Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety. With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way, and offers a roadmap towards healing. In his new series, he provides a roadmap toward healing, showing that while the journey isn t easy, it s absolutely possible to find your way forward. If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better. Go to Dailywireplus.me/Dailywireplus and start watching Dr. B.P. Peterson on Depression and Anxiety. Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve. Subscribe to Daily Wire Plus to get immediate access to all new episodes of Daily Wire and Daily Wire Podcasts wherever you get your epsiode of the news and information. Subscribe today using the promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first month with discount code Power10 at checkout. The offer valid through Nov. 1st, 2019. If you are struggling with depression or anxiety, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 and ask for help. Dr. P. Peterson can provide immediate support by texting "depressionandanxiety" at 741741 and receive $10 off your next treatment. You ll get 10% discount when you place an ad-free version of his new book, "Depression and anxiety support through his new podcast, "The DarkTetrad: The Dark Tetrad." The Dark Tetrad: A Guide to the Dark Tectradial and Anxiety Guide. by clicking HERE. Thank you for listening to his new episodes on Daily Wire plus to receive a discount code and a discount on the podcast will be available throughout the entire service, and receive a free copy of the book, and access to the book. FREE PROMOTIONAL PRODUCEDUCATION AND SUPPORTING DAILY WORD AND SUPPORTED IN-PRODUCING THE PATREON THE PODCAST FREE TRAINING AND PROMO SUPPORTING THE DEED AND SUPPORT THE MAKING THE SHOW AND PATREONS AND MORE! Learn more about his upcoming book, FREE PRACTICATIONS AND SUPPORT FREE SUPPORTED TO SUPPORT THE PROCTOR SUPPORT THE WORKING PROODCAST.
00:00:00.960Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.
00:00:06.480Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.
00:00:12.740We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.
00:00:20.100With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.
00:00:27.420He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.
00:00:35.360If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.
00:00:41.780Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.
00:00:47.460Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.
00:01:11.060I had the opportunity to speak to Brett Johnson.
00:01:14.960And Brett, well, Brett had a rough life and led him to dark places, and he spent a lot of time setting up and running the darker edges of the web.
00:01:25.820And for many years, and facilitating the development of online criminality, and that's become a real scourge in our society.
00:01:32.820And that all changed about six years ago when he decided that he was going to work on the positive side of the universe for a while.
00:01:39.380And so we spent a good amount of time walking through his bio and talking about how he got involved in Shadow Crew, say, from 2002 to 2004.
00:01:50.740It was an early consortium of online criminals devoted to the sales of illegal goods, drugs, guns, identities, and information, and so forth.
00:02:00.300And we walked through all that, and then the mechanics of his decision to stop and to start working with law enforcement agencies and so forth and with corporations and to inform the general public about the dangers of online crime and about how to protect yourself.
00:02:17.240And, well, about the realities that we professionalize and organize criminality at the same rate that we're doing with everything else using this amazing technology that's at our fingertips.
00:02:30.720So, welcome aboard. It's going to be quite the ride.
00:02:34.060I've been studying this array of personality traits.
00:02:41.460It's going to be a long question, but it'll get us right into what we want to talk about today, known as the dark tetrad.
00:02:50.320Now, the dark tetrad is a group of descriptors of personality that are negative, and they emerged as an object of investigation for two reasons.
00:03:04.060Okay, one reason was that there was this gentleman named Dr. Robert Hare, who worked at the University of British Columbia, and he was the first psychologist who studied psychopaths.
00:03:18.360And he interviewed a lot of psychopaths in prison, hundreds of them, and developed a questionnaire measurement, a set of measurements, essentially, that helped determine what the personality characteristics were of people who were likely to become long-term, unrepentant career criminals.
00:03:42.720And his students started to study that psychopathy, let's say.
00:03:46.920It kind of had two components. It had a callous component.
00:03:50.060So, people who are psychopathic are likely to be very high in the trait.
00:03:57.660They have very little empathy for other people, and can be cruel if necessary.
00:04:03.700And then they also tend to have a parasitical lifestyle, which means that they're perfectly willing to live on the earnings of other people or to manipulate them for that purpose.
00:06:01.900Now, I've got extremely interested in this in recent years because our culture is splitting apart and there's a culture war that's occurring that's much more and more serious.
00:06:12.840And it looks like part of that's driven by polarization.
00:06:16.540And so, I'm concerned that polarization is driven fundamentally by the disinhibition of the psychopathic or dark tetrad types online.
00:06:27.620So, in normal interactions between people, there are lots of evolved mechanisms to stop manipulation.
00:06:37.860So, for example, if you and I have repeated interactions and if we're in a community where people know me and know you,
00:06:45.120if you, you can probably pull the wool over my eyes two or three times, but by the third time, I'm going to catch on, maybe, and then I'll know you.
00:06:53.740And then word will get around and that'll keep you under control, right?
00:06:57.580And a lot of people are kept under control by nothing else than social reputation and social pressure.
00:07:05.600And so, I'm concerned that the virtualization of the world is enabling the psychopaths.
00:07:12.780Now, there's, I want to add one more thing to that before asking you more specifically about this.
00:07:18.500I know already that about 35% of internet traffic is devoted to the propagation of pornography.
00:07:24.580And my sense is it isn't the world's best guys that are involved in the production and distribution of pornography.
00:07:29.820And then there's a huge area where there's overt criminality.
00:07:34.660I mean, most of the elderly people I know are targeted on at least a weekly basis by people who are trying to steal everything they've got.
00:07:41.200And then around that, there's an edge of sort of quasi-criminal behavior that is engaged in by the anonymous trolls and so forth.
00:07:49.740The people who are doing their, what do they call it?
00:07:51.740They're having their fun for the laws, which is to laugh out loud, to gain amusement at the expense of others.
00:07:57.940And we also know that the people who do that are more likely to have these dark tetrad personality traits.
00:08:03.800So, I'm wondering, you have extensive experience with this.
00:08:08.000You ran an organization or were involved in it called Shadow Crew.
00:12:31.060What was your relationship with your mom like?
00:12:32.980My mom was the person who always told us that she gave up her life for us, that she was going to leave and not come back, that we'd find her dead in a ditch someplace.
00:12:43.900She'd go out and no other word to describe it other than she'd go out and whore around with other men.
00:12:50.520Like my father, once she leaves them, she would come home and tell me that, make up these stories about how the men had abused her, tried to rape her, everything else.
00:12:59.840So I became the guy that, the kid who was scared that she wasn't going to come back.
00:13:05.300I was a kid that if she wanted, if she was going someplace, I would try to go with her to make sure she was going to be okay.
00:13:12.760So she was out there putting herself at risk constantly, but also, tell me if I've got this right.
00:13:19.740I want to make sure I've got this right.
00:13:21.260But then she'd also come home and tell you in particular how dangerous the situation was.
00:14:50.140So he was, he was always in your face.
00:14:52.200He would, he would tell you what he thought of you, and it was almost as if he had a, he had high blood sugar, and he wouldn't take proper insulin for that a lot of the time, so he would go off the rocker a lot.
00:15:07.360So that was the additional, an additional wild card.
00:15:09.620But, but this is a man who, not only fencing, he would, if you, if you angered him, he would chase you around the house with, with a butcher knife, with a hose.
00:15:21.140He, he rented apartments downstairs of, of his house.
00:15:24.700He had converted the downstairs to apartments.
00:15:26.760If he heard any noise down there after 11 o'clock at night, the breakers were upstairs.
00:15:30.420He'd throw the breakers on the renters.
00:15:32.320If you, we lived in the house with him for a while.
00:15:34.960Once he went to bed at night, he slept in a bedroom off from the living room.
00:15:39.040So he, he would watch the, the evening news at 11 p.m.
00:16:26.460Every time you connect to an unsecured network in a cafe, hotel, or airport,
00:16:30.720you're essentially broadcasting your personal information to anyone with a technical know-how to intercept it.
00:16:35.780And let's be clear, it doesn't take a genius hacker to do this.
00:16:38.660With some off-the-shelf hardware, even a tech-savvy teenager could potentially access your passwords, bank logins, and credit card details.
00:16:46.420Now, you might think, what's the big deal?
00:21:50.140The shopping plaza that had the A&P, it's got a Kmart in it, starts shoplifting other things.
00:21:56.340Hoodies, so you can put, you know, the way that started, we wanted a sandwich.
00:21:59.660So, I went in, got a hoodie off the rack, took the tags off of it, and stuffed a loaf of bread down the sleeve of the hoodie, threw it across the shoulder.
00:23:20.280Do you have any idea why, I mean, you can infer from what you've said about your family why you didn't care, but have you thought about that any more in the intervening years?
00:23:29.880I spend a lot of time trying to think through that, and the answer is, well, we needed it, or at least I've convinced myself that we needed it.
00:23:38.000Yeah, well, there's some evidence for that, by the sounds of things.
00:23:40.380I mean, you were pretty young, and you're pretty desperate, and so you can imagine how your sister might have been tempted into doing that the first time.
00:23:48.080And, well, then this problem is solved, but then, you know, I'm kind of curious, too, at one point, especially once your mom joined in, at some point, I would imagine it got to be both a thrill and a game.
00:24:09.380And then it gets quickly to the point where you want to find out what you can get away with, which is also what you described, to some degree, what your mom was toying with all the time, to see what she could get away with, right?
00:24:21.380Why do you think your father, do you have any sense of why your father put up with this?
00:24:50.560Okay, so from a personality perspective, he would be—your mother would be disagreeable and high in negative emotion, to say the least, and your dad, very agreeable.
00:24:59.560Agreeable people have a hard time standing up for themselves, and they can easily be taken advantage of.
00:25:05.920But they would also be the sort of person—they are also the sort of person who's very inclined to take care of other people and who will always see nothing but their good side.
00:25:15.380But I want you to understand, too, that my dad, I really do believe that, you know, he wanted to commit the crime, too.
00:25:20.920You know, if mom had an idea to burn a home or fake a stolen car in an accident or something like that, I don't think that he had the backbone to do it himself.
00:25:31.820I think that he absolutely was all for it.
00:25:35.260I mean, he would not hesitate if mom wanted to do something like that.
00:25:38.520Right, so he was involved in those things as well.
00:26:59.340And then there's kids in the middle who toy with rule breaking, especially when they're adolescents, but then, you know, they usually straighten out by the time they're 16 or 17 and put that behind them.
00:27:38.460Like, what's the most preposterous thing we can possibly get away with?
00:27:42.460And that issue of getting away with it, you know, there's a kind of—there's a—I think of it as a kind of arrogance and pride that's associated with that.
00:27:51.220Like, because one—and one of the things that is true of the more psychopathic types of criminals is that they generally justify their crime with a rationalization that goes something like,
00:28:01.480if you're so stupid that I can take advantage of you, then you deserve exactly what you have coming to you.
00:28:07.060And it's also a demonstration of the criminal superiority in that situation.
00:28:12.500And so, I'm wondering—well, I'm wondering what you think about those sorts of motivations in relationship to what your family was doing after your mother put together this little crime network around you two as kids.
00:28:45.620But I wouldn't have thought either that that was what motivated the initial crimes, because you already laid out, really, how that happened.
00:28:55.940You don't exactly have the best moral models.
00:28:59.780Plus, you're hungry, and eating is a pain, and, you know, it sort of happens one step at a time, and then your mother facilitates, your father joins in.
00:29:35.700So, when she leaves my dad, we moved back to Kentucky.
00:29:40.320My grandfather, like I said, he lived in a house.
00:29:42.380He had elevated the house and built apartments underneath.
00:29:44.640So, we ended up living in an apartment underneath.
00:29:46.920My mom, yeah, she started out with a job as a nurse, but that lasted a few weeks, at which point she, there was another lady down the street.
00:29:55.880She hooked up with her and they would go out partying on her and basically leave me and Denise at home.
00:31:16.100It's funny that they'd want to, it's funny in some ways, meeting like that, that they'd actually want to have a relationship, because it's a hell of a, right?
00:31:24.140It's so contradictory, is that you establish a sexual relationship really at the drop of a hat.
00:32:05.800And then that expands under the tutelage, really, and the participation of your mother and your father and your grandmother and your sister.
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00:34:24.080I was stealing books and I was supposed to meet them back at the vehicle as they were coming out chasing Penny, so I go back to the vehicle, nobody's there.
00:34:30.400I wait about 30 minutes, walk into JCPenney's, there's two guards outside, and I literally hear my name come over their walkie-talkies for Brett Johnson.
00:35:27.000You know, I was, we couldn't afford the video games or the clothes or later on I was doing the dine and dash routine at restaurants and stuff like that.
00:36:58.420Yeah, well, it's a hard thing to establish later in life if you don't have a pattern of doing that from, probably from about the age of three, to tell you the truth.
00:37:07.320Like, there are boys, I'm not sure, were you an aggressive kid?
00:37:14.300So, so one of the typical patterns for long-term criminality is there's a small minority of boys, about five percent, who are quite aggressive by temperament at age two.
00:37:29.960Now, two-year-olds tend to be egocentric anyways, but these two-year-olds are egocentric and aggressive.
00:37:35.760Most of those boys are socialized by the age of four.
00:37:39.820And so then, and what that means is they start to develop friendships that are somewhat reciprocal at about the age of three, and then that expands.
00:37:53.980And then they get to be socialized well enough so they can have friends, and then they have friends.
00:37:57.900And instead of being aggressive and tilting in the exploitative direction like they did when they were two, they learn to be, you know, competitive within the confines of sports and so forth.
00:38:09.280They sublimate it into some other, yeah, yeah, but if they don't manage that by the time they're four, they never manage it.
00:38:17.740It's very hard to be socialized into a friendship network if you don't accomplish it between the ages of two and four.
00:38:46.320So would miss a lot of school, would typically not do a lot of the work, thought that I knew more than the teachers a lot of the time, and did not hesitate sometimes to tell them that.
00:39:41.900So how in the world did you manage to skirt the, more than skirt the frontiers of, like, shoplifting and other sorts of criminal behavior when you're a teenager?
00:39:52.760Especially with a mother who's partying all the time.
00:39:56.360And that sort of influenced around you.
00:39:58.440Why in the world weren't you attracted to alcohol and drug use?
00:41:41.900Okay, so we'll deal with that on a different track.
00:41:43.840But now you're, so how is it that your shoplifting expands and into what other criminal endeavors and how is it that you get brought to the attention of the law?
00:41:53.040So I don't, I don't associate the, that juvenile stuff with the shoplifting stuff.
00:42:01.860And the way that I associate that, when I was, geez, I don't know, seven, eight years old, I would catch my mom and dad, I would catch them gone, and I would urinate in the house, on the carpet, down the drains, in the sink, something like that.
00:57:05.280So you, so you don't take full advantage of the scholarships and so forth that are offered because you, you now have the interest in this girl.
01:01:01.420But, you know, on the other hand, you know, you could have imagined thinking, oh, my God, I get to leave.
01:01:07.600Thank God it's what I've been praying for forever.
01:01:09.860I've been, you know, maybe part of that, too, is like your situation in many ways was pretty desperate.
01:01:16.760And you did clamber your way out of it.
01:01:19.080But you could also imagine, conceivably, that you were concerned that you would take the stellar opportunity and it would turn out to be, you know, to dissolve into dust and to burn to the ground.
01:01:29.020And so that's people, I know people whose hopes have been dashed repeatedly.
01:01:34.100They start to get afraid of hope itself, you know, because they've put themselves on the line.
01:01:40.320They put themselves on the line and being throttled as a consequence of it.
01:01:43.880But at some point, it's easy to say, I'll never do that again.
01:01:47.240It's not helpful, though, because the alternative is, well, let's find out what the alternative is.
01:02:54.960It's a funny thing, you know, because you might ask yourself, like, did she put a knife in your heart or a stumbling block in your path that you then stumbled over?
01:07:16.680So at that point, it was like, you know, you're getting all these orders, and I'm like, well, I wonder if I could pocket some money, and nobody know about it.
01:08:12.720So still this kid's identity turns out.
01:08:17.000So what happens is I end up—I leave that day, call the DMV, hey, what do I need to do to get a replacement driver's license?
01:08:25.300I don't have any of these identity documents.
01:08:26.940And they tell me, well, you can get some school records, and you'll need to go to the Social Security Administration and get an affidavit of identity printed out by them, things like that.
01:08:34.540So I started at the school, the Board of Education.
01:08:37.660I walked in, told them I was this guy, and got his school records from there that allowed me to—
01:08:52.340So I ended up calling, acting like the Social Security Administration, telling him, hey, you know, we're the Social Security Administration.
01:08:58.980We've got some sort of anomaly with your Social Security number.
01:10:17.960So I did that and come to find out what had happened was is when I go in to get the driver's license, at that point, they had changed security.
01:10:27.640So at that point, they'd take your snapshot and they attach it to the file that has the DL information on it.
01:11:15.980So what do you think should have happened to you at that point that would have been best for you?
01:11:21.700You know, because really what you're telling me, I believe, is that in retrospect, the play in the system, the mercy that the system showed you even, was not in your best interest.
01:12:26.880So, but you needed those extra reasons to justify what you're doing, the extra reasons being that you were, that there were other people that you were serving?
01:12:36.860I did believe those justifications, but I don't think I needed them in order to go out and do that.
01:12:40.960Now, what's kind of interesting with me, and I think about that a lot, when I was from the girlfriend home, if I didn't have a girlfriend in my life, I was not doing fraud.
01:12:52.400But once I had a girlfriend in that relationship, oh, yeah, as much as I possibly could at that point.
01:13:01.540And was that an ego status thing as well, do you think?
01:13:04.540It was with my dad, and that's why I hearken back to him when I told you that he was the guy that was scared of the people that he loved leaving him.
01:13:14.540So, I am the guy that does not want to be apart from that romantic relationship.
01:14:20.100When I was in prison, and I take this to heart, I was told that if you have an addiction, that you cannot love anything else but that addiction.
01:14:30.420Now, I view my criminal activity, especially cybercrime, as an addiction.
01:14:36.840Now, I like to say, I like to say that I love my first wife.
01:14:40.540I like to say that I love that, this woman named Elizabeth that was a stripper.
01:14:56.520So, well, you know, unfortunately, people are complicated, right?
01:15:01.700And you can have more than more motivation at the same time.
01:15:04.320I mean, I guess you'd ask yourself, if push came to shove situation, so I guess, you know, one of the ways of sorting that out would be,
01:15:15.140if you were in a situation where it was lose your girlfriend or stop committing crime, if you pick the option that left you continuing criminal activity, then obviously you love that more, almost by definition.
01:15:34.080And so were you ever in situations like that?
01:17:47.520And you're, what, about 20 at this point?
01:17:49.520Yeah, I would have been probably 20, 21 at this point.
01:17:51.880Okay, okay, so you didn't get stopped.
01:17:54.980You got away with it for all intents and purposes.
01:17:57.880You could think at that point, do something like, well, if the damn system is so stupid that they're not even going to call me on my misbehavior, you know, to hell with it again.
01:18:05.600And, but you also said, you know, and then we'll go back to this.
01:18:09.640You also said that you didn't have any remorse with regards to the victims.
01:18:26.340He'll recover from that, you know, without carrying the type of trouble.
01:18:29.340Okay, so you had a realm of rationalization.
01:18:30.840Right, right, always trying to rationalize.
01:18:31.740Well, because I'm curious because, you know, the fact that you, you know, you spoke positively of your sister and you spoke positively to some degree of your father.
01:18:39.960You certainly spoke positively of this woman who helped you out in high school.
01:18:43.080You're clearly able to establish some empathic relationship with other people.
01:18:48.860And so that would beg the question, you know, why didn't that occur?
01:18:53.000Why didn't you extend that to the people that were being victimized by your actions?
01:18:56.420But you just said you had a web of rationalizations that I suspect you probably built that up one piece at a time until it was very elaborate.
01:19:04.020But same sort of thing you did with your wife when you told her that, you know, she wanted to spend the money and so she was really involved too.
01:19:10.460And, you know, and that's always an open question.
01:19:12.340If someone's misbehaving terribly in your household and you have some advantage to that and you fail to notice, you always have to ask yourself, it's like, well, was it, was your lack of noticing convenient?
01:19:27.440You know, if someone loves you, and Susan absolutely loved the hell out of me, and I knew that, you know, I knew I was never going to quit breaking the law, but would tell her that in order to smooth things over, would pretend that I wasn't in order to smooth things over.
01:19:44.880And then when it pops up again, you know, I'm so sorry, I'll never do it again, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:19:48.960Did you feel that you were genuinely sorry at that point or was that just an act?
01:23:58.760So, what I did was, is I was like, you know, I can run a Kiwanis Club myself.
01:24:04.220So, go down, get a business license for my own charity, and start telemarketing, telling them that I'm a Kiwanis Club.
01:24:11.100So, when you learned to sell food baskets for Kiwanis, you said, in all of that, you learned to be manipulative, let's say, or better at it.
01:24:22.200So, what tricks did you learn, telemarketing, that then enabled you to produce the next scam?
01:24:28.960Like, what, kind of, how much of a theory do you have of that?
01:24:32.160I mean, you're a smart guy, you must have been thinking through the processes that you used to entice people to buy, while you were selling something that was genuine to begin with.
01:24:41.060But you said you were good at, you said, I believe, that you were good at manipulating people.
01:24:45.900And, you know, the line in sales, especially something like telemarketing, between selling and manipulating is, you know, it's a tricky moral line.
01:24:53.880And so, and you can be disproportionately rewarded in a telemarketing operation if you happen to be good at it.
01:25:00.140So, what were you teaching yourself to do while you were telemarketing?
01:25:04.120Well, see, you've got to backtrack a little bit on that.
01:25:06.340So, you've got to realize that when I was a kid, and this is this whole thing called social engineering.
01:25:11.260So, as a child, I had to know what the adults were doing around me, what they were thinking, how to try to, you know, to survive that Paul Campbell routine sometimes.
01:25:28.040You're doing this active listening thing.
01:25:29.480And so, the first few seconds of the call, depending on the tone, depending on the aggression of the person, how they're answering the phone, everything else like that, you know whether they're in a hurry.
01:25:40.640You know whether they're dominant or passive.
01:25:42.880You know exactly how to handle that call.
01:25:44.520Do you need to come in and be aggressive?
01:25:46.120Do you need to come in and be more passive and submissive with that call?
01:26:18.760You're always paying attention to what they're saying, how they're saying it, the pauses that are taking place, everything else, until you finally, you've read that person enough,
01:26:26.140and you need to do it quickly, you've read that person enough to know exactly what you need to do to trigger that cell, to do that manipulation, to get them to do what you want them to do.
01:37:48.980So what I start doing is I transition over into pirated software.
01:37:54.160Pirated software, in order to play like pirated video games, back then you had to have a mod chip that was soldered onto the circuit board of the gaming system.
01:38:06.200So you'd get this little circuit chip, and you'd crack open the PlayStation 1 or the Sega Saturn or the Dreamcast, and you'd find out where on the circuit board you had to solder that chip, and you'd solder the chip on there.
01:38:17.260And that would allow you to play the pressed or the—
01:38:49.720The pirated software led into—what got me on there was I was doing porn online, and some of the sites had banner ads or people discussing pirated software.
01:39:02.360So that led into getting the context for the pirated software, which then led into mod chips.
01:39:06.820The mod chip forums started to talk about RCA satellite systems.
01:41:29.400Had no idea who you were talking to, if you could trust them, if they had something for sale, if they actually had it, or if they were just going to rip you off.
01:41:37.120The only real website at that point in time was called Counterfeit Library.
01:41:41.220And the only thing it dealt in was counterfeit degrees and certificates.
01:41:45.060But they had a forum section attached to it.
01:41:47.320So because that was the real only platform out there, I started going to that forum every single day and complaining about getting ripped off.
01:42:07.260So what happens is, because that's really the only trustworthy platform that's out there at the point, you start having these other people coming into this forum as well.
01:42:16.220I ended up partnering with two other people, a guy from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, a guy from L.A., the Moose Jaw guy.
01:43:18.300You know, one of the things I've really noticed about the most vicious online trolls is the probability that they have an anonymous name with something satanic, Nazi, or communist in it is almost 100%.
01:44:00.460I didn't have that skill at that point in time.
01:44:03.020So what he said was, he was like, hey, what you do is you become the reviewer.
01:44:07.460Any product or service, because you don't sell anything, you're not making anything, any product or service, you'll be that outside, unbiased.
01:45:06.780So once I translated over to a real criminal platform, I was like, well, you can't use that because they're going to find that name and that's Brett Johnson.
01:45:16.160So I was like, I still like Lord of the Rings, Gollum.
01:45:23.280So I become the reviewer of Counterfeit Library.
01:45:28.760And it was a field of dreams for criminals because it was the first of its type.
01:45:33.260Now you had someplace where you had an actual reviewer that when you, and when you reviewed something, if I gave a positive review, I stood by that.
01:45:41.680Meaning if you get ripped off, I will reimburse you for being ripped off.
01:46:54.520So, you know, 1% of the criminals commit 65% of the crimes, right?
01:47:01.300So if there's 4,000 of them and there are people who are dedicated, you're dealing with a group of people who are responsible for a massive amount of criminal activity.
01:47:23.560So Albert Gonzalez, Roman Vega, all these other people, they're Shadow Crew operatives.
01:47:28.200Even the Canadian guy that ran Quadriga, the cryptocurrency exchange, both of those guys were Shadow Crew people.
01:47:34.880So that connections absolutely still exist today on that.
01:47:38.720So to give you an idea, though, so 4,000 sounds like a lot until you fast forward to 2017, Alphabay, which was a dark web marketplace and forum, 240,000 people.
01:48:47.480Pig butchering is, think of a romance scheme or a cryptocurrency scheme where I'm going to not take one or two payments from you, but take every single thing that you've got.
01:49:35.120And then, remember I talked about social engineering, then you see how good of a con man, liar, social engineer he is in layering the trust and manipulating you to give up cash, information access, data.
01:51:37.180Because in the United States, a state database does not share information with a federal database.
01:51:42.980So the state can know you're dead, but the feds may not.
01:51:46.520As a matter of fact, prior to 1998, if you died, the only way the federal government knew you were dead is if the family filed a Social Security death benefit.
01:52:29.480So the way that system works is you pay your taxes.
01:52:33.340The U.S. government gives you a refund on those taxes before they are able to verify with the employer whether that person was hired and worked and had taxes withdrawn.
01:52:45.040So you can file a false return that's very realistic for someone else and claim a return.
01:53:08.820So I was—one of the things that you find out with cybercrime, and I was always good on research, so tax return—tax identity or tax return theft had been popular.
01:53:19.520And what you saw on the indictments was people would have those returns deposited to their own bank accounts.
02:04:41.000Now, you can't fix other people, Brett.
02:04:42.680You know, hell, you can't fix yourself.
02:04:43.840Well, yeah, try yourself first and see how far you get with that.
02:04:46.740So, I actually adopt this, I actually said it, I was like, what I'll do is, I'll spend enough money on her that it'll keep her mind off drones, no matter what it takes, because I've got that kind of bankroll.
02:05:02.480Well, I've spent, I've sent most of my money over to Estonia, so I've got a bankroll at the house of maybe 200K.