155: Kingpin
155: KingpinUpdate: 2025-03-04
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Description
In this episode, we delve into the multifaceted career of Joe Grand, also known as “Kingpin.” A renowned hardware hacker and computer engineer, Joe has been exploring and manipulating electronic systems since the 1980s. As a former member of the legendary hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries, he has significantly contributed to the cybersecurity landscape. Joe is also the proprietor of Grand Idea Studio, a research and development firm, and has shared his expertise through various media, including his YouTube channel. Join us as we explore Joe’s unique perspective on hacking, engineering, and his extraordinary journey in the world of technology.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Sometimes the people I want to talk to you on this show are so cool, but I want to be friends with them
00:00:04
Okay, I'm recording cool. All right, let me go on
00:00:07
Let's go to the layer
00:00:09
We're the magic happens and Joe grand is someone who because we have so much in common
00:00:14
I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection. All right. Here we go
00:00:18
One-way
00:00:21
Quite the place. Yeah display case here and then you've got a table here with a ton of projects
00:00:28
sort of on yeah, so this is kind of the main table that you people probably see in videos
00:00:33
I have my computer my oscilloscope that is my one piece of test equipment that I'm always using power supply
00:00:39
And a couple different projects some fault injection set up here all these circuit boards are for a class
00:00:46
I'm teaching in a couple weeks time to like get those prepared
00:00:49
It showed me around his office and I think a better description for his office would be a workshop
00:00:54
It's really a place that sparks creativity wherever you look
00:00:57
It's full of gadgets and tools such as backing you to pick something up and start building something
00:01:02
Workbench with various
00:01:04
Pieces of circuitry and yeah, a lot of display stuff also got your YouTube plaque on the wall got the YouTube plaque on the wall
00:01:12
Yeah, we found some comfy spots to plop down on and have a chat for a while because I wanted to hear all the stories that Joe had
00:01:20
How many books have you written?
00:01:22
That's a good question
00:01:25
These are true stories from the dark side of the internet
00:01:31
I'm Jack recider this is dark net diaries
00:01:39
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00:03:11
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00:03:19
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00:03:27
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00:03:33
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00:04:23
Hi, hey
00:04:28
Again, well we start with your name and what do you do?
00:04:31
My name is Joe Grande and I'm a hacker
00:04:33
After hanging out with Joe a few hours. I think yeah
00:04:37
He absolutely is a hacker and I think it's becoming increasingly rare to find a hacker in their forties
00:04:43
I think we all rebel as teenagers. We have a lot of that youthful energy and are waking up to the world for the first time
00:04:49
We started ignoring the advice of our parents and listen to music which talks about the problems of the world
00:04:55
And we resonate with it and we come of age listening to that stuff and we either want change or to fight the system
00:05:01
For me and for Joe our teenage rebelliousness began as skateboarders back then
00:05:06
There was a sense that skaters were counter culture not abiding by the rules or the norms of society
00:05:11
I remember the first time I fell in love with skaters
00:05:14
It was in middle school, and I saw them all outside laying in the grass during lunch and there was fallout
00:05:19
So there were a lot of leaves everywhere and a few of them were throwing leaves at each other and they were rolling around in it
00:05:23
Then the bell rang and we all had to go to class and they all looked at each other and silently agreed
00:05:30
Not to brush themselves off and instead come to class as messy as possible with leaves all through their hair and clothes and
00:05:36
Grass everywhere
00:05:38
One sat in front of me in my class totally amiss and he paid absolutely no mind to it
00:05:43
He acted as if nothing was going on different and I love that attitude and enticed me
00:05:48
It drew me in to not care about how you look or any norms or expectations that people have on you to just be your wild and goofy self
00:05:55
There's a sense of freedom in that and that's when I started hanging out with the skaters
00:05:59
And I felt completely at home there and remained a skater all through middle school and high school
00:06:04
Joe and I both got into computers around the same time too and for both of us
00:06:08
We had just great fun and seeing all that it could do building things breaking things trying just about every possible thing that we heard about
00:06:15
Bulletin boards floppy disks
00:06:17
DOS
00:06:18
AOL, IRC, FTP, Unix, Windows, programming, electronics, circuits
00:06:23
It was simply great fun to sit down saturday night at a computer and just try to do something new with it
00:06:29
Like to try out a new operating system or compile a kernel from scratch
00:06:32
We would absolutely try what other people try before us things that have tutorials for them
00:06:38
But then we'd soon find ourselves in areas where no tutorials exists for this no manuals explain what to do here
00:06:46
We were off the map
00:06:47
Explorers of the digital world and it felt like we were trying to get computers to do things
00:06:52
They weren't intended to do which in my opinion is the definition of a hacker to push beyond the roadblocks
00:06:59
That stop you from doing something and to try to get it done anyway
00:07:04
Living in that space. It's hard though. It's like you're walking in the dark and you're constantly bumping into things
00:07:09
You feel stupid for not knowing what to do and just failing again and again and it's frustrating when it doesn't work and you give up
00:07:17
As a youth you don't quite know that what you're doing is different than how other people are using these tools
00:07:23
So it just feels normal to stumble and struggle with whatever technology you have you get used to that
00:07:29
But as you learn more about the world and grow up you find your place in it and you try to be good in your domain of expertise
00:07:36
You want to find a place where you feel comfortable and confident
00:07:40
It's uncomfortable and hard to learn things without
00:07:44
Instruction manuals or YouTube videos to teach you so you wait for others to learn the things before you so that they could teach you
00:07:51
Which means you lose your edge you're not on the frontier of knowledge anymore
00:07:56
You're not pushing the systems beyond their intended purpose as we get older
00:08:00
We lose that drive and instead just become better at following the rules and as you grow older you stop rebelling too
00:08:08
Maybe because you're just tired or because you just accept that life is going to be unfair
00:08:13
You realize that you have responsibilities, too
00:08:16
So you can't afford to get in trouble anymore. You lose that punk side of yourself
00:08:22
But Joe never lost that Joe never turned his curiosity down or off Joe learned how to feel
00:08:28
Comfortable walking in the dark bumping into things failing again and again and in fact
00:08:34
He likes that place. He loves that chase of finding the answer somewhere in the muck that nobody else has ever found before
00:08:40
That place of pushing things beyond their intended use
00:08:43
He ignores people telling him that's impossible. He pushes through roadblocks and just acts like they don't exist
00:08:50
While most of us have grown tired of inventing or finding creative ways to solve novel problems
00:08:56
Joe has more energy than ever to dance and play in that space
00:09:00
And it's amazing to watch them work. I still have this idealistic view of my little bubble of what a hacker is and
00:09:08
To me it basically is kind of somebody who who's questioning the the system and curious about technology and wanting to learn things and
00:09:18
Bypassing security and really like I grew up even before I knew what a hacker was like I was
00:09:23
Pushing people's buttons. I was causing trouble. I had this mischievous side and that that's what I was gonna ask
00:09:30
Yeah, it is as a hacker. Have you ever been arrested? I have been arrested and it was a great lesson and a great experience
00:09:37
It did change some of my behavior, but the hacker mindset in that ethos
00:09:45
Is still with me and it's been the same since I was a kid
00:09:49
I feel the same way that I that I felt then as a hacker and how I fit into the world and into the society
00:09:56
Then I do now, right? So like even though I got arrested and that changed kind of my perspective a little bit
00:10:04
Change my behavior so I wouldn't get arrested again
00:10:06
My mindset is the same and I
00:10:10
Don't know but I have a sense of like that that's changing with a lot of people where somebody of my age of my generation who grew up with
00:10:18
Computers has a maybe a different mindset than people who got into it later. I don't I don't really know I just know
00:10:24
How how I feel and and I'm very kind of rigid in my
00:10:29
Beliefs as a hacker and my responsibilities as a hacker in 1982
00:10:35
He got some Atari equipment when he was like eight nine ten. He was just mesmerized by the world of electronics
00:10:40
Disventually led him to computers and he got a modem
00:10:42
And he could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach other computers somewhere else in the world
00:10:47
Which ultimately led me to hook up with with some guys that I've met on some bulletin board systems and
00:10:52
Was part of a group called renegade Legion
00:10:55
We wrote some early text files on some phone freaking credit card fraud
00:11:01
Like how to break into the CBI credit bureau and pull credit records and then like get actual credit cards and things that as a kid
00:11:08
didn't seem
00:11:11
Didn't seem bad. It was a cool thing to do. I mean even now. I don't you know it. Yes. It's a crime
00:11:16
Do I feel bad about it? No has it happened to me like dozens of times my credit card has been stolen
00:11:23
It's a fact of life now back then to hack a system would sometimes simply be telling your computer to dial a phone number and
00:11:31
It might like you into that system without a password or maybe you could just mash the keyboard and it would let you in
00:11:36
Hacking was a lot simpler than but there really were instructions on how to do it
00:11:41
You were kind of on your own to discover what was out there
00:11:44
But yeah, there so so getting into those systems the process basically was like and this was when I was
00:11:48
14 15 at this point of like all right
00:11:52
Let's look through the white pages, which was you know the book of everybody in your area. Let's find the doctor. Let's find the dentist
00:12:00
Look up their name in the credit bureau system. See what their credit was because you could see their name their social security number
00:12:06
Credit rating what credit cards they had picked the one that had a high high credit get all that information call a credit card company
00:12:14
Give them what they needed and say hey, I'm doctor. Whatever. I'm on vacation. Can you say I lost my card?
00:12:18
Can you send me a new card that send you a new physical card and you go use it? But that was later on
00:12:22
The earlier days there was a lot of this curious exploration because we would wore dial
00:12:27
We would take a prefix and say okay like just like in war games like when you know David Lightman is trying to find out his school computer
00:12:34
I figured if our school computer was connected it would be within that range. So doing those war dialing sessions
00:12:40
overnight of course, so like my parents wouldn't pick up the phone and hear everything because at that point
00:12:46
You still had an automatic you could do automatic dialing but it was still everybody was sharing a single phone line in the house
00:12:51
And then you you know wake up to a list of phone numbers and you're trying those and you never know like what it was
00:12:57
It was like this this kind of treasure hunt
00:12:59
Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts
00:13:05
So as part of joining Renegade Legion, so a bunch of you know teenagers doing
00:13:11
Stuff online and whatever like we thought it would be cool for everybody to meet up in person
00:13:15
During all of our winter break most of us were in high school
00:13:19
Some of the guys were a little bit older and one of the guys whose name was dr. death
00:13:25
Was in Michigan and that was kind of a central point where everybody else was coming from so
00:13:30
On one of our alliance teleconferences where we're all talking on the phone big party lines and of course being billed to somebody else
00:13:36
Someone's like hey, we should all get together
00:13:38
So we decided during our school break everybody meet up at dr. death's house and we'd hang out we he had like
00:13:44
An arcade game and a pool table and my parents talked to his parents and they're like okay
00:13:50
This seems like a stable household. So they actually let me fly to michigan on my own meet up with all these other hackers
00:13:57
And remember that this was already eight years after I'd been using the computer like my parents knew what I was up to but they didn't really know
00:14:04
Um, so we all got together and hung out and then somebody had an idea of like hey, let's break into the telephone companies
00:14:11
So we can you know get some hardware and get some documentation and like at the time the internet was starting
00:14:17
To kind of be a thing, but not really uh, this was 92 so really it was hackers against the phone system
00:14:24
and mobile
00:14:26
New England telephone, you know, ninex, michigan, bell, whatever, pacific bell all of those companies
00:14:32
That was the target of phone phone freaking exploring the phone network like that was for us
00:14:39
That was kind of the the holy grail we went to the hardware store and bought like
00:14:44
Some big bolt cutters and some rubber gloves and like it was like a really bad movie
00:14:48
Inbought all the equipment to like you know break into this place some automatic center punches to break the windows
00:14:54
Think so we basically went to the michigan bell telephone facility, which was down the street from this guy's house and
00:14:59
Went in and cut through the fence pull the fence back
00:15:03
I had this jacket at the time that I would wear every single day and it tore a little hole in the shoulder on my way in
00:15:09
Um, so that was sort of like this mark of pride after that
00:15:13
Um, so we didn't break break into the building itself, but we smashed the windows of the vans that had all of the the infield equipment
00:15:20
What were you looking for documentation manuals
00:15:24
Hardware telephone test equipment things that like other phone freakers other hackers didn't have
00:15:29
and took as much stuff as we possibly could
00:15:33
I think there was six of us one of the guys was a larger fellow
00:15:38
um, so he was our lookout and he was listening to the scanner radio to see when the police were called
00:15:44
And um, which it turns out that if you use a scanner radio
00:15:47
During committing a crime. That's like an additional crime
00:15:50
Yeah, at least at the time. I didn't know that uh, especially a scanner radio. There was no serial number on it because it was scraped off because it was stolen
00:15:57
Um, so yeah, he ended up getting caught the rest of us
00:16:01
Got away, but what happened is as we pulled up next to the telephone facility was a park and there was a nosy neighbor
00:16:09
That was like hey, there's a bunch of roudy kids hanging out in the
00:16:12
You know in the park so they
00:16:14
Called the police just because they thought kids were hanging out after curfew or something
00:16:19
Um, by the time the cop showed up they had the one guy there
00:16:23
He got caught in the car with the scanner radio and the police report when this guy called in said there were multiple kids
00:16:29
So they're basically like where are your friends and then he flipped and was like uh, there's six of us or however many
00:16:34
We had all gotten home by that time back to dr. desk house and we're like oh my god. Where's you know, where's this other guy
00:16:41
Turns out he got arrested and then the next day we all had to turn ourselves in
00:16:44
This was a pretty awful experience for joe's parents who had to fly to another state to rescue their son from juvenile detention
00:16:51
I could only imagine it's something like the movie home alone where the mom was trying desperately to get home to her son
00:16:56
Luckily for him because he was the youngest of the bunch. They let him off without a charge
00:17:00
But the others weren't so lucky a bunch of them got felonies some served jail time one of our other guys
00:17:08
Was already under i don't know if it was indictment or investigation or something by the secret service for some other phone freaking stuff that we had done as a as a group as a renegade legion
00:17:19
um and he ended up
00:17:23
dying by suicide
00:17:25
And that was a real eye-opener of like holy shit law breaker just killed himself like
00:17:29
Over getting arrested his parents were pretty mad and told him look you either need to get a job or take up a sport
00:17:37
And you didn't want to get a job. So he joined the track team at school
00:17:40
I started doing a lot of running
00:17:42
And this gave him a group of normal friends not rebels not skaters not hackers
00:17:48
Just normal people
00:17:51
And after this scare with the police and running track
00:17:54
He did straighten up a bit which is how he got to join the loft
00:17:58
He had to actually tone down his rebelliousness to join this hacker space
00:18:03
So loft or loft heavy industries was really just a safe space possibly the first hacker space in the us as an organized space
00:18:11
And it really was just a clubhouse for seven
00:18:14
Boston area hackers to
00:18:17
Hang out and explore and and have a place to like play with technology
00:18:21
Well, what did this what does the space uh look like it was very so if you imagine like you know cyberpunk movie
00:18:28
Like maybe hackers maybe the hackers movie is probably the closest
00:18:33
um
00:18:34
To sort of what it looked like, but it was in it was a an artist loft space. So it was a
00:18:40
A one one big room with like old wood floors. There are PCs
00:18:45
Apple Apple twos max
00:18:49
We had a vax 11 780. I think the loft was a magical place was about eight members
00:18:57
It was magical because
00:18:59
Computers weren't that popular yet. So for there to be a space with electronics and computers
00:19:04
It was really ahead of its time. They were the weirdo nerds into that geeky stuff
00:19:09
Little did they know the whole world would become weirdo nerds along with them because we were all destined to buy computers and electronics in the coming decades
00:19:18
I remember seeing count zero
00:19:20
Give talks about like stuff stuff that we found from the trash or other things that you've been researching
00:19:26
And seeing his passion of sharing information in that way of like
00:19:30
You don't need to hoard everything and as kids we would hoard stuff
00:19:34
But then we would trade bits and pieces because that's what would give you this power
00:19:37
uh, but to see him just
00:19:39
Open up the kimono of like here's everything I learned
00:19:42
And maybe somebody can take a piece of that and do something else with it like I thought that was such a a learning moment for me
00:19:48
Um, and that when I started giving talks as well. It was like all right
00:19:53
If I'm going to talk about something like I want to share as much as I possibly can
00:19:57
Not to brag about it, but to empower somebody else to say oh, that's cool
00:20:01
I want to try that or I want to build upon this or maybe I can use this piece of that
00:20:06
On something else and once I learned that like everything changed
00:20:11
Because it was all about empowering this community to grow and I would learn from other people
00:20:17
And you'd learn from you know, they would learn from somebody else and share that with you
00:20:21
So it was this very communal sort of knowledge growth, I guess you could say
00:20:26
Uh, and that's that's the main thing I learned from the loft and that for sure is like
00:20:31
Of everything that I've learned like that has has stuck with me the most
00:20:35
Loft was legendary. It was kind of like a research group
00:20:41
They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers and they released such tools like loft crack
00:20:47
Which can sometimes crack windows passwords they published new ideas of how to break systems or hack things
00:20:52
In fact, they were so legendary that they ended up going to Washington DC to testify before the Senate
00:20:59
And I remember they called us up to the stand and we sit there and there's all this so we see the senators in front of us
00:21:05
But right below them facing us was like this row of media and we sat down
00:21:11
It was just like camera flash camera flash
00:21:14
And it was like the paparazzi because it had never happened before you never had hackers talking to the government
00:21:19
What you want today by the seven members of the loft
00:21:23
Uh hacker think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts
00:21:27
I do it with a sensitivity of the work done at the loft
00:21:30
They'll be using their hacker names
00:21:33
Of mudge
00:21:38
weld
00:21:39
Brian Oblivion
00:21:41
Kingpin
00:21:43
space rogue
00:21:45
tan
00:21:46
and Stefan
00:21:47
Joe's hacker name is kingpin and this was back in 1998
00:21:51
world by his kingpin
00:21:53
I am the youngest member of the loft and one of the electrical engineers and hardware hackers
00:21:58
While some of the loft members concentrate on software programming
00:22:02
I work with hardware design and implementation of electronic circuits
00:22:06
My interests include embedded system design
00:22:09
surveillance encounter surveillance tools and wireless data transmissions
00:22:13
My current research project involves experimentation with the monitoring and ease dropping of stray electro magnetic fields
00:22:20
From computer terminals otherwise known as tempest monitoring
00:22:23
Using low cost electronic equipment
00:22:27
One can capture the contents of computer screens for more than 200 meters away
00:22:31
Possibly gaining passwords and other sensitive information
00:22:36
The phenomenon of tempest monitoring has been known to the industry for decades
00:22:40
But there is not much unclassified information available on how to both capture the emissions
00:22:45
And also protect oneself from becoming an ease dropping victim
00:22:48
My research will not only help me learn about the monitoring technology
00:22:52
It will enable me to educate others
00:22:54
To help them protect their computer systems from prying eyes
00:22:56
Their message was simple
00:22:58
The internet is not as secure as you think
00:23:02
And we should embrace and welcome hackers to show us where the vulnerabilities are
00:23:07
It's probably
00:23:09
Proper at the gentleman's session yourself for the ones who come forward and demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes
00:23:15
So we appreciate you're coming here especially in light of the fact that the Washington Post described you as rock stars of the computer hacking elite
00:23:23
I'm informed that
00:23:26
you
00:23:27
Think that within 30 minutes the seven of you could
00:23:30
Make the internet unusable for the entire nation
00:23:33
Is that correct that's correct actually one of us with just a few packets
00:23:37
How punk is that to be this group of hackers coming up to the government saying we could take down the internet
00:23:43
somebody referred to as rock stars of the new
00:23:46
Computer age
00:23:49
It's probably not
00:23:51
What what you came to hear, but I actually I think you're performing an act of very good citizenship
00:23:57
And I
00:23:59
Appreciate it. I'd compare you. I hope you don't mind that I'm not going to clear rock stars
00:24:03
I'd compare you more to a Rachel Carson who
00:24:05
Sounded some really warnings about what environmental pollution was doing to the environment and then the defense context you may be modern-day pull reviewers
00:24:14
Except in this case. It's not the British coming
00:24:16
We don't know who's coming. That's the problem. I mean
00:24:20
By that time in 98 like a lot of the software guys had found
00:24:25
You know vulnerabilities in Microsoft and they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at dinners where Microsoft is like
00:24:30
We don't mean we don't think that's going to be a problem nobody's going to exploit that
00:24:33
So we would release exploit code and we were very early if not the first to have this sort of
00:24:38
Discussion of like full disclosure or what what would now be called like coordinated disclosure or in quotes responsible disclosure
00:24:47
You know how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem do you trust that the vendor is going to fix it?
00:24:52
One of the things loft became known for is pioneering responsible disclosure
00:24:56
The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals
00:24:59
Hoodlums untrustworthy and lofts thought of themselves as hackers
00:25:03
But didn't see themselves as hoodlums. They're just trying to warn the world of the problems they found
00:25:08
And they wanted people to fix it. They were here to help
00:25:11
But as they told companies about the bugs they found the companies often misunderstood and thought these guys were there to cause trouble
00:25:18
So loft was like look what do we have to do so you'll understand that we're here to help not hurt you
00:25:23
And that's where responsible disclosure came about
00:25:26
Companies learned that hackers can be very helpful at identifying vulnerabilities
00:25:30
And it's way better to work with them than to think of them as adversaries
00:25:34
So I picture the old old old hacker spaces to not have many screens and mostly just circuit boards you're looking at and maybe
00:25:45
Some visual aspect and I imagine you falling in love with this electronics aspect of it the hardware components
00:25:53
How these things work you can send signals here and make it do that and all this kind of cool stuff
00:25:58
There's chips that have all this really cool CMOS in it
00:26:01
And then computers went in a direction of no screens and programming languages and all this software
00:26:09
Did you
00:26:12
Did you go in that direction or did you say no no I think you all need this hardware
00:26:17
I'm going to stay with the hardware or how did you know
00:26:19
That you're going to take a different route and not go at the software side of it
00:26:24
But instead you stayed on the hardware was that was that in loft that you kind of made that diversion? No
00:26:29
I had been as soon as I got attracted to computers
00:26:33
I was also getting
00:26:36
Attracted to electronics. I have I have an older brother and he was more of like an audio file kind of person
00:26:44
He had like radio receivers and things but he had a lot of electronics that he would take apart
00:26:49
And he would fix and put different capacitors in and everything and he had this junk bin full of circuit boards
00:26:54
And I just loved that tangible
00:26:57
side of things
00:26:59
Which to me make sense of like I'm using a computer and the computer really is like a very simple type of embedded system
00:27:06
Our electronic system
00:27:08
Like these other circuit boards, but I just
00:27:11
I just
00:27:13
Loved the the physical thing and I would start building projects out of magazines. There's a lot of hobbyist electronics magazines at the time
00:27:20
There were a couple people like a couple text files. You could read about of people making some interesting kind of like
00:27:26
And even this was like pre red box stuff, but like different types of tone dialers blue boxes and
00:27:35
Other telephone related electronics and so I started building things and I started building my own things and
00:27:41
I knew from an early age like you couldn't
00:27:45
You couldn't have a career as a hacker and when everybody would always say like what do you want to be when you grow up?
00:27:51
And I always knew like I'm going to be an engineer. I'm going to build electronics
00:27:55
um, so that was something where
00:27:57
It was a parallel path to the hacking was building things and the electronics that I was building
00:28:04
were things like stun guns and
00:28:06
Some laser listening systems to spy on rooms and kind of mischievous hardware, but things that I could use for the telephone system and
00:28:14
subversive technology like anything. I thought was cool
00:28:17
Joe's specialty is hardware hacking as I sit and look around his workshop. It's abundantly clear too
00:28:23
He's got drawers full of parts on the table in front of me is something like 60 circuit boards
00:28:28
And he says he's building all these for a class and there's a fault injector over there and soldering irons
00:28:32
And an oscilloscope and there's something beautiful about the low level aspect of electronics
00:28:37
There are no English words that you can use to program a circuit
00:28:42
Like you can't say if this then do that or
00:28:46
Write out a for loop. No here at the circuitry level
00:28:49
You're dealing with electrons going through some metal and you have to understand the physics of how to manipulate and move these electrons in order to make it do the things you want to do
00:28:58
And it's amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world
00:29:02
Like it feels like every now and then we reach a limit of like how fast the CPU can operate and it's like
00:29:08
Well, that's it everyone. This is the max speed
00:29:10
There's no way that we're gonna go beyond this. You just can't put more transistors on a chip
00:29:13
But then some scientists discover
00:29:16
parallel processing where they can make you go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs
00:29:21
And because they're now two or three things getting processed at once. It's faster than processing one at a time
00:29:27
So this allows us to have faster computers and then when that limit is hit when we had a max there someone else discovers
00:29:33
thin-fet transistors where they can build transistors upwards and like a 3D sort of way like little fins
00:29:39
And this invention improves processing speed again and we reach higher and higher of what technology can do
00:29:45
And just the other day I heard about CPUs that are starting to be made out of glass
00:29:49
There's no doubt that the last 30 years
00:29:51
We've seen some incredible explosions and electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics
00:29:58
It's just a really great space to put focus into as the world is constantly evolving and it's exciting
00:30:04
In the second loft space we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was me
00:30:10
Brian oblivion space rogue. We were into scanner radios
00:30:14
Poxag was the the data transmission of pages and it turned out still being used to some extent today in certain environments and
00:30:23
We basically loved and I loved being able to listen in on anything that I could so in college it was like cordless phones
00:30:30
At the loft at the time it was Poxag, you know listening into transmission
00:30:34
So you can kind of see what's going on in the world around you in the scanner radio listening to the cops and air traffic and all of these things
00:30:39
It was just getting insight into what's what's happening
00:30:43
Joe built a little device now lets you snag page your text messages out of the air and see what they say
00:30:49
The messages weren't intended for him
00:30:50
He was just seeing them fly by and his antenna would capture it and decode it
00:30:54
And this was something that the loft was actually selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place back in the day
00:31:00
You'd see all sorts of stuff because that's how people communicated is with pagers
00:31:04
And there'd be stuff about you know bi groceries for me or like we saw like some relationship, you know
00:31:09
sexting kind of one way kind of like can't wait for you to get home
00:31:14
And you'd see a hospital a lot of hospital traffic a lot of EMS
00:31:20
traffic and like emergency medical kind of things
00:31:25
And yeah, it was just really it was just really fun to do and that made a little bit of money
00:31:29
And that was actually my first circuit board that I had mass produced
00:31:32
And then we you know we'd get our orders. They all be mail order. We get our get our mail every week
00:31:38
um
00:31:40
I'd build the the circuitry or space rogue would build some circuitry and we package it up
00:31:44
And if they wanted a kit we'd just give them a components and it was just a way to do something but that really
00:31:49
like
00:31:51
That was that was a contribution that I could help make to the loft to to bring to bring some money in
00:31:57
Uh, and then that that kind of proved to the concept of like oh we could make a little bit of money on this like
00:32:02
What if we could do it full-time?
00:32:05
I might have to do a whole episode on the loft someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker history
00:32:11
And I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there. It became a company
00:32:16
And um for me as this kid who's still like even though I was starting to grow up like I'm still like I said at the beginning
00:32:22
I'm still have this kind of punk aspect to me
00:32:25
where
00:32:26
That wasn't an environment I wanted to be in and I realized like okay
00:32:30
The the specialness of it that group is gone. I don't want to work for somebody else
00:32:34
I can't stand if somebody's telling me what to do uh in 2003
00:32:38
I split and have been independent ever since and there's good and bad that has come with that
00:32:44
And after that Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show
00:32:49
It was a show called prototype this and it was on discovery channel
00:32:52
And it was made by the same production company as mythbusters
00:32:55
And the idea was that this would be the next show after mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away
00:33:01
Which of course we know you know, they didn't and it lasted another 10 years and
00:33:05
You know spin-offs are still happening
00:33:07
But the concept of this show was having four engineers building
00:33:11
Ridiculous prototypes. I got an email and it was from a casting
00:33:14
Company and they're like yeah, we're looking for engineers and that was actually they had talked to make magazine
00:33:19
Which was like that had just come out and that's like a maker magazine talking about you know electronics and hobby
00:33:24
hobby electronics
00:33:26
Um, and I was on the technical advisory board for them when they first started and this company had contacted make magazines saying hey
00:33:32
Do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV?
00:33:36
They already had selected a mechanical engineer a machinist and a software engineer
00:33:43
So they so to complete the circle they needed a hardware person
00:33:46
So they said oh you should talk to Joe
00:33:48
So they reached out to me and I got this email and I remember showing it to my wife
00:33:53
I read it. I was like I don't know
00:33:55
I was like I don't know if I want to be on TV and I showed it to her and she's like are you crazy?
00:33:58
Like this is you can you can do what you love to do on TV
00:34:02
So I didn't really just like with the Senate like I didn't I didn't know
00:34:07
The impact or the implications of what it would become. I didn't know how special that was
00:34:13
and um
00:34:15
I was like all right fine. I'll do a little interview with them. So showed all the stuff
00:34:18
Didn't really think anything of it like said by
00:34:20
I was riding my bike back from San Francisco to
00:34:24
San Diego, which is where we lived at the time just as like a solo bike trip for fun
00:34:30
It was my first experience of like I want to try to figure out what the hell I'm doing like a little bit of self
00:34:35
Self-love like like I'm going to do some met a little meditation kind of thing before that was even a known thing
00:34:41
It was just some I just needed to escape and um
00:34:44
Which is funny because we had just gotten married
00:34:48
And I talked to my wife about this recently. I'm like I can't believe
00:34:52
Like that I did that that we got married and then I went to San Francisco for like a conference
00:34:57
Then I rode my bike and you see you for 10 days or whatever because I just was doing a little bit of the time
00:35:01
Um, she's like well, you needed it like very supportive
00:35:04
Which was amazing
00:35:06
So did this bike ride I didn't have a phone or anything. This was like you know, Nokia phone era
00:35:11
And uh, I didn't even bring a phone because I really wanted to isolate myself and um come back from the trip
00:35:17
Turn on my computer and there was like five emails of like we need we going on the show can you call us back call us back
00:35:25
So I mean, it's amazing that they even waited because they could have easily been like all right
00:35:29
He's not answering. Let's go to somebody else and we spent the next year and a half
00:35:33
In a warehouse on Treasure Island in the Bay Area in San Francisco building ridiculous giant
00:35:39
prototypes
00:35:40
Prototype this was pretty darn cool my favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never ending
00:35:46
Water slide can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted
00:35:50
Everybody needs an endless water slide
00:35:52
I mean, it was like we called it the backyard water slide and the concept
00:35:55
You know like the show really was like in the future you could have one of these even though we were just prototyping
00:36:00
What they did was they connected curved water slide parts into a donut looking shape like a big circle
00:36:06
And they stood that up so it looked like a big wheel and then they put water in it and spun it
00:36:12
So if you're inside you're always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning
00:36:17
We had we did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack
00:36:22
And we had a drone that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea
00:36:26
Like we did a pizza delivering robot, which now there are food delivering robots and our maybe they ripped it off the show
00:36:33
I don't know or like yeah, you had one where you were you would try to ride on like a bug robot
00:36:38
Right a giant bug looking thing and then you would ride on it. Yeah, that's not even out yet like it's fast forward 20 years
00:36:46
Right, what is it because that was a really hard problem 15 years ago
00:36:49
And they still don't have rideable robots. Yeah, you were building them yeah, I mean ride that's like everybody needs a ride with a robot also
00:36:57
I guess the closest thing now are like the autonomous vehicles, which are terrifying
00:37:01
Right, this was this was called the six by six and this was an all-trained vehicle
00:37:05
mimicking it was actually called bio mimicry because we were mimicking
00:37:10
the
00:37:13
tripod alternating tripod gate walking of some bug that was really stable with three legs on the ground
00:37:20
And there was a project that an academic project that some guys had done with a small scale version
00:37:25
And we hooked up with them and we're like we want to build a human size version of that
00:37:30
and that was a really hard project
00:37:32
And actually that was the first project that didn't succeed on the show
00:37:37
And I just remember the producers of that show like we would propose all these
00:37:43
Ridiculous ideas and they only wanted us to submit ideas that we thought we'd be able to do in two weeks
00:37:49
Two weeks and all you had to build everything some of them ended up being longer some of them were five or six weeks
00:37:54
Because they didn't really understand the engineering process
00:37:57
Like what you're doing is you're inventing entire companies into makes like here's a full product
00:38:03
You can go to market and sell. I know it's just a prototype, but yeah, just take it from there
00:38:09
You got up. You're ready to go and you're just achieving wrap wrap with the innovation until it's exactly so insane
00:38:15
It was it was but it was also like for me
00:38:18
I spent a lot of time trying to at least explain the process of like here's how you actually
00:38:23
And here's how engineering works so the producers and and the company would understand how
00:38:29
Amazing the stuff is that we were doing
00:38:32
But we were actually like a lot of it was successful until the six by six and that failed and
00:38:38
I remember the production company seeing a rough cut of it and they're like this is amazing
00:38:43
We want you to fail more often and we're like yeah, we're like this is the reality of it like the the fun of the show really
00:38:50
If we succeed at every time it would kind of be boring because everybody would know that we're going to build like the drama goes away
00:38:56
And gave us a little less pressure of like all right, we're going to do our best
00:39:01
But some of this is just not realistic to build in that amount of time
00:39:05
The producers would always call us like prima donnas because all of us were very type a like
00:39:09
You know hard-to-rangle children basically
00:39:12
Um, but everybody had it was just so much fun. It was like this traveling circus
00:39:17
Virtual reality games already exist
00:39:21
Making good ideas better is what the guys do best at prototype this
00:39:27
So back to the concept table they knocked around the game plan in a brainstorming session
00:39:32
All right, what do you guys got?
00:39:33
All right, we came up with a great idea for prototype giant boxing robots
00:39:37
Wow, this episode is really quite incredible. They create these two giant 14-foot tall boxing robots
00:39:43
And Joe is hooked up to like a motion tracking system where he can control the robot outside the ring
00:39:48
Simply by punching and dodging and everything like he's shadow boxing on the side and the robot just does what he does
00:39:54
I can't believe they built this thing in two weeks. It looks like so much fun. We had an episode where we were building a
00:40:02
Uh a personal airbag to prevent people from falling off of roofs and dying
00:40:07
So it would like detect that you're falling and deploy this big airbag
00:40:10
We couldn't do anything that mythbusters was doing so we couldn't do it with a dummy
00:40:16
Since mythbusters had this test dummy that they always use called buster
00:40:20
The showrunner saw it would be too similar if prototype this used an adult test dummy too
00:40:25
So instead of using a human test dummy like buster we used like a little child baby test dummies
00:40:31
Which was super creepy because we're like look at the power of this airbag and we'd blow up this baby test dummy and like the arms would go flying
00:40:38
So the show ended we we were about to renew for a second season
00:40:43
But it turns out that it was just so expensive to produce the show because we had multiple film crew
00:40:48
To film mechanical stuff and electrical stuff. It was just a lot
00:40:51
So they didn't renew the show and I was relieved
00:40:55
But I was also kind of sad and I didn't realize how sad I was until like a couple weeks later
00:40:59
Where it's just like I didn't have anything to do. We're gonna take a quick ad break right here
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00:42:30
When I first discovered you was at DEF CON 17 was the first DEF CON I ever went to
00:42:39
And you were like the man of DEF CON 17 I was like oh that guy there he's the one who
00:42:46
He's the guy who did all this stuff and I was just like spellbound by you
00:42:51
In this way of just like wow there goes Joe
00:42:54
I didn't know you were inside I didn't realize the first one I went to
00:43:00
Like in the same path for that one that was a long time ago
00:43:04
It was a long time ago
00:43:06
And so I think what you did to DEF CON
00:43:09
Has affected pretty much every hacker conference
00:43:15
On the planet. Yeah. Yes. I've been to other non-hacker conferences before that
00:43:20
And when you go they typically give you a bracelet or a lanyard or some kind of badge
00:43:24
To indicate that you've paid to be there DEF CON a hacker conference
00:43:28
Had something totally different the badge to get into DEF CON was an electronic device
00:43:34
And it was built in such a way that encouraged you to hack it modify it take it apart make it do cool things
00:43:41
You were supposed to mess with it
00:43:43
It had Easter eggs in it. It was cool. And you wore it around your neck
00:43:47
Yeah, so DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge at a conference that we know of
00:43:51
I mean, it's just like everything else I've done like my my goal has never been
00:43:55
I want to be famous. I want to make money. I want to do it like it's to do something that I enjoy
00:44:02
And that's it like I'm not even really thinking about the outcome of it
00:44:08
DEF CON was a huge part of my life
00:44:11
It was a huge part of of the hacker culture at the time
00:44:14
And it still is it's just a I think it's a little bit different now than it was back then when it was smaller
00:44:18
But it was this gathering place for like-minded people
00:44:22
And I had known the dark tangent since I was younger much younger
00:44:27
He was already running black hat and DEF CON and I'd given some talks at DEF CON
00:44:31
You know went to some early DEF CON parties the dark tangent was like hey, I'm starting up these trainings
00:44:35
You should do a heart one about hardware
00:44:38
And so he was really the catalyst. He could see he's like this visionary. He can he has this crystal ball
00:44:42
And he can see kind of what's coming
00:44:44
So I was doing training and this was the first circuit board that I had made that had a custom shape to it
00:44:49
That wasn't just a square a green square
00:44:51
So the dark tangent saw that circuit board from the training classes and was like hey, we should do that for DEF CON
00:44:57
So he saw that and was like let's make this a mass a mass thing
00:45:03
So DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge and it was very simple
00:45:07
It had a really tiny microcontroller a pick 10F
00:45:11
202 I think it was like a super tiny six pin microcontroller
00:45:16
And some blinky lights you could change different blinking light patterns and it had a debug interface adapter
00:45:22
So people could kind of change the code or hack the code if they wanted to
00:45:25
And I had a badge hacking contest and it was really the first time that that a lot of people were exposed
00:45:32
to electronics and my goal was just like
00:45:35
Expose more people to electronics like it was that simple
00:45:38
It was a big hit people loved having a badge that you could hack on and it's also your pass to the conference
00:45:44
How cool is that and over the next couple years it was like all right. What can I do different?
00:45:49
What can I what what new technologies can I try what circuit board fabrication process can I use that I haven't used before
00:45:54
So for me it was like being able to spend DEF CON's money to try a new thing was great
00:45:59
And then to give something back to the community that that they could
00:46:02
Use and learn from and and get involved with electronics the first year the badge just blinked the second year
00:46:09
It had capacitive touch buttons
00:46:11
Which was the first time I've ever seen capacitive touch buttons in my life DEF CON
00:46:15
16
00:46:17
Looked like a ninja and it had an infrared eye as the transmitter and an SD card and you could load files
00:46:24
Where's or whatever you wanted onto the SD card and trade through infrared file transfer with people
00:46:30
So you could share files with people at DEF CON and the year after that the badge had a microphone and a single LED
00:46:35
And it was programmed to react to different sounds
00:46:38
I remember someone found that if you play a tone at 2600 hertz
00:46:41
It would respond by saying something in most code and all the parts were surface mount
00:46:46
So you could barely even see that there were any electronics involved in this thing by the time DEF CON 18 happened
00:46:53
I felt like I'd sort of exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try
00:46:56
But it didn't matter the ideas brought to life during those five years at DEF CON
00:47:00
Change DEF CON forever
00:47:02
But it also had a widespread impact
00:47:04
What came next was badge life which is now a huge community at DEF CON
00:47:09
A lot of people started making their own badges
00:47:11
Electronic devices to hang around your neck to represent certain groups or to get into certain parties
00:47:16
We're just where because they're cool looking
00:47:18
And if you go today you'll see thousands of people wearing a huge variety of electronic badges around their neck
00:47:24
Heck last year I was given a badge which had a little antenna on it
00:47:27
And it created a mesh network across all of Las Vegas
00:47:31
So you could talk to your friends who were anywhere around town
00:47:33
And they would also be able to identify where you're located
00:47:36
It's called meshtastic if you're wondering
00:47:38
But not only do you see hundreds of different badges these days
00:47:41
But there are also little add-on badges too where people make these little ones to stick onto your main ones
00:47:47
And I don't know if you realize this but there are at least two hacker conferences every week
00:47:51
Somewhere in the world
00:47:52
You should absolutely be looking for the ones in your area and going to them
00:47:56
I took a non-tech friend to a hacker conference the other day and he had a blast
00:48:00
And I could almost guarantee there's a B-sides conference within like a three hour drive of you
00:48:05
And so many of these hacker conferences today have taken this idea of electronic badges
00:48:10
And are using them too
00:48:11
Gosh I went to St. Con last year in Utah
00:48:14
And they've gone off the rails with electronic badges
00:48:17
First of course they have an electronic badge as your entry pass into the conference
00:48:20
And it has a lot of cool functionality too
00:48:23
But they have this whole mini-batch culture
00:48:25
There are thousands of these little tiny badges that you can use to decorate your main badge with
00:48:29
And in my opinion all this started with Joe's wonderful badges and designs at Defcon
00:48:36
It's like he birthed the whole community
00:48:41
I think it's cool to have had it an impact in a way of like that thing turned into something
00:48:48
Like the senate testimony turned into something
00:48:50
The badges turned into something
00:48:52
I don't really look back
00:48:55
I'm a lot of like okay that's done what's next and always trying to look for something
00:48:59
So it's cool that you mentioned it of like it is something that that kind of helped shape things
00:49:04
But I feel like it would be cool if more people had that mentality
00:49:11
Where it's just to bring something to the community and see what happens
00:49:17
See what comes out of it
00:49:18
Yes that's what's so awesome about Joe the stuff he gives the world
00:49:26
He does it in such a way that you can take that and run with it and create something new
00:49:31
He's incredibly inspiring not only to me but for many
00:49:35
Defcon started making this Uber award
00:49:38
Which is sort of like a lifetime achievement award
00:49:41
And I was actually it was like the first year I missed Defcon in ages
00:49:44
I was on vacation in Thailand and then going to a conference over there
00:49:49
And I woke up to like a whole bunch of text messages and photos of this big block of aluminum
00:49:53
And it was like this Defcon award and it said for endless curiosity
00:49:58
and innovation the original spirit of badge life
00:50:03
And it was like holy shit like wow that's really cool
00:50:08
So that is really the first time where I realized that there was an impact of it
00:50:14
And I thought it was cool and it's just like prototype this people come up
00:50:17
And they're like I saw that show and I became an engineer
00:50:19
And now I'm doing something at Apple or at Google or whatever
00:50:22
And like it's cool that people's lives are changed by what you do
00:50:26
And I think that's a really I guess it's a good thing to remember because your actions have consequences
00:50:32
Good or bad and it's just it's nothing I would ever expect
00:50:36
Like I'm still just a hacker in my lab that does stuff is how I see it
00:50:42
I don't see it as anything else even as you know my YouTube videos have a lot of views
00:50:47
Like I don't see it as that doesn't change me
00:50:50
It might affect other people which is cool get them involved
00:50:53
But it doesn't change me and it doesn't change my
00:50:56
belief system and my passion for what I do
00:51:00
So my perspective is like this guy's got it all figured out
00:51:04
He can just design whatever he wants he's got the
00:51:07
I cannot remember the name of Kington Labs
00:51:10
Well grand ideas do you know that's like my engineering company
00:51:13
So it's like he's got an engineering company
00:51:15
And I saw your talk he's got a Hollywood deals that he's dealing
00:51:19
I mean this guy this guy's gonna like he's I can't wait to see all the stuff that comes out
00:51:25
But you had no idea
00:51:27
No I still have no idea what what I'm doing
00:51:30
Like I think you know it's a it's a certain perspective
00:51:33
Or you see a celebrity on TV or on Instagram and you're like man
00:51:37
I want to be like them they have all their shit figured out
00:51:39
And that's just that's just part of the story
00:51:42
And I think it's important for people to know like
00:51:45
Everybody has stuff going on right like even if somebody appears to be
00:51:51
Perfect or in whatever way like there's always there's always a struggle somewhere
00:51:58
I still don't have a path of where I'm going
00:52:01
It just how I felt I've fallen into all of these things
00:52:04
And some of it maybe was luck some of it was intentional a little bit but of like
00:52:09
Most of it was just being in the right place at the right time and somebody somewhere like
00:52:14
Dropping my name
00:52:17
Because I just were doing what I was doing and loving what I was doing
00:52:20
But it's on a book that my wife had written trouble makers and superpowers
00:52:25
It actually took her like four years to write it
00:52:28
When I read her complete book
00:52:30
It got me thinking like wait everybody else like has gotten tested for things like they did their psychological testing their evaluation
00:52:36
I was like what's up with me
00:52:38
Like why did I gravitate towards the hacker world why did I gravitate towards punk rock and and why did I gravitate towards skateboarding
00:52:47
why
00:52:49
Do I not think getting arrested was a problem you know like all of these things um
00:52:55
So it got me really thinking about that and during during lockdown
00:52:58
I started meditating and I thought that was really helpful of kind of
00:53:01
Regulating me a little bit more
00:53:03
So a couple months ago I ended up doing this full psychological testing which for me was like as a hacker
00:53:10
I'm like I just want to know how my brain works. I want to know like why do I feel these things in my head?
00:53:16
Why do I feel these things um which is completely different than a public perception right you see a lot of actors a lot of
00:53:23
Musicians that perform on stage, but then they have all these other problems behind stage and they have substance abuse issues and all these other things
00:53:30
um
00:53:31
So I was just like what's up with me?
00:53:33
Why why do I think this way and um so I kind of treated it as like a science experiment of like let's see
00:53:39
Let's see what my hacker brain is like
00:53:41
So I did like a full testing that was
00:53:44
Many hours long and I loved it. It was like puzzles and math and questions and then of course like the standard psychological tests
00:53:54
and you know at some point like tests only show you certain things right like
00:53:59
I'm not a huge fan of like academic testing but
00:54:03
To give you a sense of things and a lot of the questions really frustrated me because they were kind of yes or no
00:54:09
Black or white questions and it's like nothing is black or white
00:54:13
You know and like there's things in there like well. Yeah in certain situations. Yes. I would do that or no
00:54:18
I wouldn't do that and the testing came back with the two the two main things were
00:54:23
Being diagnosed with being clinically depressed which I think explains a lot about my kind of anger and the way
00:54:31
I see the world in general and then having autism spectrum disorder so being on the spectrum
00:54:36
So this was really interesting for a validation of like okay. Yes
00:54:40
Joe is has very high
00:54:43
Skills in certain things and then some deficits in certain things and that can be caused with
00:54:49
um, you know some of the some of the autism or
00:54:53
The depression and you can manage depression in certain ways depending on what it is but like now I don't
00:54:59
have this internal
00:55:02
Anger against myself of like why am I thinking that way or why why do I feel this way like it's okay to feel this way
00:55:09
And so it totally flipped my perspective of like it validated that that I'm okay
00:55:14
The way I am and now there's a name for the things that I have so now I can work on those and as a hacker
00:55:21
It's like all right now. I understand. Let's look at that depression. What did that cause? What can I do to
00:55:25
To
00:55:27
Live better
00:55:28
Sometimes Joe likes to be an engineer. Sometimes he likes to be a hacker
00:55:32
Sometimes he likes to be a teacher. Sometimes he likes to be a father and a husband and he bounces around doing all these different roles
00:55:39
He teaches electronics classes like all over the world and he gets a lot of projects that come his way
00:55:44
But most don't spark that level of excitement for him
00:55:47
He never did settle down into a comfortable reliable job. There's something in him
00:55:52
I think that hacker spirit which urges him to stay punk
00:55:56
Buck the system break things and learn to do something that nobody else knows
00:56:00
I would occasionally get you know emails with really strange requests of things or like can you hack
00:56:08
You know my girlfriends that I think my girlfriend's cheating on me. Can you hack her device? I have those all the time
00:56:13
A sign of a healthy relationship and you know just I would generally respond to some to some emails at that point
00:56:20
Little projects would spring up here and there and he'd get involved with them
00:56:24
But he was very picky about what he decided to work on because
00:56:28
Well, it just might not be hackery enough for him
00:56:30
You know if it doesn't push his understanding of electronics or the world or challenges him enough
00:56:35
He's not interested or maybe the project just isn't rewarding enough
00:56:40
When Dan had contacted me I got this email and it was a very well written email
00:56:44
And I'm like oh, this is a legitimate request this guy Dan reached out to Joe saying
00:56:49
He had two million dollars in cryptocurrency and the crypto is on a hardware wallet called a treasure wallet
00:56:54
But he doesn't have the pinned unlock the hardware wallet
00:56:58
So we can't access the money. I was wondering if Joe could help and I'm like
00:57:03
Okay, this sounds like an interesting project like you know some friends of mine had already proven that the treasure can be hacked in different ways
00:57:09
Using fault injection. I had never
00:57:11
Personally done anything with fault injection
00:57:14
So for me it was a perfect opportunity of like all right. I'm not traveling like there's still kind of weren't kind of lockdown
00:57:19
Things are starting to open up
00:57:21
But to me it kind of peaked my interest of like now I can now I have a reason to learn a new skill
00:57:27
So to be clear this shouldn't be possible the treasure wallet is built
00:57:30
So you only have 16 tries at guessing the pin and if you don't get it right after the 16th failure
00:57:36
It wipes the device it does that to avoid someone trying to brute force the pin and trying every combination and so they get it
00:57:42
Now somewhere in the memory of the treasure is both the pin code and the private keys
00:57:48
And there's a security mechanism that blocks you from just dumping the memory of the chip and reading it
00:57:52
It'll just be garbled
00:57:54
So the thing is built to keep people like Joe out. I mean what good is a security device if the security can be defeated easily
00:58:01
Right, which is exactly why Joe felt like this is an interesting challenge and started working on it
00:58:07
But this required him to pick up a whole bunch of new skills first
00:58:13
He had to read up on if anyone else has defeated the treasure before and what vulnerabilities it might have
00:58:18
Which there were some articles on it
00:58:21
But a lot of it was just theory like there were instructions on how to do this or a youtube video to fall along
00:58:25
And he had to become very familiar with learning the architecture of this device understanding all the circuitry involved
00:58:31
And he had an idea to use a fault injection
00:58:34
This is to try to send some electrical pulses to the thing to get it to glitch to get it to do things
00:58:39
It's not supposed to do and that might somehow let them get inside
00:58:42
But he didn't know very much about fault injection
00:58:45
So he had to practice that too
00:58:47
So for months and months he got into his workshop this workshop. I'm sitting in right now every day till learn more
00:58:54
Pretty much non-stop obsessive work to to get things going because the information that was out there was correct
00:59:01
But it wasn't fully it wasn't a full exploit chain
00:59:04
So there's still some things you have to work out
00:59:06
And also the technique that was being used at the time
00:59:09
Which was voltage fault injection is very
00:59:11
Dependent on things like environmental temperature and even variances within the silicon because it's all timing based of like
00:59:20
At this point in time
00:59:22
After this signal goes high, I'm going to inject a fault
00:59:25
Which is basically with voltage fault injection
00:59:27
You're kind of like brown outing like turning off the power really fast in hopes of like messing up some CPU execution
00:59:33
So it's all very timing specific and like you could be off by one clock cycle and it's not going to work
00:59:38
I started down this path of trying to replicate some existing work
00:59:44
And going through again this roller coaster of like I love hacking. I hate hacking
00:59:49
You know why isn't this working questioning my skills like do I even deserve to be doing this really was more of the mental challenge
00:59:56
And my wife was like you know like I would come in like I can't get it to work
01:00:00
And she's like just take a break you don't have to work 18 hours at it because I was just so focused on it
01:00:05
She's like take a break come back tomorrow
01:00:07
So she was like the voice of reason in all of it like I don't know where I'd be
01:00:10
Without her like I don't really talk a lot publicly about like our relationship
01:00:15
But I would be I would be in a much different way like I would be screwed
01:00:19
without her
01:00:21
He eventually hones in on the attack
01:00:23
He's got hope that he can glitch this device just as it turns on to get it to go into debug mode
01:00:30
By sending electrical pulses through it in a way that it's just not built for
01:00:33
And he's got a time it just right even the smallest fraction of a second will be the difference of if it works or doesn't work
01:00:39
So he's trying this again and again and again and again and again and again
01:00:44
Pretty much throwing everything possible at it to get it to act in a way that it shouldn't
01:00:49
And the whole time he's trying this. He's just practicing it on a test treasure wallet
01:00:52
The guy Dan didn't want to bring his wallet over until Joe could prove that he could actually get into treasure wallets
01:00:57
Eventually, you know got it working to the point where it was it was working where I was confident enough
01:01:03
And I got some devices like a test that I made a video to show to Dan. He lived in New Jersey
01:01:08
And he actually was gonna fly out here to do it
01:01:11
Um and that's when again my wife comes in
01:01:15
She's like you should be filming this. I had just during covid. I had filmed um a video for wired called the pizza compass
01:01:22
And it was this really fun project
01:01:24
That was a device that you press a button and it would have a tps
01:01:28
You know figure out where you are anywhere in the world and it would do a google look up over the internet
01:01:32
Find out where the nearest pizza place is and direct you to it with some LEDs
01:01:35
and um
01:01:36
That was like a really fun build video
01:01:39
That that we did
01:01:40
And she's like you know a lot of your videos have been engineering focused like you should show people that you're still a
01:01:45
Hacker uh
01:01:46
So I called wired and I was like do you want to film this so like oh, it's kind of cool
01:01:50
But they kind of dragged their feet and then I talked to
01:01:53
To my friend Fred who is a former client of mine with some product development stuff
01:01:58
And he's a filmmaker and he's like hell yeah
01:02:00
So we got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress
01:02:04
Trying to hack into this treasure wallet. What if you had a couple million dollars stored on a piece of silicon
01:02:10
The size of a postage stamp and it was protected by a password that you forgot
01:02:14
The video walks us through the whole process on how Joe hacks things and it's quite fascinating to watch
01:02:19
Like Dan flies over to this workshop that I'm sitting in and gives the treasure wallet to Joe to hack into
01:02:24
And Joe just starts pulling in a part trying to hack into it
01:02:27
The next step is we have to remove a couple components from this board
01:02:31
The components where removing our capacitors and by removing them
01:02:35
It makes the chip more susceptible to those little glitches and stuff that we're doing
01:02:38
What I'm going to do is use my soldering iron and just very carefully
01:02:42
Keep both sides of the part and pull it off the board
01:02:45
The risk at this stage is
01:02:48
Pulling off some of the circuit board with it
01:02:50
Uh, which hopefully won't happen iron is on
01:02:55
Gather two that we need to remove one is easier to get to them the other
01:03:01
Okay, first one's off
01:03:04
All right, so those components are off now all I have to do is add the external connectors
01:03:11
That's going to let us look it up to the hardware over there
01:03:13
The thing is Joe's method of getting into this thing is highly dependent on luck
01:03:19
There's like a one in a million chances this is going to work
01:03:22
And he's got this station set up that is just going to try again like every second
01:03:25
And it just tries again and again and again and it powers up the device that attempts to trigger the fault
01:03:30
Did it work if not power off and power down again to try to trigger the fault again
01:03:35
And he's got it automated to just try again and again and again
01:03:38
And if it works, it'll say hack the planet
01:03:41
He's actually only gotten it to trigger the fault a few times in his life during the test runs
01:03:46
It's not like he could just crack open this thing hook it up into a machine and then boom done
01:03:49
This is a lot of work and he really doesn't even know if this is going to work or not
01:03:53
But it's worth trying and that's what makes it exciting to watch
01:03:56
But after a lot of waiting and trying thousands of times they eventually get it
01:04:02
This is this is torture
01:04:05
Oh yeah, it's like it's new. Yes. I'm like this is torture
01:04:15
OMG like they say on the internet
01:04:19
Joe published this video to his youtube channel and he got millions of views and went viral
01:04:25
Way more views than any of the videos I've ever published and I'm actually trying here
01:04:29
But it's just because how wonderful it is to watch Joe have fun hacking things
01:04:34
Well, you could probably guess once he demonstrated that he can hack into bitcoin wallets
01:04:38
His inbox got flooded with tons of messages lots of people wanted to help recovering their lost cryptocurrency too
01:04:44
And he took on some of those projects and you could watch his youtube channel to see more videos like that
01:04:49
In fact, there's one where he hacked time to get into a bitcoin wallet which in my opinion is way cooler than the other one
01:04:55
But even though this earned Joe that cool little youtube plaque
01:04:59
Something else emerged from it
01:05:01
Joe got impersonators
01:05:04
So the video came out when viral
01:05:06
Out of the blue I got an email from a guy that was like hey
01:05:11
I've been talking to you on Instagram and you said you'd help me get access to my account
01:05:17
Um, what's up? I sent you the money
01:05:19
And I'm like, what are you talking about? So one of my kids who's actually on Instagram went and found the guy and we looked them up and it was a guy that was like
01:05:28
Kind of like a model like a good looking person was to buy more followers
01:05:33
That's what it was. It was like to buy more followers. I don't know something stupid and um
01:05:36
He got screwed over by somebody pretending to be me and that like opened this door of like what's going on?
01:05:42
So I start searching on all these social media platforms and it's like
01:05:45
There's like a million Joe grams and they're all just grabbing
01:05:49
My Twitter feed and making fake profiles and all of this stuff that
01:05:53
Happens to every single person that has any sort of name recognition on the internet
01:05:59
And is it like if you need help recovering your crypto? I'll I'm the guy. Yeah, so it's it's multiple things
01:06:05
But that's the main one of like there's get there's some cryptocurrency video and then there's all of these bots that respond
01:06:12
You should talk to Joe grand. He's the man and then it's like you know a fake telegram name or
01:06:17
Joe grand 69 69 at
01:06:21
Gmail.com, you know something totally obvious that it's not me
01:06:26
But there's this whole psychological side of things. I'm actually reading a book called the confidence game
01:06:31
That's all about the psychological side of getting con and getting scammed and what I've learned over the years of of all of these emails
01:06:39
That I get is people people who are in a desperate situation
01:06:42
Are not thinking critically so they go to they ignore all the red flags and
01:06:48
scamming
01:06:50
impersonating it is such a common scam and basically it's like yeah
01:06:54
They get reached out to directly or like the fake Joe grand will direct message them and say hey, I can help you
01:07:00
Or it's like hey, you shouldn't you know how's your cryptocurrency investing going you should invest in my platform
01:07:06
I'm reaching out to members of my community and it's like
01:07:09
Anybody who knows me knows like well Joe's not gonna talk to a random stranger
01:07:12
But people who don't know me and who see the video might be like oh Joe is such a nice guy. He's reaching out to help
01:07:18
So it's a it's a cat and mouse game like you know
01:07:22
It's a whack-a-mole like we try to take them down more come up. We now at least are verified
01:07:27
So yeah, so with that I've had to set up a social media presence on every platform
01:07:32
Which is not my personality like I had Twitter to communicate to my world of friends
01:07:38
Even though that's kind of going down the drain
01:07:41
Uh, I set up a discord where my teenager was like you got to set up discord so everyone can talk
01:07:47
I was like I don't want to talk to every random person
01:07:50
And he's like daddy. You just got to do it. Someone else can answer the questions. You just can be on there
01:07:55
So that's actually been really fun because I've been able to talk to people who are asking intelligent questions and the ones that aren't
01:08:00
Just get ignored. It's great
01:08:03
But people people still are getting scammed so I've had to set up you know
01:08:08
Social media open up direct message access so people at least get to the correct joe grand and not the scammer
01:08:14
Um, and then being verified on these platforms. It's easier to take them down
01:08:19
I mean, it's a it's a never-ending battle
01:08:21
But the hope is to just prevent more people from getting screwed
01:08:25
Uh, but it's open my eyes and really disin in in
01:08:28
Enchanted me or disenfranchised me, I guess about
01:08:32
Cryptocurrency which I am not an owner of any cryptocurrency for people who are thinking of coming over to rob me
01:08:38
um
01:08:40
I'm not involving cryptocurrency at all. I am just involved in the technical kind of aspect of it
01:08:44
but seeing all of the scams really has kind of crushed my
01:08:48
My my idealistic view of like what
01:08:51
You know positive technologies could be and like there are some cool things about cryptocurrency or the cryptography behind it or like
01:08:58
blockchain
01:09:00
Maybe there are some benefits to it, but there's just so many scams um and these you know shit coins and
01:09:05
Rug pulls and all these things that sort of
01:09:08
overshadow any positive
01:09:11
Benefits that might come out of it very similar stuff has happened to me too
01:09:14
I've seen quite a few jack recider impersonators trying to scam people
01:09:18
Be careful out there only chat with me through official channels, which you can see the links on the bottom of my website
01:09:24
Just as a role of thumb if you find yourself in a weird crypto deal with me. It is probably not me
01:09:31
I don't mind all this stuff wasting my time because it's intriguing for me. It's my area of interest
01:09:36
But it's lame that Joe has to waste his time on this crap because he's so talented and he should be working on some really cool projects instead
01:09:45
And I can't wait to see what his next amazing thing is that he accomplishes. It all falls back to to my ethos of like
01:09:52
I want to build something that's that's interesting and
01:09:56
That I could use and I could help other people
01:09:58
um and then see where it see where it goes
01:10:01
But yeah, I think ultimately it's like my life has no ulterior motive and it has really no
01:10:06
Specific direction and I think that's the I think that's the key we can look we can see your direction by lifting in the rear view mirror
01:10:14
That's right. Yeah, what's exactly right because because you can look back and it's like oh Joe has it all figured out
01:10:20
Right did the TV show
01:10:23
Did Defcon did this and did that and it's like no, it's it's way easier to look backwards and create a path
01:10:28
Then know that that was where I'm going
01:10:41
A big thank you to Joe Grand for letting me come over and shop it out for a few hours
01:10:45
I encourage you all to check out his youtube channel just search for Joe Grand and you'll find it pretty easy
01:10:49
But even more than I encourage you all to be hackers yourself
01:10:52
Don't accept the world as it is create the world you want and push things beyond their limits
01:10:58
I know it's hard
01:11:00
But if you can learn to feel comfortable in that space of just not knowing what you're doing
01:11:04
But you just keep trying and trying and trying again anyway
01:11:07
Then the world is yours
01:11:10
Okay, I have some big news. I have a new bonus episode available to premium subscribers
01:11:16
If you're not a premium subscriber
01:11:18
There are 11 bonus episodes available for you right now to enjoy and you also get an ad free version of the show too
01:11:24
Being a premium subscriber is a great way to show things as well because it really does help this show
01:11:30
To get bonus episodes just visit plus dot darknet diaries dot com or just go to darknet diaries dot com and then click bonus episodes at the top of the page
01:11:39
This episode was created by me the stack jacker jack recider our editor is the uninstall wizard
01:11:45
Tristan ledger mixing done by proximity sound and our intro music is by the mysterious break master cylinder
01:11:50
Why did the smart phone need glasses?
01:11:53
It lost its contacts
01:11:56
This is darknet diaries
01:11:58
[Music]
story of the Kingpin is so inspiring, and describe the actual culture of hacking and hackers