Darknet Diaries - 155: Kingpin

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

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://linktr.ee/joegrandSponsorsSupport for this show comes from ThreatLocker®. 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.Support for this show comes from Lumen. 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.Support for this show comes from ZipRecruiter. 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.

Sometimes the people I want to talk to on this show are so cool that I want to be friends with them. Okay, I'm recording. Cool. Alright, let me get to it. Where are we going? Um, let's go to the lair. Where the magic happens. And Joe Grant is someone who, because we have so much in common, I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection.

Alright, here we go. Oh my. What a place. Yeah. You've got a display case here, and then you've got a table here with a ton of projects working on. Yeah. So this is the main table that people probably see in videos. I have my computer, my oscilloscope, that is my one piece of test equipment that I'm always using,

power supply, and a couple of different projects. Some fault injection setup here. All these circuit boards are for a class I'm teaching in a couple weeks. I have to get those prepared. Showed me around his office. I think a better description for his office would be a workshop. It's really a place that sparks creativity wherever you look. It's full of gadgets and tools that just beckon you to pick something up

and start building something. Workbench with various pieces of circuitry and yeah, a lot of display stuff also. Got your YouTube plaque on the wall. Got the YouTube plaque on the wall. Yeah. 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? Um, that's a good question. These are true stories from the dark side of the internet. I'm Jack Reisider. This episode is sponsored by Threatlocker.

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That's threatlocker.com. This episode is sponsored by ZipRecruiter. Sometimes I remember that I'm the host of Darknet Diaries and I love my job where I can tell stories and speak to so many interesting people. And if you're also doing what you love, there's nothing better than being surrounded by people who also love it as much as you. And if you own your own business, you want to hire employees who love what they do to boost the overall success of your business. Plus make it a pretty great place to work.

But how do you find passionate employees who are a good fit for all of your roles? ZipRecruiter. And right now you can try it for free at ziprecruiter.com slash darknet. ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology works fast to find you top talent so you don't have to waste time or money. Hire experienced people who are excited about what they do with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive web address to try ZipRecruiter for free. ZipRecruiter.com slash darknet.

Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash darknet. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Hi. Hey.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com.com. 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. 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. Joe and I both got into computers there, and remained a skater all through middle school and high school.

Joe and I both got into computers around the same time too. And for both of us, we had just great fun in seeing all that it could do, building things, breaking things, trying just about every possible thing that we heard about. Bulletin boards, floppy disks, DOS, AOL, IRC, FTP, UNIX, Windows, programming, electronics, circuits. It was simply great fun to sit down Saturday night at a computer and just try to do something

new with it. Like to try out a new operating system, or compile a kernel from scratch. We would absolutely try what other people tried before us. Things that have tutorials for them. But then we'd soon find ourselves in areas where no tutorials exist for this. No manuals explain what to do here. We were off the map, explorers of the digital world, and it felt like we were trying to get computers to do things they weren't intended to do.

Which in my opinion is the definition of a hacker. To push beyond the roadblocks that stop you from doing something and to try to get it done anyway. Living in that space is hard though. It's like you're walking in the dark and you're constantly bumping into things. You feel stupid for not knowing what to do and just failing again and again. And it's frustrating when it doesn't work and you give up. As a youth, you don't quite know that what you're doing is different than how other people

are using these tools. So it just feels normal to stumble and struggle with whatever technology you have. You get used to that. But as you learn more about the world and grow up, you find your place in it. And you try to be good in your domain of expertise. You want to find a place where you feel comfortable and confident. It's uncomfortable and hard to learn things without instruction manuals or YouTube videos

to teach you. So you wait for others to learn the things before you so that they 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. 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 pushed us 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. 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 who's questioning the system and curious about technology and wanting to learn things and 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. And that's what I was going to ask you. As a hacker, have you ever been arrested? 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 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. In 1982, he got some Atari equipment. And when he was like eight, nine, ten, he was just mesmerized by the world of electronics. This eventually led him to computers, and he got a modem, and he could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach other computers somewhere else in the world.

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.

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. 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 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, I lost my card, can you send me another card? They'd send you a new physical card and you go use it. But that was later on. The earlier days, there was a lot of this curious exploration because we would war dial. We would take a prefix and say, okay, 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 wake up to a list of phone numbers and you're trying those and you never know like what it was. It was like this, this kind of treasure hunt. Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. So as part of joining Renegade Legion, so a bunch of, you know, 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, OK, this seems like a stable household. 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, This was 92. So really it was hackers against the phone system and Mabel New England telephone, you know 9x Michigan Bell, whatever Pacific Bell all of those companies

That was the target of phone phone freaking Exploring the phone network like that was for us. That was kind of the 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. It bought all the equipment to like you know break into this place some automatic center punches to break the windows thing. 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 in-field equipment. What were you looking for? 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 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 So yeah, he ended up getting caught the rest of us got away but what happened is as we pulled up next to the telephone facility was a park and there was a nosy neighbor that was like, hey there'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 cop 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, oh yeah, there's six of us or however many. We had all gotten home by that time

and back to Dr. Des's house and we're like, oh my God, where's this other guy? Turns out he got arrested. And then the next day we all had to turn ourselves in. 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. off without a charge. But the others weren't so lucky. A bunch of them got felonies. Some served jail time.

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 group, as Renegade Legion. And he ended up dying by suicide. And that was a real eye-opener of like, holy shit, the law breaker just killed himself? Like, over getting arrested? 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 hacker space. So Loft or Loft Heavy Industries was really just a safe space, possibly the first hacker space in the US as an organized space.

And it really was just a clubhouse for seven Boston area hackers to hang out and explore and have a place to like play with technology. What does this space look like? 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 IIs, Macs. We had a Vax 11780, I think.

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. 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. I remember seeing Count Zero give talks about 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. 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, all right, if I'm going to 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. I want to try that, or I want to 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 the main thing I learned from the Loft.

And that for sure is like, of everything that I've learned, like that has stuck with me the most. Loft was legendary. It was kind of like a research group. They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers and they released such tools like Loftcrack, which can sometimes crack Windows passwords. They published 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. 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, 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. We're joined today by the seven members of the Loft 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.

Joe's hacker name is Kingpin, and this was back in 1998. Morning. My name is Kingpin. I am the youngest member of the Loft and one of 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, but there's 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. 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. It's probably appropriate that gentlemen such as yourself or the ones who come forward and demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes. So we appreciate your coming here, especially in light of the fact that the Washington Post

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? That's correct. Actually, one of us with just a few packets. How punk is that to be this group of hackers coming up to the government saying we could take down the internet?

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 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. By that time in 98, like a lot of the software guys had found, you know, vulnerabilities in Microsoft and they had actually had meetings with That's a problem. 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 is going to fix it? 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. So I picture the old, old, old hacker space as to not have many screens and mostly just circuit boards you're looking at and maybe some visual aspect. Yep. 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 go in that direction or did you say, no, no, no, I think you all need this hardware, I'm going to stay with the hardware? Or how did you know that you're going to take a different route and not go at the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware.

Was that in-law that you kind of made that diversion? No, I had been, as soon as I got attracted to computers, I was also getting attracted to electronics. I have an older brother, and he was more of like an audiophile 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. But I just I just loved 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 couple text files you could read about of people making some interesting kind of like, I think 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. 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. 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. 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 wanna 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 going to 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. 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 and 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. 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 turned 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 POC SAG, you know,

listening into transmission so you can kind of see what's going on in the world around you. In the scanner radio, listening to the cops and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what's happening. 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.

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, 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 um and you'd see a hospital a lot of hospital traffic a lot of ems um traffic and uh like emergency medical kind of things. And yeah, 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 we'd get our orders, they'd all be mail order. We'd get our mail every week. I'd build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry and we'd package it up. And if they wanted a kit, we'd just give them the components. It was just a way to do something but that was a contribution that I could help make to the Loft to bring some money in. And then that kind of proved the concept of like, oh we could make a little bit of money on this,

like what if we could do it full time? 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. 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 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. And after that Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show. 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 of course we know they didn't and it lasted another ten years and 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 electronics and hobby electronics. And I was on the technical advisory board for them when they first started. And this company had contacted Make Magazine saying,

hey, do you know any engineers that might wanna be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical engineer, a machinist and a software engineer. 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 and 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 do what you love to do on TV. So I didn't really, just like with the Senate, I didn't know the impact or the implications of what it would become. I didn't know how special that was. And I was like, all right, fine, 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 med a little meditation kind of thing before that was even a known thing. It was just some, I just needed to escape. And which is funny because we had just gotten married. And 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 and you see you for 10 days or whatever. Cause I just was doing a little bit at a time. She's like, well, you needed it. Like very supportive, which was amazing. So did this bike ride. I didn't have a little bit at the time. She's like, well, you needed it. Like very supportive, which was amazing. So did this bike ride. I didn't have a phone or anything. This was like, you know, Nokia phone era.

And I didn't even bring a phone because I really wanted to isolate myself and 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 five emails of 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, all right, 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. Prototype this was pretty darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending waterslide. Can you imagine riding a waterslide

for as long as you wanted? Everybody needs an endless waterslide. I mean, it was like, we called it the backyard waterslide. 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. What they did was they connected curved waterslide parts into a donut-looking shape, like a big circle 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. 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 pack, and we had a drone that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea. We did a pizza delivering robot, which now there are food delivering robots. Maybe they ripped it off the show. You had one where you would try you ride on it. That's not even out yet. Like, fast forward 20 years, right?

What is it? Because that was a really hard problem. 15 years ago, and they still don't have rideable robots. Yeah, I know. You were building them. Yeah, I mean, that's a, like, everybody needs a rideable robot also. I guess the closest thing now are like

the autonomous vehicles, which are terrifying. Right, this was called the 6x6, and this was an all-terrain vehicle mimicking, it was actually called biomimicry, because we were mimicking the alternating tripod gate walking of some bug that was really stable with three legs on the ground. And there was a project, 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 human size version of that. And that was a really hard project. And actually that was the first project that didn't succeed on the show. 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. Two weeks is all you had to build everything? Some of them ended up being longer. Some of them were five or six weeks because they didn't really understand the engineering process. It's 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. 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're ready to go and you're just creating rapidly innovation in two weeks. That's insane. to at least explain the process of like, here's how you actually, and here's how engineering works. So the producers 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

going to build. Like the drama goes away and gave us a little less pressure of like, all right, we're going to do our best. 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. What can we do to make them better?

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. Alright, what do you guys got? Alright, we came up with a great idea for Prototype, giant boxing robots. 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. We had an episode where we were building 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. 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. So instead of using a human test dummy like Buster, the showrunners thought it would be too similar if prototype this used an adult test dummy too. So instead of using a human test dummy like Buster, we used like a 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. We're going to 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. This episode is sponsored by Lumen.

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went to and you were like the man of Defcon 17. I was like, that guy there, he's the guy who did all this stuff. I was just spellbound by you in this way of just like, wow, there goes Joe Grant, his name's Kingpin. I didn't know you were inside. I didn't realize that. That was the first one I went to. You've been in the same path for that one.

That was a long time ago. It was a long time ago. It was a long time ago. And so I think what you did to Defcon has affected pretty much every hacker conference on the planet. Yeah, yes. 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 it 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. Yeah, so DEFCON 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 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 that's it. Like, I'm not even really thinking about the outcome of it. Defcon was a huge part of my life.

It was a huge part of the hacker culture at the time. And it still is. It's just 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 Defcon and I'd given some talks at Defcon, you know, went to some early Defcon parties. The Dark

Tangent was like, hey I'm starting up these trainings you should do a hard 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 defcon so he saw that and was like let's make this a mass a mass thing uh DEFCON 14 was the first electronic badge, and it was very simple.

It had a really tiny microcontroller, a PIC10F202, I think it was, like a super tiny six pin microcontroller, and some blinky lights. You could change different blinking light patterns, and it had a debug interface adapter so people could change the code or hack the code if they wanted to. And I 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 a lot of people were exposed to electronics. And my goal was just like, expose more people to electronics. Like it was that simple. 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? And over the next couple 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 DEF CON's money to try a new thing was great. And then to give something back to the community that they could use and learn from and get involved

with electronics. 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. 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 DEF CON. 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 2600 Hz, it would respond by saying something in Morse code. And all the parts were surface mounts. So you could barely even see that there were any electronics involved in this thing. By the time DEF CON 18 happened, I felt like I'd sort of exhausted all of the things that I wanted to try, but it didn't matter. The ideas brought to life during those five years at DEF CON changed DEF CON

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, 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. 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. 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 just to bring something to the community and see what happens, see what comes out of it. 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. Defcon 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 DEFCON 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 DEFCON award and it said, for endless curiosity and innovation, the original spirit of badge life. And it was like, holy shit, like, wow, that's really cool. So that is really the first time where I realized that there was an impact of it.

And I thought it was cool. 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, my YouTube videos have a lot of views. 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 doesn't change me and it doesn't change my belief system and my passion for what I do. 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,

Kington Labs. Well, Grand Idea Studio. Grand Idea Studio. That's like my engineering company. So it's like, he's got an engineering company. And I saw your talk. He's got Hollywood deals that he's doing. I mean, this guy is going to,

I can't wait to see all the stuff that comes out. But you had no idea. No, I still have no idea what I'm doing. Like, I think, you know, 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. And 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 a struggle somewhere. I still don't have a path of where I'm going. It just, I've fallen into all of these things and some of it maybe was luck, some of it was intentional a little bit, but of like most of it was just being in the right place at the right time and somebody somewhere like dropping my name 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 evaluation. 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. 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 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? Which is completely different than a public perception, right? You see a lot of actors, a lot of musicians that perform on stage, but then they have all these other problems behind stage and they have substance abuse issues and all these other things. So I was just like, what's up with me? Why do I think this way?

And 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 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 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. And the testing came back with 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 has very high skills in certain things and then some deficits in certain things. And that can be caused with some of the autism or the depression. And you can manage depression in certain ways

depending on what it is. But now I don't have this internal anger against myself of like, why am I thinking that way? Or why do I feel this way? Like, it's okay to feel this way. And so it totally flipped my perspective of like, it validated 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 live better? 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, buck the system, break things, and learn to do something that nobody else knows. I would occasionally get emails with really strange requests of things. Or like, can you hack my girlfriend's...

I think my girlfriend's cheating on me, can you hack her device? I get those all the time. The sign of a healthy relationship. And I would generally respond to some emails at that point. 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. 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. This guy Dan reached out to Joe saying he had two million dollars 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 and I'm like okay this sounds like an interesting project.

Like, you know, some friends of mine had already proven that the Trezor can be hacked in different ways using fault injection. I had never personally done anything with fault injection. So for me, it was a perfect opportunity of like, alright, I'm not traveling. Like, they're still 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 have a reason to learn a new skill. 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. 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. Which there were some articles on it, but a lot of it was just theory. Like there were 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 injections, 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. Pretty much nonstop obsessive work to get things going, because the information that was out there was correct,

but 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 gonna inject the 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 like messing up some CPU execution. So it was all very timing specific and like you could be off by one clock cycle and it's not gonna work. I started down this path of trying to replicate some existing work and going through again this roller coaster of like, I love hacking, I hate hacking, you know, why isn't this working?

Questioning my skills, like do I even deserve to be doing this? Really it was more of the mental challenge 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.

He eventually hones in on the attack. He's got hope that he can glitch this device just as it turns on to get it to go into debug mode by sending electrical pulses through it in a way that it's just not built for. He's 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. 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 gonna 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. 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. So we got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress, trying to hack into this treasure wallet. Hell yeah. So we got a camera crew out to his house and started filming his progress,

trying to hack into this treasure wallet. 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? 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. The next step is we have to remove a couple components from this board. The components we're removing are capacitors and by removing them it makes the chip more susceptible to those little glitches and stuff that we're doing. What I'm going to do is use my soldering iron and just very carefully keep both sides of the part and pull it off the board. The risk at this stage is pulling off some of the circuit board with it, which hopefully won't happen. Iron is on. Yeah, there's two that we need to remove.

One is easier to get to than the other. Okay,'s off. Alright, so those components are off. Now all I have to do is add the external connectors that's going to let us hook it up to the hardware over there. 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 going to work. And he's got this station set up that is just going 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 and power it on again to 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. But after a lot of waiting and trying thousands of times they eventually get it. This is torture.

Hack the planet. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uh oh my god omg like they say on the internet Joe published this video to his YouTube channel and he 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.

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. 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 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 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 Grans 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. And is it like, if you need help recovering your crypto, I'm the guy? Yeah. So it's it's multiple things. But that's the main one of like, there's some cryptocurrency video and then there's all of these bots that respond. You should talk to Joe Grand.

He's the man. And then it's like, you know, a fake telegram name or joegrand6969 at gmail.com. You know, something totally obvious that it's not me, but there's this whole psychological side of things. I'm actually reading a book called The Confidence Game. That's all about the psychological side of getting conned and getting scammed. And what I've learned over the years of all of these emails that I get is people who are in a desperate situation People who are in a desperate situation are not thinking critically. So they go to, they ignore all the red flags.

And scamming, impersonating is such a common scam. 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 shouldn't, 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. But people who don't know me and who see the video might be like, oh, Joe is such a nice guy. He's reaching out to help. So it's a cat and mouse game. 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, which is not my personality.

Like I had Twitter to communicate to my world of friends, even though that's kind of going down the drain. I set up a Discord where my teenager was like, you got to 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 got to do it. Someone else can answer the questions. You just can be on there.

So that's actually been really fun because I've been able to talk to people who are asking intelligent questions and the ones that aren't just get ignored. It's great. But people still are getting scammed. So I've had to set up social media, open up direct message access

so people at least get to the correct Joe Grand and not the scammer. And then being verified on these platforms, it's easier to take them down. I mean, it's a never ending battle, but the hope is to just prevent more people from getting screwed. But it's opened my eyes and really disenchanted me or disenfranchised me, I guess, about cryptocurrency,

which I am not an owner of any cryptocurrency for people who are thinking of coming over to rob me. I'm not involved in cryptocurrency at all. I am just involved in the technical kind of aspect of it. But seeing all of the scams really has kind of crushed my idealistic view of like what positive technologies could be. And like there are some cool things about cryptocurrency 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 know shit coins and Rugpoles and all these things that sort of overshadow any positive Benefits that might come out of it very similar stuff has happened to me, too I've seen quite a few Jack reciter 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 out 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. 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. We can see your direction by looking in the rear view mirror but we have no idea what's going on.

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 DEFCON, did this and did that. And it's like, no, it's way easier to look backwards has it all figured out. A big thank you to Joe Grant for letting me come over and shop it out 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 bonus episodes available for you right now to enjoy. And you also get an ad-free version of the show too. Being a premium subscriber is a great way to show thanks as well, because it really does help 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 Reciter. 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 Dark Knight Diaries.