm scoring pretty damn well.

So

I don't think feelings would do anything other than make that worse and less effective.

When you say you simulate it, it's just by just going to social situations and like an actor, yeah.

I had to recognize I didn't have it and then study what it is and break it down and understand

all the elements of it and practice it.

And I'm still practicing it, but it's, you know, getting better.

When you first told me, I was surprised because you smile, you laugh.

I mean, I wouldn't have been able to tell you had no emotions.

And that's we made the whole TV show based on when I was about 20 years old and didn't have any.

So that's probably more accurate as to how I really am.

Okay.

But I've learned to compensate.

Yeah.

I'd be curious what mine is.

I mean, I think I'm on the spectrum, and I know a lot of people with autism don't really have EQ as well.

Well, you couldn't do this very well if you didn't have good EQ.

You think so?

That's why I don't do podcasts.

Well, Lex Friedman seems pretty, I don't know, that's a slower show.

You know, have you seen that one?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

But again, I have to allow for my bias.

I'm going to like anyone who's smart.

Right.

Whether that podcast is brilliant or entertaining or not,

to everybody else, I'm not a great judge of what everyone else likes.

And that's that back back comes back to that putting yourself in other people's shoes.

When I did my TV show, I'm like, if I did it my way, it would probably be a couple of episodes on the Discovery Channel.

When Hollywood does it their way, it becomes a number one show and a billion people watch it.

It's like I had to have enough EQ to know, I don't know what I'm doing.

I better step back and let them make it fun and relatable and have feelings and romance and emotion.

And people ask me, you know, what's real about it?

And I'm like, everything except the romance and the emotion and the feelings part.

Any plans to bring that back in some way?

There may be plans to bring it back.

It's hard right now just because of Hollywood struggling budget-wise, but bringing that back as some form of movie, kind of like the A-Team made their movie later, that would be fun to see.

That'd be cool.

Are they struggling because of the strike?

Well, it was just all timing.

I mean, the strike was probably a bit of a straw to broke the camel's back, but it certainly didn't help.

And

everything is changing.

The Netflix structure changed.

The rest of Hollywood, Hollywood didn't adapt or change quick enough in how they think and understand.

And, you know, it's an interesting business.

Almost nobody in Hollywood is qualified to do what they do.

You know, in the medical business, you can't just walk in and say, I'm a brain surgeon today.

And in the technical business, you better be certified in whatever you're working on or you're going to mess it up.

But there is no degree necessarily for Hollywood in being a producer or an executive producer or what, but no one even knows what they do.

So that means they

are

resistant to change because they effectively got their job out of luck.

They know they're not qualified.

There's no piece of paper to prove they can do it other than how many movies they've done in the past.

So if they change, they might screw it up.

And then who else is going to hire them because they don't have the certification.

So a lot of Hollywood are people sitting there who got lucky and are like, I better not change anything.

I might get fired.

And that turns it into the DMV.

And as soon as you turn into the DMV, you're going out of business unless it's government-backed.

I hate the DMV.

So, yeah, people work there just enough to not get fired

as opposed to having to innovate.

Yeah, it's never a pleasant experience.

I wonder what the perfect formula would be for making your employees happy.

Have you looked into that?

I think I accidentally created that in my own company because we've almost never had anyone voluntarily leave after 30 years.

But we cheat because A, we hire smart people.

And then we put them with other smart people.

So the thing smart people hate is having to work with stupid people.

So they also don't like being different or weird or odd.

So if you put a bunch of smart people together, they're all normal.

When they come to work at Scorpion, they feel normal.

Everyone's sharp.

Everyone doesn't make much mistakes.

Everyone's on the same page.

Nobody's playing politics.

They're not insecure.

They're comfortable in their own skin, et cetera.

So all the politics you'd have if you hired B and C grade players where they're all trying to backstab each other because they're insecure.

And if they get rid of this guy, they'll keep their job longer or whatever.

My guys don't really care about that.

They're just like, what's the problem?

And let's solve it.

And if they argue with each other, they'll just enjoy the debate.

That's incredible.

And their boss is not an idiot, so he can actually pat them on the back and appreciate and read their code and say, that was really clever.

Well done.

That's an elegant solution.

And that gratefulness can mean more to them than money yeah because even if you gave them all the money in the world it's like they're smart enough not to get caught up in spending it on stupid stuff they don't need right has that ever happened to you uh

happened to me personally getting caught up buying stupid stuff yeah

Depends on how you define stupid stuff.

Honestly, so yeah,

I've self-confessed I have the car bug.

I love cars.

But all the cars I've bought, because they're unique, they've gone up in value.

So I haven't lost money.

Yeah, I wouldn't consider that a bad thing.

I collect rare artifacts, rare documents

pieces of art that have like changed society or civilization over the years but they've all gone up in value not that I bought them as an investment yeah but just buying brand stuff for brand's sake to impress someone else never fell for that trap doesn't don't care a lot of younger people fall for that one they do they do and I can see why but It's a lot better to be impressive for real things that come from how you think

than fake things that you got from someone else because of what you wear.

Yeah.

A lot of really good subconscious marketing, these brands pull off.

You got to give it to them.

They know what they're doing on the advertising side.

Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, and that's why all the wealthy brands make money from broke people.

The wealthy people, I met with a guy yesterday at a $13 billion fund.

Jeez.

We met in a coffee shop.

He's wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

I'm wearing jeans and a t-shirt.

We're sitting there chatting away.

Yeah.

And

yeah, you'd never spot them.

No, same.

I was at Craig's last night and the table behind me, the owner of the Grove, was there.

He's a billionaire.

And I would have never known.

I didn't know him.

Yeah, would have never known.

Yeah, well, you know, for security and a million other reasons, but they also don't need to impress anyone.

Whoever they're meeting already knows who they are.

Yeah.

So he was there for a birthday party.

There was a cake.

Yeah, there you go.

Crazy, man.

All right.

Formula for happiness, which you've solved.

Yes.

A lot of people struggle finding even temporary happiness.

I'm saying yes to that.

I realize how crazy it is to pretend I solved happiness, but

I'll

have a good debate with anyone thinking, yes I believe I have

let me just bring it up here so I can get it right on on my phone

give this out later if you guys want to share it or anything

here we go

so

I'll describe this first so you got a vertical axis which is one to ten happiness and then the horizontal axis is your age

now forget about brain upload and stuff, which could make you live forever, but with medical technology, we may live to 100, 110 years old because by the time we're 80, stem cell research and everything else will have advanced so much further.

A lot of people haven't accounted for that in their retirement.

Their retirement planning assumes they're dead at 77.

What if you're wrong by 30 years?

Where does that money come from?

You're going to go back to work at Denny's?

It's worth thinking about, especially with inflation every year.

So success then, if you think about like, so I combine all this together, like, what is the point in life then?

Well, for most species, the point is to survive and then evolve or thrive.

So if you take that on board, it's like, okay, I started off broke.

My family didn't have much money.

I got to the point where I made enough money to survive.

I don't have to worry about the rent anymore.

And now it's a case of, okay, well, what's life about now?

What would be success?

And in a very simple way on that graph, if I can

keep my average happiness at seven or above out of 10,

not hurt anyone else or do anything illegal, and turn around and actually help people significantly, whoever I choose to help, then I've lived a good life.

At seven?

At seven, seven or better.

And I'll explain the logic behind that.

But if I, let's say, go a Mother Teresa life where I'm only helping other people, but my life's miserable,

that's not optimal.

And if I just party my ass off and don't help anyone, I won't be happy because it's not meaningful.

So why not try and help the most people you can while being selfish enough to keep your average happiness at a seven?

And

my argument here is you'd actually help more people if you're happy yourself and you're stable as a seven.

So then the question becomes, well, how do you get to a seven happiness?

Delusion is the definition is what you think,

what only you think.

So if it's not third-party validated or external, if I walk around pretending I'm eight feet tall, I'm delusional.

So if people say happiness is internal, I believe that's delusion.

And it shouldn't be.

If you're going to be homeless at the end of the month, you can't pay the rent and your kids are sick and they have no health coverage and their teeth are in pain because you can't afford to take them to the dentist and your car broke down so you can't drive them anywhere for pain meds and you're going, I'm happy because I've told myself I'm happy.

You shouldn't be.

You should do something about that.

So I believe that happiness is external.

And that doesn't make it materialistic.

What I mean is your happiness should be anchored to external things that are real.

So I'll run through these super fast, but we talked about how long you live.

So the first one here is your stability and security for your life's runway.

So like an airplane landing, your runway is going to be, I'm going to live to 100 or 90 or whatever you estimate.

Okay, do I have enough money in the bank or retirement or assets?

to cover me in food and board till I get there.

And a lot of people miscalculate this.

If you're 30 and you live a reasonable life, let's say 10 grand a month,

you would need about $33 million after tax, but 50 million before tax, just to not be homeless yourself by the time you get to the end of your life.

Wow.

And is that 100 years old?

100.

I think it was 100, 110 when I did that calculation.

Chat GPT will do it for you at the right prompt.

But that's because people always forget about inflation.

Historically, it's been at 4%.

It's higher now, but

4% or 6% is a reasonable assumption.

So 10 grand a month, 120 grand a year, plus 4% every year times 60 years, that adds up.

That's a lot of money.

Are you interested in coming on the Digital Social Hour podcast as a guest?

Well, click the application link below in the description of this video.

We are always looking for cool stories, cool entrepreneurs to talk to you about business and life.

Click the application link below, and here's the episode, guys.

So if you have your health and your retirement covered, then that's one point where you can go, I'm okay no matter what happens.

Let's say that's 10% of your happiness.

Next one, real sustained friendships.

Very few people understand what a healthy relationship is, but it's a zero reciprocation gap.

If you and I are friends and we hang out and know each other for the next five years, and hand on heart, at any time, I could say, I feel this is 50-50.

I remembered your birthday, you remember my birthday, I invite you out, you invite me out.

On average, we've given as much as we've taken from each other.

That's a healthy relationship.

So having that with real friends that you have for a decade or more, so you're not churning different friends,

and you have no leverage over them, so they can tell you when you're being an idiot, and they can be honest with you, and they can call you out, and they can be there for you.

There's another 10% happiness.

Apply the same principles to your personal relationship.

Same thing, zero reciprocation gap, no power leverage over each other, because then you know in your heart of hearts that whoever your partner is actually wants you versus needs you, where they can't survive or feed themselves without you.

That's why it's so important to keep that zero reciprocation gap, another 10%.

Permanent home and assets being secured and unshakable and has all your stuff there and it's all insured.

So you have a home to go to.

Even if you're living on ramen noodle, at least you can't get kicked out of your home because you paid it off.

10%.

Next one, respected achievements.

where you know you're a disciplined person, you're there for your friends, and you're not a hot mess.

And that way,

whatever you promise to do, you do, whatever you schedule, you schedule, and you're a dependable person.

You have to feel that way about yourself and be proud of whatever awards or the podcast or whatever million views you got or whatever.

That's all real, external, non-delusional stuff that you did that others didn't.

So be proud of that.

Only two left.

Net positive to society.

Not just putting good vibes out in the universe, not just giving 20 bucks to the homeless guy in the corner, but actually devoting a certain amount of your time to go, what charity do I want to help?

Who do I want to help?

Who's worth helping?

How much can I help them?

And for every five grand I give them, maybe I save another kid or pay for someone to go through college or whatever it is.

Now, how many more five grands can I go out and get?

So I know I've helped 10 kids, 20 kids, 100 kids, whatever it is.

And again, externally provable.

And lastly, ego.

And we're generally taught by our parents that ego is bad.

But when you study it from a clinical psychology point of view,

inaccurate ego is bad.

It shouldn't be bigger than who you are and what you've done.

It shouldn't be smaller than who you are and what you've done.

It should be exactly who you are and what you've done.

So you'd be comfortable in your own skin.

That way you don't have imposter syndrome and you can live your life with radical authenticity and 100% integrity because anything real cannot be threatened.

So, you know, if you argued with me that I'm not Irish or I wasn't born in Ireland or whatever, it's not going to upset me because it's true.

So if you add all those 10% up, it comes to 70% or 7 out of 10.

Now the last between 7 and 10, like why wouldn't I want to get to 10 happiness?

Human nature.

You can't control everything in life.

And if I was at 10 happiness, my 10 would become my new seven because I would get used to it.

Baseline.

Baseline.

So seven is my baseline watermark where I don't get worse than that because all these things are real and I've built them up over years.

Now we all have good and bad days and I'm bounced between seven and ten, but not 10 and zero.

So if I have a really bad day tomorrow, I'm still at a seven.

Otherwise, I have to pretend that all this stuff means nothing, but I still have.

I can't go to a zero without spending years dismantling all those things that are all external and real.

Yeah, because you spent decades getting together.

You can't have a great partner and great friends and great home and great achievements and say, I'm at zero happiness.

But a lot of people are quick to say they are depressed and they're, you know, at a zero.

They are, but if you take any one of those people, and this is where I'll challenge you, and you actually have them sit down and go through each one of these things in the list, they're missing some.

Right.

There's lots of rich people who are depressed, but they don't have great partnerships.

They don't have real friends.

They don't have appropriate ego.

Whatever it is, there's something missing from this list.

Yeah.

And you have friends with zero EQ, so it's doable for even, you know, really smart people.

Yeah.

That's something a lot of them don't really focus on, I feel like, that circle.

A lot of them are lonely.

Yeah.

And thankfully at Scorpion, they can find each other.

Yeah.

And that's the thing.

I work with my friends and they're all friends with each other.

That's part of the reason we have no politics.

None of us are competing.

We're just like, what's the next cool problem we can solve?

Absolutely.

If you guys have a 150 IQ and you're watching this, apply.

Yeah.

Send it in to the website.

You mentioned, I guess, the meaning of life earlier, but could you elaborate on that?

Because you've also solved that, right?

Yeah, well, I think it's related to what we talked about here.

I mean, the meaning of life is then, okay, can I be a good person, give back significantly in a way that I care about while not being miserable.

And make sure that the phrase I use is be selfish until you can be significant.

So

don't be charitable if you're still a charity yourself.

If you haven't taken care of yourself and you don't have these things in place and you're going to be homeless in 10 years because you don't have enough retirement, take care of yourself first.

Put the mask on yourself first.

And then turn around and go really hard on helping everybody else, which is what I did.

Yeah.

You're a bit of an extremist.

Do you doubt a lot of the spiritual religion stuff just because it's not provable on paper?

Yes.

But let me explain the doubt part.

And I grew up Irish Catholic by default, but I kind of left that when I was nine.

I have high self-love, which is very, very important for anybody.

And if you do have high self-love, make sure when you partner with someone, they have high self-love too.

Otherwise, they'll resent you for caring more about their future than they do.

With that, it means I like to be able to take care of my loved ones and have everyone in my inner circle be safe and happy.

And if something goes wrong, I can be the hero and help them out.

To do that, it means I have to be reliable.

For me to be reliable, I have to believe in things that are reliable.

All the tools I use to help you on something better be reliable.

They can't sometimes work, sometimes not.

So rather than getting into philosophical arguments about deities and religion and spirituality and everything else, mine is very simple.

Either something's reliable or it's not.

And the definition of real in science is anything you can do 32 times in a row on demand under observation because it breaks the definition of delusion.

If I can do it anytime you ask me, anywhere you ask me, I knock a glass off the table and smash it on the floor every time and I go, that's gravity.

After 32 times, it's statistically relevant enough to go, it'll probably happen 33 times.

Right.

So everything in my life that I do and use is reliable.

All the other stuff, I won't say it doesn't exist or I doubt it or whatever.

I'll say it's unreliable.

So what are you talking about?

Aliens, spirituality, reincarnation, you name it, unless you can make it happen 32 times in a row right now on demand, under observation, Walter's not using it.

Yeah.

Because Walter has to be there for his friends, and I cannot depend on a bunch of unreliable stuff.

Yeah.

And that's why people come to my business when they actually want to solve something, not depending on rabbits' foots and how hard we pray on a Tuesday.

That makes sense.

There are some interesting studies on micro-dosing psychedelics at the moment.

Have you looked into those?

I've heard about them.

I haven't looked into them.

So because I tend to go hard at everything I do, I have to be very careful that I don't go hard on stuff that's bad for me.

So I've never tried alcohol.

Wow.

I've never never tried, as an Irishman, that's rare.

Yeah, that's rare.

I have never, and I mean never, I've never sipped wine, never tried a glass of champagne, nothing.

Dang.

Never tried any form of drugs, never smoked anything.

Now, it's not a moral judgment.

It's like, what if I like it?

If my brain's like, oh, this is cool, I'll be a world's number one alcoholic.

You know, I don't want to go that direction.

Plus, part of alcoholism is a gene, and I'm 600 years Irish.

So if I was a gene, I got it by now.

My dad drank a 30 pack a day.

So

for me, I got to steer clear of stuff I might get addicted to that's not good for me.

Now,

sensibly, it'd be nice to try all those things and see what happens, especially with my brain.

So psychedelics and mushrooms and so on might be the only safe one I could try.

But so many people depend on my brain and so many lives depend on my brain.

If I screwed it up right now, the next half a million people would die.

Wow.

That I've saved.

I've saved half a million over the last couple of decades.

What about the next half a million?

So now at the end of my life, if I'm retired and I got nothing better to do, I'm like, sure, let's see what happens.

And I would probably try everything once because I got nothing to lose at that point, but not while people are still depending on me again.

Yeah.

Because what if I'm drunk and then they need me?

Dang, I didn't know you saved half a million lives.

That's incredible.

Yeah, 2,000 teenage suicides prevented.

4,000 kids put through college.

44 kids brought home from sex trafficking.

Three world wars de-escalated.

29 terrorist attacks stopped besides the Boston bombing.

So when I said I went hard at humanitarian work and giving back, I went hard.

I did the most in history that is measurable that I've seen, that I've noticed.

And I won the Humanitarian Lifetime Achievement Award at half the age of any predecessor.

Incredible.

There's talks of another world war potential.

Have you been looking into that?

It's my job.

I'm sure you have.

Every day.

Does that one scare you now that there's such advanced technology, weapons?

Scaring me would be a feeling yeah which you don't feel which i don't feel because it also wouldn't be helpful it used to be terrifying i think when i was younger but but i've been through the almost wars so many times and almost happened and almost escalated that now it's it's just like a fireman being scared of a fire it's like it's just another call call out

and it's just another fire yeah i don't know which one will be the real one obviously nuclear winter would put a damper on my mood right but um yeah i mean it's

back to my original point, no group of scientists in history have ever gone to war with each other.

Wow.

And every war besides the one in the Ukraine has been a religious war.

Interesting.

So when you take a bunch of people who believe in something unreliable that cannot be proved, who then run into a bunch of other people who disagree with them who believe in something else unreliable that can't be proved, and there's no logic on either side, you end up at war.

Also money, right?

People want to make money during war.

Well, that's the side effect of that, but it's usually not what fuels the war and keeps it going.

The people in the war ain't ain't making money.

That's true.

So

that's the problem.

And those people wouldn't easily be misled or fueled up against each other if they all believed in something that can be proven because then they'd all be on the same side.

It's either true or it's not.

Let's find out.

Yeah.

Treating each other is not going to give us the answer.

Yeah.

I mean, growing up, you think that you're doing good for the country.

And I talk to a lot of veterans now.

A lot of them are actually upset they ever departed.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the saddest things are the veterans that when they get to that retirement point and they look back and they get time to think because they've been taught not to think since they were 18.

And they take a step back and they go, holy crap, my entire life self-actualization was based on a premise that was not real.

Right.

Because a lot of them went because of 9-11 to defend the country and think they're serving.

And you look back at the Iraq and Afghanistan.

And that's crushing for them.

And that, again, drives me in the opposite direction, going anything I spend time on, anything I work on, anything I work towards, I am going to make damn sure it's real first before I waste decades running in the wrong direction.

So I proactively seek wisdom from the smartest people I can find that you and I have a lot of common friends there.

And I'm constantly checking in with them in a manner where they will tell me if I'm wrong and speak up and tell me, no, I think you're off the tracks there.

And that's incredibly valuable.

How often do you think the psyop programming, this subconscious programming is going on in daily people's lives?

24-7.

So everywhere.

Yeah, everywhere.

Once you get to a certain level in life, that's all that's left to do is psyops everybody else.

Geez.

So TV, radio, music, movies.

Yeah.

I mean, everybody behind them has some agenda.

Right.

Even if it's buy more albums or whatever it is, you're psyopsing right now because you want more people to watch your podcast.

Well, that's a form of it.

I meant mainly on the side where they're trying to implant like thoughts, you know.

You know what I mean?

I do.

Yeah.

Like podcasts.

I guess, Yeah.

No, like, you know what I mean?

I know you don't have a particular, I don't think you have a particular agenda you're trying to convince everyone of.

Yeah.

Other than keep watching.

So there's an agenda, right?

Yeah, I guess.

I meant mainly on the public school side where they just teach you to be like a nine-to-five employee.

They do.

I mean, that's historical.

And, you know, as long as you don't, until someone abolishes the teachers' union, their entire job is to keep bad teachers employed.

So you're never going to fix education as long as that's the case.

So what do you think the fix is for people trying to give their kids the best form of education right now?

So

we developed almost as a joke years ago, a thing called a hot mess list.

And part of it was fueled by living in L.A.

But there was a bunch of friends of mine who wrote down the top 10 habits of a hot mess.

you know you you think of your traditional famous socialites and so on where they have all the wrong values and they're not reliable and they're super flaky and they don't check their messages and their phone batteries are dead and they they're typically selfish and their sense of entitlement for things and they don't plan anything um those kind of habits and then when we had the list correct and validated which is now pretty complete

we then reversed it into a curriculum for how to raise kids to be not a hot mess.

So we took every one of those habits and said, how do you teach them the opposite?

And that became a course that we sell called Raising Winners.

Oh, nice.

So for parents that want to make sure whether their kids are in public school or private school, make sure your kid doesn't end up being an entitled hot mess.

And we have a lot of high net worth customers who they made money themselves.

They're not a hot mess, but now their kids are growing up in a privileged environment and they're worried that they don't want them to be, feel entitled.

So

we're also using that now.

They've just adapted it again.

for hiring winners.

We have customers who are hiring a lot of people, onboarding people.

And we come up with clever psyops ways before, during, and after the interview to make sure you don't hire a hot mess

so that you don't end up with the frivolous lawsuits and the big settlements you have to do and people you hired on board you can't get rid of, but they don't pull their weight and they're not doing any work and they're focused on all the wrong things and they're not detail oriented and their memory shot to hell and so on.

It's hard to get rid of those people.

So there's ways to tell if someone's a hot mess without even meeting them just through tests?

There are ways to do that, absolutely, even by texting with them.

But the point here is at least if you brought them in and then interviewed them and then did a follow-up after the interview, you just want to find out for sure before you hire them.

Right.

Do you make them take a lot of personality tests and everything too?

No, all of this is PSYOPS, so they don't know what's happening.

Oh, wow.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's when you're the most real with yourself, when you don't even know you're being tested, I guess.

That's the point, yeah.

Yeah.

Any projects you're working on now?

Yeah,

a bunch.

And it's changing all the time.

I'm just taking a quick look here at my notes because it has been

all over.

Yeah.

So

some of the projects

at a high level that I'm working on,

we're trying to figure out on the education side

how to identify predators before again before they get hired as teachers.

The problem is a lot of them are already teachers and they just keep transferring from state to state so they don't get blacklisted.

So we're doing that one, but it's hard to get good support on it.

We have

working on the brain upload side, trying to understand consciousness better.

That'll make a big difference.

For some of the family offices, one of the problems is when we got calculators, we forgot how to do math.

When we got cell phones, we forgot each other's phone number.

GPS and Waze and so on made us forget how to navigate around and read maps.

So will ChatGPT stop us knowing how to do research, writing, reading, and ultimately thinking if we rely on it too much?

And I'm not against ChatGPT.

I think it's fabulous.

But again, when do you take so much away that humans just don't think anymore or research or read anything for themselves?

So trying to understand that, especially in kids, the brain plasticity is about 70% set or so, 80% by seven years old.

Wow.

The rest is set by 24%.

Holy crap, so you're done after 24 with plasticity?

Pretty much.

Now, some people, about 5%, are capable of leaving that window open where they can rewire themselves.

And if you study it, you'll see 5% of businesses work, 5% of relationships work, and marriages work, about 5% of money managers outperform the market.

It's the same 5%.

You said only 5% of marriages work?

Yeah.

I thought it was 50%.

No, it's a myth.

So first-time marriages in California is about 70% cheating, 70% divorce.

Cheat.

Now it's increasing all the time

for medium income and above non-repeat marriages.

And their average length is three to five years.

That's short.

Wow.

Then if you take the remaining

30%,

about 25% of them are unhappy or want to get divorced, but can't because they're trapped because of the kids or finances.

So that leaves you at 95% failure rate, and about 5% are actually above a 7% happy and still married and planning to stay that way.

Wow.

So the odds are not in your favor.

No, I mean,

it'll go extinct eventually.

Marriage?

Yeah.

You think so?

What would we move towards then?

All the alternate forms that we do now that we're just secret about.

Right.

AI, sex robots.

Well, there's that, but people cheating that just don't admit it.

Yeah.

So there's

that whole area is changing a lot anyway, because people are not getting married as much now, not having kids, not populating as much.

I know it's changed a little bit in the last couple of years, but if you track it back 50

years plus,

and you look at marriage rates versus divorce rates, it's plunging like an airplane going straight into the war.

Wow.

That's interesting.

I have the graphic and show you later.

Yeah, we'll pull that up.

Do you think as a male, we're just biologically programmed to reproduce and we're kind of fighting that urge with marriage?

It's less to do with that.

So marriage was invented 2,000 years ago to colonize farms and increase taxpayers.

And

the mortality rate was 34.

Percent?

Yeah, no, 34 years old when people died 2,000 years ago.

Wow.

So of course I'll marry you to debt to you apart.

We're only together for five years.

Not 85 years.

Right.

Right?

Nothing is monogamous that long.

Even people bring up penguins.

It's like they live 12 years.

So, so, yeah, it's hard to do something that unnatural.

85 years.

Expect it to work.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's hard.

I mean, there's guys that, you know, have 10 plus kids with multiple girls and they seem like they're happy, but who actually knows?

Well, that's the other thing.

It's like happiness is not just going to come just from that.

Yeah, yeah.

That's where you need to.

you need to balance everything, your meaningfulness and your sense of self.

Absolutely.

So dark hacker background check so how exactly are they getting all this information on people like when these governments run a background check uh well the governments don't use that's no they don't that's us oh that's you yeah so

i mean dark web and deep web is the web that's that you don't see on google

um and when you hear big hacks happening like anthem blue cross got hacked or or you know, American Airlines gets hacked or whatever else, that data gets grabbed and typically sold and data broker websites.

So what we've done is spent decades

with real hackers who have reputations in the dark web and deep web that people know, who know all the data brokers and know all the different systems in there and have scrapers and things that can search them and are typically whitelisted at the FBI so they don't think we're the bad guys.

So then if you have a court case or some guy's suing you or something else and you're like, okay, tell me everything you can know about this person.

You know, do they have money?

Are they bluffing?

Do they have any assets?

This guy wants to partner with me.

Does, you know, does he have the ability to?

Whatever.

You know, we'll scrape everything you can scrape on the regular web, but then going into deep web and dark web, we can find all kinds of lawsuits and tax liens and bankruptcies and divorces and stuff that his emails from five years ago and the email server at the company got hacked or whatever.

Dang.

And you can see all the other stuff.

And that can help you do what's called settlement analysis then, where you can say, oh, I I can just tell this guy, you know, I'll see you in court because he can't afford to go to court.

Or, you know, I'll offer him a small amount and he'll jump at it because he's going through a divorce and he's about, he's bankrupt and he needs the money.

Interesting.

So our emails are leaked out there right now?

It depends on which one.

Gmail.

Well, some of it was.

I mean, some Gmails were hacked, some weren't.

It really depends on where you were.

If you worked at Verizon, for example, and they got hacked, then all the Verizon emails might be out there still.

I got sim hacked once.

That was a smart hack.

He called us

pretending to be me, and he probably bought my social security number off the dark web.

Yeah.

And when things like that happen, we can get on there quickly, find it, and try and buy it back.

But then we have to go monitor every week because the guy who sold it might sell it again in a few months.

Right.

And

so

we have abilities in that.

And you can imagine if you're going through a lawsuit, anything you can find, like we have a technology that

will tell us the personality of judges or other lawyers.

So let's say you're going through arbitration.

And

when you arbitrate, you get to select the arbitrator

out of the AAA database.

So now, do you want to pick a judge who's, let's say,

who understands your business, who is technical, who is younger or is older, or has the same political and religious beliefs as you do, or likes likes to settle for big numbers or and be famous or likes to settle for small numbers because he's very down to earth.

We can figure all that out before you pick the judge and figure it out about the other lawyer you're going up against and what will fluster them and what their weak point is and what will confuse them.

And that's super valuable.

And we would have all of that ammunition going into the case.

Yeah, because at the end of the day, human nature, if you know their tendencies, I mean, that's massive leverage.

Yeah, and that's why we haven't lost the case yet.

And if, and there's very few we actually get to court on because they usually settle settle beforehand.

Right.

Because you know so much.

And yeah, and we can let them know we know so much.

And it's all stuff they don't want to go out in public court on public record.

Yeah.

And then often I'll be used as the expert witness as well.

And that helps a lot too.

When you go up on the witness stand, the judge starts by going, love your show, man.

Yeah.

So yeah, I bet that helps.

So are you allowed to leverage the stuff you find on the dark web as evidence?

You kind of just...

That depends on the circumstances of it.

Because we could know it.

We didn't hack it.

Someone else hacked it.

We just read it.

Now, we can't use that to like, if your password was hacked, I can't use your password to get back into your stuff.

That would be illegal.

But what's submissible in court then depends on a whole bunch of things like what state you're in, what governing law there is, what we're talking about, how relevant it is to the case.

And typically, like if you were in that situation, we wouldn't have you hire us, we'd have your law firm hire us, you pay them, they pay us.

Got it.

Now, everything we do is discovery and it's not subject to subpoena by the opposition.

That is.

So if we find bad stuff on you,

they can't subpoena that.

They don't even know you're not.

You get the cherry picket.

That's so smart.

I love that.

You were also part of a $10 billion settlement.

Yeah.

And it was that kind of situation.

We had one firm that said

this other firm copied their code and their intellectual property and they'd make $10 billion a year and it would put them out of business.

And I went in and looked at it and used some tools to analyze both mathematically.

It was the first time that had been calculated with code.

And I specifically stayed at it till I could prove that there was less than one in 8 billion chance that this guy copied the code from this company based on the structure, the data, the language choice, everything else.

The one in 8 billion was important because that

is the same as the odds of

a DNA match being incorrect.

And that's already got court precedent as proving as beyond reasonable doubt.

Oh, wow.

Because all the cases have been settled by DNA.

So the judge, who's not a software person, could understand that and go, well, if it's the same as blood type, then it's on the murder weapon and we're done.

Wow.

That's massive.

So that ended up settling or

they're being dismissed, actually.

Oh, incredible.

In favor of our client.

Even better.

But this is a great conversation because this is an example of what we do every day.

But you can see now that it's like, well, these settlement tricks that we're talking about, that would apply to almost any case, right?

The stuff we find might be different and the case might be about something different

but all the techniques and tradecraft behind it including psyops maybe that guy tells his wife everything that's going on the guy who's suing right

his wife tells everything to her mother her mother would be his mother-in-law is a real estate agent in Dallas.

Well, we're going to send a couple of agents from our place over to the local town she's in and pretend they want to buy a $5 million house.

They're going to hang out with her for the next three or four weeks.

Wow.

They're going to talk about a court case they have going on fictitiously.

The mother-in-law is going to open up and talk about everything that's going on on her side, thinking, well, they'll never know who it is.

And now we have a direct channel of all the info we need from behind the scenes of what he's thinking.

You were playing chess out here.

You play chess, by the way?

I do.

But it's, yes, it's a Truman show for people who don't know they're in a Truman show.

Yeah.

What's your rating in chess?

I'm curious.

Oh, I haven't gone through it.

I played it until I wrote Senjin, the AI tool that could then beat me every time.

And then I get off.

So I never, in Europe, they didn't have the rating thing at that time.

So I've never, never been rated.

Got it.

AI is taking over chess.

You can't even beat it now.

It's so good.

Yeah.

Well, especially if you write the AI, it beat you.

It's kind of disheartening.

Yeah.

What is Scorpion doing with AI right now?

Well,

there's a lot of good work in a few areas.

One is normalizer.

So we learn

by doing financial forensics in any business.

Let's say you own an e-commerce company or something.

You're selling water bottles.

We start start analyzing your business to learn what's normal.

How many staff come into the factory?

How many bottles do you have in advance in the warehouse?

How fast do you sell in them?

How many trucks are coming and going every day?

All the bits of data.

And we look at that and go, okay, that's normal.

Now tell me when anything's not normal.

If anything happens plus or minus 10% outside that, I want to hear about it.

And that's the beginning of fraud.

or trouble or someone ripping you off or a supply chain issue or whatever else, you'll get an early warning because they'll go, hey, you suddenly have 20% less trucks coming and going than usual, but your bottles are gone at 120% more than usual.

So now you got trucks taking empty bottles out because they're selling the glass somewhere else.

Got it.

Because of a corrupt bunch of truck drivers you didn't know you had.

So in casinos, that's huge.

Really?

Right.

Just you want to know if anything not normal is happening.

Right.

With cheaters.

Right.

People start winning too many times too often in a row.

not normal.

Yeah.

They want to kick those guys out.

Get right on that and either figure it out or kick them out.

Yeah.

Wow.

The same with cybersecurity on that.

When you log into your laptop, you'll type your password with the same rhythm

based on the length of your fingers and your habits.

And then when you log in, you'll click on the same couple of icons.

Let me load my email.

Let me load my browser or whatever.

You always do that the same way.

So if I stole your name and your password and logged into your laptop, I wouldn't behave like you.

My mouse movements wouldn't be like yours.

I wouldn't open everything in the same way.

So that's a really good way of finding and locking me down then and going, hey, someone hacked your laptop because they're not behaving like Sean.

And no one knows exactly how Sean behaves.

Yeah, I didn't even notice that.

I opened up, yeah, Gmail instantly, Google Chrome.

You do the same thing every time.

Every creature I have it.

I don't know what those things are.

So even if I have your password now, if I can't behave like you, and when you type your password, there's microseconds behind each key bounce.

So even if you gave me your password, I couldn't type it the way you do.

Wow.

There's enough signature there that's different.

Yeah.

So if you saw it took someone a minute and it normally takes 10 seconds.

Well, it's not even that even microseconds where where you hit se together for sean and i hit s and then e it'll know that i'm doing holy crap that's crazy damn that's exciting when does that come out oh we already have it we're doing it for the pentagon so i love it man um

when uh how and when should people reach out to a scorpion get in touch with you guys well that's the thing that a lot of people have trouble processing i talked about a lot of big things today and expensive things but that's just because they're those are the cooler things you wanted to hear about yeah But we really do projects from 10 grand upwards.

And our bread and butter is helping a lot of entrepreneurs who have their business and it's running and it's up and running.

And maybe they're great at sales and marketing and the people side, but they're not great at the operations, the logistics, the technology.

They either ignored it or outsourced it.

And now they're getting big enough.

Maybe they're 20 staff, 30 staff, or it's starting to hurt them.

Things are unreliable.

Stuff are breaking every day.

The website doesn't work.

They can't get paid.

Every upgrade they do breaks stuff that used to work.

These kind of problems that they run into.

So the smart ones will reach out to us and say, can you be our left brain?

You know, we'll continue to do sales and marketing, but can you fix what we call tech debt?

I know I should have done all this stuff and documented it and laid it out properly three years ago, but I didn't.

So can you please clean that, clean up my sins on that and get me up to speed so I can run a real company, scale it up and sell it?

Otherwise, it'll always be a mom and pop thing run by bubblegum and string, just barely good enough to fix it for one more week.

And those CEOs love the journey that we take them on because they learn how a real business runs,

how to be proactive, how to do quality assurance and processes and standard operating procedures and everything else to mature that business.

There's a thing called CMM, which is capability maturity model, and it's basically one to five on maturity.

So at level one, your pants is on fire, stuff's breaking every day, nothing's documented, everything's in your head, and you're just yelling at people.

And level five is like Amazon, Bezos, when he comes to work, all he's doing is figuring out where does he want to be 10 years from now.

He's not dealing with boxes that weren't delivered that day.

So we try and take people from level one to at least level three or four.

So it's a good enough business to scale it up and sell it.

So really any problem that you have where you have 10 grand or more as a budget to put towards it

and you can articulate the problem.

Then all you're missing is the ability to execute.

And that's what we are.

Love it.

So either that keeps you awake at night or a lawsuit situation that's really tricky and the lawyers don't know what to do i mean they know the legal side but they don't have all the tricks that we have yeah i wish i hired you for the one i just

that can give you a lot of leverage next time i get sued i'm texting you man and we recommend people reach out to us they might say hey you know i have this idea of a new widget or gadget you know do i have competition Does this make sense?

Is anyone going to pay for it?

Can we find a place in China to make it?

What's it going to cost by the time it ships over?

Is this a, you know, is this even a good idea?

And they use us to do the R ⁇ D on that.

We'll go do all the homework and come back and go, nope, it's a dumb idea and someone else has already beat you to it.

Don't bother.

Or, yeah,

it is a good idea and we can do all of it for you.

Yeah.

Depending on, you know, you already have a day job.

Let us run with this and

handle everything.

Incredible.

So it's not just consulting.

We'll roll up our sleeves and do it if you want us to.

Yeah.

So we'll link it below.

Is it a site, contact form?

Conciergeup.com is the easiest place for any kind of problem.

Okay, scorpioncomputer services.com is kind of the umbrella company of all the technical and military and software backgrounds and you know all the press and stuff like that.

Yeah, we'll link it below.

That was a great episode.

Thanks for coming on, man.

Thanks for having me.

I learned a lot.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching, guys, as always, and I'll see you tomorrow.