155: Kingpin

In this episode, we delve into the multifaceted career of Joe Grand, also known as “Kingpin.” A renowned hardware hacker and computer engineer, Joe has been exploring and manipulating electronic systems since the 1980s. As a former member of the legendary hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries, he has significantly contributed to the cybersecurity landscape. Joe is also the proprietor of Grand Idea Studio, a research and development firm, and has shared his expertise through various media, including his YouTube channel. Join us as we explore Joe’s unique perspective on hacking, engineering, and his extraordinary journey in the world of technology. https://joegrand.com/ https://linktr.ee/joegrand SponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker® https://www.threatlocker.com/. ThreatLocker® is a Zero Trust Endpoint Protection Platform that strengthens your infrastructure from the ground up. With ThreatLocker® Allowlisting and Ringfencing™, you gain a more secure approach to blocking exploits of known and unknown vulnerabilities. ThreatLocker® provides Zero Trust control at the kernel level that enables you to allow everything you need and block everything else, including ransomware! Learn more at www.threatlocker.com https://www.threatlocker.com/. Support for this show comes from Lumen https://www.lumen.me/darknet. It used to be hard to track your metabolism, but Lumen is a little device that you breath into which tells you if your burning fat or carbs, fast and easy and have your results in seconds. And knowing that will help you know what kind of food your body needs. And knowing that will help you with your health goals like losing weight or gaining muscle. Take the next step to improving your health go to lumen.me/darknet https://www.lumen.me/darknet. Support for this show comes from ZipRecruiter https://www.ziprecruiter.com/DARKNET. ZipRecruiter has solved the hiring problem. Employers prefer it the most for so many reasons. Let’s start by telling you about their matching technology. They work hard to find the best candidates for your needs, and will instantly show you results once you post a job listing. ZipRecruiter will speed up your hiring process. See it for yourself at www.ziprecruiter.com/DARKNET https://www.ziprecruiter.com/DARKNET.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jack Rhysider?

  Sometimes the people I want to talk to on this show are so cool that I want to be friends with them. Hey, I'm recording.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 0:06Jack Rhysider?

  All right, let me get this. Where are we going?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Let's go to the lair, where the magic happens.

• 0:11Jack Rhysider?

  And Joe Gran is someone who, because we have so much in common, I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  All right, here we go.

• 0:20Jack Rhysider?

  Oh my, quite the place.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:23Jack Rhysider?

  You've got a display case here, then you've got a table here with a ton of projects you're working on.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is kind of the main table that you, people probably see in videos. I have my computer, my oscilloscope, that is my one piece of test equipment that I'm always using, power supply, and a couple of different projects. Some fault injection setup here. All these circuit boards are for a class I'm teaching in a couple of weeks. So I have to get those prepared.

• 0:50Jack Rhysider?

  Showed me around his office, and I think a better description for his office would be a workshop. It's really a place that sparks creativity. Wherever you look, it's full of gadgets and tools that are just becking you to pick something up and start building something.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Workbench with various pieces of circuitry. And yeah, a lot of display stuff also.

• 1:09Jack Rhysider?

  Got your YouTube plaque on the wall.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Got the YouTube plaque on the wall, yeah.

• 1:13Jack Rhysider?

  And we found some comfy spots to plop down on and have a chat for a while, because I wanted to hear all the stories that Joe had. How many books have you written? That's a good question.

• 1:28Jack Rhysider?

  These are true stories from the dark side of the internet.

• 1:35Jack Rhysider?

  I'm Jack Resider. This is Darknet Diaries.

• 1:56Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Black Hills Information Security. Black Hills InfoSec loves sharing their knowledge through free webcasts, blogs, zines, comics, and courses designed for beginners and those more advanced. Through their anti-siphon training, they teach you the cybersecurity skills you need, from SOC analyst tools and methodologies to setting traps and running deception operations. It's hands-on, practical training built for people who want to advance and hone their skills. The world of cybersecurity has changed a lot in the last year, and every day seems to bring new questions about what comes next. And that's why anti-siphon training is hosting a free summit on December 9th, asking what in the actual cyber happened in 2026?

• 2:38Jack Rhysider?

  Join experienced practitioners as they share practical lessons, real-world experiences, and insights into the top security news of 2026. And because you're a Darknet Diaries listener, they've got a little something extra waiting for you at blackhillsinfsec.com/darknet. Go to blackhillsinfsec.com/darknet.

• 3:04Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Arctic Wolf. Everyone is slapping AI-powered on their security tools, but Arctic Wolf took a different approach. Instead of duct taping AI onto the SOC, they rebuilt the SOC around AI and called it the Aurora Superintelligence Platform. If you ever tried to build your own AI pipeline, you know the pain. Data engineering, model tuning, governance, validation, Aurora removes all of it. You deploy it and instantly inherit the intelligence, guardrails, and operational maturity of one of the world's largest agentic SOC. Under the hood, Aurora is running a fully agentic architecture they call the Swarm of Experts. These agents are battle-tested inside the world's largest commercial SOC and only ship when they can outperform human-only workflows.

• 3:49Jack Rhysider?

  And its integration is seamless as Aurora works within Arctic Wolf's concierge experience, allowing your security team to focus on higher-value strategy and proactive risk reduction. If you want to see what a real trustworthy agent-led SOC looks like, not the Marketing slide version, go to arcticwolf.com/darknet. That's arcticwolf.com/darknet.

• 4:14Jack Rhysider?

  Hi.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Hey. Hi again.

• 4:17Jack Rhysider?

  Why don't we start with your name and what do you do?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Uh, my name is Joe Grand and I'm a hacker.

• 4:23Jack Rhysider?

  After hanging out with Joe a few hours, I think, yeah, he absolutely is a hacker. And I think it's becoming increasingly rare to find a hacker in their 40s. I think we all rebel as teenagers. We have a lot of that youthful energy and are waking up to the world for the first time. And we start ignoring the advice of our parents and listen to music, which talks about the problems of the world and we resonate with it. And we come of age listening to that stuff and we either want change or to fight the system. For me and for Joe, our teenage rebelliousness began as skateboarders. Back then, there was a sense that skaters were counterculture, not abiding by the rules or the norms of society. I remember the first time I fell in love with skaters. It was in middle school and I saw them all outside laying in the grass during lunch. And there was fallout, so there were a lot of leaves everywhere.

• 5:08Jack Rhysider?

  And a few of them were throwing leaves at each other and they were rolling around in it. Then the bell rang and we all had to go to class. And they all looked at each other and silently agreed not to brush themselves off and instead come to class as messy as possible with leaves all through their hair and clothes and grass everywhere. One sat in front of me in my class, totally a mess, and he paid absolutely no mind to it. He acted as if nothing was going on different. And I love that attitude. It enticed me. It drew me in to not care about how you look or any norms or expectations that people have on you, to just be your wild and goofy self. There's a sense of freedom in that. And that's when I started hanging out with the skaters and I felt completely at home there and remained a skater all through middle school and high school.

• 5:52Jack Rhysider?

  Joe and I both got into computers around the same time, too. And for both of us, we had just great fun in seeing all that it could do, building things, breaking things, trying just about every possible thing that we heard about. Bulletin boards, floppy disks, DOS, AOL, IRC, FTP, Unix, Windows, programming, electronics, circuits. It was simply great fun to sit down on a Saturday night at a computer and just try to do something new with it, like to try out a new operating system or compile a kernel from scratch. We would absolutely Try what other people tried before us, things that have tutorials for them. But then we'd soon find ourselves in areas where no tutorials exists for this. No manuals explain what to do here. We were off the map, explorers of the digital world.

• 6:37Jack Rhysider?

  And it felt like we were trying to get computers to do things they weren't intended to do, which in my opinion is the definition of a hacker. To push beyond the roadblocks that stop you from doing something and to try to get it done anyway. Living in that space is hard, though. It's like you're walking in the dark and you're constantly bumping into things. You feel stupid for not knowing what to do and just failing again and again. And it's frustrating when it doesn't work and you give up. As a youth, you don't quite know that what you're doing is different than how other people are using these tools. So it just feels normal to stumble and struggle with whatever technology you have. You get used to that. But as you learn more about the world and grow up, you find your place in it.

• 7:21Jack Rhysider?

  And you try to be good in your domain of expertise. You want to find a place where you feel comfortable and confident. It's uncomfortable and hard to learn things without instruction manuals or YouTube videos to teach you. So you wait for others to learn the things before you so that they can teach you, which means you lose your edge. You're not on the frontier of knowledge anymore. You're not pushing the systems beyond their intended purpose. As we get older, we lose that drive and instead just become better at following the rules. And as you grow older, you stop rebelling too. Maybe because you're just tired or because you just accept that life is going to be unfair. You realize that you have responsibilities too, so you can't afford to get in trouble anymore.

• 8:06Jack Rhysider?

  You lose that punk side of yourself. But Joe never lost that. Joe never turned his curiosity down or off. Joe learned how to feel comfortable. walking in the dark, bumping into things, failing again and again. And in fact, he likes that place. He loves that chase of finding the answer somewhere in the muck that nobody else has ever found before. That place of pushing things beyond their intended use. He ignores people telling him, that's impossible. He pushes through roadblocks and just acts like they don't exist. While most of us have grown tired of inventing or finding creative ways to solve novel problems. Joe has more energy than ever to dance and play in that space. And it's amazing to watch him work.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I still have this idealistic view of my little bubble of what a hacker is. And to me, it basically is kind of somebody who's questioning the system and curious about technology and wanting to learn things and bypassing security. And really, like, I grew up, even before I knew what a hacker was, like, I was pushing people's buttons. I was causing trouble. I had this mischievous side.

• 9:15Jack Rhysider?

  That's what I was gonna ask you. As a hacker, have you ever been arrested?

• 9:21Speaker 01

  I have been arrested, and it was a great lesson and a great experience. It did change some of my behavior, but the hacker mindset and that ethos is still with me and it's been the same since I was a kid. I feel the same way that I felt then as a hacker and how I fit into the world and into the society that I do now, right? So like, even though I got arrested and that changed kind of my perspective a little bit, changed my behavior so I wouldn't get arrested again. My mindset is the same and I don't know, but I have a sense of like that that's changing with a lot of people.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Where somebody of my age, of my generation, who grew up with computers, has maybe a different mindset than people who got into it later. I don't really know. I just know how I feel and I'm very kind of rigid in my beliefs as a hacker and my responsibilities as a hacker.

• 10:22Jack Rhysider?

  In 1982, he got some Atari equipment and when he was like eight, nine, 10, he was just mesmerized by the world of electronics. This eventually led him to computers and he got a modem. He could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach other computers somewhere else in the world.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Which ultimately led me to hook up with some guys that I'd met on some bulletin board systems and was part of a group called Renegade Legion. We wrote some early text files on some phone freaking, credit card fraud, like how to break into the CBI Credit Bureau and pull credit records and then like get actual credit cards and things that as a kid didn't seem, didn't seem bad. It was a cool thing to do. I mean, even now, I don't, you know, yes, it's a crime. Do I feel bad about it? No. Has it happened to me? Like dozens of times, my credit card has been stolen. It's a fact of life now.

• 11:12Jack Rhysider?

  Back then to hack a system would sometimes simply be telling your computer to dial a phone number and it might let you into that system without a password. Or maybe you could just mash the keyboard and it would let you in. Hacking was a lot simpler then, but there really weren't instructions on how to do it. You were kind of on your own to discover what was out there.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  But yeah, so getting into those systems, the process basically was like, and this was when I was 14, 15 at this point of like, all right, let's look through the White Pages, which was, you know, the book of everybody in your area. Let's find the doctor, let's find the dentist. Look up their name in the credit bureau system, see what their credit was, because you could see their name, their social security number, credit rating, what credit cards they had. Pick the one that had a high credit. Get all that information, call the credit card company, give them what they needed and say, hey, I'm doctor whatever, I'm on vacation, can you, I lost my card, can you send me another card? They'd send you a new physical card and you'd go use it. But that was later on. The earlier days, there was a lot of this curious exploration

• 12:13Speaker 01

  because we would war dial. We would take a prefix and say, okay, like, just like in war games, like when, you know, David Lightman was trying to find out his school computer. I figured if our school computer was connected, it would be within that range. So doing those war dialing sessions overnight, of course, so like my parents wouldn't pick up the phone and hear everything because at that point you still had an automatic, you could do automatic dialing, but it was still, everybody was sharing a single phone line in the house. And then you'd, you know, wake up to a list of phone numbers and you're trying those and you'd never know like what it was. It was like this, this kind of treasure hunt.

• 12:51Jack Rhysider?

  Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So as part of joining Renegade Legion, so a bunch of teenagers doing stuff online and whatever, like, we thought it would be cool for everybody to meet up in person during all of our winter break. Most of us were in high school, some of the guys were a little bit older. And one of the guys, whose name was Dr. Death, was in Michigan. And that was kind of a central point where everybody else was coming from. So on one of our alliance teleconferences, where we're all talking on the phone, big party lines, and of course, being billed to somebody else, someone's like, "Hey, we should all get together." So we decided, during our school break, everybody meet up at Dr. Death's house. And we'd hang out, he had like, an arcade game, and a pool table. And my parents talked to his parents, and they're like, "Okay, this seems like a stable household."

• 13:40Speaker 01

  So they actually let me fly to Michigan on my own, meet up with all these other hackers. And remember that this was already eight years after I'd been using the computer. Like, my parents knew what I was up to, but they didn't really know. So we all got together and hung out, and then somebody had an idea of like, "Hey, let's break into the telephone company so we can get some hardware and get some documentation." And like, at the time, the internet was starting to kind of be a thing, but not really. This was 92, so really, it was hackers against the phone system. And Ma Bell, New England Telephone, 9X, Michigan Bell, whatever, Pacific Bell, all of those companies, that was the target of phone freaking, exploring the phone network.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  Like, that was, for us, that was kind of the Holy Grail. We went to the hardware store and bought like, some big bolt cutters and some rubber gloves. And like, it was like a really bad movie. And bought all the equipment to like, you know, break into this place, some automatic center punches to break the windows. So we basically went to the Michigan Bell telephone facility, which was down the street from this guy's house, and went in and cut through the fence, pulled the fence back. I had this jacket at the time that I would wear every single day, and it tore a little hole in the shoulder on my way in. So that was sort of like this mark of pride after that. So we didn't break into the building itself, but we smashed the windows of the vans that had all of the infield equipment.

• 15:09Jack Rhysider?

  What were you looking for?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Documentation, manuals, hardware, telephone test equipment, things that like other phone freakers, other hackers didn't have, and took as much stuff as we possibly could. I think there were six of us. One of the guys was a larger fellow, so he was our lookout, and he was listening to the scanner radio to see when the police were called. And, um, which it turns out that if you use a scanner radio during committing a crime, that's like an additional crime. Yeah, at least at the time. I didn't know that. Especially a scanner radio, there was no serial number on it because it was scraped off because it was stolen.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  So yeah, he ended up getting caught. The rest of us got away. But what happened is as we pulled up, next to the telephone facility was a park, and there was a nosey neighbor that was like, hey, there's a bunch of rowdy kids hanging out in the, you know, in the park. So they called the police just because they thought kids were hanging out after curfew or something. By the time the cops showed up, they had the one guy there. He got caught in the car with the scanner radio, and the police report when this guy called in said there were multiple kids. So they're basically like, where are your friends? And then he flipped and was like, ah, there's six of us or however many. We had all gotten home by that time and back to Dr. Desk's house. And we're like, oh, my God, where's, you know, where's this other guy?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Turns out he got arrested, and then the next day we all had to turn ourselves in.

• 16:32Jack Rhysider?

  This was a pretty awful experience for Joe's parents, who had to fly to another state to rescue their son from juvenile detention. I could only imagine it's something like the movie Home Alone, where the mom was trying desperately to get home to her son. Luckily for him, because he was the youngest of the bunch, they let him off without a charge. But the others weren't so lucky. A bunch of them got felonies. Some served jail time.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  One of our other guys was already under, I don't know if it was indictment or investigation or something by the Secret Service for some other phone freaking stuff that we had done as a, as a group, as Renegade Legion. And he ended up dying by suicide. And that was a real eye opener of like, holy shit. Lawbreaker just killed himself like over getting arrested?

• 17:19Jack Rhysider?

  His parents were pretty mad and told him, look, you either need to get a job or take up a sport. And he didn't want to get a job. So he joined the track team at school and started doing a lot of running. And this gave him a group of normal friends, not rebels, not skaters, not hackers, just normal people. And after this scare with the police and running track, he did straighten up a bit, which is how he got to join the Loft. He had to actually tone down his rebelliousness to join this hackerspace.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So Loft or Loft Heavy Industries was really just a safe space, possibly the first hackerspace in the US as an organized space. And it really was just a clubhouse for seven Boston area hackers to hang out and explore and have a place to like play with technology.

• 18:09Jack Rhysider?

  Well, what did this, what does the space look like?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  It was very, so if you imagine like, you know, cyberpunk movie, like maybe hackers, maybe the hackers movie is probably the closest to sort of what it looked like, but it was in, it was a, an artist loft space. So it was a, a one, one big room with like old wood floors. There were PCs, Apple, Apple II's, Macs. We had a VAX 11780, I think.

• 18:42Jack Rhysider?

  The Loft was a magical place with about eight members. It was magical because computers weren't that popular yet. So for there to be a space with electronics and computers, it was really ahead of its time. They were the weirdo nerds into that geeky stuff. And little did they know, the whole world would become weirdo nerds along with them. Because we were all destined to buy computers and electronics in the coming decades.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  I remember seeing Count Zero give talks about like stuff, stuff that we found from the trash or other things that he'd been researching. And seeing his passion of sharing information in that way of like, you don't need to hoard everything. And as kids, we would hoard stuff, but then we would trade bits and pieces because that's what would give you this power. But to see him just. Open up the kimono of like, here's everything I learned. And maybe somebody can take a piece of that and do something else with it. Like, I thought that was such a learning moment for me. And that, when I started giving talks as well, it was like, alright, if I'm gonna talk about something, like, I want to share as much as I possibly can, not to brag about it, but to empower somebody else to say, ooh, that's cool.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I wanna try that, or I wanna build upon this, or maybe I can use this piece of that on something else. And, once I learned that, like, everything changed. Because it was all about empowering this community to grow. And I would learn from other people, and you'd learn from, you know, they would learn from somebody else and share that with you. So it was this very communal, sort of, knowledge growth, I guess you could say. And that's, that's the main thing I learned from the Loft. And that, for sure, is like, of, of everything that I've learned, like, that is, has stuck with me the most.

• 20:25Jack Rhysider?

  Loft was legendary. It was kinda like a research group. They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers. And they released such tools like Loft Crack, which can sometimes crack Windows passwords. They'd publish new ideas of how to break systems or hack things. In fact, they were so legendary, that they ended up going to Washington DC to testify before the Senate.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  And I remember, they called us up to the stand, and we sit there, and there's all this, so we see the senators in front of us, but right below them, facing us, was like this row of media. And we sat down, and it was just like, camera flash, camera flash. And it was like the paparazzi. Because it had never happened before. You never had hackers talking to the government.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  We're joined today by the seven members of the Loft Hacker Think Tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Due to the sensitivity of the work done at the Loft, they'll be using their hacker names. Of Mudge, Weld, Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Space Rogue, Tan, and Stefan.

• 21:35Jack Rhysider?

  Joe's hacker name is Kingpin, and this was back in 1998. Good morning. My name is Kingpin. I am the youngest member of the Loft, and one of the

• 21:44Speaker 03

  The electrical engineers and hardware hackers. While some of the loft members concentrate on software programming, I work with hardware design and implementation of electronic circuits. My interests include embedded system design, surveillance and counter-surveillance tools, and wireless data transmissions. My current research project involves experimentation with the monitoring and eavesdropping of stray electromagnetic fields from computer terminals, otherwise known as Tempest Monitoring. Using low-cost electronic equipment, one can capture the contents of computer screens from more than 200 meters away, possibly gaining passwords and other sensitive information. The phenomenon of Tempest Monitoring has been known to the industry for decades,

• 22:27Speaker 03

  but there is not much unclassified information available on how to both capture the emissions and also protect oneself from becoming an eavesdropping victim. My research will not only help me learn about the monitoring technology, it will enable me to educate others to help them protect their computer systems from prying eyes.

• 22:45Jack Rhysider?

  Their message was simple. The Internet is not as secure as you think, and we should embrace and welcome hackers to show us where the vulnerabilities are.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  It's probably appropriate that gentlemen such as yourself are the ones who could come forward and demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes. So we appreciate your coming here, especially in light of the fact that The Washington Post described you as "rock stars of the computer hacking elite." I'm informed that you think that within 30 minutes, the seven of you could make the Internet unusable for the entire nation. Is that correct?

• 23:22Speaker 03

  That's correct. Actually, one of us with just a few packets.

• 23:25Jack Rhysider?

  How punk is that? To be this group of hackers coming up to the government saying, "We could take down the Internet."

• 23:31Speaker 04

  Somebody had referred to you as "rock stars of the new computer age." It's probably not what you came to hear, but actually, I think you're performing an act of very good citizenship. And...

• 23:47Speaker 04

  I appreciate it. I'd compare you, I hope you don't mind that I'm not going to call you rock stars. I'd compare you more to Rachel Carson, who sounded some early warnings about what environmental pollution was doing to the environment. And in the defense context, you may be modern day Paul Revere's. Except in this case, it's not the British coming. We don't know who's coming. That's the problem. I mean.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  By that time in 98, like a lot of the software guys had found vulnerabilities in Microsoft, and they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at dinners where Microsoft's like, "Oh, we don't think that's going to be a problem. Nobody's going to exploit that." So we would release exploit code, and we were very early, if not the first, to have this sort of discussion of like full disclosure, or what would now be called like coordinated disclosure, or in quotes, responsible disclosure. You know, how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem? Do you trust that the vendor's going to fix it?

• 24:40Jack Rhysider?

  One of the things Loft became known for is pioneering responsible disclosure. The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals, hoodlums, untrustworthy. And Loft thought of themselves as hackers, but didn't see themselves as hoodlums. They're just trying to warn the world of the problems they found. And they wanted people to fix it. They were here to help. But as they told companies about the bugs they found, the companies often misunderstood and thought these guys were there to cause trouble. So Loft was like, "Look, what do we have to do so you'll understand that we're here to help, not hurt you?" And that's where responsible disclosure came about. Companies learned that hackers can be very helpful at identifying vulnerabilities, and it's way better to work with them than to think of them as adversaries.

• 25:22Jack Rhysider?

  So I picture the old, old, old hacker spaces to not have many screens, and mostly just circuit boards you're looking at, and maybe some visual aspect. And I imagine you falling in love with this electronics aspect of it, the hardware components, how these things work. You can send signals here and make it do that, and all this kind of cool stuff. There's chips that have all this really cool CMOS in it. And then computers went in a direction of, no, screens and programming languages and all this software. Did you, did you go in that direction or did you say, no, no, no, I think you all need this hardware. I'm gonna stay with the hardware.

• 26:06Jack Rhysider?

  Or how did you know that you were going to take a different route and not go at the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware? Was that, was that in loft that you kind of made that diversion?

• 26:16Speaker 01

  No, I had been, as soon as I got attracted to computers, I was also getting attracted to electronics. I have, I have an older brother and he was more of like a, an audio file kind of person. He had like radio receivers and things, but he had a lot of electronics that he would take apart and he would fix and put different capacitors in and everything. And he had this junk bin full of circuit boards. And I just loved that tangible side of things, which to me makes sense of like, okay, I'm using a computer and the computer really is like a very simple type of embedded system or electronic system like these other circuit boards.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  But I just, I just loved the, the physical thing and I would start building projects out of magazines. There's a lot of hobbyist electronics magazines at the time. There were a couple people, like a couple text files you could read about of people making some interesting kind of like, even, this was like pre-redbox stuff, but like different types of tone dialers, blue boxes and other telephone related electronics. And so I started building things and I started building my own things. And I knew from an early age, like you couldn't, you couldn't have a career as a hacker. And when everybody would always say like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I always knew like, I'm gonna be an engineer.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  I'm gonna build electronics. So that was something where. It was a parallel path to the hacking was building things. And the electronics that I was building were things like stun guns and some laser listening systems to spy on rooms and kind of mischievous hardware, but things that I could use for the telephone system and subversive technology, like anything I thought was cool.

• 28:05Jack Rhysider?

  Joe's specialty is hardware hacking. As I sit and look around his workshop, it's abundantly clear, too. He's got drawers full of parts. On the table in front of me is something like 60 circuit boards, and he says he's building all these for a class. And there's a fault injector over there and soldering irons and an oscilloscope. And there's something beautiful about the low-level aspect of electronics.

• 28:26Jack Rhysider?

  There are no English words that you can use to program a circuit. Like, you can't say, "If this, then do that," or write out a for loop. No, here, at the circuitry level, you're dealing with electrons going through some metal, and you have to understand the physics of how to manipulate and move these electrons in order to make it do the things you want to do. And it's amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world. Like, it feels like every now and then we reach a limit of like how fast a CPU can operate. And it's like, "Well, that's it, everyone. This is the max speed. There's no way that we're gonna go beyond this. You just can't put more transistors on a chip." But then some scientists discover parallel processing, where they can make it go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs.

• 29:09Jack Rhysider?

  And because there are now two or three things getting processed at once, it's faster than processing one at a time. So this allows us to have faster computers. And then when that limit is hit, when we hit a max there, someone else discovers FinFET transistors, where they can build transistors upwards in like a 3D sort of way, like little fins. And this invention improves processing speed again, and we reach higher and higher of what technology can do. And just the other day, I heard about CPUs that are starting to be made out of glass. There's no doubt that the last 30 years, we've seen some incredible explosions in electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics. It's just a really great space to put focus into, as the world is constantly evolving, and it's exciting.

• 29:53Speaker 01

  In the second loft space, we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was me, Brian Oblivion, Space Rogue. We were into scanner radios. PoXAG was the data transmission of pagers. And it turns out it's still being used to some extent today in certain environments. And we basically loved, and I loved being able to listen in on anything that I could. So in college, it was like cordless phones. At the loft at the time, it was PoXAG, you know, listening into transmissions. So you can kind of see what's going on in the world around you. And the scanner radio, listening to the cops and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what's happening.

• 30:31Jack Rhysider?

  Joe built a little device that lets you snag pager text messages out of the air and see what they say. The messages weren't intended for him. He was just seeing them fly by and his antenna would capture it and decode it. And this was something that the loft was actually selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  Back in the day, you'd see all sorts of stuff because that's how people communicated is with pagers. And there'd be stuff about, you know, buy groceries for me. Or like we saw like some relationship, you know, sexting kind of one way, kind of like, can't wait for you to get home. And you'd see hospital, a lot of hospital traffic, a lot of EMS traffic and like emergency medical kind of things. And yeah, it was just really, it was just really fun to do. And that made a little bit of money. And that was actually my first circuit board that I had mass produced. And then, you know, we'd get our orders. They'd all be mail order. We'd get our, get our mail every week. I'd build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry and we'd package it up.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  And if they wanted a kit, we'd just give them the components. It was just a way to do something, but that really like, that was, that was a contribution that I could help make to the loft to bring, to bring some money in. And then that, that kind of proved the concept of like, ooh, we could make a little bit of money on this, like, what if we could do it full time?

• 31:53Jack Rhysider?

  I might have to do a whole episode on The Loft someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker history. And I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  It became a company. And for me, as this kid who's still like, even though I was starting to grow up, like I'm still, like I said at the beginning, I'm, I still have this kind of punk aspect to me where that wasn't an environment I wanted to be in. And I realized like, okay, the specialness of it, that group is gone. I don't want to work for somebody else. I can't stand if somebody's telling me what to do. In 2003, I split and have been independent ever since. And there's good and bad that has come with that.

• 32:32Jack Rhysider?

  And after that, Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  It was a show called Prototype This, and it was on Discovery Channel, and it was made by the same production company as Mythbusters. And the idea was that this would be the next show after Mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away, which of course, we know, you know, they didn't. And it lasted another 10 years and, you know, spin offs are still happening. But the concept of this show was having four engineers building ridiculous prototypes. I got an email and it was from a casting company. And they're like, yeah, we're looking for engineers. And that was actually, they had talked to Make Magazine, which was like, that had just come out. That's like a maker magazine talking about, you know, electronics and hobby, hobby electronics. And I was on the technical advisory board for them when they first started.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  And this company had contacted Make Magazine saying, hey, do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical engineer, a machinist, and a software engineer. So that, so to complete the circle, they needed a hardware person. So they said, oh, you should talk to Joe. So they reached out to me and I got this email and I remember showing it to my wife. I read it, I was like, I don't know. I was like, I don't know if I want to be on TV. And I showed it to her and she's like, are you crazy? Like this is, you can, you can do what you love to do on TV. So I didn't really, just like with the Senate, like I didn't, I didn't know the impact or the implications of what it would become. I didn't know how special that was.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  And I was like, all right, fine, I'll, I'll do a little interview with them. So I showed all this stuff, didn't really think anything of it, like said bye. I was riding my bike back from San Francisco to San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, just as like a solo bike trip for fun. It was my first experience of like, I want to try to figure out what the hell I'm doing. Like a little bit of self, self-love, like, like I'm gonna do some little meditation kind of thing. Before that was even a known thing, it was just some, I just needed to escape. And um, which is funny because we had just gotten married. And I was talking to my wife about this recently, I'm like, I can't believe like that I did that, that we got married and then I went to San Francisco for like a conference, then I rode my bike,

• 34:45Speaker 01

  then you see you for 10 days or whatever, because I just was doing a little bit at the time. She's like, well, you needed it, like very supportive, uh, which was amazing. So did this bike ride, I didn't have a phone or anything, this was like, you know Nokia phone era. And uh, I didn't even bring a phone, because I really wanted to isolate myself. And um, come back from the trip, turn on my computer and there was like five emails. I'm like, we want you on the show, can you call us back, call us back? So I mean, it's amazing that they even waited, because they could have easily been like, alright, he's not answering, let's go to somebody else. And we spent the next year and a half in a warehouse on Treasure Island in the Bay Area, in San Francisco, building ridiculous giant prototypes.

• 35:28Jack Rhysider?

  Prototype this was pretty darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending water slide. Can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Everybody needs an endless water slide. I mean, it was like, we called it the backyard water slide. And the concept, you know, like the show really was like, in the future, you could have one of these, even though we were just prototyping.

• 35:48Jack Rhysider?

  What they did was, they connected curved water slide parts into a donut-looking shape, like a big circle, and they stood that up so it looked like a big wheel, and then they put water in it and spun it. So if you're inside, you're always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  We had, we did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack, and we had a drone that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea. Like, we did a pizza-delivering robot, which now there are food-delivering robots. And art, maybe they ripped it off the show, I don't know.

• 36:20Jack Rhysider?

  Yeah, you had one where you were, you would try to ride on like a bug robot.

• 36:27Jack Rhysider?

  Right, a giant bug looking thing and then you ride on it. That's not even out yet, like fast forward 20 years, right? What is it?

• 36:34Speaker 01

  Because that was a really hard problem.

• 36:35Jack Rhysider?

  15 years ago and they still don't have rideable robots.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:39Jack Rhysider?

  You were building them.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's like, everybody needs a rideable robot also. Um, I guess the closest thing now are like the autonomous vehicles, which are terrifying. Um, right, this was, this was called the six by six and this was an all train vehicle. Um, mimicking, it was actually called bio mimicry because we were mimicking. Uh, the, the, the tripod, alternating tripod gate walking of some bug. That was really stable with three legs on the ground. And there was a project that, an academic project that some guys had done with a small scale version. And we hooked up with them and we're like, we want to build a, a human sized version of that. And that was a really hard project. Um, and actually that was the first project that didn't succeed on the show.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  And I just remember the producers of that show, like we would propose all these ridiculous ideas. And they only wanted us to submit ideas that we thought we'd be able to do in two weeks.

• 37:37Jack Rhysider?

  Two weeks, you know, you had to build everything?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Some of them ended up being longer, some of them were five or six weeks. Um, because they didn't really understand the engineering process.

• 37:45Jack Rhysider?

  Like what you're doing is you're inventing entire companies in two weeks. Like here's a full product that you can go to market and sell. I know it's just a prototype, but just take it from there. You've got, you're ready to go and you're just creating rapidly innovation in two weeks.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:02Jack Rhysider?

  That's insane.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  It was, it was, but it was also like for me, I, I had spent a lot of time trying to at least explain the process of like, here's how you actually. And here's how engineering works. So the producers and, and the company would understand how amazing the stuff is that we were doing. But we were actually like, a lot of it was successful until the six by six and that failed. And I remember the production company seeing a rough cut of it and they're like, "This is amazing." "We want you to fail more often." And we're like, "Yeah," we're like, "This is the reality of it." Like, the fun of the show really, if we succeeded every time, it would kind of be boring. Because everybody would know that we're gonna build, like, the drama goes away. And gave us a little less pressure of like, "All right, we're gonna do our best."

• 38:48Speaker 01

  But some of this is just not realistic to build in that amount of time. The producers would always call us like prima donnas, because all of us were very type A, like, you know, hard to wrangle children, basically. But everybody had, it was just so much fun. It was like this traveling circus. Virtual reality games already exist, so what can we do to make them better?

• 39:11Speaker 05

  Making good ideas better is what the guys do best at Prototype This. So back at the concept table, they knock around the game plan in a brainstorming session. All right, what do you guys got? All right, we came up with a great idea for a prototype: giant boxing robots.

• 39:25Jack Rhysider?

  Wow, this episode is really quite incredible. They create these two giant 14-foot-tall boxing robots. And Joe is hooked up to like a motion-tracking system, where he can control the robot outside the ring simply by punching and dodging and everything. Like, he's shadow boxing on the side and the robot just does what he does. I can't believe they built this thing in two weeks. It looks like so much fun.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  We had an episode where we were building a, uh, a personal airbag to prevent people from falling off of roofs and dying. So it would like detect that you're falling and deploy this big airbag. We couldn't do anything that Mythbusters was doing, so we couldn't do it with a dummy.

• 40:04Jack Rhysider?

  Since Mythbusters had this test dummy that they always used called Buster, the showrunners thought it would be too similar if Prototype This used an adult test dummy too.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  So instead of using a human test dummy like Buster, we used like little child baby test dummies, which was super creepy, because we're like, "Look at the power of this airbag." And we'd blow up this baby test dummy and like the arms would go flying. So the show ended. We were about to renew for a second season, but it turns out that it was just so expensive to produce the show because we had multiple film crew to film mechanical stuff and electrical stuff. It was just a lot. So they didn't renew the show and I was relieved, but I was also kind of sad and I didn't realize how sad I was until like a couple of weeks later where it's just like I didn't have anything to do.

• 40:49Jack Rhysider?

  We're gonna take a quick ad break right here, but stay with us because some of the greatest stuff that Joe's done is still coming up.

• 40:57Jack Rhysider?

  This episode is sponsored by Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so do your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really just stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls and playing catch up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. Their Agentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent anywhere you work,

• 41:40Jack Rhysider?

  whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools like Claude or Cursor. You want proof? Over 16,000 fast-growing companies like Ramp, Ryder and Harvey save time and resources while scaling fast with Vanta. Learn more at vanta.com/darknet. That's spelled V-A-N-T-A, vanta.com/darknet.

• 42:05Jack Rhysider?

  When I first discovered you was at DEF CON 17. It was the first DEF CON I ever went to. And you were like the man of DEF CON 17. I was like, that guy there, he's the one who, he's the guy who did all this stuff. And I was just like spellbound by you in this way of just like, wow, there goes Joe. His name's Kingpin, you know?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  I didn't know you were, so I didn't realize that we'd been like in the same path for that one. That was a long time ago now.

• 42:36Jack Rhysider?

  It was a long time ago. And so I think what you did to DEF CON has affected pretty much every hacker conference.

• 42:47Jack Rhysider?

  On the planet.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes.

• 42:50Jack Rhysider?

  I've been to other non-hacker conferences before that. And when you go, they typically give you a bracelet or a lanyard or some kind of badge to indicate that you've paid to be there. DEF CON, a hacker conference, had something totally different. The badge to get into DEF CON was an electronic device. And it was built in such a way that encouraged you to hack it, modify it, take it apart, make it do cool things. You were supposed to mess with it. It had Easter eggs in it. It was cool. And you wore it around your neck.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge at a conference that we know of. I mean, it's just like everything else I've done. Like, my, my goal has never been, I want to be famous. I want to make money. I want to do it like, it's to do something that I enjoy. And, and that's it. Like, I'm not even really thinking about the outcome of it. DEF CON was a huge part of my life. It was a huge part of, of the hacker culture at the time. And it still is. It's just a, I think it's a little bit different now than it was back then when it was smaller. But it was this gathering place for like-minded people. And I had known The Dark Tangent since I was younger, much younger. He was already running Black Hat and DEF CON. And I'd given some talks at DEF CON, you know,

• 44:03Speaker 01

  went to some early DEF CON parties. The Dark Tangent was like, hey, I'm starting up these trainings. You should do a hard, a one about hardware. And so he was really the catalyst. He could see, he's like this visionary. He can, he has this crystal ball and he can see kind of what's coming. So I was doing training and this was the first circuit board that I had made that had a custom shape to it. That wasn't just a square, a green square. So The Dark Tangent saw that circuit board from the training classes and was like, hey, we should do that for DEF CON. So he saw that and was like, let's make this a mass, a mass thing. So DEF CON 14 was the first electronic badge. And it was very simple. It had a, a really tiny microcontroller, a PIC 10F 202, I think it was.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Like a super tiny six-pin microcontroller and some blinky lights. You could change different blinking light patterns. And it had a debug interface adapter. So people could kind of change the code or hack the code if they wanted to. And I had a badge hacking contest. And it was really the first time that, that a lot of people were exposed to electronics. And my goal was just like, Expose more people to electronics, like it was that simple.

• 45:11Jack Rhysider?

  It was a big hit. People loved having a badge that you could hack on and it's also your pass to the conference. How cool is that?

• 45:17Speaker 01

  And over the next couple of years, it was like, all right, what can I do different? What can I, what new technologies can I try? What circuit board fabrication process can I use that I haven't used before? So for me, it was like being able to spend DEFCON's money to try a new thing was great. And then to give something back to the community that, that they could use and learn from and, and get involved with electronics.

• 45:38Jack Rhysider?

  The first year, the badge just blinked. The second year, it had capacitive touch buttons, which was the first time I've ever seen capacitive touch buttons in my life.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  DEFCON 16 looked like a ninja and it had an infrared eye as the transmitter and an SD card. And you could load files, wares or whatever you wanted, onto the SD card and trade the infrared file transfer with people. So you could share files with people at DEFCON.

• 46:04Jack Rhysider?

  And the year after that, the badge had a microphone and a single LED and was programmed to react to different sounds. I remember someone found that if you play a tone at 2,600 hertz, it would respond by saying something in Morse code. And all the parts were surface mount, so you could barely even see that there were any electronics involved in this thing.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  By the time DEFCON 18 happened, I felt like I'd sort of exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try.

• 46:28Jack Rhysider?

  But it didn't matter. The ideas brought to life during those five years at DEFCON changed DEFCON forever. But it also had a widespread impact. What came next was badge life, which is now a huge community at DEFCON. A lot of people started making their own badges, electronic devices to hang around your neck, to represent certain groups or to get into certain parties, or just wear because they're cool looking. And if you go today, you'll see thousands of people wearing a huge variety of electronic badges around their neck. Heck, last year, I was given a badge which had a little antenna on it and it created a mesh network across all of Las Vegas. So you could talk to your friends who were anywhere around town and they would also. Be able to identify where you're located. It's called mesh-tastic, if you're wondering. But not only do you see hundreds of different badges these days,

• 47:13Jack Rhysider?

  but there are also little add-on badges too, where people make these little ones to stick onto your main ones. And I don't know if you realize this, but there are at least two hacker conferences every week somewhere in the world. You should absolutely be looking for the ones in your area and going to them. I took a non-tech friend to a hacker conference the other day, and he had a blast. And I can almost guarantee there's a B-sides conference within like a three-hour drive of you. And so many of these hacker conferences today have taken this idea of electronic badges and are using them too. Gosh, I went to Saint Con last year in Utah, and they've gone off the rails with electronic badges. First, of course, they have an electronic badge as your entry pass into the conference, and it has a lot of cool functionality too. But they have this whole mini badge culture.

• 47:57Jack Rhysider?

  There are thousands of these little tiny badges that you can use to decorate your main badge with. And in my opinion, all this started with Joe's wonderful badges and designs at DEF CON. It's like he birthed the whole community.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I think it's cool to have had an impact in a way of like that thing turned into something. Like the Senate testimony turned into something. The badges turned into something. I don't really look back. I'm a lot of like, okay, that's done. What's next? And always trying to look for something. So it's cool that you mention it of like, it is something that that kind of helped shape things. But I feel like it would be cool if more people had that mentality, where it's it's just to bring something to the community and see what happens, see what comes out of it.

• 48:53Jack Rhysider?

  Yes, that's what's so awesome about Joe. The stuff he gives the world, he does it in such a way that you can take that and run with it and create something new. He's incredibly inspiring, not only to me, but for many.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  DEF CON started making this Uber Award, which is sort of like a lifetime achievement award. And I was actually, it was like the first year I missed DEF CON in ages. I was on vacation in Thailand and then going to a conference over there. And I woke up to like a whole bunch of text messages and photos of this big block of aluminum. And it was like this DEF CON award. And it said, for endless curiosity and innovation, the original spirit of badge life.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  And it was like, holy shit, like, wow, that's really cool. So that, that is really the, the first time where I realized that there was an impact of it. And I thought it was cool. And it's just like prototype this, people come up and they're like, I saw that show and I became an engineer. And now I'm doing something at Apple or at Google or whatever. And like, it's cool that people's lives are changed by what you do. And I think that's a really, I guess it's a good thing to remember because your actions have consequences. Good or bad. And it's just, it's nothing I would ever expect. Like, I'm still just a hacker in my lab that does stuff, is how I see it. I don't see it as anything else, even as, you know, I, my YouTube videos have a lot of views.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Like, I don't see it as, that doesn't change me. It might affect other people, which is cool, get them involved, but it, it doesn't change me and it doesn't change my belief system and my passion for what I do.

• 50:33Jack Rhysider?

  So my perspective is like, this guy's got it all figured out. He can just design whatever he wants. He's got the, I cannot remember the name of it, Kingston Labs.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Great, well, Grand Idea Studio.

• 50:43Jack Rhysider?

  Grand Idea Studio.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Engineering company.

• 50:45Jack Rhysider?

  So it's like, he's got an engineering company. And I saw your talk, he's got Hollywood deals that he's doing. Uh, I mean, this guy, this guy is gonna, like, he's, I can't wait to see all the stuff that comes out. But you had no idea.

• 50:59Speaker 01

  No, I still have no idea what, what I'm doing. Like, I think, you know, it's a, it's a certain perspective. Or you see a celebrity on TV or on Instagram and you're like, man, I want to be like them. They have all their shit figured out. Um, and that's just, that's just part of the story. And I think it's important for people to know, like, everybody has stuff going on, right? Like, even if somebody appears to be perfect, in whatever way, like, there's always, there's always a struggle somewhere. I still don't have a path of where I'm going. It just, I've, I've fallen into all of these things. And some of it maybe was luck, some of it was intentional a little bit, but of like,

• 51:41Speaker 01

  most of it was just being in the right place at the right time and, and somebody somewhere like. Dropping my name, uh, because I just were doing what I was doing and loving what I was doing. But it's on a book that my wife had written, Troublemakers and Superpowers. It actually took her like four years to write it. When I read her complete book, it got me thinking like, wait, everybody else like has gotten tested for things. Like they did their psychological testing, their evaluations. I was like, what's up with me? Like, why did I gravitate towards the hacker world? Why did I gravitate towards punk rock? And, and why did I gravitate towards skateboarding? Why do I not think getting arrested was a problem? You know, like all of these things.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Um, so it got me really thinking about that. And during, during lockdown, I started meditating and I thought that was really helpful of kind of regulating me a little bit more. So a couple of months ago, I ended up doing this full psychological testing, which for me was like, as a hacker, I'm like, I just want to know how my brain works. I want to know like, why do I feel these things in my head? Why do I feel these things? Um, which is completely different than a public perception, right? You see a lot of actors, a lot of musicians that perform on stage, but then they have all these other problems behind stage and they have substance abuse issues and all these other things. Um, so I was just like, what's up with me? Why, why do I think this way?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  And, um, so I kind of treated it as like a science experiment of like, let's see, let's see what my hacker brain is like. So I did like a, a full testing that was many hours long and I loved it. It was like puzzles and math and questions. And then of course, like the standard psychological tests. And, you know, at, at some point, like tests only show you certain things, right? Like, I'm not a huge fan of like academic testing, but to give you a sense of things. And a lot of the questions really frustrated me because they were kind of yes or no, black or white questions. And it's like, nothing is black or white, you know? And like, there's things in there like, well, yeah, in certain situations, yes, I would do that or no, I wouldn't do that.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  And the testing came back with the, the two, the two main things were being diagnosed with. Being clinically depressed, which I think explains a lot about my kind of anger and the way I see the world in general. And then having autism spectrum disorder, so being on the spectrum. So this was really interesting for validation of like, okay, yes, Joe is has very high skills in certain things and then some deficits in certain things. And that can be caused with, um, you know, some of the, some of the autism or the depression. And you can manage depression in certain ways, depending on what it is.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  But like, now I don't have this internal anger against myself of like, why am I thinking that way? Or why, why, why do I feel this way? Like, it's okay to feel this way. Um, and so it totally flipped my perspective of like, it validated that, that I'm okay the way I am. And now there's a name for the things that I have. So now I can work on those. And as a hacker, it's like, all right, now I understand. Let's look at that depression. What did that cause? What can I do to, to, to live better?

• 55:00Jack Rhysider?

  Sometimes Joe likes to be an engineer. Sometimes he likes to be a hacker. Sometimes he likes to be a teacher. Sometimes he likes to be a father and a husband. And he bounces around doing all these different roles. He teaches electronics classes like all over the world and he gets a lot of projects that come his way, but most don't spark that level of excitement for him. He never did settle down into a comfortable, reliable job. There's something in him. I think that hacker spirit, which urges him to stay punk, fuck the system, break things, and learn to do something that nobody else knows.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  I would occasionally get, you know, emails with really strange requests of things. Or like, can you hack, you know, my girlfriend's, I think my girlfriend's cheating on me. Can you hack her device? I get those all the time. The sign of a healthy relationship. And, you know, just, I would generally respond to, to some, to some emails at that point.

• 55:53Jack Rhysider?

  Little projects would spring up here and there, and he'd get involved with them. But he was very picky about what he decided to work on. Because, well, it just might not be hackery enough for him, you know? If it doesn't push his understanding of electronics or the world, or challenges him enough, he's not interested. Or maybe the project just isn't rewarding enough.

• 56:12Speaker 01

  When Dan had contacted me, I got this email, and it was a very well-written email. And I'm like, oh, this is a legitimate request.

• 56:18Jack Rhysider?

  This guy Dan reached out to Joe, saying he had $2 million in cryptocurrency. And the crypto is on a hardware wallet called a treasure wallet. But he doesn't have the PIN to unlock the hardware wallet. So he can't access the money. I was wondering if Joe could help.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  And I'm like, OK, this sounds like an interesting project. Like, you know, some friends of mine had already proven that the treasure can be hacked in different ways, using fault injection. I had never personally done anything with fault injection. So for me, it was a perfect opportunity of like, all right, I'm not traveling. Like, they're still kind of, we're kind of locked down. Things are starting to open up. But to me, it kind of piqued my interest of like, now I can, now I have a reason to learn a new skill.

• 56:59Jack Rhysider?

  So to be clear, this shouldn't be possible. The treasure wallet is built so you only have 16 tries at guessing the PIN. And if you don't get it right after the 16th failure, it wipes the device. It does that to avoid someone trying to brute force the PIN and trying every combination until they get it. Now, somewhere in the memory of the treasure is both the PIN code and the private keys. And there's a security mechanism that blocks you from just dumping the memory of the chip and reading it. It'll just be garbled. So the thing is built to keep people like Joe out. I mean, what good is a security device if the security can be defeated easily, right? Which is exactly why Joe felt like this is an interesting challenge and started working on it.

• 57:42Jack Rhysider?

  But this required him to pick up a whole bunch of new skills. First, he had to read up on if anyone else has defeated the treasure before and what vulnerabilities it might have. There were some articles on it, but a lot of it was just theory. Like, there weren't instructions on how to do this or a YouTube video to follow along. And he had to become very familiar with learning the architecture of this device, understanding all the circuitry involved. And he had an idea to use fault injection. This is to try to send some electrical pulses to the thing to get it to glitch, to get it to do things it's not supposed to do. And that might somehow let him get inside. But he didn't know very much about fault injection, so he had to practice that, too. So for months and months, he got into his workshop, this workshop I'm sitting in right now, every day to learn more.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Pretty much nonstop obsessive work to get things going, because the information that was out there was correct, but it wasn't fully, it wasn't a full exploit chain. So there are still some things you had to work out. And also, the technique that was being used at the time, which was voltage fault injection, is very dependent on things like environmental temperature and even variances within the silicon, because it's all timing based of like, at this point in time, after this signal goes high, I'm going to inject a fault, which is basically with voltage fault injection, you're kind of like brown outing, like turning off the power really fast in hopes of messing up some CPU execution. So it's all very timing specific and like you could be off by one clock cycle and it's not going to work.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  I started down this path of trying to replicate some existing work and going through, again, this roller coaster of like, I love hacking, I hate hacking, you know, why isn't this working? Questioning my skills, like, do I even deserve to be doing this? Really, it was more of a mental challenge. And my wife was like, you know, like I would come in, I'd be like, I can't get it to work. And she's like, just take a break. You don't have to work 18 hours at it. Because I was just so focused on it. She's like, take a break, come back tomorrow. So she was like the voice of reason in all of it. Like, I don't know where I'd be without her. Like, I don't really talk a lot publicly about like our relationship, but I would be, I would be in a much different place. Like, I would be screwed without her.

• 59:53Jack Rhysider?

  He eventually hones in on the attack. He's got hope that he can glitch this device just as it turns on to get it to go into debug mode by sending electrical pulses through it in a way that it's just not built for. And he's got to time it just right. Even the smallest fraction of a second will be the difference of if it works or doesn't work. So he's trying this again and again and again and again and again and again, pretty much throwing everything possible at it to get it to act in a way that it shouldn't. And the whole time he's trying this, he's just practicing it on a test treasure wallet. The guy, Dan, didn't want to bring his wallet over until Joe could prove that he could actually get into treasure wallets.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Eventually, you know, got it working to the point where it was, it was working where I was confident enough. And I got some devices I could test it. I made a video to show to Dan. He lived in New Jersey. And he actually was going to fly out here to do it. And that's when, again, my wife comes in. She's like, "You should be filming this." I had just, during COVID, I had filmed a video for Wired called "The Pizza Compass." And it was this really fun project that was a device that you'd press a button and it would have a GPS, you know, figure out where you are, anywhere in the world, and it would do a Google lookup over the internet, find out where the nearest pizza place is, and direct you to it with some LEDs. And that was like a really fun build video that we did. And she's like, "You know, a lot of your videos have been engineering focused.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Like, you should show people that you're still a hacker." So I called Wired and I was like, "Do you want to film this?" They're like, "Oh, it's kind of cool." But they kind of dragged their feet. And then I talked to my friend Fred, who is a former client of mine with some product development stuff, and he's a filmmaker, and he's like, "Hell, yeah."

• 1:01:33Jack Rhysider?

  So he got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress, trying to hack into this treasure wallet.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  What if you had a couple million dollars stored on a piece of silicon the size of a postage stamp? And it was protected by a password that you forgot?

• 1:01:46Jack Rhysider?

  The video walks us through the whole process on how Joe hacks things, and it's quite fascinating to watch. Like, Dan flies over to this workshop that I'm sitting in and gives the treasure wallet to Joe to hack into. And Joe just starts pulling it apart, trying to hack into it.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  The next step is, we have to remove a couple of components from this board. The components we're removing are capacitors. And by removing them, it makes the chip more susceptible to those little glitches and stuff that we're doing. What I'm going to do is use my soldering iron and just very carefully heat both sides of the part and pull it off the board. The risk at this stage is pulling off some of the circuit board with it,

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  which hopefully won't happen. Iron is on.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's two that we need to remove. One is easier to get to than the other.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  First one's off. Alright, so those components are off. Now, all I have to do is add the external connectors that's gonna let us hook it up to the hardware over there.

• 1:02:46Jack Rhysider?

  The thing is, Joe's method of getting into this thing is highly dependent on luck. There's like a one in a million chance this is gonna work. And he's got this station set up that is just gonna try again, like every second. And it just tries again and again and again. It powers up the device, it attempts to trigger the fault. Did it work? If not, power off, then power it on again, just try to trigger the fault again. And he's got it automated to just try again and again and again. And if it works, it'll say "hack the planet." He's actually only gotten it to trigger the fault a few times in his life during the test runs. It's not like he could just crack open this thing, hook it up into a machine, and then boom, done. This is a lot of work. And he really doesn't even know if this is gonna work or not. But it's worth trying, and that's what makes it exciting to watch.

• 1:03:29Jack Rhysider?

  But after a lot of waiting and trying thousands of times, they eventually get it.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  This is torture.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  It's like it knew. Yes. I'm like, this is torture, hack the planet. Oh, it's awesome. OMG, like they say on the internet.

• 1:03:52Jack Rhysider?

  Joe published this video to his YouTube channel, and it got millions of views and went viral. Way more views than any of the videos I've ever published. And I'm actually trying here. But it's just because how wonderful it is to watch Joe have fun hacking things. Well, you could probably guess. Once he demonstrated that he can hack into Bitcoin wallets, his inbox got flooded with tons of messages. Lots of people wanted help recovering their lost cryptocurrency too. And he took on some of those projects. And you could watch his YouTube channel to see more videos like that. In fact, there's one where he hacked time to get into a Bitcoin wallet, which in my opinion is way cooler than the other one. But even though this earned Joe that cool little YouTube plaque, something else emerged from it. Joe got impersonators.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  So the video came out, went viral. Out of the blue, I got an email from a guy that was like, "Hey, I've been talking to you on Instagram, and you said you'd help me get access to my account.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  What's up? I sent you the money." And I'm like, "What are you talking about?" So one of my kids, who's actually on Instagram, went and found the guy, and we looked him up. And it was a guy that was like... Kind of like a model, like a, you know, good-looking person. It was to buy more followers. That's what it was. It was like to buy more followers. I don't know, something stupid. And um, he got screwed over by somebody pretending to be me. And that like opened this door of like, what's going on? So I start searching on all these social media platforms and it's like, there's like a million Joe Grands. And they're all just grabbing my Twitter feed and making fake profiles and all of this stuff. That happens to every single person that has any sort of name recognition on the internet.

• 1:05:31Jack Rhysider?

  And is it like, if you need help recovering your crypto, I'm the guy?

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, it's multiple things, but that's the main one of like, there's, there's some cryptocurrency video. And then there's all of these bots that respond, you should talk to Joe Grand, he's the man. And then it's like, you know, a fake Telegram name or [email protected]. You know, something totally obvious that it's not me. But there's this whole psychological side of things. I'm actually reading a book called The Confidence Game. That's all about the psychological side of getting conned and getting scammed. And what I've learned over the years of, of all of these emails that I get is people, people who are in a desperate situation are not thinking critically, so they go to, they ignore all the red flags.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  And scamming, impersonating is such a common scam. And basically it's like, yeah, either they get reached out to directly or like, the fake Joe Grand will direct message them and say, hey, I can help you. Or it's like, hey, you should, you know, how's your cryptocurrency investing going? You should invest in my platform. I'm reaching out to members of my community. And it's like, anybody who knows me knows like, well, Joe's not going to talk to a random stranger. Uh, but people who don't know me and who see the video might be like, oh, Joe is such a nice guy. He's reaching out to help. Um, so it's a, it's a cat and mouse game. Like, you know, it's a whack-a-mole. Like, we try to take them down, work them up. We now at least are verified. So, yeah, so with that, I've had to set up a social media presence on every platform.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Which is not my personality. Like, I had Twitter to communicate to my world of friends.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Even though that's kind of going down the drain, I set up a Discord where my teenager was like, "You gotta set up Discord so everyone can talk." I was like, "I don't want to talk to every random person." And he's like, "Daddy, you just gotta do it. Someone else can answer the questions. You just can be on there." So that's actually been really fun because I've been able to talk to people who are asking intelligent questions and the ones that aren't just get ignored. It's great. But people, people still are getting scammed. So I've had to set up, you know, social media, open up direct message access so people at least get to the correct Joe Grand and not the scammer. And then being verified on these platforms, it's easier to take them down. I mean, it's a, it's a never-ending battle,

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  but the hope is to just prevent more people from getting screwed. But it's opened my eyes and really disenchanted me or disenfranchised me, I guess, about cryptocurrency, which I am not an owner of any cryptocurrency for people who are thinking of coming over to rob me. I'm not involved in cryptocurrency at all. I am just involved in the technical kind of aspect of it. But seeing all of the scams really has kind of crushed my, my, my idealistic view of like what, you know, positive technologies could be. And like, there are some cool things about cryptocurrency or, or the cryptography behind it, or like blockchain, maybe there are some benefits to it. But there's just so many scams and these, you

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  know, shitcoins and rug pulls and all these things that sort of overshadow any positive benefits that might come out of it.

• 1:08:44Jack Rhysider?

  Very similar stuff has happened to me, too. I've seen quite a few Jack Recider impersonators trying to scam people. Be careful out there. Only chat with me through official channels, which you can see the links on the bottom of my website. Just as a rule of thumb, if you find yourself in a weird crypto, deal with me. It is probably not me. I don't mind all this stuff wasting my time because it's intriguing for me. It's my area of interest. But it's lame that Joe has to waste his time on this crap. Because he's so talented and he should be working on some really cool projects instead. And I can't wait to see what his next amazing thing is that he accomplishes.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  It all falls back to my ethos of like, I want to build something that's interesting and that I could use and that could help other people. And then see where it goes. But yeah, I think ultimately it's like my life has no ulterior motive and it has really no specific direction. And I think that's the key.

• 1:09:43Jack Rhysider?

  We can see your direction by looking in the rearview mirror, but we have no idea what's going on.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  That's exactly right, because you can look back and it's like, oh, Joe has it all figured out. Right? Did the TV show, did DEF CON, did this and did that. And it's like, no, it's way easier to look backwards and create a path than know that that was where I'm going.

• 1:10:13Jack Rhysider?

  A big thank you to Joe Grant for letting me come over and chop it up for a few hours. I encourage you all to check out his YouTube channel. Just search for Joe Grant and you'll find it pretty easy. But even more than that, I encourage you all to be hackers yourself. Don't accept the world as it is. Create the world you want and push things beyond their limits. I know it's hard, but if you can learn to feel comfortable in that space of just not knowing what you're doing, but you just keep trying and trying and trying again anyway, then the world is yours. Okay, I have some big news. I have a new bonus episode available to premium subscribers. If you're not a premium subscriber, there are 11 bonus episodes available for you right now to enjoy. And you also get an ad-free version of the show too.

• 1:10:57Jack Rhysider?

  Being a premium subscriber is a great way to show thanks as well, because it really does help the show. To get bonus episodes, just visit plus.darknetdiaries.com. Or just go to darknetdiaries.com and then click bonus episodes at the top of the page. This episode was created by me, the Stack Jacker, Jack Reiser. Our editor is the Uninstall Wizard, Tristan Ledger. Mixing done by Proximity Sound and our intro music is by the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Why did the smartphone need glasses? It lost its contacts. This is Darknet Diaries.