155: Kingpin

Episode 155 [START OF RECORDING]
JACK: Sometimes the people I want to talk to on this show are so cool that I want to
be friends with them. JOE: Check, check.
JACK: Hey, I m recording. JOE: Cool. Alright, let me get this
JACK: Where are we going? JOE: Let s go to the lair,
where the magic happens. JACK: Joe Grand is someone who because
we have so much in common, I wanted to visit him in person to try to make that extra connection.
JOE: Alright, here we go. JACK: Whoa, my. Quite the
place. JOE: Yeah.
JACK: Display case here, and then you ve got a table here
with a ton of projects you're working on. JOE: Yeah. So, this is kinda 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 different projects;
some fault injections set up here. All these circuit boards are for a class I m teaching in a
couple weeks. I have to get those prepared. JACK: He showed me around his office,
and I think a better description for his office would be a workshop. It s really a place that
sparks creativity wherever you look. It s full of gadgets and tools that just beckon you to
pick something up and start building something. JOE: work bench with various pieces of circuitry
and, yeah, a lot of display stuff also. JACK: [Music] You got your
YouTube plaque on the wall. JOE: Got the YouTube plaque on the wall, yeah.
JACK: That s cool. 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?
JOE: That s a good question. (INTRO): [Intro music] These are
true stories from the dark side of the internet. I m Jack Rhysider. This is Darknet Diaries.
JACK: Hi. JOE: Hey. Hey again.
JACK: Why don t we start with your name, and what do you do?
JOE: My name is Joe Grand, and I m a hacker. JACK: [Music] After hanging out with Joe a few
hours, I think, yeah, he absolutely is a hacker, and I think it s becoming increasingly rare to
find a hacker in their forties. 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 counter-culture, 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. It was fall out, 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. 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 loved 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. I 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 discs, 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. [Music] 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 could 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. In fact, he likes that place. He loves
that chase of finding the answer somewhere in the muck that nobody else has ever found before,
that place of pushing things beyond their intended use. He ignores people telling him
that s impossible . He pushes through roadblocks and just acts like they don t exist. While
most of us have grown tired of inventing or finding creative ways to solve novel problems,
Joe has more energy than ever to dance and play in that space, and it s amazing to watch him work.
JOE: I still have this idealistic view of my little bubble of what a hacker is, and to me,
it basically is kind of somebody who s questioning the system and curious about
technology and wanting to learn things and bypassing security. Really, I grew up even
before I knew what a hacker was, I was pushing people s buttons. I was causing trouble. I had
this mischievous side, and a hacker JACK: That s what I was gonna ask you.
As a hacker, have you ever been arrested? JOE: 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, even though I got arrested and that changed 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. JACK: In 1982, he got some Atari equipment 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. He could dial out to bulletin board systems and reach
other computers somewhere else in the world. JOE: Which ultimately led me to hook up with
some guys that I had met on some bulletin board sytems and was part of a group called
Renegade Legion. [Music] We wrote some early text files on some phone phreaking, credit card fraud,
how to break into the CBI credit bureau and pull credit records and then get actual credit cards,
and things that as a kid didn t seem bad. It was a cool thing. I mean, even now, I don't yes,
it s a crime. Do I feel bad about it? No. Has it happened to me? Dozens of times my credit
card has been stolen. It s a fact of life now. JACK: 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. JOE: But yeah, there so, getting into those
systems, the process basically was like and this was when I was fourteen, fifteen at this point of
like, alright, 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 'cause you could see their name, their social security number,
credit rating, what credit cards they had pick the one that had a high credit,
get all that information, call the credit card company, give them what they needed, and say,
hey, I m doctor whatever. I m on vacation. Can you I lost my card. Can you send me another
card? They d send you a new physical card and you d go use it. But that was later on.
The earlier days, there was a lot of this curious exploration because we would war dial. We would
take a prefix and say, okay just like in WarGames when 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 my parents wouldn't pick up the
phone and hear everything, because at that point you still had a automatic you could do automatic
dialing, but it was still everybody was sharing a single phone line in the house. Then you d wake
up to a list of phone numbers, and you're trying those and you'd never know what it was. It was
like this kind of treasure hunt. JACK: [Music]
Joe grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. JOE: So, as part of joining Renegade Legion so,
a bunch of teenagers doing stuff online and whatever 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. 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 an arcade game and a pool table. My parents talked to his parents and they're like,
okay, this seems like a stable household. So, they actually let me fly to Michigan on my own,
meet up with all these other hackers. Remember that this was already eight years after I had
been using the computer. 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. At the time, the internet
was starting to kinda be a thing, but not really. This was 92. So, really, it was hackers against
the phone system. Ma Bell, New England Telephone, 9X Michigan Bell, whatever, Pacific Bell,
all of those companies, that was the target of phone phreaking, exploring the phone network.
That was for us, that was kind of the Holy Grail. We went to the hardware store and bought some big
bolt cutters and some rubber gloves it was like a really bad movie and bought all the equipment
to break into this place; some automatic center punches to break the windows. So, we basically
went to the Michigan Bell telephone facility which was down the street from this guy s house,
and went in and cut through the fence, pulled the fence back. I had this jacket at the time
that I would wear every single day, and it tore a little hole in the shoulder on my way in. So,
that was sort of 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.
JACK: What were you looking for? JOE: Documentation, manuals, hardware,
telephone test equipment, things that other phone phreakers, 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. Which, it turns out that if you use a scanner radio during committing a crime,
that s an additional crime. JACK: Really?
JOE: Yeah, at least at the time. I didn t know that. Especially a scanner radio there was no
serial number on it 'cause 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 was a bunch of rowdy
kids hanging out in the park. So, they called the police just because they thought kids were hanging
out after curfew or something. By the time the cops showed up, they had the one guy there. He
got caught in the car with the scanner radio. The police report when this guy called in said there
were multiple kids. So, they're basically like, where are your friends? He flipped and was like,
yeah, there was six of us or however many. We had all gotten home by that time or back to Dr.
Death s house, and we're like, oh my god, where s this other guy? It turns out he got arrested. Then
the next day, we all had to turn ourselves in. JACK: 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.
JOE: 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 phreaking stuff that we had done as a group,
as Renegade Legion, and he ended up dying by suicide. That was a real eye-opener of like,
holy shit, a law-breaker just killed himself over getting arrested?
JACK: His parents were pretty mad and told him, look, you either need to get a job or take up
a sport. He didn t want to get a job, so he joined the track team at school and started
doing a lot of running. This gave him a group of normal friends, not rebels, not skaters,
not hackers, just normal people. After this scare with the police and running track,
he did straighten up a bit, which is how he got to join the L0pht. He had to actually tone down his
rebelliousness to join this hacker space. JOE: So, L0pht or L0pht 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 play with technology. JACK: What did the space look like?
JOE: It was very so, if you imagine a cyberpunk movie maybe Hackers;
maybe the Hackers movie is probably the closest to sort of what it looked like, but it was in it
was an artist loft space. So, it was a one one big room with old wood floors. There were PCs; Apple,
Apple IIs, Macs. We had a VAX 11/780, I think. JACK: The L0pht 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. JOE: I remember seeing Count Zero give
talks about stuff that we found from the trash or other things that he had 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, 'cause 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, I thought
that was such a learning moment for me, and that when I started giving talks as well, it was like,
alright, if I m gonna talk about something, I want to share as much as I possibly can,
not to brag about it but to empower somebody else to say, oh, 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. Once I learned
that, everything changed [Music] because it was all about empowering this community to grow,
and I would learn from other people and you'd learn from 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 L0pht, and that for sure is of everything that
I ve learned, that has stuck with me the most. JACK: L0pht was legendary. It was kinda
like a research group. They found a lot of vulnerabilities in computers, and they released
such tools like L0phtCrack, which can sometimes crack Windows passwords. They d publish new ideas
of how to break systems or hack things. In fact, they were so legendary that they ended up going to
Washington D.C. to testify before the Senate. JOE: I remember they called us up to the stand.
We sit there, and there s all this so, we see the senators in front of us, but right
below them facing us was this row of media. We sat down; it was just like, camera flash,
camera flash. It was like the paparazzi, because it had never happened before. You
never had hackers talking to the government. SENATE: We re joined today by the seven members
of the L0pht hacker thinktank in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Due to the sensitivity of the
work done at the L0pht, they ll be using their hacker names of Mudge, Weld, Brian Oblivion,
Kingpin, Space Rogue, Tan, and Stefan. JACK: Joe s hacker name is Kingpin,
and this was back in 1998. JOE: Morning. My name is Kingpin. I
am the youngest member of the L0pht and one of the electrical engineers and hardware hackers.
While some of the L0pht members concentrate on software programming, I work with hardward 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 two hundred meters away, possibly gaining passwords and other sensitive information. The
phenomenon of TEMPEST monitoring has been known to the industry for decades, but there is not
much unclassified information available on how to both capture the emissions and also protect
oneself from becoming an eavesdropping victim. My research will not only help me learn about
the monitoring technology; it will enable me to educate others to help them protect their
computer systems from prying eyes. JACK: 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. SENATE: It s probably appropriate that gentlemen
such as yourself were 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
describe you as rockstars of the computer hacking elite. I am informed that you think
that within thirty minutes, the seven of you could make the internet unusable for
the entire nation. Is that correct? L0PHT: That s correct. Actually,
one of us with just a few packets. JACK: How punk is that, to be this
group of hackers coming up to the government saying, we could take down the internet?
SENATE: Somebody had referred to you as rockstars 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 gonna call you
rockstars. I d compare you more to Rachel Carson, who sounded some early warnings
about what environmental pollution was doing to the environment. [Music] In the defense context,
you may be modern-day Paul Reveres, except in this case, it s not the British coming. We don
t know who s coming; that s the problem. JOE: By that time in 98, a lot of the software
guys had found vulnerabilities in Microsoft and they had actually had meetings with Microsoft at
dinners where Microsoft s like, ah, we don t think that s gonna be a problem. Nobody s gonna exploit
that. So, we would release exploit code. We were very early, if not the first, to have this sort of
discussion of full disclosure or what would now be called coordinated disclosure or, in quotes,
responsible disclosure . You know, how much time do you give the vendor to fix the problem?
Do you trust that the vendor s gonna fix it? JACK: One of the things L0pht became known for is
pioneering responsible disclosure. The problem was that hackers were looked at as criminals,
hoodlums, untrustworthy, and L0pht 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, L0pht was like, look, what do we have to do so you ll understand that we're here to help,
not hurt you? 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 spaces to not have many screens, and
mostly just circuit boards you're looking at and maybe some visual aspect. 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 kinda cool stuff. There s chips
that have all this really cool CMOS in it. Then computers went in a direction of 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 gonna stay with the hardware. Or,
how did you know that you were going to take a different route and not go
with the software side of it, but instead you stayed on the hardware? Was that in
L0pht that you kinda made that diversion? JOE: 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 an audiophile kind of person. He had 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. 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 a
very simple type of embedded system or electronic system like these other circuit boards, but I just
loved the physical thing. I would start building projects out of magazines. There was a lot of
hobbyist electronics magazines at the time. There were a couple people a couple text files
you could read about of people making some interesting even this was pre-red box stuff,
but different types of tone-dialers, blue boxes, and other telephone-related electronics. So,
I started building things and I started building my own things. I knew from an early age you
couldn't have a career as a hacker. When everybody would always say, what do you want to be when
you grow up? and I always knew 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. JACK: Joe s specialty is hardware hacking. As I
sit and look around his workshop, it s abundantly clear, too. [Music] He s got
drawers full of parts. On the table in front of me is something like sixty circuit boards,
and he says he s building all these for a class. There s a fault injector over there
and soldering irons and an oscilloscope. 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 want to do. It
s amazing to watch the advancements in the electronic world. It feels like every now
and then we reach a limit of how fast a CPU can operate, and it s like, well, that s it,
everyone. This is the max speed. There s no way that we're gonna go beyond this. You just can't
put more transistors on a chip. But then some scientists discover parallel processing, where
they can make it go faster by breaking a CPU up into two or three smaller CPUs. 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. Then when that limit is hit and we hit a max there,
someone else discovers FinFET transistors, where they can build transistors upwards in a 3D sort
of way, like little fins. This invention improves processing speed again, and we reach higher and
higher of what technology can do. Just the other day I heard about CPUs that are starting to be
made out of glass. There s no doubt that the last thirty years we ve seen some incredible
explosions in electronics and their capabilities and our understanding of physics. It s just a
really great space to put focus into as the world is constantly evolving, and it s exciting.
JOE: In the second L0pht space, we had a hardware room and a software room. The hardware room was
me, Brian Oblivion, and Space Rogue. We were into scanner radios. POCSAG was the data transmission
of pagers, and it turned out it s still being used to some extent today in certain environments. We
basically loved and I loved being able to listen in on anything that I could. So, in college it
was cordless phones. At the L0pht at the time it was POCSAG, listening in to transmissions so you
can kinda see what s going on in the world around you, and the scanner radio listening to the cops
and air traffic and all of these things. It was just getting insight into what s happening.
JACK: 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. This was something that the L0pht was actually
selling to try to make enough money just to pay the rent for the place.
JOE: Back in the day, you'd see all sorts of stuff, 'cause that s how people communicated,
is with pagers. There d be stuff about buy groceries for me, or we saw some relationship
sexting kinda one-way; kind of like, I can't wait for you to get home . You d see hospital
a lot of hospital traffic, a lot of EMS traffic and emergency medical things. Yeah,
it was just really fun to do, and that made a little bit of money. That was actually my first
circuit board that I had mass produced. Then we d get our orders; they d all be mail order. We
get our mail every week. I d build the circuitry or Space Rogue would build some circuitry, and we
d package it up. If they wanted a kit, we d just give them the components. It was just a way to do
something, but that really that was a contribution that I could help make to the L0pht to bring some
money in. Then that kinda proved the concept of like, oh, we could make a little bit of money on
this. What if we could do it full-time? JACK: [Music] I might have to do a whole
episode on the L0pht someday. It was quite a remarkable chapter in hacker
history. I bet we could sit here for hours to just talk about what happened there.
JOE: It became a company. For me, as this kid who s still even though I was starting to grow up,
I m still like I said at the beginning, I still have this punk aspect to me where that wasn t an
environment I wanted to be in, and I realized, 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. There s good and bad that has come with that.
JACK: After that, Joe ended up hosting a cable TV show.
JOE: It was a show called Prototype This! and it was on Discovery Channel,
and it was made by the same production company as Mythbusters. The idea was that this would be the
next show after Mythbusters sort of sunsets and goes away, which of course we know they didn t,
and it lasted another ten years, and spin-offs are still happening. But the concept of the show
was having four engineers building ridiculous prototypes. I got an e-mail and it was from a
casting company, and they're like, yeah, we're looking for engineers. That was actually they
had talked to Make Magazine, which was that had just come out and that s a maker
magazine talking about electronics and hobby electronics. I was on the technical advisory
board for them when they first started. This company had contacted Make Magazine saying,
hey, do you know any engineers that might want to be on TV? They already had selected a mechanical
engineer, a machinist, and a software engineer. So, to complete this 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 e-mail, and I remember showing it to my wife. I read it; I was like,
I don't know. I was like, I don't know if I want to be on TV. I showed it to her and she was like,
are you crazy? 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. I was like, alright, fine, I ll do a little interview with them.
So, I showed all the stuff, didn t really think anything of it, said bye . I was riding my bike
back from San Francisco to San Diego, which is where we lived at the time, just as 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, a little bit of self-love. I m gonna do some a little meditation kinda 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 talking to my wife about this recently, I m like,
I can't believe that I did that, that we got married and then I went to San Francisco for
a conference and then I rode my I didn t see you for ten 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 phone or anything. This was like,
Nokia-phone era. I didn t even bring a phone 'cause I really wanted to isolate myself.
Come back from the trip, turn on my computer, and there was five e-mails of like, we want
you on the show. Can you call us back? Call us back. So, it s amazing that they even waited,
because they could have easily been like, alright, he s not answering. Let s go to somebody else. 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. JACK: [Music] Prototype This! was pretty
darn cool. My favorite episode is where they came up with an idea to make a never-ending
water slide. Can you imagine riding a water slide for as long as you wanted?
JOE: Everybody needs an endless water slide. It was we called it the Backyard Water Slide.
The concept the show really was like, in the future, you could have one of these,
even though we were just prototyping. JACK: What they did was they connected
curved water slide parts into a donut-looking shape, like a big circle, and they stood
that up so it looked like a big wheel, and then they put water in it and spun it. So,
if you're inside, you're always sliding down the side as long as it keeps spinning.
JOE: We did a firefighter episode where we built a high-tech firefighter pack, and we had a drone
that would go and help rescue somebody lost at sea. We did a pizza-delivering robot, which
now there are food-delivering robots. Maybe they ripped it off the show; I don't know. Or like
JACK: You had one where you tried to ride on a bug robot, right?
JOE: Oh, yeah. JACK: A giant bug-looking thing,
and then you would ride on it. JOE: Yeah, yeah.
JACK: That s not even out yet. JOE: No.
JACK: Fast-forward twenty years, right? What is it?
JOE: Cause that was a really hard problem. JACK: Or fifteen years ago, and they
still don t have rideable robots. JOE: Yeah. I know. What s up with that?
JACK: You were building them then.