I can finally talk about this...

This eight-and-a-half-minute solo episode is a product launch, start to finish. Ryan opens with the backstory: contracting for the CIA in a poor Middle Eastern country while hunting ISIS and the Taliban, his team carried clunky 'black phones' — an app inside an app inside an app — because China, Russia and Iran were all collecting on each other in the same place. That paranoia faded when he changed careers, then returned as the podcast escalated from interviewing former SEAL and CIA colleagues to vice presidents, heads of state, Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Massoud in Vienna, and Taiwan's vice president.

The modern black phones he found cost $10,000 and up, so he partnered with the developers of one — former intelligence and NSA people, by his description — to turn it into an app called Glacier. The feature he leads with is burner numbers: pick a number with any US area code, hand it out to politicians, nonprofits, or stores, and deactivate it the moment it gets sold or abused. He also pitches secure DNS (his phone had blocked over 1,300 web trackers by 4pm that day) and a US-based VPN he says collects no user data — paired with his claim that the VPN companies advertised on podcasts are owned by Chinese, Pakistani, and Israeli firms. The app is live on iOS at launch, with Android promised soon.