Transcription performed by LeahTranscribes[START OF RECORDING]
JACK: Sometimes the people I want to talk to on this show are so cool that I want to be friends with them.
JOE: Check, check.
JACK: Hey, I’m recording.
JOE: Cool. Alright, let me get this…
JACK: Where are we going?
JOE: Let’s go to the lair, where the magic happens. JACK: Joe Grand is someone who — because we have so much in common, I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection.
JOE: Alright, here we go.
JACK: Whoa, my. Quite the place.
JOE: Yeah.
JACK: Display case here, and then you’ve got a table here with a ton of projects you’re working on.
JOE: Yeah. So, this is kinda the main table that people probably see in videos. I have my computer, my oscilloscope — that is my one piece of test equipment that I’m always using — power supply, and a couple different projects; some fault injections set up here. All these circuit boards are for a class I’m teaching in a couple weeks. I have to get those prepared.
JACK: He showed me around his office, and I think a better description for his office would be a workshop. It’s really a place that sparks creativity wherever you look. It’s full of gadgets and tools that just beckon you to pick something up and start building something.
JOE: …work bench with various pieces of circuitry and, yeah, a lot of display stuff also.
JACK: [Music] You got your YouTube plaque on the wall.
JOE: Got the YouTube plaque on the wall, yeah.
JACK: That’s cool. 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. How many books have you written?
JOE: That’s a good question.
(INTRO): [Intro music] These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I’m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries.
JACK: Hi.
JOE: Hey. Hey again.
JACK: Why don’t we start with your name, and what do you do?
JOE: My name is Joe Grand, and I’m a hacker.
JACK: [Music] After hanging out with Joe a few hours, I think, yeah, he absolutely is a hacker, and I think it’s becoming increasingly rare to find a hacker in their forties. 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, and we start ignoring the advice of our parents and listen to music which talks about the problems of the world, and we resonate with it, and we come of age listening to that stuff, and we either want change or to fight the system. For me and for Joe, our teenage rebelliousness began as skateboarders. Back then, there was a sense that skaters were counter-culture, not abiding by the rules or the norms of society. I remember the first time I fell in love with skaters. It was in middle school, and I saw them all outside laying in the grass during lunch.
It was fall out, 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. Then the bell rang and we all had to go to class. They all looked at each other and silently agreed not to brush themselves off and instead come to class as messy as possible, with leaves all through their hair and clothes and grass everywhere. One sat in front of me in my class, totally a mess, and he paid absolutely no mind to it. He acted as if nothing was going on different, and I loved that attitude. It enticed me. 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. There’s a sense of freedom in that, and that’s when I started hanging out with the skaters, and I felt completely at home there.
I remained a skater all through middle school and high school. Joe and I both got into computers around the same time, too, and for both of us, we had just great fun in seeing all that it could do, building things, breaking things, trying just about every possible thing that we heard about; bulletin boards, floppy discs, DOS, AOL, IRC, FTP, Unix, Windows, programming, electronics, circuits. It was simply great fun to sit down Saturday night at a computer and just try to do something new with it, like to try out a new operating system or compile a kernel from scratch. We would absolutely try what other people tried before us, things that have tutorials for them, but then we’d soon find ourselves in areas where no tutorials exist for this. No manuals explain what to do here.
We were off the map, explorers of the digital world, and it felt like we were trying to get computers to do things they weren’t intended to do, which in my opinion is the definition of a hacker, to push beyond the roadblocks that stop you from doing something and to try to get it done anyway. Living in that space is hard, though. It’s like you’re walking in the dark and you’re constantly bumping into things. 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. As a youth, you don’t quite know that what you’re doing is different than how other people are using these tools, so it just feels normal to stumble and struggle with whatever technology you have. You get used to that.
[Music] 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. You want to find a place where you feel comfortable and confident. It’s uncomfortable and hard to learn things without 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, which means you lose your edge. You’re not on the frontier of knowledge anymore. You’re not pushing the systems beyond their intended purpose. As we get older, we lose that drive and instead just become better at following the rules, and as you grow older, you stop rebelling, too, maybe because you’re just tired or because you just accept that life is going to be unfair.
You realize that you have responsibilities, too, so you can’t afford to get in trouble anymore. You lose that punk side of yourself. But Joe never lost that. Joe never turned his curiosity down or off. Joe learned how to feel comfortable walking in the dark, bumping into things, failing again and again. In fact, he likes that place. He loves that chase of finding the answer somewhere in the muck that nobody else has ever found before, that place of pushing things beyond their intended use. He ignores people telling him ‘that’s impossible’. He pushes through roadblocks and just acts like they don’t exist. While most of us have grown tired of inventing or finding creative ways to solve novel problems, Joe has more energy than ever to dance and play in that space, and it’s amazing to watch him work.
JOE: I still have this idealistic view of my little bubble of what a hacker is, and to me, it basically is kind of somebody who’s questioning the system and curious about technology and wanting to learn things and bypassing security. Really, I grew up — even before I knew what a hacker was, I was pushing people’s buttons. I was causing trouble. I had this mischievous side, and a hacker…
JACK: That’s what I was gonna ask you. As a hacker, have you ever been arrested?
JOE: I have been arrested, and it was a great lesson and a great experience. It did change some of my behavior, but the hacker mindset and that ethos is still with me, and it’s been the same since I was a kid. I feel the same way that I felt then as a hacker and how I fit into the world and into the society that I do now, right? So, even though I got arrested and that changed my perspective a little bit, changed my behavior so I wouldn’t get arrested again, my mindset is the same, and I 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 computers, has maybe a different mindset than people who got into it later. I don’t really know. I just know how I feel, and I’m very kind of rigid in my beliefs as a hacker and my responsibilities as a hacker.
JACK: In 1982, he got some Atari equipment when he was like, eight, nine, ten. He was just mesmerized by the world of electronics. This eventually led him to computers, and he got a modem. He could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach other computers somewhere else in the world.
JOE: Which ultimately led me to hook up with some guys that I had met on some bulletin board sytems and was part of a group called Renegade Legion. [Music] We wrote some early text files on some phone phreaking, credit card fraud, how to break into the CBI credit bureau and pull credit records and then get actual credit cards, and things that as a kid didn’t seem bad. It was a cool thing. I mean, even now, I don’t — yes, it’s a crime. Do I feel bad about it? No. Has it happened to me? Dozens of times my credit card has been stolen. It’s a fact of life now.
JACK: Back then, to hack a system would sometimes simply be telling your computer to dial a phone number and it might let you into that system without a password, or maybe you could just mash the keyboard and it would let you in. Hacking was a lot simpler then, but there really weren’t instructions on how to do it. You were kind of on your own to discover what was out there.
JOE: But yeah, there — so, getting into those systems, the process basically was like — and this was when I was fourteen, fifteen at this point — of like, alright, let’s look through the White Pages, which was the book of everybody in your area. Let’s find the doctor, let’s find the dentist, look up their name in the credit bureau system, see what their credit was — ‘cause you could see their name, their social security number, credit rating, what credit cards they had — pick the one that had a high credit, get all that information, call the credit card company, give them what they needed, and say, hey, I’m doctor whatever. I’m on vacation. Can you — I lost my card. Can you send me another card? They’d send you a new physical card and you’d go use it. But that was later on.
The earlier days, there was a lot of this curious exploration because we would war dial. We would take a prefix and say, okay — just like in WarGames when David Lightman was trying to find out his school computer, I figured if our school computer was connected, it would be within that range. So, doing those war-dialing sessions — overnight, of course, so my parents wouldn’t pick up the phone and hear everything, because at that point you still had a automatic — you could do automatic dialing, but it was still — everybody was sharing a single phone line in the house. Then you’d wake up to a list of phone numbers, and you’re trying those and you’d never know what it was. It was like this kind of treasure hunt.
JACK: [Music] Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.
JOE: So, as part of joining Renegade Legion — so, a bunch of teenagers doing stuff online and whatever — we thought it would be cool for everybody to meet up in person during all of our winter break. Most of us were in high school. Some of the guys were a little bit older. One of the guys, whose name was Dr. Death, was in Michigan, and that was kind of a central point where everybody else was coming from. So, 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, someone’s like, hey, we should all get together. So, we decided during our school break, everybody meet up at Dr. Death’s house, and we’d hang out. He had an arcade game and a pool table.
My parents talked to his parents and they’re like, okay, this seems like a stable household. So, they actually let me fly to Michigan on my own, meet up with all these other hackers. Remember that this was already eight years after I had been using the computer. My parents knew what I was up to, but they didn’t really know. So, we all got together and hung out, and then somebody had an idea of like, hey, let’s break into the telephone company so we can get some hardware and get some documentation. At the time, the internet was starting to kinda be a thing, but not really. This was ‘92. So, really, it was hackers against the phone system. Ma Bell, New England Telephone, 9X Michigan Bell, whatever, Pacific Bell, all of those companies, that was the target of phone phreaking, exploring the phone network.
That was — for us, that was kind of the Holy Grail. We went to the hardware store and bought some big bolt cutters and some rubber gloves — it was like a really bad movie — and bought all the equipment to break into this place; some automatic center punches to break the windows. So, we basically went to the Michigan Bell telephone facility which was down the street from this guy’s house, and went in and cut through the fence, pulled the fence back. 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. So, that was sort of this mark of pride after that. So, we didn’t break into the building itself, but we smashed the windows of the vans that had all of the in-field equipment.
JACK: What were you looking for?
JOE: Documentation, manuals, hardware, telephone test equipment, things that other phone phreakers, other hackers didn’t have, and took as much stuff as we possibly could. I think there were six of us. One of the guys was a larger fellow, so he was our lookout, and he was listening to the scanner radio to see when the police were called. Which, it turns out that if you use a scanner radio during — committing a crime, that’s an additional crime.
JACK: Really?
JOE: Yeah, at least at the time. I didn’t know that. Especially a scanner radio — there was no serial number on it ‘cause it was scraped off because it was stolen. So, yeah, he ended up getting caught. The rest of us got away, but what happened is as we pulled up, next to the telephone facility was a park, and there was a nosy neighbor that was like, hey, there was a bunch of rowdy kids hanging out in the park. So, they called the police just because they thought kids were hanging out after curfew or something. By the time the cops showed up, they had the one guy there. He got caught in the car with the scanner radio. The police report when this guy called in said there were multiple kids. So, they’re basically like, where are your friends? He flipped and was like, yeah, there was six of us or however many. We had all gotten home by that time or back to Dr. Death’s house, and we’re like, oh my god, where’s this other guy? It turns out he got arrested. Then the next day, we all had to turn ourselves in.
JACK: This was a pretty awful experience for Joe’s parents, who had to fly to another state to rescue their son from juvenile detention. I could only imagine it’s something like the movie Home Alone, where the mom was trying desperately to get home to her son. Luckily for him, because he was the youngest of the bunch, they let him off without a charge, but the others weren’t so lucky. A bunch of them got felonies. Some served jail time.
JOE: One of our other guys was already under — I don’t know if it was indictment or investigation or something by the Secret Service for some other phone phreaking stuff that we had done as a group, as Renegade Legion, and he ended up dying by suicide. That was a real eye-opener of like, holy shit, a law-breaker just killed himself over getting arrested?
JACK: His parents were pretty mad and told him, look, you either need to get a job or take up a sport. He didn’t want to get a job, so he joined the track team at school and started doing a lot of running. This gave him a group of normal friends, not rebels, not skaters, not hackers, just normal people. After this scare with the police and running track, he did straighten up a bit, which is how he got to join the L0pht. He had to actually tone down his rebelliousness to join this hacker space.
JOE: So, L0pht or L0pht Heavy Industries was really just a safe space, possibly the first hacker space in the US as an organized space, and it really was just a clubhouse for seven Boston-area hackers to hang out and explore and have a place to play with technology.
JACK: What did the space look like?
JOE: It was very — so, if you imagine a cyberpunk movie — maybe Hackers; maybe the Hackers movie is probably the closest to sort of what it looked like, but it was in — it was an artist loft space. So, it was a one — one big room with old wood floors. There were PCs; Apple, Apple IIs, Macs. We had a VAX 11/780, I think.
JACK: The L0pht was a magical place with about eight members. It was magical because computers weren’t that popular yet. So, for there to be a space with electronics and computers, it was really ahead of its time. They were the weirdo nerds into that geeky stuff. 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.
JOE: I remember seeing Count Zero give talks about stuff that we found from the trash or other things that he had been researching, and seeing his passion of sharing information in that way, of like, you don’t need to hoard everything — and as kids, we would hoard stuff but then we would trade bits and pieces, ‘cause that’s what would give you this power. But to see him just open up the kimono of like, here’s everything I learned and maybe somebody can take a piece of that and do something else with it, I thought — that was such a learning moment for me, and that — when I started giving talks as well, it was like, alright, if I’m gonna talk about something, I want to share as much as I possibly can, not to brag about it but to empower somebody else to say, oh, that’s cool; I want to try that or I want to build upon this or maybe I can use this piece of that on something else. Once I learned that, everything changed [Music] because it was all about empowering this community to grow, and I would learn from other people and you’d learn from — they would learn from somebody else and share that with you. So, it was this very communal sort of knowledge growth, I guess you could say, and that’s the main thing I learned from the L0pht, and that for sure is — of everything that I’ve learned, that has stuck with me the most.
JACK: L0pht was legendary. It was kinda like a research group. They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers, and they released such tools like L0phtCrack, which can sometimes crack Windows passwords. They’d publish new ideas of how to break systems or hack things. In fact, they were so legendary that they ended up going to Washington D.C. to testify before the Senate.
JOE: I remember they called us up to the stand. We sit there, and there’s all this — so, we see the senators in front of us, but right below them facing us was this row of media. We sat down; it was just like, camera flash, camera flash. It was like the paparazzi, because it had never happened before. You never had hackers talking to the government.
SENATE: We’re joined today by the seven members of the L0pht hacker thinktank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Due to the sensitivity of the work done at the L0pht, they’ll be using their hacker names of Mudge, Weld, Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Space Rogue, Tan, and Stefan.
JACK: Joe’s hacker name is Kingpin, and this was back in 1998.
JOE: Morning. My name is Kingpin. I am the youngest member of the L0pht and one of the electrical engineers and hardware hackers. While some of the L0pht members concentrate on software programming, I work with hardward design and implementation of electronic circuits. My interests include embedded system design, surveillance and counter-surveillance tools, and wireless data transmissions. My current research project involves experimentation with the monitoring and eavesdropping of stray electromagnetic fields from computer terminals, otherwise known as TEMPEST monitoring.
Using low-cost electronic equipment, one can capture the contents of computer screens from more than two hundred meters away, possibly gaining passwords and other sensitive information. The phenomenon of TEMPEST monitoring has been known to the industry for decades, but there is not much unclassified information available on how to both capture the emissions and also protect oneself from becoming an eavesdropping victim. My research will not only help me learn about the monitoring technology; it will enable me to educate others to help them protect their computer systems from prying eyes.
JACK: Their message was simple; the internet is not as secure as you think, and we should embrace and welcome hackers to show us where the vulnerabilities are.
SENATE: It’s probably appropriate that gentlemen such as yourself were the ones who come forward and demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes, so we appreciate your coming here, especially in light of the fact that the Washington Post describe you as rockstars of the computer hacking elite. I am informed that you think that within thirty minutes, the seven of you could make the internet unusable for the entire nation. Is that correct?
L0PHT: That’s correct. Actually, one of us with just a few packets.
JACK: How punk is that, to be this group of hackers coming up to the government saying, we could take down the internet?
SENATE: Somebody had referred to you as rockstars of the new computer age. It’s probably not what you came to hear, but actually, I think you’re performing an act of very good citizenship, and I appreciate it. I’d compare you — I hope you don’t mind that I’m not gonna call you rockstars. I’d compare you more to Rachel Carson, who sounded some early warnings about what environmental pollution was doing to the environment. [Music] In the defense context, you may be modern-day Paul Reveres, except in this case, it’s not the British coming. We don’t know who’s coming; that’s the problem.
JOE: By that time in ‘98, a lot of the software guys had found vulnerabilities in Microsoft and they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at dinners where Microsoft’s like, ah, we don’t think that’s gonna be a problem. Nobody’s gonna exploit that. So, we would release exploit code. We were very early, if not the first, to have this sort of discussion of full disclosure or what would now be called coordinated disclosure or, in quotes, “responsible disclosure”. You know, how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem? Do you trust that the vendor’s gonna fix it?
JACK: One of the things L0pht became known for is pioneering responsible disclosure. The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals, hoodlums, untrustworthy, and L0pht thought of themselves as hackers, but didn’t see themselves as hoodlums. They’re just trying to warn the world of the problems they found, and they wanted people to fix it. They were here to help. But as they told companies about the bugs they found, the companies often misunderstood and thought these guys were there to cause trouble.
So, L0pht was like, look, what do we have to do so you’ll understand that we’re here to help, not hurt you? That’s where responsible disclosure came about. Companies learned that hackers can be very helpful at identifying vulnerabilities, and it’s way better to work with them than to think of them as adversaries. 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 some visual aspect. I imagine you falling in love with this electronics aspect of it; the hardware components, how these things work.
You can send signals here and make it do that, and all this kinda cool stuff. There’s chips that have all this really cool CMOS in it. Then computers went in a direction of screens and programming languages and all this software. Did you go in that direction or did you say, no, no, no, I think you all need this hardware. I’m gonna stay with the hardware. Or, how did you know that you were going to take a different route and not go with the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware? Was that in L0pht that you kinda made that diversion?
JOE: No. I had been — as soon as I got attracted to computers, I was also getting attracted to electronics. I have an older brother, and he was more of an audiophile kind of person. He had radio receivers and things, but he had a lot of electronics that he would take apart and he would fix and put different capacitors in and everything, and he had this junk bin full of circuit boards. I just loved that tangible side of things, which to me makes sense of like, okay, I’m using a computer, and the computer really is a very simple type of embedded system or electronic system like these other circuit boards, but I just loved the physical thing. I would start building projects out of magazines. There was a lot of hobbyist electronics magazines at the time.
There were a couple people — a couple text files you could read about of people making some interesting — even — this was pre-red box stuff, but different types of tone-dialers, blue boxes, and other telephone-related electronics. So, I started building things and I started building my own things. I knew from an early age you couldn’t have a career as a hacker. When everybody would always say, what do you want to be when you grow up? — and I always knew I’m gonna be an engineer. I’m gonna build electronics. So, that was something where — it was a parallel path to the hacking, was building things, and the electronics that I was building were things like stun guns and some laser-listening systems to spy on rooms and kind of mischievous hardware, but things that I could use for the telephone system and subversive technology, like anything I thought was cool.
JACK: Joe’s specialty is hardware hacking. As I sit and look around his workshop, it’s abundantly clear, too. [Music] He’s got drawers full of parts. On the table in front of me is something like sixty circuit boards, and he says he’s building all these for a class. There’s a fault injector over there and soldering irons and an oscilloscope. There’s something beautiful about the low-level aspect of electronics. There are no English words that you can use to program a circuit. Like, you can’t say ‘if this, then do that’ or ‘write out a for-loop’.
No; here, at the circuitry level, 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. It’s amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world. It feels like every now and then we reach a limit of how fast a CPU can operate, and it’s like, well, that’s it, everyone. This is the max speed. There’s no way that we’re gonna go beyond this. You just can’t put more transistors on a chip. But then some scientists discover parallel processing, where they can make it go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs. Because there are now two or three things getting processed at once, it’s faster than processing one at a time.
So, this allows us to have faster computers. Then when that limit is hit and we hit a max there, someone else discovers FinFET transistors, where they can build transistors upwards in a 3D sort of way, like little fins. This invention improves processing speed again, and we reach higher and higher of what technology can do. Just the other day I heard about CPUs that are starting to be made out of glass. There’s no doubt that the last thirty years we’ve seen some incredible explosions in electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics. It’s just a really great space to put focus into as the world is constantly evolving, and it’s exciting.
JOE: In the second L0pht space, we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was me, Brian Oblivion, and Space Rogue. We were into scanner radios. POCSAG was the data transmission of pagers, and it turned out it’s still being used to some extent today in certain environments. We basically loved — and I loved — being able to listen in on anything that I could. So, in college it was cordless phones. At the L0pht at the time it was POCSAG, listening in to transmissions so you can kinda see what’s going on in the world around you, and the scanner radio listening to the cops and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what’s happening.
JACK: Joe built a little device that lets you snag pager text messages out of the air and see what they say. The messages weren’t intended for him. He was just seeing them fly by, and his antenna would capture it and decode it. This was something that the L0pht was actually selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place.
JOE: Back in the day, you’d see all sorts of stuff, ‘cause that’s how people communicated, is with pagers. There’d be stuff about — buy groceries for me, or we saw some relationship sexting kinda one-way; kind of like, ‘I can’t wait for you to get home’. You’d see hospital — a lot of hospital traffic, a lot of EMS traffic and emergency medical things. Yeah, it was just really fun to do, and that made a little bit of money. That was actually my first circuit board that I had mass produced. Then we’d get our orders; they’d all be mail order. We get our mail every week. I’d build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry, and we’d package it up. If they wanted a kit, we’d just give them the components. It was just a way to do something, but that really — that was a contribution that I could help make to the L0pht to bring some money in. Then that kinda proved the concept of like, oh, we could make a little bit of money on this. What if we could do it full-time?
JACK: [Music] I might have to do a whole episode on the L0pht someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker history. I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there.
JOE: It became a company. For me, as this kid who’s still — even though I was starting to grow up, I’m still — like I said at the beginning, I still have this punk aspect to me where that wasn’t an environment I wanted to be in, and I realized, okay, the specialness of it. That group is gone. I don’t want to work for somebody else. I can’t stand if somebody’s telling me what to do. In 2003 I split and have been independent ever since. There’s good and bad that has come with that.
JACK: After that, Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show.
JOE: It was a show called Prototype This! and it was on Discovery Channel, and it was made by the same production company as Mythbusters. The idea was that this would be the next show after Mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away, which of course we know they didn’t, and it lasted another ten years, and spin-offs are still happening. But the concept of the show was having four engineers building ridiculous prototypes. I got an e-mail and it was from a casting company, and they’re like, yeah, we’re looking for engineers. That was actually — they had talked to Make Magazine, which was — that had just come out and that’s a maker magazine talking about electronics and hobby electronics. I was on the technical advisory board for them when they first started.
This company had contacted Make Magazine saying, hey, do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical engineer, a machinist, and a software engineer. So, to complete this circle, they needed a hardware person. So, they said, oh, you should talk to Joe. So, they reached out to me and I got this e-mail, and I remember showing it to my wife. I read it; I was like, I don’t know. I was like, I don’t know if I want to be on TV. I showed it to her and she was like, are you crazy? This is — you can do what you love to do on TV. So, I didn’t really — just like with the Senate, I didn’t know the impact or the implications of what it would become. I didn’t know how special that was. I was like, alright, fine, I’ll do a little interview with them.
So, I showed all the stuff, didn’t really think anything of it, said ‘bye’. I was riding my bike back from San Francisco to San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, just as a solo bike trip for fun. It was my first experience of like, I want to try to figure out what the hell I’m doing, a little bit of self-love. I’m gonna do some — a little meditation kinda thing before that was even a known thing. It was just some — I just needed to escape, and — which is funny because we had just gotten married and — talking to my wife about this recently, I’m like, I can’t believe that I did that, that we got married and then I went to San Francisco for a conference and then I rode my — I didn’t see you for ten days or whatever ‘cause I just was doing a little bit at a time. She’s like, well, you needed it. Like, very supportive, which was amazing.
So, did this bike ride. I didn’t have a phone or anything. This was like, Nokia-phone era. I didn’t even bring a phone ‘cause I really wanted to isolate myself. Come back from the trip, turn on my computer, and there was five e-mails of like, we want you on the show. Can you call us back? Call us back. So, it’s amazing that they even waited, because they could have easily been like, alright, he’s not answering. Let’s go to somebody else. We spent the next year and a half in a warehouse on Treasure Island in the Bay Area in San Francisco building ridiculous, giant prototypes.
JACK: [Music] Prototype This! was pretty darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending water slide. Can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted?
JOE: Everybody needs an endless water slide. It was — we called it the Backyard Water Slide. The concept — the show really was like, in the future, you could have one of these, even though we were just prototyping.
JACK: What they did was they connected curved water slide parts into a donut-looking shape, like a big circle, and they stood that up so it looked like a big wheel, and then they put water in it and spun it. So, if you’re inside, you’re always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning.
JOE: We did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack, and we had a drone that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea. We did a pizza-delivering robot, which now there are food-delivering robots. Maybe they ripped it off the show; I don’t know. Or like…
JACK: You had one where you tried to ride on a bug robot, right?
JOE: Oh, yeah.
JACK: A giant bug-looking thing, and then you would ride on it.
JOE: Yeah, yeah.
JACK: That’s not even out yet.
JOE: No.
JACK: Fast-forward twenty years, right? What is it?
JOE: ‘Cause that was a really hard problem.
JACK: Or fifteen years ago, and they still don’t have rideable robots.
JOE: Yeah. I know. What’s up with that?
JACK: You were building them then.
JOE: Yeah. I mean, that’s — everybody needs a rideable robot, also. I guess the closest thing now are the autonomous vehicles, which are terrifying. Right. This was called the 6x6, and this was an all-terrain vehicle mimicking — it was actually called biomimicry ‘cause we were mimicking the tri — alternating tripod gait walking of some bug that was really stable with three legs on the ground. There was a project that — an academic project that some guys had done with a small-scale version, and we hooked up with them. We’re like, we want to build a human-size version of that. That was a really hard project. Actually, that was the first project that didn’t succeed on the show. I just remember the producers of that show — we would propose all these ridiculous ideas, and they only wanted us to submit ideas that we thought we’d be able to do in two weeks.
JACK: Two weeks is all you had to build everything?
JOE: Some of them ended up being longer. Some of them were five or six weeks because they didn’t really understand the engineering process.
JACK: Like, what you’re doing is you’re inventing entire companies in two weeks.
JOE: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.
JACK: Like, here’s a full product that you can go to market and sell. I know it’s just a prototype, but just take it from there.
JOE: No, you’re exactly right.
JACK: You’re ready to go, and you’re just creating rapidly — innovation in two weeks.
JOE: That’s right. That’s right, exactly.
JACK: That’s insane.
JOE: Yeah, it was — but it was — also, for me, I had spent a lot of time trying to at least explain the process of like, here’s how you actually — here’s how engineering works so the producers and the company would understand how amazing the stuff is that we were doing. But we — actually, a lot of it was successful until the 6x6, and that failed. I remember the production company seeing a rough cut of it and they’re like, this is amazing. We want you to fail more often. We’re like, yeah. We’re like, this is the reality of it. The fun of the show, really — if we succeeded every time, it would kind of be boring, because everybody would know that we’re gonna build — the drama goes away — and gave us a little less pressure of like, alright, we’re gonna do our best, but some of this is just not realistic to build in that amount of time. The producers would always call us prima donnas ‘cause all of us were very Type A, hard-to-wrangle children, basically. But everybody had — it was just so much fun. It was like this traveling circus.
HOST: [Music] Virtual reality games already exist, so what could we do to make them better?
HOST2: Making good ideas better is what the guys do best at Prototype This!. So, back at the concept table, they knock around the game plan in a brainstorming session.
HOST: Alright, what do you guys got?
JOE: Alright, we came up with a great idea for a prototype; giant boxing robots.
JACK: [Music] Wow, this episode is really quite incredible. They create these two giant, fourteen-foot-tall boxing robots, and Joe is hooked up to a motion-tracking system where he could control the robot outside the ring simply by punching and dodging and everything. He’s shadowboxing on the side, and the robot just does what he does. I can’t believe they built this thing in two weeks. It looks like so much fun.
JOE: We had an episode where we were building a personal airbag to prevent people from falling off of roofs and dying. So, it would detect that you’re falling and deploy this big airbag. We couldn’t do anything that Mythbusters was doing, so we couldn’t do it with a dummy.
JACK: Since Mythbusters had this test dummy that they always used called Buster, the show runners thought it would be too similar if Prototype This! used an adult test dummy, too.
JOE: So, instead of using a human test dummy like Buster, we used little child baby test dummies, which was super creepy ‘cause we’re like, look at the power of this airbag, and we’d blow up this baby test dummy and the arms would go flying. So, the show ended. We were about to renew for a second season, but it turns out that it was just so expensive to produce the show because we had multiple film crew to film, mechanical stuff and electrical stuff. It was just a lot. So, they didn’t renew the show, and I was relieved but I was also kinda sad. I didn’t realize how sad I was until a couple weeks later where it’s just like, I didn’t have anything to do.
JACK: When I first discovered you — was at Defcon 17. It was the first Defcon I ever went to, and you were like the man of Defcon 17. I was like, that guy there, he’s the one who — he’s the guy who did all this stuff.
JOE: Right.
JACK: I was just like, spellbound by you in this way of just like, wow. There goes Joe.
JOE: That’s amazing.
JACK: It’s Kingpin, you know?
JOE: I didn’t know you were — so, I didn’t realize that we’d been…
JACK: That was the first one I went to.
JOE: …we’d be like, in the same path for that long. That was a long time ago now.
JACK: It was a long time ago. So, I think what you did to Defcon has affected pretty much every hacker conference on the planet.
JOE: Yeah, yeah, yes.
JACK: I’ve been to other non-hacker conferences before that, and when you go, they typically give you a bracelet or a lanyard or some kind of badge to indicate that you’ve paid to be there. Defcon, a hacker conference, had something totally different. The badge to get into Defcon was an electronic device, and it was built in such a way that encouraged you to hack it, modify it, take it apart, make it do cool things. You were supposed to mess with it. It had Easter eggs in it. [Music] It was cool. You wore it around your neck.
JOE: Yeah, so, Defcon 14 was the first electronic badge at a conference that we know of. It’s just like everything else I’ve done. My goal has never been ‘I want to be famous. I want to make money. I want to do…’ — it’s to do something that I enjoy, and that’s it. I’m not even really thinking about the outcome of it. Defcon was a huge part of my life. It was a huge part of the hacker culture at the time, and it still is. It’s just, I think it’s a little bit different now than it was back then when it was smaller. But it was this gathering place for likeminded people. I had known the Dark Tangent since I was younger, much younger. He was already running Black Hat and Defcon. I had given some talks at Defcon, went to some early Defcon parties.
The Dark Tangent was like, hey, I’m starting up these trainings. You should do one about hardware. So, he was really the catalyst. He could see — he’s like this visionary. He has this crystal ball and he can see kinda what’s coming. So, I was doing training, and this was the first circuit board that I had made that had a custom shape to it that wasn’t just a square, a green square. So, the Dark Tangent saw that circuit board from the training classes and was like, hey, we should do that for Defcon. So, he saw that and was like, let’s make this a mass thing. So, Defcon 14 was the first electronic badge, and it was very simple.
It had a really tiny microcontroller, a PIC10F202, I think it was, like a super-tiny six-pin microcontroller and some blinky lights. You could change different blinking light patterns, and it had a debug interface adapter so people could kinda change the code or hack the code if they wanted to. I had a badge-hacking contest. It was really the first time that a lot of people were exposed to electronics. My goal was just like, expose more people to electronics. It was that simple.
JACK: It was a big hit. People loved having a badge that you could hack on, and it’s also your pass to the conference. How cool is that?
JOE: Over the next couple years it was like, alright, what can I do different? What can I — what new technologies can I try? What circuit board fabrication process can I use that I haven’t used before? So, for me, it was like, being able to spend Defcon’s money to try a new thing was great, and then to give something back to the community that they could use and learn from and get involved with electronics.
JACK: The first year, the badge just blinked. The second year, it had capacitive touch buttons, which was the first time I’ve ever seen capacitive touch buttons in my life.
JOE: Defcon 16 looked like a ninja, and it had an infrared eye as the transmitter and an SD card. You could load files, wares, or whatever you wanted onto the SD card and trade, do infrared file transfer with people. So, you could share files with people at Defcon.
JACK: The year after that, the badge had a microphone and single LED, and was programmed to react to different sounds. I remember someone found that if you play a tone at 2600 hertz, it would respond by saying something in Morse code. All the parts were surface mounts, so you could barely even see that there were any electronics involved in this thing.
JOE: By the time Defcon 18 happened, I felt like I had sort of exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try.
JACK: But it didn’t matter. The ideas brought to life during those five years at Defcon changed Defcon forever. But it also had a widespread impact. What came next was Badgelife, which is now a huge community at Defcon. A lot of people started making their own badges, electronic devices to hang around your neck to represent certain groups or to get into certain parties or just wear because they’re cool looking. If you go today, you’ll see thousands of people wearing a huge variety of electronic badges around their neck. Heck, last year I was given a badge which had a little antenna on it, and it created a mesh network across all of Las Vegas so you could talk to your friends who were anywhere around town, and they would also be able to identify where you’re located.
It’s called Meshtastic, if you’re wondering. But not only do you see hundreds of different badges these days, but there are also little add-on badges, too, where people make these little ones to stick onto your main ones. I don’t know if you realize this, but there are at least two hacker conferences every week somewhere in the world. You should absolutely be looking for the ones in your area and going to them. I took a non-tech friend to a hacker conference the other day, and he had a blast. I could almost guarantee there’s a B-Sides conference within a three-hour drive of you.
So many of these hacker conferences today have taken this idea of electronic badges and are using them, too. Gosh, I went to Saintcon last year in Utah, and they’ve gone off the rails with electronic badges. First, of course, they have an electronic badge as your entry pass into the conference, and it has a lot of cool functionality, too, but they have this whole mini-badge culture. There are thousands of these little, tiny badges that you can use to decorate your main badge with. [Music] In my opinion, all this started with Joe’s wonderful badges and designs at Defcon. It’s like he birthed a whole community.
JOE: I think it’s cool to have had an impact in a way of like, that thing turned into something. The Senate testimony turned into something. The badges turned into something. I don’t really look back. I’m a lot of like, okay, that’s done. What’s next? And always trying to look for something. So, it’s cool that you mention it of like, it is something that kind of helped shape things, but I feel like it would be cool if more people had that mentality where it’s just to bring something to the community and see what happens, see what comes out of it.
JACK: Yes, that’s what’s so awesome about Joe. The stuff he gives the world, he does it in such a way that you can take that and run with it and create something new. He’s incredibly inspiring not only to me, but for many.
JOE: Defcon started making this Uber Award which is sort of like a Lifetime Achievement Award. I was actually — it was the first year I missed Defcon in ages. I was on vacation in Thailand and then going to a conference over there. I woke up to a whole bunch of text messages and photos of this big block of aluminum, and it was this Defcon award. It said, ‘For endless curiosity and innovation, the original spirit of Badgelife’. It was like, holy shit, wow, that’s really cool. So, that is really the first time where I realized that there was an impact of it, and I thought it was cool.
It’s just like Prototype This!; people come up and they’re like, I saw that show and I became an engineer, and now I’m doing something at Apple or at Google or whatever. It’s cool that people’s lives are changed by what you do, and I think that’s a really — I guess it’s a good thing to remember because your actions have consequences, good or bad, and it’s just nothing I would ever expect. I’m still just a hacker in my lab that does stuff — is how I see it. I don’t see it as anything else, even as — my YouTube videos have a lot of views. I don’t see it — that doesn’t change me. It might affect other people, which is cool; get them involved, but it doesn’t change me and it doesn’t change my belief system and my passion for what I do.
JACK: So, my perspective is like, this guy’s got it all figured out. He can just design whatever he wants. He’s got the — I cannot remember the name of it. Kingpin Labs…
JOE: Well, Grand Idea Studio…
JACK: Grand Idea Studio.
JOE: …that’s like my engineering company.
JACK: Right. So it’s like, he’s got an engineering company and I saw your talk; he’s got Hollywood deals that he’s doing. This guy is gonna — I can’t wait to see all the stuff that comes out. But you had no idea.
JOE: No. I still have no idea what I’m doing. I think it’s a certain perspective. Or you see a celebrity on TV or on Instagram and you’re like, man, I want to be like them. They have all their shit figured out. That’s just part of the story, and I think it’s important for people to know everybody has stuff going on, right? Even if somebody appears to be perfect in whatever way, there’s always a struggle somewhere. I still don’t have a path of where I’m going. It just — I’ve fallen into all of these things, and some of it maybe was luck. Some of it was intentional a little bit, but of like — most of it was just being in the right place at the right time and somebody somewhere dropping my name, because I just was doing what I was doing and loving what I was doing.
But a book that my wife had written, Troublemakers and Superpowers, it actually took her four years to write it. When I read her complete book, it got me thinking; like, wait, everybody else has gotten tested for things. They did their psychological testing, their evaluation. I was like, what’s up with me? Why did I gravitate towards the hacker world? Why did I gravitate towards punk rock, and why did I gravitate towards skateboarding? Why do I not think getting arrested was a problem? All of these things. So, it got me really thinking about that, and during lockdown I started meditating and I thought that was really helpful of kind of regulating me a little bit more. So, a couple months ago I ended up doing this full psychological testing, which for me was like, as a hacker, I’m like, I just want to know how my brain works.
I want to know why do I feel these things in my head, why do I feel these things? Which is completely different than a public perception, right? You see a lot of actors, a lot of 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. So, I was just like, what’s up with me? Why do I think this way? So, I kinda treated it as a science experiment, of like, let’s see what my hacker brain is like. So, I did a full testing that was many hours long, and I loved it. It was like puzzles and math and questions, and then of course the standard psychological test. At some point, tests only show you certain things, right?
I’m not a huge fan of academic testing, but to give you a sense of things — and a lot of the questions really frustrated me because they were kind of yes or no, black or white questions. It’s like, nothing is black or white. There’s things in there like, well, yeah, in certain situations, yes, I would do that, or no, I wouldn’t do that. The testing came back with — the two main things were being diagnosed with being clinically depressed, which I think explains a lot about my anger and the way I see the world in general, and then having autism spectrum disorder, so being on the spectrum.
So, this was really interesting for validation of like, okay, yes, Joe is — has very high skills in certain things and then some deficits in certain things, and that can be caused with some of the autism or the depression, and you can manage depression in certain ways depending on what it is. But now I don’t have this internal anger against myself of like, why am I thinking that way or why do I feel this way? It’s okay to feel this way. So, it totally flipped my perspective of like — it validated that I am okay the way I am. Now there’s a name for the things that I have. So, now I can work on those. As a hacker, it’s like, alright, now I understand. Let’s look at that depression. What did that cause? What can I do to live better?
JACK: Sometimes Joe likes to be an engineer. Sometimes he likes to be a hacker. 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. He teaches electronics classes all over the world, and he gets a lot of projects that come his way, but most don’t spark that level of excitement for him. He never did settle down into a comfortable, reliable job. There’s something in him, I think that hacker spirit, which urges him to stay punk, buck the system, break things, and learn to do something that nobody else knows.
JOE: [Music] I would occasionally get e-mails with really strange requests of things, or like, can you hack my girlfriend’s…? I think my girlfriend’s cheating on me. Can you hack her device?
JACK: I get those all the time.
JOE: The sign of a healthy relationship. Just, I would generally respond to some e-mails at that point.
JACK: Little projects would spring up here and there, and he’d get involved with them, but he was very picky about what he decided to work on because, well, it just might not be hackery enough for him, you know? If it doesn’t push his understanding of electronics or the world or challenges him enough, he’s not interested, or maybe the project just isn’t rewarding enough.
JOE: When Dan had contacted me — I got this e-mail and it was a very well-written e-mail. I’m like, oh, this is a legitimate request.
JACK: This guy Dan reached out to Joe saying he had $2 million in cryptocurrency, and the crypto is on a hardware wallet called a Trezor wallet. But he doesn’t have the PIN to unlock the hardware wallet. So, he can’t access the money, and was wondering if Joe could help.
JOE: I’m like, okay, this sounds like an interesting project. Some friends of mine had already proven that the Trezor can be hacked in different ways using fault injection. I had never personally done anything with fault injection. So, for me, it was a perfect opportunity of like, alright, I’m not traveling. There’s still kind of — we’re kinda locked down. Things are starting to open up, but to me, it kinda piqued my interest of like, now I can — now I have a reason to learn a new skill.
JACK: So, to be clear, this shouldn’t be possible. The Trezor wallet is built so you only have sixteen tries at guessing the PIN, and if you don’t get it right after the sixteenth failure, it wipes the device. It does that to avoid someone trying to brute-force the PIN and trying every combination until they get it. Now, somewhere in the memory of the Trezor is both the PIN code and the private keys. There’s a security mechanism that blocks you from just dumping the memory of the chip and reading it. It’ll just be garbled. 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, right? Which is exactly why Joe felt like this is an interesting challenge, and started working on it. [Music] But this required him to pick up a whole bunch of new skills.
First he had to read up on if anyone else has defeated the Trezor before and what vulnerabilities it might have, which — there were some articles on it, but a lot of it was just theory. There weren’t instructions on how to do this or a YouTube video to follow along. He had to become very familiar with learning the architecture of this device, understanding all the circuitry involved. He had an idea to use a fault injection. This is to try to send some electrical pulses to the thing to get it to glitch, to get it to do things it’s not supposed to do, and that might somehow let him get inside. But he didn’t know very much about fault injection, so he had to practice that, too. So, for months and months, he got into his workshop, this workshop I’m sitting in right now, every day to learn more.
JOE: Pretty much nonstop, obsessive work to get things going, because the information that was out there was correct but it wasn’t fully — it wasn’t a full exploit chain. So, there were still some things you had to work out, and also, the technique that was being used at the time, which was voltage fault injection, is very dependant on things like environmental temperature and even variances within the silicon, ‘cause it’s all timing-based — of like, at this point in time, after this signal goes high, I’m going to inject a fault, which is basically — with voltage fault injection, you’re kind of brown-outing — turning off the power really fast in hopes of messing up some CPU execution.
So, it was all very timing specific and like, you could be off by one clock cycle and it’s not gonna work. I started down this path of trying to replicate some existing work and going through, again, this roller coaster of like, I love hacking; I hate hacking. Why isn’t this working? Questioning my skills, like, do I even deserve to be doing this? Really, it was more of the mental challenge. My wife was like — I would come in; I’d be like, I can’t get it to work. She’s like, just take a break. You don’t have to work eighteen hours at it. ‘Cause I was just so focused on it. She’s like, take a break. Come back tomorrow. So, she was the voice of reason in all of it. Like, I don’t know where I’d be without her. I don’t really talk a lot publicly about our relationship, but I would be in a much different — I would be screwed without her.
JACK: He eventually hones in on the attack. He’s got hope that he can glitch this device just as it turns on to get it to go into debug mode by sending electrical pulses through it in a way that it’s just not built for. He’s gotta time it just right. Even the smallest fraction of a second will be the difference of if it works or doesn’t work. So, he’s trying this again and again and again, pretty much throwing everything possible at it to get it to act in a way that it shouldn’t. The whole time he’s trying this, he’s just practicing it on a test Trezor wallet. The guy Dan didn’t want to bring his wallet over until Joe could prove that he could actually get into Trezor wallets.
JOE: Eventually got it working to the point where it was — it was working where I was confident enough. I got some devices I could test. I made a video to show to Dan. He lived in New Jersey, and he actually was gonna fly out here to do it. That’s when, again, my wife comes in. She’s like, you should be filming this. I had just — during Covid, I had filmed a video for Wired called The Pizza Compass, and it was this really fun project that was a device that — you’d press a button and it would have a GPS, figure out where you are anywhere in the world, and it would do a Google lookup over the internet, find out where the nearest pizza place is, and direct you to it with some LEDs. That was a really fun build video that we did. She’s like, a lot of your videos have been engineering-focused. You should show people that you’re still a hacker. So, I called Wired and I was like, do you want to film this? They’re like, oh, that’s kinda cool, but they kinda dragged their feet. Then I talked to my friend Fred who was a former client of mine with some product development stuff, and he’s a filmmaker, and he’s like, hell yeah.
JACK: [Music] So, he got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress trying to hack into this Trezor wallet.
JOE: What if you had a couple million dollars stored on a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp and it was protected by a password that you forgot?
JACK: The video walks us through the whole process on how Joe hacks things, and it’s quite fascinating to watch. Dan flies over to this workshop that I’m sitting in and gives the Trezor wallet to Joe to hack into, and Joe just starts pulling it apart, trying to hack into it.
JOE: [Music] The next step is we have to remove a couple components from this board. The components we’re removing are capacitors, and by removing them, it makes the chip more susceptible to those little glitches and stuff that we’re doing. What I’m gonna do is use my soldering iron and just very carefully heat both sides of the part and pull it off the board. The risk at this stage is pulling off some of the circuit board with it, which hopefully won’t happen. Iron is on. Yeah, there’s two that we need to remove. One is easier to get to than the other. Okay, the first one’s off. Alright, so, those components are off. Now all I have to do is add the external connectors that’s gonna let us hook it up to the hardware over there.
JACK: The thing is, Joe’s method of getting into this thing is highly dependent on luck. There’s a one-in-a-million chance this is gonna work. He’s got this station set up that is just gonna try again every second, and it just tries again and again and again. It powers up the device, it attempts to trigger the fault; did it work? If not, power off, then power it on again to try to trigger the fault again. He’s got it automated to just try again and again and again, and if it works, it’ll say ‘Hack the planet’. He’s actually only gotten it to trigger the fault a few times in his life during the test runs. It’s not like he could just crack open this thing, hook it up to a machine, and then, boom, done. This is a lot of work, and he really doesn’t even know if this is gonna work or not, but it’s worth trying, and that’s what makes it exciting to watch. But after a lot of waiting and trying thousands of times, they eventually get it.
JOE: Oh, this is torture.
CIRCUIT BOARD: Hack the planet.
JOE: Oh! [Laughing] Oh, it’s like it knew. Yes! I’m like, this is torture. Hack the planet. That’s awesome. Oh my — OMG, like they say on the internet.
JACK: Joe published this video to his YouTube channel, and it got millions of views and went viral, way more views than any of the videos I’ve ever published, and I’m actually trying here. But it’s just because how wonderful it is to watch Joe have fun hacking things. [Music] Well, you could probably guess, once he demonstrated that he can hack into Bitcoin wallets, his inbox got flooded with tons of messages. Lots of people wanted help recovering their lost cryptocurrency, too. He took on some of those projects, and you could watch his YouTube channel to see more videos like that. 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. But even though this earned Joe that cool, little YouTube plaque, something else emerged from it. Joe got impersonators.
JOE: So, the video came out. It went viral. Out of the blue, I got an e-mail from a guy that was like, hey, I’ve been talking to you on Instagram and you said you’d help me get access to my account. What’s up? I sent you the money. I’m like, what are you talking about? So, one of my kids who’s actually on Instagram went and found the guy. We looked him up, and it was a guy that was kind of a model, a good-looking person. It was to buy more followers. That’s what it was. It was to buy more followers. I don’t know, something stupid. He got screwed over by somebody pretending to be me, and that opened this door of like, what’s going on? So, I start searching on all these social media platforms and it’s like, there are like, a million Joe Grands and they’re all just grabbing my Twitter feed and making fake profiles and all of this stuff. That happens to every single person that has any sort of name recognition on the internet.
JACK: Is it like, if you need help recovering your crypto, I’m the guy?
JOE: Yeah. So, it’s multiple things, but that’s the main one, of like, there’s some cryptocurrency video and then there’s all of these bots that respond; you should talk to Joe Grand. He’s the man. Then it’s like, a fake Telegram name or joegrand6969@gmail.com. You know, something totally obvious that it’s not me, but there’s this whole psychological side of things. I’m actually reading a book called The Confidence Game that’s all about the psychological side of getting conned and getting scammed. What I’ve learned over the years of all of these e-mails that I get is people who are in a desperate situation are not thinking critically. So, they go to — they ignore all the red flags, and scamming — impersonating is such a common scam.
Basically it’s like, yeah, either they get reached out to directly or the fake Joe Grand will direct-message them and say, hey, I can help you. Or it’s like, hey, you should — how’s your cryptocurrency investing going? You should invest in my platform. I’m reaching out to members of my community. It’s like, anybody who knows me knows, well, Joe’s not gonna talk to a random stranger. 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. So, it’s a cat-and-mouse game. It’s a whack-a-mole. We try to take them down; more come up. We now, at least, are verified. So, yeah, so, with that, I’ve had to set up a social media presence on every platform, which is not my personality.
I had Twitter to communicate to my world of friends, even though that’s kinda going down the drain. I set up a Discord where my teenager was like, you gotta set up Discord so everyone can talk — I was like, I don’t want to talk to every random person. He’s like, daddy, you just gotta do it. Someone else can answer the questions. You just can be on there. 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 just get ignored. It’s great. But people still are getting scammed. So, I’ve had to set up social media; open up direct message access so people at least get to the correct Joe Grand and not the scammer. Then being verified on these platforms, it’s easier to take them down.
It’s a never-ending battle, but the hope is to just prevent more people from getting screwed. But it’s opened my eyes and really disenchanted me or disenfranchised me, I guess, about cryptocurrency. Which, I am not an owner of any cryptocurrency for people who are thinking of coming over to rob me. I’m not involved in cryptocurrency at all. I’m just involved in the technical aspect of it. But seeing all of the scams really has crushed my idealistic view of what positive technologies could be. There are some cool things about cryptocurrency or the cryptography behind it or blockchain — maybe there are some benefits to it, but there’s just so many scams and these shitcoins and rug-pulls and all these things that sort of overshadow any positive benefits that might come out of it.
JACK: Very similar stuff has happened to me, too. I’ve seen quite a few Jack Rhysider impersonators trying to scam people. Be careful out there. Only chat with me through official channels, which you can see the links on the bottom of my website. Just as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself in a weird crypto deal with me, it is probably not me. I don’t mind all this stuff wasting my time because it’s intriguing for me. It’s my area of interest. 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. I can’t wait to see what his next amazing thing is that he accomplishes.
JOE: It all falls back to my ethos of like, I want to build something that’s interesting and that I could use and that could help other people, and then see where it goes. But yeah, I think ultimately it’s like, my life has no ulterior motive and it has really no specific direction, and I think that’s the key.
JACK: We can see your direction by looking in the rear-view mirror, but we have no idea what’s…
JOE: That’s right. That’s exactly right, because you can look back and it’s like, oh, Joe has it all figured out, where I did the TV show, did Defcon, did this and did that. It’s like, no, it’s way easier to look backwards and create a path than know that that was where I’m going.
(Outro): [Outro music] A big thank you to Joe Grand for letting me come over and chop it up for a few hours. I encourage you all to check out his YouTube channel. Just search for Joe Grand, and you’ll find it pretty easy. But even more than that, I encourage you all to be hackers yourself. Don’t accept the world as it is. Create the world you want and push things beyond their limits. I know it’s hard, but if you can learn to feel comfortable in that space of just not knowing what you’re doing but you just keep trying and trying and trying again anyway, then the world is yours. Okay, I have some big news. I have a new bonus episode available to premium subscribers.
If you’re not a premium subscriber, there are eleven bonus episodes available for you right now to enjoy, and you also get an ad-free version of the show, too. Being a premium subscriber is a great way to show thanks as well, because it really does help this show. To get bonus episodes, just visit plus.darknetdiaries.com or just go to darknetdiaries.com and then click Bonus Episodes at the top of the page. This episode was created by me, the stack jacker, Jack Rhysider. Our editor is the uninstall wizard, Tristan Ledger. Mixing done by Proximity Sound, and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Why did the smartphone need glasses? It lost its contacts. This is Darknet Diaries.
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