Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Josh Rasheeds. I'm your host and today I'm excited to bring back on the show Gabriel Custodiat and we're going to share with you about a brand new course that we are presenting.

Gabriel, welcome back. Thank you and here's a radical idea, Josh. It doesn't matter how you get your money or how much you have if somebody takes it. Exactly, exactly. Gabriel and I have been collaborating over the past year on our Bitcoin Privacy course, which by the way is still available at BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com.

We have scores of very satisfied students who have gone out into the marketplace, who have purchased Bitcoin completely anonymously, who own it completely privately and anonymously and who continue to enjoy excellent buying opportunities with Bitcoin at low prices where you can stock up and build your personal bank. That's available at BitcoinPrivacyCourse.com.

But in talking about opportunities and where there is needs in the marketplace, we discussed the need for becoming hack-proof and today we are excited to talk about our brand new course that's available at HackProofCourse.com. Gabriel, share a little bit about the problem as least as you see it and why we're even doing this course in the first place.

Yeah, so you know the most common person that I consult with is somebody who emails me in a panic or calls me in real life and they say that the money is being taken out of their PayPal account or they're getting suspicious emails from Coinbase and now they can't log in.

So, for example, this Coinbase person, they didn't realize that they were using a Yahoo email address for their account and Yahoo had been compromised the last few years. And so an Indonesian hacking team simply had access to that Yahoo email login and they just reset the Coinbase password and bam, they're in.

And so, you know, the statistics bear out that this will happen to you one day. You'll get hacked, you'll get digitally compromised in some way if you don't take an active role in educating yourself. And so that's what we're aiming for in this hack-proof course. Or it's going to be your child, your parents, and that's also going to affect you.

And the terror in the voices of my clients in these moments is the terror of I trusted somebody online, I trusted an online platform to protect me or some technology and they didn't and I don't know how this stuff works and so I feel totally vulnerable. And you know what?

They are. I think people just don't understand how this crazy digital world works. We're encouraged to put everything online when almost none of us understand what that means. People don't understand how many third parties we're trusting our data to on a single website. So for example, you go to eBay.

They may have two dozen other companies who are collecting your data, each with their own vulnerabilities. And of course, 90% plus of our wealth exists digitally. We have online accounts sensitive to our business lives, our love lives, our financial lives. A lot of our stuff is online. And so at a fundamental level, what we're teaching in this course is a mindset in addition to some tools that will greatly lessen your odds of having your digital life compromised.

That's what we're shooting for and hopefully allow you to, after putting in some effort to understand it, put your head on your pillow at night knowing that you're as safe as you can be. So how do we do that? Well, as with all things, I like to start with the fundamentals.

So we explain how this works. What are data breaches? What are third parties? How do hackers do their thing? What are their methods? What are your vulnerabilities? We start with the basics. And I'll say that over the years, and especially preparing for this course, I read most of the stuff out there about hacking, scamming, identity theft.

And again, like in our Bitcoin course, I was disappointed by what I found. I read the most promising book on the topic of scamming, and it simply wasn't up to date. It doesn't mention anything about getting off of people search websites, nothing about zero knowledge services, doesn't say anything about doing less with your phone or keeping a minimal computer or using temporary email addresses, offline software, planting your flag on online accounts, doesn't say anything about VoIP phone numbers to reduce your chance of getting SIM swapped.

So a lot of the information out there is simply not up to date. So I at least, I'm looking at the hacker forums where people are selling credit cards by the thousands. I know what these people are doing. I know what information is already out there. I have my podcast.

I keep a book. I consult. I immerse my stuff in this daily. And so in four hours in this course, I'm going to show you an accumulation of my time understanding how this stuff happens, but most importantly, laying out the practices, the mindset, and the tools that you can live by.

- And I think that's the most important thing is just to recognize that if you are concerned about these things, there's no magic fix. You have to begin with the end in mind. You have to begin with good personal privacy practices. And it's not that hard to engage in good, if not just better personal privacy practices, but it does require a little bit of upfront thinking.

And in these areas, by the way, many of us are accustomed to the primary vectors of financial risk and financial theft being things like false credit card charges. And I think we're wrongly comfortable because there is no fraud, because we are protected from fraud on things like credit card transactions, that then we think that applies to other things.

But this kind of hacking, these kinds of thefts do not have any consumer protections. They are in fact, of course, illegal. But if your accounts are invaded and your Coinbase wallet is emptied out, or if your stock account is emptied out, when this is done by a hacker in a foreign country, you don't have much recourse at all.

And so you have to be the one to protect yourself in advance. - Yeah, that's right. Nobody's coming for you, especially in the case of crypto, which is irreversible. And I just want to throw out some statistics for people who are trying to grasp what cybercrime is. Cybercrime is a $10 trillion industry in the world.

That's what, $1,400 per person per year, cybercrime. And it's only increasing, right? And just to focus in on a subset of cybercrime, we have identity theft, which is also growing. Every 22 seconds in the US, somebody is a victim of identity theft. And at its worst, identity theft victims have psychological effects comparable to being in active wartime.

Okay, this is no joke. And so every 22 seconds, you're rolling the dice. Is that going to be you? And if you're not scared, you should be. I'm scared and I do this for a living, right? And I'm scared because there are people who wake up every morning in Moscow, in India, in Pakistan, in North Korea, people smarter than you or I, and their single goal during their 16-hour workday is to move money from your account to their account.

There are entire businesses and industries in places like this that are set up. How could somebody live with themself doing that? Because people outside the West often don't have the same moral consciousness we have. You can watch my recent interview with Jain Pandari about that sad reality. And so this is what you're up against.

And so the grandma, and this brings up another interesting question, the grandma in Iowa who refuses to learn two-factor authentication from her grandson is not only, let's say, losing $2,000 when she's compromised, but she's giving that $2,000 to maybe North Korea, who gets a lot of their money from these kind of scams.

And she just funded five people being sent to death camps. Okay, so that's the big picture. Here are the consequences, not just for you, for your family, for other people in the world. Cybercrime is a huge industry. It affects everybody and it's only growing. No, it's a good point.

And I think we often underestimate the impact for us, but also the impact for others all around the world. I certainly don't want to be funding any malfactors around the world. Given the fact that there's so much information out there for free, I think there's a huge value to these digital courses because they're up to date, like you mentioned.

But who is this course for? Yeah, so obviously it is a course for everybody, right? It's a course for people who care about keeping their money, who feel a moral responsibility to deprive the enemy, people who care about their finances, right? What does it matter how much you earn if you lose it to a scammer or an identity thief?

It's for people who run a small business and who are much larger targets than anybody else by a huge margin. It's for people who work at home and now have their digital life in front of them for 12 hours a day, or who are mixing their business and their personal lives on their computer for the last couple of years.

It's for people who don't like the idea of waking up one morning and having your website hijacked and in control, in somebody else's control. It's for people who care about their privacy and for whom the idea of your private details or credentials being on somebody else's computer brings a serious distaste to your mouth.

It's for people who don't want disruptions to their healthcare, right? Medical fraud is a huge scam that is only increasing. And everybody in between, it's for people who want to develop a mindset, not just read an outdated list, to-do list that you're going to forget and implement, but people who want to lay the bedrock of a locked down digital life that can give them and their family comfort.

And regardless of the changes in technology in the upcoming years, have the foundation to keep their money, to keep their accounts secure, and to avoid becoming part of this immense statistic of cybercrime. Yeah, absolutely. So we're presenting the course the way we did the Bitcoin Privacy course. It was an extremely successful model.

We're doing two live classes. There'll be two separate two-hour sessions. The first will be on February 3, and then the second one will be on February 10. We'll present those courses live to all the students who sign up. And the benefit of signing up for the live class is that you will have the opportunity to interact with us live in the chat and ask your questions.

So not only do you get access to the prepared curriculum, the prepared course material that is current and cutting edge and up to date, but you can also ask your very current questions and get specific advice, specific answers to your questions. That's coming up on February 3 and on February 10.

If you'd like to sign up for the course, please do so at HackProofCourse.com. HackProofCourse.com. Gabriel, anything we forgot? >>Gabriel Just to say that according to the statistics I told you, this course will pay itself off very quickly, maybe within months. And if you're still on the fence after what we've said here, that's fine.

Just remember that in addition to us putting out content from our brands, which is intrinsically useful, remember that you engaging with us in this course is also supporting both radical personal finance and watch and privacy. So you're not only getting something useful, but you're investing in us so that we can continue to make high quality courses, books, and podcasts.

>>Ashkahn The reason we're doing this is that some of this is just basically good disaster protection. And I think a lot about, I describe it as increase income, decrease expenses, and avoid catastrophe. Those are the big three that we do in financial planning. And what Gabriel and I are looking to do is look in the marketplace and say, where is there an information shortage?

Where is the advice and the information that's available not up to snuff, up to the level where it should be? And this is one of those areas where we can help you to protect yourself for a little bit of time spent with us, a little bit of treasure spent with us, and then some time putting in place a new mindset and some new practices.

So go to HackProofCourse.com today. HackProofCourse.com. Sign up now to make sure you join us for the first live class beginning on February 3. HackProofCourse.com.