#10: Jay Smith – Cyber Security, Doxing & The Weaponization of Data

Josh Boone: 0:00

There's an artist on Instagram called Dr. Frankenstein, and they do some weird shit like these meme videos of Snoop dog's face on a little girl, and it's both hilarious and deeply fucking disturbing part of what makes it so eerie is how convincing they are. Like it's some uncanny valley shit. Like some of these are legitimately better executed than some Hollywood movies. And that is known as a deep fake, well, obviously it's not real. When it's Nick Offerman, mustached face on the Olsen twins body, that a scene from full house, it's just a stupid meme, but there are much more nefarious uses for this technology. So hear me out. What if it was used to sway political campaigns, like make some congressmen, admit to bribery, pedophilia, or racist remarks? No way you may say the press and the American people would certainly verify it's a fraud. I have failed you dear listener, I have failed you. Please return to our conversations with Sam McNerney on the gamification of the media. You know, we're lacking in journalistic integrity these days, but yeah, it doesn't even have to take anything. Elaborate to pull that off. Now in 2019, there was a video floating around of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the us house of representatives. And this video was slowed down by 25% and the pitch was altered to make it seem like she was slurring. Her words. This video was posted on Facebook on a page called political watchdogs and was shared widely, including by former New York city mayor and occasional Batman villain, Rudy Giuliani, who tweeted what is wrong with Nancy Pelosi? Her speech pattern is bizarre. So Facebook initially refused to remove the clip, but said it had reduced its distribution after it was fact-checked as false. The post was later deleted, but not before the story spread and more or less became a fact in some alt-right circles. What happens when this is weaponized and used for much more extensive PR assassinations or when it's inevitable use for false flag operations by government agencies around the world. What happens when the far left in the far right start habitually, doxing and attacking people over these false accusations, because they legitimately believe that what they're seeing is real. Do we continue to spiral into chaos or do we sign all digital media with some sort of blockchain certificate of authenticity? And let's say there's massive data breaches. As there increasingly will be. And someone gets access to a celebrity or politicians, iCloud account, all their photos and videos, or someone pulls an Edward Snowden and releases tens of thousands of government documents. So what if 99% of them has a real, but 1% is secretly doctored. And that's what the media runs with. And again, Even if the truth surfaces, the retraction is going to be buried the new cycle, which is already interested in something else entirely well after the damage has already done. And in fact, it will become a conspiracy theory that the retraction itself is the real thing. News hunter Biden has entered the chat and Hey, speaking of data breaches, according to the HIPPA journal, 9.7 million healthcare records were compromised in September 20, 20 alone due to hacking or it incidents and a Clark school study at the university of Maryland found that there's a hacker attack every 39 seconds on average affecting one in three Americans every year. And since COVID-19 the FBI reported a 300% increase in reported cyber crimes and Jenny Romany, IBM's chairman, president and CEO said cyber crime is the greatest threat to every company in the world. So. Amid all this. How do we protect ourselves from being hacked? Both in our data and in our worldviews. And that's some of what we're going to dive in today with our guest, Jay Smith. Jay is a digital forensic analyst, private investigator, us army veteran, and white hat hacker based in Louisville, Kentucky. He's an instructor and digital forensics and security at Layola university. And he has a degree in psychology from the university of Louisville. And Jay currently operates Alliance investigation group, where he merges private investigation services with modern cybersecurity methodologies to offer support protection and education to individuals, families, and small businesses. And that's what fascinated me about Jay is how he operates at the intersection of all these areas. And he has a uniquely holistic perspective on the digital landscape. Some of the other topics that we dive into are the threat of deep fakes, Tik, TOK, misinformation, doxing, and open source intelligence, anti doxing legislation, and its implications, the weaponization of Reddit, gen Z, and their relationship to online. The long-term effects of social media, echo chambers, and self-referential feedback loops the threat of social credit scores, decentralization, blockchain, and dispersing, the power of data, wall street, bets, GameStop, and the hypocrisy of the financial institutions, psychology of social engineering, the 80 20 of online security and what you can do to protect yourself, the illusion of anonymity and permanence of data, the emotional weight of working as a private investigator, tribalism and the rise of the binary world, and so much more. All righty. So let's dive into this. I bring you Jay Smith. What about podcasts do you like?

Jay Smith: 6:01

Yeah, I'm, I'm when it comes to books, I consume non-fiction business entrepreneurial stuff, I always have, or I'll read, you know, the human animal or the selfish gene nonfiction and, and real life, and learning about people and finding out about new things that are in the real world. Just appeals to me more so than fiction. Yes. And, you know, and I'll latch onto one for awhile, like a Seth Goden or something. And then I'll kind of fall off of that and find something else. A lot of the very good open source intelligence information that I use in my job, I get from podcasts from privacy and cybersecurity centric podcasts. So

Josh Boone: 6:36

it's just, it's, it's moving so quickly where it's like, books are kind of slid, particularly in something like cybersecurity or anything else, or I'm really into longevity. And like the stuff is happening so quickly in the longevity field where it's just like this, the second somebody reads a book or, sorry, writes a book. It's just like, it's already kind of out of date. You know? So that's what I love about podcasting. A buddy of mine was like, I was talking to one of the, have him on and he's just like, man, I'm, I'm afraid to like do that because like, I feel like the second I say something like, he's like even the second, sometimes words are coming out of my mouth. I'm like, oh, that's not right. So he's just like, I don't want to release something. And then people are like judging me on this stuff. And he's not even necessarily someone that cares so much about what people think it's more so like, he wants to feel like his words are accurate to how he feels. And I'm like, dude, all this is is like a time capsule for the conversation that you and I had today. Like you can, you can always do a round two, you know, like, but it was just, it's just really interesting how people have very different perspectives on the whole.

Jay Smith: 7:38

It's just new. I mean, yeah. New-ish, you know, it's not new, new, but it's new to all of us. I think I saw in your first episode, you mentioned there were 600,000 podcasts. I had no idea, but doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 7:50

There's a lot. And I think those are like the active podcasts. There's, there's several million that people do, like two or three episodes and they just drop off. Yeah. That's actually one of the reasons why, some of the ones that I recorded on other people's like they just didn't ever get released because they just stopped the fucking podcasts before they got released. And I was just like, you know, man, like out of a respect to the people, like if I was gonna, you know, if they had something serious come up in their life maybe, but you know, they just decide, oh, I don't want to do this anymore. And I'm like, If he's released the ones that you recorded with people, they took the time out of their data record the thing, you know,

Jay Smith: 8:24

Or at least send it to you, so you could put in your evergreen content.

Josh Boone: 8:28

Yeah. That's the, one of the reasons I, if I went on other people's stuff, I just started recording it on my end, because another concern that I had was just like people taking your words and splice them together. I got really lucky and I haven't had that happen so far, but some of my, some of my friends have had that happen where they're like, their stuff just gets cut up and it's,

Jay Smith: 8:47

that's certainly a danger and it's something I hadn't even thought of that I probably need to think of.

Josh Boone: 8:53

Well, I mean, yeah. I mean like deep fakes and everything else happening, I'm curious, what's your thoughts on deep fakes? Like what do you, how do you see that?

Jay Smith: 9:01

You know, as, from what I've seen you know, what comes out so far, it's, it's really in its infancy. And I think if the effort is spent on the same technology to combat and figure. It's not going to be a massive problem. It's going to be a massive problem because of our short attention span. And we react immediately to what we see and then, you know, not myself so much, but I've, I've done a couple of investigations lately that got me down the Tik TOK rabbit hole. It's a vapid app. I mean, it really is. It's pointless, but you know, everybody okay. Boomer got it. My, my parents said the same thing about my Nintendo. So but, but what I've discovered is there's a whole, it's, it's, it's like a war zone now. And you know, I, I gather evidence from any social media that's available and take talk from what, from what I'm seeing. Like 45% people getting on there and either spreading this information or just throwing a fit about something. And then there's like a 40% on their, her now who are actively doxing all these people and it's fucked up. It is. And they're really good at the open source intelligence. They they're doing things that people pay me to do. And I'm like, but they're doing it without any rains. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 10:23

Theory for Reddit scorned, man, you don't piss off the red. It's like, there that's even the worst. I think Reddit's probably the worst community you would want to piss off because of the technical and social know-how to really bring some

Jay Smith: 10:35

people to. And they've been flaming people as a community for decades, as opposed to, you know, the, the newer versions on Tik TOK or whatever. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 10:44

And then you, you kind of, they're almost like weaponized in a way, if you have subreddits, you know, I mean like wall street bets is a perfect example of that. I mean, like, it's just, you have these kind of online tribes that are emerging and now they're starting to actually like, but that's been going on for a while. I mean, there was like the Kony 2012 or whatever that thing was, where it was. And that was turned out to be from what I remember that turned out to be like completely inaccurate, like the way they was portrayed it. So there's just all this it's just, I don't know. It's fascinating to me. Yeah. I'm really curious, like, as someone who's in cybersecurity, private investigating, I know you work with the girl Scouts and helping them with like cyberstalking and everything else. What's your thoughts on gen Z and like the relationship with the internet? Like, I find it interesting cause they're the first generation growing up into these platforms and I'm like, I'm really curious to see like how they interface, like how much of their identity. With their online cells and their personal cells are kind of fused together. What's your, what's your thoughts on that? Yeah.

Jay Smith: 11:40

It's yeah, we all know that's true. You know, walk through any grocery store or target or whatever. And half of the teens or tweens are doing silly tick talk dances, even though they don't have a camera in front of them because that's their, that's their emotion they're used to doing is constantly practicing these old dances for their, for their online cred. Yeah, my personal hope. And I see this play out a little bit when I'm working with the younger kids is that they are a generation growing up in it. So they will have a lot better eventually control and oversight over what they're doing. They'll understand it better. It's their ecosystem. Whereas those people in my generation are largely floundering with it. Either misusing it MIS controlling it, not, not understanding the permanence of data, vast majority people. I still talk to believe that if they delete a text or a posting or whatever, that it's difficult to get to. Yeah, it really isn't, you know, I'm in my mid forties and I started on a computer. I was fortunate to grow up in California where we had computers in our classrooms and, you know, they weren't great, but I did learn the fundamentals of programming, but I also, by the time I was in high school, I understood what data was, what it really is. And the fact that it's being shown to me because it exists somewhere on a server, just because I can't see it anymore. It doesn't mean it's not there. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 13:03

It gets difficult. Cause like the second that kind of who was it? David Cho. So David shows like an artist. He famously did a mural for Facebook and. So, like he did like $60,000 and like working, it ended up becoming like over 200 million with the equity. So yeah, he's, he's a very, he's probably the richest artists in the world at this point. And that was like, what a decade ago or something like that. So like, who knows how much money that dude's got now, but he did this podcast called DVD a S a back in the day. And it was like raw. I mean, like, it was really raw. And then after a certain point, he just decided I want to take it down. And he spent apparently like a lot of money having people take it down and everywhere, but there's still archives, like archive.org, I think. Has it like, I mean, it's, it's still, it's very much so easy to get if you want it. And like, there isn't a scrubbing off the internet, you know, the second you post something it's screenshot it, it's backed up. It's downloaded it's whatever. This is something I think about a lot is like, okay, you have this generation like gen Z and they're putting a lot of everything online, both good and bad. And I'm really curious to see, like in the professional, but it also just like in a society, what happens when these children grow up and they start taking on, they start getting in the politics, they start getting into corporate and they have all of this, like compromise all this compromising information. That's so easy to find like, yeah, I don't know. How do you think that's going to go down? Because the thing is, is like, everybody's going to have

Jay Smith: 14:35

that. Yeah. So what, what, what I fear, and this is just my brain doing, this is a natural, a natural evolution into a social credit score like China does. And other countries are toying with that may evolve without us intentionally doing it really. Because it's going to be impossible to divorce yourself from all of your online content and. Whether intentionally or not that stuff's all there. So when you do background checks or when somebody like me is looking for data or for information, for a case, finding all of it. So I, I fear that that's the, that's the one issue right? There is just the, the ease with which when we discovered and crude apps and the speed with which we want people to onboard to the app, use the app and then grow their community. So everybody's on it. And we give them the good feels for, they got another light. Cause they got another follower, I've got 10,000 followers, whatever, but we, we put no effort into controlling the other side of that, the downside of it. And like I mentioned, the, these, it was really eye opening, you know, the Tech-Talk thing because every other one that pops up is somebody doxing somebody else. Yeah. So now here in Kentucky, We actually have an anti doxing legislation that's been signed. So somebody is going to inadvertently, and this is Kentucky. So we probably have a good population of people on Tik TOK saying controversial things. Yeah. Yeah. Some somebody who takes offense to that in another state is not going to realize what they're doing. They're going to dock that person. And then they're going to end up getting sued and lose. So that's going to be the other, that's the worm that's going to turn. So it's, you know, things move at the speed of light and these apps feed into our need to react or respond or solve something immediately. And the long-term effects. I mean, that's, you know, I think that's a lot where a lot of our interpersonal communications have gone. We can't look at somebody. It takes some effort to look at somebody who's saying something. Just insane or in your mind, it is, and look in the light and realize like, sometimes I just have to listen and I'm trying to picture you just going through your day, like you getting out of your car, getting gas, going into Kroger Winn-Dixie or whatever. That's hard to actually picture when you're just seeing them as somebody who's screeching about something. Yeah. Yeah. And that's everybody. So everybody is, has got that instant snapshot. Oh, I just saw 15 seconds you on Tik TOK. That's who you are. Yeah. And we react

Josh Boone: 17:13

to it only know like a couple of tech talk influencers. One's a good friend of mine and then out and somebody recognized them and they're kind of expecting to be like the personality, do the dance. Yeah. Yeah. And th th these very different in, in real life. And not to say that that's not a side of him, but it's like an alter ego, you know, it's, it's a very exaggerated thing. It's not who he is as an individual. So it's just kind of interesting to see. Actually happening in real time. Sure. I don't know. I think w what, is there anything you think we can do about it?

Jay Smith: 17:48

So, I mean, the genie, isn't going back in the bottle, unless some sort of, you know, crazy Saifai anarchist type movie comes out. People go to the bottom of the ocean and cut the cables or whatever. It's not going anywhere. So what we have to do is, is, like I mentioned, I mean, we have to remember that we're all humans and be aware of our reaction to things. Be aware of other's reactions. Think much like your friend. So like you said, he's, he's a completely different person for that influencer ideology. How long is it before general motors or whatever? Fortune 500 companies said, Hey, there's this Silicon valley startup that can take someone all of someone's social media content and tell us whether they're going to be a good middle manager. Yeah, yeah. All of his content becomes that's who this guy is, that's a

Josh Boone: 18:39

liability almost. It

Jay Smith: 18:41

is what it's going to be sold because somebody wants to build the Uber for taco bell or whatever, you know, the, the, the hustle, startup culture. That's just like, however, we just get the email, let's just get the data and we'll figure out what to do with it.

Josh Boone: 18:55

Yeah, no, I mean, like I'm in, I'm in digital marketing, so like there's a lot of overlap there and it's the same thing. It's like, I was talking with another founder about this the other day, because they heavily have been growing due to Facebook ads and we were just kind of musing. He's just like, yeah. Ever since the iOS update with the privacy, he's just like our everything's gone down and he's like, I know that's affecting everybody, but it's like, it's really hurting our numbers. And we were just sitting there because, you know, talking about the business side of things, it really sucks. But then both he and I agreed. We still support apple doing that. Even though, like it's hurting his bottom line and it's hurting a lot of my clients bottom line. It's just like, yeah, that's, it's still like a net positive, but it's just really, I don't know. I mean, there's just so much there. It's like when that that one movie came out, oh God, what was it? The social dilemma. Yeah. Yeah. Social. When I came out, I watched it, it was a very good documentary, but I was just like, oh, this is none of this is new to me. You know? So it's like, you know, saying the same thing for you, anyone who's in that adjacent, you know, anything that has to do with tracking, targeting cybersecurity, anything it's like, we've all known this for a while, but it's kind of interesting when you're peeling back the layers and seeing how the lay-person, they get all that dumped at once. And they're like, oh my God. But it just seems like nothing's really being done about it. And I add it to your point. I, you know, genie's out of the bottle. I'm not really sure how you can either reverse those feedback loops at

Jay Smith: 20:17

this point. You have, it has to be incentivized. Yeah. However, however, that is because we've, we've. We've used all the dopamine to incentivize the behavior that we're now talking about. It's used up, if I've heard a little bit about, you know, we can get paid for our purse or whatever. Okay. Yeah. Nobody who sees that on paper is going to take $12 a year in order for Facebook to weaponize their data or whatever it is. Yeah. So I don't know. I mean, honestly think that's something that's going to have to naturally just occur is these kids are going to get burnt out by the time they're 11. And they're like, okay, this is boring. Like most of us do eventually in our lives with, you know, network TV or whatever, or, you know, we used to listen to Howard stern or, or Joe Rogan or whoever for years and years and years. And then eventually we just evolved beyond that kind of energy or those kinds of people or that kind of content, whether it's TV or whatever. You know, I used to go to movies every weekend. I'm in a movie in years and I just wonder. Maybe kids whose entire existence, whether they want to or not is digital. If they eventually, when they become older and start running the business world and finding jobs, if they don't just like, what use is that? Yeah.

Josh Boone: 21:36

It's not serving them any longer.

Jay Smith: 21:37

Right. But unfortunately it's Howard, how's that going to get unlinked from the income or their income? Really? Yeah. So if they want to build something, what are you going to build? That's not typically. Yeah, I

Josh Boone: 21:49

think the problem is, is that to your point, it's like a, it's a reoccurring theme on this podcast so far is talking about the incentives. Like we have misaligned incentives in pretty much every aspect of society. I think about this a lot, you got all these different layers that are all compounding on each other. So it's just like you got the business, you know, Silicon valley tech and they're gamified based on, you know, just attention. So controversy is good. The media is exact same way and they feed off of each other. So it becomes this like negative compound interest of feedback loop. That's just like growing and growing and it's just like, they have so much equity of our attendance. That it's, it's just, it's hard to get out of. So yeah, it's just like one of the things that makes me really optimistic though, is actually like crypto and blockchain, not so much crypto, but more so blockchain because of all of this, all this technology that's happening, like with decentralization and that, that decentralization may be the thing that get us out of this whole like rabbit hole. Certainly. Have you, have you gotten into any of that space at all? I

Jay Smith: 22:55

haven't. When it comes to blockchain, it's primarily the larger cybersecurity corporations that are selling products. The decentralization, I love it. I think, I think that is definitely a part of an evolution, you know, much like when everybody learned how to read, as opposed to just the churches, you know, by dispersing that power of that. I have to imagine, there will be some kind of, you know, right now it's so heavily incentivized to those who have the most to Google, Amazon, Yahoo, whatever. I think when that disperses more, it will have that effect, but who knows? I mean, in as far as crypto, who knows, I mean, yeah, that's, that is so victim to the winds of chaos, GameStop or something. You're talking about humans who banded together to move a market. Yeah. Whereas usually that's, well, it's also humans, but they already have all the power and they want. Peanuts in a certain direction, small, small

Josh Boone: 23:52

group of people that are doing that. And it's, it's not frowned upon, but they get away with it, but versus, you know, the masses, so

Jay Smith: 23:58

yeah. But let read it, do it. And we got to shut down Robin hood.

Josh Boone: 24:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one of the most fucked up things, man. Cause like I bought some game stop, like completely knowing that I might lose a lot of money, but I like, I don't care. I was, for me it was just like a fuck you like, no, I'm a, I'm a little bit of an anarchist at heart. So I was just like, hell yeah. I just wanted to contribute to it is kind of like buying a ticket to a movie almost like let's just see where this

Jay Smith: 24:21

goes. Absolutely be a part

Josh Boone: 24:22

of it. Yeah. So like, it was just interesting watching that though, because like you could just see the media takes such a negative stance, such a negative stance and we're like, oh, okay. We know who's paying your fucking checks. You know, like just. Like they're, they're literally sitting there and trying to defend like wall street. Yeah.

Jay Smith: 24:43

Yeah. Which is, we'll add an illicit gambling hall that only rich people are allowed into. Exactly. Yeah. You're allowed to sit at the window and throw quarters at it, but you have no impact on any of it.

Josh Boone: 24:55

Yeah. Yeah. Like we might, you know, thank you for your quarter. We might throw you a dime every once in awhile. Yeah.

Jay Smith: 25:01

Or, or we can design an entire retirement system. That's actually based on making money on moving your money around for 40 years. Yeah. And

Josh Boone: 25:10

it give you nothing and then it might all vanish, you know? So it's just like, ah,

Jay Smith: 25:14

right. You had a pension, but where do you see 401k?

Josh Boone: 25:17

It's so fucked, but. I mean,

Jay Smith: 25:19

that's why even here hear 10, 11 year olds talking about that now, because they are so inundated with all information. They're like fucking 401k boomer. I'm not doing that and

Josh Boone: 25:32

all in on doge coin

Jay Smith: 25:35

and it wasn't there a 12 year old or something who became like a fifty-five millionaire from the GameStop shit. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 25:41

Good for him. Yeah. One of my buddies bought a bunch of doge coin. Caldwell Joe, like, I don't even know, like six, seven years ago or something like that. And he said he had like thousands and thousands or millions of it. I think he had millions. I don't, I forget what it was. It was a ridiculous amount. And then he it's on a hard drive somewhere that he can't find, oh shit. He's just like, you gotta be kidding me. Cause he just thought it was just worthless. You know, it was, it was literally like monopoly dollars back in the day. Like people used to send thousands and thousands to each other on Reddit, just as like a joke, like just basically, you know, no one took it seriously. It's just like, I don't know. I love all that stuff. There actually are some things with crypto that I think you would find really interesting. Like one is called our Arweave and it's basically permanent hard drive. That's completely decentralized. So you can go on there and for like literally cents per megabyte, basically have your storage on the blockchain decentralized across the world. Kind of similar to BitTorrent almost, but it's like guaranteed because it puts them on. In defy and then the interests, self repays itself, and distributes out to people that they are incentivized to keep it up. So when you put it on there, it's supposed to last for 120 years. Wow. So one of the reasons why this is so fascinating is because like, if you think about one of the main goals that they have is decentralization of online storage, but also worried about censorship. So let's say you have some sort of manifesto or you have something like the Panama papers or some shit like that. You could put it up on our we've have a completely distributed, and it would be a total pain in the ass for any one government to be able to find out. Now that's fucking cool.

Jay Smith: 27:26

To me. It is. That's the new pace, Ben. I mean, you can put whatever you want on Pastebin, but it'll get taken down. Of course people scrape it constantly, but the idea that it's permanent permanent, rather than in the hands of some, you know, oh, we got it to this. Side of chute group down in Bolivia and who knows, you know, whatever. Yeah. That's really interesting.

Josh Boone: 27:46

Yeah. If you want to learn more about that Kevin Rose has a podcast that he did with the founder of Arweave. I'll send that to you later, but yeah, that'd be awesome. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating. There's so much stuff happening in the crypto space that I'm just like, man, I wish I was talking to my buddy about this the other day. He's a web developer and I was like, dude, you should seriously look into like, what's happening in blockchain because he's like, me and him were like huge fans of Mr. Robot. You know, like this whole just like fucking take down the establishment shit. And I'm like, that is what's happening in this space. Like all of this stuff is being built. It's not just fucking Dogecoin or Bitcoin. Also the craft there's so much being built. It's just amazing. Like one guy I was listening to lately, he was talking about like having entire cities where everything is basically you have a DAO, you familiar with DAOs? No. So it's a, it's a decentralized autonomous organization. It's fucking cool as shit. You basically, they're already doing this online in groups. So I, people will think of it as almost like a collective where you can actually run an organization entirely autonomously and everyone gets stakes in it. And it's almost like a new way of having a corporation, but what, what some people are using it for now is like, for example, they will group by NFTs. So they'll put the, pull their money together into this token. That is representative of the whole, some of the DAO, like the, you know, almost like a pooling of their resources. And then they will actually vote and decide what NFTs they want to buy. And then w and they hold that. And then when it gets sold, the funds get distributed. So that's like a super small example of how it's happening immediately, but now they're taking these downs and trying to essentially have it, like replace a corporate. Hmm, and it's really fucking cool. So now this guy's talking about trying to bring that and actually like getting a city and running the whole city, essentially on a DAO, having everybody being able to stake and then be able to make those decisions completely autonomously, removing a tremendous amount of governmental structure and overhead. I mean, it's just fucking fascinating. The shit that's happening.

Jay Smith: 29:57

Sounds like the start to a terrifying movie too. Skynet was born out of a really good idea too.

Josh Boone: 30:04

I dunno. Like, yeah, I think it could be, it could be interesting. Yeah, it could be amazing, but also it's just, I don't know. At least it keeps things interesting. It's just like having a bunch of old white guys run things and we we've

Jay Smith: 30:16

seen that. Well, yeah. Look at, look at our, look, our school board meetings now and our fucking community. What decisions are made based on small groups of humans. Yeah. And if we've proven anything. A small group of us can make some really stupid fucking decisions. Yeah. And especially when, when our group has, has the leverage, has the power, has the money that, that makes a very compelling argument for what you're talking about. We can be swayed,

Josh Boone: 30:45

can go back to the, the tech talk thing. It's like, what happens when that's gamified? I mean, you have to even think about the influencers themselves. There's been a lot of case studies recently of like people that start off really cool, you know, they're an influencer and they're just doing their own thing. Whether that be, you know, making Tik TOK videos or making like political commentary or whatever it is. And then they start seeing, you know, the incentive, usually you're saying creeps in and they start seeing that certain types of content starts getting them more traction and then they're making more money and then they start editing everything to optimize for that. And next thing you know, they're basically a caricature of themselves, but these people are now influencing everybody else. So becomes like the self referential feedback loop where now people aren't even like seeing things outside of this echo chamber that they are creating themselves. So it's just like, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't know how the fuck you get

Jay Smith: 31:39

out. And every time it bounces off a wall, it degrades by 5%. So it's like the telephone game and hell

Josh Boone: 31:46

yeah. Yeah. What concerns you the most that you think the average, person's not that concerned about

Jay Smith: 31:54

your personal information online? Yeah. Yeah. It's something I preach about. I've actually, I've built an app that we're, we're getting ready to launch. It's an it's along the same lines of delete me, you know, it's clearing your personal information off of about 200 data broker sites. Oh wow. Cool. And the vast majority of people are all over these sites and in most people it's like, so what, you know, they've already got my social, I'm all over the internet who cares whatever. Or the, I don't do anything wrong. So I don't have anything to worry about. That's, that's a really bad angle to go at

Josh Boone: 32:27

what I think that's bad. Like if you had somebody sitting in front of you that had a good, I've talked to a lot of people that feel the same way and it's, it's confusing to me probably just as it's confusing to you, but like, what would you say to that person?

Jay Smith: 32:37

So I relate this to. Of David Quinta, volley, who's a resident of Chicago. And during the January six events, he was misidentified. There was a picture of a man taken at the Capitol on the steps, had a Chicago fire department head on somebody on the internet identified just, you know, did a PIM eyes, or did some kind of facial rec online and identified this gentleman who was a retired Chicago fire department, I believe who was in Chicago during those events. But before any of that could have been resolved, his home address, his phone number, his, his, his wife's name, all of that was boom online. Yeah. So no, if somebody really, really wants to find where you are, you know, clearing yourself off of these, the white pages dot coms and these websites isn't necessarily going to help you. Yeah. But if somebody in the heat of the. Has such easy access to your personal information that they can put it, blah. Yeah. That's far more big of a problem to me. And it's just, you know, I also use the analogy and I, I, I overuse this analogy. It's not mine by any stretch, but it's the campers running away from a mayor. You know, the camper doesn't have to outrun the Barry's guy or on the other camper. When it comes to getting hacked, embezzled, having your things stolen, having your identity stolen, it's the easiest targets that are going to get hit. Yeah. So when we have a massive breach, like T-Mobile just had, or target head years ago, or home Depot or whoever those, all of those pay sites and all of that information just goes into these massive jumbles of data and the more data points available about you and the easier it is to find your information, the more of a mark you become. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, regardless I'm a mark, anybody's a mark. If you hit them at the right time with the right cycle, And the right sense of danger and the well-crafted message, you know, nothing's unhackable. No, one's unhackable. So that's why it concerns me. Just because to throw your hands up and say, who cares, who cares? Everybody's on the internet. True. But it's not that binary. It's not that black and white, the more in danger you are. I think the more susceptible you are and the difference between perfectly fine and nothing happened. So I don't care. My dad is online and oh my God, people are threatening my wife's life. They're outside my house. That's one post these days, no one has to vet it.

Josh Boone: 35:11

Yeah. And people don't realize how much information is just easily accessible in these databases. Like there's the website. Like I think it's dot com or something like that. Yeah. It's like, you just put in your email address and like, it's just like, oh shit. Okay. There's been a lot of leaks and I've sent that to a couple people. Cause they're like, oh yeah. Like somebody tried to fraudulently log into my account or something. I'm like, okay, first of all, get last pass or something like that. Use different passwords for everything. So that's step one. I said, second of all here, put your email address in there. And then they're like, oh my God, I'm on like 17 of these. And I'm like, well, there you go. Like, you're, you're in a CSV file somewhere, you know?

Jay Smith: 35:49

So the targeted attempts to steal, use those quite a bit to they'll they'll contact someone and say, you know, we use your, your password summer 1, 2, 3, this on this account. And we've been watching you on your computer doing nasty stuff, and we're going to send pictures of, into your family. It may sound silly, but when you get that message and you see a password that you recognize is one you use for many years at reptilian brain takes over. Oh, and that's what they count on.

Josh Boone: 36:20

Yeah, no, for real, I had literally two weeks ago I had a friend call me and had almost the exact same email and they have. Pretty tight corporate job. And they were just like, well, you know, I I'm worried about this. And I'm like, dude, they didn't, they didn't do that. I'm like they literally take copy and paste, insert the syntax auto-generated and it just gets sent out to hundreds of thousands of people, because they're looking for the low-hanging fruit people that are going to go on there and pay them a Bitcoin because they're fucking terrified. Like it's like, they're not, they're not going to take the time individually to do that with thousands of people just to see if, you know, if you're a high, high mark, a very high target. Yeah. They might do that because it's worth the money. But you know, the average person like is just not going to do it. And so it's sent out in mass and this is a person whose critical thinking skills were pretty high, you know, but it just still got worried and I'm just like, wow, okay. If it's that's working on them, how many, how many other people, you know?

Jay Smith: 37:16

Yeah. It's tough for us when it's not in the moment. It relies so heavily on the psychology of the moment. And I've, I've dealt with business owners, successful business owner for 30 years. And he was very concerned because he was contacted by the us Marshall service. Somebody murdered somebody in Florida using his social security number and he needed to go get some gift cards to send it to the U S Marshall service. So they could fix this online without him going to Florida. As he's telling me this whole thing, I'm like, and I, I really want to like, how did this get through your, and it's just, it's the moment if someone's got you on the phone and it's still our human nature to trust what we hear, especially if someone's speaking directly to us, if it's online, your filters are a little bit more, you know, you can see the ads pop up or whatever, but if somebody is speaking directly to you and knows things about you, and then they start escalating the conversation, threatening your safety, your health, your money, your family, how you react is different than how you and I will react to the same story. Yeah. But I, I had to walk them through the steps. The U S marshal service wants a, a gas gift card.

Josh Boone: 38:28

Oh shit. You're right. It doesn't make sense.

Jay Smith: 38:31

Right. But, but in that instance, they had time and I'm not, I don't want to be condescending about it. Yeah, for sure. I've, I've clicked on phishing emails. Everyone has, but if you just like walk them through it, say, I know that's, that's very scary, but even if they do get your money, you're going to get it back in some way. Or they're only going to get so much. We, and that's what I try to tell people when the toughest one right now is where people are contacted directly because somebody has enough information about them and they say they're with their bank. They say, we, we see a hacker in your account right now. We need to move your money. And I T I tell everybody the number one, tell them you're hanging up. And you're calling back period. And anybody who tries to dissuade you from doing that, that's it right there. They're a scammer, because any company would encourage you to do.

Josh Boone: 39:19

Yeah. I actually had somebody that almost got me a couple of years ago. I, I had a hospital visit that I had and said that they were going to run it through my insurance and whatever else. And I just never really heard back. And I thought I sent a payment, but then they're like, well, you know, we're still have this payment and it wasn't that much. It's like 200 bucks or something like that. And they're like, so like, we're just calling you to do that. And I was like, oh, okay. I was about to do it. And then, you know, the Erica was right and everything else. And I'm like, all right, but I'm like, you know what, I'm out and about right now, I'll call you tomorrow. And I called them back and they're like, yeah, dude, you already paid that. Like, you're fine. And I gave them the number and they're like, yeah, this has been happening a couple of times. I'm like, fuck, man. Like even, even with my bullshit detector, pretty fine tuned at this point, like they almost got me and I was like, damn. And I was smart too. It was a low hanging fruit, but here's the thing I still don't really quite get. It's like, how the fuck did they know that I had a hostile. Yeah.

Jay Smith: 40:14

Oh, openness, three buckets that shows a list of who knows. That's just it, you don't know. And then the, all those other data points about you are available. So that, that's kinda my point to people when they like, who cares, you know, it's everywhere. What can I do? You control what you can, so you're not the lowest hanging fruit.

Josh Boone: 40:32

You're talking about the filters, like what would you say that somebody could do to kind of like upgrade their filters, I guess so they could spot this shit. Personal filters. Yeah.

Jay Smith: 40:41

Yeah. I mean, it, it comes down to getting away from the gamified way that we have trained ourselves to deal with apps, information, email. I'm the same way that if there's a red number on any of my emails, it drives me nuts. I have. I'll go through and click all the unreads in my spam folder. Cause I can't stand seeing that number there. Oh shit. So you're one of

Josh Boone: 41:01

those inbox, zero people.

Jay Smith: 41:03

No, I've got shitloads, but I've put them in folders thought hookah, so I'd have to see them or ever interact with them again, but I've got to, but yeah, so we, I mean, honestly it comes down to reclaiming our psychology and, and saying, okay. Before when a police department wanted to talk to me about something, I had the time, the wherewithal to contact an attorney, go down to the police department, put my mind right. With where I was that time and what was going on. Not they're calling me right now and I have to wire them a gift card for whatever. Yeah. Nothing there, unless unless your life is literally being threatened right now. That's the biggest part is to just think about what you're going through and what you're doing. And if, if it means putting a pause to the conversation or the interaction and just. I understand what you're saying. Safety department at my bank. I'm going to call the bank back right now and we'll do, and they'll say something like, oh, those departments aren't open where they were the after hours emergency team. Whatever's okay. That's fine. It can wait until tomorrow. Yeah. I'll call I'll call tomorrow. It's a bank. My money's insured. We're good. Don't worry about it. And the more they push they'll start floundering or they'll just hang up on you if you give them any challenge, because they're a volume business too. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 42:18

Yeah. It's like I said, there's, there's a lot of marks out there. Just move on to the next one. Well,

Jay Smith: 42:24

fruit and I do, I do think that the, the companies at large bear some responsibility to help us fix these.

Josh Boone: 42:31

Yeah. At the incentive structure is just not there. You know, I've said this many times on the podcast, but it's like, you need like a Marcus or really as type stoic, altruistic person to come in and just, you know, or like a George Washington type, it's just like a better example is probably even Lincoln, you know, like completely doing something that like, most people don't want because they're like this needs to happen. And it's just like, who's going to take that arrow. Like who's going to like sacrifice themselves. And it's just like, it, it doesn't really happen much. I mean, the only kind of people, it seems like they can get away with that on such a high level as somebody like an Elon Musk, you know, like, but he's an anomaly, you know? And, and a lot of people would think that he would say he could do a lot more, but I'm just saying like, One of the only people I see that actually can like, just do whatever the fuck they want and like make it work. So it's all that almighty leverage. Yeah. I'm curious. Do you have any thoughts on like things like neuro link? Like as we start interfacing more and more with say like AI, but also like, I am so fucking conflicted on this because on one hand I am a tech nerd and I love the idea of being able to plug into the matrix and digest an audio book like instantaneous. Like it is amazing. I love that idea and I love the idea of being able to communicate more purely. So that's one of the things when w when Musk was on Rogan, they were talking about like, the fact that, like, you could literally just communicate in. Like pure intention to one person and was so much of the conflict that we have is things getting lost in translation and people thinking that there's bad acting when maybe there's just a misunderstanding and that is like beautiful. But on the other hand, it's like it could turn into a dystopian nightmare where like your brain can literally get hacked. Does that worry you?

Jay Smith: 44:13

In my lifetime, not as much like it is only a matter of time, you know, honestly, if we can survive the climate long enough, it's only a matter of time before. Of course the brain could get downloaded or uploaded like you're talking about, but the problem is that's going to come from a very resource, rich source, somebody who, an Elon Musk and apple, or one of those, and they have their agenda, they have their power, they have the data it's not going to come from. Spaceship. Who's going to say, oh, there you go. Yeah. It's the spread to all of humanity. It's either going to be only available to the ultra rich, or it's going to be available to everybody, but it's going to be used as, as a further social control or whatever. Eventually like look in a hundred years, do you believe the Taliban or whoever won't have their own apple in a hundred years? So when you start getting tech giants in countries that don't necessarily have the best human rights record, what starts happening to that?

Josh Boone: 45:14

I mean, that's a huge concern of mine for like China, you know? Sure. That's a big concern of mine. Like I, I worry about, you know, the social credit score and all this other stuff. It's like that shit like terrifies the fuck out of me. Like even, you know, it's one of the reasons why, like, I've been just diving into this de-centralization so much because like, there's, there's a dude who runs a channel on YouTube called internet comment etiquette. And he literally just kind of trolls people and just goes on the comments sections and like deconstructs things. He just tries to find just crazy people. You know, and whatever it is, like the people that were drinking, like literally drinking bleach when COVID started, you know, just like this weird, you'll find these like weird subcultures, but he did a video on like ivermectin and like he was talking about, he can't even mention the fucking word in the title, even if he's doing like, basically almost like a parody, even if it's a comedy channel, he can't even mention the word because he's worried about him getting demonetized and getting. After he, he spent a lot of time doing a 30 minute intercut video and then it just gets taken down and I'm like, man, that's scary when these platforms have so much, like, I, you know, I remember when Alex Jones got like deplatformed. I was like, man, I don't like this because like, Alex Jones is an easy boogeyman. He's a really easy boogeyman, but then that's a slippery slope. Sure. You know, it goes back to the you're talking about the dude who got doxed in, in Chicago, that was a false positive. So it's just like, that can happen to so many people. It could.

Jay Smith: 46:44

And that's the, that's the real, it's the attention that, you know, going all the way back to, what do we do? How can you fix it? The problem is for that gentlemen, it took a catastrophic event in his life. And now of course he's a massive proponent for privacy. He's paying out of his own pocket with a lawyer to help mitigate this, this disaster. But until it hits one of the. That doesn't have a high enough score in my attention category for me to deal with that or to worry about it. But when it does, it's from zero to a hundred miles an hour, there's not, unless, you know, it's just some kind of whatever doxing, you know, somebody gives you a bad Google review on your, your mom and pop up,

Josh Boone: 47:25

but then it's almost like a car accident or like an untimely death or something. And like, somebody didn't have their affairs in order. And you're like, you already got a job and you've got kids and you've got a mortgage, you got all this stuff going on. And then like, you know, somebody close to you dies. You're the executor of the will. Oh, shit. I got to deal with all this crap. Now I got to go back and get rid of all their stuff and grieve, first of all, you know, like you're dealing with that. And then you got to deal with all the legal stuff and then going through, I mean, it's just a nightmare. I feel like. Kind of a similar, in a way situationally, you just, you're not expecting it. You know, you're not expecting that to happen, but then when it happens, it's utter chaos. So like, I don't know, like what, what can I do to, to like deal with that proactively? Like, it sounds like you got that app coming out, which sounds dope. But other than that,

Jay Smith: 48:10

so, so there's for larger companies that sign on with us, we do workshops and whatnot. But the number one thing I tell everybody is freeze credit right off the bat with the top three agencies, you can do it with, I think there's five or six other.

Josh Boone: 48:21

Can you just do that indefinitely?

Jay Smith: 48:23

Yeah. Oh, and it can, because you can unlock it within minutes and you can actually do it in a temporary time. So say it's Equifax, Experian or TLO. Those are the three TransUnion. Those are the three major credit reporting agencies. It takes like five minutes on each website to do a full freeze and you can choose, you know, a week, a month or whatever, but I just leave them frozen. And then when I need to get a mortgage or buy a car or get a credit card, which is the only reason why my credit needs to be. Yeah. Yeah. If you're not using it, it does not hurt you to have your credit frozen. And that's, that's one of the biggest hurdles people get. They, they think that that's going to have a negative impact on their credit score. It does not interesting not having your credit available to open new accounts, unless you jumped through a lot of hoops. And if you forget your pain or your sign-on, it can be difficult to get if you go, and you'll forget, because you'll need to go get a new cell phone account and they run your credit and you'll forget it. And then you go, oh yeah, I got a call. Oh boy. Now they've made it easier. But so that, that right there puts the firewall over your money or at least future money. Now somebody is going to call you up and socially engineer you into your bank account. You know that they're going to get whatever you've got right now, but they can't open anything in your name. And that also goes for the fraudulent unemployment claims. Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. So I do that. I would opt out of as many marketing as you possibly can. There's actually one website where you can go to, to opt out of marketing. A lot of people don't realize is the three credit bureaus. They make a lot of their money off of selling your information to credit card providers and other companies who market directly to you. Fun. Yeah. So we're, we're used to that from apps. Of course, you know, all the things you do, all of a sudden, you know, you mentioned medieval broadswords and now all of a sudden that's going to start popping up on your phone or, you know, the little funny social experiments where dudes in their fifties, in the middle of Alabama start talking about feminine hygiene products for three days, and then sure enough, they'll show their phone and that's all you see, right? Yeah. Well, what people don't realize is much of the marketing that you get in the mail comes from the three credit agencies selling your information to marketers.

Josh Boone: 50:31

So how do you, how do

Jay Smith: 50:32

you opt out of that? There's a, there's a a single link. I've got it somewhere. I'll shoot it to you, but I think it's direct mail marketing opt-out or something like that. And they actually require you to print this form out, sign it and mail it to. Was there anything that now you can opt out online? I think it's for one year, but if you'd mail in the form, it's a seven-year opt-out so they can't, you can't even permanently say, look, I don't want ValPak's and credit cards and all that other bullshit and my mail, but, you know, I mailed it in and I did that. So those are the two big things. And then you already mentioned that I get a password manager. Yeah. If you know your password, that's not good because that's the first point of attack. And by the time we hear that there's two terabytes of personal information from T-Mobile or home Depot or whoever that is already been filtered through by the criminals. They don't announce that they stole this stuff the day they stole it, that doesn't do them any good. They, they use the data as much as they need to. They just resell it and then just for street credit or whatever they go on and say, you know, eh, we stole all the target data here it is. Yeah. Yeah. Those are the main things. And then of course, you know, because the reason why I've, I've stuck with building this other app. You know, opt out of all these websites, get yourself off of these websites and just don't be a part of the 99%. That's a big target.

Josh Boone: 51:52

what would you say to somebody who's just like, okay. I used to like shit post a lot on like all these different, like things. And I might've like dropped away too many hints on like who I actually am. And now I've got a an actual like adult career and I'm worried that people going back, this actually happened to me once there was an online profile I had and I was just like, yeah, I'm just going to delete this. I realized that the email address I signed up for on I no longer have access to. And I'm like, fuck something like, how do you, is there anything that somebody can do in situations like that?

Jay Smith: 52:26

I mean, that's when you really need boutique service there are kind of hacky ways to do it. You know, if it's a, if it's a comment section on some online. And you can't get your account taken out of there or can't get it taken down. You go in there and just flood it with more, you know, just garbage comments to just bury it in a sea of useless information. Now, if you are fortunate enough to get something taken off a website, you can contact Google to recash the site to re crawl it and get it out of their cash, the internet way back machine archive, dot org, things like that, that you mentioned, that's a, that's a tougher sell, unless you can prove that there's some illicit, you know, under-aged content or, or something they're probably not. But I mean, unless you were just prolific in your personal name was tied to it. If you said it was an old email. If, if I'm doing a background investigation or somebody is doing one currently, they're only looking for the most part of that, unless it's a deep, deep dive in which you're a high value asset, but even still that's another key point is everyone needs to realize that it's all. Like, even if that's not true, go into it with that assumption. Cause there, I mean there are, there are people creating scrapers and bots every day that do really cool stuff. Like the moment anybody who's probably in the top 50,000 on Twitter tweet something it's automatically pulled stuck in a day. You cannot delete what you posted, not if you're of interest to anybody. So, and that's the same for Tik TOK. That's the same for Instagram. And that's what I tell people, particularly teenagers, because they presume that a Snapchat or a, a burner text now type thing that hides their phone number that doesn't, that's not hiding anything. It's, it's obvious skating it from our eyes right now. But if, if somebody like me's been called or that family has hired a lawyer to put a stop to what you're doing, they've got money out of pocket. You're going to be, you're going to be found because all those telecom they share it. So

Josh Boone: 54:29

I'm going to sign up for proton mail. I'm going to use a VPN and I'm going to have a burner cell phone. If they actually signed all that up, they probably think they're pretty safe. I mean, what were all the holes there? It

Jay Smith: 54:40

takes a lot of effort, a whole lot of effort, you know, there's more data points. You, you bought, you bought that SIM card off of wherever with something that identifies you eventually not you. Okay. You use crypto, you did it over VPN. You did it over Tor. The tremendous amount of effort that you have to expend to actually be anonymous. What, what are you actually doing? You

Josh Boone: 55:01

bought that crypto on Coinbase,

Jay Smith: 55:03

right? Your, your information is available. And it's much like talking to smaller businesses because larger businesses know this. You cannot be unhackable. Yeah. It's impossible. There's far too many points of entry. Same comes to it. When you're going to be a criminal. We see in the news fairly often, if you're watching you see criminal hackers in Eastern Europe, United States, Germany in Asia, get arrested all the time. These are people who do this all day. They've been doing it for years. They're highly, highly skilled. And yet, because everything you do is run through the internet, which several layers deep who owns all that infrastructure. Yeah. You know, even Tor. So, so yeah, if you're, if you're doing something that's going to get you enough attention, you're going to get uncovered. If somebody wants to bad enough. Now look at the, the reveal ransomware they're there. Their wallet was wiped out within two days of that, that pipeline thing they did several months ago, you know, it's, it's just what attention do you garner much? Like if, if somebody is going to target you to socially engineer you and hack you, what have you got? We can't spend our entire lives trying to constantly play defense the best way to do it is to respect the fact that the data is permanent and understand that. And just don't react whether someone's trying to engineer you or whether you've seen something online that really pisses you off. Let it piss you off. Let's just feel it. See what, see what happens when you just kind of let it flow through you rather than getting on and doing the same thing back or doxing. Something like need

Josh Boone: 56:43

that instant dopamine hit of just like raging at people.

Jay Smith: 56:47

Yeah. And there was there's one guy I've seen him quite a bit. He's, he's prolific and he's really good at what he's doing. And he's actually ended up, I think on CNN and he's doxing people who are threatening other people in public spaces coughing on them, things like that. I, I'm not going to say right or wrong. I'm just, I'm concerned when that becomes the norm and people start getting reinforced for doing that kind of thing. Yeah. One of them is going to run a foul of either somebody who's going to do something dangerous or a state like Kentucky who's passed a law, which, and nobody knows that really, unless you're in Kentucky and paying attention, most people in Kentucky don't know it either, but the law even states that I can recover all of my legal expenses for suing you.

Josh Boone: 57:29

Yeah, that's crazy, man. I've been following like what people like Joe Rogan, like their, their whole like climb and then seeing how the online communities turn on them. It's just really fascinating to see these, these personalities and their trajectory. Man. I know Rogan talks about, he just doesn't even want to look at any of the comments you yeah. Cause it's crazy. Cause every once in a while he'll post some. And Tim Ferriss talked about this where he like, literally just commented on like a kid's wrestling match or something. Cause he's really, he did a lot of wrestling when he was a kid. And, and I guess there was just some performance that some kids wrestle wrestler did just crushed it. I mean, it's kids wrestling. It's, it's completely innocent. And there's really, how could you have a problem with that? And this one woman was just going off in the comments, talking about how it's like barbaric and it's doing this and it's putting kids in danger and how terrible he is for like promoting this. It's just like, dude. Oh my God. And I'm like, I don't know, like I will, that's why the internet comment etiquette is so good. He's just reading these comments. And you're just like, how, how are these people? Like, they're like pod people. It's like, I don't these comments, like what compels someone. To write this shit. And it's, it's, it's not it's I don't know.

Jay Smith: 58:45

I honestly don't know either, but I, but I'm starting to see it. And that, you know, when I, when we started, I was talking a little bit about just really taking a pause and I have to sift through a lot of crap when I'm doing a case, whether it's Snapchat, Instagram, whatever it is, I'm looking through a lot of crap. And I really do have to just take, pause and look at this little snapshot in time and picture that person just being a normal person, doing normal things and more and more lately, I'm just picturing them, sitting there on their phones, screaming at other people. And I have to imagine, and I know people have been saying this for 20 years. I have to imagine that it's cresting or it's going to, at some point, there's going to be some sort of Luddite type push where people like. What am I getting out of this? You know, kinda like the, the, the, the old trope where they walk outside of the cave and, you know, they see the sun and all that, you know, oh, I can actually smell things out here. You guys heard of this park thing they've got now,

Josh Boone: 59:52

what, how do you, how do you digest that? Let me, when we start here, what is the day to day look like for you?

Jay Smith: 59:59

So it's primarily I'm working of the online side of an investigation. We have our closed databases, which provides me information that people don't normally have access to you know, license plates and, and, you know, all your drivers addresses phone numbers. And then I will start an, a, an open source intelligence investigation where I will look for all online sources of information about you, because it's a very clinical process for me, and I've done it so many times. It doesn't, I mean, unless I find some. Utterly shocking, which I would immediately just turn over to the law enforcement. Yeah. For the most part, it's very clinical because as a, as a private investigator, I'm not looking for the why I'm merely providing all of the information to the lawyer or law enforcement or the client for them to do what they will with the information. So I just have to make sure that it's correct. Yeah. So that's primarily what I'm doing is just online investigations and following those threads and ensuring that I'm not students sending myself on wild goose chases. You know, my friends will make the comment that you're just doing fancy Googling, like exactly. Yeah. And that's, that's precisely what I'm doing, but I can do in five minutes, what it would take you week.

Josh Boone: 1:01:13

And part of that part of that's the tools and part of it's also just knowing how to correctly look for things. I mean, like my, my background's in search engine optimization, so it's just like it's really easy for me to find stuff when I know what to look for and I know how to use the right keywords. But it's still interesting. I spent two years traveling the country and I had just kind of I guess, tendered across America. So like, I was like

Jay Smith: 1:01:38

fantastic show. I would watch it

Josh Boone: 1:01:40

was, it was pretty fun, but you know, I would meet people and sometimes I would just like, look them up before I met with them. And. I'm not trying to be creepy about it, but I'm just like, okay, who the fuck am I meeting up with? Like, I'm sitting there like at the bar, like waiting for the person to show up. And I'm like, oh, okay. They have their Instagram here. Okay. So I, you know, I Google their Instagram and then I start seeing and they're like, oh, okay. So I'm just trying to get an ideally who this person is. And people all the time would be like, oh my God, like, how did you find that? And I'm like, how do you know that? And I'm like, because you literally tied it to your account. And then do you not realize that your name is now on your Instagram? Then I can just put in the city and the name and all this stuff comes up. Oh, you work for this place because you're on the staff page. You know, like literally it took me like a minute to find that. So it's just, yeah. I mean, it's, it's so much low-hanging fruit people just don't, they don't realize how easy it is. No.

Jay Smith: 1:02:34

Or they don't care.

Josh Boone: 1:02:35

They don't care. But then they act, they always act surprised. They're always like shocked. And I even had one or two people, the like, that feels like very invasive and I'm like, huh? Right. How is that invasive? I spent like a minute Googling, two things that you, you get, like, it's just, I dunno, it's crazy to me. Like, if it seems that invasive, then why don't you take measures to like, prevent that from happening?

Jay Smith: 1:03:00

That's the point, right? Is it feels invasive to somebody that, that you just met under positive circumstances. Yeah. If I was really pissed at you and had decided to spend an hour on finding everything I could on you, what would that look like? Would that feel invasive? Yes. Sure.

Josh Boone: 1:03:19

Yeah. Yeah. It was, it was, it was nuts. There's so much you can find, I remember I was trying to buy a house and the, the dude who was selling, it seemed really, really sketchy. And he, he actually owned the property across the street as well. So he had bought the property that I was going to buy for his. And I guess he was trying to convince them to move from whatever state they were in to come with across the street from them. And I got some weird vibes, but at first I was just like, okay, whatever, I'm buying a house from, it doesn't really matter. But then I'm like, oh, this guy's going to be my neighbor. Right. And it was pretty rural. And he was like the only real house nearby. And it's like directly across the street. So I do a background check on this guy and you know, he's got like aggravated assault. He's got, he, he apparently like beat the shit out of his baby mama. His ex-wife got divorced. He actually lost his real estate license for like Shay I'm like, yup. Okay. I'm good. No, I was backed out of that situation. I'm like, I don't want to live across the street from this guy. That sounds like a nightmare. You know, certainly so much information that you can find so easily. How do you process that though? I mean, just as a human being, like all day, just seeing all this stuff and sometimes it's probably been. And it's fine, but then I'm sure you also come across a lot of stuff that's just fucked up. So, I mean, how do you, how do you deal with that

Jay Smith: 1:04:40

much? Like we were talking for the general user. I have, I have to be even more aware of my mental state and my filters as I'm looking through this and I really do approach it in a clinical manner. And I know I've told people before, it's like, you may not realize this, but as a licensed investigator, I have the same requirements of privacy with your information as your lawyer and your clergy. I cannot divulge anything unless a court demands that I do it. And even then I may not do that. You know, it, it, that could come down to it. So I really approach it from the same angle that I would hope that medical professionals, clergy attorneys do is my role here is to provide you with all of the available. And if some of it's not the greatest information, so be it. But I've think I've become overdoing it for a couple of years on become numb to natural judgements that may arise over a person. But again, I have to keep in mind that I'm not here to, I'm not here to judge the data. I'm here to find it and provide it. Having said that though, I don't take every case.

Josh Boone: 1:05:52

What's your prerequisites for taking on a case?

Jay Smith: 1:05:55

The main filter really is. Can I provide you anything of value? That's going to do anything. If it's a, if it's a custody type situation, I'm going to talk to you extensively and, and ask, what is it you think I'm going to find work? What are you hoping? I find, what do you think I'm going to find? The more I can talk through with a potential client. And I do end up mitigating a lot of cases over the phone before I even get there. The vast majority of those are people who think there's someone in their phone or in their life. Mainly I'll just tell them how to fix it if, if that were the case, but I'll, I'll assure them that that's a very, very slim chance, but if it is the case, here's how you fix it. Because I'm not, you know, computer city, but yeah. So anything where my sense is get a little up and I think that this is a control type situation where someone else is wanting to get information, to control someone else. I'm not going to touch it. You know, that's kind of our, as, as a private enterprise, as opposed to law enforcement, that's kind of our, our nice way of there's things we don't have to get involved in. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:06:59

That control. And they want to say one of my clients. So there's some, I don't particularly like working with venture backed. Companies, because the incentive, you know, talking about the incentive again, the incentive is scale, scale, scale, grow, grow, grow, and they do a bunch of stuff. And I don't like contributing to that. There are some venture backed businesses that really have a strong culture against that. And they also have, and to have VCs that are little more responsible. But anyway, like the point is, is like, I mean, that's one of the reasons why, like, I I'm independent, I have my own business. I do whatever. It's the same thing as you, it's just like, I like having to pick the, pick the projects you take on that you feel good about, you know, it's like, why else do you have your own business? It's like, you just, I don't know. Is there ever been something that you've taken on and it's actually like changed you in some way,

Jay Smith: 1:07:45

Or deeply affected you? There was, there was one somewhat recently without getting into too much detail. You know, it was a, it was a custody type situation. And I was pointed to, you know, some, some sexual content being produced by one. But it was completely illegal and it was benign, but it was the situation where somebody from a different generation thought that that would give them leverage in court against somebody who's younger, who has a completely different view of sex work online and being kind of, not in the middle, but being in the scale between their two age groups and being in a different generation. I saw, I saw both sides of it, but I was like, I had tap out. I'm like, I can't, I can't do this. I in good conscience. I'm not providing you anything that should be presented in a court of law. Yeah. Because there's nothing illegal about what this person's doing. However, if this goes to a court of law and there's a judge there who's of a different generation has a different idea about. Could significantly impact this person's life. Yeah. And that's where I couldn't be a clinician about it. I had to make my choice as a business owner. Like this is not what I do. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:09:02

Do you think that your profession has made you more empathetic?

Jay Smith: 1:09:07

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Because I'm rarely dealing with anybody who's dealing with a good situation. Whether, whether it's my client or whether it's the person I'm investigating, it's, it's not just for unemployment background check it's for custody or it's for legal defense. So, you know, getting to know somebody who's been accused of something who is adamant, they haven't done it. And then sometimes I'll get into a case. I had one, a few months ago where everybody was lying about everything. So on, on all sides of an investigation,

Josh Boone: 1:09:43

how the hell does that go down?

Jay Smith: 1:09:46

It was exhausting. I got home because, and I finally, I called the, the, the main client, the lead attorney. And I just said, dude, I was like, you've got to, you've got to start telling people upfront that I'm going to find the information. If it's available, I'm going to find it and I'm going to vet it. That it's true. So rather than pay me eight hours of pretty high consultant fees, we could have done this into. Yeah. But I ended up running circles around everybody who was in, some of them were just silly, you know, just, just because when you're telling a story about what you've done or what's going on, or this day, or that day, you don't, you leave out the fact that you showed up seven minutes late or. Yeah. That's probably stuff that we all do, you know, just to make ourselves feel or project better than we are, or not as bad as we are, but when it comes to an investigation, those, those they're just exhausting. But when, but when I'm genuinely able to help somebody in a situation that I feel like is helpful, it does, it gives you a whole lot more empathy.

Josh Boone: 1:10:51

Yeah. I, I feel like from the outside, people would probably think it would make you more

Jay Smith: 1:10:55

I could see it. I could, I could definitely see it. I mean, there's, there's some things that I've worked for. I'm like out, it's just yucky. Like I don't, I don't like the outcome or, you know, God forbid I get too emotionally invested just in my, just helping someone. And it does not come to a good result. And as that happened, yeah. I mean, you're still dealing with a legal system. You're still dealing with tech companies to get evidence from them. God forbid, they wipe their servers every 30 days. And you know, your request finally got to them on day 35 and you're, you're dealing with a situation, you know, is like really bad. And, and you knew as soon as you heard it, you're like, okay, I can do this. I can do this. I couldn't because that's just the, that's the tech it brain. Right? I know I'm going to find all those little events. I'm going to find my way to the information I need to give this person resolution to what's going on and something, you know, there's no one working in the courthouse right now due to COVID you go in there and it's a ghost town. So things take a little longer and sometimes that stuff isn't available or somebody just didn't send it. And those are the kinds of things where once something's out of your control, it's like, yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:12:11

What if like Jesus would have done this one thing, all this could have been avoided,

Jay Smith: 1:12:15

right? Had you called me two days prior or whatever. Or had that person that I handed personally handed this to, and even stuck in a little time card at the courthouse, sent it within three days of when they should have, you know, that kind of thing.

Josh Boone: 1:12:35

What is, what has this taught you like as a human being, if

Jay Smith: 1:12:39

anything? Oh, man. I have a healthy respect for what technology does to us and what we're doing to ourselves with it. I don't discourage anybody from it. That's, that's a common question, especially when I'm talking to students or teachers or, or something like that. Like, well, you know, maybe we should just not do any of this. Like, you can't really do that. Like, Hey, you can't, you, you know, just by opting out, you're going to give a lot of your leverage away. So, but B you know, what you got to respect is you can talk to anyone in the world. You can listen to anything that's ever been created. You can see any piece of art you want right now, you can literally do anything. And if you learn some pretty basic programming, you can create just about anything. And that's amazing. So instead of blaming the Hulk for the skyscraper that went down, we probably need to look at Bruce banner because that's, who's actually in control. I don't know how we incentivize doing this correctly. I really don't. That's that's what, that's the question that constantly nags at me is who's gonna, who's going to do something that incentivizes companies to do the right thing with data, GDPR and CCPA. Those are mitigated measures, but they're not doing, you know, they're not protecting you from. Do

Josh Boone: 1:14:03

you feel confident that we're going to be able to keep up from a cybersecurity and legislation standpoint versus like, it seems to me like the trends and the evolution of everything that's happening with the technology and how it's being utilized as far outpacing, like legislation and our ability to kind of contain it. Like, do you see that? Do you agree with that? A and like, be like, do you see that continuing or do you think we're going to like somehow catch up?

Jay Smith: 1:14:32

I agree with it. I absolutely agree with it. Legislation, the way it continues to work as it has for hundreds of years, can't move near as fast as technology. Yeah. I have to imagine in the nearish future, something will, some, some kind of control will be put in place otherwise. Where, where does it stop? Right? Yeah, literally Skynet. I mean, that's, that's the only, the only natural stop to it, unless there is a way to at least control the tide is the, basically our extinction at the hands of technology. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:15:10

Are you optimistic about things?

Jay Smith: 1:15:13

Sometimes, sometimes I'm not. But really I take that. I try not to be as binary about it. I try to say, if I'm not optimistic about it, what am I foreseeing for my kids and myself it's 30 years. So I, I feel like I kind of have to be. Hmm. And occasionally, you know, I'll, I'll work with, you know, I think October, I think we're think the daisies is next on our schedule for workshops and doing this stuff with the kids and having them solve puzzles and, and having them talk about their online. Definitely can give me a much more positive outlook. Yeah. Because they're incredibly smart about what they're doing. So I'm hoping that maybe we're just the cavemen who have the really crappy wheel and the next generations, like their wheel kind of sucks. Like why don't we make it round? Yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:16:07

Walk whale. Yeah. I've been, I've had several conversations about this recently, as far as like gen Z goes. And I, I feel like they it's like a zombie apocalypse is happening right now. And you know, you and me remember what it was like before the zombie apocalypse, you know, did before times. And the zombie apocalypse sucks because we were used to how things are, but this next year, this generation grew up in the zombie apocalypse. This is all they know. And they're like, well, you know, things aren't that bad, like we'll make, do you know, they don't have that psychological trauma of it to like, no, they don't have the contract. Sure. You know, so like, I feel like in a way, yeah, they're, they're, they're going to iterate off of it. And it seems to me, gen Z is pretty skeptical and, and I think they're very skeptical and I think they, they aren't buying a lot of what, you know, society is selling them. No. And I, that makes me optimistic.

Jay Smith: 1:17:03

Absolutely. And, you know, and, and it just occurred to me, you know, the zombie apocalypse that we're in right now, perhaps that's the kind of event for their generation or afterwards, like, fuck this, I'm going to a music festival. I'm going to be outside. I am sick of looking at my teacher on zoom and everyone else on zoom. I hate zoom. So then companies who have like, oh, finally, we got everybody on zoom. Let's have our 45 minute meeting where we don't do Jack shit. Yeah. And the gen Z will be like, why? Yeah. I'm good

Josh Boone: 1:17:34

dog. No.

Jay Smith: 1:17:35

Yeah. Yeah. Send me a slack message and I'll handle it. And we don't have to do.

Josh Boone: 1:17:39

Yeah. So I'm really, I'm really excited to see that generation kind of come to power and just see how disruptive they are. Cause like, I feel like I'm all such fucking curious to see what happens when all the boomers die. You know, like, well, I don't, I don't, they don't need to die. They just need to like, not be in positions of massive amount of power, you know, like it's, it's th they're in the before, before times. And I, I feel like, you know, there's some exceptions, but most of them, it just seems like don't understand how things work now and they want to keep it the way that it used to be. You know? So I don't know. It's like this whole concept of make America great. Again, it's like, was America for that? Great. You know, like, like you know, w the, the perception that they have, and I'm not even talking like politically necessarily, I'm just saying like, as a. Was it ever really what God, what's the way that Dan Carlin, the guy from hardcore is, or I think he describes it as like this Jeffersonian persona of America, like the ideal of America and all these things it's like, did that actually ever exist or was that just kind of the PR and that's something that I think about a lot is terms of, like, we, it seems like we all want things to be this ideal that never really actually was, but we could create that, you know, we could create that. Yeah. How's it been like working with the kids? Like how did that get started?

Jay Smith: 1:18:59

So a person reached out to me, I'm friends with a lot of police officers here in Louisville, just because my kids went to Catholic school with them. And there's a lot of Catholic schools in Louisville. It's a big Catholic town. And one of them who's a friend of mine reached out to me and put me in contact with a den mother at one of the local schools or pack leader, I think. Because they usually have a police officer who would come and do these workshops with their Scouts and she was unavailable. So that's just kinda how it started. So I worked with that troop and I just created a nice little slide deck. Talk to them for about two hours, gave them, gave him stickers. It was amazingly fun. But then I started getting calls from other den leaders that pack leaders to do that at other schools, because most of them were kind of centered around one community school. And then over time, it just evolved to working with the girl Scouts of Kentuckiana, which was based here in Louisville. One of the leaders had shot my information up and then right as we were about to start doing in-person events COVID happened. So she said, you know, let's try it with zoom. And it worked, it worked fairly well. And then we can have Scouts from all of these. And I'm probably going to go ahead and record this content so they can do it on demand too. Yeah, that'd be cool. And it's a community thing. It's not a money-making thing, but I'm, I'm a natural, I'm a teacher at heart. That's what I've always loved doing. It's just not what I ended up doing as a vocation. But I, you know, I, I sit on the board at one high school. I work with another high school. We're going to be doing a lot of stuff in October for bullying awareness and harassment month. I'll be doing, you know, doing a lot of information for vice principals, principals, how to deal with the apps, stuff like that. But really, I just love talking about this stuff, particularly to people who are interested in doing something better with it,

Josh Boone: 1:20:48

talking with the principles, everything like how are the schools dealing with all this right now?

Jay Smith: 1:20:53

It's tough. They've got, they've got so much going. I mean, just the logistics of dealing with constantly changing lists of who can and cannot come in to school. Oh, wow. Just the logistics of that. And, and, and, you know, here locally, of course, they're providing lunches for kids that are homebound too, because of COVID or just all of that going on in addition to their regular task list of things that must be done every day that did not, did not diminish at all because of COVID it only increased. So we're kind of on a we're on a little bit of a breather with the in-person stuff, just because they don't have time for me. And, and totally understandable. What they're primarily struggling with is the different ways in which bullying and harassment enter the school. And it's always a different app or an app they haven't heard of, or, you know, a calculator app. That's actually a hidden messaging app, things like that. So it's, it's just educating them on what those things are. And, and also the steps to be taken when some serious harassment is going on.

Josh Boone: 1:21:57

How do think, how do they deal with that? When that happens? It's

Jay Smith: 1:22:01

tough. For schools in particular, because they've also got that whole dynamic of the parents and the family and how engaged they are or whether they believe it's bullying at all. And that's a, that's a big problem too, is on the other side of it. Like that's not bullying get over it that get over an idea. Well, in today's society, harassment is pretty, pretty clearly defined. And you can say get over it all the way until you lose that court case and are shelling out some money. How did those,

Josh Boone: 1:22:31

how did those situations typically resolve? I mean, I could definitely see somebody being like, oh, we used to do that back in the day. Like, they're just kidding kids, but then, you know, then you got like, you know, some poor teenager that's like, you know, hating themselves. Maybe self-harming

Jay Smith: 1:22:48

there was a documentary. I can't remember if it was Netflix or Hulu called bully and you watch it it'll will enrage you. Just the, the, the lack of taking things seriously. In the way I hope to deal with things like that is to educate everybody that every on the permanence of data and also the steps they need to take diminishing it. And, and you know, that that's going to happen because it's just the first natural defense mechanism like, oh, you know, it's no big deal. You know, we used to actually punch each other. Okay. The world is just, that's the way the world is now. Good, good, bad. Or, or whatever is people take their mental health more seriously now than they did when we were children. Yeah. And they, they take the, the health and welfare of their children much more seriously now, too. And basically once somebody has established that, what you're doing is not okay. It's not okay. Yeah. And that's where we get into the feedback loop and, and everybody's just shoring up their defenses and building a tower as opposed to taking a step back. Oh, okay. Me and my camp don't really have a right to impact those people in this way. And they're not doing anything that impacts me anyway, but that's a, that's a hill to climb when there are already emotions involved and people are already angry at each other. And that's where the schools find themselves in the middle is they're arbitrating between two families. When this stuff gets that bad, when a lawyer gets involved and I get involved, that's where you've kind of got the, the line. Like if, if you have not been able to resolve this in a humanistic manner between each other, then you're getting professionals involved who are not cheap. And attorneys, attorneys cost way more than I do, but I'm not cheap either who pays for that, by the way, generally the family who's bringing the action. But in, in many cases they will also seek their legal. In return on that action. And now, and so that's, that's why it took so much interest on this Senate bill that was signed back in June for doxing and Kentucky, because that happens a lot with, with adolescents to say, this is where she lives, you know, y'all should go do something. And so that's why, that's why I was like, you know, not only do we have these civil actions that we deal with where, you know, your child, or you have been harassing this person to the point where they actually paid an attorney or an investigator to gather evidence, to present a court, to get a court order against you, you know, then, then it was kind of up to the judge and up to the two, whichever specific statutes may have been violated, but with the new doxing bill, you're talking serious money now, and somebody can Sue for anything it's. So it's, it's proven damages in addition to, you know, whatever kind of harm you did in addition to legal fees. So there's really a lot less. Cost to bringing action up front.

Josh Boone: 1:25:50

What, what ramifications does that have for journalists? Like, for example, it sounds like the doxing bill is amazing, but is there any way that that could be overreach on that? Absolutely.

Jay Smith: 1:26:02

And it's, and the press is the one who has, has pressed back on it. It could, but from my, from the way I read it, my understanding of it is, you know, it has, you not only have to prove, you know, who put your personal information out there, but that it was done to harass threatened or negatively impact you. So it kind of hits that libel kind of thing where, you know, you have to prove that the intent was to cause damage. Then that's where the press is probably pretty safe. Now, the people who parade as press. Put on a Shire on and, you know, put on a suit and tie and film things that look like they're a newscast. They're not going to be protected because it wouldn't take the best attorney in the world to establish that they are posting someone's personal information in order to harass, threaten or harm them.

Josh Boone: 1:26:55

Yeah. I think, I think the distinction would probably be like, did they do their due diligence on the fact checking first? And do they have a valid reason to be publicly displaying this? Because if you can't, if you can't justify those two things, then you're strange as doxing someone for basically the fact just being a troll, you know, it's, you know, just an archivist it's like, it doesn't make any sense. So yeah, I mean, and that, and then that's the way that the bills the legislation is set up. I mean, that makes total sense to me. And that sounds like it's a net positive. So

Jay Smith: 1:27:26

yeah, it, it it was a written originally due to the case of the teenager we had from Kentucky up at the camp. Facing off with the native American a couple of years ago, he was from Kentucky and he, he got some pretty brutal online treatment, which isn't shocking.

Josh Boone: 1:27:44

Yeah. Didn't that turn out to be completely misconstrued. Oh yeah.

Jay Smith: 1:27:48

In, in many ways, I mean, it was, it was, it was twisted all around, depending on which outlet you were watching. It was amazing that anybody knows what the hell was going on. But so that, that legislative action was initially just for minors, which I would absolutely support it even then. But over time it evolved to why only minors. If you're putting someone's personal information online to threaten, harass, or cause them harm. Why is that? Okay. Regardless of their age. So, yeah, I'm all for it. I'm just, again, watching this happen. On Tik TOK, where there's there's professional doctors now who have followings and in t-shirts and swag, it's a lot of people on Kentucky get on, on Tik, talk and speak their mind. And it's only a matter of time before someone talks as one of them. W

Josh Boone: 1:28:44

what's the what's the point of just like having a tech talk and doxing people? I mean, is it just the troll aspect? Is it just,

Jay Smith: 1:28:50

it's the other side of the coin? So people, people see the people see things that get them very upset. They see people who, you know, espouse certain values that are totally against what they believe in. And some of them also have that, that dopamine hit of getting followers and getting loves and likes and follows. And then, oh, check out my Instagram, oh, look, I'm building an e-course that's the extreme version, but they fall into the same loop. Like we're all susceptible to the same tricks of technology that put us where we are. And I think they're just kind of a natural reaction. So you can only have so many people that are doing something that's so far at the end of one spectrum before another group of people is going to rise up and in clash. Yeah.

Josh Boone: 1:29:37

What's your relationship with like technology? Like how do you, how do you personally, just as a human being, like what, how do you cope? I mean, for me, it's like, I, I I've had to limit it significantly and it's not even just online. Like I even noticed for myself, I listened to podcasts and audio books religiously, which has massively, massively benefited me as a human being, particularly the audio books. Like, you know, you said you read a lot of nonfiction, I'm the same way. I'm constantly learning. And it is fantastic for me, but also I realized that like every waking. Like last year, for example, every waking second that I wasn't on a call talking with like my fiance or like, you know, doing whatever else. If I was doing anything else, I just have my AirPods in. And I was like listening to an audio book or a podcast. And I started realizing it's almost like the temperature was rising and like, I just needed a fucking break. So now I've had to like kind of limit that and put that governor on and be like, okay, well, if I'm like doing the dishes, okay, I'll listen to a podcast or something, but otherwise it's like, I need that space to just relax. But what is your relationship with technology at this point, since you have such a holistic view of it dealing with it everyday?

Jay Smith: 1:30:47

Oh, I still, I still struggle with controlling my own much the same to the point where if on, on some occasions we'll be going, going out to lunch or something like that, and I'll realize my phone's upstairs or downstairs. And I'm just like, let's try something, just leave it. And as I'm walking to my truck, it's almost like, I feel. The sole of my body being pulled back to the

Josh Boone: 1:31:08

house. It's like my goal I'm in the ring, you know?

Jay Smith: 1:31:11

Absolutely. Like, and as I'm driving away, but then there's this, there's this invisible wall that I drive through it and like, oh man, this is all right. And I need to be more aware of seeking that feeling out because, you know, I did get rid of all notifications on my apps. I don't see when they, you know, there's a red number on it. I don't see it because that would tempt me to click. I can't have that hanging. Chad. I have to S I have to get rid of that. So I just took all those notifications off. I removed social media apps unless I have to have it. So Instagram, you know, there's not much of a web interface there. I have to have it on my phone for research. Take talk again. Same that same idea. But it's, if I, you know, if I'm doing an investigation with an app and I no longer need it, because it's something that. And edge case on deleted. I don't need it, but being that I'm also a coder and I'm always constantly trying to create and create some kind of new Python script that does something cool. I don't do a good job of shutting it off and putting things away. And I, and I have to do better.

Josh Boone: 1:32:16

It's it's hard, man. It's hard. Like, there's just so many things there because then like, for me, it's like, I have LinkedIn on my phone, you know? Okay. That's a business thing I'm being productive, you know? Like, and then so yeah, I've had to do the same thing. I've removed all notifications off everything. Dude, email removing the email off of Gmail app. No notifications has been a fucking shit. Oh my God. I, I wish I would have done that years ago. I was always worried about being like, oh, the client needs me right away or whatever. And I'm like, that's not a fucking important. It's not like I just check it a couple of times a day and that's all I need to do. You know, somebody urgently needs to get ahold of me. They know that. And they know that is a trunk car that they should only pull, you know, pull every once in a while, you know, like, so it's, it, it works out. But I would say that for me, I'm kind of optimistic in the longterm about our relationship with technology, but I'm I think the way to getting there is going to be very bumpy and I'm kind of pessimistic more on the short term. It's interesting. Cause the people that are around like I'm 31. So it's like the people that are around my age and older, I feel like we're kind of at a point, most of the people that I know, at least it could just be selection bias with my group, but all kind of around the same time independently are just like, yeah, I'm deleting my Facebook. Yeah. I'm getting off of this. Yeah. I'm putting the notifications off where I just feel like we've done. We've we've done this simulation so many times every single day where we're just like, this is not serving me anymore. But I feel like. Younger kids in a way, like they haven't had as many iterations, but also they have a different relationship with it. So I don't know. It's interesting. What, what, what's kind of top of mind for you just like in general.

Jay Smith: 1:34:01

Honestly, it's, it's, it's looking forward to, you know, some final resolution on this pandemic because I believe as we've kind of talked around about I'm hopeful that this will, like, people will get the bins from technology. Yeah. Like once you, you can go safely and not just, not just the, the virus itself, but after a couple of years, when hopefully everybody calms the fuck down and there's not, you know, a reason to scream at everybody at all times. And I've just gotta be hopeful that's coming. Yeah. Because we're not all cooped up in our houses talking to a screen for this reason or that reason. I'm just hopeful that people. Find a new appreciation. And maybe that we've, we've had a little bit of a bubble with apps and social media, and that, that pops a little bit and people will just go out and be again and go to a wine festival or go to the pumpkin patch or just, just do real things.

Josh Boone: 1:35:02

I think that like being able to go out and go to like a festival, like you're saying, or like go out and like meet people and do all this. Like, that is a thing where like you can connect and bond over with a shared mutual experience that you can get past all the gamification and the tribalism and the political bullshit and realize that like we're all far more fucking alike than we are different. Absolutely. You know, it's just sad to me. Like there are people that I know. That, you know, they've root for different teams politically, if you will, or like with a pandemic. And I have very different views on how we should approach it. Or even what the cause of it is or whatever. And I'm like, you guys would totally be friends if you just removed all that, you know? And, and so like, I'm looking forward to when hopefully we get past a little of that and, and people can kind of connect on things again. That's

Jay Smith: 1:35:54

what it is. We've lost. We've lost the idea that there's a middle. Yeah. We're existing in a binary world right now. And that, you know, that's what I'm seeing in some of these investigations. It's like, what, what went sideways that, what are you even screaming about? Like, it's a cantaloupe, like what, you know, and that's just a term to throw in there, but honestly, it's, it's just a thing. That's a thing. That's not a person. And I just have to hope that once we're through this, God willing, we'll get through this. Which if we don't, this is a pointless exercise anyway. I mean, cause the shit once we're through this, I'm hoping that there is some sort of snap back from living and maybe it took an event like this that forced us to live everything online for us to open our eyes afterward. Like, fuck, I was way too much into that. You know, I need to go out here and actually hear some birds chirp for awhile.

Josh Boone: 1:36:53

Oh brother. I think that's a good place to wrap up. Is there, is there anything that you, you wanna, you want to plug or how can people reach

Jay Smith: 1:36:59

you? So my, my Kentucky pie site is AIG disco.com and just, you know, be on the lookout for bear trace. You know, we'll be competing with, with the other data removal sites, but we're never going to share your information and we're not going to take any advertising money from the sites that are showing you information. That's kind of our value. And we're a veteran owned business.

Josh Boone: 1:37:20

Oh, hell yeah. That sounds awesome. Put links to both of those in the show notes and thank you so much until next time they would do a next round in person and get some, get some drinks.

Jay Smith: 1:37:29

We do. We do have some bourbon down here. I'll be glad to hook you up.

Josh Boone: 1:37:33

Hell you do, man. I'm looking forward to it.

Jay Smith: 1:37:35

Great. Thanks a lot, Josh. All my

Josh Boone: 1:37:37

friend. Thank you. All righty. And that is it for this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can follow us on Spotify or apple podcast or wherever the hell you like podcast. But the best thing you can actually do is just share this with a friend. If you think somebody would get value out of this, just share the love. And that's the best thing you can do to kind of help us out until next time PCL.