How to Hack a Poker Game

Last week, the US Justice Department published an indictment involving NBA stars and members of the mob for allegedly running a network of rigged gambling games. One of their rigging tactics was a manipulation of a Deckmate 2 automatic shuffling machine—almost identical to an experiment done by senior correspondent Andy Greenberg and his hacking crew for WIRED’s Hacklab. Hosts Michael Calore and Lauren Goode sit down with Andy to break down how the machines can be compromised, and what the vulnerabilities behind it say about our tech devices at large.

Articles mentioned in the episode:

• How Hacked Card Shufflers Allegedly Enabled a Mob-Fueled Poker Scam That Rocked the NBA
• Hackers Rig Casino Card-Shuffling Machines for ‘Full Control’ Cheating

You can follow Michael Calore on Bluesky at @snackfight, Lauren Goode on Bluesky at @laurengoode, and Andy Greenberg on Bluesky at @agreenberg. Write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com.

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Transcript

Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.

Michael Calore: Hey, Lauren. How are you doing?

Lauren Goode: Hey, Mike. I’m good. How are you?

Michael Calore: I am fantastic today. Thanks.

Lauren Goode: You rarely hear that. Happy for you.

Michael Calore: Before we dive into the show, I have to ask, are you a poker player?

Lauren Goode: Not exactly.

Michael Calore: What do you mean “not exactly”?

Lauren Goode: No, I mean, so you’ve probably heard of this little thing called CES—

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: —that happens every year in Las Vegas. So for several years I would go cover CES often for your team and would play a little bit of pai gow poker. Are you familiar with pai gow?

Michael Calore: Oh, yeah. It’s one of those games I don’t understand.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it’s a combination of pai gow, which is a Chinese game with dominoes and American poker and it’s played at casinos. You get two hands, you get a set of five cards and a set of two cards, and you’re essentially playing against the dealer and it’s quote-unquote “poker.” So that’s the extent of the gambling that I do.

Michael Calore: Oh, I’m already lost.

Lauren Goode: How about you? Do you have a poker face?

Michael Calore: No, I have sportsbook face, which is me just staring at my phone waiting for the scores to come in.

Lauren Goode: Is that a real thing? I think we just coined that.

Michael Calore: I think so.

Lauren Goode: So if I’m not mistaken, you’re asking this because our guest today definitely has some recent experience playing poker.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Andy Greenberg, welcome to Uncanny Valley. We’re so thrilled to have you on the show. How are you doing?

Andy Greenberg: Glad to be here again. Good to talk to you both.

Michael Calore: All right, Andy, get your chips ready, because we’re about to double down on poker cheating.

Andy Greenberg: OK, here we go. With as many poker puns as possible in this episode.

Michael Calore: This is why WIRED’s Uncanny Valley, a show about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. Today we are hacking our way through a poker game. Recently our colleague Andy Greenberg and the crew at WIRED’s Hacklab experimented with how the card shuffler machine DeckMate 2, one of the most common machines used in casinos, card houses, and private games could be altered to cheat in a poker game. Then last week the US Justice Department published an indictment against 31 people, among them NBA stars and members of the mafia for allegedly running a network of rigged gambling games. One of their rigging methods and the one described in detail in the indictment was a manipulation of the DeckMate 2 shuffling machine in almost exactly the same way that Andy and the Hacklab folks at WIRED previously showed. We’ll dive into why their hackability matters for everyone involved, even for those of us who don’t frequent the poker table. I’m Michael Calore, director of consumer tech and culture.

Lauren Goode: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior correspondent.

Andy Greenberg: And I’m Andy Greenberg, senior writer covering hacking, cybersecurity, surveillance, and apparently cheating at poker.

Michael Calore: So Andy, let’s start with what made you want to chase the story? Why did you and the team here at WIRED get interested in seeing if you could rig the DeckMate 2 shuffling machine?

Andy Greenberg: Well, this story actually goes back three years kind of in its origin. So this group of security researchers who I talk to pretty frequently at a company called IOActive, they actually got this idea from watching this kind of streams televised game of poker at Los Angeles’s Hustler Live Casino. There is this notorious game that every poker player in America, it seems like, is now familiar with, where this inexperienced player who was being staked by a pro—like given lots of money to gamble with—called the bluff of this other veteran player on a major, major pot. And she called that bluff with a terrible hand like a Jack and a four basically. And there’s no way every poker player knows that you would ever know that you could call a bluff with a hand that bad unless you somehow knew that the other player’s hand was even worse.

It would make no sense unless you were cheating. Poker players tell me at least, of course, the player who called that bluff, she denies cheating. But this was a huge scandal, and there was a big investigation into the game. There was actually a kind of official report written about the incidents in which Hustler Live Casino had to try to get to the bottom of what happened. And in that report they looked at all the different possibilities of the ways that the new player might have cheated, including hacking the automated shuffler machine called the DeckMate that was used in that game and actually used in casinos and private games and gambling establishments all around the world, this machine that automatically shuffles cards. And in that investigative report it stated, “Well, we can rule out the automated shuffler because this thing is basically unhackable, it cannot be compromised.”

That’s what it said in the report. So coming back to my sources, these researchers at IOActive, the security firm, they read that, and to any hacker, honestly, a description like that is just an invitation to prove someone wrong. If you hear that something is unhackable, then you cannot help—apparently if you are a hacker—but try to find its vulnerabilities, which they did. And so by 2023, they had found a whole collection of vulnerabilities in the DeckMate 2 that they were about to present at the Black Hat hacker conference in Las Vegas. And they told me about it. By the summer of 2023, they had in fact come up with this technique where they could insert a little device that they had developed into the USB port that sits exposed on the back of a DeckMate 2 shuffler, often by player’s knees under the table, the machine kind of sits flush with the table.

The body of it is below the table, including this exposed USB port, and you can stick a little device into that port and then alter the code of the machine, get access to—this is kind of unbelievable—but the DeckMate 2 has a camera inside of it, put there by the manufacturer. So their hacking device will gain access to that camera and learn the entire deck order as it’s being shuffled and then transmit that deck order to a cheating player so that they would know what is in everybody’s hand in a game of Texas Hold‘em and be able to bet or fold and essentially cheat perfectly and undetectably.

Michael Calore: So why does the company put a camera inside the automated shuffling machine?

Andy Greenberg: Well, ironically, that camera is inside the machine to prevent cheating, to ensure that the integrity of the deck basically. It looks to see that all 52 cards are there, that nobody has slipped in an extra ace or something. But yes, it is completely nuts. It feels to me that there is a camera inside this thing where if you’re able to hack, and there were in fact vulnerabilities in the firmware as well, that allowed the security researchers at IOActive to alter the code of the machine undetectably. And that means that you can get access to that camera and learn the deck order. It did not seem like a good idea to have a camera inside of this thing waiting to be accessed by hackers.

Michael Calore: So you hooked up with these researchers recently in Las Vegas. DEFCON is the big hacker conference that takes place in Las Vegas every year and you’re like, “OK, we’re in Las Vegas. I know that these guys have this hacked machine, I want to see if it works.” So tell us about your experiment.

Andy Greenberg: Right. So in 2023, we at WIRED broke the story of the vulnerabilities in this machine thanks to IOActive telling me about them. And then now in 2025, two years later, we on the video team for our Hacklab series were just thinking, “What is a fun hacking demonstration we can show on camera?” And so I had this idea of what about that automated card shuffler that got hacked two years ago? Maybe we could, if that vulnerability still exists in these machines, we could demonstrate that.

And that’s like this really cool Hollywood hack to show on video. And so we got Joseph Tartaro, the lead researcher from IOActive to join us and not only demonstrate how to hack a DeckMate 2 card shuffler, but we had him and two unsuspecting players sit in on a real game of Texas Hold’em in which he hacked the shuffler and acted as my cheating partner.

And we actually tried out this exploit in a real game where I cheated against people who had no idea that the shuffler had been hacked. When I finally met Joseph in person in Vegas, I did want to see how the DeckMate 2 works firsthand. He was able to open up the machine and show me how it operates.

Andy Greenberg (clip): How does the DeckMate 2 work internally? Is it actually the same way that I would take a deck and riffle, shuffle it like this? Is it doing that mechanically inside?

Joseph Tartaro (clip): No, actually it has 20, 23 or 26 different shelves and it will generate a random number. So it’ll eventually just produce a deck. It’s really used to make sure that the casino just gets more hands an hour. Let me show you. See the door opened here. And now we wait.

Andy Greenberg (clip): And the dealer just pulls the deck out of this little container at the top.

Joseph Tartaro (clip): Correct. There’s your deck.

Andy Greenberg (clip): Yeah, here we go.

Lauren Goode: So if the point of the hacking technique is to learn the perfect order of the deck, then what happens once the dealer starts cutting the deck?

Andy Greenberg: That is a really good question. It seems like if you just cut the deck when it came out of the shuffler before everybody’s hands are dealt, then that would solve this problem of the cheater knowing the order. But in a game of Texas Hold’em, once you see what’s in your hand or you see the three flop cards, the first cards that are put out publicly onto the table, you’ll know exactly where the dealer has cut to or where a player has cut to before the hands are dealt. And so with the app that IOActive built, this custom cheating app that receives the order of the deck, you can actually quietly put into the app the cards in your hands or the flop cards on the table, and as soon as you do that, it will tell you what’s in everybody else’s hand. That solves the problem of somebody cutting the deck.

Michael Calore: So something that’s still sticking in my mind is that in order to compromise the machine, you have to plug this custom-made device that IOActive developed into the USB port of the DeckMate 2. So how do you do that? How do they actually get access to the machine if they’re in a situation where they’re at a casino or they’re at a private game and they want to cheat?

Andy Greenberg: Right. So the way that Joseph, the security researcher describes this is that port is often sitting under the table by your knees in a casino. So if you’re bold enough to pretend you dropped your chips or a sandwich or whatever, you can just duck under the table, plug in this device and start cheating. The company that sells this shuffling machine from the very beginning said that that’s not a realistic scenario. Things are monitored too closely in a casino. That’s not actually possible. I really don’t know. And of course we didn’t test that out in our demo in a real casino. It seems like it could be possible. Joseph points out that people even sometimes charge their phones in that port because it provides power too.

So you could use a malicious Android phone, like an Android phone set up to carry out the same exploit instead of his little hacking device plugged into the shuffler. But also there’s this whole other threat model. Once you’ve seen that by hacking the shuffler through the USB port, you can cheat in this incredibly effective way. That also means that a maintenance person who has access to the machine before the game or the host of the game themselves, if the casino is in on it, if the host of this private game, if it’s their shuffler, they can hack their own machine and allow somebody to cheat and you would never know.

Lauren Goode: So Andy, how do the cheaters who are at the table actually participate in this? How do you see what’s going on if you’re not a person who’s sitting there staring at your phone screen that has access to all of that digital information?

Andy Greenberg: Well, I think the point you’re raising maybe is that you’re not supposed to be messing with your phone in the middle of a high-stakes poker game.

Lauren Goode: Right. Exactly.

Andy Greenberg: If you’re in the game, you’re not allowed to use your phone in some casinos, in certain private games if enough money is on the line. So the system that Joseph and I set up in our hacking demo that we kind of just figured out on the fly through a bit of experimentation was that he, being my cheating partner, would fold and get out of the game on the hands where we would cheat. And then once he was out of the game, he was able to pick up his phone and nobody would think twice about that. So he would look at his hand, he would fold, then he would pick up his phone and quietly put into the app on his phone, the two cards in his hand, and then he would know who had the best hand.

In fact, he would know everybody’s hands, and then he would silently signal to me how to bet or to fold. And the way we actually did that was through a kind of system of covert signaling that used the number of chips he was holding in his hand. I’m an absolutely terrible poker player, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I would just watch Joseph’s signals on these hands where he had folded and was out of the game and was instead my cheating partner to see how many chips he was messing with in his hand. And through those chips alone, he would give me the signal of what to do and he would know when I had the best hand, and he would tell me to bet big and I would win these massive pots.

Lauren Goode: What was he doing with his hands? What did he do with the chips?

Andy Greenberg: Our system was just like play with one chip means fold, play with two means call, play with three means raise. And so I would just do as I was told, and when I had the winning hand and I saw him messing with those three chips, I would sometimes go all in and take these unsuspecting players for enormous sums of money.

Lauren Goode: This is a Bond movie? This actually is a Bond movie.

Andy Greenberg: Yes.

Lauren Goode: Andy, you are WIRED’s James Bond.

Andy Greenberg: Well, it’s funny you should say that because we experimented with other ways of cheating too and other ways of hacking the shuffler. You can not only learn the exact order of the deck, but you can actually reorder the deck by hacking it too. And Joseph tried that, and he demonstrated to me that he could in fact replicate the exact hand from Casino Royale or Bond as a straight flush. And we played out that hand too. He can with code alone deal you exactly the hand he wants you to have. But that just seemed like a kind of actually clumsy way of cheating where it would start to become apparent if you had these crazy amazing James Bond hands too often. So instead we just stuck with this much more subtle technique of learning the deck order rather than messing with the deck order.

Michael Calore: Let’s take a quick break. When we come back, we’re going to find out how this cheating strategy worked out for Andy, and why the FBI, the Mafia, and the NBA are all involved with the DeckMate 2 machine.

[break]

Michael Calore: Welcome back to Uncanny Valley. Today we’re talking about hacking poker games. So Andy, you’re sitting in a room in Las Vegas at a poker game. You’re not playing with real money, but everybody at the table has chips and everybody wants to win. You are sitting next to your co-conspirator from IOActive, and then there are two unsuspecting players at the table with you. Joseph is watching the cards on his app. He knows who at the table has the best hand and he’s signaling to you to fold, to call, or to raise by playing with a certain number of chips in his hand. Did you clean them out? Did this work?

Andy Greenberg: Well, I am actually such a bad poker player that I was still losing for the first hour of the game, which was kind of amazing. I thought this was going to be the most humiliating evening of my life that I went all the way to Vegas, set up this incredibly elaborate experiment to cheat, and still lost. That really almost happened. But that was just actually bad luck. We were not actually hacking the shuffler to give me good hands. We were just hacking the shuffler to know when I had the best hand.

And so it took me more than an hour to start getting good hands. And then once I did, I would know exactly when I had the best hand thanks to Joseph’s signals. And yes, we did eventually just clean out these two players. If it had been real money, it would’ve been a very lucrative scheme. And ultimately I felt pretty bad about having done this to them on camera. And by the end of the night I did confess to them.

Andy Greenberg (clip): I have to confess, both of you are far better poker players than I am, and I was cheating this whole game. I guess the question is, can you tell how I was cheating?

Speaker 1 (clip): I did not tell anything was up.

Speaker 2 (clip): Maybe you looked at your phone a couple times. I don’t know.

Andy Greenberg (clip): Actually it was Joseph who was looking at his phone. It was the shuffler. The shuffler was hacked. It transmitted via Bluetooth the exact order of the deck to Joseph’s phone. He was then signaling to me whether I should bet or fold because, honestly, I’m a terrible poker player. I have no idea what I’m doing.

Michael Calore: So that experiment was run over the summer. And I want to switch gears now to the news from the government’s indictment last week, because the indictment document alleges that members of several organized crime families and some well-known figures from the NBA, including Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups and a former player and assistant coach named Damon Jones, were all part of a network of rigged gambling games. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was charged in a separate alleged gambling scheme as well. But for the main scheme, the rigged card games, it seems that one of the methods used was very similar to the one that you and Joseph used in your experiment. I have to know how you reacted to the news when you saw that the DeckMate 2 was actually named in the indictment.

Andy Greenberg: I mean, I could not believe it. I’d seen the headlines that morning of these NBA figures who had been arrested in this scheme, and then I just got busy with other work. I had no sense at all that this was any kind of hacking operation. It took me hours to start reading other people’s reports and then finally the indictment. And I just could not believe it, that they had actually done almost exactly what we had done. We published our video on October 10th, and then just two weeks later, this alleged Mafia-run gambling scheme had actually done almost exactly the same thing that we had just revealed. I mean, it was a bizarre coincidence.

Lauren Goode: After you did read the indictment, what did you learn about how similar this operation was to the one that you experienced? Were there other hacking mechanisms used?

Andy Greenberg: Well, it was actually kind of remarkable how close it was to the scheme that Joseph and I had developed, almost just by chance it felt like. I mean, we were just making it up on the fly practically. They didn’t use a USB device to hack their shuffler on the spot. These were private games where the host of the game had set up a rigged game. So it was their shuffler, they had hacked it ahead of time, but they had done almost exactly the same thing of not reordering the deck but rather learning the deck order and transmitting it. In fact, they transmitted it over the internet to some remote operator in a different state, according to the Justice Department, who would then send the deck order back to one of the players in the game.

Just like Joseph being my cheating partner, they had these players in the game who they called the quarterback or the driver, the kind of secret cheating mastermind in the game who I think similarly was there so that they could look at their cards and then fold, then pick up their phone and it wouldn’t be suspicious. And then start once they learned the deck order from their phone signaling to everybody else in the game, they were using exactly the same covert signaling system that Joseph and I had developed, but they were actually using it to steal hundreds of thousands, ultimately millions of dollars from these victims.

Michael Calore: That’s wild. So in the years that you’ve been reporting about the DeckMate 2, you’ve reached out to the company that makes it several times and they’ve told you on different occasions that they’ve addressed the security concerns. Maybe they disabled the USB port or made other changes to the hardware, the software, and the security experts that you’ve spoken to I’m sure have thoughts about these changes that they’ve made. Are they enough?

Andy Greenberg: Well, it’s interesting because in 2023 when I wrote about the DeckMate 2 for the first time, back then Light & Wonder, the parent company of Shuffle Master, which sells the DeckMate 2, told me that this just wasn’t realistic. That it really didn’t matter, that this could never be pulled off in a casino. Kind of not really even thinking about the fact that you could use a rigged shuffler in a private game or in an unlicensed card house or someplace like that. But then we did reach out again to Light & Wonder ahead of our video demonstration just this past summer. That’s when I learned that Light & Wonder had in fact pushed out security updates to its shufflers in casinos in Las Vegas, in Atlantic City all around the world if you have a contract with them.

They even made those security updates available to people who have secondhand unlicensed shufflers. And that security update may in fact patch the vulnerabilities that we were hacking in our demonstration. But the problem it doesn’t solve is when people are hacking their own DeckMate 2 and they’re not going to put in the security update before they rig their own machine. So there’s this kind of insider problem that is not fixed by some update to the firmware. The problem there, it really is that Light & Wonder has just been manufacturing and selling a machine for years that has a camera inside. That was probably a bad idea.

Lauren Goode: So I’m curious what the big takeaway is here. For people who don’t play poker, go to the casino all that regularly except for me and Mike making our regular pilgrimage to CES. Why should people care about this story aside from the fact that it is a twisted tale?

Andy Greenberg: To me, I guess it’s just kind of a parable about modern technology. The more that we digitize simple devices and processes, something as simple as shuffling a deck of cards. When you make that a digital device, when you make it a smart tool, then you’ve introduced the risk that it can be hacked. And that’s true not just of automated shufflers and casinos where a lot of money’s on the line, but also of medical devices in hospitals and smart devices in our homes, including security systems, including things that we depend on in our daily lives. The more that we add digital tooling into the kind of infrastructure of our lives, the more vulnerable it becomes to being messed with, meddled with, sabotaged, surveilled, that is the modern world that we live in. And sometimes it would be better if we just stuck with a bit more of an analog approach.

Lauren Goode: As I like to say, “Shut it all down.”

Andy Greenberg: That’s what we say here at WIRED, “Do not use technology.”

Lauren Goode: If you go to the casino, make sure it’s a really dumb casino. And by that I mean not digitally connected.

Michael Calore: And also to makers of smart home devices, stop putting cameras in things, please. We don’t need more cameras in our homes.

Andy Greenberg: I mean there’s also just a much more specific lesson here. One that I heard from poker, from gambling experts when I was working on this story, which is that if you go to a private poker game, especially one with a lot of money on the line and you see an automated shuffler, get out of there. Just do not play, leave.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, don’t be taken for a mark.

Michael Calore: Word to the wise. OK, we need to take another break and then we’ll come right back.

Lauren and Andy, thank you both for a great conversation today. Hopefully no one takes our discussion as inspiration for going and hacking a poker game. And if that happens, we are not liable. We just want to make that clear. So now let’s go into the final segment of the show. It’s called WIRED and TIRED. This is an opportunity for us to tell people what we think is WIRED and what we think is tired. Lauren, would you like to go first?

Lauren Goode: Sure. Mine are not tech related at all. I’m sorry to say.

Michael Calore: Love it.

Lauren Goode: Our producers were like, “Make it techy.” And I’m like, “I have a food recommendation.” So my WIRED is Brazilian Coconut Sweet Bread.

Michael Calore: What?

Lauren Goode: It’s exactly what it sounds like.

Michael Calore: Brazilian Coconut—

Lauren Goode: Sweet bread.

Michael Calore: Sweet Bread.

Lauren Goode: It’s delicious. And there’s a cafe, Mike, that I’ll take you to that has it, it’s delicious. That’s it. If you can find it anywhere in your neighborhood or city, I highly recommend trying it.

Michael Calore: It’s like if there’s a Brazilian cafe or a Brazilian—

Lauren Goode: Or just look up the recipe if you like to bake.

Michael Calore: OK.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s all. My TIRED, told you, my TIRED is really obvious product placement. It’s out.

Michael Calore: Was there a recent television show or movie or piece of content that you watched recently?

Lauren Goode: Yes. And I think you know exactly which one I’m talking about, right?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: Have you watched Nobody Wants This Season 2?

Michael Calore: No.

Lauren Goode: The product placement is so obvious in this show and I’m really enjoying the series, but it’s sponsored by Airbnb and halfway through one of the episodes they’re like, let’s do an Airbnb experience making pasta.

Michael Calore: Oh, boy.

Lauren Goode: And it’s like, “Oh no.” And then there’s this other really obvious part where Kristen Bell, at least twice uses this L’Oréal skin serum and the camera kind of zooms in close on it before she uses the skin serum. And it’s really to L’Oréal or Estée Lauder, it might be Estée Lauder. See, you know what? I don’t care. I’m just going to bungle it because I don’t want to give them an extra product placement but it’s like one of those skincare conglomerates. And I’m watching and I find it distracting and I know their product placement is just a part of films, TV shows, everything, but do it discreetly, do it better.

Michael Calore: Yeah. My favorite indiscreet product placement was in the show Entourage from HBO. It was on TV, I don’t know, 15 years ago.

Lauren Goode: Oh, I remember it.

Michael Calore: And the characters used to say to each other, “I’ll BBM it to you.”

Lauren Goode: No. Time capsule.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Which is like, even if you had a Blackberry—

Lauren Goode: Yeah, you never said that.

Michael Calore: Nobody ever said that.

Lauren Goode: No, it’s so true.

Michael Calore: They would text it to you.

Lauren Goode: Incredible.

Michael Calore: But no, I’m going to BBM it to you.

Andy Greenberg: Just the fact that we even know what BBM-ing is just kind of means it worked.

Lauren Goode: Or maybe it’s more, “What is that, guys? I don’t remember that. I’m too young.” All right, Andy, give us your WIRED, TIRED.

Andy Greenberg: Well, I am not a video game reporter, but I did buy the—everybody has been talking about this game Silksong. It was $20 on the Switch. I bought it for my 9-year-old son, and I thought that I would play this cute little game and I just cannot believe how fricking hard it is. Nobody is talking about the fact that this incredibly popular game—it makes you want to cry. Like me, not my son, like me, the adult. I cannot stop playing it.

But I have been more frustrated playing this game than I have been maybe in anything else in my life or work for years. This is my extremely amateur video game trend watching observation that for a while all these games got really easy like Candy Crush and Farmville and Angry Bird stuff where you just basically can’t lose. And people seem to love that and games got incredibly easy. And now it feels like we’re in this era where games are just absurdly hard, including these—what look like casual games for kids are in fact some of the most challenging things you will do in your life. And actually I think it’s great. So yeah, I would say TIRED are easy games and WIRED is games that are ridiculously hard and making me want to cry.

Michael Calore: Nice.

Lauren Goode: So you’re saying it’s easier to hack a poker game than it is to play some of these games?

Andy Greenberg: I will say that I did almost cry on the day when we were cheating in the poker game as well because I thought I might lose and that the entire video team was going to murder me.

Lauren Goode: All right, Mike, what’s yours?

Michael Calore: So my TIRED is eBooks, and I am not saying that eBooks are passe or anything, I still love eBooks, but lately I’ve been putting the Kindle down and picking up actual paper books just because the titles that I want are really hard for me to get on eBooks. So I get eBooks mostly from the library here in San Francisco through the Libby app. And if you have a Kindle and you have a Libby app, you know how that goes. Sometimes you have to wait three or four months to get a good book that you like. And it’s gotten to the point now where if I want to borrow the ebook and I’m waiting for it, I walk into a bookstore and there’s already a used copy of that book available. So I just buy the used copy of the book and then I read the paper book.

So I’ve been doing that a lot over the last year. My bookshelf has swollen and so have the shelves next to my bed, but that just feels like a shift in my life that eBooks, who needs them anymore? I think my Kindle probably hasn’t had a charge in the battery for months at this point. However, the thing that I have been getting very, very into, my WIRED is audio books on Spotify because I have a Spotify premium subscription—it’s the one that’s like $12 a month—and it comes with 15 hours of audiobook listening every month, every 31 calendar days. That’s like an audiobook every month or maybe two if you listen to the shorter ones. And they have them right when they come out and they don’t have everything. Spotify still sells audio books. So if you want to listen to a brand new book, it may be available, but you may have to pay a little bit of money to get it.

But still, if you don’t have crazy mainstream tastes, there is a very good chance that the audiobook that just came out is available to you as a Spotify paid subscriber. So I would say explore the audio book options on Spotify if you like audio books and if you’re like me and you use Libby for audio books and you don’t want to have to wait two months to get the audio version of your book, you can just go to Spotify and listen to it right away. So that’s my WIRED. My WIRED is like go hard on the thing that you’re paying for and not using and TIRED is just read the analog book.

Andy Greenberg: When this started on Spotify, actually when I learned that all of my books that I’ve written were available on Spotify, I actually checked with my agent too about what the deal is. Everybody says that Spotify notoriously underpays musical artists, right? But it turns out that if you listen to 10 minutes of one of my books on Spotify, that counts as a full audiobook sale. Wow. I get paid the same royalties as you would if you had downloaded it from Audible or something. So you can do this, I guess is what I’m saying. At least that’s the deal with Penguin Random House who publishes my books.

Lauren Goode: That’s good to know.

Michael Calore: So if you have 15 hours, that means you can pay royalties out to what 70 authors every month if you wanted to just by listening to the first 10 minutes of a bunch of different audiobooks.

Andy Greenberg: I would actually recommend that you listen to the first 10 minutes of my books 70 times.

Lauren Goode: From different accounts.

Michael Calore: All right, well that brings us to the end. So thank you Andy for being here. Pleasure talking to you both as always.

Lauren Goode: Thanks, Andy, for taking us deep inside your dark world of hackers.

Andy Greenberg: Anytime.

Michael Calore: Thank you for listening to Uncanny Valley. If you’d like what you heard today, make sure to follow our show and rate it on your podcast app of choice. If you’d like to get in touch with us with any questions, comments, or show suggestions, write to us at uncannyvalley@wired.com. Today’s show is produced by Adriana Tapia and Marc Leyda. Amar Lal at Macro Sound mixed the episode. Marc Leyda is our San Francisco studio engineer. Pran Bandi is our New York Studio engineer. Daniel Roman fact-checked this episode. Kate Osborn is our executive producer. Katie Drummond is WIRED’s global editorial director, Chris Bannon is Condé Nast’s, head of Global Audio.