Adam: Hey, this is CoRecursive, 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 were still searching for the table of contents? I have at times, for sure. I remember my first job outta school.
I had to work on this giant messy internal inventory and ordering system. There were 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.
John: Went and found a building that, you know, was kinda like, there was some server equipment in there. Not much stuff, just like, close it, lock the door, and just like, lay down on the floor. But just like literally curled up in a ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now I gotta go back out and fix more printers.
Like, I generally do enjoy people. Like I’m scared of them, but I enjoy them.
Adam: That’s John Walker, and I’ve seen him solve problems no one else can. He once found a Kubernetes vulnerability, so it 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 wanna spoil it, but it’s super good.
Breaking Bad
Adam: 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. You know, he got an admin account on his school’s Novell system and installed key loggers, and got into all kinds of teenage computery trouble.
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.
John: 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 retry, an attempt to reinvent myself.
And it became like, it felt like an anthropological exercise experiment. Like as much as anything else. It was like, you know, started to talk to new people and go to new places and all. It was very exciting and like. You know just felt like this whole new exciting world.
Adam: Computers and the internet played a big part in why John changed directions.
John: And the thing I sort of hit on was very interested in, in drugs from, like, a, you know, academic perspective. I’d read, like, Erowid and Lycaeum, these old internet websites, and I have all these reports of, like, I use ketamine and, like, nitrous and this thing, and here, like, at T-minus 15 min.
Like, here’s the effect it was having on this stuff, and all that at that point in my life, like, I always smoked 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, now I know, in retrospect, the trip reports people write up are, like, you know, dramatized or, like, very kind of hyperbolic and exaggerated at times and stuff like this.
Adam: John was sharp. He was smart enough to start college at 17, but then he got kicked out.
John: But um, struggling a lot with mental health and kind of had an emptiness in my life. ‘cause now like, oh no, no longer in school for the first time in my life and I decided that like, you know, buying and selling drugs was gonna be my thing. I think normally when this is your thing, like you come into it naturally, right?
But I’m, 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.
Adam: Things went okay for a while until he got caught and landed in jail, and not juvie, but an adult jail. Imagine being an 18-year-old computer nerd in a place like that. It kind of did a number on him.
John: 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. I got really, really isolated, and more into, you know, like alcohol, pills that I could get, and benzos. And you know, around 19 or so, it was just kind of like, oh, what the— you know, like, I think honestly I pretty much wanted to die, but was not, I think there was a lot of fear of hell and not willing to just like, I would 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.
Finding Things
Adam: 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.
John: So I got kicked outta my parents’ home at, you know, left initially at 17. Came back for a bit. I 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. Uh, I was kind of walking down this, the street is called Gay Street. It is West Chester, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
And I was kinda walking down the street and I found a large Ziploc bag with many kind of small smaller Ziploc bags in it. I never had any experience with crack before, but, like, you know, I’d used powder cocaine like other things and like, oh, this is, that’s probably what crack is, right?
Adam: The anthropologically interested drug dealer. John might not have been excited about crack. I. 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.
John: It was kind of like the train was, the train was already off the rails and kind of, you know, rolling down the mountain.
Learning to smoke crack on IRC
John: Especially living in a new place and stuff, and with a lot of people leaving and going to college, other things that was kind of really, really isolated in like the real world, like the physical world.
So I think on EFnet, there was a channel called #GeekIssues, which I was a big fan of. They had like bash.org, which basically collected things from this channel, like quotes from this channel.
And, like, I had just gotten a little digital camera that I used to take pictures of myself for dating purposes. I was trying to set myself up on a dating site, which did not go well.
So I had like a large bong with like a piece called a slide, like a little flared-out piece of glass. You apply a flame to it and then pull air through, you know, from the top, and it pulls the smoke through in a way that I’m not describing well.
Adam: 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?”
John: 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 cutting attention, seeking behavior or something, or read that way.
But then found, I found someone was like willing to help me a bit as, oh, just like take a, take a cigarette, sprinkle a little bit ash to the, the top of the bowl and then like, you know, then you put a little bit on, it could give 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 or like it’s rough roughly becomes like a stem. and so like I try to, you know, try to do a little bit then took another picture and like, this is what it’s looking like now. And uh, you know, kind of got to the point where I was working pretty well working with someone on EFnet that there.
Crack Binge
Adam: So what did you do? Did you just smoke a dealer’s worth of crack cocaine in an afternoon, like on IRC?
John: Pretty much, I think like each one of these bags, I felt after the fact was like a 50 to a hundred dollar bag. And I had a good, you know, 10 to 15 of them. It started out in like the afternoon, but if, like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with like stimulants at all. It basically just sat down and smoked until I wasn’t anymore.
Adam: That’s insane. Yeah. The IRC people were cheering you on.
John: uh,
I’m, I mean, once you have crack, like I, like what the fuck 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, 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, I that, that feels like nothing I’ve ever felt in my life.
So, you know, why, why don’t I do that pretty much?
And so like I smoke however long it takes to smoke that much crack, which is a, a long time, but you’re not very aware of the time.
And so just smoking until 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 gonna 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 outta 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.
Homeless
Adam: 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.
John: I’m, I’m willing to look at that internal mental compass and decide, oh, you know, like, I, I think I would like to start being, being more sociable, right? And getting more community support for this issue.
So I, I’m gonna start going to, you know, an AA meeting a few times a week, and I know it’s gonna be uncomfortable. I gonna start doing that. And, and when I did like little things like that, right? Like they don’t didn’t buy themselves, make myself, make me magically happy.
I do want to die. If I had to choose, do I wanna die or live today, I would probably choose die.
But. I did get a little shot of like, oh, this feels different and better. You know, like that, that, that kind of like, oh, something about this is, is really out. 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, 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.
IRC Bots
Adam: 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.
John: Yeah, I probably shouldn’t say a recovery program ‘cause they’re big on like anonymity and stuff. But I, I found an online recovery program for people recovering from drugs to add online meetings. And, you know, they were a really great fit for me because I could feel more open, you know? It was more like the meeting was very much me out of my element, right? It’s not like I was spending a bunch of time; you know, it was very isolated before that. It wasn’t really involved in the world. You know, it was kinda like the place I would’ve socialized would’ve been online anyway.
So I got very involved in the community as a user of it. And then, you know, in these 12-step groups, volunteering and service is a big part of the recovery piece. It’s kind of like doing the actions that you know are gonna fix your brain eventually, kind of thing.
Adam: and so John volunteered to help with the website and with the online chat.
John: And I think what it quickly led to is, so we, these, these communities were hosted on, I think like EFnet or something, which is not a friendly place for recovery. So there’d just be like in all the fucked channels, like, you know, where’s, you know, #warez, like #killeveryone or whatever. There’d be like hashtag name 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, try to hack and attack the group and these sorts of things.
And I think there, it was kind of like, this was like I was technically responsible for running like the website, keeping the channel up, but then I like started to 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.
Adam: 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.
John: It was just, it was, you know, 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 out into that world of like the technical side of online recovery on IRC, I think really 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.
Bakersfield
Adam: After getting sober, John moves to Bakersfield, California, and he starts college again. Through AA, he lands a job as sort of an IT networking consultant, fixer-upper guy. Say a business’s Windows server crashes, and suddenly their point of sales system won’t work. John gets the call, and he drives over there, and he figures out a way to bring it back online.
John had a knack for this stuff. One client had a point of sale system that kept printing really long stretches of blank space at the end of every receipt, wasting paper and wasting time. No one could fix it. Not even the vendor could fix it, but John could. He wrote a custom printer driver that stripped out all those extra line breaks before it sent things off to the printer.
So John became the IT guy that people called when their business was on the line. He’d walk in with no idea of what problems he’d find or even what tech he’d be dealing with. Sometimes he had to recover lost data. Sometimes he had to reverse engineer weird formats or fix bugs and 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 was hard. Walking into an office where everybody was waiting for him to fix things, that was real pressure.
John: I’ve always been a very anxious person, you know. I was struggling with the depression, that kind of stuff. And so there were days where I was just kind of like forcing myself through, right? And just kind of very on edge the whole time.
And just, 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, oh, I wanna run out at the door, you know, and like, you know, go hide somewhere kind of way.
Adam: like what were you worried about?
John: I don’t even know, like I still get that mode sometimes. I struggle with a lot of panic. Like I would go to get panic attacks.
I went out to see a client once; it was like a resort out on the coast of California. I was about to say their name, but probably best not to say their name, given the other content that was to get completely sober, you know, through this time.
And it was 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. I just got so overwhelmed, went and found a building that, you know, was kinda like there was some server equipment in there. Not much stuff, just like, close it, lock the door, and just like not people went for crying for whatever reason. I just literally curled up in a ball for a half hour. And then, like, okay, you know, now I gotta go back out and fix the printers, that kind of thing.
But I think I was very good at basically pushing out the feelings or whatever else, and like functioning, like white knuckling it basically, and functioning. Then I would go to the bathroom and be like, fucking panicking, and then come back out and pretend like nothing’s happening. Kind of thing, if that makes sense.
I loved the work. All the parts that involved dealing with people, that was a stressful part. And so there was a way of escaping into, you know, white knuckling the parts that were the people parts to get to like the technical parts.
In my mind, it was almost like, yeah, tomorrow might be the day. And, you know, try to interpret things people said or did, like, is tomorrow gonna be the day they’re gonna fire me? You know, it was all that form of delusion, I guess, in some way.
Adam: 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 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 about people’s perception of you, but probably on their side, they were so desperate just to have you around.
Right, because it’s very rare to have somebody that you could throw hard problems at. You’re one of those people; you could have done whatever you wanted and still been an asshole. People could have been disheveled and unclean and rude to everybody, and they would’ve kept you because you actually have an ability that is quite rare.
But I don’t think you knew that, right?
John: No, I think there’s probably an element where I was disheveled and rude, without being to be, you know, like, and like there people were tolerating.
You know, in a very real like, some of it is just like my own internal critic is very strong.
Data Mining
Adam: 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 doom and impending disaster he was feeling, and then he met someone who had a big positive effect on his life : AJ.
John: He was a, a good friend of one of my coworkers at the place I was working at the time, Paul. So, because I did freelance work, Paul had connected me to him as somebody who needed IT/DB work; is the short version of it.
It was in the Bureau of Land Management, a like a federal building up by the airport in Bakersfield, like on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Kinda like a single-story, sprawling government-looking building.
And then you’d walk in through the front door, and it was kind of like an officey environment with, you know, I forget if there were cubicles at the time, but imagine that sort of thing. It would just be like he’d be there in the office. Like most of the people wouldn’t be there.
And we’d spend a few, like, you know, talking about, oh, what is it you want done? And then, um, yeah, I would just sit down at a workstation that would normally be someone else’s, I guess, during the week, and put in a few hours taking care of something for them.
Adam: 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.
John: They make efforts sometimes to contact you ‘cause it builds goodwill. But they’re also typically allowed to collect interest on the money sitting in this bank account. So they’re often not terribly incentivized to like, seek out the owners of this. And it’s just, just a hard data problem often because, you know, you like, like some of those they didn’t even know the address associated with it or just like complete, you know, the records video.
There’s, there’s a reason that it wasn’t returned to the person in the first place.
Adam: AJ’s company dug through public data sets, tracked 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 ‘em to join full-time.
John: So very, very open-ended, very low friction. He was like very much the business side, didn’t care about the technical, just like, yeah, sell me on an approach, you know, like, we, we need to get more letters out, you know, and 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
The Scrapers
Adam: 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. I.
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.
John: And so I created a bunch of scrapers that would go to. And instead of just waiting for like the CD in the mail, you know, or the PDF, which was often contained on it, that was horrible to process.
One of the first things I did was, oh, we need some servers probably. I knew where to get like refurbished and previous generation Dell servers, but they came with a warranty that was not the Dell one. So, you know, I kind of sourced a bunch of cheap servers and put ‘em in the server rack and got up a kind of basic server setup to do the things we needed to do.
‘Cause we’ll need to run SQL somewhere, you know, we need to run the web apps that people are going to be using internally and stuff like that. So, in the early days, we were sourcing on a budget. At this point, this business is like a million dollars a year in revenue, if that.
And so, dude, I tried to do all this with a fairly shoestring budget. I would set up a lot of scrapers that would go to the website and then, one way or another, scrape all the property currently on the website and do this constantly.
So that basically meant that we could contact people faster than other people who weren’t able to do that, but also contact people who, like, otherwise, the state would not, you know, there was no way to get this data except to go to the website designed for a human to use and essentially scrape, or some variation of that.
Adam: 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.
Drugs
Adam: 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, for which he did not have a prescription.
John: I stopped having panic attacks. Like I was much more mellow, not like a mellow person, but exactly. But like, I wasn’t 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, I would take the same dose every day at the same times, you know? And I just felt, it felt like being cured, really.
My, the period of sobriety, you know, when I was trying to deal with the panic attacks just by, you know, keeping myself very, very still and I’m gonna stare at the space above the person’s nose and sort of nod when it seems like I’m supposed to be nodding, and then try to reconstruct after the fact what the fuck happened in the meeting. Right? Or like, when I get back a hold of myself, having to ask questions and stuff without seemingly always asking questions to try to piece together what the last few minutes of the conversation were.
And it was like, oh, I got opiates. I don’t have to do any of that. Like, I just focus on the fun technical problems. Dealing with people is more pleasant. I enjoy, because I generally do enjoy people. I don’t, I’m not scared of them, but I enjoy them. Right? And when they say, “Oh, I have my security blanket,” I feel, you know, I’m not really worried if they don’t like me.
Captcha
Adam: 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.
John: One was, sometimes they didn’t implement the CAPTCHAs very well, and you could just use JavaScript to do something, just say, “CAPTCHAs solve.”
We did our own OCR. Well, that was another thing we did with some CAPTCHAs: use OCR libraries to, you know, they actually did, like, even with the technology, the time, it wasn’t that hard to do these things.
Adam: Then he found a service that somehow could break CAPTCHAs. You send them an image and about 30 seconds later you get an answer.
John: Like one day, this service was suddenly running very slowly. And so I contacted support, which I didn’t really like. I don’t know if there was any phone support or anything. It was kind of like going to the weird chatbot and speaking to someone who clearly doesn’t speak English as their first language.
And they’re like, “Oh yeah, it’s like the lunar new year,” is basically what they said. So we have, and then that put together something in my mind. I was realizing, oh, like there’s literally people that are like really, the reason you get a 30-second response is they’re presenting this image to someone in a call center who quickly keys in, you know, what to capture. I thought you still had a really good OCR or something.
But it turns out it was because people all along was kind of the thing, like some sort of warehouse somewhere.
Operations
Adam: John built an entire ecosystem of scrapers and clever workarounds for the various anti-scraping measures the cities would throw at ‘em. 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.
John: And I got fairly involved as far as having to do things like introduce like jitter, like fill out the forms using Selenium, and the way a human would or like sort spinning up like hundreds of little EC2 instances.
Adam: The EC2 instances would act like proxies.
John: So what that blocked was like all attempts to limit, you know, rate limit or like check by IP or anything like that. Or like, obvious pro they, they had some level of like obvious proxy detection or VPN detection. But the IPs for that method would come through as just EC2 IPs.
I would have like different municipalities that was not like using the full bag of tricks with, like, it wouldn’t be bothering with the distributed scrapers because they, it wasn’t necessary and they would roll out like rate limit protection or something like that. And it was like, oh, well we’re just gonna 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 a hundred things, like much even faster anyway, you know? And it was like, oh wait, wait, let’s see how long it takes ‘em to notice this.
But, uh, 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 of what I was doing that I think felt very comfortable, like pushing the limits of like the limits of like what is possible to do with data collection.
The Wall
Adam: 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.
John: 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 kinda, 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 lost a very kind of, I think my favorite thing to do. Like, you know, I work on the weekends or when other people, and there’s kind of like go, you know, peruse the latest letters kind of. I think it felt, you know, to see that wall of like, thank you letters grow, right? And like, just be able to compute. ‘cause 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 four to $5 million a year range, and that’s taking 10 per, that’s taking 10%, you know, or so.
So that gives you like a sense of the scale. And like a lot of it, a lot of it was kind of nickel and dime, you know, a hundred dollars, few hundred dollars. But I think for me, like. I loved that it was so open-ended and just fig, 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, and I love that. Like the, 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, the, the thank you letters on the wall give like deeper,
FP
Adam: 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.
John: I was getting into functional programming, like, it’s clear for the sort of distributed systems we were building. Like, this is fucking night and day better than Java and imperative programming. And so I would hang out on the various hashtag #Scala channels and other places.
And it felt like, you know, 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, the place I’m gonna do that is IRC.
Heroin
Adam: Oh, he had 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.
John: I was sourcing my heroin from the LA area, which is like a 90-minute drive from Bakersfield among other places. Was odd. The best at doing any of this. I’m sure like the people who were, you know, used heroin for years and years and years probably think, “oh, this is a lightweight, you know, kind of tourist or something.”
But so I’d drive down, you know, buy a large quantity and then drive back home and then be good for like, you know, for like a week or something. This was kind of like, you know, my after work activities, you know? Yeah. It’d take like a 180-minute kind of drive down, buy some more heroin for the week, and then come back up.
Adam: 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 ask me to describe John, like, I would say like, yeah, you’re, 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.
John: 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. ‘Cause like, there’s a thing of like, I pull a car over and there’s four people sitting in it and one of them is me. Like, that’s not the person the cop’s gonna focus on.
Right. That’s just like the quiet kid who’s got caught up in all this. Right. Probably just, maybe he was just catching a ride, you know? Or maybe they were just trying this for the first time and like, you know, or in over her head.
Right. That’s kind of like the, I, but on some level, as it comes from, like, not fitting in, in either world, right? Not fitting in the drug-using world, not fitting in, in the regular world. And so just like, you know, you know, I might as well use that to my advantage, kind of basically.
Back at Work
Adam: Besides the hassle of driving to LA and, and honestly a a ton of other reasons, heroin came with its own set of problems as a way to handle social anxiety.
John: So, like Europe, the east coast of America and the 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 is smuggled in from Mexico. It’s like black chunks.
They’re kind of like, I mean, it’s as big as you buy it, I guess, but think of it like a large crack rock. It doesn’t have the consistency of a crack rock, but it’s black, you know? And so when you’re shooting, you’re breaking off a little bit of this thing. You throw it in water, stir it up, then draw it up into the syringe.
Adam: So John would drive to an out-of-the-way spot, not too far from his work.
John: It’s kinda like an industrial area, you know, like office buildings and industrial things. And then, kind of, real quickly try to hit. I think I didn’t use IV; I used IV long enough to have a lot of problems with veins collapsing and stuff. It’s like a pretty reliable hit, you know, in my forearm or the crook of my arm on one side or the other.
And then, kind of, do that quickly, cap up, and hide the syringe in case I passed out ‘cause of a cop close by. Like, the thing you don’t want is for them to find you passed out in your front seat with, you know, like a syringe in your lap, ‘cause that’s a very easy case for them to make.
So I would try to quickly set it aside and then give myself a few minutes. It takes like 10 to 15 seconds to really hit. And then, to give myself like, okay, five to 10 minutes, like, have a cigarette. Like, see how this is gonna hit me. If it’s too much, then maybe I’m gonna hang out here a little longer or figure out something to deal with the situation and then kind of go back in.
OD
Adam: 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 is 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.
John: There’s, you know, groups of people who use opiates and coordinate online. I met someone online. Oh, they met up for the first time and drove them down to LA with me.
So, I picked this person up and drove down. You drive from Bakersfield to LA; you go over a mountain range on a stretch of road called the Grapevine. It’s kind of like a windy road. It goes from sea level up to, you know, kind of three or four thousand feet down to the LA basin. 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 talked this person’s ear off for the entire ride to LA. I think they were probably, by the end of the trip, convinced they were in a car trapped with a crazy person.
So we met the person down there. I was trying to introduce this person to that person. I bought an undisclosed quantity of heroin, and the three of us were like, “Well, do we all want to get high?”
Adam: They hit the road, John in the backseat, the dealer up front reaching over to hand him a syringe.
John: His eye for what the right amount is, is different than mine. And as we were driving down the road and I shut up and I remember putting the, like capping the needle back up and saying, like, “Oh, 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 was laying on my back, on a parking lot, and there was like a paramedic over me, I guess. I guess they just hit me with a Narcan or something. They were asking some questions to orient me and basically said, like, a passerby reported that you were like, you know, passed out in the back of your car. And they called 9 1 1 and we came and like got into your car, which was unlocked, and you know, da dah, dah, dah. Because it turned out what had happened is like they had been talking in the front seat, like, you know, and not really paying attention to what was going on. Anyway, I looked back; my face was blue; I wasn’t breathing. So I just pulled over and like took all the shit outta the car and left it locked. And then like, you know, they were literally standing over there, you know, called 9 1 1. So I was unconscious for about 10 to 15 minutes, I think, which is not like, as far as these things go, not the worst.
Recovery
Adam: John makes it back to Bakersfield, although the details of how are a little bit fuzzy; 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.
John: If there was any way to continue using opiates in a controlled way, to the way that was working, I would’ve 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 do actuarial table type things.
And like there’s no you could tell yourself, like I mean, you can use OxyContin for your whole life and not have a bad life, right? Or even methadone or whatever else. Like, 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 a life that’s not much shorter than it would be otherwise.
I was clean, especially for the first six months. I was an absolute mess. You know, it did not feel like, oh, this is better. It felt like, oh, this is all the shit that is the reason I use drugs. And it felt like I’m just trapped now.
Like, I can’t continue to use drugs without dying. I’m just a mess, you know, kind of like in a million ways. It just felt like, oh, my back’s to the wall as far as like, I can’t go back to the drug use route pretty much.
Made For TV Movies
Adam: 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.
John: The problem is that the made-for-TV movies focus on the wrong thing, right? Because that’s like, that’s the beginning of recovery. Like, so recovery starts when it’s like, okay. Like, I can’t continue to use drugs anymore, but like I am, my fucking head is a mess. And like I am every day fucking miserable.
Because the thing is, like when you stop using heroin, the withdrawal is not the worst part at all. Like, that’s like, you know, whatever, four or five days depending on who you like, you know, that’s a few, like, you’re kind of, you’re pretty good shape 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 to 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 into the office would be a panic attack very quickly.
Adam: So John switched to working remotely. He managed projects, and he kept in touch with his team through chat, email, and phone calls.
John: And fortunately again, you know, very fortunate that you know, AJ kind of like, uh, 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, the no longer using heroin part was very, actually the easiest part of all of it. And I think that’s like a lot of people’s experience, really, but like, it doesn’t make for a good movie.
Outlets
Adam: In recovery, John found weightlifting and bodybuilding, but he also rediscovered an outlet for his tendencies.
John: I think these scraper problems would be an example of that. For me, security research and hacking type stuff is an incredibly open-ended, complex problem that requires full attention and, critically, a lot of dopamine hits and stimulation along the way.
There are all these ups and downs of poking at a thing. Oh shit! 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. I’m jumping right to step three of a process, but that cookie looks like the kind of cookie I could use over here on step three of this thing, right?
It’s kind of like these ups and downs too. The joy of discovery or that you end up in a dead end—it’s like, oh fuck, I’ve just wasted four hours. This is never gonna be done. In some ways, it is chaotic in the way that drug use or other things are, but in a much more controlled way. At the end of the day, it’s nothing, you know? Oh, they’re still gonna be able to go home, right? No one’s gonna be dead; no one’s gonna be whatever.
I think anything in the security research hacking space, which I include hacking in the broad sense, is kind of open-ended hard problems. It’s articulated as a thing that, in some ways, I guess is another addiction or a thing for me.
I find that when the complexity level is high enough and there’s pressure, stakes, and the problem is engaging enough, the voice in my head kind of shuts up finally.
You know? There’s a sense of newness and excitement. I think there’s also a dopamine hit thing to it, especially with security research. You know, you hammer on ten things for a very long time, and nine of them don’t pan out. Then you finally hit the one, and it’s like, oh, you know? You get kind of a big hit of, you know, I’m not a crazy person.
Autism
Adam: 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. 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, 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.
Adam: Well, ‘cause I’ve known you for, I don’t know, it’s, it’s some amount of years at this point.
John: about 10, no, I think a little less than 10. Nine. Nine.
I think you.
Adam: That’s wild. I knew when I, when I said I wanted to interview, like, I knew that one of the things I wanted to ask you about was autism, ‘cause I had this sense. I don’t know, like, I feel like saying this seems rude. I knew that you were on the autism spectrum. Like, I don’t know that that’s good or bad, but like, if you’re at a group of people in various areas, like, you’re very clearly in this group, right?
But I also just had the sense that you didn’t know you were in that group, right? And that’s a weird thing,
John: there’s, I don’t want to draw too strong of a parallel ‘cause I, 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
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, I, I just like hooking up with men from time to time, but I’m not like, ‘cause 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 homosexual, you know, regularly have sex with men.
would not fill out that box. You could 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.
Adam: 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.
John: I think, like, the way that I internalized a lot of my problems before is basically like, I’m not good at that. If you think about a technical problem or a sports problem, the problem is that you’re not good enough, right?
You gotta run harder, or, you know, you have to like, you know, get better at executing or handling pointers, right? That mentality works great for getting better and better at those things. But putting a lot of pressure on myself and pointing out all the areas that are wrong, I still keep dereferencing pointers 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 is incredibly self-destructive and toxic. For me, socialization was that sort of problem. I’m on the verge of cracking it, right? I know if I just remember all these things, like, you know, I’m not gonna be as weird. That creates a self-image that’s very toxic.
Adam: 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 reason, 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.
John: I think if I had been at the point where I could’ve accepted that, then it would’ve been so much easier. But at the point someone supplying the label to me was not enough to make me feel like, “Yeah.”
I think that I am finding that accepting it is helping with a lot of those things. I do think, like, just being much more visible has helped me a lot, like with more people being diagnosed.
Oh, like I can relate to this person. They’re not in a group home. 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.
I still, like, in the last few years, have finally accepted it. And still, there are some days where I wonder about it. So I’m still very much in the phase of coming to terms with that.
Reflections
Adam: John can’t rewind his life, right? He can’t tell his younger self. You don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not, but he can’t share what he’s learned for everyone else
John: 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 there are, you know, spectrum people to find other people on the spectrum to get along with. And develop relationships and talk with those people and, and kinda get an understanding of themselves and, and do more of that rather than like, you know, reading of, diagnoses and stereotypes and, and these sorts of things.
Because like, 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, and helped balance things out.
Adam: 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 is now a chief research scientist at a stealth startup that poached him away from BeyondTrust, who took him away from CrowdStrike before that.
John: 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, 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, that’s like an acceptable way to exist as a human being. And like people like seeing other people like that, like that are accepted. Also, like, there’s just a lot more, you know, a lot more people are publicly talking about these things now, which I think has been like, oh, like more and more it’s like, oh, there’s like a way to exist in a world that doesn’t involve the, like, trying to pretend to be something I’m not on in a way that like, is just like a daily battle of like how to like perfectly method, act like a, a a non-autistic person in a way that always feels like I’m failing.
Outro
Adam: that was the show. Thank you so much, John, for being so honest and so real with us. I think it takes guts to, to talk about addiction and anxiety and the messy path of self-acceptance. It takes guts to share that. I think a lot of us will see a bit of ourselves in in your story.
If you wanna reach out to John, you’ll find him on Twitter or on Blue Sky details on the webpage, or just email me. I’m sure if his story resonates with you, you know, 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, you know, 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 CoRecursive community on Slack, where we talk about everything from technical deep dives to the human side of software and there’s always great conversations going on there. One of my favorite places to hang out on the internet for sure. I’d love to see you there. I. And there’s also a newsletter, but if you really wanna support the show and, and help me to keep bringing you these kind of conversations, please go to recursive.com/supporters.
And until next time, thank you so much for listening.
Sticher
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