Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

Episodes

Mentioned books

Jan 23, 2022 • 1h 18min

Diving Deep into the World of Computer Hacking & Becoming a Hacker — Riley Eller

One of the things I get asked the most about is questions about how to be a hacker and how to learn hacking skills. And I think there’s a few people I know who really epitomized what that’s all about, and we’ve had pretty deep journeys and in their lives and their careers about about computer hacking. We talk a lot about the mindset of hackers, which is one of the things I’m super interested in and attracted to. I find to be very helpful way of thinking about things. But you know, when we’re talking about the technicalities of computer hacking, what that means, it really appeals to a certain kind of person and I think a lot of people just don’t know where to start. And so I wanted to share one of the folks that I find inspiring and who I’ve known for a long time. I think his life and his career sort of epitomizes what a lot of folks are thinking about when they’re asking about computer hacking. And so his name’s Riley Eller and Riley’s sort of a famous in the hacker community because he used to run the most popular party for hackers called Caesar’s challenge. And we’d have this party once a year at DEF CON and only the league got in. Riley has done a great job over the years of figuring out how to get hackers partying, and get us all connecting to each other and making friends with each other. I think that’s a really important and valuable thing for a community of folks who maybe having focused on social skills so much previously. And so Riley’s also known for being a member of the ghetto hackers, which was the first team of hackers to win the DEF CON Capture the Flag contest three years in a row. Then they took it over and ran that contest for a few years and really up the game. This was the notorious, you know hacking contest, cause it was the first big hacking contest. It was the place where that got started. And now of course you have hacking contests all over the world, but capture the flag at Def CON is where it started. The ghetto hackers were one of the first real teams to take that on and they advanced the game and really turned it into a spectator sport at DEF CON. And it’s, it’s gone on and evolved since then. We talk about that a bit in this conversation. We go deep into a little bit deep into talking about a wifi mesh networking at a company called CoCo Communications where Riley worked another one of our upcoming guests on the podcast, Jeremy Bruestle who was the founder of that company. You can listen to that to learn a little more about CoCo, but a lot of those inventions and those technologies are just coming of age now. And so I think it’s actually pretty relevant and interesting because mesh networking is one of these things that keeps coming up again and again, and the problems are hard and interesting. So that’s a cool conversation. And then later on, we talk about Caesar’s experience as a hacker growing up, how he got into it, what he’s learned, what he values about it as well as his ideas for how you can become a hacker. I am really excited to share Riley with you guys. He’s made a big impression on me and my life, so I hope you enjoy it. Pablos: This has been one of the conversations I’ve had in my mind as being important for the podcast and what I want to do. I’ve known you for more than twenty years. We have similar progression or timelines in our lives of getting interested in computers, hacking, and ending up in the social dynamic of the hacker community in those days. There’s a lot to learn from that. What I want to do with you is talk about some of those experiences early on and how we got into it. First, let’s talk a little bit about what you’ve been working on professionally because you spent a lot of time on the last company you were at. It was a company started by Jeremy, who was one of the founders, so it was started by hackers. I remember talking to him before he started the company about the ideas for trying to create mesh networks that were ad hoc mesh networks. That was, in those days, one of the hard problems with networking to solve. I’d seen lots of trial and error and lots of difficult problems in that. Jeremy was amazing because he was able to get further than anybody, as far as I could tell, technically. I was always interested in that company, and you and a bunch of other friends end up working there, so can you tell me a little bit about what the progression of that was like? Riley: Originally, we were doing a Business 2.0 article. Jeremy was explaining on the whiteboard in the Ghetto Hacker workspace how that all worked and I was trying to repeat it back to him to see if I understood his ideas, because it was difficult to grasp with what I knew at the time. There’s a photo of him and I talking over that particular moment right before the company was taking off. It was a pivotal moment in my life. Maybe the first thing to do is describe what the point of that was at that moment because this must have been about 2005, 2006 or something. No. The company was started in 2002 and I joined in 2003. They had about a year to go around, raise funding, talk about it and get their hands around what the problem was that they were trying to solve. What happened was a whole bunch of families who are proud of the country in Seattle, people with some money to invest, saw the communication failure on 911 as a critical infrastructure defense problem that could be solved commercially. It should be available so people who are busy doing things, running toward emergencies and disasters, will know that they’re not going to get cut off from the lifeline and the lifeline for those people is always information. Having that access to information or failing to have that access to information was responsible for about 10% of the deaths that day. It’s not solving all of the world’s problems they thought, but it was something that they could focus on, it was narrow. This was about a year after the dot-com crash, so they’d all been gotten used to investing in technology. They saw this problem and they decided to try to get somebody smart and they knew Mark Tucker, who was the CEO. Mark and Jeremy had worked together on a project before, so they brought Jeremy in and he took some initial ideas out of IEEE and what was available at the time and said, “We’re going to build the stack of these existing technologies.” He went around and talked to people who were in the upper echelons of communications, telecommunications, first responder communications, and military comms. He found that there was huge resistance on cost because centralized networks are much cheaper to operate than networks where all the smarts have to be in every device. The more decentralized a network, the more expensive it is, period, because like a smartphone, the phone part of it is low power, tiny little chip. Most of what we call phone now is a lot of other stuff. Adding anything, even communication technology that is constantly running, trying to help other people on demand, all those things that the first responder would need if the central communications went down, each of them is a real challenge. Jeremy kept pushing on invention after the invention and built a four-tier stack of pieces that would be needed. At the bottom layer, you need to be able to defend against denial of service attacks because that’s an easy way to knock down a network like this. It’s to send crappy messages, so we had to have link security and link identity but we needed to provide application communication concerns like police and firefighters have common missions. You may have police and firefighters on the same scene at the same time but they have distinct missions. You can’t get the communications crossed up. A firefighter can’t misunderstand that shoot comes from a police officer or firefighter. They need to know what their lingo is and their jargon is. They need to use their words their way and not have to double-check who’s talking. We needed to have a separation of communications as well, even though we had to have a common trust model, being able to join a lot of groups of people who have different interests in missions. Journalists, possibly even those who may need to talk to each other or send pictures back and forth to their cameras and so forth. All of these problems turned out to be tractable but complicated. It’s building up to pieces one at a time and working out how we can make a network that doesn’t have a central registrar. In the end, we found that we couldn’t create trust without some centrality. We had to have some trusted arbitrators of identity, but once you had an identity service, then the rest of it could be done purely decentralized. We saw in the 802.11p or 802.11r, whichever one is the automotive spec they ended up rebuilding almost the same technology stack. They came around and they’re like, “These vehicles are going too fast. We need them to be able to talk to each other. They don’t know each other. A Ford doesn’t know to trust a Toyota.” All these same problems came back out so the model proved to be correct and effective. The way we implemented it, and our desire to make the network scale to essentially infinite size, make it scale-free. That ended up being too costly for the amount of network resources available at the time, especially if you think about high-speed devices like airplanes or cars relative to bicycles and humans. Having that slow stability is great, but having those high-speed movers can shuffle the topology of the network quickly if you do any automated algorithms or if you consider those to be all part of the same network. There are good reasons that the military divides the universe up into upper air tier, middle air tier, lower air tier, ground tier, sea tier, undersea tier and cyber tier. These are all different dimensions and each one of them has a completely distinct communication technology. That was an opportunity for improvement and we didn’t see that. A lot of our designs were homogeneous. It’s a little over-engineered. That took us a long time to recover from. In those days, if we’re talking about 2002, 2003, 2004 or 2005, basically, we’re at a point in the world where the internet has completely taken over. TCP/IP 1, people, especially at that time, thought of it as this is a decentralized protocol, in a sense compared to centralized networks that came before us. The telephone network is a hub and spoke design where you have a switchboard in the middle and anytime you want to talk to anybody else, you go through the switchboard in the middle. TCP/IP, all you’ve got to do is find anybody else on the network and you can connect through them. We think of it as decentralized but in fact, for it to work the way you described, there’s a bunch of quasi centralized services like name service, issuing IP addresses and that stuff that has to be managed too. You have to have an identity database. You have to log into all these services. We have a whole bunch of different identity services but those are all essentially centralizing services. Even the IP address assignment is a central function. I remember we were first playing with Wi-Fi probably by ‘98, or something. It was for extreme nerds and nothing had Wi-Fi in it, so you had to plug a Wi-Fi card the size of an iPhone into your laptop to get on Wi-Fi. By 2001 and 2002, it’s getting normal. The first laptops with Wi-Fi were probably the iBook, Apple’s Titanium PowerBook, or something. It was one of those that had Wi-Fi build in. We were using PalmPilot or Pocket PCs, which were a phone board and PC board jam together with a serial port and stacked with it with a screen. The HP iPAQ and the Compaq iPAQ were the things because it had Wi-Fi and that Wi-Fi in the old days had to have ad hoc mode. Lately, that’s not supported on most radios. A lot of the companies wanted to put this communication technology into an employee problem rather than a job problem.Tweet They don’t even support ad hoc mode anymore. Ad hoc mode, I thought, were some descendant of it. It is basically what’s used when you do personal hotspot on your iPhone. It’s a descendant and it has a parent and a child relationship even then. The point being is all these networks that we use have that hierarchical relationship where, in Bluetooth, you pair to your other devices. There were occasional cases like airdrop as an example of an ad hoc thing where you could find devices on a network that you didn’t even know about before and talk to them for a little bit. I remember those days. As computer nerds, we were all fantasizing about how to build the next generation of the wireless network to be an ad hoc wireless, we call it a mesh network, meaning there was no centralized authority in the network. What we imagined was you would be able to go anywhere, devices and all find the other devices around them. As long as one of those things was on the internet, everybody could route through them. It ended up being intractable because largely, the overhead of managing routing tables and those things. What I saw with the company that was called CoCo at the time, what Jeremy had come up with was a more practical way to solve that routing problem. Did it not end up being a big deal? It did but what it ended up doing at the scales we wanted to achieve was creating a lot of ongoing or zombie connections. It wasn’t even the routing that was complicated. It was keeping all the devices leashed together. The big problem for multi-party or multi-security domain mesh networks is that we give them to the police and the firemen. We want to keep the comms separate. The big problem is to track a firefighter who has moved through and past the end of the police area. We have to hop that firefighter’s connections through those policemen and back to where the other firefighters are. That is such a core conceptual model that your workgroup stays together as long as you exist and you’re connected to the mesh. You have this constant application layer concept of group communication or a group connection. When you have that, then it’s cool because you can have an IP subnet in your mind or your machine. You can represent a group of any nature that you’re a part of in the whole world with an IP range and use all your standard TCP/IP applications. The problem was to keep that real, then there needs to be a path for people in, for instance, that big group of firefighters that have one of their own orphaned out and at the end of the police network. They need to have a live connection in tracking where other firefighters are moving, so when messages come for them, there’s a path selected. It is a routing problem but it’s an online routing problem and it turns out that, even though nobody cares, except for your people and that was our goal. It was to make it lightweight for everyone else. Everyone still has to pass along updates about destination locations as you move. It’s got this whole mobility problem and nowhere to send the mobility information so it can be permanently routed in a central place. Mobile IP doesn’t have this problem, because mobile IP does not allow two mobile devices to talk to each other ad hoc. It’s not mobile. It’s both of them. Each of them has a static IP somewhere and they proxy through that. Only that one device needs to know about their location updates and everyone else can forget it. In a truly purely ad hoc mesh, you can’t do that. There’s a connection overhead, a connection load. Where did you guys land? I know that you build various iterations of this product to try and help emergency services and in those situations, what did you end up with? We ended up with the first high res audio USB audio digitizer that was pluggable for firefighters or emergency response radios. We went down to Katrina as soon as Hurricane Katrina happened in the aftermath. We went down and we hooked up a lot of the radios to each other and created multi-discipline talk groups to help them out. That was one of our successful products, our tactical radio gateway. Instead of all the police and firefighters having analog radios on channel thirteen, talking to each other, you could have them all on channel thirteen, but you’re using digital sampling of their audio when they’re talking, sending it digitally and separating out on the network. This goes to the police group and this goes to the firefighters’ group. We could do that but we also have the power to then cross those groups up. Maybe by regions EMP 25 and these other guys are using a more legacy Motorola StarTAC or something network. They’re unrelated radio networks and we get them to give us one radio each plug it into the gateway and now those two top groups are merged. It was either a distributor like you’re saying or a mock server. We did that and we were able to at least to some degree, effectively negotiate the push-to-talk problems. Push-to-talk networks that have an incredibly low timing sensitivity. You have to be as fast as possible. Because if I push my button and you push your button, we both talk and nobody hears. Everyone else hears both of us, but we don’t hear each other. We don’t know that there’s a problem. The farther apart those networks are, the harder it is to mediate an effective push-to-talk regimen, so we came up with some patents in that area as well. We branched out all over the space of communication in hastily assembled or dynamic environments. We built a chat network so it was your Jabber chat client but it would connect to a localhost. There’s a local service that you were running that pretended to be a chat server and would transact all your messages out to multicast well and track which ones of them arrived and didn’t retransmit correctly. You could on a multicast plane have a bunch of people using this chat service, transacting files at extraordinary speeds. That makes sense. Because everyone’s getting a copy of the packet at once so you didn’t have to send ten copies to ten people. You had one copy to the network and if anyone needs a particular frame retransmitted, somebody else can do it while you’re still spewing. It was efficient and it worked effectively up to 70% packet loss and you get delays of one second in your chat. That’s tolerable in chat. Is this stuff being used widely in emergency services scenarios now? No. Emergency services are utterly owned by Motorola Public Safety. They own the regulators, schools and engineers. They own everything. It sounds like a great business. Three years after we got going and they heard of us, they bought Mesh Networks Inc., which made a much simpler product that wasn’t meant to solve the world’s hunger. Many Motorola devices have mesh network devices in them, which is interesting because the radio at least at one time, beaconed all the time, and beaconed a clear crystal simple sound on the unique frequency. You could easily build a, “Where’s the police officer near me,” direction pointing to yourself. It’s a convenient GPS overlay of, “Where’s the nearest police officer?” We pivoted into the military space and we did that. We took those same radio gateways and mesh network repeaters. There was a company that was making Pocket PCs in a scanner form factor with four bar codes. It was rugged. We took some of these rugged Pocket PCs and mesh network repeaters that look like little bricks and tactical radio gateway, which looks a little pelican case. We took those out for the Coast Guard and helped them to build a hastily assembled boarding team interdiction network. What does that mean? I didn’t get up close to a freight ship before but they’re the size of a skyscraper lying sideways in the water. They’re utterly huge. You think about a 40 or 50 story building covering that in communication seems a hard problem. When you think about a ship, it’s not clear necessarily. It wasn’t to me anyway what the problem would be. It turns out the ship is made out of a Faraday cage. It does not permit radio to pass any part anywhere at all ever. Coming up with a way for people with bulletproof floating vests, rifles, comm systems, flashlights, these Coast Guard are there to see if there’s smuggling. They’ve got their border mission. Coming up with a way that guys can operate a mesh network became a real challenge. On the bricks, we had to come up with a light signal system. We had an ON button but no OFF button so you couldn’t turn them off later to screw up the network. They’re rugged. They break it in and it stops working and the crypto falls off. On the front, there were four lights: red, yellow, green and purple. It was that blue LED that was popular at the time. Blue meant that the device was connected back to the radio gateway. You’re on the network. As long as blue was lit, you’re live and you’re okay. Red, yellow, and green was the link quality of the first hop back to the radio gateway. We would tell people to leave them off in the provisioning center, on the cutter, they would be off, pack them in their jackets, and take them across. They turn on the radio gateway, talk back to the cutter, turn on the first mesh node, and it’s likely to go green and blue. The green and the blue. They’d walk away and it would drop to yellow. We’d have them step back up until it got to green, set it down there and that’s as far as this device can go. They leave breadcrumbs all the way. BreadCrumb is a registered trademark of the Rajant Corporation, which makes a similar communication device so I’m not going to say that word. The Hansel and Gretel story is the way that went. The cool thing was, by making it real-time, live and visible, this utterly impossible concept of link quality that no Boatswain’s mate is going to ever be able to jump to lecture on. That usability in real-time changed the future of our product in an interesting way. It turns out that there are these spots where a guy would be taking one round to see. As an experiment, we did it on an icebreaker, the Polar Star. We went around playing with them and playing with them, Grant Wallace moved a live one that was in a red state. The blues off. You’re not on the network. You can’t see what’s going on. You’re too far away. He’s like, “These don’t cover enough ground. We’re going to have to take 40 of them over.” They weigh a couple of pounds and that’s unrealistic. He moved it in front of an air vent and it turns out that the ventilation system is a perfect effing waveguide. He mounts it outside and it goes green and blue. We ended up filling the Polar Star with six Wi-Fi radios. It’s like a 30-story skyscraper lying on its side on the water and we’ve got six 2005 era Wi-Fi radios. You could go down into the hold and live talk back and forth with Groton, Connecticut, over a SATCOM back on the cutter. They could take a picture, have it go round trip, be in Groton within a minute or so with several seconds anyway. They were slow radios back then and have an analyst tell you whether it was a problem or not. You wouldn’t have to do what they did before, which was go over, go down and below decks in pairs, take photos of everything that could be found and come back up every fifteen minutes to make sure nobody got shot. Anyone being shot is not an acceptable experience. It’s a US problem. That was my feeling. We’ve got to change this. We’ve got to do something different so giving them live round trips back to Connecticut made a huge difference. To be clear, the reason they would have to do it that way before is because the analog radio, a Faraday cage means all the radio communications are going to get blocked if you’re below the deck or whatever. Your cell phones don’t work on the inside of the big ship. Cable TV and satellite phones, none of that shit works when you’re inside of a big ship. You guys develop that type of technology and other things around it and end up selling the company at some point. We worked on rebranding as well. We pivoted out of the Federal space and went into construction first. We thought that construction was a natural thing. It turns out if you can rig a communication system for a skyscraper on its side in the water, you could also do that for one that’s being built. It was an easy pivot to stand that skyscraper back up and go into the construction industry. Did it end up being a successful market for guys? Not as much as we wanted. Construction is hard to sell into because it’s conservative. We got written into some IT plans like this as part of the IT budget for a bidding process. We made it all the way through the selection and integration process. I don’t mean to say that it was unsuccessful but there’s a weird intersection for those guys. There are some things that they buy every time they do a job. There are some things that they buy every time they hire an employee and they expect the employee to track that device like a cell phone. A lot of the companies wanted to put this communication technology into an employee problem rather than a job problem. There were weird technical issues that made that go way slower than we wanted and potentially not have a lot of resales because the company would reuse the same system building after building. They buy enough for how many jobs they do at once, rather than enough for every job. Finally, we went to residential and started building residential Wi-Fi mesh networks, so home routers and extenders. Nokia was moving into the Nokia Wi-Fi space. Nokia makes most of the phone equipment that’s not Huawei or outside China. They’re the leader. They build the head and equipment and lay the fiber or somebody lays the fiber. They even built the CPE. What’s that? Your router, your fiber modem or terminal. They wanted to provide the carriers the capacity to deliver that gigabit fiber service all the way through even an extender to the far edge of the home. They acquired our company, Unium was the rename of CoCo. Unium like E Pluribus Unum. Unium, the element of connection. That’s where we wanted to take the brand eventually. We rebranded it and turned it around. Mike Chen from Linksys that we had met before had gone over to head up the digital home business unit there. He knew about us and came. He found our people and talked through them. Over about a six-month period, we worked our way to a partnership and that’s been going for a few years now. I want to change gears a little bit. When we first met was probably at DEF CON sometime in the late ‘90s. In those days, DEF CON, which is now the world’s largest hacker convention, probably always was, but there were maybe 1,000 people there, maybe 2,000. Maybe up to 1,500. I was still at Alexis Park which is the size of a Motel 6 or something. It’s a small hotel off the strip in Vegas that gets invaded by 1,000 hackers or so every summer, every August maybe. It’s 106 degrees, you’ve got 1,000 pasty white computer nerds in black t-shirts with witty slogans about internet protocols, Linux or something, laptops the size of VCRs, some of them with dual VCR decks in them. Can you explain VCR to me? I don’t think anyone reading this is going to know what you’re saying. We’re definitely losing people. My daughter has no idea what a VCR is. Hacking is like this bottomless pit of puzzles. It’s that bottomless pit of intrigue about the computer.Tweet Laptops that are the size of stoves. They were huge. People who have probably heard stories or anyone interested in hacking have probably heard stories or read about DEF CON in those days. I remember at that point, we were at Alexis Park because we’d been kicked out of every hotel on the strip for being poorly behaved, essentially cutting the power to a wing of the hotel and arson. Breaking the security system and throwing bottles off buildings. There you go. The ATM is going haywire. Who knows why? All payphones being destroyed. It’s all those things. People dying the fountains. Hackers in those days were fringe. It hadn’t gone mainstream. These days, a hacker is anybody who plays video games. There’s nothing to it. That’s not that big of a pride point. I still call myself a hacker because I’m still proud of it but there’s something definitely diluted about it. That’s the progression. Hacker in those days was not something that you advertised. It was essentially considered a criminal. For most people, it was isolated, at least for me. I grew up in the ‘80s, in Alaska, and I lived in a small town where there was nobody around who was interested in computer hacking, except for me. I would get these floppy disks mailed to me with The Anarchist Cookbook, information about hacking phone systems, how to crack video games and Apple II. It’s that kind of stuff. I get the floppy disk mailed to me once every few months. By whom? There were others but the one I remember was called the Bootlegger. It was a magazine for hackers on a floppy disk. You could subscribe to it and get mailed out. That was probably in ‘81 or ‘82. It was bad. By ‘82, I got a modem. I was in Alaska in those days and long-distance calls were expensive. Freaking was the law. The physics of the environment. If you don’t freak, you don’t play it. You couldn’t afford to call. Do you remember the first time you ever turned on a TCP/IP connection and you were like, “Russia, oh my God, it was free?” TCP/IP, I didn’t get it. It was like legal freaking but the internet was like a crime that you could buy. You could go out and buy this thing that could commit crimes for you by sending packets for free around the world. That’s the best feeling in the entire universe. That’s well put. I got on mainframes in the early ‘80s. How did you learn all this so young? It’s because I had nothing else to do. It was cold outside. You were going to die if you left the house and I had a 300 baud modem. The thing was, the university had mainframes, which in those days, were VAX mainframes. VAX, to be clear, has the computational power of a Tamagotchi but it was a multi-user computer, and it could have 100 people connected at once and a lot more in the computer lab at the university. The most boring LAN party possible. It was the most boring LAN party but we were all so excited. The cool thing was because I was a kid with nothing else to do, I managed to finagle my way onto the system even though I’m a 13 or 11-year-old kid, whatever it was, and everybody else was a computer science professor. They didn’t know I was a kid, but they all had jobs and in school and stuff to do and I didn’t have anything. I could spend sixteen hours a day learning about the mainframe, but it was painful. I learned the hard way as I’ve told other people. I learned to code by reverse engineering 6502 assembly language. There was no one to teach me. There was no YouTube video. There was no how-to for dummies guide. You didn’t get the Commodore 64: Programmer’s Reference Guide? I had Apple II and I had the manuals that came with it, but that was not how to code. There’s an assembly reference in that, isn’t there? There isn’t a Commodore. There is a reference that’s generous. It shows you, “Here’s what jumps statements are in hexadecimal.” What does a jump statement do? I don’t know. Let’s delete them all and see what happens. It was bad. I had pin-free Dot Matrix printer so I could print out all the assembly for a program. Was it like fanfold? Yeah. You printed all that, it would be hundreds of pages and you would go through and look like how you would crack video games in those days. Find all the jump statements one bite at a time. I didn’t learn a lot too fast but I had made up for it by time and enthusiasm. That’s what they called talent, time plus enthusiasm. These days, that’s about as good as it gets. Once I got on the mainframe, I could finally talk to people who knew more than me and there was an email system on there where you could email the other people on the mainframe. There are a couple of hundreds of people you could talk to, so I would ask them dumb questions, “How does this work? What does that do?” Because the mainframe was limited, you could only get so much processing time, so much storage and memory, and I always wanted more. I would write these programs, which we call Mail Bombs, and you would write a little program in DCL, which was the scripting language for the mainframe for VAX and you name it like Star Trek Game. You would email it to somebody and get them to run the Star Trek game. It would give them an innocuous error because they didn’t have a game. It would give them errors and I’d say, “I’ll go try and fix it,” but in the background, it would be locking them out of their account if they’ve given me all the resources and access to all their stuff. It’s a computer virus, but we didn’t have that nomenclature yet. We independently invented Mail Bombs. I believe that’s called a Logic Bomb, not a virus because it doesn’t make more viruses If you’re nitpicking, that’s true. I didn’t get to the automatically replicating part of it. The point being, that’s what, in a nutshell, my childhood was like. It was trying to learn as much as I could about computers and having nobody and almost no resources to lean on, and now it’s so much different. Kids can go on YouTube and watch how-to videos with animated cartoons explaining everything. The point being, by the time the internet came along because there’s a window of time where you got past mainframes into BBSs and things like OBS. I’m one tech generation later, like four years later. BBSs were more accessible communities of fringe wackos essentially who wanted to get into nerd stuff. For me, you go over to the Disk Copy Party that happened once a month and steal everybody’s software with each other and copy everybody’s stuff. Somebody came into a place that I’ve had my first job and they had a duffel bag full of pirate floppy disks. No envelopes, nothing protecting them, it was jammed in there. Floppies were oddly resilient. It’s so true. It’s surprising compared to even a CD or a DVD. You get a little scratch in the plastic and it’s all ruined. Out of the backdrops CCGMS, the modem program for Commodore 64. I had no idea. I didn’t have a modem so I’m asking this guy what does he do and all this stuff. We end up becoming short-term friends. He was on the run and making his way toward Vancouver and had some stuff. He was from Portland and they had some stuff going on. He was on the run with a duffel bag of floppies. We stayed in Arlington for a little while and we were friends for a minute. I went to his house once and there were five discs left on the floor and he’s gone. Everything is gone. In that meantime, he taught me how to get Sprint to issue a calling card that didn’t bill. I thought, “This is acceptable. This is my solution.” This guy tells me one thing and for eighteen months, I don’t have to work to dial internationally. I’m not a freaker. I script kiddie the solution from a guy and that solved my problem. I got a 300 baud modem, 1,200 baud modem, and 2,400 baud modem as fast as I could upgrade. I got two and ran a little BBS of my own. It’s like being part of a global underground. Our German teacher was the head of Brain Damage Studio, which was a distribution group in the Pacific Northwest, pulling out of Frankfurt. He would be on the phone on one of his phone lines 24 hours a day pulling down from Frankfurt. I was like, “I’ll help.” He’s like, “Great. Here’s another Fairlight BBS. You go here and get this stuff and bring it in.” That was my introduction to it. I fell into it. I had a sense that that existed out there but I was far removed that I couldn’t get to that thing. There was no place to do floppy copy parties. I remember one time, I met a guy on a mainframe, who also had Apple II. My parents drove me across town to a sketchy mobile home park, a trailer park. They dropped me off to hang out with some weird guy. Mine did too. I did the same thing too. I went to his house because he had dual floppies and I only have one, so it’s a lot better to copy. That was weird stuff. That seems amazing because you probably got far fast doing that. I got to learn about password security and logging. Joe Grand was the one who remembered this guy’s name. There used to be a guy on the East Coast and it’s because I could call anywhere on this scheme at the time. There used to be a guy on the East Coast who would set up voicemail boxes because all the voicemail systems were brand new at the time, they all had stupid hardcoded backdoors. You could call into one, dial a few different codes to see which brand it was, get yourself administrator privilege, and set up a voicemail box on (77245) extension, which no one is ever going to dial in history because it’s a two-digit extension box. (77) is not allowed, so you’d make these absurd voicemail boxes, no one ever knows they’re happening. This guy would call in and he’s like, “Here we go. I’ve got numbers for six bulletin boards,” and read them fast. It was like the Micro Machine’s commercial guy. He read them so fast. He’s like, “Here are thirteen Mastercards all fresh in the last 24 hours. American Express, Visa.” The Hacker ethos has always been anti-aesthetic. It’s not as good to look good as it is not to be cool.Tweet He’s reading the stuff up in the voicemail boxes. He’s not even putting it on a digital packetized thing and leaving a modem tone or something. He reads it off. The capacity to do stuff was far away from the practice of how to do it. If a guy is reading you into a phone and you’re calling, in the end, the next voicemail box would be a phone number and a voicemail by extension. That one would never get used again and get deleted a couple of days later. Once you get on the train, you’ve got to stay on the train. It’s like a podcast that was hard to get. When did you first end up going to DEF CON? Shortly after all of these shenanigans, my age of majority was starting to approach and I was working a lot. I bought my first car when I was fourteen. I wanted to get going in life. With Operation Sun Devil and some of the other police anti-hacker moves in the late ‘80s and at the transition to the ‘90s, with that stuff going on, I decided to put away all of those childish things and go out in the world and do my thing. I got my first programming job before my eighteenth birthday and went fully professional. I helped the guy who built the Sonic Arris Assembly Line and all these little projects and cool little things I fell into working with Datalight, Roy Sherrill in particular. They lifted my career up. I went in for a programming interview and they said, “The Program is Tic Tac Toe in C.” I was like, “Cool. Do you have a book on C? I’ve never seen that language before.” I sat there and for eight hours, I learned C and got a partly working Tic Tac Toe and they were like, “If that’s your first day in C, you are in.” That was mostly because I’d had Mr. McKay and Ainsworth in the Marysville high school system. They put a lot of effort into exposing kids early and effectively to programming. I learned logo when I was eleven. I would assume it would be now the normal programming course. I’m meeting more kids that haven’t taken a programming class and I’m a little surprised. It’s finally been legitimized. When I was a kid, I remember everybody’s parents wanted them to grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer because those were legitimate career choices. Computer programmer sounded psychedelic. Now, it’s like, “You should be a computer programmer or doctor, definitely not a lawyer.” That’s the progression. It’s the revenge of the nerds. We ended up succeeding at making careers, businesses and a lot of money. The explicit goals of the Ghetto Hackers were to improve our skills, our revenue and our careers. Hacking was a thing when you’re a kid and you ended up getting jobs. I remember when I got out of high school, I got a zillion computer consulting jobs. Whenever somebody wanted to do something with a computer, somebody goes, “Call this guy because he knows computers.” I never knew what I was doing. It’s like the C thing, I’m like, “I’ll figure it out.” I figured it out because I wanted to prove that I could do it or I wouldn’t get another job. That’s was my whole early career, but I might still be doing that. I am. I don’t know if that’s a personality thing or the window in time. I didn’t go to college because I was busy. I could get these jobs to play with cool, new computers. Why would I pay somebody else to play with their old computer? That’s how it went and that worked out for me. I lived for two years because a friend said, “You have to go to college and I’ll drive you.” I was like, “Did someone gave you a ride to college?” In two years, I almost finished it. I quit because it was too boring. For similar reasons, I did get signed up for college as a way to get the student loan so I could buy a car. I skipped all my classes to go snowboarding and that wasn’t considered copacetic. I was going to drop out but I wanted another student loan. I signed up again and I decided to only take classes that sounded fun or interesting. I was looking through the course catalog and I found the dance classes. I had never taken any dance classes but I signed up for dance classes. I took tap dance, ballet dance, jazz dance, African-Haitian dance and every kind of dance class they had. It was fun. It paid off. I’m still there. That was a good life decision. It worked out great and then I dropped out. You got the good stuff. First is dessert then screw the meal, let’s go dancing. You got legit. Somewhere along the way, professionally, you ended up falling in with hackers again or somehow ended up with them. I was working on a newsreader to convert Usenet to FidoNet. I mostly spent my time on FidoNet at the time and using it for binaries, for downloads of a certain kind. I was working on a QuickReader format translator to package back and forth and connect up the old FidoNet to the Usenet. It turns out it didn’t matter. One of the things that choked my reader was this message posted to Usenet and it was an invitation to DEF CON 4 and it was two months after DEF CON 4. I opened it and I looked at it and it was like, “Underground Hacker Convention.” I was like, “You are sending this out in public.” I got this weird ASMR thing. My hair stood up on my skin. I got all weird feeling, I was like, “Hackers are outside now. You can meet people in real life.” I was always taught like, “Don’t use it from home. Don’t admit it. Pretend to be an amateur spy.” When I saw that, it stuck in my head. For month after month, I kept reopening this file and looking at it. I can’t even explain what it was like. It was something magical. I ended going to the website. I found the DEF CON 5 invitation. I made my plans. I went to the opening discussion and Mudge is on stage and I’m fanboying, squealing. Mudge points at me and he says, “That guy right there is one of the best hackers you’ll ever know.” I’m like, “Something is wrong.” The Hobbit is right next to me. Hobbit stands up and he’s like, “Thank you. I wrote Netcat.” I lost my mind. I went from fanboy to fangirl or fan kid. I was sitting in this room and there were 500 or 1,000 hackers together. You could see it in everyone’s eyes, every person there had something to tell you about. I started little conversations here and there. Do you know when they say, “I found my people?” Yep. I walked into the room and I found my people. I was adopted as a kid. I’ve always felt a little on the fringe. How old were you when you were adopted? Two months. Did it felt different? It felt different. My family all look alike and I look different. I go in there and I’m like, “Everyone here is pasty white. I’m the man or at least a boy.” It was like a clone army. It felt like being a Stormtrooper and we’re on the Death Star. I’m like, “I’m home.” These days, it’s something that the hacker community gets much credit for being a place to feel included. For a certain class of person, that was the case. It was a life-changing moment when I sat there and met these people. The Anarchist Cookbook Being a computer nerd in the ‘80s, for those who weren’t around for that, wasn’t cool. It was maybe like what drug problems are. You’re alone at home, in the basement. No one is looking. No one will talk about it. No one wants to hear about it. If you’re into drugs and you at least have a leather jacket, it might be cool. If you’re a computer nerd in the ‘80s, there’s nothing about being cool. It can be isolating. You’re the first one to get kicked off the raft. It’s like, “The raft doesn’t have room for you.” “I’m skinny.” “There’s no room for you.” “Code a raft for yourself.” That’s a great story. It’s probably equivalent to the story for every other single individual in that room at the time. It was a community made of nothing. That Saturday night, there wasn’t a huge amount of well-known or well-publicized parties. It wasn’t like now where you go around and you get sixteen invites to go to a party on a Saturday night at DEF CON. DEF CON now is 25,000 people. It’s massive. Corporations throw parties at DEF CON now. Microsoft and Facebook do. All the little security firms do it. For me, when I was there, I didn’t know what to do on a Saturday night but I wanted to do something with the hackers. To be honest, I’ve told that story several times that way. My wife at the time went to the liquor store and got a couple of bottles, brought them back to the hotel room, and I stood at the hotel room door like a lady of the night. I’m standing there and pulling my jeans up a little shorter and seeing if I could attract hackers to come in and get free drinks. I’m standing in the doorway and pulling people into the room. Everybody was happy to come in and say hi and meet each other and stuff. The social tools they had available to them lasted about 2 or 5 minutes. They’re standing on the wall waiting for somebody to have a party. It was about to be a magical thing. I’m looking at all these people and I’m thinking, “You all love each other. You all have all this stuff in common. You love the same stuff. Why aren’t you either making out if you’re inclined or talking and making out with your brains? Why aren’t you doing stuff together? I’ve put you in the room. Why aren’t you doing the thing?” It was this breakthrough moment, I said, “I need $10,000. Let’s steal it from Western Union. Let’s get Western Union to give us fraud money.” They were like, “We can’t do that.” I was like, “Let’s decide whether we can do that once we make our plan.” All of a sudden, it turns into Ocean’s Twelve up in there. All of a sudden, everybody is a criminal. They’re like, “Let’s analyze this. Is there a backdoor? Do we have pictures of the place? Where’s the wire? What protocol do they use? Is there encryption? What about the terminals? Can we dig?” Immediately, everyone jumped in and started throwing their passion at it. Of course, we were never going to do it and no one ever did. There’s no conspiracy to be active further. It’s a fun conversation. People in the hallway who were walking by and looking like they were ready for bed would hear the noise and turn and come back and join. The party went from 8 or 10 people by about midnight to 30 people crammed into a single, small hotel room. All was jamming and talking and yelling, “That doesn’t work.” All this crazy energy and I looked at it and I thought, “Something about what happened is the most important thing in my life and I need to figure it out. I need to be able to reproduce this. I need to bottle this crap.” I came back the next year and I decided to brand the party as the challenge. I hadn’t worked out to put the puzzle on the invitations yet. It was an invitation to a party. I took them around and I set them in innocuous places. They were on a clear laminate with a fragile ink. If you rubbed your thumb over it, you’ll destroy the entire invitation. I set out 200 of them on tables and places where they were hard to see. I’m not sure which year this was. It was the second year I did the party. This is about ‘95. No, more like ‘98. I went back. Once the party got going, I said, “Let’s try this other challenge. Let’s try this other thing.” Wallflowers turned into extroverts. As soon as the state of their brain could lock on to something that was a challenge, something they couldn’t get their whole mind around quickly. For the kinds of friends we have, for the hacker mind, putting something in their brain that they’re okay with and that they want to think about that’s fun, that is complex enough that it gets their creativity chewing, it occupies their critical voice. This is my hypothesis from watching this party happen. As soon as they get this thing in their brain to work on, all of the self-criticism and internal doubt finds no exit. They can’t start talking in their brain because this problem is talking to them. They lose that sense of self-consciousness that can be toxic. It’s interesting because if you think about what’s attractive to computer hackers, hacking is like this bottomless pit of puzzles. It’s that bottomless pit of intrigue where everything about the computer, it’s like, “That’s funny. It wasn’t supposed to do that. What happened?” You dig. That’s what debugging code is like. It’s puzzles. Security problems, in particular, like puzzles, it’s like, “You’re not supposed to be able to do that but I got it to do something it’s not supposed to do.” That’s mentally stimulating and interesting and a lot of it’s done in isolation. It’s done alone. That conversation isn’t happening with another person in the room. What’s interesting about those challenge parties is it bridged the gap to doing the thing that they like to do but doing it with other people. Something that is still important to me is learning more about that, doing it better and finding ways to engage more in different people. Years ago, there was a battle of the sexes. Some horrifying men in the computer security community are taking some angst out on the women in the industry. If you had to stereotype DEF CON attendees over the years, there’s a lot of poorly socialized males. Like anything else, you get better at it with practice. If you grew up by yourself in your bedroom with a computer, you’re missing out on some of the work it takes to get good at cooperating with other people and treating them well and those things. It doesn’t surprise me. It’s a community that welcomes people. There’s no screening process. You just show up. All the behaviors that people would have that would signal to any normal person that’s like, “Stay away from that person. They’re creepy.” We don’t have a defense mechanism for those. You could be creepy and show up and we’re like, “You’re creepy.” I don’t know if you’re in a sorority or something. You wouldn’t get within 100 miles of a sorority before some football players were hired to get rid of you. There are those things. As inclusive as the community is for those reasons, it accepts people who are not specifically well balanced in other ways. I’m not saying everyone is that way. I would further that though. I would say that some of the people, myself included, who are part of the community have done a poor job of accepting and criticizing the artwork. It seems a little tangential but a lot of the artwork in our community in the early years, in the ‘90s at least, came from metal bands and industrial music or anime. In the anime, especially, there’s maybe an overly stereotypical presentation of females and that was the aesthetic. That was what was happening. Everybody wore those t-shirts. That’s what it looked like to be around us at the time. Capture the Flag has done more to escalate the defenders than anything else.Tweet Not enough people had absorbed that the artwork that they choose, the decorations that they choose are messages that reinforce or subvert stereotypes. By having a social norm of reinforcing certain stereotypes, especially the love of Japan, whatever that was going around in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Snow Crash and all those cultural iconic moments and the movie Akira. Letting that become the visual language we use to represent ourselves has the consequence of giving us a reduced conversation around, for instance, gender issues. One of the things that have been tickling me in the back of the brain is how could we bring a discussion around personal aesthetic into the hacker community in a way that gives people a much more diverse self-presentation? A much more diverse self-presentation, one that they can talk to and one that other people can criticize effectively to say, “That thing that you’re wearing is like a pro-holocausts t-shirt. I don’t like that. There’s something wrong with that,” and opening that conversation. Now, people at DEF CON can wear some offensive stuff. People don’t think that’s part of the conversation. They don’t think that’s part of their environment. They don’t think that’s part of their responsibility. You think that other person is doing something wrong, maybe, or they don’t. The people who don’t know that they’re doing something wrong are having their stereotypes reinforced. There’s a ton of stuff in there to pick apart. You were talking about that on the other episode. I’m always a little cautious to throw people under the bus from history or to cast judgment on the past. People are doing the best they could with the situation. We know more now. We can go piece together how we got here. We can see the things that were happening in this community that led to the problems that happened and you certainly want to learn from that. It’s interesting because you’ve identified a set of issues that have become a big deal. One of the things I loved about my social group, my friends being hackers, is the comparative irreverence that they have. These are people who don’t take the status quo for granted. They’re willing to argue about anything. They want to find a way to reason their way to their beliefs. They have no compunction about telling you when you’re full of crap. I remember times when you did that for me. That’s why we’re friends. I value that. I need that. I want to be able to take an idea, shoot a bunch of holes in it and see if there’s something left standing at the end of the day. That has influenced my process as an inventor. That’s what we do. I don’t find that in other communities the same way. People are worried about social hierarchy. They’re worried about their status. They’re worried about offending others. They’re worried about all these things and it keeps them from having these honest conversations. Not to defend it but one of the things I saw in the hacker community in those days, the late ‘90s, is that it was accepting of whatever you brought. You could show up. You could wear a t-shirt with something offensive on it and everybody would be like, “Cool. Whatever.” It was accepting of marginally criminal behavior. It was accepting lots of anti-social behavior. It was accepting people who were gay. I saw that there are more than in other places I had been. You could be gay and that was no problem. Trans people, for sure, were more accepted there in general than in other places. This might be less true now. At DEF CON, maybe there’s a lot of that. It was accepting a wide variety. Drugs are more accepted, psychedelics and things like that, that wouldn’t be in other communities. I’m not somebody who had any of those things that I needed acceptance of. I learned to be accepting of those things or at least slow to judge. I appreciate that. I remember that having a positive influence on me. I’m not trying to defend it. I certainly know, especially for women, this was a hostile environment in a lot of cases. This is not an accepting environment that was comfortable for women. I have a lot of female friends who were hackers that would come and they had put up with a lot to be there. They were brave. Some of them had to compromise themselves in ways to be there. In my early experience with women, they were tough as nails and sharp. Even the term in and of itself is derogatory in a sense. It’s like saying, “They have no other value other than to look pretty and be there with some guy.” It isn’t cool but that’s the context. That’s what it seemed like at the time anyway. I only mean to say that looking forward. One of the things that would be a healthy endeavor would be to engage in some aesthetic discussion, which is new. The Hacker ethos has always been anti-aesthetic. It’s not as good to look good as it is not to be cool. That was how we tried to make the Capture the Flag game. It’s cool but we didn’t necessarily try to make it look good. We tried to give it a lot of experience, a lot of stuff. It was still gritty. That’s the origin of the challenge party. How did you end up playing Capture the Flag? Maybe describe that. Originally, Capture the Flag was a game run by Miles Connolly as far as I know, from the beginning. Miles would organize to have some people bring in servers and then everybody else could come in and they could play Capture the Flag. They could try to capture those servers by hacking them. Each server had to have a file on it and that was the flag. You’d hack into it and get the file. You’d write the file. You’d put your name in the file called flag.txt. The first year I went, I didn’t know about it or played it or anything. It was just talk. The second year, I went and saw that there was this Capture the Flag game. There were big banquet tables and different people at different tables had gone up and purchased some static IP addresses to participate in the network. There was a table that had a couple of spaces open in it and I sat down at that table and I opened up my laptop and introduced myself. I made the fateful decision to buy a round of drinks. After it, we’re blood brothers forever. I bought a round of drinks. We got our drinks. We drank them. We set all the empty cups in the middle of the table. The next guy bought the round and it went around the table. This went on for two days. We barely left the table that year. We sat there and we were all working separately. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know each other. It turned out that two other people at the table lived here in Seattle. When I got on the plane back, one of them was on the airplane with me and I was like, “You’re my blood brother. We bought drinks for each other. We’re bound together forever. Where do you live?” He lived four blocks from me and that was Michael Eddington from Deja vu Security. It’s is probably one of the few companies populated with actual hackers on this planet. The whole team, they are brilliant people and many of whom I’ve worked with before. He set up a mail server and that was the thing and I started inviting everybody on the mailing list, which was mostly those three of us but then we started going to 2,600 every month in Seattle. That was already going and you guys showed up. We showed up and we started bringing whatever we had hacked last, whatever was on Packet Storm. Bring in an exploit, go in and talk about it, see who could carry on a reasonable conversation, and invite them over to the house. We grabbed the entire hacking community in Seattle and made them into Ghetto Hackers, one after the next and up to the next. I don’t remember how we got in touch with MD5. Maybe he was the third guy. I got them all together. It started on Tuesday nights at my house, building up our idea of how to be ready for a hacking contest was. The truth of it is Michael Eddington did all the work. He was like, “I’ve downloaded Packet Storm and made it into a searchable database and you can have access to it.” We were all like, “Sweet.” On the back of his research and his collecting Packet Storm, his mirror, we won the contest the second year playing. You guys went and tried to do Capture the Flag as a team. We had this idea that it would be a cool thing to do. We went and we won. We came home. We’re super jacked and super excited. We went and rented a workspace and started to try and make a real thing out of it. At that time, this was probably the only hacking contest on Earth. I’ve never been in touch with CCC so I don’t know what their history timeline is. I know that’s even bigger and older. We went back the third year to win the second time and it was a little harder because people were getting a little more serious. The excitement was starting to ramp up about the contest. We had to resort to fairly shady means to win that. We won that year again. The third year, we went and we coerced the team that was going to win into joining the Ghetto Hackers and merging our points. We won the third year in a row. It was shady. That irritated one of the other teams, rightfully so. That was some out of the box thinking. This was a contest all about out of the box thinking. I don’t know which year it was, maybe before you went, there was a server room that had to be highly guarded because those are the machines you’re trying to hack into. They didn’t want to let anybody mess with them. I remember one year somebody brought a VAX mainframe to put in there. People bring all different kinds of computers. It had been gutted and there was a guy inside. In the middle of the night, he climbed out of the mainframe and locally routed all the machines because they were all there. It was easy and that’s how they won. There’s lots of shady stuff. It’s a hacking contest. Our view was if you have a hacking contest, do whatever it takes to win. That was the zenith of the idea that we would do anything to win. Hearing the other team’s frustration triggered a guilt reaction. I was like, “This is probably crossing the line into unfun.” We got up. We got our awards at the end of the conference and our Black Badges. I asked Jeff if I could use his mic and talk for a minute and I announced that we were taking over Capture the Flag. I remembered this. Did Jeff not know this? Jeff didn’t know. Miles didn’t know. Nobody knew. I was in the audience. I thought this is amazing. I didn’t realize that you hadn’t even got DT on board. Nobody was on board. Nobody agreed. Nobody ever approved. To this to this day, we never got approval to do it. Did you make this up on the fly? I made it up on the fly at that moment. What happened? We went home and we got serious. We cranked and we cranked. I’m going to say this in different two different ways. Michael Eddington built the core router that was the actual network. He’s such a talented hacker. MD5 built the client operating system. A few people put in all this amazing work. I wrote the scoreboard software. My main contribution was arguing over threat models the whole time for the whole year. How are people going to cheat? In the second year, we double NAT everyone so that you couldn’t tell either what IP address you were coming from or to through the central router so that it would look like everything was homogeneous. The central router also reached out to your machine and tested whether it was working. You had to get defensive points and offensive points. At this point, the Ghetto Hackers are running the contest. You guys changed the architecture of the competition. Instead of being either an attacker or a defender, we made everyone be both. Everybody has to be red team and blue team. We got the idea of there being service uptime points. We got the idea of there being transient points that were capturable, they’re like tokens that you had to capture in flight. You’re running services and you got to keep them going. The funniest one was one of the teams realized that when the packets went to hops from the enemy team to the central router to theirs, the TTL was 254. When it came from the scoreboard, the TTL is 255. They blacklisted all TTL 254 traffic. They got a perfect service uptime for the entire contest. Nobody could even see them or scan them. No one could figure out how they did it. That was one of those like, “We screwed up TTL.” I was doing this thing called Capture Capture the Flag. Me and the Shmoo Group had made this logging system that would try to log every packet from the entire competition. We thought, “This will be interesting, historical artifacts, to see the TCP dump from the entire Capture the Flag competition.” Now that it’s been decades, it probably would be interesting to go with those dumps. We still have them of like, “What kind of hacking were people doing because it should have been state of the art hacking on the network for that timeframe?” You have to remember that at that time, the way that we won the first year, the second year, and the third year was deploying known exploits. A hacker, at that time, might be building their own exploits. It was a good network search person with some script kiddie capabilities. That was the thing that we also added to the contest. We did use live services that were state of the art at the time. You could use state of the art exploits in attacks. We also started building custom services so that these were new pieces of software so that people would have to adapt and improvise. Our view was that it was a little too much of tactical exploit deployment in the original contest and a little too little of creative problems. We tried to get creative problem solving, real-time scoring, a lot of these pieces that are pretty much standard in every hacker conference in the world. In those days, the game went from Capture the Flag, which is all the thought that goes into it is in a tweet to a sophisticated game. You guys did a lot to turn it into a spectator sport. We wanted to bring the audience in and give them a reason. Before that, all you could see was a bunch of drunk guys on laptops. With what you guys did, it turned into something people could see in real-time play out, at least the leaderboards and things. You guys ran it for three years. If you take the frustration as a thing to stop at, as a negative signal, then you’re going to fail.Tweet We tried one with one and we ran three and then we handed it over to Kenshoto. That was a different gang of hackers who decided to run with it for a few years. They took it in a direction much more seriously, new exploit authorship, simpler, smaller systems so you could do a better job as a player, simpler scoring. One of my concerns and a well-founded one is that it tends to be the case that one of the teams is going to run away with the contest. If somebody figures out either how to never get hacked like a TTL 254 team or how to hack everyone at every time tick and get all the tokens at such a pace. You’re attacking seven other teams. Hypothetically, you can get a whole weekend’s worth of scoring in about five hours. My argument and one that has been unsuccessful but I would still stand up for is that we wanted to have the contest. We wanted it to remain relevant over the course of a three-day contest. The leaderboards that we came up with were a little hard to read and a little confusing. They were like deltas in a recent time. That didn’t give people a sense of who was winning or losing but it gave them a sense of who was pulling ahead and so forth. I wanted it to be a little more like NASCAR in the individual race sense as opposed to Formula One where the champion is well-known for weeks at a time. There’s a hacking contest every weekend somewhere all over the world going on. Do you think it has relevance in computer security? Yeah. Capture the Flag has done more to escalate the defenders than anything else. Maybe that’s a bold statement but I feel that when we started, the attacks were static because the defense was static. As the defense became more naked and simple, like with the Kenshoto version of the game where they shrunk it all down and made it a much less code, much less stuff to worry about, it’s was streamlined. The attacks, you could reasonably, in a day or so, build a custom exploit and send something in. You build zero days live. At first, it escalated a lot of hackers from script kiddies to exploit authors. At the same time, we saw the rise of a net exploit. We see all of these advances in counter defensive technologies and all these crazy exploit techniques. When I was winning Capture the Flag with the Ghetto Hackers, when we were there, no person I had met had that flexibility and capacity. Now, every DEF CON speaker has it. It burst the exploit author bubble and blew them up fast but that created intense pressure on all the other teams that maybe they did or they didn’t have a great exploit author. It created much more pressure on the defenders. That’s why we see Naval Warfare College. Chris Eagle’s team, the Naval Postgraduate School. We see these teams from military, from other countries. There’s a Chinese hacker team that comes to DEF CON. We see these guys coming and they bring new talent and they bring great exploitation capability but it’s not that much different than it has been in the past. However, the defensive capabilities, the power of these guys, these guys set up live DevOps shop at the table and they start deploying router configs. If something goes wrong, they got an alarm setup. These guys, in an hour, are setting up what used to take ten years of general dynamics. I thought it was there to measure and to separate hackers from moderate coders. I thought it was there to rank and organize people. That was my original concept of what it was doing as a mechanic, but it wasn’t. If done well, it gave the attackers a field to practice in. Once they seeded the field, it gave defenders a place to grow up. I don’t know if you remember Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, the TwC initiative. Yeah. That was sensible, hardcore, smart people building security on chips and getting ready for a world of digital media. They were doing a great thing. They had nothing in that system that compares to what a DEF CON Capture the Flag team has now. The idea that one of the most vaunted security programs in the world, ten years later, is replaceable by sixteen-year-olds. In my mind, that’s the difference between trying to be smart and architect for a hypothetical future versus having your feet on the ground and testing and steering your way into what works. They say, “Steel sharpens steel.” It’s a much different game. Big companies make that mistake all the time. It’s why they suck at innovation. They’re trying to guess what the market is going to want years in advance. You can’t guess. Nobody can guess. That’s what’s amazing about not only hacking but the software in general. It gives us a way to test everything and that’s working well. You have to have it in-hand all day, every day and have an obsession to perfect it. You have to have both those pieces. That’s the progression of Capture the Flag and, to some extent, DEF CON. I get a lot of questions from people about, “How do I become a hacker?” I probably have 7,000 variants of that question in my email from people who’ve asked me over the years and I don’t have time to reply to them. One of the things I’m hoping we can do with the podcast is give folks a sense of at least what our experience has been and what our observations have been and maybe help people feel like they know what track to get on. A lot of that intrigue comes from kids who are interested in computers. It comes from kids or people in different stages of their life, maybe who are interested in computer security for different reasons. A lot of it is folks who are attracted to hacking with some of the same sentiments that we had where they’re slightly marginalized or loners or had more of a positive experience with their computer than they did with Boy Scouts. I don’t know what to tell people exactly. It would be good for us to try and figure out if there’s advice or where to start. A lot of times, the questions show that they don’t know where to start. It’s like, “What programming language should I start with? Where can I learn to hack?” Will you teach me?” “No, I won’t teach you. That’s not what you would want anyway.” I understand the question that you’re asking. I found that there are a couple of pieces that are important. I’ve tried to answer this a lot over the years. I’ve searched for the right answer. There’s one way that I started and this is a sarcastic joke but it comes in the form of a Japanese Koan, a Zen Koan. The pupil says to the master, “How do I become a hacker?” The master says, “You don’t.” The pupil says to the master, “Fuck you.” In a way, the way that you become a hacker is by refusing to let someone stop you. There’s a clinging to the decision to do it that is utterly required. The thing about anything that is purely noetic, purely idea space concept or an idea space mechanic is that you will feel frustrated until you don’t. If you take frustration as a thing to stop at, as a negative signal, then you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail once and never again. As I’ve seen many times, people who say they want to become hackers, get to the moment when they are angry, “It’s not working. It doesn’t work the way that it said it would. Screw this. This is too hard. I can’t do this.” Some word goes through their head and then they take the frustration as a reason to back away, reconsider themselves, and distance themselves from the identification with the hacker. It’s almost like oil and water. You have to be able to feel frustrated to know what frustration feels like to be able to call it frustration. Stand up and walk in a circle and sit back down and do it again. You have to be able to swim in frustration. Hackers are fish and frustration is water. It’s the only thing you get. I certainly never was able to articulate it that way but when you described that, it is entirely my childhood and my early career. Looking back, there’s nothing about my experience with computers. It was different than that. I was constantly frustrated and I’ll stare at something, “Why isn’t it working? It doesn’t make any sense.” There was no easy way out. That accurately describes my experience. Having it described is like a fundamental architecture for success in that mindset. You’re right. These days, there’s a popular notion of grit. Grit is like the people who are like, “Stick it out. If you give up early, you’re robbing yourself of that.” It’s an interesting point. How do you foster that? First, you have to identify as a person who’s not going to let things stop you. This is a case on the computer where there’s no injustice. In the machine itself, there is no injustice. There is never an unfair game. There is never an unfair set of rules. There’s never a software that doesn’t want to work for you because you don’t look, talk, sound, or smell right. You are the only thing that can screw up between you and your computer. That means that everything between you and your computer is perfectible because you can change, grow, and learn and the computer can’t. It can’t participate in this. It can’t let you down and it can’t lift you up. It is just there. It is going to work and do the same thing every time. You have to first decide that you’re not going to let other people stop you from doing it and then you have to decide you’re not going to let yourself stop you from doing it. Except that the computer is never smart enough to be a jerk and then decide that. When the frustration comes, that frustration is the heat that is melting your bad ideas and turning them into good ideas and they suck and it hurts to melt your brain and put it back together into pieces. It’s going to be painful. The thing to do is to build it up from the bottom. I know this is uncool in the way that people are taught now, but I highly recommend there’s a lot of programming games where you run little robots around and you set tiles down or something on the floor. The robot moves through the room and tries to do automated assembly instructions if you’re making a factory or something. These programming games contain all of the critical concepts in computing. They have recursion, iteration, enumeration and all of the things that you need to be able to do to assemble a concept in your brain that’s going to turn into a useful program. I recommend people start with games that don’t have an explicit programming language that are teaching you sequential reasoning. Commodore 64: Programmer’s Reference Guide If you don’t have access to one of those, then what you can do and I did because I didn’t have access at the time. Carl Cluster was a great geometry teacher. He told me, “If you write down everything you know, then you can do anything that you’ve ever been shown or ever been taught. You can do it because you won’t forget it. The only thing that can go wrong is forgetting how to do stuff once you’ve been taught. If you write it down, and you write it down in carefully detailed instructions how to do a proof or how to do algebra. If you write down the actual ideas in a row, then your brain will remember the pieces, but it will assemble the pieces into a larger concept.” I highly recommend for a person who wants to be a programmer that they begin to take excruciatingly detailed notes in math class. That has a strong mapping to the process of computational reasoning and sequential logic. Doing things like this that get your brain around those core ideas is so much more important than learning a programming language. First of all, the way I think about it is framed by this notion of computational thinking, which is what they call it in my daughter’s school. It’s not necessarily about learning to be a programmer, but it’s learning the way you and I did to understand the way that a computer does so that you can communicate with the computer. You have to communicate with it in a logical progression and that turns out to be a useful skill well beyond computers, programming and everything. They have a class for computational thinking every year from 6th grade to 12th grade, which I’m super excited about. She doesn’t know that it’s cool. She’s like, “I don’t know why I got to this computational thinking class.” The school is trying to figure out the best way to do that and you have some ideas there that will be helpful. I learned how chips work from Rocky’s Boots, which was a game on Apple II in probably ‘81 or ‘82 where you are going around configuring logic gates. You have AND gates and OR gates. To win the game, you have to put them in order. I didn’t know I was learning. I thought I was playing a game. It turns out, now I know how computer chips work from that thing. There might be other games like that. I know a popular one that a buddy of mine made. Dan Shapiro made this game called Robot Turtles, which is a board game that you can play with a five-year-old. I have a Kickstarter on that. He launched on Kickstarter and it’s wildly successful. Get Robot Turtles because you can play it with 5 or 6-year-old kids and they learn how to think logically about making a plan and embodying it in a set of logical steps. I don’t know what’s after that. I know with my daughter, she played Swift Playgrounds, which is a game on iPad that Apple made for kids. Half of the screen looks like a video game. You have a character on a map that you’re giving directions to, but you tell it what to do by writing Swift, which is a programming language Apple has now. It’s a scripting language. Each level is introducing a new programming concept. You learn what a four loop is at different levels. She was probably 8 or 9 or 10 when I started it out with her. I wouldn’t say she loved it, but she loved doing it as an activity with me. It tries to explain things so you don’t need somebody to do that. Having me go through it with her helped a bunch. She doesn’t even know it, but she does have some of those ideas in her head already because we did that stuff when she was a kid. I was going to say one extra thing about the ideas I have about how to become a hacker. One of them is finding someone on the internet, in a college, in your church or wherever you go that’s trustworthy. Kids, talk to your parents first. Not that we did, but yeah. We didn’t but they dropped us off across town at a trailer park. Find someone trustworthy who is a professional programmer while you’re learning. Go to them not as soon as you feel frustrated. You have to learn to accept and to perform with frustration. When your frustration turns to anger or fear or sadness or something when the frustration wells up and creates secondary emotions, then pull back, take a shower, go for a run, go outside, or do something different. Talk to the person when you can. It doesn’t have to be live, “Help me. I’m doing this right now.” Set aside time and send them an email, so they answer you the next day or something and be clear, “Here’s what I’m trying to figure out. Here’s the program as it sits now. Here’s the output. I’m supposed to make it look like this. What am I doing wrong? What’s the problem here?” There’s something about knowing that there’s someone who’s going to help you when you get stuck. That makes it a lot easier in my experience for younger people to accept frustration. Also, get yourself somebody somewhere. You’ve got to find some. That’s Stack Overflow if nothing else. Have a place you can go and ask the question. Don’t be quick about writing your question. Take a minute to introduce yourself and introduce what you’re doing. “I’m a sixth-grade student. I’m just learning Logo. My turtle doesn’t go left when I do this left instruction.” The person is like, “That’s because you spelled left wrong.” It may be simple stuff. Give people a sense of the story of what you’re going through and that will make one, you, accept your frustration better. Two, they want to help more. Three, it will focus their help and help generate some social relationships. That’s another one where you’ve articulated well, but that is what happened with me. Lots of times, it didn’t have that person, but I did find that person. That’s what those folks on the mainframe work. That’s what folks in Usenet groups work. I miss email lists. In the ‘90s, you had an email list for every programming language, every topic and everything. There were a bunch of nerds who were there and you could ask them questions when you got stuck. You didn’t want to waste their time by asking dumb questions, so you would try to work through it until you were too frustrated and then do it. That is equivalent. You and I probably have no experience with this, but I keep thinking the way you’re describing things sounds analogous to what people experience with in sports. The way you describe the computer as being completely objective and just. Sports are like that. You’re running on track against a clock. Everything about it is fair. It’s up to you to run as fast as you can. It’s not judging you because you showed up with a screwy haircut or wearing the wrong sneakers or something. That’s your problem. Maybe that’s another area where people get to shape themselves because they’re working against objective metrics, and then they get that frustration. They’re like, “If I could do it a little faster,” and that kind of thing. They have that coach. Once it gets too extreme, they can fall back on the coach and get that insight and that helping hand. Even if they’re saying, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” They express the resignation they feel and the coach can be like, “That’s okay. You have to feel that way. You will make it. I promise. I’m going to help you a little more. We’ll push a little differently. Let’s fix this and make it better.” Sometimes, you need to know from the outside that, one, there’s a tribe for you, and two, that the tribe loves you and is going to stick with you. Your frustration does not make you a bad part of the tribe. It’s interesting because it puts a fine point on folks with other interests who might not ever get that kind of experience. They might not get that experience of working through frustration of being able to develop themselves in an objective situation where they’re not being judged and isn’t just. That might be true if you were into performing arts or something like that or something more social if you’re interested in politics. I think of different things, but we were lucky to have that. I’m starting a new company, so I have a lot of entrepreneurial things to do. I had to find a lawyer and get a lawyer. I don’t know how to tell which lawyer is better than any other lawyer, so I’m asking other entrepreneurs like, “Who have you used? Who was good and why?” I talk to lawyers and see if I like them and figure this out. I don’t know what I’m doing but I’ve got to get through that. I’m frustrated with it because I don’t even want a lawyer, but I got one. You’ve got to go through that frustrating process, but I’m doing the same kinds of things that I did when I was trying to debug a program. I’m still using that computational thinking. I’m making a list of features that I need. I’m figuring out the logical progressions like, “I can’t interview lawyers until I get introductions and I can’t get an introduction, so I’ve got to figure out who’s had them before and people I know that I can email or talk to.” All of that is a progression that I take for granted because I worked that way. Learning and developing that skill is the fundamental thing that kids should probably be doing or trying to do in any context and you could do it in any context. You’ve done a great job identifying the things to look for. There’s another one though, which I often associate with hackers. It’s a different mindset. What you’ve described so far could be applied to becoming a programmer, which is different than becoming a hacker. There’s a certain amount of time you have to spend becoming a programmer. Hacking, to pick an exact definition for me, is causing systems to produce unintended effects. To do that, you have to be able to understand the systems and to understand the systems, you have to be a programmer. I consider the path toward being a hacker as being initially all about becoming a programmer who can write in a low-level language like C Counts, ASM, VHDL and anything like that. Eventually, what you develop is a sense of the conceptual physics inside the computer like, “You can’t add numbers faster than X. You can’t multiply numbers faster than Y. You can’t divide numbers at all because it takes too long.” Don’t ever do that. If you can avoid it, just screw division. It’s not worth it. It’s better to multiply it until you find the answer. Getting an idea of how the memory works, prefetch queue, CPU instructions and those kinds of things, maybe you don’t need to be perfect at them and maybe you don’t need to be an ultra-guru at every one of these pieces. You at least have to be able to say, “That looks like bedrock. I don’t think I can solve this problem. I need to look elsewhere.” There’s this problem that sometimes people get to, which is they don’t know what part of the problem is solvable and they don’t know which problems to work on, so they end up either trying to solve an unsolvable part and trying to work around reality. That’s where a lot of bad software comes from because people decide that if they do something more complicated, that will make reality easier. That comes from not being close enough to the machine in your sense of aesthetic and your sense of what’s fair, just and reasonable. The computer can’t do that fast. In the machine itself, there is no injustice. There is never an unfair game. There is never an unfair set of rules.Tweet There’s a big path toward programming. The last piece of becoming a programmer in my mind and this is where it ties into the step up to hacker, is the scientific method. You have to be able to say, “I want to compare what this non-working software does in state A versus in state B. I want to make a random change and then change it back, compare the results and do it again.” You have to be able to do this guess and test thing. It’s almost like a guessing test effectively with the scientific method behind you is gaining eyes. You can start to see through the parts of the problem that are changeable versus seeing the part of the problem that will not budge. When you start to see that, then you can start to say, “I don’t want to try to go through that bedrock because I’ve learned enough times that every time I try to go through or around the bedrock, I start making huge mistakes. It goes off in the weeds and it doesn’t ever accomplish anything.” Your brain turns and it’s like, “What if I attack this other part of the problem?” That ability to think you’ve got a way in and a directed course to solve the problem you want to solve and realizing that you’re hitting up against a wall that’s not going to budge. Turning your attention to something different like, “What if I attack the password found or the user database?” That is where the famous lateral thinking part of hacking comes in. It’s not just throwing yourself at a wall every day dying on it. It’s throwing yourself against a wall once and going, “That wasn’t padded at all. That hurt a lot. Let’s not do that anymore,” and walking away from an idea. You have to have that ability to, one, recognize the ideas to be able to use them, test them and see what they work. That’s the programming part. Using the scientific method to decide what’s real and what’s not to convince yourself that you’re seeing what you think you’re seeing, and then having enough experience to know when you’re going down a fruitless avenue. When you have all those pieces together, you naturally begin to develop a sense of a quick pivot. That’s where the hacker’s mind turns the magic on. That’s a great description of a framework that I haven’t seen articulated well. Even I haven’t been systematic about trying to break down those pieces. Having done that, you could imagine, at least for the first one, which is computational thinking we talked about like, “What kinds of steps somebody might take to get there?” Computational meta-thinking. Also, the practical steps, like you described in your math class of learning to write down, what do I know? What do I understand? It then becomes part of your brain’s vocabulary. It might be possible to come up with ideas like that for these other aspects too, like lateral thinking. I certainly like the analogies of, find the bedrock, understand when you’re banging up against an immovable object and learning to steer faster. The only difference between me and most other people that think of me as being creative or whatever is that I’ll turn on a dime. If I get new data that affects my worldview, I can internalize that and have an entirely new worldview within 30 seconds. From then on, I’ll be using the new model. For other people, it could take months or years and that’s the difference. It is core to all great hackers because of this transformation and they develop this capacity to evaluate when they’re running in the wrong direction. The willingness to say, “I’ve got to skill up in skilling up. I can’t make the skill up process take so long. I need to cut out all this crap of arguing with people and disagreeing. I need to become humble. I need to say, “Yes. If you say so, let’s go for it. Let me make that the new truth.” When you get that limberness and flexibility of approach, then you can back away. You can even identify other tangential mistakes you’ve made in life because of a misunderstanding that you had. You change your worldview, you get working and then you’re like, “I remember this one time. I would now have succeeded at that moment with this new idea in place.” Your framework is super interesting because most people, and even myself included, have fixated and come at it from the other direction. “Hackers are irreverent. They don’t mind challenging the status quo. They almost do that by default.” Those might more be symptoms than causes, the way you describe it. This is interesting because it might get us closer to understanding how you make hackers. I often chicken out of that question and say, “Probably you know some and you don’t want to hang out with them because they don’t want to watch the Super Bowl with you.” That’s interesting. I’m going to have to pick that apart. I bet there are things we could do to back out from that. The other question I get is like, “What do I do with my kid? He doesn’t make any friends. He just loves making mods in Minecraft.” I’m like, “Have him drop out of school and play Minecraft because that’s where he’s more productive than other kids his age.” Minecraft is the starter drug for coders. I meet eight-year-old kids out there who can probably go circles around me. They learn to code in Minecraft because they wanted to blow up their friends or whatever and that was a way to do it. It’s absurd to me. I tried to get my daughter to load Minecraft and play it and I couldn’t even figure out how to load it. It’s complex. I’m like, “I don’t have time for this. I’ve got to load different versions of the JVM, and then I’ve got to get these mods.” I’m watching YouTube videos by kids in junior high telling me how to do it. You realize that’s their FreeBSD install. For us, years ago, trying to install an operating system was like pulling teeth. You learn so much about how a computer works just by trying to install your OS. I’m a fairly technical Minecraft player. I’ve got a ten-player server. I’ve got a whole world. I don’t play games so much, but I appreciate that. That was one of the amazing things to see in Minecraft. Maybe a good thing for you and I to do in some days is to figure out like, “For each of those things that need to be developed in that rubric you described, what are tools to do it for kids or college students, or professionals?” Maybe build a Coursera program. “What do you tell your kids? What do you tell the teachers at your kid’s school?” That could be a kingpin. It’s something that has been near and dear for a long time. It stems up out of the parties where I’m trying to get younger new people who are wallflowers to enact with people who are a little older, a little more mature and far-right on the road. I’ve always been fascinated with the degree of skill deployed by some of our friends. I mentioned Mike Harrington a couple of times. He’s a great example of what happens when someone decides they’re going to be great and sticks to it. It’s difficult to sit next to him and feel smart. Not because his personality makes him smart. He’s a nice guy. I like to hang out with him so other people think I’m probably smart too. If you’re standing next to the person with a mohawk, you are suddenly cool. You don’t have to get a mohawk. I’d be inclined to circle back and go deeper on all these topics but we probably should go forever. Do you have any ideas of questions for me? I heard a rumor that you once sold a patent to Carl Zeiss. Is that true? Not that I’m aware of. Maybe. I have a lot of patents, but I don’t track them. That would be cool. I don’t know. That’s funny. I never heard of that rumor. That was an explanation. Now you know that the rumor mill is bigger than your opinion. People spread that rumor far and wide because that sounds cool, but I’m not aware of it. I have probably 80 patents. Like 80 filings with numbers or 80 different issues. Yeah. Are those families and descendants and all the crap, or do you mean the actual top-level idea? Some of them are related and you might consider them to be in a family. They’re not near and dear to my heart the same way that some other inventors have that relationship. I had a lot of help on those. Almost all of them are things that I worked on with other inventors, with other people. It’s a community effort, but a few of them are things that I feel proud of that are close to me. It’s not clear to me that any of them have been sold to Carl Zeiss. What did you try to invent that you failed at? The first one that comes to mind is that we had tried to cure cancer at the Intellectual Ventures Lab. This came out of an invention session, which is our team sports invention concept. I might have described this before with another podcast. People misunderstand cancer in the first place. Cancer is a thing that your body does all the time. It should be a verb, not a noun. You’re cancering. Most of the time, your body kills that off and flashes it out and you’re fine. Occasionally, it gets out of hand and a whole bunch of cells grows fast, and you’ve got this cancer, which could be contextualized as a tumor. A lot of times, that doesn’t kill you. It’s fine. You get away with it for a long time. In a lot of kinds of cancer, what will happen is some of those cells break off and circulate in your bloodstream. Those are called circulating tumor cells and they’ll float around your bloodstream and then they’ll latch on somewhere else and metastasize. A bunch of cancer will grow in a completely different place and that’s what will kill you. What we had heard was that on average, these circulating tumor cells circulate your bloodstream one million times before they latch on. We thought, “If you get a million shots on goal, why not just look for them?” We came up with a bunch of inventions for ways to use fiber optics to jam lenses into your bloodstream and then we were going to use computers to take a photo of every cell in your bloodstream, which is trillions of cells. When I was working on this, it sounded preposterous because that’s a petabyte of photos or something, but we figured, “Why not try digital pictures? It’s cheaper and getting cheaper every year.” One of the ways that we cheated invention is to invent ten years out on Moore’s Law and say, “It would cost you $1 billion to take all those pictures now, but in ten years, probably an iPhone could do it.” We got some blood and we set up a bunch of experiments to circulate the blood. We try to take pictures of blood cells. We got all that working and then the idea was like, “If we could spot those tumor cells, then we zap them with a laser like we always do.” We’re always wanting to use the laser when we’re inventing stuff because lasers are cool. Down that road, we probably spent about a year on it, and then we found out that circulating tumor cells often only go around one time. We’re like, “If it’s one time, we’ve got no chance.” What I love about that story is that we didn’t keep banging our heads on cancer. We found the bedrock like, “That’s not going to work.” I worked on self-sterilizing elevator buttons after that because we had an idea for that that made sense. I was able to steer to wherever the next best idea was. I don’t know anything about cancer in the first place. I’m not a cancer expert. I’m not an elevator button expert for that matter, but in that context, it was using that same mindset. It’s moved from the thing that failed to the thing that had potential and that one does. That’s the one that comes to mind. I use that example sometimes because that story makes sense. There are things I wanted to invent that I didn’t get to work on and some, you could say, are failures. Some of them failed to get the time, money, resources, people and that kind of thing. There are other inventions that didn’t work. People think I’m a crazy futuristic inventor, but I’m quite pragmatic. Most of my inventions are things to do with computers anyway. If I can figure out how to make a computer do something, usually, there’s not going to be a big question about whether it’s going to work or not. A lot of my work is applying computers to things that you normally wouldn’t like. That’s how we ended up at cancer because that’s not a chemistry solution to cancer the way we’ve been doing it. It’s a computational solution to cancer. That’s how I think about those things. I don’t even track them as failures in my mind because you go until you can’t go or it doesn’t make sense. You find the bedrock and then turn and go somewhere else. They’re intersections. It’s not the destination. I think of almost everything like a Google Map now. I got started and I put in my destination. There’s a big map, but there’s a blue line showing you how to get there. There are some gray lines showing you alternative routes to get there. You get stuck in traffic, that thing recalculates. You make a wrong turn, it recalculates. You’ve still got your destination in mind. Halfway along the way, you might get hungry and decide, “Screw it. I’m going to go there instead.” I’m going to register for a career on Maps.Google.com. That’s how a career should be. That’s how it should look like. I spent 1.5 years thinking about healthcare in that context. The day I get a diagnosis, “You’ve got cancer.” “Show me the blue line.” “You’re going to do this. You’re going to do that. You’re going to get chemo. You’re going to do rehab. You’re going to spend this much time here and end up at the destination.” “I should get to see that blue line.” No one gives you that. If you break your arm, there should be a blue line. “You’re going to go here. You’re going to get a cast. You’re going to do physical therapy. There’s the blue line.” “Why can’t I see that?” How we should be doing everything in the world is like a Google Map. Daniel Suarez hit that well with Freedom (TM). It is great near-term sci-fi. You’ll want to read Daemon. That first is great about how powerful scripts and batch files can be. The second one is about encrypted mesh networks with HUD overlay blue lines. It’s my thing and your thing jammed together. Daniel Suarez is amazing. I don’t read a lot of science fiction. The truth is I did read those books. That was a while ago and they have not stuck with me, so I couldn’t recount them the way you did. It’s helpful to have those mental visual models of how to think about complex things. I love everything should be a blue line. Why couldn’t you just say, “I want to be a computer security consultant, a programmer at Google, a database administrator, or nurse and see that blue line?” It’s like, “Here’s the main way to get there. Here’s the fastest way to get there. Here’s the cheapest way to get there. Here are some other alternatives that might be more fun. Here’s the way to get there that lets you live in Santa Cruz for a couple of years.” Let people choose from any given moment, “Here’s where you are and here’s where you’re going. Here’s the map of potential choices.” Khan Academy and Coursera are helping people get there. They have a lot of those things. Khan Academy, in particular, is like, “If you’re going to know that, you’re going to know these things first. This is the secret.” You’re right. You’ve got your thumb on the pulse there. What does Coursera do that’s like that? They now have degrees and programs. It lets you pull your pieces together from different schools or different parts as you would do with a college registration. It lets you put together a degree. It’s like, “I’m trying to decide whether to get an MBA. I don’t know whether I need one. I didn’t want to go to college, to begin with. I definitely didn’t need it for my career.” Everything between you and your computer is perfectible because you can change, grow, and learn, and the computer can’t.Tweet If you think you want to do that, I probably know some folks you should talk to about it. I’ll take you up on that. I often feel like I’m faking it and I need an MBA. I don’t know what an MBA is. Everybody else can stop thinking I’m cheating. There’s this notion, “Whatever business I have, you know you need some around,” and they don’t self-identify as MBAs though. They do. They are Oxfords. That is certainly true, but they don’t like to be called MBAs. I keep calling them MBAs. “These are our MBAs.” They’re like, “That’s not exactly. We’re the people. We’re Oxfords.” As far as I can tell, in every company I’ve been in, you do need them. You need one from Harvard and you need one from Stanford. The main reason is they each have an email list with all the other MBAs that they’re on. That’s what you need it for. You and I are on the email list, but we need a proxy in their basic career. They need to have us with the email lists we’re on. You and I are on the email list they’ll never touch. MBA might be a way to buy your way into those email lists and then you just do deals. I would never start a company without an MBA from Harvard and Stanford because that’s where the deals come from. All the things that you would learn as an MBA is a way you described the Tic Tac Toe in C job interview. It’s like, “I know all the stuff that an MBA knows and probably a lot more and I learned it in the context of doing projects, businesses, and everything. I just don’t know that I know it and I don’t know the jargon that they would use and those kinds of things.” You have to get right with the jargon if you want to hack your way into a community. I don’t know if that’d be a good waste of your time or not. I probably haven’t done any of the prerequisites necessary to get into an MBA. I don’t know if this changed for you. I always felt like, even today, there’s no job in the world that I’m qualified for. I don’t even have a resume, but if I did, it certainly wouldn’t map to any job opening. For the first maybe decade after high school or something, or maybe even more, it felt like a dirty little secret. It’s like, “If people find out I don’t have a degree, I’m probably out of the run,” or that kind of thing. A computer consultant or something like that is what I would get referred to. I wouldn’t ever apply for a job I would get from word of mouth, introduced, referred, or something. For me, in early 2001 to 2003, or somewhere around there, in those days, I would go to DEF CON and the Shmoo Group would show off cool hacking tricks we came up with other hackers. It is the worst possible audience you can get that could hire you. They all think they’re smarter than you. They know everything. They’ve seen it all before. The only reason they came to your talk is to tell you why you’re full of shit. One thing I learned from you about this was you described speaking at hacker conventions. You had come up with this clever trick, which was to figure out who everybody in the room thought was the smartest guy in the room, and then get him in the front row, and then make fun of him from the stage. That would establish enough credibility that everybody paid attention to you. I have co-opted that. That’s what I do. I’ve taken that so far. My audiences are the presidents of companies and the presidents of countries, and I don’t give a crap because I know I can take a roomful of hackers and put them in their place. After that, it’s easy. My wildly successful public speaking career is a side project. I don’t know why I started doing it because I thought it was funny. I realized hackers were preaching to the choir. It’s a lost cause. I started taking all the fun things that hackers could do and going to other audiences that had never seen it. I ended up with this weird hacker magic show, stealing people’s passwords live on stage that blows everyone away, except for hackers. I’m like, “That’s a trick from the ‘90s.” I would be taking it to other audiences. That may be popular as a speaker, but it was always easy. For one thing, I’m a magician because I have superpowers no one else in the room has so that made it easy. The bigger one was that after speaking to audiences of hackers, a CEO wasn’t about to get funny. Probably for my own amusement, it progressed over years. Now I’m on stage making fun of CEOs who are in the audience because they’re going to suck at innovation. Whatever it is they know about, they don’t know what I know about. It got easy. From 2001 to 2003, I was the first guy to show up publicly and say, “I’m a hacker.” Other than Kevin Mitnick, who is a notorious hacker/criminal/script kiddie gone wild. In those days, it was unusual. Even everybody from DEF CON would say, “I’m a computer security expert.” They were trying to legitimize themselves in that way, but I didn’t have anything to lose because I wasn’t a criminal and I wasn’t trying to get a job in any conventional way. Being the hacker got me a lot. That’s how I got known, and then after that, within the next decade, it progressed gradually to being a mainstream thing. Now, no one gives a crap if you’re a hacker. That doesn’t get any attention. “I’ve seen that before.” Probably there’s some progression like that for you. You feel less imposter syndrome because you’ve had success. I did get past that many years ago because there was a flip where if I sat and went to college, they’ll be like, “You’re smart like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. You need to go to college.” It’s like, “I like that.” I don’t have any of the imposter syndromes like that anymore. The truth is it’s not because I’m less of an imposter. I still don’t know what I’m doing most of the time, but I’m comfortable with it. I wouldn’t want to be doing something where I knew what I was doing. “Just take me out and put my head off the floor and kill me. I don’t ever want to do something where frustration goes away.” That’s what I was getting at earlier. The frustration is the water. Hackers are fish. If you’re out of the water, you die. You have to find your way back to the hard stuff. If you go into management, you need to learn how to be frustrated with people and be nice to them. You need to learn how to be frustrated with people and get them to perform. Not to just yell at them and inspire anger, fear, and those kinds of simple solutions, but to praise the person you’re frustrated with for how far they got without you, to see the pain that they went through and how difficult it was for them to embrace that. You have to be able to take that same idea of frustration with the machine and do it to a person. That’s the transition that a lot of fully well-formed hackers could make. If they wanted to deal with unjust and unfairness, that’s where the meta where the wheels fall off the trail. I’ve inadvertently stumbled into those situations at times and found myself largely unprepared for them. “This is unjust. Why are you being irrational? I pulled all the memory locations.” Applied Cryptography “I said the right magic words. You’re supposed to do what I want.” That’s not how people work. That’s another episode. Let’s wind this down. I’d be remiss not to ask you because I’m sure you have ideas and we probably have folks reading who would love that insight. What are the things people could do to learn more about the hacker mindset and getting comfortable with the technical side of computers, whether programming or otherwise? Are there books that you read that you learned? I learned a ton in the old days from reading things about what Alan Kay had said. I learned from different thinkers about computers and technology in those days. I’m wondering, what influences are on you? We don’t need the best sellers that are on the bookshelf at the airport. The most important thing that I ever read was called the Rebel Asm Tutorial. It was for people who knew how to program BASIC and it would teach them how to program Assembly. BASIC was easy to get your head around and Assembly was foreign and alien. Having something there that could pass your knowledge for the 1st step to the 2nd step and do it piece-by-piece, it took me two nights to translate my BASIC knowledge to Asm knowledge. All of a sudden, I’m able to read all these programmers’ work. That could have taken years back in the day. I’d figure out a little from the reference manual. This tutorial was like, “Make sure you have your reference manual because I’m not typing this stuff.” It was a 100,000 binary with a GUI and stuff. It was this fantastic little tutorial. I have to give credit to the author of the Rebel Asm Tutorial because that has escalated the speed of my knowledge gain quickly. If it were someone who wanted to follow in the track, I would say get your programming down to Assembly language. Even if you don’t stick there long, just having that comfort and that knowledge of what it takes to take a number and a different number and add them together, put it somewhere, and do these mechanistic computer actions. That’s critical for developing the sense of where the bedrock is. Applied Cryptography, Bruce Schneier’s book taught me a lot about how to think about security. I’ve heard people say that it’s not perfect, but it taught me so much about how to think about security, protocols, and information exchanges. One of my favorite books ever was a book by Danny Hillis called The Pattern On The Stone. Danny is a famous inventor who made a company called Thinking Machines, which was the first massively parallel processing computers in the late ‘80s. This machine has 64,000 processors and a lot of that is what’s in supercomputers now, but also even just chips now. The Pattern On The Stone is a tiny book. It’s out of print and might be hard to get. I loved it. I’ve given away all my copies. I bought dozens of copies of this book. Your mom could read it, understand everything from how chips work and what logic gates are, and how they’re constructed and put together into logical groupings to do different things. All the way up to massively parallel processing and everything in between. You can read it in a couple of hours. He’s a bright guy. I should figure out if I can get an eBook of that or something to get people. It’s incredible. On Intelligence by the creator of the PalmPilot. I don’t know that one. I don’t remember his name. It’s great because it’s pamphlet-length. It’s probably 5,000 words, maybe 10,000. It’s like, “Here’s how intelligence happens.” It’s a little bit about artificial neural networks and how those work ground up. It’s a nice little primmer, a place to start. For people who aren’t necessarily going into the pure math, pure neural networks, pure hacking side but want to have that creative outlet and are going to do it in a digital universe, I love the book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It’s a thin book in a big format. It’s old, maybe 100 or more years old. It’s the story of the development of a guy who made a lot of money on Wall Street. His story of development from six years old running numbers for the bookies in the neighborhood and developing his understanding of money all the way through being a major stock operator. In it are the lessons that for instance, the Bitcoin kids are all learning one by one as they get ripped off by people who learn these tricks. It’s all the first round tricks that stock players knew 100 years ago or so. It’s thin, easy to read and super personal. You think of him as, “That guy lied to me.” Instead of thinking about it as an arbitrage opportunity. There’s not a lot of technical wording. It’s like, “This person lied. I made a bad bet, so I need to learn that I have to vet my sources.” There’s a weird amount of solid reality wisdom in the book, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Anything else we didn’t cover that comes to mind? Not at all. Let’s wrap this up. Thanks. I appreciate it. Important Links: Riley Eller DEF CON IEEE The Anarchist Cookbook Commodore 64: Programmer’s Reference Guide Robot Turtles Stack Overflow Maps.Google.com Freedom (TM) Daemon Khan Academy Coursera Kevin Mitnick Applied Cryptography The Pattern On The Stone On Intelligence Reminiscences of a Stock Operator About Riley Eller Riley heads up all aspects of our software and hardware development and manages our IT infrastructure. Riley’s team builds the technology that is the core of the React Mobile offering ensuring that our products deliver exceptional customer value. Recorded on May 14, 2019The post Diving Deep into the World of Computer Hacking & Becoming a Hacker — Riley Eller appeared first on .

Mar 17, 2021 • 2h 7min

Into the World of Genomics ＆ Entrepreneurship — Adina Mangubat

Today we get to hang out with Adina Mangubat, a friend of mine that I know from a salsa dancing, and also hanging out with computer hackers. She’s probably the youngest founder that I know. And she’s been running her company for almost a decade since starting it in college at age 22 called Spiral Genetics. It could be considered probably the most advanced bioinformatics technology for population genomics. And what that means is DNA sequencing, massive populations, hundreds of thousands of people, if you can, and then correlating that data to see what can be learned about it. And it’s a huge frontier there’s so much that can be learned from doing this kind of work. And Adina is really at the forefront of that. And so it’s a really fascinating conversation where she breaks down all that stuff: What it means, what DNA sequencing is about, the potential for bioinformatics, the potential for population genomics etc. So, this is the perfect episode for you. If you don’t know anything about it, because I’m asking Adina, a lots of dumb questions, you’re going to love it. She’s also a super entrepreneurial and hustler which is very inspiring. Adina has built this company. She actually sold it to a large biotech company and then spun it back out on. And so she’s been through a lot as an entrepreneur and we’d talk about that a bunch. And the other thing about Adina that’s super interesting to me is that she’s really committed to figuring out how you can create these transparent, high integrity, mission driven cultures in startups and small companies, and that’s pioneering work. It is really important and difficult work. It’s unproven. We don’t know if it’s even going to work, but it’s so necessary to figure out how we make better companies. Some people have to be the ones to try that. And so we talk about that and I think there’s a lot to learn at the end of this episode. Adina and I talk a little bit about adoption and parenting and I am kind of deep into that, having adopted a child and raised her to age 14, so far seemingly successfully. Adina is kind of early in that cycle. And so if you’re interested in that sort of thing at the end, there’s a conversation about that. I hope you guys liked this episode and get a lot out of it. Pablos: You seem to be possibly the youngest Founder/CEO that I know. I know other people who are young. You might not be the youngest now, but when you started, you were the youngest. Adina: 22? I know some people that are younger. It’s not common. I know people who started younger but they did not succeed at keeping it going for very long. You started at 22 and you’re still at it, which means you’re tenacious. Maybe also stupid or crazy or all three. I’m curious about that. First, I want to know how that happened for you. I don’t know if the track you’re on now is what you had planned. When you were a child, were your parents trying to convince you to be an entrepreneur? No, definitely not. My family had planned on helping me out with grad school if I wanted to do that. I was like, “I don’t want to do that. I want to start this company instead.” My dad wrote me a tiny check and he slid it across the table. He’s like, “This is going to be the hardest and most educational year of your life.” I was like, “Really?” He was like, “Yes.” My mom was supportive but worried. She would call me every couple of weeks and be like, “How’s it going? Are you thinking about applying for a normal job?” After a while, she figured out this was clearly not a phase and that I was going to be okay. I gathered later that the reason why she kept on asking is because she had started a company when she was young. She ran up a CPR business, a training business, and trained a bunch of the Secret Service. Back then, she had connections and you could roll up to the White House at midnight and be like, “Can I get a tour?” They would be like, “Yes.” She’d had to go through the entire process of starting a company back then. She knew that it was going to be hard. Were they right? Yes, it’s hard. Do you think that you believe them or you didn’t believe them? I didn’t. The blessing and the curse of being a newbie is that you’re so naive that you don’t know what you don’t know. If I knew everything that I know now if I were given the option of starting this particular company, I don’t know. I wonder about if I move on to another company someday… If you’d have the guts to take it on? It’s a big one. I’m clear that I have a reasonable business acumen. There are a lot of other companies that I could start that would be easy by comparison like stuff that is not this complicated. I have fantasies about easy companies. The reality is that I get bored after running a festival earrings company or something like that. That’s an idea that has been sitting around for a long time. One of the things that’s missing in our vernacular is a way of describing the difference between entrepreneurship and tech entrepreneurship because you could start a Taco Wagon or a festival earrings company or something that will be entrepreneurship but it’s something that’s been done before. There might even be more fine-grain definitions because I think that we have something to describe that there are “lifestyle businesses,” which is the Taco Wagon or the festival earrings company or whatever where the intention is to build a company that is going to feed your lifestyle and be fun generally. There’s then tech entrepreneurship, and it’s tech entrepreneurship of stuff that is hard but not bonkers hard. If you want to make enterprise software or a Fitbit device but for your animals or your pets, things like that. Things where you’re basically you’re taking off the shelf technology and you’re retooling it to a particular vertical or something. You’re doing some innovation but it’s not hard and never ever been seen before innovation. I call the hard stuff deep tech now. All that other stuff, I call it shallow tech. If it’s iPhone apps or enterprise software or modified Fitbit’s, shallow tech. I don’t know if that’s going to stick but that’s how I’m thinking about it. It’s unlikely because a lot of people feel like, “My tech isn’t shallow.” It’s revolutionary and it’s sprinkled with blockchain. You went to college and you finished college. It’s nothing related to this. I got my degree in Psychology with a focus on Bio Psych. Do you feel like you know about the brains of people? I do. At the time people were like, “What on earth are you going to do with that?” It turns out that a lot of things in life have a lot to do with humans that have brains. Understanding how humans work and how they tick and all of that stuff is ridiculously useful. That’s why I like computers. I just reboot them if things go wrong. They mystify me. You finished college for your parents. Was that here? Yes, at UDub. The plan was like, “I’ve got to find something to do and I don’t want a job.” How did you end up deciding to start a company? I’d been involved in two companies while I was in college as an intern. One was a smart grid company that was looking at like, “How can you optimize the usage of energy that come from green sources like wind energy.” Essentially, it was how can we use big buildings as batteries? If you know that the wind energy is spiking at a particular moment, you can overheat or over-cool your building a little bit. If it’s a large enough building so you can use that. Did it seem it would work? It seemed it would work. They had a good run but didn’t end up making it in the end. It turns out that the tech for building control is ancient and terrible. When you’re trying to integrate with that, that’s more complicated and there were a variety of reasons. I was involved in that company. I did a bunch of marketing related stuff for them, initial business strategy sales. How big was the company at the time? Seven people, maybe. The curse of being a newbie is that you're so naive that you don't know what you don't know.Share on X That’s cool though, as an internship, especially because you get to see pretty much every part of the company. If you go be an intern at Microsoft, you get to see one dime and you don’t get to see the whole operation. You learn about management, what works, what doesn’t work and all of those pieces. I was involved in that company and before that, my first job was an internship with a company that did home automation. Turning your lights on and off with a control panel. This is before cell phones. They were in direct competition with Control4. They did pretty well up until the housing crash. Nobody was looking to outfit their homes with cool smart techs. I had a lot of friends because lots of my friends are nerds, especially when one of them leaves the company or sells their company or ends up with some free time, they dive into home automation and they try and install everything and they tell you all about it. It’s all amazing. They’re spending full-time integrating their home automation stuff. A year later, I’ll ask them about it. They’ll be like, “I had to tear all that shit out.” You’re going to be a sysadmin for yourself for your home light switches. At some point you’re like, “I’m going to open the blinds by myself like an adult and it will be fine.” Another very interesting experience, they were larger, probably 30-something people. I learned a lot about what worked and what didn’t work. Back then, I was doing video creation for them, teaching people how to use the product and stuff like that. I took it to see the whole operation and have direct contact with all of the “upper-level management.” I was involved in those. After that, it seemed like, “It’s easy to start a company. I’ll do that.” No. It was cockier than that. It was like, “These guys are doing it wrong.” I had a whole thing about how people were managed. Especially as a psych person, I was like, “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Some of these people aren’t fulfilled.” I feel I could do that better. It turns out that that’s hard and complicated and they were doing it for the best that they could. There are definitely best practices but that stuff’s hard. That was part of it. I took an entrepreneurship course at the UDub Bothell because UDub Seattle wouldn’t let me into the normal course because you need prerequisites like accounting and stuff like that. I wasn’t going to do accounting for taking one class. Do you wish you had now? No. Accounting’s not that complicated. If you need deep accounting, you can call somebody that loves that, which I don’t. Somebody else can do that. That’s cool. I need to know how much money do I need in order to get to X and make sure I don’t run out of it before then. I commuted 40 minutes each way 2 to 3 times a week to take this class. Bothell is a very interesting campus because it’s got a lot more diversity in terms of its student population. One of the people that was up there, her name is Becky Drees and she was a non-matriculated student, Molecular Biologist, PhD at Berkeley. She had been the industry for years and ran one of the labs at UDub. On the first day, the way the entrepreneurship course works is you get up there and you either picked your skillset, which is what I did, or you pitch your idea because I didn’t have an idea. She pitched this genetic analysis company that was very similar to a 23andMe style company these days. Her ultimate pitch was if we are going to be able to impact disease, we have to understand the code of who we are. For me, that was compelling both from an intellectual perspective but also from a personal perspective. I’d had people in my life that had been significantly impacted by things that are entirely genetic in basis. Cancer is quite literally the disease of the genome. I’d had my grandfather pass when I was thirteen from lung cancer. I remember at the time when that was happening. Mine too. I was eleven. Where was he located? Was he in Seattle or no? No. I grew up in Alaska but he was mostly in California. That doesn’t seem that much in the way, but it was still my grandfather and it was hard. It was the first person I lost. What was striking for me at the time was like my dad is a doctor. He’s a surgeon but when you’re thirteen, you don’t differentiate between surgeon and oncologist. You’re like, “Doctors should be cool,” and it wasn’t. As I got older, I learned that in large part it was because they didn’t know what to do. Even now, to a certain extent, if you get diagnosed with cancer, there’s a super over simplification. They’re like, “You have this, we have X number of drugs that could be used to treat that. We’re going to try this first one. If that doesn’t work then we’re going to try the second one and we’re going to try and hope that we get the right one before it’s too late.” Becky’s basic pitch to me was if you could see what’s going on in there, then you could pick the right one the first time. That for me was far more interesting than any of the other companies that were being pitched. I didn’t want to do Fitbit for your dog or any of that stuff or a concierge service. It sounds like I should go pitch my crazy ideas to the entrepreneurial class and I can pick up people like you to run with them. People have a very interesting relationship or opinion about young students because I was 21, 22 at the time. I went back. I’ve maintained a good relationship with the professor that teaches it, Alan Leong. He now teaches at the UDub proper, the Seattle campus, but I’ve gone back and helped to judge classes and etc. Frankly, the younger they are, the better. I’ve even been in classes where there have been MBA students and freshmen and then they’re competing in a competition, a business plan competition together. I’ve got to tell you, the freshmen kick the MBA’s butts every time. The vast majority of the reason why, in my opinion, is that the older we get, the more we fall susceptible to thinking, “This is that way. This is possible. That’s not possible,” whereas the freshmen, they don’t know. They’re like, “Let’s try this thing.” There are probably two escape hatches, either personality or naiveté. Have you ever hired anybody from one of these? We’ve had bunches of them as interns. We’ve definitely hired some pretty young people sometimes. I want to dive into the problem with genetics. What happened to the woman who had the idea that you heard pitch it? Did you end up working on it with her? We were cofounders. She and I won a business plan competition and that’s how this whole thing got started. It’s 2009. If you recall back then, the economy was not so hot. Here I am graduating with a Psych degree. My options are stupid, boring, shitty job or go to grad school but I’d come to the conclusion that I didn’t want to get a PhD because it turns out that I’m impatient enough that research doesn’t appeal to me or it was like start this thing. It seems like a very similar risk profile at the time. Find a job, make a job. I was like, “How hard could it be? That was my naiveté speaking. We went for it and we found our third cofounder Jeremy through a Japanese tea ceremony, which is how you usually find cofounders. I worked for Jeremy for a long time. Maybe you should start with what you guys thought you were doing. At the time we thought that we were doing essentially what is 23andMe now. 23andMe then came out and pro tip, don’t go head-to-head with essentially what is a Google-backed company. This was in 2009. Was that when 23andMe came out? They were even maybe right before 2009. I’ll have to look but they weren’t so big at that time. There were large enough announcements where it was like, “Somebody already doing this. Maybe we should pivot.” At the time, the plan was to do exactly what 23andMe is doing in terms of snip chips. There are lots of ways to look at a genome. One way is to look at the whole three billion base pairs. Another way is to only look at certain markers that you’re interested in. That’s what they were doing at the time. They’re still doing that for the vast majority of things. It’s cheap to do that, etc. I met them in January of 2009. I’m one of the first 100 people on 23andMe. Now there’s all this cool stuff they can do, but my sample was done so long ago that they don’t have as much data about me. There’s a bunch of things they can’t do for me. I have to redo it again. The chips that they were using probably at that point didn’t have as many individual markers but even now, at least the last time I looked, they’re only doing about 500,000 markers, which sounds a lot but out of three billion, it’s tiny. They’re single base pair. They’re also usually the most commonly varying ones. While that’s interesting from, “Are you a fast metabolizer of coffee and caffeine? What color your eyes?” It is relevant for some medical things BRCA1, BRCA2, the breast cancer genes that research is on lockdown. It’s very good. Whereas your risk for diabetes or other things, the reality is that you might have a single-base pair that has been changed that increases your risk right next to something that you didn’t look at that decreases your risk and you would have no idea. It’s not high risk yet. If I go to a service that can do my whole genome because some of those exist, it could cost $2,000, maybe. It’s $1,000 for chemistry, plus the analysis on the computational side. That’s vastly less expensive than it was. Back in 2009, it was $100,000. If I did that, would I discover vastly more? Probably not. It’s because the analysis hasn’t been done on all those other things. The first 500,000 that the zillion people have done, we have a lot of data on. The game that we’re focused on now is how do you figure out what the rest of it means. That’s what our business is focused on now. As a juxtaposition, we started out with like, “Let’s do a 23andMe-like thing.” What we do now is we make the software to compare large groups of whole human genomes. We’re going after the folks that are doing country genome sequencing projects, where they’re sequencing hundreds of thousands or millions of people and trying to sort out what’s going on in there. Are they trying to do the whole genome for millions of people? The United States is doing that. Can you tell me a little bit about what that project looks like? There are over 50 countries now that are doing this thing. A fun fact that most people don’t know about that. If countries are doing it, what’s the example of a country’s project like? The one that’s furthest along is England, the UK. They have this project called Genomics England. It started out as 100,000 people and they did all of that. They did it for people generally that had gone through most of the medical system, hadn’t received a diagnosis and they were trying to still assess out what’s going on. At that point, they were given an option of, “We don’t know what it is. You can either be at a dead-end or we can sequence your genome. It’s totally up to you. If we sequence you, you’re consenting to research.” They had 100,000 people say yes to that and they were able to solve 23% of the cases. It’s pretty good. They were able to diagnose people who were unable to be diagnosed 23% of 100,000 people from genomic data. Diagnosed, maybe we shouldn’t use that word. It’s like a candidate is what they call it, a candidate-able gene. They made a very large dent. The essential problem then is even if you have the money and the people and you can do all these tests, it yields a ridiculous amount of data. How much data is sequencing three billion base pair are going to yield? It’s 120 gigs per person. If you multiply that by 100,000 people, that’s a good chunk. All the memory on my top of line iPhone would be full with my genome. The raw data of your genome. That’s just the raw data and it’s going to be more once I started trying to analyze it. The older we get, the more we fall susceptible to thinking one way is the way.Share on X In terms of getting into the tech side, this is where there’s a lot of debate about how should you do the analysis because the vast majority of the industry right now tries to take that 120 gigs and determine what’s important as part of it. They go through this whole process where they align your genome against a reference genome, which is a Franken genome of Craig Venter and a bunch of other people. They do a big diff and then they output the diff into what is essentially a glorified Excel spreadsheet. What they try and do is compare these Excel spreadsheets against one another. There’s a bunch of technical issues with doing that. One, you’re not going to see everything that’s in there. Two, if you’re trying to align against essentially what is mostly a European white male reference genome, you don’t see a bunch of stuff. There’s a lot of interesting challenges in the space of diversity within genomics and how do you get representative information about what’s going on in an individual? Are you making that up or is there any evidence that this is the case where people have gone back and said using the white male European reference turned out to make us miss out on this stuff though there are actual projects? There have been multiple efforts to make custom reference genomes for specific ethnic groups. There was a whole Han Chinese genome effort. The Japanese did a genome that was specifically for theirs. There’s an error of reference genome that’s in the middle of construction. They did their first version. They’re trying to do a second run. It seems that would be the thing that you would make by taking all the Japanese folk’s data, go find the stuff that’s the same in all of them and drop that out. It’s basic compression algorithm and then go looking into the rest. What am I missing here? Why is there work? How do you figure out what is present in there? We’re going to have to get a little technical in order to get there. Let’s start with what does the data look when it comes off the sequencer? A lot of people have the misconception that when you sequence a genome, it comes off like a book. You read it from the beginning to the end. It doesn’t go that way. In a super squishy way, it’s like how they did the human genome project, which is why we know what the order of a human being looks like, but it costs a lot of money to do it that way. It was slow, etc. They did this innovation where it’s called shotgun sequencing. What they do is they take your genome and they duplicate it 30, 40 times. They chop it up into 150 base pair long chunks. I’m glazing over a lot of technical details. For any of your technical readers out there, it’s not exactly that way but for the average reader, it’s 150 base pair long chunks. What the sequence reads is all of those 150 base pair long chunks. What comes off of the sequencer quite literally is a huge pile of text files. If you open up one of these text files, it’ll be 150 bases with a guess of the quality score for how likely it called that particular base correctly or not. That’s it. You don’t have any information about where that thing came from in the original. It’s the worst jigsaw puzzle of your entire life. It’s 150 base pair and base four is the notation. It’s got something 256 bits of data or something like that. Plus, the quality scores of how likely was the sequencer to call it correctly? Was it 90% sure? Where does that number come from? The sequencer generates it when it looks at it. It’s like, I’m 90% sure it was an A. I probably could have 36 or 34 or whatever copies of the same 150 base pair in my data. That’s how they fixed errors. That’s my check sum that they are correcting there because if I find ones where that’s a few bits off, then it’s easy to fix. If I’ve got essentially a 256-bit key, ostensibly looking at a unique chunk of the genome or are there duplicates? There are lots of duplicates. I’m trying to figure out how to put them all together in the correct order if half the battle. The reason why they use the reference genome thing is they take every 150 base pair long chunk and they look for the nearest match. That works great for small changes. In my 150 bases, if two of them don’t match the reference genome, that’s great. I know where that goes, but what happens when 50 of them out of the 150 don’t match? You then get to a place where there’s no longer a unique match. Where does it go? Does it go in this place in the genome or that place in the genome or this other place? What happens if the person has genetic code that didn’t show up at all in the reference genome, which totally happens? You can have a full 5,000 base pair of novel institution, which I know I do because I sequence my genome. You’re going to have this huge insertion. How do you figure out where that goes? Do I have to go do it the old-fashioned way? No, not exactly. What everybody else does is they try and do this process where they fish the things out of the garbage bin because when they don’t align, then they try and take all of the things that didn’t align. After the fact, they try and put things back together and figure out where it might’ve come from because there’s overlap with every little chunk. You could try and stitch it together and figure out where it goes. By then, you have already placed these little chunks potentially in the wrong spot. You’ve already biased everything against the reference. We try not to do that. I have an idea. I got my 150 base pair but if I have it overlap by 50 on each side and it’s only 50 in the middle, it’d be really good, but now I’ve reduced the efficiency of my shotgun approach by two-thirds but then I should get the order of stuff for free at the end. Why can’t we do that? They do a version of this. As I said, skipping over some stuff, it’s not 150 straight up. What they do is it’s about 500 or 600 bases. They read in from both sides of the chunk. There’s a gap in the middle of that they don’t hit. It’s about 300 bases. This is what is called a paired read. You have 150 bases, a gap of 300 where you don’t know what it is and then 150 bases. You can also get, to a certain extent, further with that because if one section aligns in this particular area and then this other one doesn’t align very well, then you can try and trace over that. It only works up into a certain extent for a 5,000 base pair insertion. It’s longer than the length of the overall chunk. The likelihood they’re going to have some error or dropout is relatively high such that you can’t assemble over it. Now that we understand the problem, tell me why you don’t have that problem. It turns out that there is another way of doing it. These little chunks are called reads. If you were to compare every read against every other read, you were essentially to create a probabilistic structure of how they could all go together without worrying about figuring out exactly how they go together. You could imagine that you could account for all of the possible paths and you’ll have a lot of information about what is more likely versus the other and you weight them. You could imagine that you could do that for one person. You could also imagine that you could do that for many other people and you could even overlay a lot of this information over one another. That’s part of the reason why population genomics is important. That sounds the big data approach to guessing more or less what the likely structure this is. Is there metrics now on how well that works? We’ve done testing a bunch of what are called truth sets, like golden datasets because one of the big challenges of knowing whether or not your stuff is good or not is how do you know what’s in there? There’s this one sample that has been sequenced a bazillion times with every single different sequencing technology out there. It’s run by this particular consortium out of NIST called the Genome in a Bottle Consortium. It’s very cutely named. They’ve done it with regular short-read sequencing, which is what we all described but they also have long read sequencing tech, which is much longer chunks like 10,000, 20,000 base for long chunks but it’s expensive, so nobody uses that at scale. Usually, it’s used for plant genomics, things like that. There are other various chemical sequencing technologies that you can use to try and get at these golden datasets. We’ve done a bunch of testing regarding the golden data set approach. Other technologies can see about 33% of the genetic variations that a represent. If you look at on a base for base basis, we can see about 72% if you’re using any amount of population style data. If you think about it, it’s intuitive. The burden of proof for finding a variation the first time is pretty high, but if you’re looking for evidence of whether or not you’ve seen that thing that you’ve already seen before, then it’s much lower so you can pick out things. If I do it the old school Craig Venter way, I get a complete and accurate genome. Is that right? You’ll get about as good as you’re going to get. That’s as close to 100% as we’re going to get. The best off-the-shelf technology we know of gets us to 33%. If you’re going to identify variations, yes. Your way, it’s 72%. That’s amazing. You can characterize it like that. Essentially the job of the company is to make the software tools to help us manage and analyze all this data at a large scale. What scale are we talking about here? How much data are you guys working with here? It’s 100,000 people or 350,000 people. It depends on the country. You guys have multiple countries you’re working with at this point. Is it a real business? Yeah. I don’t think that people would keep giving me money if it wasn’t. Is the customer is giving you money or investors? Both. If I understand all this correctly, we think that for a lot of the problems that people have, various diseases, different types of cancer and things, by analyzing their genome, we can probably at least gauge what risk they have of having this problem. In some cases, we might know. For sure you’re going to have this problem. I have the cilantro gene that makes me think cilantro tastes like soap. It’s pretty bad in Seattle because cilantro is everywhere. That’s not the worst one you could possibly have. It turns out there no other problems with me other than that. I got lucky. I suppose if we’d had a good analysis of my genome, I could have been more before the first time I had discovered that the hard way. What I’m wondering is if this is an important part of what we would want for this type of work. It’s tools that can handle the scale of the data that the testing is putting out and allowing us to analyze it in ever smarter ways. We would also want better testing or better ability to test a genome that’s more cost-effective. What else is missing? More research on what each of these markers would mean. That’s perpetual research project. I would say that’s the research project now. To give you a perspective, at this point as a globe, we have characterized about 1% of all human variation and associated with anything. When I say anything, I mean high breast cancer risk, everything. That means that there’s still a lot of stuff that we don’t understand even a little bit. If you think about it, to a certain extent, it makes sense why because your search base is large. It’s three billion bases. If you do a study of 1,000 people, that’s not enough information to be able to sort out much of anything, unless you happen to be looking at something that is so strongly correlated that it’s going to be obvious. We’ve gotten some of those great, low-hanging fruit things like the breast cancer genes, BRCA1, BRCA2. Those have massive impact. You can discover that in a sample of twenty people, which is how it was originally discovered. Is 100,000 people enough that we’re starting to feel confident or do you need 100 million? It depends on the disease or the particular phenotype. For some of them, 100,000 is going to be sufficient. For some of them, it’s not and we don’t know yet. That’s a mystery that we’ll find out. In some sense, to answer the question of to pick that mystery apart, you want to scale this up. In your life, what I suppose you’re hoping for is over the next 1, 2, 3 decades, we want to get from counting hundreds of thousands to millions or tens or hundreds of millions of people who we’ve got in the database so that we can start going after these things that have smaller that show up less frequently. Sometimes you’re going to get those one hits. If you have this single base pair change in this particular location, you have this significantly increased risk. For a lot of it, it’s going to be something more like if you have this and this, then you have an increased risk. You’ve got to have all four. You have to find all four to correlate them and that’ll take a lot of work. Do you think that the cases where we figure it out, what does that research look like? Is it lots of data and software finding it? There are a lot of analysis techniques that people had to use when the datasets are smaller. Now we’re entering a time where there’s enough data that you can do things like machine learning or even deep learning. You could use that technology to be able to assess it out. Deep learning is a little bit more complicated because search base is large and the number of examples you have are lower. You have to be smarter about how you do the feature detection, but you can make some of that stuff work. All of a sudden, you don’t have human beings that are trying to do basic statistical analyses anymore. You have things that can look for much more interesting, subtle patterns that frankly our little human brains can’t. In some sense, given enough data and desktop computers, we’re going to be able to set these things free and let them go find everything for us. To some extent. I don’t know if it’s that simple, but yes. Why wouldn’t it be? Can you think of a reason? What what’s missing from that? Machine learning is complicated. It can over fit easily. There are a lot of nuances, I would say. Plus, biology is a lot messier than people anticipate. I got interested one time. I saw this video of Danny Hillis talking about proteomics. He made a company called Applied Proteomics but his thesis was that cancer is a normal thing that your body does all the time. You got these cells mutating. Most of the time, nothing bad happens. They get flushed. Everybody is doing that. He is like, “Cancer shouldn’t be a noun. It’s more a verb. You’re cancering all the time.” You’re pairing and occasionally you screw it up. You don’t repair fast enough and things get out of hand and you end up with a tumor and then that breaks off and floats around your bloodstream and latches on to where it metastasizes and kills you. That’s the process. The way he described it was when we started the human genome project, we thought we were going to get the recipe for how to make the human. What we got after going through all that work and sequencing, the whole genome is more like list of ingredients but we still don’t have the recipe. The recipe is proteins and that’s interacting with your DNA. What he believed the next frontier was we need to go be able to sequence the proteins and figure out what they’re doing. I would say that to think that you’re going to get the whole enchilada in just genomics is naive. Frankly, to think that you’re going to get it with just proteomics is also naive. You got to have the whole thing. It’s going to be a combination of all of the omics’, if you will. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, you name that. As I said, biology is complicated. Back to your question of like, “Can we have sort out everything? Can the computers work it all out?” Maybe if we gave it everything that it needed. Eventually, it gets all the data but right now we don’t even get all the data. It changes too. The genome, for the most part, it seems it’s stable-ish. It doesn’t change that much over the course of your lifetime. Certain cells might write the ones that become cancerous, but your proteomics and metabolomics, it changes by the moment. When I was a kid, we didn’t know any of this stuff. Not only did I not know it, the scientific community didn’t. In the last few years that we seem to have gotten our heads around things like the microbiome. To a certain extent, we know that it’s important. Do we know what any of it does? No. It hadn’t even been discovered. We thought your tummy is full of acid and then it eats up the food and then you poop it out. That was the entire understanding as far as I could tell. At this point, as a globe, we have characterized about 1% of all human variation and associated with anything.Share on X A lot of people still think of it that way. It’s way more complicated than that. I don’t know that much about it but you start to learn, you’re like, “I eat food that feeds a bunch of microbes in my gut and then they spit out what feeds me.” There’s a layer of indirection in there that there’s no measurement for. My microbiome is different than yours. It changes over time and none of us knows what we’re randomly shoving in our mouths. It’s crazy. It’s not that crazy. We have been doing it for thousands of years. That’s why we’ve got thousands of different microbes in case we eat that weird thing. This is also simplistic but coming from working on computers, my whole career, I lived through these multiple progressions where we started out with. I got the first digital camera with a CCD in it in 1990 or ‘91 or around that. I’m the world’s earliest adopter. I would go take pictures on the thing. It had a little Post-it note sized screen. I could show people immediately the picture that I took of them, which blew everyone’s mind because they’d never seen anything like that before. Times have changed. Before that, it was Polaroid. That was the only other option. Even Polaroids were slow. You had to stand up and wave them. Which apparently makes no difference, by the way. It’s detrimental. You do not shake a Polaroid picture anymore. The thing that happened is that camera sucked and the photos were 16k or something. Every year, it got a little better but you had this global scale argument going between photographers saying, “That digital crap will never be as good as real photography.” That progressed all through the ‘90s and into the 2000s. This asymptomatic progression where as the digital cameras got better, cheaper, higher resolution and better color management, all that stuff. All those guys started keeping their mouth shut because what they don’t realize is the chemistry was the best technology we had at the time to make photographs. Now we have a better technology and at the beginning, it’s low resolution. As the sensors get better and the data collection gets better and we can collect more data and we can collect data at a higher resolution than essentially the thing we’re sampling, that’s exactly the same progression went with audio too. Computer audio sucks, CD-ROMs aren’t as good as vinyl and all that. People still have that argument. They don’t understand how it works. It sounds warmer because there are imperfections in the vinyl. We go through those progressions but at some point with a lot of things, you get to a point where the resolution is high enough that you’re now dealing with high-quality, meaningful data. We’re there with things like audio, video and these things but we’re not there with all the biological stuff in a human sample. We’re close. It’s amazing, the progression. In the last few years, it’s been insane to watch because back then it was $100,000 to do one person. It would take 30 days of chemical churning to output the text files for one person. You had 30 days of computing to do the basic analysis to try and out, put the differences against the Craig Venter reference type style thing. At that time, the best sequencer in the world could do twelve genomes a year. Now the best sequencers in the world can do a whole genome for $1,000 and it can do 18,000 in a year. It’s been insane. It’s a different world. It’s been cool to watch it grow up. People have asked me like, “How could you even get into this field when you had no background in it?” It’s like, “No one had any background in it.” You think it’s one of those rare instances where if you get in early enough, nobody has a significant advantage over anybody else. That’s why I was able to do it. I hadn’t thought about it but that’s what happened with me and computers. It’s that I got there so early. There was no one else to call but me. Do you think that you can see any other frontiers that now? What’s the equivalent of that if you were 22 now and you knew that key fact to latch onto? Probably the AR and VR stuff. Maybe3 to 4 years back. Whatever’s happening now, I don’t know. It’s not like anybody has a ton of deep experience in how to make an AR or VR game. There’s some but there’s nobody that’s the premier expert that is taking out everybody else. If I was a young kid, getting into developing AR and VR games, that wouldn’t be a bad idea. I could see that. I don’t know what the super new hot thing is that’s coming up. I don’t spend time with the young cool kids anymore to know that. You hang out with the nerdy genomics people instead. How’s that going? I like it. Is it a class of humans, nerdy, genomics people? They’re great. They party a lot harder than you would think too. Especially the people that study plants and animals. If you want a raging party, go to the plant and animal genome conference in San Diego. It’s held at one of the lamest hotels in the world but it doesn’t matter. The lights are still on for the conference center, blaring and bright lights. It doesn’t matter. The second the music goes on, the dance floor is packed. I go to a lot of conventions for nerds, mostly computer nerds. One time I was at a conference called TiE, which is The Indian Entrepreneurs network. They’re like, “We’re the biggest entrepreneur club in the world,” because they’re from India and they have unlimited people. They have tens of thousands of members. I was speaking at the TiE conference. As soon as the conference is over, music comes on, everybody dances because they’re all from India and that’s normal thing for them. Did they lead a dance? That happened at the plant and animal genome conference. Somebody got up and led a Bollywood style dance. Everybody participated. It didn’t matter. I was like, “This is amazing.” They do if you’re at the plant and animal genome conference. If you go to the UDub to an entrepreneur’s class and talk to these folks, what do you tell them? Like, “I did it and I got lucky and you should get a job,” or, “Being an entrepreneur is hard but amazing. It’s like parenting. It will be the best and the worst thing you’ve ever done.” It’s close to the second one. I speak to the UDub a lot. I speak there once a quarter, maybe three times a year or something like that. A bunch of people came and spoke at my classes and it’s one of those pay it forward things. It makes a huge difference. For me, I remember that there were certain people that came and spoke at my class where I was like, “That’s cool. If she can do it, I can do it.” She was the CEO of Modumetal. It’s cool. They do the super-thin layering of metals in a specific meshing way. It could make armored cars but for way cheap and it’s way more effective. I remember watching her and I was like, “That’s cool,” or other people that were young that were coming back through. They were the graduates from 2 to 3 years ago, etc. I’m old now. I’m a ten-year veteran, which is bizarre. I go and talk to them all the time and the things that I say to them are it is going to be hard, so you had better pick something that’s flipping worth it. If you don’t and you’ve picked something because you’re only interested in it for the money or whatever, statistically you are way better off getting a job at Google or something. From a money perspective, in terms of expected value, if you’re in it for the money, don’t do this. If you’re interested in solving a particular problem, you’re passionate about having that particular problem be solved on this planet and you are willing to go through the pain suffering that will be required to do that, then you should do a company. Don’t pick something that you don’t love because otherwise you won’t stick with it when it gets hard and it will get hard. Do you think that advice is at odds with finding people who are motivated to sell, which is a big part of making it less hard? Motivated to sell what? Like the company? Something to make the company make money. It does seem that’s one thing that a lot of entrepreneurs have in them that makes them successful and take investors in particular to see it go because a lot of startups, most of them don’t fail to ship a product. Most of them fail to sell it. That is coupled with the advice of make sure you talk to your freaking customers. To be fair, when I started out, we had the exact same mistake of doing some amount of customer interviewing and then thinking that what you need to build and then building it without checking in with people. Being like, “It’s brilliant. It’s going to work. They’ll fall in love with their idea.” That has more to do with the inability to sell the product. The likelihood of burnout outweighs the likelihood of not being able to ship a product. I would say pick something that’s worth your life first and make sure you talk to your customers second, in that order. When we think about what is hard, what are the experiences that come to mind? Firing the first person that you ever have to fire. That’s a tough one. Maybe it’s not tough for some people but I care so much about people. In that moment where you’re letting them go, it’s easy to feel like a complete asshole. To think that you’ve screwed up or failed them somehow and to indulge in the conversation of how you’ve let them down, which you learn over time is not what’s happening and it’s not a healthy conversation to be having. The first time you do it and when you’re new to it, it’s an easy trap that pretty much everybody falls into. That one sucks. Running out of money for the first time, that one sucks. I don’t think people talk about that one very often, but I don’t know any entrepreneur that has gone for something relatively risky that hasn’t gotten within days of running out of money or if it has run out of money. It’s not like it happens only once. It’ll happen multiple times and people never tell you that. I tell the poor little entrepreneurs and it scares some of them. Some of them think, “That will never happen to me,” and that’s fine. It’s one of the naiveté things and that’s cool but that sucks because then you had to lay off everybody because you as a founder, you’re financially on the hook for anybody’s salaries, if you keep them past, etc. That stuff is rough. That stuff’s the hardest for me personally because it’s all about the impact on the people. Other people might have a different answer to that. I feel like I’m talking to my friends to go in with this crazy plan and when it doesn’t work out, I do feel I’ve let them down. One of the ways that I often let them down is by not firing people that I should because I’m very optimistic about people and I see the potential in them and those things. Especially as somebody who does care about people first, how do you end up getting through that and making decisions? One of the biggest alterations that I made in my overall leadership, I say moderately early on, was finally being transparent about where we were from a financial perspective at any given moment. In the first few years, I thought that I had to have it all together and I needed to put up this strong front of like, “Everything’s fine and it’s great.” What I realized is that it led to situations where people were caught off guard and surprised when shit was not fine and we were three weeks from running out of money. At this point, pretty much everybody in my company can ask me at any time how much money do we have left and how many months of runway and all of that stuff. A lot of people don’t do that. I can understand why they don’t do that. Maybe that does not work at scales of companies but for the scale that I’m at and for the risk that people are taking on now, I feel it’s the right thing to do because of exactly what you said. I’ve asked people to go with me on a crazy journey, crazy mission. It is highly likely to fail and everybody’s got a different risk tolerance. By not providing them that information, then they have no ability to choose for themselves about what’s going to work for their particular risk profile. For me, that’s where it gets irresponsible. If I provide them the information and they stick it out anyway, then they chose but they were choosing with full knowledge and then that’s okay. If we run out of money, it’s not a surprise even. In some cases when that has happened, people have been willing to stick it out for long periods of time until we get it worked out. I’ve been shocked to a certain extent in the cases where that has happened by the ultra-low churn. You might lose one person or something like that. For the vast majority of the times, pretty much everybody has stuck it out and come back, which is crazy. It has to do with the fact that they also feel like they’re trusted enough with the information and that they’re a partner in it, not just a standard cut the check employee, which is what they would get at a normal place. It probably varies depending on the scale of the operation because at my last startup, I tried to let the team not worry about money. I had to worry about it a lot, but I didn’t show them that because I wanted them to be able to focus on doing their job. It was probably the wrong way to go. I can see it both ways because I also tried that approach too. I also think it depends a lot on the type of people you hire. After going about this for a couple of years, we started to place a very large emphasis on risk tolerance as a factor for when we were hiring. We include a question in every interview, which is, “What is the riskiest thing you’ve ever done?” If you don’t have a good answer for it, this was probably not the company for you. I had this one woman, she was super well-qualified for what we were trying to hire. Her answer to that question was driving in the rain was the riskiest thing. I was like, “This is not the place for you because we were going to skim the treetops multiple times and we might even crash land and I need to have people that can handle that and not freak out when it’s happening. I’m going to have other things that I’m dealing with when we’re dealing with the crash-landing situation.” I’m making this up here. I don’t know if this will work but I imagined that I could tell people more upfront and say, “Here’s the situation. We’re trying this crazy mission. It’s probably not going to work. We’re probably going to crash land and all going to end up unemployed but we’re going to learn a lot along the way. We’re going to do the best we can. We’ve got some shot at getting through and if we do, it’ll be amazing.” I feel like if I could provide all those disclaimers upfront, then it wouldn’t be so bad on the day when I got to either fire them or lay them off or shut down the company or those things. We do that for people that are coming in that are new because we’re interviewing right now. Before we extend you an offer letter, it’s like, “Just so you know, this is how much money we have left. This is what you should expect.” I tell people upfront, “I cannot guarantee you employment past X date and you have to be okay with that. Clearly, we have been around for a long time and yes, there have been some bumps and it’s unlikely that you will be completely out of a job and you are joining a startup. It is a risk. Make sure you’ve had a conversation with your significant other if you need to do that before you accept this job.” Do you manage to scare anybody off that way? Yes. As I said, at the moment we’re dealing with an emergency landing situation. They need to be able to put on their own oxygen masks first. I can’t do it for them. You talked about this earlier but if you could do anything else, what would you do? Real companies or fantasy companies? Anything. Not even accompany to go on and walk about? I’ve considered that. I would walk about for about three months and then start another company. I tried to go on vacation for three days and I was stir-crazy. On the vacation front, it’s good for me. It’s very important. Long periods of time not creating something, not building something, not having a team, team is important for me. If I didn’t have a great team. I don’t know if I would put up with all of the crap that I’ve dealt with. I totally have fantasies about like, “Someday when I have achieved my mission, I’ll sell and then I’ll go and become a yoga teacher in Bali.” There’s nothing wrong with Bali, but I would get stir-crazy quickly. I don’t know what it is that I’m here to do. This is more life philosophy stuff but each one of us are here to contribute something, whatever that is. One of the things that I’m here to contribute is to create leadership and lead and inspire others to create great change in the world. That’s what I think I’m here to do. Genomics is a huge arena that I want to play in. At some point, neural augmentation would be cool. I’ve thought a lot about that. We’re still way too early, so I’m waiting for the market to mature on that one. A Matrix-like thing, I don’t think it’s completely insane. The other area that I’m passionate about is entrepreneurship and having people be supportive throughout the journey of it because entrepreneurship, this stuff can get lonely sometimes. Even if you have a great team, if you are the leader of the organization, there still is sometimes stuff that only you get to worry about. I have been good myself about building myself strong networks of people where I can go on talk to other human beings that get the thing I’m dealing with. Some human beings will never have the experience of payroll and some will. I participate in things EO, Entrepreneur’s Organization. That one’s great. I went to an EO event and I couldn’t believe how fun these people were. They’re a great group. The events are awesome but the thing that’s most valuable to me is that I meet with a group of people. It’s up to ten people in a forum, that’s what they’re called, and you share the highest stuff and the lowest stuff. It’s a mandatory attendance. You can only miss one a year. To get CEOs to work it out such that you don’t, you have to be committed. It creates a space where you can share anything personally or professionally, whatever it is that you’re dealing with. The vast majority of entrepreneurs don’t have something like that. While EO provides that for people that are at a level because you have to have raised an amount or have a certain amount of revenue in order to be part of that. There’s an absolute necessity for that for the people that are starting out. The people that are coming out of the entrepreneurship class that have won the business plan competition or whatever. They don’t have the network. They don’t have anybody else that understands what they’re dealing with. I remember what it was when I was first starting. Not that many of my friends were going down that route. I had some but not a lot. I had a number of my friends that were like, “You seem stressed out. I know this recruiter friend at Amazon, we could get you a regular job. You wouldn’t have to stress out.” They’re trying to be helpful but it’s in that moment it was the opposite of what I was looking for because you’re already doubting yourself enough at that stage, not that ever goes away. You’re still doubting yourself and your capabilities enough at that stage that’s the exact opposite of what is helpful. There’s a real need to have some network or space where people can be around other people that are dealing with the same thing. That’s important not from a sanity perspective because entrepreneurs also deal with a lot of mental health issues and there’s lots of statistics to back that sucker up. People would be more successful if they had other people they were around. That’s part of the reason why you see things the YC effect because I went through Y Combinator. How was that? It was awesome. You did that ten years in your company. We were acquired and then we unacquired ourselves. This is a reboot to focus entirely on the population genomics side and YC is what we took it through. It’s a restart. You applied to Y Combinator. You got in. What was the program like? You meet on specific days of the week. They’re large enough now that it used to be always Tuesdays but it’s now you’re either in the Tuesday or the Thursday batch. Is it just in the Bay Area? I went down every week. They usually ask you to move there. I did the math and the flying there every week versus living in the Bay Area, it’s cheaper to fly. Entrepreneurship can get really lonely sometimes, even if you have a really great team.Share on X How long is the program? Three months or ten weeks. I joined late. I originally wasn’t going to apply at all because I was like, “I’m a ten-year-old company. They’re not going to touch that.” A friend of mine said, “Ginkgo Biosciences joined YC when they were seven years in and it worked out well for them, so you should apply.” I did three weeks after the program had already started and I had an interview and then they flew me down and then they told me yes. The next day I went to my first thing. I don’t know what the beginning is like, so I can’t provide any information about that because I wasn’t there. What it is going forward is you have a group that you meet with every week. You have office hours with your YC partners. You’re assigned 1, 2 or 3 partners. You work with them and you’re looking to achieve specific metrics and improve those over time. They prepare you for fundraising. I would say that is the arena where I got the most out of it. I’ve done a bunch of fundraising successfully before. I’ve raised $5 million before without doing YC. What I can tell you is that they have that down to an art form. I was making a bunch of mistakes that I didn’t even realize. The primary one being that when you’re so down deep in the weeds, you think that everything’s important. I would have conversations with investors and try and tell them everything about how the sausage is made and they don’t need to know that. I thought I’d already scaled it back. The reality was that no, I was still telling them way too much information. That, for the most part, would scare people off because they were like, “It must be so complicated. I can’t possibly understand. Therefore, I can’t invest because I’m investing in an area that I don’t understand. I’m going to make a stupid mistake.” How do you tell your story in a way that still gives them all the information about what’s going on but doesn’t freak them out? I had that problem too. I want to explain everything. I’ll tell you for seven hours if you’ll listen what my plan is. Did you go raise some money after YC? Is there any way to characterize where you end up? What’s the size of the pitch for investors now? Is it like I do the whole thing in twelve minutes? They get you down to two minutes. How long would it have been left to your own devices when you started? Was it two hours? The shortest that I would ever do were maybe eight minutes or something like that. There are further diligence talks, etc., but I would try and give them all of the information upfront. The art is no, you provide them with all of the information that they would need to be able to say, “Yes, I’m interested,” and create a compelling case. You can feed them the pieces of information that they want as they request it, but don’t give it to them unless they ask for it. Otherwise, you’re just confusing them. The art of the two-minute pitch is incredible. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched YC demo day pitches. They’re amazing. What you put together so compelling. I listen to my pitch and I’m like, “Damn, that’s good. They’re great.” That’s one of the biggest things that I got out of it and they have a huge network of other entrepreneurs. It’s one of those things where you’re part of it for life. You are now in a place where you have access to a network of 4,000 founders. You can post on their internal forums for virtually anything and get responses back in hours. I asked for crazy stuff. I was like, “I’m looking for the introductions to the Ministries of Health for the following countries.” I got four introductions in four days. I was shocked. I was like, “That is more business development action than I’ve seen in the last six months.” It was crazy. That network and that collective experience is needed not just in the work part of the entrepreneur’s lives but also in the living part because also people go home. I don’t have this problem with my particular significant other but I can tell you having been at EO, for the vast majority of people, their significant others think that these people they’ve married are crazy. How do you have an environment that has those people be supported too? There’s a whole missing ecosystem. Back to your original question of what else would Ito work on, I think I would like to work on that and I have a lot of ideas about how we could solve that but one thing at a time. I was thinking as you were talking, being on a team is important to me as well. I don’t think I’ve been as good about crafting that over my career as I would have liked. I’ve been fortunate to have been put on some good teams. What do you think is necessary to craft one? I’m trying to figure that out. Looking around, the way society works, we have a lot of hero-worship. Even people who are sports fans, you’re a fan of a team but that’s not even a team. That’s whoever they hired this season, you’re more of a fan of the logo and maybe a fan of a player. You follow that player or rock stars or Instagram people or whatever. It’s not a team that you are observing. It’s not team worship. There are probably exceptions. You might be a fan of a company that makes a product you or something, but you don’t get to see teams. Even in reality TV, you see a lot of stuff where people are against each other but not teams. Things like a TV show or a movie or a company or everything, it’s all stuff created by teams. There’s some disconnect there. I always was wanting to be on a team, but figuring out, how do you make that and how do you make it good. That’s all stuff that nobody knows. You have to figure it out through trial and error. It’s clear that I have capabilities in that area because they seem to be able to do it. I’m trying to figure out how I would articulate like, “What is it that I’m trying to do exactly? What makes it work?” Safety, it’s one of the biggest ones and you can see research on this too. Psychological safety in workplaces, etc. There’s a whole Harvard Business Review thing about this. Psychological safety is also what breeds innovation, as it turns out, because if you feel you’re in a safe enough environment where you can throw out that crazy wacky idea and not get shot down for it, that obviously encourages you to do that. I would say safety is one of the biggest ones and safety shows up in a lot of different arenas though. It’s not safety to be able to say whatever it is that you’re thinking but it’s also knowing that you’re going to be the person that’s leading is going to make sure that you’re taken care of. I’ve asked people about this because honestly, sometimes I’ve gotten confused in the past where I’m like, “Why are you guys still following me? We have gone through some serious crap at this point. Why are you still here?” For them, a lot of the answers have been like, “I know that you’re going to have my back and I know that you are doing everything that you possibly can to make sure that we’re taken care of. I trust you to do that.” That’s the biggest thing that I would say if I had to point to anything around. I sometimes wonder if people who aren’t performing well, does that same things still apply? I’m making you feel safe. You’re not performing well but you’re getting paid. There’s no job security risk here. If I tell them that you need to step up and perform better or there’s no job security anymore, how do you reconcile that? It’s one of the things that I should to figure out. My opinion is that when people aren’t performing in jobs, something else is off. They’re either feeling confronted and they’re not willing to ask for the help that they need or they have something going on personally. Creating enough safety such that they can be like, “My grandfather is in the middle of passing away,” or, “My mother was diagnosed with cancer. I’m going to need some time.” Let me think about the times when people have been underperforming. It usually has to do with they’re dealing with something personally with their health or somebody significant in their life is dealing with something health-wise or they’re afraid of looking dumb so they don’t ask. Those are the places that I’ve seen the most non-performance. It rarely is that they don’t understand. I am working with people that are very smart. For me, it hasn’t been a lack of understanding or lack of capability. It almost always is people dealing with their own internal conversation about how their work is good enough or not good enough and the fear of being able to put it out there or not. That’s what I have found. Have you got any questions for me? I have tons of questions. How did you get to be the way you are? You’re a very unusual human being. What do you think is unusual? Don’t hold back. You’re obviously smart. You have gotten to a place in your life where there’s a certain, “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. You are very confident in whatever it is that you say and you don’t seem to care if people are like, “That dude’s overconfident,” because I’m sure that people say that to you and you clearly don’t care. You have this huge, bizarre diversity of interests, including dance, which I can get because we both dance. I know a lot of smart people from the computer science side or etc. and they don’t usually come in your form factor, if you will. One of the things you’ve said, like why don’t I give a fuck? Is it that you don’t or is it that everybody thinks you don’t? No, I do. I care about a lot of things. I don’t care about a lot of other things and I’m adamant about not caring about some of those things. You could say part of it is I’m older than a lot of those other folks that you know that are computer nerds. I grew up in Alaska and there was nobody for 1,000 miles who knew any more about computers than me and I couldn’t learn from anyone else. I was learning in isolation. I literally learned how to program by reverse engineering 6502 assembly language. This is the machine language for the Apple II. It’s not how you learn to program. I’m a shitty coder because everything I learned was before software engineering was a thing. I was so excited about computers and I would try to get other people interested in them. Did that work? At first, no. I would try to convince everybody that, “This computer is going to be amazing someday,” and nobody believed me. I was in a small town in Alaska. It was lost because but I had a bottomless enthusiasm for it. That is part of what got me to trying to be able to explain things. I was trying to explain these complicated technical things to people who not only didn’t understand but didn’t care. I had to be able to simplify very complex concepts. In some sense, I’m still doing that. You do a fair amount of speaking gigs and that’s what you do all day. Also feeling like an outsider, a loner as a kid because I wasn’t into sports or electric guitar and the normal stuff. I had to be okay with not being cool. Do you still think that you’re not cool? I think you’re cool. Revenge of the Nerds. I don’t feel that so much anymore but that’s part of one of the things that’s amazing to me about dancing. Being a salsa dancer, you show up and I’m on the same level as the Mexican dishwasher. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, how smart you are or what you’ve done in the past. No one gives a shit. You’re there and you’re not cool. I’m very specifically not cool when I show up dancing. You get a little bit cooler over the years and as you get better and as you get shirts with buttons on them and shoes that are not dirty, stuff like that, you can get slightly cooler in the dance community. Do you think that’s the key, the shirts with buttons and the cool shoes? Definitely. The salsa black belt is every year you advance levels by getting one less button. The guy who’s got a deep V with one button at the bottom, that’s the best dancer in the room. You can see it. I have to test this theory. Does it only apply in salsa? Do you think it applies in another dance? It probably carries through at least bachata but these are Latin dances and I don’t know. Those things I’m describing pretty much hold worldwide. As you know with Zouk and the very niche dances, you end up with these very strange communities with their own idea of what’s cool. There is always something. I get a lot out of that. It’s a different type of society. It’s a different angle on the world. It’s a level playing field so you meet people from all walks of life. I don’t bring anything into that room that makes me cool. I have to be a good dancer and I have to be cool to the people I’m dancing with and those things that’s how you got to do it. That’s good for you. It’s hard. It sucks. Especially as a lead, you have way harder of a job. I have tried leading. It is so much decision-making. That’s why I liked being a follower because I make all the decisions in my job. This is the one place where I’m like, “I’m not make any decisions. It’s a different role. It’s a different art form. They’re both cool but being a lead, even now, I’ve been dancing years and I’m not the best dancer but I’m competent. I show up in a new town or nobody knows me and I do this all the time, traveling for salsa, “Who’s the weird guy with the glasses on?” “I don’t know. I’ve never seen him before.” “Do you want to dance?” “No, thanks.” You’re at the bottom again, every time. Those things are good for me but one thing I was thinking of is just because of the way events played out, I didn’t go to college. I didn’t get a degree. I’m not qualified for any job on earth. There’s no job I can apply for and get. I don’t think I’ve ever done that in my life. If you’ve got, I don’t know that you would like it. Maybe not. I don’t think we’re ever going to find out. At this point and up until few years ago, I almost felt ashamed of it. I didn’t do that work. I didn’t get that degree to get that certification to get trained properly as I was talking about software engineering. It was a little too early. Universities couldn’t teach me much about computers yet and so I didn’t do that. Companies would pay me to buy a computer for them and so I did that but I always felt some of that imposter syndrome. What would I know if I’d done that? It’s because I don’t know, those things. For a long time, I felt that was a liability. What happened is society changed. Nerds won. We built the most successful companies in the world and everybody wants to be Mark Zuckerberg now and parents want their kids to grow up and be computer programmers, not lawyers. All that’s amazing. There are all these fables in people’s minds because, “Steve Jobs didn’t go to college and Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.” Now when I tell people that I didn’t go to college, they think, “You’re too smart. You didn’t need to go to college.” I’m a computer hacker, which is like being a fake scientist. It’s like a scientist but without all the formal training and accountability. You can do whatever. No one’s expecting a computer hacker to be particularly diligent about anything. That has bought me a lot of self-assurance and freedom. I can sit down and ask you all the dumbest questions about genomics and I’ve got no professional reputation to protect because I’m a computer hacker. I’m already suspect. That worked to my advantage. That’s why those things you described that you see in me, it comes from having to make my own way. I’m not counting on anybody to give me anything. I’m not counting on that degree or certification or job title or anything. I know that I’m going to have to earn everything I got myself and build it. Second, the other thing you described, the don’t give a fuck thing comes, it’s important to me to be beholden to no one. I want to be only beholden to what’s technically true. What is the truth as best as we know it, not what is politically correct or not what’s in vogue or not what other people’s opinions are? That’s important to me. If I can’t do that because of the company I’m working for, the job I have, or the society on part over whatever, then I can’t be a part of those things. I maintained a lot of independence because of that. Where do you think that came from? A part of it could be Alaska was a weird place to grow up. Everybody there was an immigrant. It’s like Israel. Israel’s a fake country that all of a sudden, many years ago it was a startup and people moved there from everywhere and it’s this melting pot. Alaska is like that. Right before I was born, people moved there for the oil industry. There wasn’t a lot of people there before that, or at least not a lot of any kind of people. There were certainly Alaskan natives and stuff. They’re all Americans but they’re American immigrants. It’s a state full of people who came to Alaska to get away from somebody or something. It was hard living. The conditions are hard. People had to work to get by day-to-day. You have to shovel a lot of snow and it was dangerous. That attracted people who were very independent and felt they could make it all work and didn’t, so they had that attitude. I suppose, I grew up appreciating that aspect of those folks. Alaska is tamed now. There’s drive-through everything and everybody there have a suburban and drive-throughs. The Starbucks has a drive-through, the dry cleaners have a drive-through, the restaurants and everything you can drive because it’s snowing and cold. They didn’t have pizza delivery when I was a kid. You go get the pizza or you stay home and make one. That rubbed off on me some and then also I’ve been at it long enough that I can see how other people’s life choices have played out. I can see the way people chose to play it safe. They chose that college. They chose that degree. They got that job. I became a dentist. The first day of your career as a dentist, there’s a spreadsheet that will tell you exactly how much you’re going to make over your entire career and how much to put into 401(k) and how much to put in a mutual fund, what to do. That plan is safe. That appeals to people. People are over-optimizing for safety. You get those predictable results and it’s not all that safe anyway. I don’t want to make those choices. For me, I always tried to make good life choices, but I didn’t optimize for safety and security. I ran out of money a lot of times. Almost no company I ever worked for still exists. IV exists. That’s one. There are two. There’s Blue Origin. It’s a company has got thousands of people building rocket ships but it’s not a real business yet. It’s a weird one. Other than that, no company I’ve ever worked for still exists. They all went out of business because I was too early or the idea was too crazy or whatever. The amazing thing is I’m fine. The Silicon Valley mentality. I come from the Silicon Valley of the ‘80s. That was very much about using a startup as a vehicle to invent a new technology, bring it into the world, create a market, make something people didn’t even know they wanted. All that is what I grew up with and what I believe in and what I want to be a part of and what I want to do. That’s been diluted and eroded by a lot of what’s happening in the tech industry now but that’s still what I’m for and what I want to do, and so I did. I worked for startups, so a lot of them either I started them or my friends started them and I worked for them and even so they’re often too early but every single one of them, all those technologies exist now. They all exist in the market. We were right about every one of them. We’re ten years too early. Do you think you’ve gotten better at being able to predict when it’s too early or do you think you’re still just as bad? Now I know the difference. I’m not better at predicting but I know when I’m too early and I don’t make the same kinds of bets on things. I wouldn’t start a company that’s ten years too early again. What do you think is ten years too early right now? All kinds of things. Fusion reactors, quantum computing, probably a startup based on CRISPR, all things that are ten years too early or they still need research. They still need economies of scale and cost reduction. They need a market demand. There are so many things. You can’t create all of those things all at once as a small little tiny startup. You have to pick one. It’s like, we got to get lucky about one thing, not a Rube Goldberg machine of seven things that all have to line up. The companies I start are quite pragmatic. They look a little deranged from now outside because of how I described them. I’ll use technologies that I’m comfortable with but the rest of the world isn’t. I’m obsessed with rearchitecting entire industries using machine learning because this is a superpower that we have that we can use to change almost everything that humans do. It’s scary to everyone except for the handful of people who understand the technology. It’s hard to get your head around that but I don’t have those same problems. For me, if I can look it up a business or an industry and understand how it’s structured to understand its problems, then I can use those tools to radically reinvent how it’s done. That to me is exciting. What for you is the next thing? It sounds like you’re interested in that particular aspect. Is there a particular field that you’re thinking about yet? I’ve got obsessed a long time ago with these ideas around automating apparel manufacturing because this is a very manual industry. It’s a massive industry. The numbers, I say these almost every day, “Somebody but $2.4 trillion a year apparel, that’s almost as big as the oil industry or cars maybe.” This is a big industry. Every human on Earth is a customer. In 2019, we made 100 billion garments not for the 7 billion people on Earth but the 1 billion people who buy them. Twenty-five percent of those are in the landfill already. Of those, 30% of them still have the tags on. This is one of the most wasteful industries on earth. It’s sad because it’s responsible for a massive amount of freshwater depletion. This is a major natural resource for humans that we’re depleting. We’re running out of fresh water and it’s not easy to make more. It’s an industry that is polluting rivers and killing off all the life in them. The cities where your jeans come from in China, everyone has some kind of cancer. They have lesions on their skin. Everybody is suffering from this industry and we keep making it bigger and keep making it worse. What do you think the solution is? A big part of what I do is I try to understand problems and this is an industry that’s full of problems. They collected every problem and then they didn’t adopt any technology. They haven’t installed Windows 95 yet. This is an industry that they’re sticking their heads in the sand about the technologies we have that could change it. To me, that looks like a ripe opportunity and a chance to rearchitect the industry without all those problems. What do you think the biggest thing is? Part of it, to me, based on the statistics you said, it sounds like there’s a supply-demand issue and that they are not very good at predicting what’s going to be interesting in fashion. The way I think about it, they have got to have the lowest cost labor, which means you’ve got to do it in Asia, which means you have long product cycles. Six, seven, eight, nine months is normal for the fashion industry. That means you’re doing speculative manufacturing. When people have been underperforming, it usually has to do with what they're dealing with personally.Share on X It’s definitely not just in time. Just in time is a ‘90s term that means all of the components from the supply chain land at the factory in time to make the batch. Not like it’s produced at the time that you need it. On demand means I produce it after it’s sold. At the moment when I have a buyer, then I produce it. I’m trying to rearchitect the apparel industry beyond demand. That’s what Bombsheller does. That’s the company I built to prove that concept. Now that the concept is proven, I want to go do that at a larger scale. Anyway, that speculative manufacturing drives all the problems in my mind because they’re producing stuff and then discovering later whether they guessed right or not about what would sell. In 2019, H&M burned $4.3 billion worth of clothes. H&M is the bottom of the market already. There’s nowhere you can take it, “It didn’t sell at H&M. Send it to TJ Maxx and sell it for 50% off.” No, they’re already the bottom. There’s a liquidation after H&M. It’s obscene and it’s bad for humans. It’s bad for the world. It’s our responsibility to clean these things up. Historically maybe we didn’t have that opportunity, but we certainly have it now. In my mind, you’re responsible not to go use these technologies to solve these problems and we can do it. That one looks easy to me. That’s not hubris. We’ve already proven a lot of this with Bombsheller but it is still work. We have to build a company and build a brand to build factories and ship a lot of products and then get the rest of the industry to copy us. What you’re looking to do is you’re looking to be the demonstration such that they have to deal with and compete with you and then they copy. You’re like, “My work here is done.” By then, I can be the apparel equivalent of Tesla or Uber. The way that they’re structured is different. They aren’t in a position to make the change. I can take over the industry. We’ll see. I am curious about you being a dad, the choice to do that and what the whole process has been like. I have people in my life now that have tiny humans that are getting less tiny and I’m curious your perspective on that whole thing. My daughter was adopted from Ethiopia. Her mom and I were married at the time and we’re not anymore but when we decided to adopt, you look at these different kinds of adoption programs and the most popular ones here in the US are Eastern Europe. The reason is because you get white kids. It’s not politically correct but there’s higher demand for them. It’s unfortunate because a lot of the adoption programs in Eastern Europe come with a lot of problems. There’s a lot of fraud, lots of fetal alcohol. These kids are in fetal alcohol syndrome. There’s lots of abuse in the orphanages and things. These kids have it rough. You get over there to pick up a kid and find out they have siblings or find out they have Down Syndrome. Everybody has a horror story. It’s a sad situation but you still want to do the best you can for those kids. That’s one class. American adoption programs within the country are popular but most of those are set up so that you meet a pregnant mom and work out a deal with her. You can take the baby home when she has it from the hospital. She gets two days to decide if she wants it back. Those are the two craziest days of her life with grandmothers and aunties breathing down her neck. That didn’t sound like the stress I wanted. I made a spreadsheet of all the different countries you could adopt from. It’s not every country, it’s like fifteen countries. That has a paved route for adoption to the US. We did a comparative analysis and figured out, “Ethiopia sounds amazing,” and it was. Ethiopia, they don’t even drink. The country is dry by choice. In fact, the emperor back in the ‘70s tried to get them to start drinking and have bars as a way of improving tourism. It’s almost no alcoholism. There’s no drug abuse. The orphanages are happy places. Ethiopians are super genteel people. It was amazing. That worked out. It paved the charts for all the things we wanted. Those other things like, “Can you choose the gender or the age of the kids you get.” We went through all that, and you do nine months of paperwork and then you get a kid. That’s the start of it. It’s also very fraught with anxiety and there’s a moment along the way where you get what’s called a referral and that’s where they match you to a kid. At that moment, it becomes so real. I got a little photo of the size of a postage stamp of my kid who I’d never met halfway around the world, sitting in a third world country, waiting on paperwork from the government. That starts to get hard because I’m like, “Let’s go get the kid.” We had to wait another four months. That gets hard. I go into commando mode. I’m like, “We’re going to parachute in and extract the kid.” How old was she? She was eight months old when we got her. She was, undernourished, had scabies and Giardia and couldn’t sit up. We went to pick her up in Ethiopia. We spent a week or so there and every day we’d go to the orphanage. She’d spend the day with us a part of the day with us getting used to us. She goes spend the night there and they had nannies and all this stuff she’s used to there. She wouldn’t take a bottle from us and it started to get a little nerve-wracking because we know we’ve got to get on a plane for 33 hours to get her home and she’s not taking a bottle for us. I would go to the orphanage. I would get the nanny, the baby and a translator. I would say, “She’s not taking a bottle for us. Can you show us how you do it?” The nanny is an Ethiopian woman who would grab the baby, stick the bottle in, everything would work fine. It was amazing to see. Even at that age, even at eight months old, she knew that you don’t take a bottle from white people in black clothes. It’s black people in white clothes. She had that and it was amazing. After a week, she started to finally take the bottle from us and all worked out fine. It was things like that are amazing. We got her home and even flying home from Ethiopia, up until that moment the year before, you wonder about everything. You wonder like, “What’s it going to be like being a parent but also what’s going to be raising a black kid in a white neighborhood? What if I don’t like her?” I got other things going on. How are the hormones that are going with? How’s that going to work? By the time we landed the plane in Seattle, that kid was 100% my daughter for life. I was completely in love with her. I will never leave her, everything about it. It’s incredible. No question. That was years ago and not a moment of hesitation since. Another weird thing and this is an interesting thing about Seattle. You would think it would be a little bit weird sometimes. You got this mixed-race family, your daughter’s got an Afro. Am I doing a good job of keeping the braids in it? There might be some moments where it’s awkward. Never once. Nobody’s ever said anything disparaging about our family or even mildly awkward. That’s one of the amazing things about Seattle. That’s not true in a lot of places in the world. It’s not true where I grew up. It’s not true in a lot of places I’ve traveled to. We’d be weird. Here, it’s no problem. Everybody’s supportive. Everybody accepts the whole thing the way they should. It’s cool. Anyway, so that’s the origin. How old is she now? She’s in middle school. She’s super precocious. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Dating’s coming up soon. For her. Maybe, I don’t know. It’s extreme. Every stage of it is extreme. Every stage of it is overwhelming and you can’t believe how much work it is. What’s something that you didn’t know where you’re like, “No way?” They evolve to command all your attention. She’s a survival of the fittest rock star already from the day I got her. She was abandoned in Ethiopia. She’s not going to let me leave her for dead. She commands all your attention and it’s how she’s evolved. It’s hard as a parent because it’s relentless. You don’t get a break. Anything else you can be like, “Fuck off. I’ll call you back tomorrow,” but not being a parent. She’s on your mind, 24/7. Especially as a baby, you don’t get a break all day. When they’re a year old, you’re like, “We fed her. She’s had her nap. She peed. We changed her diaper. Everything’s fine. She’s playing with a thing. I can call the electric company and pay my bill.” That’s about as much attention as you can get and then you’re anticipating it. How do you run a business in the middle of all of that? It’s your wife who watches the kid and you get away. That’s the way to do it. Don’t be a mom, be a dad because that’s the winning strategy. Moms, I could never do that job. It totally consumes you because my daughter’s mom, her brain is fixated on the kid’s needs at all times. She knows when Sion has to pee about a month before Sion knows she has to pee. She’s focused on it. It’s an amazing and wonderful gift that she’s given up her entire life to be a mom. It’s intensive. I got a break for a few hours a day where I could go to work and get away. It’s insanity on a parent. How do you think that people do that? Here’s the thing. One parent stays home isn’t an option for the vast majority of people, at least in the United States, because of the need for double income. How do you think about that? When you’re on a farm, kids are an asset that can work for you. In a city, kids are liabilities that are going to cost you almost every dollar you’ve ever made. You should not have kids. That’s the right answer. If you can’t get away with not having kids, at least adopt a kid and try to keep it to one so that your because your life ends and the little kids’ life takes over. That’s not an economical thing for most people. We’re lucky to be able to afford to raise our kid in the city and do okay. The right way to do it. I had a friend from Zambia. She grew up in Africa in a village where it’s a whole bunch of kids. Some of the moms have died of AIDS. You have a kid and pop it into the village and the village raises all the kids in a giant swarm. It takes a village. She told me, “She can’t imagine raising kids in America.” If she has kids, she’s going back to Zambia because she needs a village and you can’t get one here. This is an interesting question. I’ve been thinking about the whole village concept when it comes to entrepreneurs and families. I’m very interested in co-housing and all of that stuff. How do we reinstitute the villages? Do you think that there’s anything that’s fundamental with our society that is preventative of villages? Do you think that it’s fell out of vogue and now we’re realizing how much we’re paying the price for it and now it’s going to come back into vogue? We’re definitely at the point where we’re realizing we’re paying the price for it. I feel that way. Even where I grew up, my family was small. I had a brother and my parents. We didn’t have any direct relatives in the state. My ancestors were in other states. My ex-wife’s family was big. They also had immigrated but they have big family concept. There were five kids. Most of the kids had kids and there’s a whole tribe going there. They all hang out at grandma’s house on weekends and it’s a village thing. They get a lot of support from each other. Grandma helped raise the kids, all of them. She’s amazing, I don’t know how they do that. There’s that thing that’s possible. Family, you can never get away from. Even though you abused your family members by making them babysit your kids and stuff like that, they abuse you by making you babysit their kids and stuff. It all keeps going. With friends, in my life, I optimize for friends more than family because I liked being able to choose. My family is good and all but I like to be able to choose people who have shared interests and things. It’s very difficult to build a relationship as deep and significant as a family member with friends because they’re here in the city for a while until you get a job offer in the Bay Area or vice versa. People are coming and going and you can’t abuse them the same way. My friends didn’t babysit my daughter too much. Is that a willingness issue or is that a willingness to ask issue? It’s a willingness to ask issue. That’s part of it. I don’t want to babysit anyone’s kids, so don’t ask me. That sense of community has eroded so much in modern life because we don’t need each other to survive. Up until 50 to 100 years ago, a person couldn’t survive on their own. You had to get married, you had to have a family, and you had to have somebody helping you out. Now, anybody can survive on their own. You can get a job, even if it’s a lame one. You can pay rent and you can buy food. You can get by. I’m not to disparage anyone who’s got a tougher situation but the point is your neighbors, I don’t know my neighbors. I know the one guy over here a little bit. The folks in the building, there are three neighbors. I don’t hang out with them. I don’t know anybody else who lives in this immediate neighborhood. Upper Queen Anne over there, I know people because my daughter goes to school there. What do you think that is? As I said, I’ve been thinking about the co-housing thing a lot and I live in the Pike Place Market. There’s a very interesting community aspect that happens there, more so than other places. I’ve been there for years now. You do know some neighbors but you’re the type of person who would know. I am the type of person that would try to know their neighbors. We got team-building and leadership stuff all starts to kick in. What’s happening is we’ve homogenized on a few life patterns, let’s say. That’s what people are growing up looking forward to and expecting. Humans are only good at doing what they’ve seen done before. We’ve only seen a few things. We’ve seen them become an old maid cat lady. We’ve seen get married and have a kid and then get divorced and then fight. There’s that pattern. They’ll get married, grow old together, and have nothing in common and don’t get divorced because it would look bad to the kids. There are a few patterns. I’m being disingenuous but basically, we have a few patterns. You notice there are not happy ones in your list. They’re off for a little while but I’m not being totally disingenuous. The truth is a lot of them are happy for a while. I was married for twenty years and a lot of them were good years and I’m not sorry about that. It was successful for a long time but it wasn’t something that would work for our entire lives. We’re already out living the median lifespan of a human. Those first 30 years, if a long time ago, let’s say, I got married at twelve and had babies by 13, 14, 15, died by 30, you’re doing pretty good. You don’t have time to get cancer. Cancer isn’t going to catch you if you died at 30. Now that we’re living to 70, we got a lot of problems and some of them, it’s hard to maintain those relationship structures for so long. Do you think that that’s fundamental or do you think that we just sucked at figuring out how to do that well? It’s fundamental but we suck at figuring out what to do because we’re trying to do what we’ve seen done, whether it works or not for us. The answer is you got to run a lot of experiments. This is one of the amazing things about Seattle, San Francisco, being on the West Coast. We are running lots of experiments. Co-housing doesn’t sound like a crazy thing. If you show up in Indiana or Tulsa, Oklahoma and talk about co-housing, I don’t think people know that work. No offense. You’re going to be like, “That’s some weird hippie stuff.” It’s especially going to fail and a lot of it does fail because it’s not a fair experiment. If you start an experiment, you don’t get equal support for this experiment that people doing the traditional thing would get, then it’s a doomed experiment. You have to have societies that are willing to allow people to try things like having multiple partners or having co-parenting situations or cohabitation situations or different kinds of things to figure out what works. Sometimes those things do work and I’ve seen a lot of them because I used to live in San Francisco and there’s some weird shit going on and everybody plays along and we’ll try to be supportive like, “What happens?” “There are three people in this couple and we’re trying to send them a wedding invitation but do we put Mr. and Ms. and Mrs.?” We don’t even have conventions for these things. Every time you don’t have a convention, it’s one more thing that makes it hard on the people and experiment even if they had something good going. These are very difficult things to solve in short order. They take a long time but overall, what I try to do is give people the benefit of the doubt, let them try the craziest thing that they can bring themselves to try and see if they discover something that can work. Don’t judge them based on whether they lived happily ever after. If it worked for a while, that’s pretty good. If you can take care of somebody and be good to them for a while, a good place to start would be better breakups. That’s totally possible. I’ve seen some amazing ones. I’ve heard some great breakups. Great divorces even. Those are things people should strive for. That should be part of your model and say, “We’re going to do this until death do us part or until we have a good breakup. Let’s try and get ahead of that.” That’s not usually what’s in people’s vows but if you can’t do that, you’re going to do more damage to each other, to kids, to people around you. We already know marriage is long in the tooth as an institution. It’s great for people who want to try it. It’s good for some people for some time but lots of them are failing. You have to accept the statistical probability that it’s not going to last forever. Don’t make your only way out raising everything and burning it to the ground. It’s sad to see that happen. It’s damaging to a lot of people. I don’t know what the answers are but the way to find those are through lots of experiments. I can keep asking questions all day long. We did good. It’s not so bad. We’ll let you go. Thanks for doing this. Important Links: Danny Hillis – TEDx video Y Combinator About Adina Mangubat Adina is the CEO and co-founder of Spiral Genetics, a leader in bioinformatics for population genomics. At Spiral Genetics, she leads complex sales to highly technical audiences, drives business development and product vision, and has built a diverse team of highly talented technical and scientific individuals to develop the world’s most advanced bioinformatics technology. In addition, she is the primary catalyst for creating a transparent, high integrity, and mission-driven culture. Early in her career, Adina worked with two other high-technology companies wherein her role included team development, brand development, marketing, channel development and sales for complex technologies. A graduate of the University of Washington, Adina holds a B.S. in Psychology with a focus on Entrepreneurship and was recognized by the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association as one of the 2013 Women to Watch in Life Science. Additionally, she was featured in Forbes 2013 “30 under 30″ for Science and Healthcare. In 2017, Forbes named her as one of the All Star Alumni for the 30 under 30 in Science and Healthcare. Adina’s passion for world-changing technology, coupled with her adept entrepreneurial focus and clear team development skills have enabled her to bring Spiral’s technology to the forefront of bioinformatics innovation. Recorded on May 1, 2019The post Into the World of Genomics ＆ Entrepreneurship — Adina Mangubat appeared first on .

14 snips

Mar 10, 2021 • 2h 3min

Video Games: Optimized Learning Environments — David Edery

David Edery, co-founder and CEO of Spry Fox, shares his insights into the power of video games as learning tools. He discusses the unique dynamics of gaming, where engagement is key, and how this can translate into educational benefits. Edery emphasizes the capacity of games to promote empathy and personal growth, particularly in challenging contexts like mental health. He also explores the future of indie game development and the importance of practical learning in the educational system, advocating for a shift towards integrating games into curricula.

5 snips

Jan 22, 2021 • 1h 59min

Building the Right Thing at the Right Time - Jeremy Bornstein

In this engaging conversation, Jeremy Bornstein, a seasoned engineering executive and tech pioneer, shares insights from his journey in technology and innovation. They reminisce about early computing experiences and how childhood interests sparked a passion for programming. Jeremy discusses his entrepreneurial journey with Xigo, the rise of AI in finance, and the cultural shifts he encountered moving from Alaska to Silicon Valley. He also emphasizes the importance of mentorship and cultivating creativity through curious exploration in technology.

The AI-powered Podcast Player

Save insights by tapping your headphones, chat with episodes, discover the best highlights - and more!

Get the app

Deep Future

Episodes

Mentioned books

Top Sleep Doctor's Brain Dump - Michael Breus, Ph.D

Urban Transportation ＆ the Truth about Garbage — Assaf Biderman

Reimagining Entertainment, Work ＆ Education — Brent Bushnell

Kids Building Dyson Swarms — Levi Hurt

Exosomes, Stem Cells, Ketamine ＆ VR — Dr. Melissa Selinger

Sex on Demand for Women — Saundra Pelletier

Diving Deep into the World of Computer Hacking & Becoming a Hacker — Riley Eller

Into the World of Genomics ＆ Entrepreneurship — Adina Mangubat

Video Games: Optimized Learning Environments — David Edery

Building the Right Thing at the Right Time - Jeremy Bornstein

The AI-powered Podcast Player