Troublemakers and Superpowers

[Music] thank you for coming um my name is Joe Grand and this is uh a presentation called troublemakers and superpowers and it's a little bit different than what I normally talk about or normally I talk about technical things um this is something figured I'd mix it up a little bit and uh talk a little bit about some some personal kind of stories and ultimately uh hopefully seeing how we can all kind of you know we all have our troublemakers and sometimes we can take those and and use them to some advantage to like succeed in whatever way we Define that um but just something a little bit different right and leave us with this hopefully a sense of community

and and some of the stuff in here I haven't talked about before so hopefully um I don't bum you out and uh we can see some positive stuff that comes out of this so so this book I have to say I stole the the title in a lot of the graphics um from my wife uh key her book just came out a couple days ago called troublemakers and superpowers um this is a book about different types of people that have had struggles in their life whether it's trauma or mental health issues or other things um and we able to use those in some way to to to move forward right and take a step forward

and I know a lot of us have troublemakers and and some of them we can use to our advantage and some of them we can't um but it's a part of our story and it's something that's really important especially in like the hacker Community where a lot of us think differently and like we're here for a reason and you'll see kind of how I fell into this as well um it's kind of cool and this is meant you know for for kids uh but also you might find something interesting in there so anyway that's kind of what it's based on um yeah my name is Joe gr and it's it's really hard to actually be up here right so it's

actually harder to talk to people that you know than it is to like a bunch of strangers in a big room um and this is very very cool because like we're in Portland and so many people here come every year and like we have such great communities of things going on so this is actually trickier for me especially also because it's not technical right it's like this is this is hard stuff um but hopefully you'll get something out of it oh also yeah so we have everybody here but we are live streaming like the the introduction said to the internet um for people who are are either watching live or watching later so I wonder if we

can all just yell High internet and um welcome everybody outside of this room okay ready one two three High internet nice okay good job passed the first test so um this is me I love computers I grew up using computers fascinated by computers um and it's something that you know at the time wasn't cool to do right I think most of you can kind of relate to that of like using computers wasn't something really interesting until maybe like the past what five or 10 years or people like oh use computers you must be smart but back in the day it wasn't that way um a friend of mine had said like you know being involved in computers is a great

way to get stuffed into a locker and uh that was kind of what it was like when we were walking into bsides today a group of us um somebody working on campus said you all must be here for bides and it's like how did you know so there must be something about us that that stands out in a good way um yeah this is something that the computer I don't I don't exactly know why I think it was either like having this power to do something with a computer or nowadays you know with technology in some way um that other people didn't have and I thought that was really powerful you know being made fun of in school and and

being teased by my family and tormented by teachers and everything it's like yeah but I could still you know steal your credit card information and go spend your money or hack into whatever ever and like it was this power of like trading passwords to systems and doing all these things that normal people didn't do and and and that's probably why I I really liked it and this is one of the quotes these Graphics some of them are from the book and it's like it's me against the world and that was something that um I kind of dealt with for a long time of like kind of having to prove myself um so yeah this is the actual

picture I think I was 10 years old at the time in in my computer room so it could have been the power but it also could have just been this sort of um you know being being in like a like the Solitude of being in in the computer room or like being connected to this world of bullettin board systems and people that you might not even know who they are physically but you have this connection to them and as I was working on this presentation even last night I i' messaged key and and I was looking at this slide I'm like I'm literally still doing this exact thing like I'm in my computer room it's

quiet Like Nobody's around and I'm working on my computer um so it's funny how like some things don't change and she's like yes you are doing that but you've come along way from you know from this so yeah it was sort of the you know the power and the Solitude um this is my friend Josh who is also in the book for a completely different story and um we met in kindergarten in the timeout Booth he wasn't a nerd but he kind of watched me do nerd things and uh we realized pretty early on right like when we were getting in trouble for some reason in kindergarten um like we didn't we didn't really fit in right it's like

who gets in trouble in kindergarten I know that like when our kids got in trouble in kindergarten we're like okay there's there's probably something that they're trying to say or maybe they can't get it out or do something um so we kind of tried to figure that out but in our case we just kept getting in trouble and sometimes we would get in trouble for things that we did and sometimes we would get in trouble for things that we didn't do and we just got blamed for it because that was kind of just our our energy or whatever it was right we didn't fit in um he's done a lot of great stuff a lot

a lot different than me but he you know he teaches and he teaches writing at a community college and he uh teaches poetry to inmates and he fights Nazis um and is a you know very defensive of the community and I think that was like really really powerful and for me being somebody who doesn't actively go out and do those things um I you know contribute in different ways and like seeing that is is very like um kind of INSP inspirational for me to see that so it's it's kind of cool how we had these different paths but we connected because of this whatever was in our heads and whatever the troublemakers were that we

had brought us together right just like we are here together because of what we love um at the same time as discovered in technology I discovered punk rock and hardcore and I was like 8 years old right so this stuff was so normal to me of like my brother I have an older brother he's six years older he had a friend that had a circle jerks tattoo so the you know was like the skanking guy um from their I don't know one of their one of their albums but he had a huge tattoo on his arm and this was like 19 85 and it's like who had tattoos back then so I was just fascinated with that

I just loved everything about it like the music spoke to me in a way that nothing else did besides technology which is kind of weird right because you have this this chaos of punk rock and hardcore and fighting against the system and all this stuff but then at the same time I loved being alone in my room so it was this I guess with everything there's this balance um so yeah I would you know got involved in in in skateboarding in going to shows and I was in a band and all of these things that nobody likes liked like if you were a skateboarder people didn't like you if you were into punk rock or metal or like if even nowadays

right you have long hair like people look at you they're like oh he must be a little bit you know they must be doing something a little bit different if they can have long hair uh you know whatever it is and and it really does change people's behavior based on what you look like right and it's very strange to notice that um so yeah you know got involved in this uh and still am involved right like I still listen to to new new bands and the old stuff still really hits me but it's realizing like I didn't realize at the time that this is different but to me it was all normal right just like the hacking was normal

and uh the music was normal but I didn't realize until probably like five or 10 years ago of like oh these are like small communities but that's what's important and I felt really comfortable in those communities of just showing up and like doesn't matter what you wear doesn't matter what you do you go nuts at the show and you know you as long as you feel it and believe it and help out and there's a lot of DIY aspects of pkin Hardcore that flow over to the hacker world and like I don't know it made sense to me um at that same time too growing up I build a lot of electronics because I'm a hacker and I

love building Electronics most of the stuff I built were things to screw with other people or to you know abuse the telephone system or whatever it was um I built a well this is like a universal garage door opener so basically replacing the um the dip switches with like a 555 counter or 555 and a um a decade counter or whatever binary counter to cycle through all the possibilities um and I wasn't stealing stuff from the garages at that point um but it was it still was a cool kind of hack um what else like different types of uh like blue boxes you know red boxes to screw with the phone system this was like a laser listener this was pre NSA

playset um but basically trying to mimic you know what can the government do of spying on somebody through a window so using a laser to modulate um had like you know uh what else this was like a device that you could plug into the phone line and still use the phone as normal but if somebody tried to call in like the teacher or the Secret Service or the phone operator or whatever it would be a busy signal so my parents would never Reed the phone calls that I was you know terrified of them having um and then this was something that I used in school so this was just like a high frequency generator and you

know with high frequency sound you can't really tell where they're coming from because they're bouncing all over the place um so I would you know turn this thing on in school this was in like a sucret tin so like a cough drop tin and I'd leave it on the table and then you know everybody would be like what's that sound where's that coming from and it was like it was great I don't think I ever got in trouble for that one um what you don't see here is like the stun gun that I built so I could like shock my friends and and other people um yeah just a lot of a lot of sort of like what

I would call technological juvenile delinquency um coupled with being an actual juvenile delinquent and those were things also that I didn't realize until later like I was talking with Josh recently and he had said that we were juvenal delinquents I was like what are you talking about like we weren't that bad he's like really like yes we were juvenal delinquents and there usually comes a reason for that right like if you're doing things again there's usually a reason behind it um there's a long story between that picture and this picture um but we can basically say you know being involved in the hacking community at that time was less about helping the community and more

about exploiting everything else against Society right it was sort of like doing what I could against big business and blah blah blah and this I basically got arrested for breaking into a telephone company building to get documentation and materials and things and I was in Michigan with a hacker group at the time um and it's like well why why were you in Michigan as a 15 16-year-old when you're from Boston and I don't know why my parents let me go um but basically a bunch of us who are online doing stuff we had a group called Renegade Legion you can go to textfiles.com and check out all of our awesome uh text files from back in the

day um but yeah we thought it'd be like a good idea to break into to this place and this was after like a couple days of other stuff that we didn't get caught for um but this was sort of that that turning point of like oh okay that's a problem um but this is sort of where it's like all right well why do you why do why is Joe even telling us like this bio kind of thing and the point here is like everything that has happened in your life has brought you to where you are and some of that's good some of that's not good um I just read a quote recently that was like if you wish you could have

done stuff differently congratulations you're growing right so it's like there are things I look at and it's like oh it would have been nice if I did that differently or like if I wasn't such an and like did other you know constructive things but then at the same time it's like yeah well then I wouldn't have met my wife I wouldn't have had this family I wouldn't be in Portland like there's all these things that if you change one thing it could really affect other things so sort of acknowledging like yeah I had kind of a tormented childhood and in my family I think one of the reasons not getting to like psycho therapy whatever but like

looking back at this it's like I had um you know very little emotion in the family nobody was paying attention to me so this was like yeah I was reaching out and trying to screw with people to get attention and now it's obvious to look back at that um my parents kind of disagreed they're like well you had a great childhood like a you know nice house place to go your computer room um but not the emotion and not everybody needs emotion it turns out I did so I was acting out in ways and the same thing like finding those communities the hardcore scene at the time and then the Loft which I'll talk about next those

were my communities right like those were where not only I had a tension that I was was seen but I could see other people and we could work together and like that's kind of what this all is so history matters and thinking about your history matters and acknowledging your history matters uh my dad also by the way uh was a doctor and he had just admitted recently of like um yeah we raised you know we raised our kids as um as fellows what are they like research fellows at a hospital so it was a very like mentorship relationship and like that works maybe for research fellows but not quite for kids so anyway it's like kind

of realizing all this stuff later and I don't blame them for it obviously like I take responsibility but I understand like they had their things they had their troublemakers and it all comes together right so like we are we are the way we are for some reason and that's okay because we're all different and we all have different things to bring regardless of um you know kind of those those things that have happened as long as we can try to take those goes and turn him into some positive thing the real turning point after getting in trouble was joining The Loft and again this was where Community really came into play of me realizing oh like this

is cool I can be a hacker uh and I can do what I love but I can share information and share my passion and work with people that believe the same things um so I'm not going to go into all the details of like the history of this stuff because you can find it online um but these guys were basically six years older than me and I was just a kid joining in this group of people that had a hacker space in Boston Boston area hackers and um I still to this day don't know why they let in a 15-year-old kid um but they did and they had all they said is like well you stopped doing dumb

stuff so we let you in but like I know I wouldn't hang out with 15year olds when I was like 20 something um but anyway this became a group where you know we would find security vulnerabilities and and force vendors to fix problems and all these things and go to conferences and share things so that was pretty cool um but still on the inside it was like I still was kind of struggling with building this reputation and like publishing papers and giving talks and all of these things I didn't know why it was like um I started running also after I got arrested U because I had to either do a sport or get a job like to stay busy and

I was like I'm not going to work uh so I started running which was a really good outlet for things but I had this desire of like I needed to do well like I needed to win or try to win and like be recognized right so it was still this thing like this baggage um still with me even when people are like legendary hacker group you guys testified in front of Congress and did this and that it's like yeah that's great but is that feeding me like not really um as far as like moving forward from there and I think this is this combination of of of troublemakers and superpowers and and what the superpowers

I have or I guess you could say what the troublemakers have left me as um or toward turned me towards as like um you know kind of independent uh kind of taking no sort of thing um also very stubborn and not flexible in what I'm doing and sometimes that can be great like if you're starting a working on a project or um doing you know uh trying to like license a product to a big company where you're negotiating against lawyers like it's always fun to do that but at the same time like those are not traits that are always good um especially if you want to work with other people so it's kind of acknowledging like okay those

are great superpowers but like everything is a balance um around the same so after I graduated college kind of around the same time as the Loft I became a professional engineer because you couldn't be a professional hacker hacking was like a fun thing to do and like got some press whatever but it wasn't it wasn't a career path um so became an engineer worked on a lot of products and that was really cool to see kind of be build something that comes from your mind that help people and I'd spent a lot of time working on a portable infusion pump that was the first portable infusion pump you know in hospitals and you have the the

the IV bag and everything um before this thing had come out you were stuck at the bedside and then this portable thing gave people some freedom to move around and once we passed like the human testing phase of the product it was really amazing to see because it's like wait I just built something that like will let somebody leave their hospital bed or at least go out into the into the hallways of the hospital like that's a really powerful thing um so I I really loved engineering but at the same time it's like straddling that fence of of being a hacker and the Loft and eventually all of us at The Loft were like we want to be hackers full-time and

everyone's like you are crazy uh but we joined forces with some Venture capitalists which was a horrible idea by the way if there's any VCS in the room sorry um uh it changed the whole mentality right if you're a hacker it's very hard to take money from somebody and then continue being a hacker when the person who gave you money wants to make money those two things can't usually go together and I realized that very quickly I was still like 20 something years old and um realized like okay the fun has has left like if if you're being forced to do something it's not it's not the way like The Loft wasn't how it was

anymore we were supposed to be this research group within the company didn't work um so I ended up quitting and I think that's part of like my mindset of like if it's not fun I'm not going to do it and sometimes that's a great thing if you have the capacity to do that at the time I was just young enough and dumb enough of like I don't like you guys anymore I'm going to stop working with you didn't have any responsibilities um but even to this day like there's still some self- sabotage in here of like no I just don't want to work I don't want to do that I don't want to work with you I

don't want to work on this like I'll just say no because I feel like it um there's one project that that actually recently um the jtagulator which is a tool that I built like a hardware hacking tool open source and um sold for 10 years and just one day I'm like H I don't want to sell it anymore like I don't want to support it and anybody in a business world would be like you're crazy like it's helping people and you're selling it and I was just like no I don't want to do it so now it's not being manufactured anymore and it's still open source and hopefully Peter Eden will will take it and roll it into

glasow or something like that but um sometimes I'm not making the best decisions but it feels right and it feels good to do those things and so I don't really care the end result it's bad business sure like I had a friend who once say a very well-known Tech person um that had started a website sort of like Reddit but before Reddit and like totally crashed and and burned at the end um he turned into a venture capitalist and he was like Joe like all you do is sit around and like hack on things or teach classes like you should be building companies and I'm like I don't want to build a company like that

doesn't feel right to me like no I don't want to do it um so yeah maybe there's missed opportunities but again it's following your heart based on kind of your own history um the intro bio had mentioned prototype this that was a really cool opportunity to share engineering with people it was kind of taking that love of of sharing and Technology Building crazy projects there was four of us and this was another thing kind of like the loft of realizing everybody has these different skills and you can work together to to do really cool stuff and respecting other people's skills at the same time as as respecting your own skills and not stepping on each other

and like we all had very distinct personalities and distinct skill sets um but it was really really fun to to kind of do that what was not fun is having the producer say okay we're going to start filming at 6:00 a.m. to get the shot with the nice sun and I'm like no like you can't tell me what to do he's like but you're on the show like you need to be on the camera so again it was this sort of like I don't want you to tell me what to do um it turned out okay and then recently sort of going more into like kind of unfortunately I've been uh kind of grouped into like

cryptocurrency wallet hacking because um basically like during coid lockdown the short version like somebody contacted me was locked out of their their treasure Hardware wallet and was like can you hack it and put together like my little process based on existing work and we made a video about it um that went viral and now there's like millions of crazy crypto people that are that are wanting to like come over to my house um and hack their and hack their devices so that was sort of an unintended consequence but it's still comes back to sort of the love of of hacking um and what I didn't realize at the time and what I realize now of doing it more of

like having a power to help somebody and even though it's cryptocurrency and a lot of people crap on cryptocurrency and um the meanings behind it and the risks and all of this stuff like to still be able to help somebody recover money that maybe was like their last thousand that they had put into their their bank account to try to try to grow right or like whatever it is they they they uh get locked out of something there a lot of people are getting scammed which I can't help with but you know to help somebody in some way is cool regardless of what it is whether it's medical or crypto currency or whatever right and

like we all have those skills to be able to help people um okay so this is where I'm going to try something new we're going to have a little fireside chat how we doing on time we're doing pretty good okay so um I have no idea if this is going to work so this is a huge room by the way it's amazing um does anybody have any thoughts or like does anything stand out to them like of your own troublemakers or superpowers or something you want to share related to this or even a question about something so it's sort of like discussion but not at the end of the talk kind of like in in the middle like

is there anything that resonates with you which is kind of a big ask right like I don't know if anybody's going to stand up and say something in public in this in this environment but that's fine and oh I see some hands this is amazing um no maybe I should uh here I'm gonna walk down there and give it to you I'm just curious right I mean I don't want to hog the stage just telling a story about me because that's not the community oh there's another mic okay thanks Joe will Joe will be the mic distributor I I would start by asking in the room how many people here associate personally with everything you said and

see themselves in you o that's a good question right a few cool a a little bit yeah I mean I guess how many people even if you don't have to share it like how many of you have some sort of thing that you're aware of of like a some something in the past that has shaped you pretty much everybody right and like that's cool awesome I feel like Dr Phil or something um I didn't anticipate this okay let's see okay so less about me I am raising a troublemaker who is in preschool and trying to figure out um if you have any advice or anybody else has any advice on how to help um him reconcile the

difference between teachers and school's expectations of him um and my expectations which are you interact with the world physically and you need to interact with the world physically and that is how you learn and he is wicked smart but as a four-year-old we're already starting to get in trouble yes for pushing those boundaries so I can tell you my suggestion and people might have their own also but it's what we found our kids also were sort of the same way like really really smart and a lot of times if there's an imbalance of like you're really talented one thing there might be something else you're struggling in and that sort of acting out might be related

to that it might also be they just want to learn learn more or do something but when we found like one one of our kids when they were when they were younger actually in preschool one of them ended up getting in like an actual debate with the preschool teacher and he was like four years old and the preschool teacher called us in and he was like we need to have a meeting so we had this face to- face meeting and we're like well first of all why did you let a four-year-old get under your skin and and what was the end result do you remember like I don't remember what the battle was but he was feeling

something yeah yeah it was a long time ago but it was something right there was something there and then when they were in like early grade school every Wednesday they would get kicked out of the classroom and we're like what the hell is going on like this is like he's such a nice kid why is he getting kicked out what's going on and then we realized that on Wednesdays around that time is when the fire drill was happening and we go oh so he's getting kicked out of class because it's not as loud outside the classroom than it is inside the classroom and that was like mindblowing right it's sort of like babies cry because they have something to say kids

act in different ways because they have something to say and can't say it teenagers act dumb because they're teenagers but also because they maybe have something to say um adults the same thing like we can maybe emote better or express ourselves better but not always right so there's all these things so it might just be like talking talking to your child saying like how are you feeling right like where are you feeling something and then talking to the teachers too and trying to figure out if it might be some completely unrelated thing that's causing that reaction does anybody want to add add to oh yeah we have so many hands get a team yeah so key says get a

team like get people that support you and that you know that can that can stand up for your kid because once we found people outside the school that were like your son has OCD and anxiety and a sense sensitive to sounds and it's like oh good now we can go to the school and say this is the problem that we need to handle or this is the Troublemaker that we need to handle and now they're like completely flourishing and that's has turned into the superpower which is why the book was originally created anyway to inspire kids like ours to relate to somebody uh so I'm listening to your story and I think it's so fascinating

because I was a punk rocker hacker in Boston in the right I kind of wonder if we knew I'm looking up I'm like oh I saw those bands or whatever but there's a few different things is like when you talk about your story and you're like my computer room and I'm like you had a computer room wait ready you had a computer yes so I mean a lot of this too is when you even talk about the mentorship of like you know a 15-year-old being you know pulled into this hacker group and you like that was weird well how about a 15-year-old girl yes suddenly that has a very very different yeah why that Happ different

opportunities present themselves maybe uh also risk yes yes I mean that's kind of what we're talking about here so some of it is is girl troublemakers especially during that time we treated very very differently than than the boys and you even look too is the community being in the punk rock community that also had a lot of risk and non-acceptance so I think some of that is and you can look at other groups too that you know I hate using the word but there's a certain amount of gatekeeping that kind of happened during that time that makes it like who didn't get to be in there and even in this room right now we kind of still see it so at some point

I want to like sit down and talk about what shows we're at yeah yeah the the name of your band by the way well so it was called abolition um it's actually on band camp it's um yeah it was fun um but no you're right like you know especially I think we see this just with inclusiveness and diversity and acceptance and it's like I have the the the privilege and the opportunity to stand up here and tell my story but some people will never get that opportunity based on on their experiences or other people's feelings of them um I will say like at The Loft we were kind of gatekeeping our community because we were not an open

Hacker space we were a closed group but then we would still hang out with people so it was kind of this this community of ourselves and then hanging out with other hackers um with the with the the women girl hackers at the time um you know we had L Ada Lady Ada who Lor freed who runs adaf fruit uh window Snider who's been all over lots of different companies making huge changes in security so we tried to keep to accept everybody but you're right like it doesn't happen all of the time um and and those days yeah even having a computer and I think being younger like there is sort of this aspect of that

power and control thing but having the mentorship and learning to not be that way I thought was really really important um any any other fireside chat comments I think for me probably one of the most interesting things is talking back to your child um I think we teach kids not to explore when we get them into school even in houses we teach them don't do that do this this is the right way to do it and I'm wondering what do you think we can do to change that mentality yeah yeah that's um it's a hard one especially because so many schools now are just teaching for the testing right it's like kids in kindergarten are already they already

have homework they don't get a lot of time to to be themselves um and it's a very systemic problem because everybody's just testing testing testing and kids don't get to be kids and I think especially with technology too not even having get into the whole mental health issue of like watching other people on YouTube and and successful you know YouTube famous people and and comments and all these other things um so it's almost like you have to supplement that with outside of school because they're in school for a certain amount of time and that does make a huge difference but like what we have at home now is is our our younger kid um got super into making slime you

know different types of slime like fidget sort of slime and I think the tactile they really like um the chemistry they really like so we set them up with a table and bought a bunch of like stuff in bulk glue and um the the borak whatever Bor boric acid and just let them do their thing and explore and and and play and it's very hard a lot of times if you're like don't do that you know because it like makes a mess but it's like all right that is the defined space to do that and it's fine um so I guess it's just sort of trying to Foster that outside of the school environment and come to hacker spaces or

come to a to an event and explore like take stuff apart right like find stuff on the street and take it apart and look at it so I think it's just getting getting kids to realize it's okay to um explore and experiment and places like this like we're mostly older I see a bunch of bunch of kids in the back and kind of volunteers but it's like you want to start that early and and normalize it as far as like yeah this this is um this is something we should be doing of exploring and questioning at the same time questioning things uh but yeah getting your hands dirty I guess I don't know if that answers the question

but good any other Hey Joe um oh uh so I just want to say thank you for speaking but uh some of the things that I would be curious about um is how do you differentiate between constructive criticism and hating and what's your what's your method of kind of slicing and dicing that that's a great question I basically don't read any comments and I don't take any criticism so yeah um it's very very hard um um I found that like I I really don't read comments but if it's something where like somebody says face to face like oh that was cool but you should have had of this or I have a comment about this like that's a personal

connection um but I I think personally it's still really hard to take and like comments the reason I don't read them is like it actually hurts right it's like what that that person shouldn't say that like I'm going to go find them and beat them down but it's like that doesn't solve anything first of all but it like triggers something of like they don't deserve to say that like that's a mean thing or whatever so um and there are positive comments too that I don't see because I don't see the the the other ones and Neil Pier the drummer of Rush who was a very private person but very talented you know onstage drummer um had

said you know if you read if you trust the the the positive reviews then you have to trust the negative reviews also um so I think a lot of it is like just ignoring the noise and just follow doing what I want to do um but then if somebody has has an actual valid constructive criticism like in person is different than than online but I try to just avoid anything and focus on like just things that I would like to do which is a little bit selfish but at the same time it's like again it feels feels better because if somebody says something negative like I will actually get stuck on it I'll be like they're

right like the one person out of you know thousands or millions of people right it's like that person's right and then I go for that and it's like very hard to get out of that state and I feel way better of just like ignoring all of it and it's so great like when I have to log into YouTube to like change something and it sees all these comments and thumbs up and thumbs down and everything like I my heart starts going I get all sweaty and it's horrible so um I found like the peace is in not looking and then learning and and growing from what other people say but in a in a human way not a not an internet

way this fire oh oh the oh my god did we go through the entire video you saw him eat the marshmallow and everything wow okay um so talking about Community a little bit I want to mention a lot of great stuff that's happening in Portland that you may or may not know about but this comes all the way back to like fitting in and and being together and um kind of building these communities and being inclusive of everybody's different or troubles or whatever it is um when I first moved to Portland which was like 10 years ago now um Jared Boon I don't know if he's in here um had brought me to see the Church of Robotron and I know

there's a bunch of Church of Robotron people in here woohoo this is like a really really cool project I don't have my I can't see my notes on here um but this is like an art project that got people together and a lot of dorkbot community were were building this and and this was downtown at like an exhibition and and they go to different places still do you still go around been a minute but we're trying been a minute but trying yeah so I think that if you go to control h you can actually see the the little trailer with the stuff in it just a really cool Community project and I was just blown

away coming from San Francisco where everything was very like Tech get famous focused and it was really annoying like you'd go to events and it's like who do you know like how can I get money for my new idea we coming to Portland it was like this is freaking awesome like these guys are hacking on an emulator and building things together um but go to the website and read the description um I think Carl wrote it but it was just really powerful to see like art and hacking as community and that really stuck with me futel another one a lot of the same guys right woohoo so providing the community with access to people and to

connection I haven't heard of this anywhere else in the world and this is another thing like when I moved here I was like this is freaking this is like so cool um to do this and it's helping people in different communities regardless of their situation right there's a lot of fear of like well people are going to use these phones to sell drugs blah blah blah and it's like yeah but there's also a huge amount of people that need access to a phone so there's this positive aspect again this community in Portland is so special um dorkbot so woohoo um another group right A lot of the same people have doing those projects but it's

something Jared also brought me to dorkbot when we first moved here it was on it was that bunk bar right on Water Street or something and so easier for me to get to from cellwood and uh but it was like this great feeling of belonging very similar to feeling connected at a show or feeling connected to skateboarding and whatever it is like that Community like hanging out and and learning from each other and eating and sharing and like everybody has such cool stories so dork bot's one of those places that that kind of bring people together control h of course which I think really is the glue that brings us all together throughout the year not

only hosting events but having a place for everybody to go and I will say like I know personally I should I I feel like I should be doing more like going there more and like there's so many things to to do but also I don't know if I mentioned like I'm kind of a Hermit at the same time of like the computer room right like I like being at home um and it might surprise you but I'm not that social like besides being at at events where I love being like socializing is hard right like being here for a lot of us is probably like I love it I love seeing everybody I love being with everybody but then it's like

I'm going to go down to that quiet room and chill um so there are so many great opportunities if you don't know about them and um yeah ve just very very cool and then I would be remiss to not mention besides right we're all here yay besides and thank you everybody for putting it on and you know the description um for the introdu for the introduction talk was like you know building an inclusive space for people and it's just we're just really really lucky for what we have in Portland I wouldn't even say luck because it's the people that are building this right it's all of you that are contributing to these different projects and volunteering it's what

makes it what it is um and I personally am so grateful for it even though I don't take advantage of it all the time it's just know knowing that there are these groups that surround you and that you have the opportunity to go to um is just so it just feels so good so yeah thank you to to all of these groups and then we have impostor syndrome or at least I do uh and a lot of other people do too so I just wanted to mention it as far as again community and acceptance this was a a a a tweet or sorry an X or a post or whatever it's called um from last year and um you know this was

somebody saying I think they're based in in Houston of like I'm second guessing myself as to whether I belong in infos SEC and I you know I know the answer is yes um like yes everybody belongs and again talking about sort of gatekeeping of things from back in the day like I think we still see that now it's hard for me to see it because I don't really get out of the house much but if you are a woman or underserved or whatever else it is like there are still challenges like if you don't have a college degree it's still a challenge to get into certain tech places right you still have these old school mentalities in some of

these companies um and there will be challenges for people but yes everybody belongs so like there shouldn't even be a discussion it's like should I be an infosec or should I be a hacker or whatever you feel like being yes that is the thing is you belong no matter what doesn't matter what people say it doesn't matter what people think I'm going to leave you with this little thought exercise I've always been fascinated with life growing from unlikely sources and I should probably talk to a therapist about it um but it it's really fascinating to me like this is something I think I picked this in like 2002 or something like a little flower growing

out of a bunch of little lava Pebbles this huge lava field in Hawaii it's like this one little flower growing out of that and then we have some little cute moss growing on my backyard deck right I mean if you live in the Pacific Northwest like you see this like this is so cool like that Moss is like I don't care where I am like I'm growing I'm doing my thing and uh just the other day my one of my kids came out and said Daddy there's moss growing on the on the wood and it's like yeah that's what we get to see like life growing out of things things happening and and and growing from unlikely

places and then this is one of my favorites um there was a quote and I don't have my notes so I can't pronounce the name properly but he was a a Vietnamese monk um is it thick thick not con yes um he had a quote and has given some talks about no mud no Lotus and like he had mentioned that I'd heard that on on something I didn't mention like I've I I got into meditation with like the insight timer app during Co and that is like completely changed that's when I started really reflecting on my past and stuff huge GameChanger um even when you're trying to solve like technical problems right of like getting like meditating

and and not like you know getting Enlightenment but just settling your brain and doing stuff like was huge so I'd heard about this no mud no Lotus and that stuck with me so much of like you you know you have this beauty coming from from mud or like a struggle or something and really it's like you can't have beauty without having struggles and there's a connection um and I just love that like this is one of my favorite things to look at of like if this lotus flower can grow out of like the dredges of this thing and make life right and make color and do things all of us can also um so I guess that's it uh I do

want to mention that uh bides has generously and graciously um offered to donate money to Charities of my choice uh for giving the talk which is awesome like it feels really good to be able to do that so the two Charities is going to is a doll like me which which makes look you know dolls that look like a person who might have some for of sort of physical deformity so kids you know they grab a doll and a lot of times the doll like Barbie doesn't look like them um so this is a place that they can relate to seeing any sort of physical deformities and like I think that's pretty cool and like now they see it and it's like okay

I might my doll looks different than other dolls but like that's still that's still me I'm like that's really awesome um and I don't know how to say this if it's peir or PE um but this is like a local Portland uh group that helps atrisk Youth and and houseless youth and has a resource center and they get to go out on adventures Outdoors which really helped me you know running and and getting out into nature uh offering lots of resources and I just thought you know given my history as a kid like to to be able to help other kids like that um is really cool so yes with that hopefully you're not too bummed out um but you

know this is kind of a thought exercise in in in not Tech but Community right and thinking about our our our histories um and how we can become that Lotus regardless of the mud um but yeah so thanks for listening and contributing and sharing and uh enjoy the show [Music]