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Ian Carroll

Ian Carroll

Software developer and founder of Seats.aero, the award-travel search engine for finding flights bookable with points and miles.

Oct 7, 2026

43:02
Can you explain kind of the tech behind that, Ian?
43:05
It's really important because it's the way that we can show you, you know, all of these results at once, right? If you imagine, like, USA to Europe, you know, across a bunch of dates, that's a lot of individual searches on an airline.
43:15
And so what SeatGeek does is we run these searches in the background periodically, and we update this data.
43:20
And so then when you run the search, you know, it's fresh and it's ready and it's available.
43:24
But the downside is, yeah, it hasn't been checked immediately when you run it.
43:27
And so the Pro account, it does refresh this data as you look at it, and that's what I really love about SeatGeek is, you know, I can run the search.
43:34
I can say, "I just want to see the data." I can see what, you know, we think is available from our database, and then as the thing runs in the background, it'll update that and refresh it.

6 MINS LATER

49:53
I think listeners will be listening to this and thinking, "Oh my gosh, this tool might solve all of my problems related to trying to find flights with points and miles." But are there any limitations you think people need to know about before they start going crazy searching all these [laughs] flights?
30:17
Hard to get, unless you're someone like Ian Carroll.
30:22
Anyone with administrator accounts to these systems have the ability to issue all these expensive tickets for $0.
30:29
And I could just issue any of those.
31:03
But for Ian, it was also a warning about how AI could affect our day-to-day security online.
31:10
So my name is Ian Carroll.
31:11
I'm an ethical hacker.
31:13
I had just moved to Las Vegas and, you know, EDC was coming up at the time.
31:17
It was April and EDC is in May.

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