Dr Chase Cunningham: Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good whatever. ⁓ my name's Chase Cunningham or Doctor Cunningham. Wait a minute, why is my camera slowing down here? Come on camera pick up. Hang on, I've probably got too much shit running. You're still hearing me, right? Alright, let me see what's up with my fucking camera.

Den (909Cyber): Yep. Your videos rose.

Dr Chase Cunningham: There we go. Hang on. Hang on one second.

Den (909Cyber): Turn off and on again.

Dr Chase Cunningham: I mean, when in doubt, that's ninety percent of you know IT problems, just turn the sh off and turn it back on.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. So we know we're professional.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah, alright. Alright, let me shut down this one more thing. ⁓ all right, cool. All right, so here we go. Hey, so good afternoon, good evening, good morning, I don't know, whatever it is. ⁓ my name's Chase Cunningham or Doctor Cunningham, if you're being formal or Doctor Zero Trust. That's the show that you're on right now, is Doctor Zero Trust. ⁓ I've got a good friend of mine here, Den Jones, who runs nine ⁓ nine Cyber. Den, give a breakdown on who you are, what you do, and ⁓ kind of the cool stuff that you guys have brought to the market now.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Hey Chase. Thanks for having me on the show. First of all, really appreciate it. ⁓ so Dan Jones, founder and CEO of a consulting firm called Nine O Nine Cyber. And we've been on a journey for a year and a half where I guess in the in the last year and a half, ⁓ we were consulting practice, doing software resale and stuff like that. And then as as we're building our our bench, we start to stumble into the world of freelance marketplaces. And fraud and more fraud and even more fraud. And ⁓ that got us into the whole thing about interview fraud as well. Because one of the things that ⁓ I'm I'm excited to talk about and share, I think exclusively with you, is that we've launched a product called 909 Shield, which we believe is gonna revolutionize the remote interview process and eliminate the fraud and the wasted time. And ideally, North Korea Laptop farm workers and all that nonsense. So yeah. ⁓ and I guess

Dr Chase Cunningham: But what if I wanna hire North Korean laptop w farmers or whatever?

Den (909Cyber): Well you you you might I mean man you live in a farm so you could have a you could have a whole farm of laptops in your farm. Farm in a farm for a farm I think. Yeah, ⁓ and before this chase I done

Dr Chase Cunningham: North Korean. So what's the I mean, what's the crux of that? Like how to what's the difference in the way that you guys are doing it?

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, so well there's a couple of things. One is we we originally started to build a marketplace called nine ⁓ nine select. ⁓ and and a year ago we built a thing for students, trying to connect s students with ⁓ part employers for part time work. And the interesting thing is part of building that out is we were applying zero trust principles. So it's funny, you and I, you know, we've talked about zero trust for eons now. I think at Adobe, my team deployed the ZT thing in 2017. So for me, it's it's coming on 10 years. I know for you it's been longer. and and really as we were applying principles of zero trust, because we realized in places like Upwork and Fiverr, there's such a huge amount of of ⁓ you know fraud and fake profiles and stuff like that. And I know that they're trying to fix that too. So we applied things like, you know, identity proofing, ⁓ employment background checks, Uber style reviews, and then interviews. But then in the interview steps, we're like, wait a minute, there's a lot of interview fraud. And we started to realize that in the interview fraud space, you've got a lot of wasted time because employers they'll do a phone screen of the HR person, then the hiring manager, they'll do their s their call. And then the technical team will do their call. And some people are doing like seven or eight interviews. And during the process, either the applicants are fake to begin with. So you get like 30% fake applicants, and you're now sifting through shit that you shouldn't be. Then you go through the next stage, which is like, Well, I'll turn up for the first interview, Chase, but why don't you do the second one? Right? And then then we'll then you know. We need a smart person to do the technical one. So we'll send in our mate Dave. And that and as you go through that process, the employers are wasting a lot of time. If you do get all the way through, then you ship the laptop to them, well, or to your farm, right? You ship the laptop to the farm, and then you've got a hacker that's actually joined the team, or in some cases, there's organized ⁓ criminals where they're applying for like five or six jobs. And there's gangs of them just working these jobs, or normal people working two or three jobs at the same time as well. So we built Shield with the goal to eliminate all of that. Our first thing is that we're taking we'll do the the identity proofing with with entrust, and then we're gonna do a biometric match. And at the same time, so imagine you're in this call right now, and I'm I'm the interviewer. I would see a little widget on my screen right now that talks about your IP, your location, whether you're using VPN. We're running that against known threat feeds. So we're using two known threat feeds. And in real time, we've got a whole stack of data and data in the background. But for the interviewer, we're assuming they're not the most technical all the time. So we're just showing them three or four things about the network that we know about Chase. And we're like, this is good, this is good, this is good. Or we're like known bad. At the same time, we're scanning your face and we're matching the biometric against the identity proof with entrust. But not just on this interview, every single call you do on our platform, we're gonna match all this stuff and we're gonna build up a trust profile. So over the course of time, if you interview with Walmart today and and Target tomorrow.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Okay.

Den (909Cyber): We're still running the same thing. So your identity becomes portable. Now, on top of that, we're overlaying some AI stuff. So we're now also looking at what what are the questions we're asking? What are the answers you're given? And if you're answering, what are you looking when you answer the question? Because quite often, if you're using AI to answer the questions, you're reading, you're reading from the thing.

Dr Chase Cunningham: You're like looking somewhere else. Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): And it's not as if you're moving that window around, right? So we're doing some of that. Then then on top of that, we're adding things like sentiment analysis. So if you think of like sales calls, they've done this for years. So it's not new. Just what are the sentiments? Are are you in a good space? Are you answering? Are you into you know, so all of that stuff. So it's pretty, it's pretty slick. And what we're finding in talking with HR leaders and CISOs is that. First of all, HR leaders know this problem because they they see the wasted time, but they just think that's a cost of doing business. CISOs don't necessarily hear about it until you get the bad hire, and then all of a sudden you've got a security incident on your hands. So we're trying to do with CISOs is alert them to this thing can be solved at the start of the pipeline. And then even with HR leaders, If you're posting a job and you say in order to go through this job process, you're going to go through 909 Shield and explain that this is telemetric, biometric, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, then the number of applicants would start to reduce. We do. Yeah, and we and we do that on our platform. On our platform, when you post a job on our platform and it's free to post a job,

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah, you start to get rid of the chaff right right off the bat. Okay.

Den (909Cyber): When you post the job, you as the employer can select identity proofing is a minimum requirement. You could also select that you want them to go through an employment background check and be successful there as well. So when we've done that, what we recognize is we eliminate about thirty percent of the applicants there and then. So it's pretty yeah, it's pretty it's pretty slick, man. I mean, do you know it's funny

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm. Yeah, 'cause why even bother? Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): Five year plan that I came up with as we launched a business, nowhere was there anything like this. None of this shit was in the plan. It was a we're gonna be a consultancy, we'll do software sales, we'll probably build a product as part of being efficient. ⁓ we never planned to be in the marketplace game. We never planned to be in the recruitment solving problem risk game. ⁓ and it all started because we wanted to try and help cyber students get part-time work.

Dr Chase Cunningham: So so that's really interesting too. And I mean there's a good transition there. I think ⁓ that boiling off that massive, you know, level of fraud is how do you deal with deep fakes, I guess, is a question somebody would ask.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. So it's it's cool, right? Because we're yeah, we're we're building that piece into the platform this month. Everything else is all up and running, the the telemetric, the biometric stuff, the deep fake stuff and the AI fraud thing is what we're working on right now. And what's really, really cool is normally a lot of people are like, Hold your hand up and show me your power sockets and all that bullshit. So yeah, we're we're leveraging technology that enables us to identify whether that's a deep fake or not. I don't want to share the secret sauce, but it's pretty slick. ⁓ but yeah, that gets you away from the need to do silly things like that. ⁓ and the whole AI fraud thing, it's gonna be interesting because I think the deep fake thing that's been solved by a lot of companies already, you know, so that's not too tricky.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm.

Den (909Cyber): ⁓ it does burn a lot of our credits though. That's one of the things. Yeah.

Dr Chase Cunningham: It's a token, yeah, choose through a ton of tokens.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, we're and and you know, it's at the very start of this when we think of the pricing and we think about how we build it out, we're already, you know, we're we've got infrastructure and GCP, you know, we are we are spinning up compute in order to run through a lot of the AI fraud stuff. So that becomes expensive. and yeah, so The other the other one as well, which we we spoke to a CISO about, and they were just talking about the glasses with all the words running through them, right? Now the good thing is, is we can see your glasses. I can see your reflection. So if someone's wearing glasses where there's you know, answers going through there. Yeah. And then the other one, somebody said was an earpiece, they had an earpiece in and they they were getting the answers via somebody else on the call.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Like a meta or classes or something. That's I mean you really want that job if you're wearing a fucking earpiece for it, but

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, yeah, yeah, dude. I'm like, Jesus Christ. I went, Well, we haven't we haven't thought about that one yet. ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, I mean the the good news is is if you look at the eighty twenty rule here, right? Eighty percent of the fraud during interviews are the things that we're kind of covering now. And then

Dr Chase Cunningham: I mean, yeah, turn your head, I guess. Let me see if you have an earpiece. I don't know. What do you do? There's always you can't ever solve for everything. I mean that yeah.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. One of the things I said on stage years ago, I know I know you and I we're we're pretty straight shooters, right? So I like to call bullshit out on stuff. So someday when we were doing our Zero Trust project, I was on stage talking about it at some fancy dancey conference, and somebody asked me a question and and my answer was so flippant. I was like, You can't solve for stupid. Right? We're not we're not yeah, we're not solving for the one percent.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. Right.

Den (909Cyber): Solving for absolute stupid, dumb decisions or users.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Well, and it's also the the lone wolf thing, right? Like, you know, from the the folks that are, you know, anti terrorism or whatever else. It's like, look, I and I mean, I've been in those briefings, it's like I can't stop one crazy person from doing crazy shit. I mean, I can be prepared to respond to it, but I can't prevent it, if that makes any sense.

Den (909Cyber): ⁓ yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And and that's I mean, that's the the one thing. You know, a lot of people talk about insider threats and stuff like that. And and I I kinda c grew up on the the school of thought that at the end of the day, everybody almost looks like an insider threat. Unless they are hitting your door on the outside and just absolutely hitting you from there. If they social engineer your user base and take over your your accounts and your creds for that user, then

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): you've now got to determine whether that's that user behaving normally or abnormally. But they still look like an insider. So if all of a sudden you get somebody who's you know, their their partner died and they're really disgruntled and hate the world or some shit happened and then they suddenly flip, that's an anomalous thing that you're not you're not, you know, you're not planning for. You know? So

Dr Chase Cunningham: Well, and I mean, yeah, and on the hiring side, like if I really have a hundred percent dedication to getting, you know, hired at some company, I can find a way around all of those controls. But hopefully you've got enough internal, you know, controls and analysis and whatever. You'll you'll ⁓ eventually I'll reveal myself. I mean, that's pretty fair. Especially like you said, eighty twenty. I mean, it's probably even more like ninety five five in the hiring space.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well that that's it. I mean, if if we could eliminate fifty percent of the wasted time the HR teams go through and eliminate that bad actor getting in the door. So now I think my business, man, I it's funny, I think my business like, okay, we're we're set up ⁓ to help your company as they bring in staff. were set up to help your company win with the staff you've got and internally with your strategies and execution and stuff. ⁓ but the whole thing before you hire people, like that that little bit, man, that's that became really an exciting challenge for the team. I mean we we were s I mean we are pretty much racking our brain on how do we solve some of these problems. And then then you get into the well wait a minute, how do we How we solve this problem in a way as well where we are not stacking up and retaining a lot of PII? Like, so we're sitting here with our lawyers this month going through absolutely everything. And it's like we want to get so transparent that on our website you'll see here's all the data we collect, here's the circumstance, here's what we do with it, here's what we don't do with it. And I I want, you know, I think every business should be. You know, because as a CISO, we're trained over years that you never store data if you don't have to. And when we work with product teams, I know you do this a lot, a lot of advising, right? When we advise product companies, you're trying to tell the CEO and their team, like, don't store shit. Like get rid of as much data as you can. Yeah. Don't do it. Don't do it. So when we're building SHIELD, because Shield and Select.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Like holding radioactive material, like just don't do it.

Den (909Cyber): holds a lot of PII. So it's like, what is the minimum we can hold and get away with? And then from a retention perspective, like as I'll give you example, right? We don't know anything about the job you're applying for. Right? So if if Adobe's using our stuff and they're hiring an engineer, we don't know it's an engineer role. I mean, we actually we we do know a little bit because You type in the job description and that well, not the description, you give the job a title, and then you assume that I'm gonna have many candidates apply for the job, and then I assume I'm gonna have many rounds for each candidate. So we'll know the title and maybe your internal reference number, but we don't know Jack after that. We're not storing resumes for people on Shield or any of that stuff. And then all the biometric and telemetric stuff, the minute we can get rid of that.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm.

Den (909Cyber): for that candidate, then it it's gone. So yeah, it's it's pretty that that's a really another challenge that we've like, how do we solve that problem so we can be viable and serve the purpose, but without putting ourselves at risk or the customers at risk.

Dr Chase Cunningham: That's smart. I mean I that's why that's why I tell people all the time is like if you don't need to hold it, don't 'cause it's just radioactive stuff. Like you wouldn't stick uranium in your shorts. You know what I mean? Like don't do it. Maybe you would put maybe you would put uranium in your shorts, but yeah, you shouldn't.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Well some some people would. Man, some people would. We know there's hey Chase, we've met some dumb people along our journey. So yeah, we know some people would.

Dr Chase Cunningham: ⁓ yeah. There there's you you can't ever account for all of it. So on the on the hiring side, I think that's really interesting the ⁓ hiring students piece. Expand on that because that is ⁓ and then I guess the follow-on question I have too is like is your being somebody that's dealing with hiring and jobs and all this other stuff, like what's your opinion on the the crisis and the seven billion jobs and whatever else?

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, brilliant man. Yeah, so let's a couple of things. So the first one on the students. I and and by the way, when I say students, I don't mean just the spotty little kids coming out of college. I also mean people that are are re-educating themselves. So we we enabled it so that we could reach out to vets and we're like, hey, if you want to re educate yourself, you're trying to get into industry, this is a great opportunity. ⁓ we got into anyone, you know, going through career changes. I I think of it like if you're studying and you're learning this craft, rather than work at Starbucks or Trader Joe's or some bullshit, get a part-time job with a company. And I think companies and you know, I and I I used to go around with a slide deck man. I was like, before I talk to you about this, I want you to ask yourself two questions. What was your first opportunity? Who gave you your first break? And if you've got kids coming out of college, who's going to give them their first break? Now let me talk about this subject. How are we helping students get part-time work in industry while they study? It helps employers have students work at a lower rate so they can pay 40 bucks an hour or 50 bucks an hour. And you get a second or third year at at college or university, you've you've got someone that by the time they graduate, they've already onboarded to your company. So I and we still support, we still have over 150 students in our platform. So we still push that message. We still get that out there. ⁓ and we've got, yeah, one one startup, they grabbed a student and they're doing all the security questionnaires and stuff like that. They get paid like 40 or 50 bucks an hour. Our platform fee our platform fees only ten percent. So we're we're I think at the end of it, Chase, yeah, we we made like, I don't know, man, fifty bucks, a couple of hundred bucks or something. ⁓ so we're not, yeah, we're not we're not raking it in there. And the goal was we don't wanna fleece people, we want that to be good. Now the hiding crisis is funny, right? 'Cause I think I I first of all, I think it's bullshit. Secondly, yeah.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Great. Yeah. Couple hundred bucks. Yeah. I think it's total horseshit. I think it's a I think it's an engineered thing by the certification bodies and by the the fact that people don't know what they're trying to hire. Like I think it's just it just is and I'll quickly I'll give you like a thing that really s proved to me that this is horseshit. So I know somebody that works for a company. Literally he's doing the job right now, right? And he's been through sixteen, twenty weeks of training. He's been at the jump company for like six, seven months. And fast forward, they came back and said, Look, you got a cert on this one particular vendor tech. Okay, fine. Kid's new to the space, young. He tries the cert once or twice, fails both times, because those cert tanks are engineered to make you fail. Just FYI for anyone listening. The third time around, he failed it again by a couple of points, right? And the the company was like, Look, we're we're probably gonna fire you for this. And he reached out to me, like, what do I do? I was like, I was like, I don't know what to tell you because they can do that. Like, that's just how it works. I said, but I would let that company know if you fucking fire me because I didn't get this vendor cert, even though I've been doing the work and I've trained and I've got these other certs and whatever else, and there's no issue with my job performance, I was like, I'm gonna come after you with everything I can fucking find because this is horseshit. Like, why in this world do I need to have a cert on a vendor piece of tech? I don't sit here and do this job. I've been a knock operator, I've been a sock operator, I've been an analyst. If I have a question, guess what? I fucking Google the question. Or I throw it into Claude. So we're gonna fire people that have the job, that have the skills, that are doing the work because they can't get a vendor cert. And then we're gonna complain that we don't have enough people to do the work. Like that is just bonkers.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. And I I I you know, so I think I think there's a couple of things. One is there's a mismatch on expectations of employers when they post a job. It it just reminds me of I'm gonna buy a house and I list all the shit I want in that house. I want three car garage, I want two far places, swimming pool, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then I realize I got five dollars, right? I can't afford the bloody house. So I think a lot of employers post jobs like that. I think employers, sometimes they miss the mark when it comes to treating candidates with respect. So they don't get back to them if you apply for the job. Does anyone get back to you? And I think I think that's a that's a challenge. And and then I I think there's a lot of ghost jobs out there. A lot of people post jobs because they just always know that they might be wanting a soccer analyst and shit. So I think there's a lot of a lot of fake jobs in that world.

Dr Chase Cunningham: That shit drives me nuts too.

Den (909Cyber): And then the other the other one for me is I do think that after COVID, ⁓ the remote work thing, there's a lot of layoffs, a lot of this AI business. And and by the way, I I have a strong opinion on the bullshit that's going on right now with AI in the job market. ⁓ I'd love to get to that and rant in a minute. But the reality is, is we're gonna see more and more tech workers as gig workers.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): So when we built our platform, let the marketplaces, it was because of the student thing, but but the realization that I know a lot of people, the A, maybe they have a full time job, but they they need to do a thing on the side to make money. So we obfuscate freelancer ⁓ identities actually on the platform until they choose to connect with an employer, just for that reason. But I also think you're gonna get people being like, I only want to work 20 or 30 hours a week. Like an Uber driver. They're like, I just want to be a gig worker. And this platform's good for that. It focuses I also as well, we focus on cyber, IT, AI, and engineering roles in the US only. We're geofenced. You you can't go through shit. Even our identity proofing is selected to be US only. ⁓ so what we're really trying to promote is high risk jobs in country, because I think

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): this whole like offshore shit also after a while becomes nonsense too, right? So and so ready firm on that. And then this AI thing, your bored reads some press bullshit that says you need to do AI, need to do AI, and it'll save you a ton of money.

Dr Chase Cunningham: ⁓ yeah, go go fire f a third of your workforce and have agents do it. Like that'll work.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Yeah. So they they fire everybody and then they realise two things. One, the cost of this AI thing is getting higher and higher and higher. Anyone that that started off as a AI company that was doing per user models, they're all moving to consumption models. Our consumption goes through the roof because your employees don't know the difference in cost from one model to another model. So all of a sudden they use the most expensive model and then you're paying through the nose. I think it's

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. ⁓ what was that one article I said somebody somebody saw us they spent five hundred million dollars on tokens or some shit?

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, and and yes out of control. And the other thing is, is you don't know. There's a lot of companies that we partner with that give visibility into AI usage. And but you don't know whether your employer employees are using Claude for business stuff or personal shit. So they're burning tokens on like some other nonsense. Yeah, to do their own thing. You don't know that. So you have no visibility. So I I look at it like that. The other thing is.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm. To do their own thing. Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): It reminds me when we were all going to the cloud, right? And they're like, ⁓ the cloud will be great. Well, there's this. Yeah. Yeah. But there's this, there's this point. And there's this point in that journey. And we're exactly the same point here where you've got that. I'm still doing it the old way. I'm ramping up the new way. The new way is not very efficient. There's the overlay. And and now if we move that to AI.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah, exactly. Go to the cloud. Fucking run to the cloud, man. Cloud. Cloud cloud. Yeah. And there's the gap.

Den (909Cyber): Well, you're do you're meant to be there, but you got rid of a third of your workforce. Or the other thing is as well, I think, is bullshit, is I think a lot of people laid off people in their companies, so some of these big tech giants, because they overhired during COVID. They're like, ⁓ God, we're ramping up, we're ramping up, and then they overhire and they're using the we're using AI and efficiency bullshit. as the storyline behind getting rid of people because they overhired. So I hear I hear that a lot.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah. I was reading one paper that said that there's a bunch of companies that are realizing they laid off large percentages of their workforce and then they would start moving towards AI doing whatever. But then they realized really quickly, like, wait a minute, we optimized by moving to AI. Now we can do more. I need people to do more with the more. But then I've already fired those people and then I'm gonna go back to them and say, Hey, we wanna hire you again and they're gonna tell us to go fuck ourselves, like You know, and I would too. If you laid me off for a bot, I would tell you directly, like, go put that bot square where the sun don't shine. ⁓ no.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. And do you know this is one of the things I think a lot of people are realizing as well is you used to go to like the fan companies and be like, ⁓ I c I'm I'm secure. Right? I don't think now you go to Facebook, Google, Apple, whatever, whatever. I don't think there's any job security. I don't think I I and how they lay people off I think is absolutely inhumane and bullshit. So

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): And ⁓ but a lot of that happened dur during COVID, right? Because before COVID, when you were doing a layoff, you'd have a personal conversation. Then COVID happened and it became acceptable to lay you off via disabling your account and an email. Yeah. Yeah. So I I think I think COVID they use that and but all that's done is expose corporate greed for what corporate greed is. I mean, at the end of it.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. With a fucking email, yeah. Or a tweet from the CEO, you know. Well, and all the all the cowards that run those organizations that don't have the balls to look somebody in the face and be like, Look, you know, I don't want you here which you know, it's it's one thing if you're gonna if you're gonna let me go, fine. It is what it is. But yeah, to your point, like at least have the the respect and the intestinal fortitude to look me in the face and say, You know what, this just isn't working out or whatever. But this yeah, that whole thing of what was it? I think ⁓ some company th

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Chase Cunningham: laid off like eight hundred people because the CEO sent out a slack message and it was literally like, You're fired, you're fired, you're fired, like, wow. Yeah. I would burn the building down.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. And this is yeah. Yeah, dude. And this and but you know, the the one thing, you know, you and I have got a lot of respect for each other because we do operate with a level of integrity. And and I think like in life, you can you can treat people really fairly and with some level of respect and still send a message which is a hard message. I mean if if

Dr Chase Cunningham: Sure.

Den (909Cyber): If it's the difference between the business going out of business and you laying off ten percent, you you have to make that tough decision. But how you make the tough decision, I think you should have the e balls and the ability to turn around and say, Hey, I'm I'm gonna do this in a way that's got some level of humanity to it, right?

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah, it's very I don't know, the whole thing's crazy. Let me fix this. Hang on one second.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, you just bounce to a fancy camera. Doctor Zero Trust no longer trusts the other camera.

Dr Chase Cunningham: I don't know what is going on. I'm wondering if my my My kids are messing with the fucking internet or something probably.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, that's you know, we've become so reliant. I got a friend that was traveling on an international flight and and complaining a little bit about the speed of the internet. And I'm like, wait a minute. You're in a metal tin. You're in a metal tin flying at like five hundred thousand feet or whatever you're flying at five hundred miles an hour and and you're thinking it's not great because your text messages are slow. I'm like, wow.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah, for real, you're bitching about that.

Den (909Cyber): Doctor Zero Trust disappears. Is this a good infomercial infomercial time?

Dr Chase Cunningham: Or some shit. Anyway.

Den (909Cyber): Well while while you were gone, I'd done an infomercial for, you know, nine ⁓ nine cyber and

Dr Chase Cunningham: Let's let's take one more step back. ⁓ so I think the the the kind of final piece of this whole conversation on the hiring and what you guys are doing, which I think is super valuable. Honestly, I'm gonna try and throw as many people towards nine ⁓ nine because I I know you and I know the guys, you know, what you're doing is valuable is like what I I have this idea that we're moving towards ⁓ like you said, it's not I I think it's it's gig and I think that there's gonna wind up with like the specialist economy, and then you're gonna have enterprises. I don't know that the mid-sized businesses in the next five years really exist because I as one person, if I'm doing things correctly with the right tools and tech and whatever, I can operate like a small enterprise. ⁓ so then all those people that are at those small enterprises, I don't think it'll be too long before a lot of them sit there and realize like, wait a minute. Why is a percentage of my salary going to pay for my boss's Lambo? Why don't I just go do this myself? and I mean it's funny too, because like what was it? Hundreds of years ago, that was the way that things worked. You had big, big kind of government really, and you had like East India Trading Company and some of those. Everybody else was an artisan, and artisans did artisan things. Even before Henry Ford standardized making automobile. There were like 300 automobile manufacturers. So everybody made, you know, specialized seats and no, whatever else. I think that we're kind of staring down that barrel in the future where it is artisan tech and then enterprise. What how do you see that?

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, I mean, I really I really see I mean it's funny, I've got a buddy that's building this AI business in a box, right? Where pretty much it sparks up all the agents that do different roles in the company, from, you know, your your chief of staff to your marketing lead to your SDR team to whatever, right? And engineers and QA and security re researchers, and it's all within the self-contained thing. And I'm like, holy crap. So yeah, so I I can see the ability to build an empire without needing empire of people. But I think there's room and and and I do this a lot, like in the moment, like I've pulled in four different lawyers for different things from patent to trademark to terms and conditions to privacy and stock allocation and all sorts of stuff. Now, yeah, I can use Claude to rustle up some things. But the problem is, and and this is the one thing about AI is it doesn't know the nuances. It doesn't necessarily know the questions to always ask. And if we don't ask it the question in the prompt, then then we could be in trouble. We could be in trouble. It might look good, but we also could be in trouble because we don't know because we're not specialists. So I think to your point, I think even with AI, you're going to end up having specialists that you'll pull on. For 10 hours here, five hours there, 20 hours there. And that's why I'm hedging my bets in the marketplace. That when I do want a specialist for 10 hours, I need to know I can trust them and I need to know something about their trust level. So I I look at that as being hugely important. And and it's funny, man, because you and I talking about zero trust for all these years. I'm now applying zero trust to the humans.

Dr Chase Cunningham: That's a bit of my height. Yeah.

Den (909Cyber): And at the end of it, I need to know that I can trust the human before ⁓ I don't have time to do ten interviews. So how do I get trust? If I'm gonna be the artisan, if I'm gonna be the freelancer that comes in for a quick hit, how do you get trust and without wasting your time? So yeah, my

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm. Yeah, because I mean that then it is I think that's a really good point too, right? Is because if we do move to that artisan sort of model, which I think is gonna happen regardless, is you do have to that's a really good point. You do have to be able to say that I'm not burning resources at a level that is beyond the scope of what I need to deliver. Cause then, like me, if I'm one person shop serving ten customers, if I spend my time solving bullshit problems, I am out of revenue. ⁓

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, you can, yeah, you can.

Dr Chase Cunningham: And if you're an enterprise, that doesn't matter, but for me it sure as hell does.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, and you can't spend five hours interviewing somebody who's gonna do ten hours of work.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. Yeah, right. I mean, that's a really good way to put it too. I I I got a a young guy that I'm looking to hire for a project and ⁓ all right he was he was kind of miffed because I said, Hey, you know, we'd met at this conference and I said, Hey, would you be interested in working with me? He said, Sure. I literally sent him a project to test him out. I said, Go do the project. And he came back and did it, he crushed it. And he's like, Great. ⁓ and I said, All right, you know, you're on my list. As soon as this thing comes through, you're hired. And he was like, Well, what about the rest of it? I was like, I don't give a fuck about the rest of it. Like you I know you, I've met you, you tr showed me that you can do the work. Like, let's go. You know, I don't all that other stuff. I don't need 35 interviews and six committees and no no no, whatever else. And I think if you have the capabilities that you're talking about in s in for in that process, like that would alleviate a lot of the ⁓ like I I like you said, I had to physically meet this guy so that I knew that it was legit. Whereas if I was using something like you're talking about, I can alleviate a lot of that stuff.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. They ⁓ Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no exactly. ⁓ and the other the other one as well, by the way, is fake employers. So, you know, fake employer scams. So on our platform, in order to post a job, we actually go through a review, a review and approval of the job. So you can't so now from a scale perspective, obviously, you know, a couple of years from now that might not scale very well. But the reality is

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. Okay. ⁓ you'll probably be able to automate it.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing, is we will apply some AI to magic to that process, but but we do see a lot of fake jobs and fake employers so that they can try and scam details of people. You know, 'cause if you can get a thousand people logging into your platform, usernames and passwords and blah blah blah blah blah, you know.

Dr Chase Cunningham: And yeah, giving you all their PI and all that stuff too. I hadn't thought about that. That's yeah.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, yeah. We s we we see some of that now and again. It's not as frequent, but our platform as nine ⁓ nine select had been up for two months and we had a fake employer jump on the platform. Post a job and blah, you know. And and at that point, every job post in, we would send out a mass mailer to all the freelancers.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Mm-hmm. For that per for that fake job, yeah.

Den (909Cyber): For that fit now and we're like, ⁓ fuck. So we instantly, like that that day, pulled pulled the job, pulled the thing, and then, you know, and and then put into effect like a a review and approval process straight away. Like we're like, wow.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah. That's that's good. I mean at least, you know, that's that's that's the stuff that makes the difference, right? Is like when there's an issue you fix it and you don't have it to be a problem going forward.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Well for people like you and I, we're like security incident, security incident, run around, run around, Friday afternoon. Friday night, nine PM after five glasses of wine. No.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Yeah, it's never on a Thursday at two o'clock. It's always Friday night at nine or whatever. Yeah, right. I wish. I wish. I wish. ⁓ all right, cool. So folks, when you're listening to this, if you're looking for people, reach out to Den D E N Jones, J O N E S, in case you can't spell Jones. ⁓ nine ⁓ nine Cyber, nine ⁓ nine Shield. ⁓ Den, anything else I'm leaving out? There you go. Nine ⁓ nine Select, the marketplace. So he's a good dude. He's running a good company and they're helping people get jobs where they should. So Den

Den (909Cyber): Nine ⁓ nine select the marketplace. Yeah.

Dr Chase Cunningham: Thanks for jumping on, man. And ⁓ maybe ⁓ maybe next year at RSA, you know, we'll do the ⁓ the Den Jones broken stick golf tournament again.

Den (909Cyber): ⁓ no God, I tell you, I still have that broken golf club. Actually, we are we are yeah, we are trying to make this be the prize, right? So that is gonna be the trophy, man. I I've I've got that plan. I've got that plan to execute. So any day now.

Dr Chase Cunningham: That's I think that's a trophy right there, yeah. Awesome. Are you gonna be a black hat if people are out there? Can they find you a black hat or

Den (909Cyber): Yeah, yeah, we'll be Black Cat Monday through Friday. The team will be there. We actually we're also we've got a couple of dinners that are being sponsored and stuff, so check out check out the website for that. And everything that we talk about, 909 cyber dot com, everything's all up there from events to blogs to shield select and all that stuff. So we'll have the Black Cat stuff up up on the site this week as well.

Dr Chase Cunningham: ⁓ cool. Awesome. So there you have it. Love reach out to Den. He can help you find the right people or maybe help you get a job. ⁓ not there's not a lot of better people in the industry. Den Jones. Thanks, man.

Den (909Cyber): Yeah. Thanks, Chase. Really appreciate it, man. Take it easy.