Beyond the Code

The Future Thinkers co-founders spent ten years as digital nomads. Now they look after 400 acres in British Columbia, where the walkie-talkies connect to Claude.

On episode 111, Mike and Euvie join me to talk about Portal.Place, the project they're building near Wells Gray Provincial Park. Today it operates as a seasonal campsite rather than a residential community, with 200 to 300 people on a busy summer day. We get into what that takes: zoning and road costs, two wells and spare pumps, septic, storms that bring down trees, and six-figure annual maintenance. Then the fun part.

Mike 3D printed a CNC machine for about $1,200 and uses AI to model replacement parts for old machinery. They explain the barbell strategy of running forest school and AI side by side, why Euvie's childhood during the collapse of the USSR taught her that you're only as resilient as your community, and their plans for cabins, a makerspace, festivals and a drone-scanned digital twin of the land.

Guests: Mike Gilliland & Euvie Ivanova – Portal.Place: https://www.portal.place ·

Future Thinkers: https://futurethinkers.org

Host: Yitzy Hammer – X: https://x.com/ijhammer · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ijhammer ·

DLT Law: https://www.dltlaw.io

New on Substack: https://byndthecode.substack.com

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Mark Karpelès bought a half-price Ledger Nano X, opened it, and found a mass-produced spy implant. The former Mt. Gox CEO explains what he found, and how to check your own wallet.

Mark, now CEO of Karpelès Labs in Japan, spotted the implant before the CryptoBillis story broke. He walks through how it uses an LTE antenna to send data back to the attacker, why he's now sharing his findings with Ledger, and the detector he's building to tell you "clean" or "not clean." He also explains how to open a Nano X yourself.

Then we go back to 2010: accepting Bitcoin for web hosting, taking over Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb, growing from about 6,000 customers to 1 million in two years, the Silk Road fallout and the $5M US seizure, years under public suspicion, and how he'd build a secure exchange today with all-cold storage and FROST. We finish with AI and CatCard, his custom firmware for the Coldcard.

Chapters
00:00 Welcome, Mark Karpelès
04:11 Karpelès Labs: "specialized in doing the impossible"
06:14 The CryptoBillis Ledger implant story
08:03 Finding a mass-produced implant in a half-price Nano X
12:22 Ledger's response, and cooperating now
14:40 The risk of a broad reseller network
15:50 Mark's implant detector
19:22 How to check a Nano X yourself, and the warranty catch-22
21:17 A cat-and-mouse game with implant makers
23:40 Mark's story: from France to Japan
30:49 Taking over Mt. Gox from Jed McCaleb
34:10 From 6,000 to 1 million customers
35:39 Silk Road, banks and the $5M US seizure
41:11 BIP32/BIP39: what could have saved Mt. Gox
42:24 Living under suspicion
45:42 How he'd build an exchange today
48:44 Bankruptcy and creditor recoveries
51:31 A few months in Israel
55:30 Crypto, AI and 20–30 agents at once
1:00:49 CatCard: custom Coldcard firmware
1:04:00 Where to follow Mark, and a parting warning

Guest: Mark Karpelès – X: https://x.com/MagicalTux
Host: Yitzy Hammer – X: https://x.com/ijhammer · LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ijhammer · DLT Law: https://www.dltlaw.io
Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/MeG8kFkCPQQ
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I’ve told my wife I might need to retire in five years. Not because I want to stop working—but because I’m wondering whether AI will leave commercial lawyers with a profession that looks anything like the one we know today.

Zohar Fisher, founder of Robus and co-founder of LawFlex, joins me to debate that prediction. He sees disruption coming, but also an opportunity for adaptable lawyers who move quickly and build relationships their clients won’t want to lose.

We explore legal outsourcing, human review of AI-generated work, the uncertain path for junior lawyers, and the shift from hourly billing to value-based legal fees. Zohar explains the idea behind AI-native law firms, while I ask what happens to insurance, professional responsibility and the price clients will pay for human judgment.

We finish with a problem many commercial lawyers will recognize: AI turning a routine agreement into a long list of objections—and making a deal harder to close.

If you’re a lawyer, law student, founder or someone wondering what AI means for your own career, this conversation is for you.

Hosted by Yitzy Hammer on Beyond the Code.

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Diego Borgo helped bring Adidas into the NFT and metaverse world during one of the wildest moments in crypto history.

In this episode, Diego takes us behind the scenes of Adidas’ move into Web3 and reflects on whether the NFT boom was a failed experiment, a successful one, or simply too early.

We also dive deep into branding and storytelling: why great products aren't enough, what tech founders get wrong when explaining what they build, and how brands like Patagonia, Salesforce and Tesla create stories people want to become part of.

But the conversation eventually becomes much more personal. Diego opens up about faith, fatherhood, hope, leaving security behind, and the importance of showing your kids what's possible.

He also shares the story of the wall of images he created during one of the hardest periods of his life — pictures representing the future he wanted — and what happened when he looked back years later and realized he was living it.

Geoff White has spent over a decade at the intersection of technology and organized crime. As Channel 4 News' technology correspondent, he reported on the Snowden leaks, exposed the Talk Talk hack, and dug into fraud across the online dating industry. He's the co-creator of the BBC's Lazarus Heist, a chart-topping podcast on North Korea's hacking operations, and the author of three books — Crime Dot Com, Rinsed, and, for Audible, The Dark Web and AI: Friend or Foe, the latter released back in 2019, well before AI became a household conversation.

In this episode, Geoff joins Yitzy to talk about his path from local newspapers to investigative journalism, the difference between writing a book and building a podcast, and how crypto has genuinely changed the mechanics of money laundering — not made it impossible to trace, but made it faster to move. He also breaks down how his team pieced together 350,000 leaked internal messages from the Conti ransomware gang, translation quirks and all, and gives his take on recent AI-driven hacks, including the Hugging Face/OpenAI incident and the Cold Card wallet exploit — plus why he's skeptical of confident claims about how much AI is actually being used in phishing today.

This episode is brought to you by FirstRead — the AI-powered contract and document tool built for lawyers. Use code BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off, or sign up here: https://first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026

In this episode, we cover:

00:00 – Intro: who is Geoff White04:14 – From balloon modeler to investigative journalist09:25 – Going freelance and the leap into book writing11:05 – How book deals and advances actually work13:39 – Researching and writing Crime.com15:05 – Meeting Brett Johnson, the "OG of hacking"17:36 – Books vs. podcasts: what changes in the storytelling24:00 – What the reader knows and when: crafting a true-crime narrative26:18 – Rinsed: has crypto made money laundering easier, or just different?35:37 – Inside The Conti Files: leaked chats, translation chaos, and "the grandmas"42:30 – Personal safety and the risks of covering hackers directly44:22 – Revisiting AI: Friend or Foe, written in 201948:05 – The Hugging Face/OpenAI hack, the Cold Card exploit, and self-custody risk50:45 – Why Geoff won't say "AI phishing is worse" without the data

Connect with Geoff :

https://geoffwhite.tech/ (podcast and audiobook links, book purchases and contact details)

In this episode, we cover CJ Hetherington's path from a self-taught teenager trading crypto in the UK's Lake District to Co-Founder and CEO of Limitless, one of the fastest-growing prediction market platforms built on Base.

CJ walks through his early builds - a gamified NFT protocol, the Atlantis World metaverse — and how a chance conversation led him and his Ukrainian co-founder to raise crypto donations for humanitarian aid within hours of the full-scale invasion, eventually hosting a hackathon inside a bomb shelter with Vitalik Buterin. From there, he traces Limitless's founding in late 2023, why staying outside the Polymarket/Kalshi duopoly has been an advantage, the CFTC review process for US market entry, and why he sees institutional hedging — not sports betting — as the real endgame for prediction markets. We close on what Limitless saw in the data during the World Cup and CJ's read on where the broader crypto market is headed next.

Sponsored by FirstRead — the AI-powered contract review tool built for lawyers who don't have time to read every clause twice. Use code BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off at ⁠first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026⁠.

In this episode, we cover Michael Terpin's journey from early internet PR (founding Globe Newswire, working with Motley Fool, Earthlink, and AOL) to becoming one of crypto's earliest and most recognized figures — a path that earned him the nickname "the godfather of crypto" from CNBC, by his account, for his PR work on Ethereum, Tether, and roughly 400 other early projects.

Terpin walks through his "Four Seasons of Bitcoin" framework — his own thesis on how fear-and-greed cycles play out predictably between halvings — and shares his (unverified, forward-looking) outlook on where he believes Bitcoin's cycle lows and highs may land in the years ahead. He also discusses meeting Coinbase's Brian Armstrong at the first Bitcoin conference in 2013, and his book and fund, both built around the Bitcoin Supercycle thesis.

Note: price levels and cycle predictions discussed are Terpin's own analysis and should not be taken as financial advice or confirmed fact.

This episode is brought to you by FirstRead — use code BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off at first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026.

In one of the most unique conversations in Beyond the Code history, Yitzy sits down with Reuven "Ruby" Rivlin — the 10th President of the State of Israel — to talk about why, at 86 years old, he's betting on crypto.

Rivlin is now Honorary President of Bitcore Capital, a publicly traded Israeli company building regulated digital financial infrastructure — including a shekel-pegged stablecoin, Bitcoin-backed lending, and what could become Israel's first crypto-native digital bank and have recently entered into a very significant partnership with Lava Network. The company has assembled a team of former senior government officials, regulators, and law enforcement leaders specifically to earn the trust of the Israeli public and regulators alike.

But before all of that, Rivlin was a trial lawyer, a Jerusalem city councilor under Mayor Teddy Kollek, president of Beitar Jerusalem football club, a 30-year Knesset member, Speaker of the Knesset twice, Israel's Communications Minister, and finally — the President of Israel from 2014 to 2021.

In this episode:

• Why Rivlin joined Bitcore Capital and what they're actually building
• The regulatory challenges facing crypto adoption in Israel
• How assembling former chiefs of police, ministers, and regulators is a trust-building strategy — not just optics
• His vision for Israel as a leader in the digital financial revolution
• Stories from his legal career, the Knesset, Beitar Jerusalem, and his relationships with world leaders

This episode is brought to you by FirstRead — your go-to source for crypto legal and regulatory intelligence.

Get 10% off with code BYNDTHECODE10 at https://first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026

This episode was recorded live at Consensus Miami 2026.

Jonathan Schmalfeld — known as 'Birdnals' across Crypto Twitter — is Policy Director at The Digital Chamber. He came up doing soft IP litigation, got into crypto around 2015, and eventually turned what he was doing for fun into his full-time work.

We cover the NFT IP moment, what it takes to be a real Web3 lawyer, the knowledge-sharing culture that makes this community unique, and how he went from associate at a major law firm to advocating for the industry in front of Congress and regulators.

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This episode is sponsored by FirstRead (use BYNDTHECODE10 for 10% off).

This show is hosted by Yitzy Hammer.

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Check out our new website: www.beyondthecode.fm

A milestone episode, recorded live at Consensus Miami 2026: after three years, Beyond the Code has its first sponsor — and there's a good story behind why it's FirstRead.

Yitzy is joined by returning guest Mike Bacina, now a partner at NXT Law leading the firm out of Cayman, to talk about how boutique firms are gaining a real edge with AI, why the billable hour quietly works against adoption at big firms, and why "AI will take your job" is the same fear lawyers have had about every technology before it.

Sponsored by FirstRead — AI-powered contract help for lawyers. 10% off with code BYNDTHECODE10: https://first-read.com/signup?ref=BEYOND2026