If It's Free To You Online, Realize That "You Are The Product" Banking Crises Are Actually Designed Ahead Of Time Dollar Recycling Being Replaced By Gold "And it just goes to show how vulnerable a lot of this infrastructure is, particularly the internet. When you talk about the internet as we conceive of it, like going to Amazon and buying something, or your mobile phone, going to New York Times, that internet is very much a trust-based cabal of people that for the longest time have just decided there is a decorum that they're going to have about how it's run. But if that changes, then the internet is going to look very different." —Becker Polverini Kevin: Welcome to the McAlvany Weekly Commentary. I'm Kevin Orrick, along with David McAlvany. David, oftentimes you and I, when we go out on Monday nights, we talk about past guests, and we'll say, "Hey, I'm going to go back and listen to that." And it's great for discussion. Last week's program, Peter Zhao, I went back and listened to that. I'm going to listen several more times and I'd like to take our listeners through that process a little bit. David: Yeah, certainly as we look at the fabric that we've created, the tapestry, if you will, of guests that we've had and content that we've created, we refer back to these things as lessons that we've learned, things that we've gained, insights that we've benefited from, and it's a part of our everyday conversation. If a new listener is unfamiliar with some of the most important guests that we've had on the program and content that offers insight that would be outside of a normal expected analysis, it's really important to be familiar— And we're not asking them to go back through the hundreds of guests that we have, but every once in a while we will highlight a few of them for their benefit. Kevin: Well, and the three that we've chosen for today that we wanted to go back and talk about, now think about this crypto week that people are talking about. And we've been talking about AI, all this electronic intrusion. Yes, are we trying to move forward electronically, but what is the cost to doing that? And I go back to 2017, Dave, you interviewed Becker Polverini, and this is a man who spends his entire life in that world, cybersecurity, looking at anything from China, countries who are trying to break into each other's systems, to companies. And I think it would be worth going back to his interview back from 2017. David: Yeah, and just to set it up a little bit more, a part of our conversations in that time frame included an interview with Nazli Choucri, who wrote a book on who controls the internet. And it's important, particularly because we're in a period of time where data is one of the most important assets that exists. And so where is it organized? Who organizes it? How is it sold? What are the means of distribution? This year, we have Nvidia trading in a market capitalization of over $4 trillion, and they're feeding the AI frenzy. And that AI frenzy is really about organizing and distributing the data that already exists. Kevin: Well, and whose information is it? Right? David: That's right. And that's a key point that we get to in the conversation with Becker Polverini. That data is you. You are the asset. Kevin: You are the product. David: What is being sold is the breadcrumbs that you've left, all over. The activity, the searches, you have this profile and you are being monetized. * * * Becker, I have a whole lot of questions for you, and I wondered if you might be able to tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of what puts you in the position to speak to cybersecurity and cryptography and the many other things that you're interested in and an expert with. Becker: Yeah, yeah, sure. So currently I'm the CEO of PKC Security. We're a cybersecurity consultancy south of Los Angeles in Southern California. My background is in really nation-state cyber warfare.