Hello, this is Matt from the Explorers podcast.

I want to invite you to join me on the voyages and journeys of the most famous explorers

in the history of the world.

These are the thrilling and captivating stories of Magellan, Shackleton, Lewis, and Clark,

and so many other famous and not so famous adventures from throughout history.

Go to Explorerspodcast.com or just look us up on your podcast app.

That's the Explorers Podcast.

Welcome to Spycast, the official podcast of the International Spy Museum.

I'm your host, Sasha Ingber, and each week I take you into the shadows of espionage, intelligence, and covert operations across the globe.

Vinnie Troia is at home on the dark web. The veteran hacker has developed relationships with cyber actors who have quietly stolen sensitive data from the far corners of the world.

Vinny then sells that data to intelligence and law enforcement agencies, like the CIA.

His book, Gray Area, Dark Web Data Collection in the Future of Ocent, is out this October.

Full confession, I have never been on the dark web. I, like, picture this dark space, which I know it's not. So I know

I'm already starting off with a disadvantage. How did you get so good at this? So this is something

I've actually been doing my whole life. My dad brought home a computer when I was, I think,

10 or 11, and I just sat down and I taught myself. And, you know, you just kind of start,

or at least I started figuring out

my ways around it. And it was a natural instinct to try to like break into things. You know, at the time,

we were using phone modem. So we were using dial-up connections to call into places. And it's

something that I always had a passion for. And I just kind of learned on my own. Okay. So you get really

good at hacking.

And then there's this moment where you're approached by the FBI. So at the time, I was doing a lot

...