Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - The Hank Show (when computers are right)

Episode Date: November 7, 2023

Today we live inside data systems that contain, surveil, and judge us. In his new book, the Hank Show, author and journalist McKenzie Funk provides us with a totally unique origin story of our world: A guy named Hank Asher. We talk with McKenzie Funk about the  former Florida conto painter, drug-running pilot, alleged CIA asset, and  pioneering computer programmer known as the father of data fusion. McKenzie Funk has written many stories about the dangers of computer systems that can get us wrong, but the story of Hank Asher has turned him on to a danger even more alarming. What chance do we have when the computers know everything about us? Note: The TOE limited series “Not all Art is Propaganda” will be debuting January 2024! I know its been a long wait, but we are nearing the finish line and I can’t wait to share it with you.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. I tend to shy away from great man or great villain of history books, mostly because I think we miss a lot of the real story when we boil it down to the work of one man or one woman. But let's face it, usually it's a man. But my guest today, writer Mackenzie Funk, argues that when it comes to the data systems that now contain us, surveil us, and judge us, there really is a guy at the heart of it all. One guy who kind of shaped the world we live in today. This man was Hank Asher. And Mackenzie Funk named his book after him. It's called The Hank Show.

And it's a really great book. And I'm glad that Mackenzie had some time to come on the show and talk to me about it. So I want to start, Mackenzie, with the man himself. Who was Hank Asher? Yeah, the man himself was a, well, first he was a high school dropout. Next, he was a house painter and a condo painter in Florida. And then he became a pilot and he became a cocaine smuggler because he had a fast plane. And then he came back and got out of trouble with the DEA and Florida Department of Law Enforcement. And he became a data broker. And eventually he became the probably the greatest data broker the world has ever known, at least pre Zuckerberg. which obviously is the thing that stands out the most on this resume you just gave us. But first, I want to talk about the house painting. Can you explain Hank Asher's painting philosophy and how this philosophy enabled him to dominate the database industry when he first started working with computers? Yeah, as a house painter, he was obsessed with efficiencies. He wanted to dominate

the market. And I think it was part of proving himself. He wanted to be a multimillionaire by the age of 25. And so the way he went about this was other painting companies might have a dozen very good painters. He hired hundreds and they would tackle these buildings like a swarm. He would have 100, 200 people on a job painting every side of the condo. And he'd have these supervisors who knew what they were doing, and they would teach all these younger folks. And he would have one mastermind, usually himself, especially early on, deciding how they would approach this problem. And this idea of all these relatively untrained people managed by the superstructure was what led him to his big idea with computing, or at least it was one of the things that led him to it.

And that was the idea that at the dawn of the PC era, you could get a bunch of processors, cheap off-the-shelf processors, that people were making these PCs out of them. But instead, you could string them together. And if you had someone, a supervisor, telling each one what to do, doling out jobs to each one, that you could tackle these huge problems very efficiently and very quickly. And that was his way to build a supercomputer on the cheap. It's an idea that independently came out of MIT in a much bigger fashion, funded by DARPA. But in his case, it was him and his business partner, Roy Brubaker, who were thinking about how do we break up these big jobs into component pieces? And part of that was the architecture. It was the computers themselves and using these small things they called ghosts at the time,

these not very smart processors, but having some way to manage them all. Did Hank ever make this connection between painting and computers himself, or is this something you sussed out in your reporting? I don't know that he ever stated it as such. The one that I heard him say a lot was a reference to a dig that Cray, the builder of the most famous supercomputers of his era, Seymour Cray was a guy who built these just giant processors. Imagine the fastest car, just a huge engine. But it was just one of them. And he said, well, I'd rather have two strong oxen than 1,000 chickens. And 1,024 chickens is actually what it was. And the idea being that he's like, OK, yeah, you guys making your massively parallel computers with all these tiny, weak processors, great. But if I'm going to go do some real work, give me a couple oxen and

I'll do it. That was Cray. And Asher always said, no, our systems, they're like a bunch of chickens. And so he talked a lot about the thousand chickens of parallel computing. It was really striking to learn how much Florida figures into your story, you know, not just because of the condos and the cocaine, which, you know, we're going to come back to, but also, you know, the computer building that was going on, but also the data laws, Florida's specific data laws that enabled this nascent database industry to flourish. It's all Florida. Yeah, Florida was huge for him. Of course, there was the condo boom that made him the millionaire in the first place. The next thing was, it's the Sunshine State. It has very open public records laws. And so how he got into the data business was that another business person came to him and he said, hey, I hear you're good with computers.

I want to build a database of vehicle registrations. And he said, sure, I can do that. He said, well, there are 30 million records. He said, OK, I can do that. And then the guy said, well, son, we're going to make a lot of money. And they did. They went up there and they got all of the vehicle registrations. And then they went up there and they got every driver's license for the state of Florida. And they piled dataset onto dataset ontoet because Florida was so open. All right. So let's talk about the drug smuggling now. Because drug smuggling, like house painting, seems to have taught Hank Asher something about how to build the computer system of the future. So what exactly did he do? And what did he learn from being a drug smuggler? So I had a very hard time pinning down at first what exactly he'd done because there were so many rumors on both sides about it.

Asher, when he spoke publicly about his cocaine smuggling, he said, you know, it was just seven trips. I was just a pilot. No big deal. A small period of time. But I went out and I really wanted to know what he was hiding and who he was working with. And so I ended up tracking down all these people and what they called their gang. And a much more complex picture came out.

Basically, once he became a pilot, he fell in with this group of people who had airplanes called Aerostars, the fastest twin-engine plane on the planet at the time, and a great plane for moving cocaine up from Columbia in the Caribbean. Ed Asher was the one who fixed a sort of logistical problem for the gang when it came to smuggling coke, because as South Florida did more and more of a crackdown in the 80s on coke smuggling coke because as south florida did more and more of a crackdown in the in the 80s on on coke smuggling they were trying to fly to other airports but you couldn't take a full load of cocaine all the way from columbia to florida you'd run out of fuel or you'd have to you know have a

small load of coke and so they he came up with this again the logistical solution which was a trans shipment point in belize where they would basically refuel their planes and then go on to whatever airport they wanted and asher was known as a daredevil so when he was the pilot but clearly he was more than the pilot he would do these barrel rolls upon, after dropping off a load, they would fly into this ranch in Okeechobee County. And it had three big barns on it. Land, taxi up to one of the barns, quickly unload everything, and then close the door, and then the pilot would take off again and fly back to wherever their origin was off in Belize. And so Asher, he was certainly involved in that. Eventually there were drug agents hiding in the woods watching this whole thing, and they noticed that one of them always did a barrel roll. That was something that later got him in some trouble.

And all that said, it really wasn't a huge part of his life. It was a couple years, a couple wild years. And then him hiding from it. He retired around the age of 30, he said, from both cocaine and, well, at least the smuggling of it, and from his painting business and went to the Bahamas. And in the Bahamas, he met a lot of people, including F. Lee Bailey, the famous attorney. And Bailey helped him get out of trouble with the DEA. Okay, that's a clearer picture, I guess, of what he did. But I guess what I really want you to talk about is what he learned from being a drug smuggler and how that applies to the world of computers.

You say he brought a paranoid style to database management. Yeah. What does that mean? He was in a world already that we had marketing databases. That was nothing new. Think about what marketing does. They just need a certain percentage of people who they think might be into this or that brand of, let's say, tennis shoes to buy their product. It doesn't need to be precise. You don't need to find people's hidden desires, although that can help in marketing too, certainly. And you don't need to find their associates and all that. But Asher's world was risk and risk management. And he was really the father of trying to help these companies and

police and federal agencies figure out what people were hiding. Who are the associates they might be hiding with? Where would they be hiding? What connections do they have? What past is hidden from view? Wall Street had started to take notice of the power of Asher's companies because the original clients were insurance companies. It was automotive insurance at first. That's why they wanted those car registrations

was just to see, okay, who lives with whom and who can we stick this bill with? And that went very quickly to police and then eventually the DEA and the FBI. And that was Asher. that these people, the people who'd been tracking him and eventually as he was working with them, how much a little bit of information, just an associate's address, where someone might be hiding out, all these little bits, if compiled in an easy to understand way, were gold to the DEA and FDLE as they were to street cops. So you quote an executive from one of Hank Asher's companies. You're interviewing him about what powers these databases.

And he says to you, you know, Hank was the algorithm. What does that mean? Oh, yeah. Well, that means that Asher had this mind for numbers and foreseen the patterns in data that even these highly trained data scientists that he eventually hired, they didn't have. He could look at a massive numbers on a whiteboard and just pick out the pattern. And what was relevant here is that he could think about what information do we need to put together to really know who someone is, and how can we link these data sets.

And it's hard to remember that back then we didn't all just log into Facebook and then say what our likes were and do the compilation of who we were for someone else. Someone had to painstakingly figure out who was who and that one John Smith was this John Smith and another John Smith was a different one and connect each data point to each of us. And he was the one who could somehow see what that was. He could see what information would help you figure out how to connect these things. And one data set he was super into was car crashes. And you would think, why is that? He said, well, of course, if you're riding in a car with somebody, you know them pretty well. So he wanted relationships. That's what he tried to map out. So all the data that Hank Asher collects and the algorithms that he builds to sort of, you know, parse this data, you know, it's easy to see why law enforcement, you know, would be interested in this. And I guess that brings us to 9-11, which is, you know, a really big moment for

this story, because, you know, Hank Asher seems really, you know, right place, right time, when it comes to 9-11. Yeah, well, Asher had a, his second data startup. They had just launched this new product around the time of 9-11. And when the planes hit the Twin Towers, he immediately was like, oh, let's give it away to everybody. So they called every cop they knew, every agency they knew. That was one half. And the second half was that he went into his bedroom and started programming a program known as the Matrix, which eventually gave a score, like a credit score, but for terrorism, to every adult in this country. So he gave what he called the terrorism quotient or the high terrorist factor, which took in who you interacted with when you arrived in the country. It certainly looked for Muslim males, and it created a score. It sped out a score for everybody.

And eventually there was a list of 120,000 names who had a sort of a non-zero score, and there was a very high, the highest scoring 1,200. These names were all passed along to law enforcement. And that list of 1,200 did have the names of five of the 9-11 hijackers on it. He did come up with some of the names before they were publicly known. So it worked. Yeah, I think this is why I love your book so much is because, you know, we're so used to talking about, you know, the problems that arise when computers get it wrong. And, you know, even in your book, you document a bunch of stories, harrowing stories about what happens to some individuals when they're, you know, misidentified by some of the systems that Hank Asher helped build.

But if I'm understanding you correctly, what's the real driving force for you in this story and this book is that what really worries you now is that these computers are getting it right. The thing that I came to be much more afraid of was absolutely when these algorithms are so right about us that we're trapped in our own patterns. And for me, the best example of that was when it comes to healthcare. A lot of these data systems are now used by healthcare companies, by hospitals, because what matters to your likely outcomes with healthcare, they can say, sure, 30% is clinical, but 70% in many cases is your situation in life. Do you have someone to take you to the doctor? Do you have a good media diet such that you're

going to believe in this or that medication? And are you likely to stick with your regimen? Are you someone who, if you don't have someone to take you to the doctor, lives near public transit? Are you someone who grew up poor and therefore maybe your diet early on was not as healthy or there was a lot of air pollution, which has caused some sort of lung disease now. These are the kind of things that these data sets now 30 years on can get absolutely right about you. And then the decisions made on top of those, because of those, that data can be quite scary. I looked at systems being sold for triage during the height of the pandemic. And the companies were going around selling basically a scoring system to decide who should get a ventilator when there was a ventilator shortage.

And, of course, the data is going to show that the poor person, maybe the black male, should not get the ventilator. It should be the well-off white lady, should not get the ventilator. It should be the well-off white lady who should be getting the ventilator in these triage situations. And that's the kind of future that is even scarier when we are so caught in these systems that our past is entirely predictive of our future. That's the biggest danger. Not that they get you wrong, but that you're just funneled into where you started. So Hank Asher died in 2013, but it's really hard not to notice some of the similarities he has

with individuals like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who both, like Hank Asher, have a lot of power at this moment over the information and data systems that we live in today. And you even bring this up in the book. We are still conditioned to talk about the democratizing power of the web. You know, people will go there, you know, the flick of a switch. But when it comes to talking about the incredible power one individual might have in this space, it's harder for us. I mean, it's harder for me even to go there. I talked about this at the beginning of the show. You know, this great man or great villain lens is difficult for me. But that said, it's impossible not to notice that, you know,

what those three individuals all have in common is this absolute disregard and contempt for the rules, you know, any rules. And, you know, which correlates to, you know, quickly amassing a lot of power. And, you know, another warning you seem to be giving us in your book is that this kind of power is only going to be more and more difficult to keep in check or take away in the future. Yeah, it, and you know, there are some Carlisle Tolstoy questions here always. But I do think there is something to the fact that Asher, because he had fewer mores than other people might, because he was unafraid to gather things

that certain stodgy corporations were at the time, he kind of pushed through some boundaries that others might not. And eventually, of course, he sold it to corporate America once it was sort of normalized. And so there's that part of it. Would this have happened without Hank Asher? Yes. Would it have happened as quickly and as insidiously? And would the record on all of us be as long? I think not. And it did take someone who had something to prove like he did to want to do this and to follow his whims. That's part of it. And then the other part is, yes, this digital compilation of things makes for concentrated power like the world has never seen there's a reason there are a few big corporations now that define the internet economy and that was true for for

asher's era as well where there are a few big data brokers he created most of them that have these data sets going way back it's because the more you have the more you have, the more you have, as someone put it in the book. And that once you own this market, you can just go up and up and up and up. And that's what he did. Mackenzie Funk is the author of The Hank Show, how a house-painting, drug-running DEA informant built the machine that rules our lives. Find it wherever you get your books. The Theory of Everything is a proud and founding member of

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