Cybersecurity and Society | Insights from Lux Blox Inventor Mike Acerra

[00:00:04] Hey everybody, this is David Mauro, the creator of Cyber Crime Junkies, and we have an exciting announcement for our podcast listeners and viewers. Our non-fiction true crime book, Moving Target, The Art of Online Camouflage, was just published. Three years, over 400 interviews, one book that has turned into three, a new trilogy. It's about Stevie Parker, a successful leader, mother, and daughter.

[00:00:31] She does everything right until cybercriminals lead her right where they want her, making the same mistakes most of us made this week. And by the end, she gets out of range. Book one is out now, available on Amazon. Book two comes out this summer. Getting Out of Range was only chapter one of her story. When you read it, you'll see why. We are all Stevie Parker. Start with book one. Give us your feedback.

[00:00:58] If you like it, leave us a review on Amazon. There's a link in the description. Thank you for being a cybercrime junkie. Did you know your body makes trillions of decisions on its own every second without asking you? Trillions. Heartbeats, cells divide, immune system fights off infections you'll never know about.

[00:01:28] All on autopilot. And out of all that, you maybe get one tiny sliver of free will. One little window where you can actually get to choose your actions. And what do we do? Most people give it away. To habit. To blind guidance. To doom scrolling. To clicking whatever lands in their inbox at 447 on a Thursday.

[00:01:57] Because the day was garbage and you just want to go home. If you haven't noticed, nobody gets fished on a Monday morning after a good night's sleep. It's always on Thursdays or Fridays. And always in the late afternoon. Right about 20 minutes after your brain has checked out. Cyber criminals know this. They're not hackers in hoodies.

[00:02:24] They're organized crime and a lot smarter than you think. And in their world, you have a name. You're considered a mark. A target. So we sat down with Italian-American philosopher and inventor, Mike Acera, to find out why we keep handing over the only freedom we've got. What he told us? That's the part nobody wants to say.

[00:02:53] So we'll explain the quiet part out loud today. This is Cybercrime Junkies. And now, the show. How are you? Yeah. Who knows?

[00:03:23] I'm doing good. How have you been? You look good. We always have a fun conversation. So. Absolutely. All right. Well, welcome, everybody. I'm your host, David Mauro. And today, we have a very special guest. CEO and inventor of LuxBlocks, the award-winning building system driving transformation in STEM and K. Across the Globe, featured on national morning shows, television, with roots in my alma mater, college town of Galesburg, Illinois,

[00:03:51] and legendary Knox College, home of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He is also a fellow Italian-American with family unofficial history at the segue of law and order and organized crime. Mr. Mike Acera, how are you, sir? We're innocent. We're innocent. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know. There is no mafia. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. They're not in Chicago. That's the outfit. Yeah, that's right. It's not Chicago. So, how have you been?

[00:04:22] I've been good. I've been good. Happy Lent. It's been a good Lent for me. It's been good. It is Lent. It made me think about how Lent, speaking of segue, or our intersection, how Lent intersects with cybersecurity and cybercrime. I think there's actually links to be made here, so we'll talk about that. But, yeah. I would love to hear the segue between Lent and cybersecurity. Yeah, there is one. I think it's actually an intersection there. Please humor me. I've been great. Please humor me. It's been a good year. You know, I'm not a socialist, but I'll tell you what.

[00:04:50] We applied for three different grants this year, or last year. We applied for a grant. And I got two out of three, which is amazing. So, all my socialist friends are like, hey, congratulations on the grant. You like that state money? I'm like, yeah. I like money, so that's good. Well, and look, if you were truly a socialist, you wouldn't have created or invented anything anyway to be able to get the grant. So, let's go to the root of it, right? Probably right. I don't know.

[00:05:16] The root of a free society is you get to invent the things that you've been inventing. And then you qualify because of the good you're doing. You qualify to help the greater good in larger scale. So, they're going to invest in it. I think of it as an investment from the government in you rather than a gift from the government. No, believe me. Yeah, we've all paid into it, right? Yeah, exactly. You're just starting to get some of the stuff back.

[00:05:44] In a truly socialist country, if we're all getting like $13,000 a year, you can't hire an employee anyway. So, you're not going to have a business. You wouldn't be able to see what you're doing come to fruition. Right. So, let's talk about you and I had been speaking about first principles. And you had mentioned that when you're designing a construction system or thinking about digital security, you asked what really makes things stand or collapse. So, you said you saw a similar pattern.

[00:06:11] So, first, let's talk about LuxBlocks for people that maybe don't know you yet. You invented this system. It is incredible. Look, I always kind of explain it first off to somebody. It's the best competitor to Legos on the market as possible, but it's nothing like Legos. So, I don't mean to like insult you by saying that. I'm not sure Lego even knows that because we're really small.

[00:06:39] We were a Lego family, you know, and I come from a construction family. So, I understood bricks and sticks and all that kind of stuff. But when we were homeschooling our kids, we started out – we were very social people. We're Italians. So, we had a maker space in our backyard and it was back in the 90s, 2000s. So, we had kids from all over the neighborhood coming and building things. We started this project called Project Lux. We were like drilling into Lego and chemistry sets and trying to make a better construction toy. We were literally – that was the project. What are we going to do?

[00:07:09] And it comes down to – it's not just a better block or something like that. It's a different way of looking at nature. So, you know, we confuse freedom and as being the absence of being constrained. The constraint is a bad thing. But if anything, civilization is the art of constraining matter to make it useful, right? So, bricks naturally want to be a pile. And sticks, if you strap four sticks together, they just – they don't really want to hold their shape. Four sticks together are useless.

[00:07:37] But if you do three sticks, they don't want to change their mind. They're just completely – so, there was a point in time in history where somebody figured this out and when they figured this out, they could make, you know, pyramids and wigwams and structures that hold sails. So, when humans invented like how structure works, which is it's great. It's constrained freedom. They found out they can do a lot of things with the physical world and that applies to even how we engineer our own lives. So, useful – it's useful freedom is what we want, not freedom. We want useful freedom.

[00:08:06] That's why we tolerate police forces and armies because we have to constrain freedom. We don't want roving bands of 15-year-olds with AK-47s on drugs, right? We want freedom that's constrained and useful. So, that's Lux Blox is that. It's basically the same plastic as Lego. But we figure out if we put hinges on it, you get all this freedom, which is also – it's just totally wonderful. But the kids want to make structures. So, all you do with this is instead of stacking it into something rigid, you just fold it. So, you have what they call corrugation.

[00:08:37] So, that's how Elon makes his rockets out of steel. He takes very thin sheet metal steel and he folds it and makes these beautiful, elegant rockets that are very super thin and light and strong. And with that, this has been rolled out in a lot of school districts, a lot of charter schools, homeschools. And it allows them to actually visualize and make, right? Like new things that they've been designing or imagining. It does things they don't understand.

[00:09:04] Like they'll make a cube and then the cube will – this is actually the true personality of a cube. A cube wants to actually dance and jiggle around. Every carpenter knows that. So, a carpenter will put sheathing on it like plywood or they'll put a diagonal to stop it from doing that. So, again, constrained freedom. And kids are just smacked with that when they use Lux Blox. But they found out in that constrained freedom, you can get amazing results. You can make a building with a core and a skin that's integrated. And it's really hard to do with bricks. And I love brick art. Lego is the highest brick art there is.

[00:09:33] But what we do is we do something that gives you a kinematic universe, a universe of connections. And so, you're going to make things that just pulsate and undulate and move in really exotic ways like our hips move. So, and that's what we want to give kids. This thing where if they ask their teacher, what's this thing doing? And it's made the teachers going to be like, I have no idea. That's – to me, that's really where you want education, where the kids are asking the questions the teachers have to struggle to answer. That's interesting. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

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[00:11:00] I mean, I want to know the answer. They asked us. They came to us twice. They came to us twice and said, send in your stuff. FedEx it to California. We want you on the show. So we FedExed to California and then we got ghosted both times. And we spent a lot of money on videos because they want you to do a production video. And then we finally – I can't tell you – I won't tell you who the judge was. We knew a friend who was a high school buddy of one of the judges, okay, who was a spouse of one of the judges, if I didn't say that.

[00:11:28] And I said, could you find out why this is happening? And we got an answer back because you're not supposed to talk to the judges. That's the whole thing you never talked to. And they said, oh, yeah, we found out. And the judge says the judges hate the toy category. They've been burned too many times. It has to do with China stealing things. And Heather, we don't even see ourselves as a toy, actually. But we hate the toy category. We've been to a bunch of New York shows. We've done this thing.

[00:11:53] And the toy category is a very – in terms of business, everyone's got their own kind of verticals and categories where they go to trade shows and the cultures. The culture of toy is really funky. Is it really? Yeah, it is. It is for a lot of reasons. Is it copyrights get stolen, things like that, like intellectual property? Yeah, there's that. Oh, they're notorious for that. Right. They say how much – the toy companies say how much they love inventors. Send us your ideas, da-da-da. Right. And they say no.

[00:12:22] And then two years later, they just knocked it out. They just made it. Yeah. So there's a – it's – and also they're very fad-driven. Like any modern business that want to own your credit card, they want you to keep spending money. And so they don't want forever toys. They don't want Lincoln Logs and Tinker toys because you buy those once and you've got them, right? Or Monopoly game. You got it. They want planned obsolescence. They want fads. They want – And so that doesn't really breed necessarily the best toys or the best things for kids, you know? Oh, that's fascinating.

[00:12:51] I mean that sounds really negative. I mean I have a kid who loved toys like anybody else. But that's just the nature of the industry. No, I was going to say I actually know a couple of people that have invented different things, not in the creative space like yours but more in the adult space or golf and things like that. And they didn't go on Shark Tank because they were like, no, we'd have to give up. Even if you don't get selected, you give up like a certain percentage of ownership. That's what they told me. And what I –

[00:13:21] And I was like, well, that's not like – that's – you know what I mean? Like that's – And then there's a whole thing where – This is your whole life. This is just a line item on their investment. And then again, I think I would push a little harder on that and say I think majority of what people know about Shark Tank is fake. And what I've heard from insiders who've won Shark Tanks, they tell me that most often what happens – you have to send all these NDAs. You can't even talk about what happens. And what mostly happens is you think the person had a deal, da, da, da.

[00:13:49] Then they lawyer up and they say, well, here's the deal. And it's completely different than the deal that was on the show. And if you don't like it, then F you. It's over. And you can't even talk about it. But you could say I was on Shark Tank, you know. And some – and a lot of – like I would imagine you would get a boost from being on Shark Tank. Every rerun that they run, things like that, it raises general awareness. So I think the benefit there would help.

[00:14:15] But taking a deal, I think you just – I mean, look, it could be – it could work out great for people or not. But the devil's in the details when it comes to that. Let's talk about what we were just pursuing. And that is especially with AI, Mike. Like the technology is developing so quickly. And the ways that online cybercrime can happen to individuals, can happen to organizations.

[00:14:42] And there's clearly blurred lines between our private lives and our work lives now because of the technology and its advancements. But the tactic to me is the same as it's been for thousands of years, right? Absolutely. Like fear, urgency, greed, status, lust, isolation. All of those emotions are exploited by attackers.

[00:15:10] And it seems so clear after somebody gets harmed, but – Why are they – why do you think that is? Yeah, why is that? Well, I think because back when I was younger, I used to represent crime victims as a lawyer. And when I saw cybercrime coming, I just thought, oh, my God, it's so much worse. Like I can help individuals locally where I physically am located, right?

[00:15:39] But cybercrime has an element of anonymity and it has an element of global reach and it can harm people at scale. Meaning they can do the same things that they did to this one person. But they could do it to tens of thousands of people all at once without you even knowing who they are and be in an area or a geography where they don't have accountability.

[00:16:04] We don't have, you know, treaties so that we could get them here to prosecute them. And the harm is the same, right? And so how it – you know, like why do I think that happens? I just think technology breeds scale. It allows the crimes to happen to more people faster. Yeah. I mean why do you think they prey on those vulnerabilities you just said? Because it drives behavior. Yeah. That's what I believe.

[00:16:32] I think that they speak to the part of the brain, not the neocortex, not the outer part, the more modern brain. But they tap into the base core part of our brain that doesn't have a capacity for language but that drives emotion and behavior. Right. And so – and exactly. I would agree. And I would think that those are what I would call pretty much automatic responses. If you're an emotional person, you're predictable. And they love – the algorithm wants predictability because then you're going to get the biggest hits, right?

[00:17:01] So that casts the widest net as all the predictable behavior. So if you're unpredictable, the net – there's holes in the net or the net misses the mark and you're not – their ROI isn't great because you've just – you've lowered the target landscape, right? The vector. The best, I think, defense is to not be a predictable person. And so it's to – even though we're all emotional, if we develop the disciplines to take a beat, when you're working in their vector, target vector, and they've just elicited an emotion from you on your phone, before you act, you take a beat.

[00:17:31] You go maybe to a second source. Right. Pause. There's these strategies that a reasonable person takes, but a reasonable person is not an automatic person. A reasonable person, a rational person is the opposite of that. See, I think that the more we know about science, the more we've found since – we discovered – when Hook discovered the cell when he was looking at cork, and he discovered the cell, he said, oh, shit, we're made out of cells. That means we're not just a thing, a creature. We're a creature made of creatures, these little cells.

[00:17:59] The cells are actually named after the monk's cell, little rooms. That was where the word cell came from, was the monk's cell, right? So, yeah. I always learn something. So, yes. And then I tell my kids later, and they're like, Dad, you've obviously read a lot. I'm like, no, I just talked to Mike. He's got all the – Jesus described heaven as my father's house's mansion has many rooms. We're a mansion with many rooms, right? And so we're really complicated.

[00:18:25] And then all those cells pretty much – we as conscious human beings have zero, zero pretty much control out of all the different happenings in those cells. And we're talking about millions or billions of happenings in our body per second. Actually, I think it's trillions of happenings. Like decisions that are being made by our body chemically, biochemically that we have nothing to do with. So when we talk about automation, let's talk about ourselves, right?

[00:18:46] So the little tiny sliver we get of free will, the little tiny, tiny, tiny sliver where we can make a decision during the day, a lot of people actually give that up too. Right. They operate on autopilot, right? They're giving up their most precious gift. It's such a sliver of automaty. Automaty. Autonomy. And they give it up because they're lazy. I don't mean to be condemning. We all do it. But so it's that. It's like – it's fun to have emotions and then watch a movie and get scared and stuff.

[00:19:13] But when it comes to your day-to-day, understand just the difference when you're acting emotionally and when you're not. And don't be preyed upon because we all long for things. We want friends. We want to be popular. We want to be thinner. Whatever it is, these things are designed to manipulate you. Just if you know that going into the – go off. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that you're exactly right.

[00:19:36] They prey – and when I say they, I mean threat actors, hackers, attackers, people that – cyber criminals, people that want to use technology not to build and grow and be creative but to damage another person or an organization through another person. Yeah, they're evil shits. Absolutely. Right, exactly. And sometimes they just do it online. The hacktivist groups, they call it – they just do it for the lulls, right? Just for the laughs.

[00:20:05] Like some of the younger hacker groups and hacktivist groups, they just want to harm a group or harm a person to show that they can so that they can brag on their Discord channel with their friends, right? It's no different in my opinion than in the 70s and 80s, people going and doing property damage or tagging or doing graffiti and then bragging about the work because the work itself could be creative even though it's damaging, right?

[00:20:34] But they're bragging about that. It's like a trophy to them among their peers. And that's what we're seeing online. It's the people that are busy, stressed, tired, distracted, right? Or emotionally drained, right? And at that moment, we choose to just do it on autopilot, right? They're like, look, I just don't care. I just need – my day has been crap. I got to get out of here.

[00:21:02] Just let me click the link. Let me just download this. I'm sure it's got to be like – normally maybe if it was a Monday morning and you were refreshed and you had slept and you were – you recalled things and you had read over the weekend, whatever, you were ready to go. They probably couldn't get you that. But Thursday afternoon, you're exhausted. You had a horrible day. Your spouse is yelling at you. You've got to get out. You know you're going to hit traffic.

[00:21:28] You just click the thing just to end the day and then that's when it happens, right? Yeah, yeah. And – I agree. Talk to me about your – because you don't work in the technology space. No, I don't. I can't speak to – I can't speak to the technology. That's what I want. But I'm a person. That's why you're – yeah, but – and you're a business owner and you have employees and you leverage technology every day but you don't work. You work in more of the kinetic space, the physical space.

[00:21:55] Yeah, well, I'm concerned about how kids are being raised and how they're – 100 percent. How they're learning. So – and I think of the actors that are those little evil actors you were talking about. There's like – there's asymmetric kind of actors that like the rogue guys are doing it for bragging rights and shits and giggles on the dark web. But there's also big actors like Meta and the CIA and Mossad and the CCP that are out there that are watching your behavior and watching your kids' behavior.

[00:22:24] And that's all – Yeah. And there's kind of disinformation that they – I mean that's an entire other conversation because there's so much – there's so many reports that have come out that like 40 percent – one report I read said 40 percent. And I'll cite the references in the show notes. But like there's like 40 percent of all of the news and ads that we're seeing on Instagram and Facebook are patently false. Yeah.

[00:22:53] But Meta keeps it going because of ad revenue. And so you are fed a bunch of stuff. Part of the reason why we're so divided as a country is because my feed shows me my political favorite line of candidates, right, are doing good things and the other side are doing bad things. Somebody on the other side of the aisle is showing the exact same thing, only the reverse. Yeah. None of which is true. Well, nuance, nuance. None of it's true. Like what I'm seeing isn't true.

[00:23:23] What they're seeing isn't true. It brings us farther away from each other. Or it could be part true, which is even more salient. Even more dangerous. They salt a little bit of truth and it's like, oh, yeah. So, of course, the algorithms won't love nuance and complex personalities because there's not as many of them. And it's hard. They'd rather box us into red and blue, of course, right? Right. And I hate leftists. Which none of us are. Which none of us are. Yeah.

[00:23:51] And so now you meet people who are like just, you know, have Trump derangement syndrome or something. You're like, really? It's like that was like so last year because now, you know, MAGA people are like have Trump derangement syndrome. Like we're pretty critical of Trump too. So it's like, in fact, I just went out the other day. An artist from Sky. We're friends now and he's definitely on the left wing and he's terrific. And Heather and I, my wife, we socialize with people who are definitely on the other side of the aisle than us. Exactly. And we find them interesting and fun.

[00:24:19] I think people just, those are bubbles you're talking about that are really toxic. Yeah. And they're not real. It's not real. And what concerns me more is what it's doing to children because, you know, you and I are kind of old guys now. But we grew up when we knew, I'll give you an example. When we were younger and you grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Yeah. So you remember in your third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, you go out with your buddies and you go and you're on your own and on an adventure and you go to a creek and you're screwing around by a creek.

[00:24:47] Maybe you're collecting beer cans or building dams or throwing, breaking bottles, whatever you're doing. Right. Yeah. But you learned that like glass will cut you and that bricks are cool to throw into a creek to make a big popping sound. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you're, but to me, that's the classroom of life and it's really good for kids. And Galesburg is an old town and there's people who live here, I think. And you could drive out to the parks, to the creeks, to the golf courses, anywhere.

[00:25:11] And you'd be hard pressed to find a gang of boys walking around with sticks, just walking around or girls. It doesn't matter. There's no kids outside. So what the hell are they doing? It's all screen time. Yeah. They're on their screens at home. It's all screen time. And the same with adults. All they want for their birthday is the new app or a couple new skins for their game. Yeah. Right. Like it's not and putting that screen down and getting like touching grass and getting out there. Like. Yeah. Getting in trouble.

[00:25:39] I welcome a young kid getting in trouble for like, like walking somewhere in nature and maybe breaking something accidentally because they were experimenting like that. Like, yeah. That's great. So what does it, what does that do? As opposed to trying to hack something or do like, like you. Okay. It's fine. Like get out there and just live and experience because at the end of the day, that's still the world that controls the rest. Yeah. So it really is. That's where my concern lies is with those kids.

[00:26:09] It's a kind of neglect. And people will say, and I could be, I'm as Pollyanna. She's an ex-Pollyanna about technology. I love technology. I think AI is a hoot. I use it. I enjoy it. But I know it's a tool. And I think kids who grew up around tools know the nature of a tool. But kids who didn't grow up around tools might confuse a tool for being something else. And I'll give you an example. Yeah. And reality is really important. I'll give you an example. I like to bring this up. This is my little story. Imagine it's 1850 or 60 in Galesburg.

[00:26:39] And you're a boy. Maybe you're like a 10-year-old boy. And you work. You work for a few shillings, you know, whatever we're making, you know, maybe 10 cents a day or whatever you're working for then. And you go down to a local shop. And your job is early in the morning, you have to get there and put coal into a boiler. So the boiler will build up steam. So when the workers come into the shop, there's a furniture shop, they can activate the steam into a piston. And it connects to these pulleys that drive these buffalo skin belts that go around the ceiling of the shop. Very safe. Very OSHA safe, right?

[00:27:08] And these buffalo skin, because they use buffalo skins. And then the leather belts would go down to a clutch. And the worker would engage the clutch. And then a lathe would go around and he'd carve a chair leg or whatever, right? And that kid, that 1850s kid would see that the labor he put into putting that coal in the furnace, went into the steam piston, went into the wheels around the whole shop, went into that. And, you know, Newton calls that work. That's a physical term for that's work, right? And he sees what work means.

[00:27:36] But now it jumped to 2025 and you've got this 10-year-old kid at home and there's a plug in the wall, right? With this thing that's actually made that there's something in that plug and it might as well be magic. That kid does not see that the coal plant in Illinois went into a turbine that spun a turbine with steam that pumped this electricity through the wires into his house. So I think that kid from the 1850s has a huge advantage over the kid today.

[00:28:02] And to me, that's a substrate of learning of that civilization that we've basically pulled out of the schools, pulled out of the family. And it's like that same kid would have taken a tram to Chicago to the Great Exposition in Chicago to the World's Fair to see Tesla showing these arcs of electricity coming in. And everyone was in awe of this beautiful thing called electricity. It was so admired. It was the marvel of the age. The future is coming. And now it's like electricity is just something to charge this with.

[00:28:29] Yeah, it's just fuel to get my game going. To me, it's a disaster. I just think that's a freaking cultural disaster. Well, yeah, to me, I think you touched on something really good there, and that is context. It is the lack of awareness of context. And that's where victims of cybercrime, just like victims of physical, get exploited, right?

[00:28:52] They walk down a dark alley thinking, well, I've gone down this dark alley on a Saturday morning with my friends and it's been fine, right? It's right by, you know, the coffee shop that I love is right around the corner. But they're not aware of the context. They're not aware at that moment that it's not Saturday morning and that I hear a sound over in the corner of that alley. And they continue to physically walk down there, putting themselves in harm's way.

[00:29:21] And online, people forget the context, right? Like it's Thursday. I've had a bad day back in that scenario, right? And I just want to get going, so I just click it. As opposed to being aware of the context. Why am I getting this contract from this vendor? I wasn't expecting it. Why am I getting this thing that I didn't ask for, right? Like if you think of the context, you'd pause and you'd verify it out of band.

[00:29:50] I mean, you just verify it not responding to that email. You just verify it from the actual vendor that you know, even though this one might look like it's from the same person, right? Or somebody that you trust. You're going to contact that person through the number that you know or through the email that you know. And you're going to say, hey, did you just send me this? I wasn't expecting this right now. And they're going to say, no. What are you talking about? Right. And then you're going to know not to click on that. But because you're distracted and because you're stressed, because you're running out of time, right?

[00:30:21] You behave. It's that emotional part of your brain that's acting before thinking. Right. And so you're saying people are becoming a mark. To use the terminology of swindlers, we're all potential marks. A mark is the target of a swindler, right?

[00:31:03] Yes. And because of AI, and I will say things have gotten worse for victims because of AI, they do not send you an email. I'm old enough to literally have gotten this email. And just to show you how gullible I am. I was like, Colin, Kim, like, do we have a relative who's a prince in Nigeria? Like, of course we don't. Right. But I don't know about your side of the family.

[00:31:31] Like, I just, you know, we're kind of new together. So this is 20 years ago, right? And you're like, we used to get emails that today you'd look at it like, this is ridiculous, right? Well, now because of AI, they can do so much recon on everybody, right? They don't need to hack systems. They can just hack people. Like, if they can do, they can know we all have essentially dossiers on us, right?

[00:31:57] They scrape all of our social media, all of our Reddit comments. Everything you've put online can be traced back to you. And they can create an entire dossier on you. And so that when they reach out, they're going to say and pretend to be somebody that you trust. That you work with. Right. That you know. And they're going to sound exactly like that person or look exactly like that person. And you're assuming that you're still a private person.

[00:32:26] And it's like, no, you kind of made that deal a long time ago. Yeah, you still think that you're a private person. But did you hear the headlines? Is it true? Maybe you know. Did you hear the headlines about Meta and the CIA? Yeah, I've been following the Meta trial as well. Now, I'm talking about the date in history where Meta applied for their patent or their business license and CIA gave up their rights to their social media page. Did you hear about that? No, I did not. Please share this. It's something.

[00:32:56] I forget what it's called. Hey, Heather. Now, I'm going to have to look it up. It's something log. The CIA created a... Heather. Oh, she's not there. So I just heard about this and it could be fake news. But I heard that the CIA created a technology that was basically Facebook. It was called something log. It was DARPA, actually. It was DARPA. And DARPA created this technology. Oh, yeah. And the whole point of the technology was to get people's information. And Meta could be, in fact, a complete fabrication.

[00:33:26] And the movie we saw could have been all theater. And it was actually just the DARPA technology. And they gave it a nice backstory. And it was the hot new technology. But that's what I heard. That could all be fake news. I don't know. But I'm not surprised.

[00:33:38] I can tell you what recent reports show is that recent reports and statements from early 2025 through March of 2026, where we sit today, highlight a complex and involving relationship between Meta and U.S. intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA, focusing on data access, user privacy, and surveillance.

[00:33:58] WhatsApp access, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed that U.S. authorities, including the CIA, can read WhatsApp messages by physically accessing users' devices, exploiting vulnerabilities, and utilizing spyware like Pegasus. Pegasus has been around for a long time, usually used in nation-state attacks. While end-to-end encryption protects messages in transit, it does not safeguard the data once it's on the device.

[00:34:27] So they can tap your device. So if you click a link on your phone, et cetera, you're giving access to the CIA or to somebody that has sent that to you for your device. So your message in WhatsApp, while it's encrypted in transit, when I'm sending it from me to you, when I'm receiving your message and I have it on there, right, in our prior messages that are sitting on my device, that would be visible. Right.

[00:34:58] Correct me if I'm wrong. Wasn't the CIA's charter about only doing things for overseas actors and the FBI was supposed to be doing things that were domestic? So the FBI had really no legal right to spy on Americans on their home soil? I think that's what the charter was. Which is part of the reason why Claude came to, you know, came to Claude AI has had some issues with the Department of War right now because they were asking him.

[00:35:24] Claude just wanted to limit the ability to do things on American citizens. But the counterargument to that is, well, we're not going to do anything unlawful. Like if there's a terrorist in the United States, we need to be able to access it. We've got to watch out for those terrorists. Right. I mean – As an Italian-American, I mean, we kind of invented terrorism, right? We were the first – Sacco and Vanzetti. They didn't call us. They didn't call Italian-Americans in the criminal element of the Italian-American culture that back then.

[00:35:54] We call them anarchists. Anarchists. Yeah. Suck. But today it seems like it would certainly be classified as – Do you know the biggest public lynching in American history was Italian-Americans in Louisiana? No, but I believe it. Yeah. They lynched a shitload of Italians, like all in one big – the biggest mass lynching, not the most people lynched. And they had a mass lynching and the Italian-Americans were so upset that the president at the time – I can't remember who it was – basically instituted a holiday for them. He said, let's have Columbus Day.

[00:36:24] That would be the Italian-Americans' formal holiday. We feel bad about nixing hundreds of you at once. Yeah. We can give you a holiday. Yeah. Have a paid day off, guys. Yeah. But so it's interesting how – but they saw us bringing in elements of radical ideas like anarchy, for instance. Right. And organized crime, right? Which is really what cybercrime is today. Like what cybercrime is today is organized crime.

[00:36:53] Like it is – and to me it is more powerful than the outfit was or that the families over in New York have been clearly than they are today. Right. But because of the scale. Because of the scale. Like they're able to do millions of dollars in transactions in minutes, in hours. Like the amount is just at scale. It's huge. The old saying, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. One man's gangster is another man's government.

[00:37:22] So if Besant says that we last year destabilized the Iran banking system and all those Iranians with their 401ks and retirements basically lost their retirement to force them into the street to protest how bad the Iranian government is. Okay. So how is it not gangster? How is that – I mean you could be relativistic about it, but it sounds like fucking evil to me. I mean I don't know. Yeah.

[00:37:49] That sounds like a whole – yeah, that sounds like a lot of chess moves. Yeah, so I was – To bring us to the free – to proclaim that then we're freedom fighters, right? Yeah, we're pro-democracy. Right. So I know, of course, the AI is probably listening to us right now, but – We don't have anything – we don't have anything worthwhile that they can use. Well, the Constitution was designed to be a radically disruptive element to power, right? Yes.

[00:38:19] It's supposed to cancel each other out. And that's what we're – we can bring it down to like the microscopic level or the granular level and say as a person, as an individual, you have to fight these cyber criminals by also devolving power to yourself. Like what can I do as an agent to stop them? And the way you throw at them is by being rational and boring and deliberative and not emotional and reflexive, okay?

[00:38:43] So you have to not be a victim always to your automatic nervous system, but say, okay, I'm the captain of my ship and I'm going to say no. I'm in a Bible group with a bunch of Catholic guys on Saturday morning, 630 in the morning we meet, and we're all talking about we're giving up for Lent. And it's funny, almost all of them gave up or curtailed social media. A lot of them just like took Facebook off their phone. That's great. I think that's really good. I said I just don't – I don't even let – I quit social media, and I keep my phone on the charger by the TV downstairs.

[00:39:13] I don't let it go into the bedroom for a lot of reasons, but especially like hitting beeps and clicks and talking to AI in the middle of the night because I could talk to AI all night long. Brainstorming at 3 in the morning. Yeah. I'm healthy for instance. So, yeah, so there's something about taking control of this. It's really empowering. And I'm reading more now than I've ever done before by picking out – I put my reading list on my bedroom and I read. I think it's fantastic.

[00:39:37] And look, the data is there that use of social media on long term has very negative effects on people's mental health, let alone the vulnerable segments of – like the vulnerable demographics, right? The prepubescent girls and boys and things like that that the meta trial is currently addressing. I mean, that to me is very egregious. It's something that I want to shed light on because there needs to be change, right?

[00:40:05] And so far the change that's been offered in those apps is superficial at best. It's not very effective. It doesn't really solve the problem whatsoever. And so I think letting the core system operate there, it'll be interesting to see how effective it can be. But letting big tech govern itself has clearly failed, right? Like guess what? They're going to choose profit over safety.

[00:40:29] That is no different than 75 years ago or 60 years ago with the tobacco industry, right? Like it's no different. Like you can't let them self-regulate because they have investors. They've got numbers to hit. They have to – they feel pressure to maybe not do the right thing but to hit those quarterly numbers. And because of that, the victims are wide and far. Yeah, unconstrained freedom leads us to a stockholder capitalism.

[00:40:57] And stockholder capitalism of these poor CEOs, poor, that are under the burden of every year, every quarter, not making the same mark but always raising the profit, always raising the revenue. The company has got to keep growing and growing and growing. Well, after a while, you're going to have to start figuring out how am I going to sell more of this stuff, right? And they'll say, hey, hey, just make it addictive. Just make it – just – Who doesn't want to make their product addictive? Think about it.

[00:41:26] Like just in pure capitalist thought process, right? Who doesn't want to make their profit? Like nicotine is a brilliant product. It is physically freaking addictive. It's one of the hardest things to ever get yourself off of, right? So it goes back to the thing. When you're addicted to something, you basically become an automatic person. Right. Repeat customer. You've lost self-control. So addiction means lack of self-control. Self-control is bad for business. We don't want health food.

[00:41:56] Health food is terrible for business because health food hurts pharma. Health food hurts the medical industry. We don't want – Say we want healthy people. We call it health care. But we want insurance and we want people to pay into something. And at the same time, it might even be the same players, same stock portfolios are paying into shitty food, right? And alcohol advertisements and all this stuff we know are poisons, right? And you've seen that.

[00:42:21] The evidence of that, the evidence of the truth of what you just said is found in the ownership and the mergers and acquisitions that have gone on over the last 25 years, right? Well, look, big tobacco, blah, big food. That's a big one. Yeah, and you now have companies that have vested interests in health care and pharma, also in charge of cereals and snacks and other things.

[00:42:48] And the contents, if you look at Pop-Tarts today and the contents, it's like glue and dye and a bunch of toxic crap, right? As opposed to when we were kids, it was flour and sugar and jam. Hey, dude, I was at the state – It was like, yeah, maybe it wasn't healthy, healthy, but it wasn't this, right? Like – I was in Springfield at a conference held by the deputy governor of Illinois.

[00:43:17] And this was in the capital of Illinois. I got to ask you, how can you live in Illinois with the governor? Yeah. Dude. Okay, that's a different – That's a different podcast altogether. Well, I'm going to give you a very nuanced answer to that one because here I am in the seat of power in Illinois in Springfield. I mean all the powers in Chicago, but it happens to be the capitalists in Springfield. And the deputy governor is hosting this thing and the majority and minority leaders of the Illinois Congress and Senate are there, okay? And I'm – the whole conference is for lobbyists.

[00:43:47] Everyone there at this conference are all the lobbyists. And I happen to be sitting at – I was with Quantum, the people in Chicago, the Quantum people. But there was only four of us. But we were sitting at a bigger table that was paid for by ADM, Archer Danielsman. And Archer Daniels – Heather and I are kind of like Maha Republicans kind of. We're definitely Robert Kennedy kind of people. We're all about health food and being healthy. And so I was like, oh boy, I'm with the devil here with Archer Danielsman and glyphosate and Roundup-ready foods and stuff. So they're there.

[00:44:15] They're all nice guys, but I felt like I was kind of near Satan. But anyway, so I'm at the ADM table. And then they start talking to – they're interviewing the different majority leader and minority leader. Well, the minority leader is a woman. She's a Republican, okay? And she says the quiet part out loud. She says, you know, we know – us congresspeople, we know we're not experts. So when we want to write a bill, we come to you guys to help us write these bills. The you guys were – the you guys were the lobbyists.

[00:44:44] We rely on you lobbyists to write our bills for us because you pay our – because you're paying us. You're paying us to be politicians. Right. Because you're the biggest donators. I was like – she just said the quiet part out loud. But she's in a friendly audience. But I was like, man, are they reporting on this? Because this is crazy. And, you know, me being kind of a Republican in Illinois, you can't really be anything. But I was like, oh, my gosh. They're all so crooked. It's just terrible. It's just – nobody disagreed. I mean they're all like, yeah, it's true.

[00:45:13] Yeah, it's really shocking. It's kind of the way it's always been, but it hasn't been as visible. And I think technology has made a lot of this stuff bubble to the top more. I'm positive about that, that there is more independent media, independent journalists, thank God. Oh, yeah. Because – Yeah. You know, so that pops bubbles, right? Right. It really does because it gets out there. And if the news can be verified and factual, then it can go viral and it's pretty good.

[00:45:42] Or at least people are arguing with each other. I'm an anarchist in that way. I think there should be lots of arguments, lots of people. I think civil discourse is really where the future will blend because when – like friends that are both. Like I have – and for me, I tend to be right of center, but I've been dead of center a lot of my life. Like I have voted for quite a number of Democrats in certain roles. I've voted for quite a number of Republicans in certain roles.

[00:46:11] I don't really care. I care about the person. I care about the issue. And so I'm one of those voters. So I will tell you though that views that used to be center are now deemed far right. Yeah. And I'm like, how is that – like what? Like that's crazy. But here – so here's one thing I want to circle back on and that is when we were talking about – the element of the human behavior and being distracted, right?

[00:46:41] Because I see a lot of this and I see a lot of parallels in politics. I mean I do. Like I see some of these people, they are just – they are – it's like the Dunning-Kruger effect, right? Like they are absolutely confident in an unresearched opinion, right? They are just absolutely venomous toward the other side and they haven't researched it to find what the truth is. They just researched it to confirm their bias, right?

[00:47:10] And some of that plays into the issues that we see in personal cybercrime. And to me, all cybersecurity is personal. Like at the – when we see a big data breach that happens in the news, right? What is not in the news is what happens to the person or people at the epicenter there. Their 401ks are drained. Their identities are destroyed.

[00:47:36] They have a foreclosed condo in Nevada a couple years later and they're like, what happened to me? Not only did I lose my job for falling for this social engineering trick, right? But my life got destroyed and nobody really talks about that. And that's why if we can just create awareness for people that you want to do this, you want to pay attention, you want to create that human firewall, you want to become a moving target, right? So that way you can dodge the bullets for yourself.

[00:48:05] Do it for yourself. Do it for your kids. Do it for your family. And your employer will benefit. Like because it still boils down to behaviors that have gone on for thousands of years. Impulse control, slowing down under urgency, verifying out of band. All of that can create a human firewall, make you a moving target that's harder. Yeah. And firewall is, of course, a metaphor. And I like it. It's a structural metaphor. And lever is another metaphor.

[00:48:32] Find the room in your brain that has actually the levers, like the guy with the clutch and the belts above him, right? And know that you do have levers you can pull. You can go as radical as just live off grid and live in a cabin with your family. Or you can pull your kids out of public school and either homeschool or put them in a private school. There's lots of ways you could – that's why we had levers. We said, let's take our kids. And our kids went to parochial school, but it was a cute, nice little school. But we wanted a homeschool because we wanted our kids to learn a second language, learn classical instruments. So there was a lot on our agenda. That's what we did.

[00:49:02] That's what we did with ours. Yeah. It was fantastic. That's the levers of being the captain of your own little family industry, right? And also going analog. You don't have to be 100% digital person. You could say, my kids aren't going to have phones and devices until they're in middle school or high school. And I know that's really radical because the PSYOP is you are an evil bastard if you don't let your kid be on TikTok. I mean, that's like how could you take – you're depriving your children of all that socialization.

[00:49:28] How can you not let your child have a device that is socially engineering an entire culture for the Chinese Communist Party? Or now the Mossad. Now the Mossad owns it. Exactly. So a few of the Israelis have TikTok now. But needless to say, whether it's them or CIA, what difference does it make? You know, you're kind of – I like what you're doing. You're elevating cybersecurity and not just be some thugs out there on the dark web. But cybercrime could be what the U.S. government is doing to us, what the CCP is doing to us, what bankers are doing to us. Yeah.

[00:49:59] You know, bad things happen from all different trajectories, right? All from vectors. Yeah, that's exactly right. Right. And really making yourself as resilient as you can without – the beautiful part of this is it doesn't cost anything. Like nobody in – I use this analogy. I've used the bear in the woods analogy. One of my favorite analogies is the shark in the water. And think about this. Let me tell you the story. So we go and we are out swimming.

[00:50:29] You know, all the people from work, we're all out swimming, right? Somebody sees fins, they scream shark. Is it a dolphin? Is it a shark? I know I'm not going to wait around and find out, right? I'm going to start swimming to shore. Now the truth is I cannot out swim a shark. Like a mako shark can swim 45 miles an hour. A great white from the movie Jaws can swim 25 miles an hour.

[00:50:52] The fastest human – and you can Google this – the fastest human on earth has only been recorded to swim 8 miles an hour. So we are not going to out swim that shark just like we will not ever defeat the Mossad, CIA, CCP, cyber crime, organized cyber crime. Like if they wanted to get us, they can get us. So how do we make ourselves a moving target? How do we change this? It doesn't cost us anything, right?

[00:51:19] We have to realize to be secure in our use of technology in any sense, we don't have to build Fort Knox. We don't have to spend a fortune, right? We just have to be a faster swimmer than that guy. Like than the guy who just ate five cheeseburgers and hasn't exercised in 20 years. Like think about it. Like I don't have to be the fastest swimmer. I just have to be faster than the guy in between me and the shark, right?

[00:51:48] Because the shark is going to go for the fastest opportunity. It's like another analogy is when somebody wants to break into a car, right? When a criminal wants to break into a car, let's say we're at Target. There's hundreds of cars in the parking lot, right? Are they going to smash the windshield and cause the alarm to go off and draw attention to themselves? No. What they're going to do is they're going to walk by all of the cars and they're going to pop the doors. They're just going to be pulling on doors.

[00:52:16] They're going to see who left the car door open because by and large there will at least be one, right? And then they will be able to take whatever's there and walk away. And the point is we want people to realize, have the contextual awareness to make yourself a moving target. To when you pull up, lock your doors, go into the store, right? Like it doesn't cost anything. But again, if you're stressed, busy, distracted, right?

[00:52:45] You will forget to lock that door. And the goal is to realize you don't have to do all that much. Meaning even organizations, smaller organizations that maybe can't afford like top of the line security. I'm not sure they need top of the line security. I think maybe they need everybody that works for them to care, to pause and be safe and to want to do it for themselves.

[00:53:12] And by doing it for themselves, then they themselves will protect the organization, right? Because nobody wants to be at the epicenter of that breach. Does that make sense? It does. I was thinking about this podcast and about like when you said it is easy. One thing that's really easy to do to make your life better, not just cybersecurity wise, but just in general is to say no. The human brain, the research is out there. I'll send it to you.

[00:53:38] But the research is really out there now that when you cut down your – when you increase your constraint environment, when you cut down on your freedoms, you actually develop more useful freedom in your life. Okay. So for me, for Lent, I wanted – well, I've lost 25 pounds since Christmas. And the way I did it was – That's great. I couldn't – what I was doing in the past was I'd say, oh, I'm going to cut down on sugar. I'm going to cut down on bread. I'm going to cut – I'm going to exercise more. All these things where it required lots of everyday mediation. Should I eat that raisin?

[00:54:08] Can I have a handful of raisins? And I never got thinner. I work out every day in the gym. I never got thinner. I just – and so this year, I said, I'm just going to start saying wholesale no to things. So I just – at first, I cut out all – pretty much all carbohydrates, right? No sugar. Not just no desserts, but no sugar, no carbohydrates, no bread, nothing. And then I cut – then I found out that yogurt was so easy to eat and nuts, a handful will just destroy your entire diet. That's like – so I cut out nuts and dairy, right?

[00:54:38] And so I'm just down – I'm down to lamb, beef, chicken, and like freaking pickles, maybe avocados. So I'm down there. But all of a sudden, I could walk into Aldi now and there's whole aisles that just – there's no-go zones. And my brain is really free. I feel so light because like I know there's only a few choices in the store and I'm out. You simplify things. You simplify things. I've simplified. It's a very underestimated superpower is – and I think a lot of top CEOs do this too. They just have a very kind of like – they put these blind – we call them blinders, but actually they're on good tracks. Absolutely.

[00:55:07] And they're getting tons of shit done and they're not letting the small shit ruin their day. So – If you've read Steve Jobs' book – Yeah, he kind of did that, didn't he? Yeah. It's why he wore black – Same outfit. Einstein had one suit. He wore the same outfit. Why do you think he did that? Einstein did the same thing. One suit. Look, he's like when I make decisions, sometimes it really hurts people. Sometimes it affects millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. I need to not think about anything other than that decision that day. And that's not a lack of thinking.

[00:55:36] That's a lack of thinking. That's a focus thinking. It is the most focus you can have and the most intent, the most like be intentful, like intend to do right by that decision. And that is really key. And I mean I love – I'm going to be getting shirts and hats and stuff that just says don't click on shit. Like just don't. Like if you just say I don't. Like I get people that hit me up on LinkedIn constantly or that send me emails. I'm like I don't click on links.

[00:56:06] Like if you want to – like I'm not clicking on your link to set up a meeting. Like I don't do it. Like and I don't do it. So like that part won't affect me. Like if it's something that my boss or a client needs to do, I'll be like send me the image, send me this. And like I'll verify that I need to download that or click that one thing. But I'll like go – like I'll verify it clearly if it's something that I am expecting.

[00:56:36] But 99.9 percent of everything, I don't click on anything. And I'll tell you like it's so freeing because I don't care. Like I could go and use social media now. I can go do this because I know the one rule kind of keeps me really, really safe. Right. Well, I've noticed that delivers from evil but there's the other part in the prayer too about temptation. Yes. Lead us on to temptation and deliver us from evil. But we have to lead ourselves away from temptation too. It's kind of on us.

[00:57:06] And Instagram and YouTube reels and Facebook reels, they are temptation hellholes. And it might go as innocent as you're interested in ballet or ballroom dance to 14-year-old girls doing pirouettes and all you're seeing is upskirt views of their legs. Right? Right? And it gets into soft porn really fast because they know you and they know your weak spots. So really you got to watch it. And for women, it might be criminal behavior and psychotic – they like the whole crime thing. Right? Women, they get into that.

[00:57:36] So my wife will be going down totally different rabbit holes than me. And I'll be like, look, we're sitting next to each other, totally going down rabbit holes. We're next to each other but that's the only physical proximate we have. We're not talking to each other. And we're just going down these vortexes. And I think that, again, I'm a victim of it. I understand how it works, I think. And just the best thing to do is just not look at it because they're going to pull you in, man. Because it's – It's the dopamine. It's the other stuff. They know you.

[00:58:00] They pay really expensive – they pay a lot of money to really good psychiatrists, psychologists to figure this stuff out. They're way more good at pulling you in than you are and pulling yourself out. So I'd say just turn it off. I absolutely love it. And I love your tactic of leaving the phone like in your home office or in the kitchen or wherever it is at night so that when you go to the bedroom, you are present. You know?

[00:58:29] Well, I'm pulling out books from my library for the first time. And you can do it. Yeah. It's wonderful. And then reading will pull me to sleep. But it'll be – it's a nice sleep. It's like, well, I've read and I'm going to go to sleep now. And yeah. Yeah. And then when you're on technology, you're more fully aware and you're more conscious. And I love technology. I mean – Oh, yeah. Don't – yeah. Technology is my job. I use AI every single day. This is what I do. I'm all about technology and I have AI and I have printers and all that kind of stuff. And I love it. All the 3D printers, all that. I love it. But I know the tools –

[00:58:58] So somebody I want to – I want to have you and Sergio on the same podcast. So I'm going to have you on again soon if that's okay, if you'll give me the time. Yeah. Thank you. He is a 3D printer guy, super creative. He's worked for – he did – he's currently in Ohio. He's the CIO for a healthcare organization over there. But he's had a fascinating life. He was a – he's from Mexico. He's an American citizen. He was a surgeon in Mexico.

[00:59:27] But he's always loved technology. So when he came to the United States, he began working for a game developer and he worked for Activision. But he's always loved 3D printing and stuff. So he was one of the inventors of Skylanders where you have the 3D printed people, right, that play the game. And you put them on the game and then they come on the screen and they do this. And he worked for Activision.

[00:59:56] So he has like 50 games like Call of Duty, all these games. He was part of the five people that invented the whole thing. Really fascinating guy. He just wrote a book. His book comes out in a couple weeks. Just really – and he's super warm and super generous. He's a wonderful person. I think you guys need to meet because the two creative minds, that'll be a fascinating – I just want to meet a Sergio. I don't know any Sergios. Oh, yeah. It's Dr. Sergio Sanchez. I have him on a – Sergio Sanchez. Are you serious? Yeah. Okay.

[01:00:26] Awesome. He's fantastic. So, all right, man. We will talk again soon. It was great catching up, David. Thank you for your time. Yeah, it's fascinating. Always great. Thanks for having me. And I encourage everybody to check out the other episodes that we've had with Mike. He's talked about Lux Blocks. He's talked about his family history in Chicago growing up as an Italian-American. Good stuff. Great stories. You're a great storyteller. You can catch us at luxblocks.com. Yes. It looks like a toy store, but they're more than a toy. They will get your kids thinking. I can promise you that.

[01:00:56] It's so creative. And it gets them away from a screen. And I love that. Yeah, bottom line, they're definitely playing with their hands, which is an intrinsic good for sure. Absolutely. All right, buddy. Thanks so much. See you, Dave. And we will talk soon. Okay, man. Take care. Thanks, man. That was good. Take care. Good.