CoRecursive: Coding Stories - Story: Coding Through Chaos : Addiction, Recovery and Acceptance

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

What if your search for connection took you somewhere you never meant to go—almost costing you everything? John Walker grew up building computers and exploring early internet forums, always looking for a place to fit in. As a teenager, he hacked his school network and spent hours on IRC, but loneliness crept in. Drugs became a fun exploration and a social experiment. But soon, addiction pulled him into homelessness and jail. Even at his lowest, John turned to online communities. He ran IRC bots to keep recovery chatrooms safe from trolls and built scrapers to solve tough data problems at work. These technical challenges gave him a reason to keep going, even when face-to-face life felt impossible.  But the real turning point came when John stopped trying to hide his differences.   How do you rebuild when you feel like an outsider? Episode Page Support The Show Subscribe To The Podcast Join The Newsletter  

Hey, this is co-recursive and I'm Adam Gordon Bell. Have you ever felt like you didn't fit in? Like everyone else got the manual for how to be a person and you're still searching for the table of contents. I have at times for sure. I remember my first job out of school, I had to work on this giant, messy internal inventory and ordering system. There was complicated reports and endless data entry forms and it was overwhelming in some ways.

But the real challenge was the people. The customer service reps and the data entry folks and figuring out what they needed and what they were struggling with. Trying to say the right things or look like I knew what I was talking about. Trying to decide where to sit in the lunchroom. It's like high school all over again. I could handle the technical stuff, no problem, but the unwritten rules, the small talk, the chatting, that was the hard part.

This episode is about that. How do you fit in? What do you do if you don't? Today's about the hidden costs of being different, and our guest is someone who's lived this journey. I went and found a building that, you know, was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and not much stuff, and just like, like, closed it, locked the door, and just like, laid down on the floor, which is literally curled up in the ball, you know, for was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and not much stuff and just like, like close and lock the door and just like lay down on the floor, which is literally curled up in the ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now that I go back out and fix the war predators, like genuinely do enjoy people. I don't like scared of them, but I enjoy them. That's John Walker. And I've seen him solve problems. No one else can. He once found a Kubernetes vulnerability. serious it was front page

tech news. John and I worked together 10 years ago, and back then he was a principal engineer and security researcher at Tenable. But here's the thing, John's curiosity and his drive, they came at a price because he can solve hard problems, but he struggles with feeling alone and isolated. If you've ever felt like your differences were a weakness instead of a strength, I think this episode is for you. I'll warn you, it starts with a lot of drug use and internet culture, but it ends in a place well, I actually don't want to spoil it, but it's super good. John grew up on computers.

He and his friends built their own rigs and spent hours on bulletin boards and then AOL chat rooms and eventually IRC, where the hacking and mischief started. He got an admin account on his school's novella system and installed key loggers and got into all kinds of teenage, computer-y trouble. But he grew up in a strict conservative family, and at 17, he was off to Christian college. And then, almost out of nowhere, he decided to reinvent himself as a drug dealer.

The reality was, I was like a nerdy, awkward, not very menacing 18 year old kid, but it wasn't like in some ways not really about the substances as much as maybe like a re-attempt to reinvent myself. And it became like it felt like an anthropological exercise experiment like as much as anything else is like, you know, starting to talk to new people and go to new places and all of this very exciting and like, you know, I just felt like this whole new exciting world. Computers and the internet played a big part in why John changed directions.

And the thing I sort of hit on was very interested in, in drugs from like a academic perspective, I'd read like Arrowood and Lyceum, these old websites that have all these reports of like, I use ketamine and like nitrous and this thing and here like a T minus 15 minutes like here's the effect it was having on me and stuff. And all the other point of my life, like I always spoke pop and all this stuff was just incredibly, incredibly fascinating. Like the idea that you could take like a substance and just, you know, changes your whole perspective on the world. And of course, now I know in retrospect, the trip reports people write

up are like, you know, dramatized or like very kind of like hyperbolic and exaggerated at times and stuff like this. John was sharp. He was smart enough to start college at 17, but then he got kicked out. But I'm struggling a lot with mental health and kind of had an emptiness in my life because now like no longer in school for the first time in my life. And I decided to like, you know, buying and selling drugs was going to be my thing. I think normally when this is your thing, you come into it naturally, right? But in my kind of, I don't know,

not overachiever kind of way, but it was just kind of like, oh, I am going to get into this without the requisite connections and people and knowledge and experience and stuff. Things went okay for a while until he got caught and landed in jail. And not juvie, but an adult jail.

Imagine being an 18-year-old computer nerd in a place like that. It kind of did a number on him. And after that, I was just like, you know, my social functioning was fucked. Like, my ability to trust people, interact with people was fucked. Like, got really, really isolated and more into, you know, like alcohol, pills than I could get in Benzos. And, you know, around 19 or so, I was just kind of like, oh, what the, you know, like, I think, honestly, it was pretty much, you know, wanted to die, but was not, I think, a lot of fear of hell

and not willing to just like outright kill myself. And it was just like, well, then, you know, I'm just going to live very recklessly and we'll see what happens basically. Teenage drug stories usually go one of two ways. Either it's just a phase or it's really not. For John, it went that second way. So I got kicked out of my parents' home. I left initially at 17, came back for a bit, got kicked out when I turned 19. And I ended up living in a town outside the Philadelphia area

trying to go to school there, college there. I was kind of walking down the street, it was called Gay Street, it's in Westchester, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yeah, I was kind of walking down the street and I found a large Ziploc bag with many kind of small, smaller Ziploc bags in it. I'd never had any experience with crack before, but like, you know, I'd use powder cocaine, like other things and like, oh, this, that's probably what crack is, right? The anthropologically interested drug dealer, John, might not have been excited about crack. There wasn't a lot of interesting stories about mind expansion written on the internet about crack cocaine, but John was in a different place then.

He was sort of on a suicide mission. It was kind of like the train was, the train was already off the rails and kind of, you know, rolling down the mountain, especially living in the place and stuff. And with a lot of people leaving and going to college, I think it was kind of really, really isolated in the real world, like the physical world. So I think on FDET, there was a channel called Geek Issues, which I was just a big fan of. They had like bash.org, which basically collected things from this channel,

like quotes from this channel. And I had just gotten a little digital camera that I used to take pictures of myself for dating purposes. I was trying to set myself up on a dating site, which did not go well. So I had a large bong with a... there's a piece of the bong called a slide, like a little glass, flared out piece of glass and apply flame to it and then pull air through you know from the top that it pulls

The the smoke through in a way that I'm not describing Well, so yeah John snapped the photos of the baggies he found and his glassware Etc and he posted it on IRC on this geek issues channel known for you know Kind of trolling and sarcastic behavior and asked hey, how do I smoke this? I think the general response that people thought I was trolling or like we just kind of like messing with me I think probably from a good hearted place of just not wanting to help someone with this, you know And also just kind of like, you know Probably kind of attention seeking behavior or something or read it as that way. But then I found someone was like willing to

help me a bit as well. Just like take a cigarette, smoke a little bit of ash into the top of the bowl and then like, you know, then you put a little bit on it, it gave me a sense of how much. And here's how you apply the lighter and then you spoke from the back end of the the bong, essentially like it, if you're familiar with crack at all, it roughly becomes like a stem. And so I tried to do it a little bit and took another picture and this is what it's looking like now. And got to the point where I was working pretty well working with someone on FDET there. So what did you do?

Did you just smoke a dealer's worth of crack cocaine in an afternoon like on IRC? Pretty much. I think like each one of these bags I felt after the fact was like a $50 to $100 bag and I had a good you know 10 to 15 of them. It started out in like the afternoon but if like I don't know if you're familiar with like stimulants at all it basically just sat down and smoked until there wasn't anymore. That's insane. Yeah the IRC people were cheering you on. I mean, once you have a crack like IRC, what the fuck is IRC?

It's kind of like, I think I've lost sight of everything except for the pseudo stem and you take a lungful of this stuff and it literally feels like the best pleasure you've ever had in your head instantly and it goes away minutes after you exhale. And so there's just like that rat in the cage, push the lever kind of reaction of like, that feels like nothing you've ever felt in my life.

So, why don't I do that pretty much? And so like, I spoke, for however long it takes to smoke that much crack, which is a long time, but you're not very aware of the time. And so just spoke until it was gone, time wasn't an issue. Nothing was an issue. It was just kind of like focused on, you know, hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting, and then

laid on the couch for probably the next morning at that point for at least a few hours just trying to stay perfectly still wondering if my heart was going to explode, which felt like a very real possibility in the moment. And I laid down on the couch. I was convinced I was dying. My heart was exploding out of my chest. And I was like, oh my God, this is where I died probably. And I remember laying perfectly still on the couch.

If I moved even a little bit, my heart rate would go even higher. And I was like, oh fuck, that's not good. Things kept getting worse for Johnny. He didn't have close friends in the physical world, just people online he talked to. And he was drifting from his family. That meant more crack and then homelessness. Eventually though, John found some strength in accepting his situation.

I'm going to look at that internal mental compass and decide, oh, you know, like, I think I'd like to start being more sociable, right, and getting more community support for this issue. So I'm going gonna start going to, you know, an AA meeting a few times a week, and I know it's gonna be uncomfortable when I start doing that. And when I did like little things like that, right? Like they didn't buy themselves,

so it would make me magically happy. I do wanna die. If I had to choose, do I wanna die or live today, I'd probably choose die. But I did get a little shot of like, oh, this feels different and better, you know, like that, that kind of like, Oh, something about this is, is ready. Now, my my brain is kind of telling me there's something

about this is fulfilling, you know, especially like getting past initial discomfort, like, Oh, I'm going to dinner with people after a meeting, and that feels really good, like people are joking and laughing, and I leave feeling happy, right? So I would say like, just stacking little not running from it, not denying the feelings or or trying to pretend they're not there John was going to meetings in person and that helped but being around people face to face could be super stressful for him He didn't always feel comfortable Socializing in the physical world. I probably shouldn't say which recovery program because they're big on like anonymity and stuff

But I found an online cover recovery program for people recovering from drugs that had online meetings and you know they were a really great fit for me because they could feel, be more open you know and it was also like more like the meeting was like very much me out of my element right. It felt like I was spending a bunch of time you know I was very isolated before that. It wasn't you know it wasn't really involved in the world you. It was kind of like the place I would have socialized, would have been online anyway. So I got very involved in the community as a user of it.

And then in these 12 subgroups, like volunteering and service is a big part of, part of the recovery piece is kind of like that, do the actions that you know are gonna fix your brain eventually kind of thing. And so John volunteered to help with the website and with the online chat. And I think what it quickly led to is these communities were hosted on I think like FNET or something, which is not a friendly place for recovery.

So there would just be like in all the FNET channels, like, you know, where there's, you know, whatever, like kill everyone or whatever, there'd be like hashtag name of like of a full step recovery group, you know, and you could imagine about how well that would go, right, with trolls and things like that. And I think, and people just, you know, try to hack and attack the group and these sorts of things. And I think there it was kind of like, this was like, I was technically responsible for running the website, keeping the channel up, but then I started to like, get really like,

this is my first time in recovery, I'm a mess. But then you go really deep down the world of like, like IRC bots. Here's the thing. If there was another John out there, someone isolated and struggling with addiction, he wanted to make sure that person didn't get attacked by trolls when they were reaching out for help. He wanted their first steps towards recovery to feel safe and supportive. Yeah, it was just kind of you know, a fun technical problem,

very open-ended, very hard, right? But also I did like kind of very gratifying when it was working, very frustrating when it was not working. It's the first time around that was, I think in a lot of ways, like just going into that world of like the technical side of online recovery on IRC, I think really like kept me sober.

It gave me something to like focus on. that was not like, I'm really miserable not being high basically being involved with that, I think is the biggest part of why I stayed clean the first time around. After getting sober, John moves to Bakersfield, California, and he starts college again through AA. He lands a job as sort of a IT networking consultant, fixer-upper guy. Say a business's Windows server crashes and suddenly their point of sale system won't work.

John gets the call and he drives over there and he figures out a way to bring it back online. John had a knack for this stuff. One client had a point of sale system that kept printing really long stretches of blank space at the end of every receipt, wasting paper and wasting time. And no one could fix it, not even the vendor. But John could. He wrote a custom printer driver that stripped out all those extra line breaks before it

sent things off to the printer. So John became the IT guy that people called when their business was on the line. He'd walk in with no idea of what problems he'd find, or even what tech he'd be dealing with. Sometimes he had to recover lost data. Sometimes he had to reverse engineer weird formats or fix bugs in abandoned software that kept the whole business running.

And sometimes he just had to restart a printer or a server or put a new disk drive in. He could handle these tough technical problems, but dealing with the people in person, that was hard. Walking into an office where everybody was waiting for him to fix things, that was real pressure. I've always been a very anxious person, struggling with the depression and that kind of stuff.

And so there were days where I was just kind of like forcing myself through, right? And just kind of very on edge the whole time and just kind of very uncomfortable. And like right? And just kind of very on edge the whole time and just kind of very uncomfortable. And like it felt like most of my mental energy was going into like just trying not to, you know, like freak out during the day. Like in a very literal, like, I want to run out the door,

you know, and like, you know, go hide somewhere kind of way. Like, what were you worried about? I don't even know. Like, I still get in that mode sometimes. I struggle with a lot of panic. Like I would go worried about? I don't even know. Like I still get in that mode sometimes. I struggle with a lot of panic attacks. I would go to get panic attacks. I went out to see a client once. It was like a resort out on the coast of California. It was about to say their name but probably the best Dutch city name given the other content. I was getting completely sober

through this time and it was like a property, like a large property with different buildings in different places. And I was kind of going from one to the other, taking care of things and stuff. I was just so overwhelmed. I went and found a building that, you know, it was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and not much stuff. And just like closed it and locked the door. And it was like not a big one for crying for whatever reason, but just like literally curled up in the ball,

you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now that I go back out and fix the word prayers, that kind of thing. But I think I was very good at like, like basically pushing out the feelings or whatever else and like functioning, do like like white knuckling it basically and functioning.

And then like go to the bathroom and then be like fucking panicking. And then come back out and pretend like nothing's happening kind of that kind of thing like if that makes sense. Like I love the work I like all the parts that involved dealing with people like that was a stressful part and so there's a way that I'm escaping into like you know white knuckling the parts that were the people parts to get to like the technical parts. Like in my mind it was all almost like, yes, tomorrow might be the day and like you know, like try to interpret you know things people said or doing like is tomorrow going to

be the day they're going to fire me? You know, like it was all you know that form of delusion I guess and in some way. You know what's interesting like I remember the early days we worked together there was Jared and I remember Jared coming to me one time and being like, oh my god, like John's a genius. You are able to get things done that others can't. In a very significant way, like if John focuses his mind on something really gnarly and nasty, he'll be able to solve problems that nobody else can. And I feel like you were probably worried, like about people's perception of you, but probably on their side They were like oh so desperate just to have you around right because it's very rare to have somebody that you can throw hard problems at You're one of those people probably you could have done whatever you wanted and still been asshole the people

been disheveled and unclean and rude to everybody and they would have kept you because You actually have like an ability that is quite rare. But I don't think you knew that, right? No, I think there's probably an element where I was disheveled and rude without being to be, you know, like, and like the people were tolerating, you know, in a very real, like some of it is just like, my own internal critic is very strong. So of course they didn't fire John. In fact, so many businesses needed his help that he did more work on the side. And that became his sober consultant life. A lot of great technical challenges that could distract him from the sense of doom and impending

disaster he was feeling. And then he met someone who had a big positive effect on his life. AJ. He was a good friend of one of my coworkers at the place I was working at the time, Paul. So Paul, because I did freelance work, Paul had connected me to him as somebody who needed data work, is a short version of it. It was in the Bureau of Land Management, like a federal building up by the airport in Bakersfield, on the outskirts of Bakersfield, kind of like a single story, sprawling government-looking

building. And then you'd walk in through the front door and it was kind of like an office-y environment. It was, you know, I forget if there are cubicles at the time, but like imagine that sort of thing. And it would just be like, he'd be there in office. Like most of the people wouldn't be there. And we'd spend a few, like, you know, talk about like, oh, what is it

you want done, you know? And then, um, yeah, that would just sit down at like a workstation. That would normally be someone else's, I guess, during the week and like, you know, put in a few hours taking care of something for them. AJ's business had a PI license, private investigators, but they were not the type of PI you see in the movies. Instead of chasing down people who skipped out on debts, his team tracked down people who were actually owed money by city governments or by businesses Say you overpaid your taxes and then moved before they could send you a check

They make efforts sometimes to contact you because it builds goodwill But they are also typically are allowed to collect interest on the money sitting in this bank account So they're they're often not terribly incentivized to like seek out the owners of this and it's just just a hard data problem often Because you know, yeah, like like some of those leaving no this. And it's just a hard data problem often because sometimes there's even no address associated with it or just like complete, you know, the records, you know, there's a reason that it wasn't returned to the person in the first place. AJ's company dug through public data sets,

tracked down people by hand, and then took a 10% cut for connecting people with their lost money. It was a classic messy data problem, and the end result was always a letter in the mail. John started out freelancing, just cleaning up their data, but eventually AJ convinced him to join full-time. So very, very open-ended, very low friction.

He was like very much the business side, didn't care about the technical, just like, yeah, so suddenly on an approach, that we need to get more letters out, that we need to make more money. The thing I loved about it was, you know, people not surprisingly, like when you're, when you're getting people free money, right? Like people like that, you know. Every so often, someone would send a thank you note after getting their money back. These notes meant a lot to John. They

reminded him that this wasn't just about the money or the data. He was actually helping people and that made him feel good. And now that he was full time, he could help AJ scale up their operations and get money to more people by pulling data straight from the source. And so I created a bunch of scrapers that would go to, instead of just waiting for the CD in the mail, you know, or the PD, which is often contained a PDF on it. There was horrible to process. Well, the first things I did was, Oh, or the PD, which is often contained a PDF on it. That was horrible to process. Well, the first things I did was, oh, we need some, some servers probably. And I knew where to get like servers that were refurbished and like previous

generation Dell servers, but they came with a warranty that was not the Dell one. So, you know, kind of source a bunch of cheap servers and, you know, put them in the server rack and got out and kind of get up, got up like a kind of bobo server setup to do the things we need to do because we'll need to run like SQL somewhere. We need to run the web apps that we're going to need, people are going to be using internally and stuff like that. So probably the early days we're sourcing on a budget like at this point, this business is like a million dollars a year in revenue if that and so like do try to do all this you know with kind of like a

fairly shoestring budgets I would set up a lot of scrapers that would go to the website and in one way or another scrape all the property currently on the website and do this constantly so that basically that meant it we could get to we contact people faster than other people who weren't able to do that but also contact people who like otherwise otherwise the state would not, there was no way to get this data except to go to the website designed for human to use and essentially scrape for some variation of that.

John wasn't breaking any laws with his scraping. Still, the municipalities really didn't want people pulling data like this, and so they pushed back. But for John, these typing goal challenges were the easy part. What really got to him was working in an office and having to talk to people day in and day out. To cope, he started taking benzodiazepines.

And then he found something that worked even better, extended release OxyContin, which he did not have a prescription for. I stopped having panic attacks. I was much more mellow. Not like a mellow person, but exactly. But I wasn't on the verge of a panic attack all the time. And I felt much more warm and connected to other people. I wasn't afraid of them. But I would take the same dose every day at the same times. And I just felt like being like cured really. My my the period of sobriety, you know, when I was trying to like deal with the the panic attacks just by like, you know, keep myself very, very still. And I did a stare like kind of the space above the person's nose. And so we're like, nod what it seems like I'm soliciting nodding.

And then like, try to reconstruct after the fact, like what the fuck happened in the meeting, right? Or like, when I get back a hold of myself like having to like ask questions and stuff to like without seemingly like always asking questions to try to piece together like what the last few minutes of the conversation were and stuff like that. And it was like, oh, like I don't piece. I don't want to do any of that. Like it's I just focus on the fun technical problems like dealing with people is like more pleasant.

Like I enjoy because I generally do enjoy people. I'm like scared of them, but I enjoy them. Right. And when they say oh, now I have my security blanket. I feel, you know, I'm not really worried if they don't like me. With his anxiety under control, you know, though not in a way his friends from AA or NA would endorse, John could finally focus on the technical challenges at work. And there were tons of those. Cities did not want people to scrape these lists, and so they started adding captures. John had to get creative and came up with a few ways around them.

Well, sometimes they didn't implement the capture very well, and you could just use JavaScript to do something like, just say, capture solved. We did our own OCR. That was another thing we did with some captures, is use OCR libraries to just, they actually did, even with the technology at the time, it wasn't that hard to do these things. Then he found a service that somehow could break Captchas. You send them an image,

and about 30 seconds later you get an answer. One day this service was suddenly running very slowly, and so I contacted support, which was like, didn't really like, I don't know if there was any phone support or anything. It was like, kind of like, go to the weird chat bot and speak to someone who clearly doesn't speak English as a first language. And they're like, oh yeah, it's like the 8th of the lunar new year is basically what they

say. So we have like, and then like that put together, suddenly in my mind, I was realizing, oh, like there's literally people. They're like, really, like the reason you get a 30 second response is they're presenting this image to someone in something like a call center, and quickly key in what the capture is. I thought they had really good OCR or something, but it turns out it was people all along was kind of the thing, like some sort of warehouse somewhere.

John built an entire ecosystem of scrapers and clever workarounds for the various anti-scraping measures the cities would throw at him. But he wasn't just pulling data, he also had automated the messy workflows at the various municipalities to claim money for customers. Because often these application processes were anything but user-friendly. And then something would change on a web page and the scrapers would break. And I got fairly involved as far as having to do things like introduce like jitter, like fill out the forms using selenium in the way a human would or like sort of spinning up like hundreds of little EC2 instances. The EC2 instances would act like proxies. So what that blocked was all attempts to limit rate limit

or check by IP or anything like that. Or obvious, they had some level of obvious proxy detection or VPN detection. But the IPs for where that method would come through is just EC2 IPs. I would have different municipalities I was not using the full bag of tricks with. I wouldn't be bothering with the distributed scrapes because they didn't it wasn't

Necessary and they would roll out like rate limit protection or something like that It was like oh well We're just gonna move you from pile a to pile B And they just go with it like suddenly, you know, and now we're scraping in parallel, you know across a hundred things like much You know faster anyway, you know, it was like oh wait Well, let's see how long it takes them to notice this but I think it got to a point where, at least for my, you know, probably over-legal testicle perspective at the time, it felt like they were outgunned, basically.

It sounds like a scammy kind of thing, but like the fact that like, I think that I was very like, had a little kind of like moral certainty of what I was doing, that I think it felt very comfortable like pushing the limits of like, what is possible to do with data collection. The moral certainty came from the wall. When people sent in thank you notes,

that was a special place where they would all get put up. Initially, it was only a portion of the wall and over time, it grew to the whole wall in multiple layers. It was like, I was having trouble making my rent or whatever, and then I got contacted, and I got X thousand dollars and stuff like this. I thought it's a very kind of, I think my favorite thing to do, like I work on the weekends or with other people, I just kind of go peruse the latest letters kind of. I think it felt good to see that wall of like thank you

letters grow, right? And like just be able to compute because I could run aggregations on the data and see like, what's the dollar amount we've gotten back to people? And I forget exactly what it was, but I knew our revenues ended up in the four to five million dollars a year range, and that's taking 10%, you know, or so. So that gives you a sense of the scale. And a lot of it was kind of nickel and dime,

a hundred dollars, a few hundred dollars. But I think for me, love that it was so open-ended and just figure out how to do it, figure out how to get the money back to the people, just sell it was so open-ended and just figure out how to do it, figure out how to get the money back to the people, like, you know, just like sell it to AJ as far as like why this is a responsible thing to do. And I love that, like, the better I am at my job, like, the dollar value that we've returned to people goes up each month even more. And like the number of them, the thank

you letters on the wall get like deeper. As the business grew, so did John's skills. What started with building scrapers became a foundation for his work in security research. Scaling those scrapers also pushed him into cloud computing and then into other areas. I was getting into functional programming like it clearly looked like for distributed, the sort of distributed systems we were building like this is fucking, there's no end date, this is no end date better than Java and imperative programming. And so it would hang out on like the various like hashtag scala you know channels in various places and it felt like you know like I'm learning another new skill and regardless

of whether that's shooting heroin smoking crack or whatever you know or like learning new programming language you know the place I'm going to do that is like is IRC. Oh yeah. The heroin for years, John used the extended lease, Oxycontin while the company kept growing and John grew team under him and things were scaling up, but then the Oxy market kind of dried up. And so John turned his analytical mind to finding a new fix for his social anxiety. Heroin. I was sourcing my heroin from the LA area which is like a 90

minute drive from Bakersfield among other places. It was not the best of doing any of this. I'm sure that the people who were you know used heroin for years and years and years, probably, oh this is a lightweight you know kind of tourist or something. But I drive down you know by a large quantity and then drive back home and then be good for like you you know, a week or something. This was kind of like, you know, after work activities, you know, yeah, it'd take like 180 minutes. But I drive down, drive down, you know, you know, buy some more heroin for the week, you

know, and kind of go back and come back up. What's crazy to me is like all of it, I guess. Like I worked with you not that long after this, right? I had no idea and like if people asked me to describe John like I would say like yeah you're a little bit like socially you're a little bit withdrawn and like maybe you give off like some sort of like Doogie Howser or Sheldon Cooper like vibes. But honestly like that stuff about like not seeming like a drug user like I think I've used that to my advantage a lot in

My life because like there's a thing of like a pull a car over and there's four people sitting in it And one of them is me like that's not the person the cops gonna focus on right? That's just like the quiet kid who's got caught up in all this right over probably just maybe he was catching a ride You know or maybe they were just trying this for the first time and like you know or an overhead right? That's kind of like that But on some level as some level as he comes from from, like not fitting in in either world, right? Not fitting in the drug user, the drug using world, not fitting in in the regular world. And so just like, you know, you know, I might as well use that to my advantage, kind of basically.

Besides the hassle of driving to L.A. and honestly, a ton of other reasons, heroin came with its own set of problems as a way to handle social anxiety. So like Europe, East Coast of America and West Coast of America used to be different because of where the heroin comes from. So on the West Coast of America, black tar heroin swaddled in from Mexico. So it's like black chunks. They're kind of like, I mean, it's as big as you buy it, I guess. But like kind of like think of like, you know, something kind of like a large crack rock doesn't have the consistency of a crack rock or black, you know?

And, and so when you're shooting, you're like, you're like breaking off a little bit of this thing. You throw it in water, you stir it up and draw it up into the syringe. So John would drive to an out of the way spot, not too far from his work. It's kind of like an industrial area, you know, like office buildings and industrial stuff, you know, thing, and then kind of, and then real quickly try to hit. I think I didn't use like IV, I use IV long enough to have a lot of problems with like veins collapsing and stuff.

It's like a pretty reliably hit, you know, in my forearm or the crook of my arm on one side or the other. And then kind of do that kind of quickly cap up and hide the syringe in case I passed out because of like a cop comes by like to think you don't want for them to find you passed out in your front seat with you know like a syringe in your lap because that's a very easy case for them to make. So I would try to like quickly set aside and then like give myself a few minutes. It takes like 10-15 seconds to really hit and then but then

they give myself like okay five-ten minutes like have a cigarette like see how this is going to hit me. If it's too much then maybe I'm going to hang out here a little longer or like figure out something about you know to deal with the situation and then kind of go back in. You can see where this is heading and it's not anywhere good. John does cut back on the heroin a bit for a while, so he's not using it every day, but you know he has to increase his benzos to counteract and then he's still taking opioids in one form or another and then he has to resupply. There's you know groups of people who use opiates that coordinate online. I met someone online and oh they met up for the first time and

I drove them down to LA with me. So I picked this person up and drove down. You drive from Baker's Hill to LA, you go over a mountain range on a stretch of road called the Grapevine. So kind of like a windy road. It goes from sea level up to, you know, kind of three or four thousand feet down to the LA basin. You know, it's a very large highway, but kind of windy and dark. I was driving very quickly, I think not realizing the effects the Benzos were having on me. I think in retrospect just like talked this person's ear off for the entire ride to LA. I think they were probably by the end of the ship, like by the time we were like actually there, getting ready to buy,

you know, like probably convinced they were in a car, trapped with a car with a crazy person. So we met the person down there. I was trying to introduce this person to that person. I bought an undisclosed quantity of heroin, and the three of us were like, well, we all wanted to get high. They hit the road, John in the back seat, the dealer up front, reaching over to hand him a syringe.

His eye for what the right amount is, is different than mine. And as we were driving down the road, and I shot up and I remember putting the, like capping the needle back up and saying, like, I gotta clean, I gotta clean this stuff up, like, meaning like the stuff in the back of the car. And then like the next thing I remember is kind of coming to, laying on my back in a parking lot and there was like a paramedic over me. I guess they just hit me with a Narcan or something. And they were asking some questions to orient me and basically saying like a passerby report that you were like, you know, passed out in the back of your car.

They called 911 and we came and got into your car, which was unlocked and you know, da da da da. And it turned out what had happened is they had been talking in the front seat, not really paying attention to what was going on. And when I looked back, my face was blue. I wasn't breathing. So I just pulled over and took all this shit out of the car and left it unlocked. They were literally standing over there, called 911.

So it was unconscious for about 10 to 15 minutes. It was just not, as far as these things go, not the worst. John makes it back to Bakersfield, although the details of how are a little bit fuzzy. And he phoned somebody in the recovery community. He knows that things aren't good. And he decides he's not gonna go into work the next day. He needs to find a way to get clean.

If there was any way to continue using opiates in a controlled way, the way that was working, I would have done that. But, like, even just, I've been reading a bunch of stuff about the complications of IV drug use and, like, the portality rates and all these things, like, the actuarial table type things, and, like, there's no... You could tell yourself, like, you can use OxyContin for your whole life and not have a bad life or even methadone or whatever else like there there are people who pull this off there are very few people who find a way to successfully inject drugs for their

entire life and have like a life that's not much shorter than it would be otherwise I was clean especially for the first six months. I was an absolute mess. Did not feel like, oh, this is better. It felt like, oh, this is all the shit. This is the reason that I use drugs. And it felt like I'm just trapped now. I can't continue to use drugs without dying.

And I'm just a mess, kind of like in a million ways kind of thing. It's just totally on my back to the wall as far as like I can't go back to the, you know, the drug use route pretty much. Okay, but like, like you finished rehab and you've cleaned up and your perspective is like, I've considered it analytically. And IV drug use is like not my number one option like that's like that is not the recovery story that I hear from a from a made-for-tv movie. Well the problem is that the made-for-tv movies focus on the wrong thing right because that's like that's the beginning of like some recovery starts when it's like okay like

I can't continue to use drugs anymore but I am my fucking head is a mess and like I everyday fucking miserable because the thing is like when you stop using here We're like that the withdrawal is not the worst part at all Like that's like, you know, there's a few like, you know Whatever four or five days depending on who you like, you know You're kind of you're pretty good shape by it by then The the thing is fucking miserable is then like all the stuff you've been running from and all the stuff that you've done is there For example, like I I stopped being able to go into the office, like I would be trying to do that white knuckling thing. I'm forcing

myself to be in an office and not have a panic attack. But I just sort of like was so unable to navigate regular life without these things that it was literally like going to the office would be a panic attack very quickly. So John switched to working remotely. He managed projects and he kept in touch with his team through chat and email and phone calls. And unfortunately, again, you know, very fortunate that, you know, AJ kind of like a patient with this stuff. But so the recovery process was the process of months and years there figuring out like, how do I not want to kill myself every day? And the work was all like,

no longer using heroin part was very actually the easiest part of all of it. I think that's like a lot of people's experience really, but like it doesn't make for a good movie. In recovery, John found weightlifting and bodybuilding, but he also rediscovered an outlet for his tendencies. I think the scraper problems would be an example of that. Like for me, like security research hacking type stuff is like it's an incredibly open-ended complex problem that requires full attention and critically like there's a lot of like dopamine hits and stimulation along the way there's all these ups and downs of like poking at the thing oh shit like if i if i submit something to a form in this way i get back a cookie that looks like i could use over here you know in this place where

it's not letting me go to this site because i'm going to i'm jumping like right to step three of a process but that cookie looks like you know the kind of cookie I could use over here on step three of this thing, right? And it's just kind of like these ups and downs to and like the joy of discovery or that you end up like in a dead Ends. Oh fuck. I just wasted four hours. This is never gonna be done, right? In some way it is like chaotic in the way that like drug use or other things are but in like a much more Control like at the end of the day, it's nothing, you know, oh, there's still gonna be able to go home, right? You know, or like, no one's going to be dead. No one's going to be whatever.

I think like anything in the security research hacking space, which I include that hacking in the broad sense, that's kind of open-ended, hard problems like RtKr, the thing that like are in some ways, I guess, another addiction or thing for me. And I find that when there's like a complexity level is high enough, and like there's like pressure and stakes and open-ended and complexity level is high enough and like there's like pressure and stakes and open it and the problem is engaging enough like the voice in my head kind of shuts up finally, you know, and there's a sense of like newness and excitement. I think there's also like a dope mean hit thing to it of like, because it is like, especially security research, it's like,

you know, handle on 10 things for a very long time and like nine of them don't pan out and then you finally hit the one and say, oh, you know, like, you know, they get kind of like very long time and like, nine of them don't pan out. And then you finally hit the one and say, oh, they get kind of like a big hit of like, I'm not a crazy person. So John slowly found ways to cope with sobriety. Remote work was a big part of it. And so was, the standard hard work of recovery that John says usually isn't included in the movies.

But yeah, he left the data mining place for a couple of reasons. One was he wanted a clean start. And another was because he wanted to work in cybersecurity. So he started at Tenable and I worked with him there. I didn't know anything about these drug struggles, but I did know something about him. I mean, I spent a lot of time with him and I felt like I knew something that really related to his struggles and I wanted to confront him about it. Well cuz I've known you for I don't know It's it's some amount of years at this point. About 10 now

I think a little less than 10. 9, 9 I think you. That's wild I knew when I when I said I wanted to interview like I I knew that one of the things I wanted to ask you about Was autism because I had this sense. I don't like I knew that one of the things I wanted to ask you about was autism, because I had this sense, I don't, like I feel like saying this seems rude. I knew that you were on the autism spectrum. Like I don't know that that's good or bad, but like if you're in a group of people in various areas, like you're very clearly in this group, right?

But I also just had the sense that you didn't know you were in that group, right? And that's a weird thing. I don't want to draw too strong a parallel because I don't want to cheapen the experience of other people. People are kind of in the closet with homosexuality or something and then there's the process of often coming out or there's some level of even self-hatred that can develop and things like this.

I think there's no way to describe it except denial, right? In the same way that someone is, maybe,, maybe, oh, like I just like hooking up with men from time to time, but I'm not like, because the reason for donating blood, they ask you, are you a man who has sex with men? Not are you homosexual or are you bisexual or whatever? And the reason for that is there'd be people who regularly, you know, or almost like, you know, regularly have sex with men would not fill out that box. Because not because they were lying, but because in their head like, you know, Oh, I just I just do all these I have all these behaviors, but that's not who I am identity wise.

And I think like sort of with autism, I could probably tell you like, oh, I'm socially awkward. Yeah, I'm this and I'm that but like I'm not but I'm not really an autistic person. The way this all connects at least for me is that yeah, John has anxiety issues for sure. And he has drug dependence issues that he's had to overcome. But also he's spent so much time comparing himself to a false standard. I think like the way that I internalize a lot of my problems before is basically like, I'm not good enough. Because I think you think of like a technical problem or like a sports problem or something.

The problem is that you're not good enough, right? Like you got to run harder or you have to get better at XTing or get better at handling pointers, right? And it's just like, that mentality works great for getting better and better and better at those things and putting a lot of pressure on myself and pointing out all the areas that are wrong and I still keep dereferencing pointers and you know, in sloppy ways, it's causing my application to crash, I'm gonna get better at that. If you apply that mentality to yourself, I think the thing I

found is incredibly self destructive and toxic because like that was like, for me, like socialization was that sort of problem is out. I'm on the verge of cracking it right. But if I just like remember all these things, like, you know, I'm not going to be as weird, you know. And that all these things, I'm not going to be as weird. And that's incredibly, I think that creates a self-image that's very toxic. It's only helpful for you to identify with that identity if it actually helps you overcome things, right? But if it helps you understand that, oh, my struggle is to work in the workplace. Maybe it's not a code for me to crack.

I'm just like, I'm this person. I think, I think if I did the point where I could have accepted that, then it would have been, it would have been so much easier. But at the point someone supplying the label to me was, was not enough to make me. It's like, yeah, I think, I think that I am finding that accepting it is helping with a lot of those things. Yeah. I do think like this, it being much more visible has helped me a lot.

Like there was much more people, many more people being diagnosed. Oh, like I can relate to this person. Like they're not in a group home and running into more of those people in my day to day life and stuff. It's like the diagnosis by itself would not have done anything useful for me. I don't think it's like the acceptance of the diagnosis piece has really been the biggest thing for me. It's still like the last few years that I've finally accepting it, like and still there's some days where I wonder about it. So I'm still very much in like the coming to terms with that phase.

John can't rewind his life, right? He can't tell his younger self, you don't have to pretend to be someone you're not, but he can share what he's learned for everyone else. I think that the thing that I was missing, I think, is not having a community of people like me where I felt like I was accepted. I kind of ended up finding that truth of, you know, engineering is a job, but like I think I would encourage, you know, people who are on a similar life path to like find, if they are, you know, spectrumy people, they find other people in the spectrum they get along with and develop relationships and talk with those people and kind of get an understanding of themselves and do more of that rather than like you know reading of

diagnoses and stereotypes and these sorts of things. I think that's like a key step to me for like finding community of a sort. You know I found community in the technical world but I needed that other kind of community as well, you know, that kind of helped balance things out. So it's years later, and John is doing well, and he's got a friend who's also on the spectrum. And that's sort of how he started to understand who he is in a way that doctors telling him he might be on the spectrum really did not. And he's now a chief research scientist at a stealth startup that poached him away from beyond trust, who took him away from CrowdStrike before that.

I've been like 11 years clean at this point, like, you know, I'm not having middle health crisis. I cannot imagine kind of going back to that, you know, that kind of way of living, like I feel like my life continues to get more and more fulfilling over time and more and more stable and more and more other things. And I think the thing that I'm finally, literally like in the past few years, finally, you know, starting to like come to terms with is like, I am kind of weird in some ways, I do have some social difficulties, but like that's like an acceptable way to exist as a human being.

And like people are like seeing other people like that like that are accepted. Also like there's just a lot more you know a lot more people are publicly talking about these things now which I think has been like more and more it's like oh there's like a way to exist in a world that doesn't involve the like trying to pretend to be something. I'm not on in a way like it's just like a daily battle of like how to like perfectly method act like a non-autistic person in a way that always feels like a failing. That was the show. Thank you so much, John, for being so honest and so real with us. I think it takes guts to talk about addiction and anxiety

and the messy path of self-acceptance, takes guts to share that. I think a lot of us will see a bit of ourselves in your story. If you want to reach out to John, you'll find him on Twitter or on Blue Sky details on the webpage or just email me. I'm sure if his story resonates with you, he would love to hear from you. I think we could all benefit from the kind of self-acceptance that John has been working on cultivating. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend,

please spread the word of mouth. It's the best way to grow the show. And then more people can hear messages like John's. You can also join the co-workers of community on Slack, where we talk about everything from technical deep dives to the human side of software. And there's always great conversations going on there. One of my favorite places to hang out

on the internet for sure. I'd love to see you there. And there's also a newsletter, but if you really want to support the show and help me to keep bringing you these kinds of conversations, please go to co-recursive.com slash supporters. And until next time, thank you so much for listening.