SOS Deep Dive | The Staged Library Raid That Toppled Silk Road

In this week's deep dive, we strip out the spin and follow one story all the way through: The FBI's dramatic arrest of Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the billion-dollar darknet marketplace Silk Road, began with a staged fight in a San Francisco library. We trace how a libertarian idealist built an anonymous drug empire, the shadowy mentor who guided its expansion, and the corrupt federal agents who stole from the case. This is the untold story of greed, betrayal, and the battle for the darknet’s soul. The Silk Road saga reshaped online crime—and revealed how easily enforcers become criminals. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Every day, stripped-out news gives you the facts in just a few minutes. But some stories are complex. They need room to breathe to get the full picture, start to finish. This is SOS Deep Dive. A longer look at the stories that matter. Inside the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library, a 29-year-old man is sitting at a wooden table on the second floor, right in the science fiction section. He has his Samsung laptop open, connected to the library's free public wireless internet. He's typing code, reviewing user logs, and moderating an online forum. To the people sitting at the tables around him, he looks like any other young tech worker in the city. He's wearing a worn t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His name's Ross Obrecht. Suddenly, directly behind him, a man and a woman begin shouting at each other. The argument's loud, physical, and escalating quickly. It sounds like a domestic dispute, a lover's quarrel spilling into the quiet sanctuary of the library. It's disruptive enough that almost everyone in the section, including Ulbricht, turns around in their chairs to see what's happening. In that fraction of a second, as Olbricht's attention shifts away from his screen, two plain clothes federal agents step forward from behind a nearby bookshelf. Before Ulbricht can react, before he can hit a panic keystroke, close his screen, or shut down his system, one of the agents reaches over his shoulder and snatches the open laptop from his hands. Simultaneously, the arguing couple and several other library patrons reveal themselves as federal agents. They grab Ulbricht, pulling him away from the desk and pinning his arms behind his back. A computer scientist from the Federal Bureau of Investigation immediately steps forward and inserts a black universal serial bus drive into the open laptop. The drive executes a script designed to keep the system active, preventing the laptop from locking or encrypting its contents. On the screen, logged in as the master administrator, is the control dashboard of the Silk Road. The username visible in the top corner of the screen is Dread Pirate Roberts. The anonymous digital empire that had processed over $1 billion in transactions was seized in a local library because of a staged fight. But the most bizarre part of the story isn't how the government caught him, it's what some of the federal agents did after they joined the hunt. This is that story. Start to finish. In this feature-length episode, we're stripping out the internet myths, the dark net romanticism, and the political campaign talking points to examine the documented history of the rise and fall of the Silk Road. We'll follow the full arc. How a quiet graduate from Texas built a multimillion dollar anonymous black market based on libertarian theory. How that market became a playground for global drug dealers. How a mysterious mentor known as Variety Jones guided the site's transition from a small experiment to a global empire. And how the federal task force sent to investigate him fractured into a case study of extortion, theft, and a staged assassination. This is the story of the Silk Road and the battle for the Darknet. He was born on March 27, 1984, in Austin, Texas. He grew up in a stable middle-class family. He was an Eagle Scout. He attended the University of Texas at Dallas on a full academic scholarship, graduating in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics. During his undergraduate years, he was known as a quiet analytical student who spent hours in the lab, but he was also starting to read deeply in political philosophy. He then went to Penn State for graduate school, studying material science and engineering, with a focus on crystallography. But while at Penn State, Olbrich's interests shifted away from physics. He became obsessed with libertarian economic theory, specifically the works of Ludwig von Mises, and the philosophy of agorism, developed by Samuel Edward Conkin III. Agarism argues that the ultimate way to achieve a free society isn't through political action, voting, or lobbying, but through counter-economics, voluntary, unregulated exchanges that bypass government tax, licensing, and control. This philosophy, which Konkin called the counter-establishment, proposed that if enough people engaged in voluntary black market transactions, they'd eventually render the state's coercive power obsolete. Olbricht believed that if you could create a market where people could buy and sell anything anonymously, you could prove this theory in the real world. You could build a practical proof of concept for absolute individual liberty. He didn't see himself as a criminal mastermind. He saw himself as a pioneer of freedom, using technology to build a parallel economy where the state couldn't interfere. In 2008, while at Penn State, Ulbricht met Julia V. She was an 18-year-old freshman, and he was a graduate student. They met in an African drumming class. The attraction was immediate and intense. V would later describe a powerful physical and emotional connection. They spent almost all their free time together, often in his graduate office on campus, discussing politics, philosophy, and their futures. Ross was intense and deeply committed to his ideas, frequently engaging in long debates about how the world should operate without government boundaries. After his graduation in 2009, Olbricht moved back to Austin. V left school to join him. They shared a cheap, cramped apartment and began imagining a future together, perhaps even marriage. But the relationship was stormy, marked by frequent arguments over money, lifestyle, and politics. Olbricht was extremely frugal, viewing money as a resource to be preserved for his grand projects, while V wanted to socialize and experience the city. V was also more aligned with the Democratic Party, preferring traditional social reforms, while Ross was moving toward radical libertarianism and agorism. In the summer of 2010, they split for about a one and a half months, leaving Ulbricht heartbroken and writing emotional messages to his friends. They eventually reconciled, but their relationship began to fall apart for good as Ulbricht became consumed by a new project. In late 2009, Ulbricht partnered with his friend and neighbor, Donnie Palmertree, to launch Good Wagon Books. The business was an online used bookseller. They went door to door in Austin collecting donated books, sorted them in a warehouse, and resold them on Amazon. Ulbricht built the website, managed the inventory database, and wrote a custom pricing script based on Amazon sales rankings and competitive listings. It was a hands-on introduction to the mechanics of online logistics and database management. At its peak, the business had 50,000 books in inventory and managed five part-time college students, but it was a constant, exhausting struggle. They tried scaling the business with door-to-door hires, but the profit margins were thin and the physical labor was relentless. Donnie Palmertree eventually took another job as a vice president of sales at a milling company in Dallas, leaving Ulbricht to run the operations in Austin alone. Ulbricht received 50% ownership and a salary of $3,000 a month, but he felt trapped in a business that wasn't growing. In December of 2010, the business reached its peak, generating approximately $10,000 in sales. But in early 2011, a literal warehouse collapse occurred. The tall, heavy wooden shelves, loaded to capacity with thousands of books, fell like dominoes because they'd been assembled without the necessary safety screws. Ross stood in the middle of the ruined warehouse, looking at tens of thousands of scattered books. The collapse was a physical representation of Ulbrick's internal state. His heart was no longer in the business. They closed Good Wagon Books amicably in March of 2011, and Ross sold his share. Ulbrick later reflected on this period as leaving him with nothing. His attempts at day trading, game development, and other business ventures had all failed, leaving him deeply discouraged. But the experience had taught him practical e-commerce skills, inventory systems, database design, website coding, and online payment processing. He was ready to build his real project. In 2010, while still running the book business, Ulbricht began working on the code for what he originally called underground brokers. He combined three separate technologies to make it work. First, Tor. Originally developed by the United States Navy, Tor is an onion routing browser that bounces internet traffic through multiple encrypted servers, hiding a user's physical location. It allowed the website to exist on what's known as the Darknet, invisible to standard search engines. Second, Bitcoin. In 2010, Bitcoin was in its infancy, a decentralized digital currency that allowed peer-to-peer transactions without banks. It provided the anonymous financial engine that could bypass the traditional banking system. Third, escrow. The site would hold the Bitcoin in a central account until the buyer confirmed the drugs had arrived, protecting users from fraud. To seed this site with product, Ulbricht rented a dilapidated off-grid cabin near Bastrop, Texas. There, in a makeshift lab with sterile jars, peat, gypsum, pressure cookers, and petri dishes, he grew several kilograms of psilocybin mushrooms. It was time-intensive and highly risky, but he wanted to ensure the marketplace had goods for sale on day one. In early 2011, the Silk Road went live. Its first listing was Ross's own cabin-grown mushrooms. In his journal at the end of 2010, Ulbricht wrote, quote, Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon, end quote. Initially, the site was small, and Ulbricht handled transactions manually, mailing packages and managing the server from Austin. But in June of 2011, the technology blog Gawker published an article detailing the site. The writer Adrian Chen described a place where anyone could buy illegal drugs with a few clicks. The traffic exploded overnight, crashing the servers under the weight of thousands of new users. The public attention was immediate and hostile. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York held a high-profile press conference, calling the Silk Road the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs in the history of the Internet, and demanding that the Department of Justice shut it down immediately. Within months, the Silk Road became a global hub. It wasn't just mushrooms anymore. You could buy heroin, cocaine, LSD, ecstasy, fake driver's licenses, and hacking tools. Ulbricht's took a commission of between 8 and 15% on every transaction. As the site scaled, Olbricht adopted the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. He also met a crucial figure who would shape the site's future. In late 2011, a user known as Variety Jones, also using the aliases Simon and Plural of Mongoose, contacted Dread Pirate Roberts. Variety Jones was later identified by federal investigators as Roger Thomas Clark, a Canadian citizen with prior experience in illicit online sales. Clark became Ulbrick's mentor. Ulbrick's journal entries reveal that Clark helped him see a larger vision for the Silk Road, acting as a sounding board and strategic advisor. In a journal entry, Ross wrote that Variety Jones was, quote, the biggest and strongest-willed character I had met through the site thus far, end quote. Clark advised Ulbricht on technical operations, identifying security vulnerabilities, and managing site staff. He was the one who suggested that Ross adopt the Dread Pirate Roberts persona as a mythological figure, drawing the name from the movie The Princess Bride. Variety Jones told Ulbricht, quote, you need to change your name from admin to Dread Pirate Roberts, end quote. He reportedly added, start the legend, end quote. The idea was to create the myth of a transferable title passed from one operator to the next, providing plausible deniability and a cover story if Olbricht needed to claim he'd sold or handed off the site. This became central to Dread Pirate Roberts' public image and was later used in communications and a Forbes interview, where Dread Pirate Roberts claimed not to be the original founder. Variety Jones also helped restructure the site's business model. Initially, Silk Road used a flat 6.23% commission on all transactions. Under Clark's guidance, the site shifted to a tiered sliding scale. The commission was higher on smaller transactions, 10% on the first $50, but dropped to as low as 1.5% on transactions over $1,000. This sliding scale encouraged bulk wholesale purchases and maximized revenue, turning the site into a highly profitable enterprise. But Clark also introduced a darker element. When security issues and extortion threats arose, Clark was the first to suggest that dread pirate robots use violence to protect the marketplace, including arranging hits on individuals suspected of theft or blackmail. Variety Jones argued that since they were running an illegal marketplace, they'd already crossed the line into criminality and they shouldn't hesitate to enforce their rules. He warned Ross about the United States drug kingpin laws, pointing out that a conviction would mean a life sentence, so there was no point in holding back. By 2012, a multi-agency task force had been assembled to bring dread pirate Roberts down. The New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation focused on digital forensic tracking, while a second task force was set up in Baltimore. The Baltimore task force was composed of veteran investigators, including two men who possessed exceptional access to the darknet. The first was Carl Mark Force IV. He was a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was appointed as the lead undercover handler for the task force, communicating directly with Dread Pirate Roberts under the alias Knob. The second was Sean Bridges. He was a special agent with the United States Secret Service, specializing in computer forensics and digital currency tracking. The Baltimore team was highly focused on finding Dread Pirate Roberts, but they became obsessed with the theory that Mark Carpolis, the chief executive officer of the Mt. Gox Bitcoin Exchange, was the mastermind. Carl Force even engaged in unauthorized communication with Carpolis, attempting to extract information or construct a case against him. This obsession distracted the Baltimore team, but in January of 2013, they got a concrete break. They intercepted a package containing one kilogram of cocaine in Utah. The recipient was Curtis Clark Green, a 47-year-old grandfather who worked from his home as a customer support administrator for the Silk Road under the usernames Flush and Chronic Pain. Green was arrested. Confronted with federal charges, he chose to cooperate immediately. He surrendered his computer, his phone, and his administrative credentials to the agents. While Green was sitting in a hotel room debriefing investigators, Sean Bridges did something the rest of the task force didn't see. Using Green's administrative credentials, Bridges logged in to the Silk Road backend. He accessed user accounts and siphoned approximately $350,000 worth of Bitcoin directly into digital wallets under his personal control. On the Silk Road, the Dread Pirate Roberts watched the funds vanish. Because the withdrawals were executed using Curtis Green's admin key, Dread Pirate Roberts was convinced that Green had stolen the money and fled. Even worse, Dread Pirate Roberts feared that Green was a major operational security risk who turned informant. Dread Pirate Roberts panicked. He turned to his primary undercover contact on the site, Nobb, controlled by Carl Force. Dread Pirate Roberts told Knob that Curtis Green had stolen from the site and had information that could compromise the entire operation. Dread Pirate Roberts wanted Green found, beaten, and forced to return the stolen Bitcoin. On January 26, 2013, Dread Pirate Roberts messaged Knob via TorChat, quote, I'd like him beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back, beat up only if he doesn't comply, end quote. But within 24 hours, Dread Pirate Roberts's calculations changed. He realized that a beaten admin was still a breathing threat. On January 27th, Dread Pirate Roberts updated the order. Quote, can you change the order to execute rather than torture? I have never killed a man before, but it's the right move in this case. End quote. Dread Pirate Roberts agreed to pay Nob $80,000 for the hit. The first $40,000 was wired on February 4th from an Australian payment service called Technocash to a Capital One bank account controlled by the agents. Carl Force had a problem. Curtis Green was already in federal custody. He couldn't be killed. But Force didn't want to lose the $80,000, and he wanted to maintain his cover with Dread Pirate Roberts. So Force and Bridges decided to stage a murder. In February of 2013, federal agents transformed a Marriott Hotel room in Salt Lake City into a movie set. Curtis Green, cooperating fully, agreed to play the victim. First came the torture photos. Agents bound Green's hands behind his back and forced him onto the bathroom floor. Carl Force staged a fake waterboarding scene, pouring water over Green's face in the bathtub to simulate physical distress. They took approximately 16 photos. On February 16th, Force sent the images to the Dread Pirate Roberts. Dread Pirate Roberts's response was preserved in the database logs, quote, a little disturbed, but I am okay. I'm new to this kind of thing, is all, end quote. But Dread Pirate Roberts still wanted proof of death. A few days later, agents went to Green's home to stage the final scene. Green lay face down on the carpet, wearing the same clothes as in the torture photos for visual consistency. He held his breath and made his face appear pale. To simulate vomit, Green and his wife splattered a can of Campbell's chicken and star soup across his face and the surrounding carpet. They took ten photos of the staged corpse. Force sent the death photos to Dread Pirate Roberts and confirmed that the body had been, quote, disposed of, end quote. Dread Pirate Roberts was satisfied. On February 28th, he transferred the remaining $40,000 of the bounty. He messaged Nob, quote, I'm pissed I had to kill him, but what's done is done, end quote. Green was told by federal authorities to go into hiding. He stayed inside his house with the blinds drawn. To make the disappearance look real to anyone watching, Carl Force went so far as to file a false missing persons report with the local police department. To the rest of the world, Curtis Green was dead. But while the staged hit succeeded in protecting Force's cover, it also unlocked a massive extortion scheme. Carl Force realized that the Dread Pirate Roberts was desperate for information about the federal investigation. Operating under the unauthorized alias FrenchMade, Force messaged Dread Pirate Roberts offering inside government information in exchange for Bitcoin. Dread Pirate Roberts paid FrenchMade approximately $100,000. All of these These transactions were routed into personal accounts. The Drug Enforcement Agency had no record of them. The Secret Service had no record of them. While Force and Bridges were accumulating hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen Bitcoin, the New York Federal Bureau of Investigation team was closing in on Ross Olbricht through traditional digital forensics. We'll be right back.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Hey SOS fans. This is Jesse Spano. If you're enjoying this deep dive, you need to check out the Stripped Out News Daily Podcast. Every single morning, we cut through the partisan spin and give you the bare facts of the most important stories happening around the world. All in just a few minutes. No screaming talking heads, no hidden agendas, just the news. You can listen on your favorite podcast app or head over to stripptoutnews.com to read the stories and see the data for yourself. That's stripptoutnews.com. Also, if you're in a hurry but still want to get a little reading in, try the five-minute summary on the site. People are raving. Back to SOS.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Welcome back to SOS Deep Dive. The breakthrough did not come from Baltimore. It came from a Homeland Security Investigations special agent in Chicago named Jared Der Yegian. Der Yegian had been intercepting drug packages at O'Hare Airport since 2011. By tracking the forum postings of early Silk Road users, he found a post from January of 2011 where a user named Altoid had advertised the launch of a new anonymous website. Altoid had included an email address in the post, rosubricht at gmail.com. Forensic specialists tracked the Gmail account. They found a Stack Overflow programming forum post where a user posting under the name Ross Olbricht had asked a highly technical question about how to code a Tor hidden service connection. When he realized his real name was visible, Olbricht had quickly changed the username to Frosty, but the digital footprint was permanent. In July of 2003, a major close call occurred that nearly brought the entire operation down months before the library arrest. During routine mail screening at the Canadian border, United States Customs and Border Protection Officers intercepted a package originating from Canada. The package was addressed to a multi-unit brownhouse at 2260 15th Street in San Francisco, a residential area where Ulbricht was renting a room under the alias Joshua Terry. When officers opened the package, they found nine high-quality counterfeit identity documents, including driver's licenses. All nine documents featured Ross Olbricht's photograph, but they bore different names and details. For example, one California driver's license featured his real birth date, but a completely different name. The package had been sent by a Canadian vendor on the Silk Road. Olbricht, operating as Dread Pirate Roberts, had ordered the fake identities because the site was experiencing rapid growth. He needed fake identification to rent additional servers anonymously and secure the site's expanding infrastructure. On July 26, 2013, agents from Homeland Security Investigations visited the 15th Street address. Ross Olbricht answered the door, dressed in shorts and appearing casually. His roommates were completely surprised by the visit. Ross generally refused to answer detailed questions, but he remained polite and cooperative on the basics. He identified himself and showed the agents his real Texas driver's license, which matched the photographs on the counterfeit documents. During the conversation, Ross volunteered a curious piece of information. He said that, hypothetically, anyone could go on a website called Silk Road on tour and purchase drugs or fake identity documents. The agents, who were not connected to the main Silk Road investigation and were simply tracing the source of the fake IDs, documented the encounter, logged it in their databases, and left without arresting him. Following the visit, Ross immediately adjusted his living arrangements, moving to a different room to distance himself from the address. His roommates, who knew him only as quiet, reclusive Josh, who was always home in his room on his computer, were shocked by the agent's visit, but didn't suspect him of major criminal activity. The encounter was logged, creating a paper trail in federal databases that would later connect when investigators cross-referenced their cases. Ross's private journal entries from this period reflect his growing paranoia and stress. He noted the visit as a close call, but did not view it as fatal to his operations, continuing to run the site as Dread Pirate Roberts. They knew he was Dread Pirate Roberts, but they had a major legal and technical hurdle. If they raided his house or arrested him on the street, Olbrich's Samsung laptop would lock instantly. The drive was encrypted. Without his active logged-in terminal, prosecutors would struggle to prove that the files on his computer belonged to the Dread Pirate Roberts. They needed to capture the machine while it was open, unlocked, and actively connected to the Silk Road administration dashboard. That's why they chose the Glen Park Public Library on October 1st. They waited until their digital monitors confirmed that Dread Pirate Roberts was active on the Silk Road back end. They followed Ulbricht into the library and watched him sit down in the science fiction section. The staged domestic dispute was the key. Two undercover agents began screaming at each other directly behind Olbricht. When he turned to look at the noise, Agent Jared Duryagayan snatched the laptop. Within seconds, the computer scientist inserted the universal serial bus drive, preserving the open terminal. The evidence was overwhelming. The laptop contained Olbricht's private journal detailing the creation of the site, chat logs with administrators, spreadsheets tracking millions in commissions, and the master keys to the Silk Road server. The Anonymous Empire was gone. Ross Olbricht's trial began in New York in January of 2015. His defense team, led by attorney Joshua Dradel, faced a massive challenge. Shortly before the trial began, the defense learned that federal investigators Carl Force and Sean Bridges were under investigation for corruption. But the prosecution successfully argued that the grand jury investigation into the Baltimore agents should be kept under seal. The judge, Catherine Forrest, ruled that the defense could not raise the issue of the Baltimore corruption before the jury. She argued that because the New York Federal Bureau of Investigation team had built their case independently, the actions of the Baltimore agents were not material to Olbricht's guilt. The jury never heard about Knobb. They never heard about the Campbell Soup death photos. They never heard about the stolen Bitcoin. On February 5, 2015, Ross Olbricht was convicted on all seven counts, including continuing a criminal enterprise, drug trafficking, and money laundering. On May 29, 2015, Judge Forrest sentenced him to two life sentences, plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole. In March of 2015, just weeks after Olbrich's conviction, the Department of Justice unsealed the criminal complaints against Carl Force and Sean Bridges. The exposure was a massive embarrassment for federal law enforcement. Carl Force pleaded guilty to extortion, money laundering, and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison. Sean Bridges pleaded guilty to money laundering and obstruction of justice, receiving a sentence of 71 months. But while out on bail before his self-surrender date, Bridges was caught attempting to siphon an additional $600,000 in stolen Bitcoin and attempting to flee the country. He was arrested again and sentenced to an additional 24 months to run consecutively. On forums like Bitcoin Talk and Reddit, users pointed out the dark irony. The federal government had prosecuted Ross Ulbricht to protect the rule of law, while its own agents were stealing the very cryptocurrency they claimed was a tool of criminals. Joshua Draydel filed repeated motions for a new trial, arguing that the suppression of the Baltimore corruption had denied Ulbricht his constitutional right to a fair trial. He argued that the entire investigation was tainted. The appeals court rejected the motions. They ruled that even without the Baltimore evidence, the New York team's forensic evidence, found on Ulbricht's laptop at the moment of his arrest, was too overwhelming to ignore. The conviction stood. Roger Thomas Clark, the mentor known as Variety Jones, was arrested in Thailand in 2015 and extradited to the United States in 2018. In 2020, he pleaded guilty to narcotics conspiracy. In July of 2023, he was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Ross Olbricht was sent to a maximum security penitentiary. His double life sentence was widely criticized by legal scholars and human rights organizations as excessively harsh for a nonviolent first-time offender. A massive clemency campaign, Free Ross, gathered over half a million signatures. For nearly a decade, Ross Ulbricht remained behind bars, while the price of Bitcoin rose from $100 at the time of his arrest to tens of thousands of dollars. The Silk Road had proven that Bitcoin had utility. It had launched the cryptocurrency into the mainstream. Then came the federal government's final transactions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had seized 144,000 bitcoins from Ross Olbret's laptop and another 30,000 from the Silk Road servers, making the United States government one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world. In 2014 and 2015, the United States Marshall Service held a series of public auctions to sell off the seized cryptocurrency. The venture capitalist Tim Draper purchased the majority of the coins in the early auctions, paying approximately $650 per coin. Today, those auctioned coins would be worth billions of dollars. Then came January 21, 2025. On his second day in office, President Donald Trump granted Ross Olbrecht a full and unconditional pardon. Trump had made the promise at the 2024 Libertarian Rational Convention, and he fulfilled it immediately upon returning to the White House. Olbrecht was released from federal custody after serving over 11 years. He posted an emotional video to social media, thanking his family, his supporters, and the president for his freedom. Green publicly stated that Ulbricht had paid his debt and deserved to go home. Today, the Silk Road is a historical footnote in the evolution of the Internet. Ross Olbricht lives in Texas as a free man. Carl Force and Sean Bridges have served their sentences. The camel logo and the green seizure banner are gone, but the question at the heart of this story remains. Ross Olbricht built the Silk Road to prove that technology could make human transactions free from state control. Instead, the story proved that when you build a market in the shadows, the shadows eventually swallow everyone, the buyers, the sellers, and the agents sent to watch them. All facts in this episode are drawn from the public indictment filings in the Southern District of New York, the criminal complaints against Carl Force and Sean Bridges in the Northern District of California, contemporary news reporting, and trial transcripts. This has been SOS Deep Dive from Stripped Out News. If you want to support our mission of delivering factual, spin free news, share this episode with a friend. No spin, all facts. We'll see you next week.