← CoRecursive: Coding Stories
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- [00:00]
Adam Gordon Bell
Hey, this is code recursive, and I'm Adam Gordon Bell. Have you ever felt like you didn't fit in? Like everyone else got the manual for how to be a person and you're still searching for the table of contents? I have at times, for sure. I remember my first job out of school. I had to work on this giant, messy internal inventory and ordering system. There was complicated reports and endless data entry forms, and it was overwhelming in some ways. But the real challenge was the people, the customer service reps and the data entry folks and figuring out what they needed and what they were struggling with. Trying to say the right things or look like I knew what I was talking about. Trying to decide where to sit in the lunchroom. It's like high school all over again. I could handle the technical stuff, no problem, but the unwritten rules, the small talk, the chatting, that was the hard part. This episode is about that. How do you fit in? And what do you do if you don't? Today's about the hidden costs of being different, and our guest is someone who's lived this journey.
- [01:18]
John Walker
I went and found a building that, you know, was kind of like, there was some server equipment in there and not much of them. Just like close and lock the door and just like lay down on the floor, which is like, literally curled up in the ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now I got to go back out and fix the word. Printers, like, generally do enjoy people. I don't like scared of them, but I enjoy them.
- [01:37]
Adam Gordon Bell
That's John Walker, and I've seen him solve problems no one else can. He once found a Kubernetes vulnerability, so was serious. It was front page tech news. John and I worked together 10 years ago, and back then he was a principal engineer and security researcher at Tenable. But here's the thing. John's curiosity and his drive, they came at a price. Because he can solve hard problems, but he struggles with feeling alone and isolated. If you've ever felt like your differences were a weakness instead of a strength, I think this episode is for you. I'll warn you, it starts with a lot of drug use and Internet culture, but it ends in a place. Well, I actually don't want to spoil it, but it's super good. John grew up on computers. He and his friends built their own rigs and spent hours on bulletin boards and then AOL chat rooms and eventually irc, where the hacking and mischief started. He got an admin account on his school's novella system and installed Keyloggers and code got into all kinds of teenage computery trouble. But he grew up in a strict conservative family and at 17 he was off to Christian college. And then almost out of nowhere he decided to reinvent himself as a drug dealer.
- [03:02]
John Walker
The reality was I was like a nerdy, awkward, not very menacing 18 year old kid. But it wasn't like in some ways not really about the substances as much as maybe like a re try attempt to reinvent myself. And it became like it felt like an anthropological exercise experiment like as much as anything else. It's like, you know, starting to talk to new people and go to new places and all of it was very exciting and like, you know, I just felt like this whole new exciting world.
- [03:27]
Adam Gordon Bell
Computers and the Internet played a big part in why John changed directions.
- [03:31]
John Walker
And the thing I sort of hit on was very interested in drugs from like a, you know, academic perspective. I read like Arrowid and Lyceum, these old Internet websites that have all these reports of like I use ketamine and like nitrous and this thing and here like at T minus 15 minutes, like here's the effect that was having on me and stuff and all the other at that point in my life, like I always smoke pot. But all this stuff was just incredibly, incredibly fascinating. Like the idea that you could take like a substance and just you know, changes your whole perspective on the world. And of course, and now I know in retrospect the trip reports people write up are like, you know, dramatized or like very kind of like hyperbolic and exaggerated at times and stuff like this just.
- [04:08]
Adam Gordon Bell
John was sharp. He was smart enough to start college at 17, but then he got kicked.
- [04:12]
John Walker
Out but struggling a lot with mental health and kind of had an emptiness in my life because now I got no longer in school for the first time in my life. And I decided that like, you know, buying and selling drugs was going to be my thing. I think normally when this is your thing, like you come into it naturally, right? But you know, my kind of like, I don't know, not overachiever kind of way, but it was just kind of like, oh, I am going to get into this, you know, without the requisite connections and people and knowledge and experience and stuff.
- [04:39]
Adam Gordon Bell
Things went okay for a while until he got caught and landed in jail. And not juvie, but an adult jail. Imagine being an 18 year old computer nerd in a place like that. I kind of did a number on him.
- [04:52]
John Walker
And after that I was just like, you know, my social functioning was fucked. Like my ability to Trust people interact with people was fucked. Like, got really, really isolated and more into, you know, like alcohol, pills than I could get in benzos and you know, around 19 or so, just kind of like, oh, what the. You know, like, I think honestly we pretty much, you know, wanted to die, but was not, I think, in a lot of fear of hell and not willing to just like, all right, kill myself. And it was just like, well, then, you know, I'm just going to live very recklessly and we'll see what happens, basically.
- [05:22]
Adam Gordon Bell
Teenage drug stories usually go one of two ways. Either it's just a phase or it's really not. For John, it went that second way.
- [05:30]
John Walker
So I got kicked out of my parents home, left initially at 17, came back for a bit, got kicked out when I turned 19. And I ended up living in a town outside the Philadelphia area, trying to go to school there. At college there I was kind of walking down the street is called Gay Street. This is Westchester, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yeah, I was kind of walking down the street and I found a large Ziploc bag with many kind of small, smaller Ziploc bags in it. I never had an experience with crack before, but like, you know, I'd use powder, cooking, like other things and like, oh, this is. That's probably what crack is, right?
- [06:09]
Adam Gordon Bell
The anthropologically interested drug dealer John might not have been excited about crack. There wasn't a lot of interesting stories about mind expansion written on the Internet about crack cocaine. But John was in a different place then. He was sort of on a suicide mission.
- [06:26]
John Walker
It was kind of like the train was. The train was already off the rails and kind of, you know, rolling down the mountain, especially living in a new place and stuff and, and with a lot of people leaving and going to college, other things. I was kind of really, really isolated in like the real world, like the physical world. So I think on FDET there was a channel called Geek Issues, which is a big fan of. They had like bash.org has basically collected things from this channel, like quotes from this channel. And like I. I had just gotten a little like digital camera that I used to take pictures of myself for. For dating purpose. I was trying to set myself up on a dating site which did not go well. So I had like a large bong with like a. There's a piece of the bong called a slide, like a little glass. Glass flared out piece of glass and apply flame to it and then pull air through, you know, from the top and it pulls the, the smoke through in a way that I'm not describing well.
- [07:14]
Adam Gordon Bell
So yeah, John snapped the photos of the baggies he found and his glassware, et cetera, and he posted it on IRC on this geek issues channel known for, you know, kind of trolling and sarcastic behavior and asked, hey, how do I smoke this?
- [07:31]
John Walker
I think the general response that people thought I was trolling or like just kind of like messing with me. I think probably from a good hearted place of just not wanting to help someone with this, you know, and also just kind of like, you know, probably kind of attention seeking behavior or something or red is. Red is that way. But then I found someone was like willing to help me a bit as I was just like take a, take a cigarette, smoke a little bit ash into the top of the bowl and then like, you know, then you put a little bit on. Okay. Gave me a sense of how much. And here's how you apply the lighter and then you smoke from the back end of the, the bong essentially. Like it, if you're familiar with crack at all, like it's roughly becomes like a stem. And so like I try to, you know, try to do it a little bit, then took another picture and like this is what it's looking like now. And you know, kind of got to the point where I was working pretty well working with someone on F that there.
- [08:18]
Unnamed Interviewer
So what did you do? Did you just smoke a dealer's worth of crack cocaine in an afternoon like on irc?
- [08:26]
John Walker
Pretty much. I think each one of these bags I found after the fact was like a 50 to $100 bag. And I had a good, you know, 10 to 15 of them. It started out in like the afternoon, but if, I don't know if you're familiar with like stimulants at all, it basically just sat down and smoked until I wasn't anymore.
- [08:42]
Unnamed Interviewer
That's insane. Yeah, the IRC people were cheering you on.
- [08:46]
John Walker
I mean, once you have crack like Irish, like what the is irc? It's kind of like, you know, I think I lost sight of everything except for, you know, like the, the, you know, the pseudo stem and like the. And you take a lung full of this stuff and it literally feels like the best pleasure you've ever had in your, in your head instantly. And it goes away, you know, minutes after you exhale. And so there's just like that rat in the cage, push the lever kind of reaction of like that. That feels like nothing I've ever felt in my life. So, you know, why don't I do that pretty much. And so like I Spoke however long it takes to smoke that much crack, which is a long time, but you're not very aware of the time. And so just smoked until it was gone. Time wasn't an issue. Nothing was an issue. It was just kind of like focused on, you know, hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting, and then laid on the couch for probably the next morning. At that point, for, for at least a few hours, just trying to stay perfectly still, wondering if my, my heart was going to explode, which felt like, felt like a very real possibility in the moment. And I laid down on the couch, I was convinced I was dying. Like, my heart was like exploding out of my chest. And I was like, oh, my God, this is where I die, probably. And I remember laying like perfectly still on the couch. If I moved even a little bit, like, my heart would go. Rate would go even higher. And I was like, oh, fuck, that's not good.
- [09:59]
Adam Gordon Bell
Things kept getting worse for John. He didn't have close friends in the physical world, just people online he talked to. And he was drifting from his family. That meant more crack and then homelessness. Eventually, though, John found some strength in accepting his situation.
- [10:15]
John Walker
I'm willing to look at that internal mental compass and decide, oh, you know, like, I think I'd like to start being more sociable, right, and getting more community support for this issue. So I'm going to start going to, you know, an AA meeting a few times a week. And I know it's going to be uncomfortable. And then I start doing that and, and when I did, like, little things like that, right? Like, they don't, didn't buy themselves, make me magically happy. I do want to die. If I had to choose, do I want to die or live today, I'd probably choose die. But I did get a little shot of like, oh, this feels different and better, you know, like that, that kind of like, oh, something about this is, is, you know, my, my, my brain is kind of telling me there's something about this that's fulfilling, you know, especially like, getting past initial discomfort and like, oh, now I'm going to dinner with people after a meeting. And that feels really good, like that people are joking and laughing and I leave feeling happy, right? So I would say, like, just stacking little, not running from it, not denying the feelings or, or trying to pretend they're not there.
- [11:11]
Adam Gordon Bell
John was going to meetings in person and that helped. But being around people face to face could be super stressful for him. He didn't always feel comfortable socializing in the physical world.
- [11:21]
John Walker
Yeah, I probably shouldn't say which recovery program because they're big on like anonymity and stuff. But I, I found an online cover recovery program for people recovering from drugs that had online meetings. And you know they, they were a really great fit for me because you know, feel be more open, you know and it was also, it was like more like the meeting was like very much me out of my element, right. Sound like I was spending a bunch of time, you know, it's very isolated before that wasn't, you know, wasn't really involved in the world. You know, it was kind of like the place I would have socialized would have been online anyway. So I got very involved the community as the user of it. And then in these 12 step groups like volunteering and service is a big part of, part of the recovery piece is kind of like the do the actions that you know are going to fix your brain eventually kind of thing.
- [12:05]
Adam Gordon Bell
And so John volunteered to help with the website and with the online chat.
- [12:09]
John Walker
And I think what it quickly led to is these communities were hosted on I think like FNET or something, which is not a friendly place for recovery. So there just be like in all the F that channels like you know, where's you know, whatever like kill everyone or whatever, there'd be like hashtag name of like of a 12 step recovery group, you know and you could imagine about how well that would go right with trolls and things like that. And I think and people just you know, tried to hack and attack the group and these sorts of things. And I think there it was kind of like this was like I was technically responsible for running like the website, keeping the channel up. But then I like started like get really like this is my first time in recovery, I'm a mess. But then going really deep down the world of like, like IRC bots.
- [12:48]
Adam Gordon Bell
Here's the thing. If there was another John out there, someone isolated and struggling with addiction, he wanted to make sure that person didn't get attacked by trolls when they were reaching out for help. He wanted their first steps towards recovery to feel safe and supportive.
- [13:04]
John Walker
It was just kind of a fun technical problem. Very open ended, very hard, right. But also had that like kind of very, very gratifying when it was working, very frustrating when it was not working. So the first time around that was I think in a lot of ways like just going into that world of like the technical side of online recovery on irc I think really like kept me sober. It gave me something to like focus on that was not like I'm really miserable not being high, basically, being involved with that, I think is the biggest part of why I stayed clean the first time around.
- [13:35]
Adam Gordon Bell
After getting sober, John moves to Bakersfield, California, and he starts college again. Through aa, he lands a job as sort of a IT networking consultant, fixer, upper guy. Say a business's Windows server crashes and suddenly their point of sale system won't work. John gets the call, and he drives over there and he figures out a way to bring it back online. John had a knack for this stuff. One client had a point of sale system that kept printing really long stretches of blank space at the end of every receipt. Waste. Wasting paper and wasting time. And no one could fix it, not even the vendor. But John could. He wrote a custom printer driver that stripped out all those extra line breaks before it sent things off to the printer. So John became the IT guy that people called when their business was on the line. He'd walk in with no idea of what problems he'd find or even what tech he'd be dealing with. Sometimes he had to recover lost data. Sometimes he. He had to reverse engineer weird formats or fix bugs in abandoned software that kept the whole business running. And sometimes he just had to restart a printer or a server or put a new disk drive in. He could handle these tough technical problems, but dealing with the people in person, that was hard. Walking into an office where everybody was waiting for him to fix things, that was real pressure.
- [14:54]
John Walker
I've always been a very anxious person, you know, struggling with the depression, that kind of stuff. And so there were days where just kind of like, forcing myself through, right. And just kind of very on edge the whole time. Time and just. Just kind of very, very uncomfortable. And like, it felt like most of my mental energy was going into, like, just trying not to, you know, like, freak out during the day, like in a very literal, like, I want to run out the door, you know, and, like, you know, go hide somewhere kind of way.
- [15:21]
Unnamed Interviewer
Like, what were you worried about?
- [15:23]
John Walker
I don't even know. Like, I still get in that mode sometimes. I struggle with a lot of panic. Like, I would go to, like, get panic attacks. It would. I went out to see a client once. It was like a resort out on, like, the coast of California. I was about to say their name, but probably the best not to say the name, given the other content. I was getting completely sober through this time, and it was like a property, like a large property with different buildings in different places, and I was kind of going from one to the other, taking care of things and stuff, just Got so overwhelmed, I went and found a building that, you know, it was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and not much time and just like. Like, close and lock the door and just like, not people for crying for whatever reason, but just like, literally curled up in the ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now I gotta go back out and fix the word printers, that kind of thing. But I think I was very good at, like. Like, basically pushing out the feelings or whatever else and, like, functioning, like, white knuckling it, basically, and functioning. And then, like, go to the bathroom and then be, like, panicking and then come back out and pretend like nothing's happening, kind of. That kind of thing. Like, if that makes sense. Like, I love the work. I. All the parts that involve dealing with people, like, that was the stressful part. And so there's a way, like, of escaping into, like, you know, white knuckling the parts that were the people parts to get to, like, the technical parts. Like, in my mind, it was almost like, yes, tomorrow might be the day. And, like, try to interpret, you know, things people said or doing, like, is tomorrow going to be the day they're going to fire me? You know, like, it was all, you know, that form of delusion, I guess, in some way.
- [16:58]
Unnamed Interviewer
You know what's interesting, like, I remember the early days we worked together. There was Jared, and I remember Jared coming to me one time and being like, oh, my God, like, John's a genius. You are able to get things done that others can't in a very significant way. Like, if John focuses his mind on something really gnarly and nasty, he'll be able to solve problems that nobody else can. And I feel like you were probably worried, like, about people's perception of you, but probably on their side, they were like, oh, so desperate just to have you around, right? Because it's very rare to have somebody.
- [17:32]
Adam Gordon Bell
That you can throw hard problems at.
- [17:33]
Unnamed Interviewer
You're one of those people probably. You could have done whatever you wanted and still been asshole to people, been disheveled and unclean and rude to everybody. And they would have kept you because you actually have, like, an ability that is quite rare. But I don't think you knew that, right?
- [17:48]
John Walker
No, I think there's probably an element where I was disheveled and rude without being. To be, you know, like. And, like, the people were tolerating, you know, in a very real. Like, some of it is just like, my own internal critic is very strong.
- [18:00]
Adam Gordon Bell
So of course, they didn't Fire John. In fact, so many businesses needed his help that he did more work on the side and that became his sober consultant life. A lot of great technical challenges that could distract him just from the sense of, of doom and impending disaster he was feeling. And then he met someone who had a big positive effect on his life. Aj.
- [18:21]
John Walker
He was a good friend of one of my co workers at the place I was working at the time. Paul. So Paul. Because I, I did freelance work. Paul. Paul connected me to him as someone he did at work. Is the, is a short version of it. It was in the Bureau of Land Management as a, like a federal building up by the airport in Bakersfield, like on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Kind of like a single story, like sprawling government looking building. And then you'd walk in through the front door and it's kind of like an officey environment with, you know, I forget if there are cubicles at the time, but like imagine that sort of thing and just be like he'd be there in office, like most of the people wouldn't be there and we'd spend a few, like, you know, talk about like, oh, what is it you want done? You know, and then yeah, that would just sit down at like a workstation that would normally be someone else's, I guess during the week and like, you know, put in a few hours taking care of something for them.
- [19:11]
Adam Gordon Bell
AJ's business had a PI license, private investigators, but they were not the type of PI you see in the movies. Instead of chasing down people who skipped out on debts, his team tracked down people who were actually owed money by city governments or by businesses. Say you overpaid your taxes and then moved before they could send you a check.
- [19:29]
John Walker
They make efforts sometimes to contact you because it builds goodwill. But they are also typically are allowed to collect interest on the money sitting in this bank account. So they're often not terribly incentivized to seek out the owners of this. And it's just a hard data problem often because sometimes even no address associated with it, or just complete the records. There's a reason that wasn't returned to the person in the first place.
- [19:53]
Adam Gordon Bell
AJ's company dug through public data sets, tracked down people by hand, and then took a 10% cut for connecting people with their lost money. It was a classic messy data problem and the end result was always a letter in the mail. John started out freelancing, just cleaning up their data, but eventually AJ convinced them to join full time.
- [20:13]
John Walker
So very, very open ended, very low friction. He was like very much the Business side didn't care about the technical, just like, oh, sell me on an approach. We need to get more letters out, we need to make more money. The thing I loved about it was, you know, people, not surprisingly, like when you're, when you're getting people free money, right, like people like that, you know.
- [20:34]
Adam Gordon Bell
Every so often someone would send a thank you note after getting their money back. These notes meant a lot to John. They reminded him that this wasn't just about the money or the data. He was actually helping people and that made him feel good. And now that he was full time, he could help AJ scale up their operations and get money to more people by pulling data straight from the source.
- [20:54]
John Walker
And so I created a bunch of scrapers that would go to, instead of just waiting for like the CD in the mail, you know, or the pd which is often contained a PDF on it. That was horrible to process. One of the first things I did was, oh, we need some, some servers probably. And I knew where to get like servers that were refurbished and like previous generation Dell servers, but they came with a warranty that was not the Dell one. So you know, kind of sourced a bunch of cheap servers and you know, put them in the server rack and got, and kind of get up, got up like a kind of bobo, like, you know, server set up to like to do the things we need to do because we'll need to run like SQL somewhere, you know, we need like, you know, to run like the web apps that we're going to need like people going to be using internally and stuff like that. So, so, so probably the early days we're like sourcing on a budget. Like at this point this business is like a million dollars a year in revenue, if that. And so like do try to do all this, you know, with kind of like a fairly shoestring budget. I would set up a lot of scrapers that would go to the website and in one way or another scrape all the property currently on the website and do this constantly. So that basically that that meant that we could get to, we could contact people faster than other people who weren't able to do that, but also contact people who like, otherwise like the state would not, you know, there was no way to get this data except to like go to the website designed for a human to use and essentially scrape or some variation of that.
- [22:17]
Adam Gordon Bell
John wasn't breaking any laws with his scraping still. The municipalities really didn't want people pulling data like this and so they pushed back. But for John, these technical challenges were the easy Part what really got to him was working in an office and having to talk to people day in and day out to cope. He started taking benzodiazepines and then he found something that worked even better. Extended release oxycontin, which he did not have a prescription for.
- [22:45]
John Walker
Like, I stopped having panic attacks and like, I was much more mellow. Not like a mellow person, but exactly. But like, I wasn't like on the verge of a panic attack all the time. And I felt much more warm and connected to other people, you know, like I wasn't afraid of them, but like, like I would take like the same dose every day at the same times, you know, and I just felt, it felt like being like cured really. My, my, the period of sobriety, you know, when I was trying to like, deal with the, the panic attacks just by like, you know, keep myself very, very still and I'm gonna stare like kind of the space above the person's nose and sort of like nod when it seems like I'm supposed to be nodding. And then like, try to reconstruct after the fact like what the happened in the meeting, right? Or like when I get back a hold of myself, like having to like, ask questions and stuff to like, without seemingly, like I was asking questions to try to piece together like, what the last few minutes of the conversation were and stuff like that. And it was like, oh, I got opiates. I don't have to do any of that. Like, it's. I just focus on the fun, technical problems. Like dealing with people is like more pleasant. Like I enjoy, because I genuinely do enjoy people. I don't. I'm like scared of them, but I enjoy them, right? And when they say, oh, now I have my security blanket, I feel, you know, I'm not really worried if they don't like me.
- [23:52]
Adam Gordon Bell
With his anxiety under control, you know, though not in a way his friends from AA or NA would endorse, John could finally focus on the technical challenges at work. And there were tons of those cities did not want people to scrape these lists. And so they started adding captchas. John had to get creative and came up with a few ways around them.
- [24:13]
John Walker
One was sometimes they didn't implement the CAPTCHA very well. And you could just like use JavaScript to like, you know, just do, you know, do something like just say, like, captcha solved. We did our own ocr. That was another thing we did with some captchas is like use OCR libraries to just, you know, they actually did. Like, even with the, the technology at the time it wasn't that hard to do these things.
- [24:33]
Adam Gordon Bell
Then he found a service that somehow could break CAPTCHAs. You send them an image and about 30 seconds later you get an answer.
- [24:40]
John Walker
Like one day like this service was suddenly running very slowly. And so I contacted support, which is like, didn't really like, I don't know if there was any phone support or anything. It was like kind of like, like go to the weird chatbot and speak to someone who clearly doesn't speak English as a first language. And they're like oh yeah, it's like it's the lunar new year is basically what they said. So we have like. And then they got put together. Something in my mind I was realizing, oh like there's literally people, they're like reading like the reason you get a 30 second response is they're presenting this image to someone in something like a call center. We quickly keying in, you know what the captcha is. I thought you said they had really good OCR or something. But it turns out like it was, you know, it was kind of people all along was kind of the thing like some sort of some warehouse somewhere.
- [25:20]
Adam Gordon Bell
John built an entire ecosystem of scrapers and clever workarounds for the various anti scraping measures the cities would throw at him. But he wasn't just pulling data. He also had automated the messy workflows at the various municipalities to claim money for customers. Because often these application processes were anything but user friendly. And then something would change on a webpage and the scrapers would break and.
- [25:45]
John Walker
Got fairly involved as far as having to do things like introduce like jitter, like fill out the forms using selenium in the way a human would or like started spinning up like hundreds of little EC2 instances.
- [25:58]
Adam Gordon Bell
The EC2 instances would act like proxies.
- [26:02]
John Walker
So what that blocked was all attempts to limit, you know, rate limit or like check by IP or anything like that. Or like obvious pro. They had some level of like obvious proxy detection or VPN detection. But IPS for, for where that method would come through is just EC2 IPs. I would have like different municipalities. I was not like using the full bag of tricks with like I wouldn't be bothering with the distributed scrapes because it wasn't necessary. And they would roll out like rate limit protection or something like that. And I was like, oh well we're just going to move you from pile A to pile B and like just go with it. And like suddenly you know, and now we're scraping in parallel, you know, across 100 things like much faster anyway, you know, it was like, oh wait, let's see how long it takes them to notice this. But I think it got to a point where at least for my, you know, probably overly egotistical perspective at the time, it felt like they were outgunned basically. It sounds like a scammy kind of thing, but like the fact that like I think that I was very like had a level of kind of like moral certainty in what I was doing that I think felt very comfortable like pushing the limits of like what is possible to do with data collection.
- [27:03]
Adam Gordon Bell
The moral certainty came from the wall. When people sent in thank you notes, that was a special place where they would all get put up.
- [27:11]
John Walker
Like initially it was like only a portion of the wall and over time it like grew to like the whole wall and multiple layers and it was kind of oh, like I was having trouble making my rent or whatever. And then I got contacted and I got, you know, x thousand dollars and stuff like this. I thought it's a very kind of. I think my favorite thing to do like you know, I work on the weekends or when other people know is kind of like go, you know, peruse the latest letters kind of. I think it felt to see that wall of like thank you letters grow, right? And like just be able to compute because I could run aggregations on the data and see like, like what's the dollar amount we've gotten back to people. And you know, I forget exactly what it was, but I know our revenues like ended up in like the 4 to 5 million dollars a year range. And that's taking 10, just taking 10%, you know, or so. So it gives you like a sense of the scale and like a lot of, a lot of it was kind of nickel and dime, you know, $100, $few hundred. But I think for me, like love that it was so open ended and just figure out how to do it, figure out how to get the money back to the people, like you know, just like sell it to AJ as far as like, why this is a responsible thing to do. And I love that, like the better I am at my job, like the dollar value that we've returned to people goes up each month even more. And like the number of the thank you letters on the wall get like deeper.
- [28:22]
Adam Gordon Bell
As the business grew, so did John's skills. What started with building scrapers became a foundation for his work in security research. Scaling those scrapers also pushed him into cloud computing and then into other areas.
- [28:34]
John Walker
I was getting into functional programming. Like it clear like for distributed, sort of distributed systems we were building. Like, this is fucking. There's night and day. This is night and day. Better than Java and imperative programming. And so I would hang out on like the various, like hashtag Scala, you know, channels in various places. And it felt like, you know, like I'm learning another new skill. And regardless of whether that's shooting heroin, smoking crack or whatever, you know, or like learning a new programming language, you know, the place I'm going to do that is like, is irc.
- [29:03]
Adam Gordon Bell
Oh yeah, the heroin. For years, John used the extended release OxyContin. While the company kept growing and John grew a team under him and things were scaling up, but then the oxy market kind of dried up. And so John turned his analytical mind to finding a new fix for his social anxiety. Heroin.
- [29:22]
John Walker
I was sourcing my heroin from the LA area, which is like a 90 minute drive from Bakersfield, among other places. Was not the best at doing any of this, I'm sure. Like the people who are, you know, used heroin for years and years and years probably. Oh, this is a lightweight, you know, kind of tourists or something. But I drive down, you know, buy a large quantity and then drive back home and then be good for like, you know, a week or something. This was kind of like, you know, after work activities, you know. Yeah, take like 180 minute kind of drive down, drive down, you know, you know, buy some more heroin for the week, you know, and kind of go back and come back up.
- [29:58]
Unnamed Interviewer
What's crazy to me is like all of it, I guess, like I worked with you not that long after this, right. I had no idea. And like, if people asked me to describe John, like I would say like, yeah, you're a little bit like socially you're a little bit withdrawn and like maybe you give off like some sort of like Doogie Howser or Sheldon Cooper like vibes.
- [30:20]
John Walker
But honestly, like that stuff about like not seeming like a drug user. Like, I think I've used that to my advantage a lot in my life because like there's a thing of like I pull a car over and there's four people sitting and one of them is me. Like, that's not the person the cops going to focus on, right? That's just like the quiet kid who's got caught up in all this right over. Probably just maybe he was catching a ride, you know, or maybe they were just trying this for the first time and like, you know, or in overhead. Right, that's kind of like that. But on some level, some level as it comes from like not fitting in in either world, right? Not fitting in the drug use, the drug using world, not fitting in in the regular world. And so just like, you know, you know, I might as well use that to my advantage kind of.
- [30:56]
Adam Gordon Bell
Basically, besides the hassle of driving to LA and honestly a ton of other reasons, heroin came with its own set of problems as a way to handle social anxiety.
- [31:08]
John Walker
So like Europe, east coast of America and west coast of America used to be different because of where the heroin comes from. So on the west coast of America, black tar heroin smuggled in from Mexico. So it's like black chunks, they're kind of like, I mean it's as big as you buy it, I guess. But like, kind of like think of like, you know, like something kind of like a large crack rock doesn't have the consistency of a crack rock or black, you know, and, and so when you're shooting, you're like, you're like breaking off a little bit of this thing. You throw it in water, you stir it up and draw it up into the syringe.
- [31:38]
Adam Gordon Bell
So John would drive to an out of the way spot not too far from his work.
- [31:42]
John Walker
It's kind of like an industrial area, you know, like office buildings and industrial, you know, thing. And then kind of. And they real quickly try to hit. I think I didn't use like iv. I use IV long enough to have a lot of problems with like veins collapsing and stuff. So I could pretty reliably hit, you know, in my forearm or the crook of my arm on one side or the other and then kind of do that kind of quickly cap, cap up and hide the syringe in case I passed out because of like a cop comes by. Like to think you don't want for them to find you passed out in your front seat with, you know, like a swing in your lap. Because that's a very easy case for them to make. So I would try to like quickly set it aside and then like give myself a few minutes. It takes like 10, 15 seconds to really hit and then, but then to give myself like, okay, five, 10 minutes, like have a cigarette, like, see how this is going to hit me. If it's too much, then maybe I'm gonna hang out here a little longer or like figure out something about, you know, to deal with the situation and then, and then kind of go back in.
- [32:40]
Adam Gordon Bell
You can see where this is heading and it's not anywhere good. John does cut back on the heroin a bit for a while. So he's not using it every day. But, you know, he has to increase his benzos to counteract, and then he's still taking opioids in one form or another, and then he has to resupply.
- [32:58]
John Walker
There's, you know, groups of people who use opiates and coordinate online. I met someone online, and they met up for the first time, and I drove them down to LA with me. So I picked this person up and drove down. You drive from Bakersfield, la, you go over a mountain range on a stretch of route called the Grapevine. So kind of like a windy road. It goes from sea level up to, you know, kind of three or 4,000ft down to the LA basin. You know, it's a very large highway, but kind of windy and dark. I was driving very quickly, I think, not realizing the effects the benzos were having on me. I think I, in retrospect, just, like, talked this person's ear off for the entire, like, ride to la. I think they were probably by the end of the ship, like, by. By the time we were, like, actually there getting ready to buy, you know, like, probably convinced they were in a car, trapped with a car with a crazy person. So we met the person that I knew down there. Let's try to introduce this person to that person. I bought an undisclosed quantity of heroin. And the three of us were like, well, do we all want to get high?
- [33:59]
Adam Gordon Bell
They hit the road. John in the back seat, the dealer up front reaching over to hand him a syringe.
- [34:05]
John Walker
His eye for what the right amount is, is different than mine. And as we were driving down the road, and I shot up, and I remember putting the, like, capping the needle back up and saying, like, I gotta clean. I gotta clean this stuff up. Like, meaning, like, the stuff in the back of the car. And then, like, the next thing I remember kind of coming to. Laying on a. On my back on a parking lot, and there's like, a paramedic over me, I guess. I guess they just hit me with a Narcan or something. And they're asking some questions to orient me and basically saying, like. Like a passerby report that you were like, you know, passed out in the back of your car. And they called 9 11, and we came and, like, got into your car, which was unlocked, and, you know, da, da, da, da. And because it turned out what happened is, like, they had been talking in the front seat, like, you know, and not really paying attention to what was going on. And when I looked back, my face was blue. I wasn't breathing. So he just Pulled over and like, took all this shit out of the car and left. And left it unlocked. And then like, from, you know, they were literally standing over there, you know, called 91 1. So it was unconscious for about 10 to 15 minutes, which is not like, as far as these things go, not the worst.
- [35:11]
Adam Gordon Bell
John makes it back to Bakersfield, although the details of how are a little bit fuzzy. And he phoned somebody in the recovery community. He knows that things aren't good. And, you know, he decides he's not going to go into work the next day. He needs to find a way to get clean.
- [35:26]
John Walker
If there was any way to continue using opiates in a controlled way, the way that was working, I would have done that. But, like, even just. I've been reading a bunch of stuff about the complications of IV drug use and like, the mortality rates and all these things, like the actuarial table type things. And like, there's no. You could tell yourself, like, you can use oxycon for your whole life and not have a bad life, right? Or even methadone or whatever else. Like, there. There are people who pull this off. There are very few people who find a way to successfully inject drugs for their entire life and have like, a life that's not much shorter than it. Than it would be otherwise. I was clean, especially for the first six months. I was an absolute bat. Like, I was absolute mess. You know, it did not feel like, oh, this is better. It felt like, oh, this is all the shit. Like, this is the reason that I use drugs. And it felt like I'm just trapped now. I can't, like, I can't continue to use drugs without dying and I'm just a mess, you know, kind of like in a million ways kind of thing. It just felt like, oh, my back to the wall as far as, like, I can't go back to the, you know, the drug use route pretty much.
- [36:34]
Unnamed Interviewer
Okay, but like, like, you finished rehab and you've cleaned up and your perspective is like, I've considered it analytically, and IV drug use is like, not my number one option. Like, that's like, that is not the recovery story that I hear from a, From a made for TV movie.
- [36:50]
John Walker
Well, the problem is that the made for TV movies focus on the wrong thing, right? Because that's like, that's the beginning of like. So recovery starts when it's like, okay, like, I can't continue to use drugs anymore, but I am. My fucking head is a mess and like, I every day fucking miserable. Because the thing is, like, when you stop using hair, like the withdrawal is not the worst part at all. Like that's like, you know, that's a few, like, you know, whatever, four or five days depending on who you like. You know, you're kind of, you're pretty good shape by it by then. The thing that's fucking miserable is then like all the stuff you've been running from and all the stuff that you've done is there. For example, like I stopped being able to go into the office. Like I would be trying to try and do that white knuckling thing of forcing myself to be in an office and not have a panic attack. But I just sort of like was so unable to navigate regular life without these things that it was literally like going to the office would be a panic attack very quickly.
- [37:40]
Adam Gordon Bell
So John switched to working remotely. He managed projects and he kept in touch with his team through chat and email and phone calls.
- [37:47]
John Walker
And unfortunately again, you know, very fortunate that, you know, A.J. kind of like patient with this stuff. But so the recovery process was the process of months and years there figuring out like, how do I not want to kill myself every day? And the work was all like, no longer using heroin part was very. Actually the easiest part of all of it. I think it's like a lot of people's experience really, but like it doesn't make for a good movie.
- [38:09]
Adam Gordon Bell
In recovery, John found weightlifting and bodybuilding, but he also rediscovered an outlet for his tendencies.
- [38:16]
John Walker
I think these scraper problems would be an example of that. Like, for me, like security research, hacking type stuff is like, it's an incredibly open ended, complex problem that requires full attention and critically, I guess a lot of like dopamine hits and stimulation along the way. There's all these ups and downs of like poking at a thing. Oh shit. Like if I, if I submit something to a form in this way, I get back a cookie that looks like I could use over here, you know, in this place where it's not letting me go to this site because I'm going to, I'm jumping like right to step three of a process. But that cookie looks like, you know, the kind of cookie I could use over here on step three of this thing, right? And it's because kind of like these ups and downs too and like the joy of discovery or that you end up like in a dead end. It's like, oh fuck, I just wasted four hours. This is never going to be done right. In some ways it is, it's like chaotic in the way that like drug use or other Things are but in like a much more controlled like at the end of the day it's nothing, you know. Oh. Because still gonna be able to go home, right? You know, or like no one's gonna be dead, no one's gonna be whatever. I think like anything in the security research hacking space, which I include like hacking in the broad sense that's kind of open ended hard problems like RT cards are thing that like are in some ways I guess another addiction or thing for me. And I find that when, when there's like a complexity level is high enough and like there's like pressure and stakes and, and open ended and the problem is engaging enough like the, the voice of my head kind of shuts up finally, you know, and there's a sense of like newness and excitement. I think there's also like a dopamine hit thing to it of like because it is like especially security research, it's like, you know, hammer on 10 things for a very long time and like nine of them don't pan out and then you finally hit the one and say oh, you know, like, you know, they get kind of like a big hit of like, you know, I'm not a crazy person.
- [39:52]
Adam Gordon Bell
So John slowly found ways to cope with sobriety. Remote work was a big part of it and so was you know, the standard hard work of recovery that John says, you know, usually isn't included in the movies. But yeah, he left the data mining place for a couple of reasons. One was he wanted a clean start and another was because he wanted to work in cybersecurity. So he started at Tenable and I worked with him there. I didn't know anything about these drug struggles, but I did know something about him. I mean I spent a lot of time with him and I felt like I knew something that really related to his struggles and I wanted to confront him about it.
- [40:30]
Unnamed Interviewer
Well, because I've known you for, I don't know, it's some amount of years at this point.
- [40:35]
John Walker
About ten? No, I think a little less than ten. Nine. I think you.
- [40:38]
Unnamed Interviewer
That's wild. I knew when I said I wanted to interview like I knew that one of the things I wanted to ask you about was autism because I had this sense. I don't like, I feel like saying this seems rude. I. I knew that you were on the autism spectrum. Like I don't know that that's good or bad, but like if you're at a group, people in various areas, like you're very clearly in this group. Right. But I also just had the sense that you didn't know you were in that group. Right. And that's a weird thing.
- [41:07]
John Walker
I don't want to draw too strong a parallel because I don't want to like, you know, chip in the experience of other people. People are kind of like in the closet with homosexuality or something. And then, you know, there's the process of coming or often, you know, coming out or like there's some level of like even self hatred that can develop and things like this. Well, I think, I think there's no way to describe it except denial. Right? Like in the same way that someone is, you know, maybe, oh, like I just like hooking up with men from time to time. But I'm not like, because they're like the reason for, for donating blood. They ask you are you a man who has sex with men? Not are you homosexual or are you bisexual or whatever. And the reason for that is there'd be people who regularly, you know, or almost, you know, regularly have sex with men would not fill out that box because. Not because they were lying, but because in their head, like, you know, oh, I just, I just do all these. I have all these behaviors, but that's not who I am, identity wise. And I think like sort of with autism, I could probably tell you, like, oh, I'm socially awkward and I'm this and I'm that, but like, I'm not. But I'm not really an autistic person.
- [42:01]
Adam Gordon Bell
The way this all connects, at least for me, is that, yeah, John has anxiety issues for sure, and he has drug dependence issues that he's had to overcome. But also he's spent so much time comparing himself to a false standard.
- [42:15]
John Walker
I think like, the way that I internalized a lot of my problems before is basically like, I'm not good enough. Because I think if you think of like a technical problem or like a sports problem or something, the problem is you're not good enough. Right? Like, you gotta run harder or, you know, you have to like, you know, get better at X thing or get better at handling pointers, right? And just like, you know, it's like that mentality works great for getting better and better and better at those things and putting a lot of pressure on myself and pointing out all the areas that are wrong. And you know, I'm. I still still keep like de referencing pointers and, you know, in sloppy ways, it's causing my application to crash. I gotta get better at that. If you apply that mentality to yourself, I think the thing I found that is Incredibly self destructive and toxic. Because like that was like for me, like socialization was that sort of problem. I'm on the verge of cracking it, right. If I just like remember all these things, like, you know, I'm not going to be as weird, you know, and that's incredibly like, I think that creates a self image that's very toxic.
- [43:11]
Unnamed Interviewer
Like it's only helpful for you to identify with that identity if like it actually helps you overcome things. Right. But like if it helps you understand that, oh, there's a, like my struggles to work in the workplace, maybe it's not a code for me to crack. I'm just like, I'm this person.
- [43:30]
John Walker
I think if I had been at the point where I could have accepted that then it would have been my life so much easier. But at the point someone supplying the label to me was not enough to make me, it's like, yeah, I think that I am finding that accepting it is helping with a lot of those things. Yeah, I do think like this it being much more visible has helped me a lot with much more people, many more people being diagnosed. Oh like I could relate to this person. Like they're not in a group home and I'm running into more of those people in my day to day life and stuff. It's like the diagnosis by itself would not have done anything useful for me. I don't think it's like the acceptance of the diagnosis piece has really been the biggest thing for me still the last few years that I've finally accepting it. And still there's some days where I wonder about it. So I'm still very much in the coming to terms with that phase.
- [44:14]
Adam Gordon Bell
John can't rewind his life. He can't tell his younger self, you don't have to pretend to be someone you're not. But he can't share what he's learned for everyone else.
- [44:26]
John Walker
I think that the thing that I was missing I think is not having a community of people like me where I felt like I was accepted. I kind of ended up finding that through the, you know, engineering as a job. But like, I think I would encourage, you know, people who are on a similar life path to like find if they are, you know, spectrumy people, to find other people on the spectrum they get along with and develop relationships and talk with those people and kind of get an understanding of themselves and do more of that rather than like, you know, reading of diagnoses and stereotypes and these sorts of things. Because I think that's like a key step to me. For like finding community of a sort. You know, I found community in the technical world, but then needed that other kind of community as well, you know, that kind of helped balance things out.
- [45:08]
Adam Gordon Bell
So it's years later and John is doing well and he's got a friend who's also on the spectrum. And that's sort of how he started to understand who he is in a way that doctors telling him he might be on the spectrum really did not. And he's now a chief research scientist at a stealth startup that poached him away from Beyond Trust, who took him away from CrowdStrike before that.
- [45:31]
John Walker
You know, like 11 years clean at this point. Like, you know, I'm not having mental health crisis. I cannot imagine kind of going back to that, you know, that kind of way of, of living. Like, I feel like my life continues to get more and more fulfilling over time and more and more stable and more and more other things. And I think the thing that I'm finally literally like in the past few years, finally, you know, starting to like, come to terms with is like, I am kind of weird in some ways. I do have some social difficulties, but I guess like an acceptable way to exist as a human being. And like, people like seeing other people like that, like they're accepted also, like, there's just a lot more, you know, a lot more people are publicly talking about these things now, which I think has been like, like more and more. It's like, oh, there's like a way to exist in the world. It doesn't involve me like trying to pretend to be something I'm not on in a way that like, it's just like a daily battle of like, how to like, perfectly method act like a non autistic person in a way that always feels like I'm failing.
- [46:33]
Adam Gordon Bell
That was the show. Thank you so much, John, for being so honest and so real with us. I think it takes guts to talk about addiction and anxiety and the messy path of self acceptance. Takes guts to share that. I think a lot of us will see a bit of ourselves in your story. If you want to reach out to John, you'll find him on Twitter or on bluesky details on the webpage or just email me. I'm sure if his story resonates with you, he would love to hear from you. I think we could all benefit from the kind of self acceptance that John has been working on cultivating. And if you enjoyed this episode, please tell a friend, please spread the word of mouth. It's the best way to grow the show. And then more people can hear messages like John's. You can also join the co recursive community on Slack or where we talk about everything from technical deep dives to the human side of software. And there's always great conversations going on there. One of my favorite places to hang out on the Internet for sure. I'd love to see you there. And there's also a newsletter. But if you really want to support the show and help me to keep bringing you these kind of conversations, please go to codecursive.com supporters and until next time, thank you so much for listening.
- [47:56]
John Walker
SA.