Story: Coding Through Chaos : Addiction, Recovery and Acceptance
48:06 Share

Hey, this is Co-Recursive and I'm Adam Gordon-Bell. Have you ever felt like you didn't fit in? Like everyone else got the manual for how to be a person and you're still searching for the table of contents? I have at times, for sure. I remember my first job out of school, I had to work on this giant, messy internal inventory and ordering system. There was complicated reports and endless data entry forms and it was overwhelming in some ways.

But the real challenge was the people, the customer service reps and the data entry folks and figuring out what they needed and what they were struggling with. Trying to say the right things or look like I knew what I was talking about. Trying to decide where to sit in the lunchroom. It's like high school all over again. I could handle the technical stuff, no problem. But the unwritten rules, the small talk, the chatting, that was the hard part. This episode is about that.

How do you fit in? And what do you do if you don't? Today's about the hidden costs of being different. And our guest is someone who's lived this journey. I went and found a building that, you know, was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and I watched them just like close and lock the door and just like lay down on the floor. We just literally curled up in the ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now they go back out and fix the war prayers. Like generally do enjoy people. I don't like scared of them, but I enjoy them.

That's John Walker, and I've seen him solve problems no one else can. He once founded Kubernetes Vulnerability, so serious it was front page tech news. John and I worked together 10 years ago, and back then he was a principal engineer and security researcher at Tenable. But here's the thing, John's curiosity and his drive, they came at a price because he can solve hard problems, but he struggles with feeling alone and isolated.

If you've ever felt like your differences were a weakness instead of a strength, I think this episode is for you. I'll warn you, it starts with a lot of drug use and internet culture, but it ends in a place, well, I actually don't want to spoil it, but it's super good. John grew up on computers. He and his friends built their own rigs and spent hours on bulletin boards and then AOL chat rooms and eventually IRC.

where the hacking and mischief started. You know, he got an admin account on his school's novella system and installed key loggers and got into all kinds of teenage computer-y trouble. But he grew up in a strict conservative family. And at 17, he was off to Christian college. And then, almost out of nowhere, he decided to reinvent himself.

as a drug dealer. 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 reattempt to reinvent myself. And it became like, it felt like an anthropological exercise experiment, like as much as anything else is like, you know, starting to talk to new people and go to new places and all of it's very exciting. And like, you know, I just felt like this whole new exciting world

computers and the internet played a big part in why John changed directions. And the thing I sort of hit on was very interested in science

drugs from like a academic perspective. I'd read like Arrowwood and Lyceum, these old websites that have all these reports of like, I used ketamine and like nitrous and this thing and here like a T minus 15 minutes, like here's the effect it was having on me and stuff. And at that point in my life, like I'd always smoke pot, but all this stuff was just 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,

or very kind of hyperbolic and exaggerated at times and stuff like this. John was sharp. He was smart enough to start college at 17, but then he got kicked out. But I'm struggling a lot with mental health and kind of had an emptiness in my life because I was no longer in school for the first time in my life. And I decided that buying and selling drugs was going to be my thing. I think normally when this is your thing, you come into it naturally, right? But my kind of like...

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. And after that, I was just like, you know, my social functioning was fucked. Like, my ability to trust people, interact with people was fucked. Like, got really, really isolated and more into, you know, like, alcohol, pills than I could get and benzos.

And, you know, around 19 or so, I was just kind of like, oh, what the, you know, like, I think honestly, it was pretty much, you know, wanted to die, but was not, I think, in a lot of fear of hell and not willing to just like outright kill myself. And I was just like, well, then, you know, I'm just going to live very recklessly and we'll see what happens, basically. 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. So I got kicked out of my parents' home, you know, left initially at 17, came back for a bit, got kicked out when I turned 19. And I ended up living in a town outside the Philadelphia area.

trying to go to school there, college there. I was kind of walking down the street, it was called Gay Street, it was in Westchester, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yeah, I was kind of walking down the street and I found a large Ziploc bag with many kind of smaller Ziploc bags in it. I'd never had any experience with crack before, but like, you know, I'd use powder cocaine, like other things, and like, oh, that's probably what crack is, right?

The anthropologically interested drug dealer John might not have been excited about crack. There wasn't a lot of interesting stories about mind expansion written on the internet about crack cocaine. But John was in a different place then. He was sort of on a suicide mission. It was kind of like the train was already off the rails and kind of, you know, rolling down the mountain, especially living in the place and stuff and with a lot of people leaving and

Going to college, other things that are kind of really, really isolated in the real world, like the physical world. So I think on FDET, there was a channel called Geek Issues, which I was a big fan of. They had like bash.org has basically collected things from this channel, like quotes from this channel. And like I had just gotten a little like digital camera

I used to take pictures of myself for dating purpose. I was trying to set myself up on a dating site, which did not go well. So I had like a large bong with like a, there's a piece of the bong called a slide, like a little glass, glass flared out piece of glass and apply flame to it and then pull air through, you know, from the top and it pulls the smoke through in a way that I'm not describing well. So yeah, John snapped the photos of the baggies he found and his glassware, etc.,

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? I think the general response that people thought I was trolling or like just kind of like messing with me, I think probably from a good hearted place of just not wanting to help someone with this, you know, and also just kind of like, you know, probably kind of attention seeking behavior or something or read as that way.

But I found someone was willing to help me a bit. He was like, take a cigarette, smoke a little bit of ash at the top of the bowl, and then you put a little bit on it. It gave me a sense of how much. And here's how you apply the lighter. And then you smoke from the back end of the bong, essentially. If you're familiar with crack at all, it's weird.

roughly becomes like a stem. And so like I try to, you know, try to do it a little bit and took another picture and like, this is what it's looking like now. And, you know, kind of got to the point where I was working pretty well working with someone on FDAT there. So what did you do? Did you just smoke a dealer's worth of crack cocaine in an afternoon, like on IRC? Pretty much. I think like each one of these bags, I felt after the fact was like a 50 to $100 bag. And I had a good, you know, 10 to 15 of them.

It started out in like the afternoon, but if like, I don't know if you're familiar with like stimulants at all, it basically just sat down and smoked until there wasn't anymore. That's insane. Yeah. The IRC people were cheering you on. I mean, once you're a crack, like Irish, 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, you know, the pseudo stem and like the, and you take a lungful of this stuff and it literally feels like,

the best pleasure you've ever had in your head instantly and it goes away, you know, minutes after you exhale. And so there's just like that rat in the cage, push the lever kind of reaction of like, that feels like nothing I've ever felt in my life. So, you know, why don't I do that pretty much? And so like I spoke, for however long it takes to smoke that much crack, which is a long time, but you're not very aware of the time. And so just

Spoke until it was gone. Time wasn't an issue. Nothing was an issue. It was just kind of like focused on, you know, hitting, hitting, hitting, hitting, and then laid on the couch for probably the next morning at that point for at least a few hours just trying to stay perfectly still.

wondering if my heart was going to explode, which felt like a very real possibility in the moment. And I laid down on the couch. I was convinced I was dying. My heart was exploding out of my chest. And I was like, oh my God, this is where I die probably. And I remember laying perfectly still on the couch. If I moved even a little bit, my heart rate would go even higher. And I was like, oh fuck, that's not good.

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. I'm going to look at that internal mental compass and decide, oh, you know, like, I think I'd like to start being more sociable, right? And getting more community support for this issue. So I'm going to start going to, you know, an AA meeting a few times a week. And I know it's going to be uncomfortable. I'm going to start doing that. And when I do like little things like that, right? Like they don't, didn't by themselves make me magically happy. I do want to die.

If I had to choose, do I want to die or live today, I'd probably choose die.

But I did get a little shot of like, oh, this feels different and better. You know, like that kind of like, oh, something about this is really, you know, 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 trying to pretend they're not there.

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. Yeah.

I probably shouldn't say which recovery program because they're big on like anonymity and stuff. But 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, be more open, you know, and it was also, it was like more like the meeting was like very much me out of my element, right? It's not like I was spending a bunch of time, you know, I was very isolated before that. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't really involved in the world. You know, it was kind of like the place I would have socialized would have been online anyway. So,

I got very involved in the community as a user of it. And then in these 12-step groups, like volunteering and service is a big part of. Part of the recovery piece is kind of like to do the actions that you know are going to fix your brain eventually kind of thing.

And so John volunteered to help with the website and with the online chat. And I think what it quickly led to is these communities were hosted on, I think like Fnet or something, which is not a friendly place for recovery. So there'd just be like in all the Fnet channels, like, you know, where's, you know, whatever, like kill everyone or whatever. There'd be like hashtag name of like of a 12 step recovery group, you know, and you could imagine about how well that would go right with trolls and things like that. And I think, and,

and people just, you know, tried to hack and attack the group and these sorts of things. And I think there it was kind of like, this was like, I was technically responsible for running the website, keeping the channel up, but then I started to like, get really, like, this is my first time in recovery, I'm a mess. But then you go really deep down the world of like, like IRC bots. 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. It was just a fun technical problem, very open-ended, very hard, right? But also 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, just going into that world of the technical side of online recovery technology.

On IRC, I think really like kept me sober. It gave me something to like focus on that was not like I'm really miserable not being high, basically. Being involved with that, I think is the biggest part of why I stayed clean the first time around. After getting sober, John moves to Bakersfield, California.

And he starts college again. Through AA, he lands a job as sort of a IT networking consultant, fixer-upper guy. Say a business's Windows server crashes and suddenly their point-of-sale system won't work. John gets the call and he drives over there and he figures out a way to bring it back online. John had a knack for this stuff.

One client had a point of sale system that kept printing really long stretches of blank space at the end of every receipt, wasting paper and wasting time. And no one could fix it, not even the vendor. But John could. He wrote a custom printer driver that stripped out all those extra line breaks before it sent things off to the printer. So John became the IT guy that people called when their business was on the line. He'd walk in with no idea of what problems he'd find.

or even what tech he'd be dealing with. Sometimes he had to recover lost data. Sometimes he had to reverse engineer weird formats or fix bugs in abandoned software that kept the whole business running. And sometimes he just had to restart a printer or a server or put a new disk drive in.

He could handle these tough technical problems. But dealing with the people in person, that was hard. Walking into an office where everybody was waiting for him to fix things, that was real pressure. I've always been a very anxious person, you know, struggling with the depression, that kind of stuff. And so there were days where just kind of like forcing myself through, right? And just kind of very on edge the whole time and just kind of very uncomfortable sometimes.

And like, it felt like most of my mental energy was going into like just trying not to, you know, like freak out during the day. Like in a very literal, like I want to run out the door, you know, and like, you know, go hide somewhere kind of way. Like, what were you worried about? I don't even know. Like I still get it that mode sometimes. I struggle with a lot of panic. Like I would go to like get panic attacks. It would, I went out to see a client once. It was like a resort out on like the coast of California and

I was about to say their name, but probably the best not to say their name given the other content. I was going to get completely sober through this time.

And it was like a property, like a large property with different buildings in different places. And I was kind of going from one to the other, taking care of things and stuff. I was so overwhelmed. I went and found a building that, you know, it was kind of like there was some server equipment in there and I watched them just like close and lock the door. And it's like not a big one for crying for whatever reason, but just like literally curled up in the ball, you know, for a half hour. And then like, okay, you know, now they go back out and fix the war prayers.

That kind of thing. But I think I was very good at, like, basically pushing out the feelings or whatever else and, like, functioning. Like, white-knuckling it, basically, and functioning. And then, like, go to the bathroom and then be, like, fucking panicking. And then come back out and pretend like nothing's happening. Kind of that kind of thing. Like, if that makes sense.

like i loved the work i had all the parts that involved dealing with people like that was the stressful part and so there's a way like of escaping into like you know white knuckling the parts that were the people parts to get to like the technical parts like in my mind it was all almost like yes tomorrow might be the day and like you know they try to interpret you know things people said or doing like is tomorrow going to be the day they're going to fire me you know it like it was all you know that form of delusion i guess and in some way

You know what's interesting? I remember in the early days we worked together, there was Jared. And I remember Jared coming to me one time and being like, oh my God, John's a genius. You are able to get things done that others can't. In a very significant way, 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 like,

oh so desperate just to have you around, right? Because it's very rare to have somebody that you can throw hard problems at. You're one of those people. Probably you could have done whatever you wanted and still been asshole to people, been disheveled and unclean and rude to everybody and they would have kept you because...

You actually have like an ability that is quite rare, but I don't think you knew that, right? No, I think there's probably an element where I was disheveled and rude without being to be, you know, like, and like the people were tolerating, you know, in a very real, like some of it is just like my own internal critic is very strong. 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 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.

He was a good friend of one of my coworkers at the place I was working at the time, Paul. So Paul, because I did freelance work, Paul connected me to him as somebody who did Adidas work. He has a short version of it.

It was in a Bureau of Land Management, like a federal building up by the airport in Bakersfield, like on the outskirts of Bakersfield, kind of like a single story, like sprawling government looking building. And then you'd walk in through the front door and it's kind of like an office-y environment with, you know,

I forget if there were cubicles at the time, but like imagine that sort of thing. And it would just be like, he'd be there in office, like most of the people wouldn't be there. And we'd spend a few, like, you know, talk about like, oh, what is it you want done? You know, and then, yeah, that would just sit down at like a workstation that would normally be someone else's, I guess, during the week. And like, you know, put in a few hours taking care of something for them.

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. They make efforts sometimes to contact you because it builds goodwill.

but they also typically are allowed to collect interest on the money sitting in this bank account. So they're often not terribly incentivized to seek out the owners of this. And it's just a hard data problem often because sometimes there's even no address associated with it or just complete records. There's a reason it wasn't returned to the person in the first place. Age's company dug through public data sets, tracked down people by hand, and then took a 10% cut for connecting people with their lost money.

It was a classic messy data problem, and the end result was always a letter in the mail. John started out freelancing, just cleaning up their data, but eventually AJ convinced him to join full-time. 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, suddenly on an approach, you know, that we need to get more letters out, you know, that we need to make more money. The thing I loved about it was,

You know, people, not surprisingly, like when you're getting people free money, right? Like people like that, you know. Every so often someone would send a thank you note after getting their money back. These notes meant a lot to John. They reminded him that this wasn't just about the money or the data. He was actually helping people. And that made him feel good.

And now that he was full-time, he could help AJ scale up their operations and get money to more people by pulling data straight from the source. And so I created a bunch of scrippers that would go to, instead of just waiting for the CD in the mail, you know, which is often contained a PDF on it that was horrible to process. One of the first things I did was, oh, we need some servers probably.

And I knew where to get servers that were refurbished and previous generation Dell servers, but they came with a warranty that was not the Dell one. So I sourced a bunch of cheap servers and put them in the server rack and got up a Bobo server setup to do the things we need to do because we'll need to run SQL somewhere. We need to run the web apps that we're going to be using internally and stuff like that. So

So probably the early days were like sourcing on a budget. Like at this point, this business is like a million dollars a year in revenue, if that. And so like do try to do all this, you know, with kind of like a fairly shoestring budget. I would set up a lot of

And scrapers that would go to the website and in one way or another scrape all the property currently on the website and do this constantly. So that basically that meant that we could get to, we could contact people faster than other people who weren't able to do that. But also contact people who like otherwise like the state would not, you know, there was no way to get this data except to like go to the website designed for a human to use and essentially scrape or some variation of that.

John wasn't breaking any laws with his scraping. Still, the municipalities really didn't want people pulling data like this. And so they pushed back. But for John, these typing goal challenges were the easy part. What really got to him was working in an office and having to talk to people day in and day out. To cope, he started taking benzodiazepines. And then he found something that worked even better. Extended release OxyContin.

which he did not have a prescription for. I stopped having panic attacks. I was much more mellow, not like a mellow person, but exactly, but I wasn't on the verge of a panic attack all the time. And I felt much more warm and connected to other people. I wasn't afraid of them. But I would take the same dose every day at the same times. It felt like being cured, really.

my the period of sobriety you know when i was trying to like deal with the the panic attacks just by like you know keep myself very very still and i'm gonna stare like kind of the space above the person's nose and sort of like nod when it seems like i'm supposed to be nodding and then like try to reconstruct after the fact like what the fuck happened in the meeting right or like when i get back a hold of myself like having to like ask questions and stuff to like without

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.

The 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. What was it? Sometimes they didn't implement the CAPTCHA very well, and you could just use JavaScript to just do something, like just say, CAPTCHA solved. We did our own OCR. That was another thing we did with some CAPTCHAs, is use OCR libraries to just, you know, they actually did. Even with the technology at the time, it wasn't that hard to do these things.

Then he found a service that somehow could break CAPTCHAs. You send them an image, and about 30 seconds later, you get an answer. Like one day, like this service was suddenly running very slowly. And so I contacted support, which was like, didn't really like, I don't know if there was any phone support or anything. It was like kind of like, like go to the weird chatbot and speak to someone who clearly doesn't speak English as a first language. And they're like, oh yeah, it's like the 80s, the Lunar New Year is basically what they said. So we have like, and then they got put together. Suddenly in my mind, I was realizing, oh, like there's literally people

They're like, really, like, the reason you get a 30-second response is they're presenting this image to someone in something like a call center and quickly key in, you know, what the CAPTCHA is. I thought they had really good OCR or something. But it turns out, like, it was, you know, it was kind of people all along was kind of the thing, like some sort of warehouse somewhere. John built an entire ecosystem of scrapers and clever workarounds for the various, you know, anti-scraping measures the cities would throw at him.

But he wasn't just pulling data, he also had automated the messy workflows at the various municipalities to claim money for customers. Because often these application processes were anything but user-friendly. And then something would change on a webpage and the scrapers would break. And I got fairly involved as far as having to do things like introduce like Jitter, like fill out the forms using Selenium in the way a human would, or like sort of spinning up like hundreds of little EC2 instances.

The EC2 instances would act like proxies. So what that blocked was all attempts to limit, you know, rate limit or like check by IP or anything like that, or like obvious, 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 different municipalities I was not using the full bag of tricks with. I wouldn't be bothering with the distributed scripts because it wasn't necessary. And they would roll out rate limit protection or something like that. It was like, oh, well, we're just going to move you from pile A to pile B and just go with it. And suddenly, now we're scraping in parallel across 100 things, much faster anyway. It was like, oh, wait, let's see how long it takes them to notice this.

But I think it got to a point where, at least from my, you know, probably overly egotistical perspective at the time, it felt like they were outgunned, basically. It sounds like a scammy kind of thing, but like the fact that like, I think that I was very like, had a level of kind of like moral certainty in what I was doing, that I think it felt very comfortable, like pushing the limits of like, what is possible to do with data collection. 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. Initially, it was like only a portion of the wall. And over time, it grew to like the whole wall and multiple layers. And it was kind of like I was having trouble making my rent or whatever. And then I got contacted and I got, you know, X thousand dollars and stuff like this. I thought it's a very kind of I think my favorite thing to do. Like, you know, I work on the weekends or when other people are just kind of like go, you know, peruse the latest letters kind of.

I think it felt good to see that wall of like, thank you letters grow, right? And like, just be able to compute because I could run aggregations on the data and see like, 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%, you know, or so. So it gives you like a sense of the scale and like a lot of it was kind of nickel and dime, you know, a hundred dollars, a few hundred dollars. But I think for me, like,

I loved that it was so open-ended and just figure out how to do it, figure out how to get the money back to the people, just sell it to AJ as far as why this is a responsible thing to do. And I loved that the better I am at my job,

The dollar value that we've returned to people goes up each month even more. And the number of the thank you letters on the wall get deeper. 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. I was getting into functional programming. It cleared for distributed, sort of distributed scrapers.

systems we were building, like this is fucking, there's no end day, this is no end day better than Java and imperative programming. And so I would hang out on like the various like hashtag Scala, you know, channels in various places. And it felt like, you know, like I'm learning another new skill. And regardless of whether that's shooting heroin, smoking crack or whatever, you know, or like learning a new programming language, you know, the place I'm going to do that is like is IRC. Oh yeah, the heroin.

For years, John used the extended-release OxyContin while the company kept growing. And John grew a team under him, and things were scaling up. But then the Oxy market kind of dried up, and so John turned his analytical mind to finding a new fix for his social anxiety.

I was sourcing my heroin from the L.A. area, which is like a 90-minute drive from Bakersfield, among other places. It was not the best of doing any of this. I'm sure that the people who used heroin for years and years and years, oh, this is a lightweight kind of tourist or something. But I'd drive down by a large quantity.

and then drive back home and then be good for like, you know, a week or something. This was kind of like, you know, after work activities, you know, yeah, it'd take like 180 minutes to kind of drive down, drive down, you know, you know, buy some more heroin for the week, you know, and kind of go back and come back up. What's crazy to me is like all of it, I guess. Like I worked with you not that long after this, right? And I had no idea. And like if people asked me anything,

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. But honestly, like that stuff about like not seeming like a drug user, like,

I think I've used that to my advantage a lot in my life because, like, there's a thing of, like, I pull a car over and there's four people sitting in it and one of them is me. Like, that's not the person the cop's going to focus on, right? That's just, like, the quiet kid who's got caught up in all this, right? And we're probably just, maybe he was catching a ride, you know, or maybe they were just trying this for the first time and, like, you know, or in overhead, right? That's kind of like the...

But on some level, it comes from 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, I might as well use that to my advantage, kind of, basically. Besides the hassle of driving to L.A.,

and honestly a ton of other reasons, heroin came with its own set of problems as a way to handle social anxiety. So like Europe, East Coast of America and West Coast of America used to be different because of where the heroin comes from. So on the West Coast of America, black tar heroin swuggled in from Mexico. So it's like black chunks. They're kind of like, I mean, it's as big as you buy it, I guess, but like kind of like think of like...

You know, like something kind of like a large crack rock, doesn't have the consistency of a crack rock or black, you know. And so when you're shooting, you're like breaking off a little bit of this thing. You throw it in water, you stir it up and draw it up into the syringe. So John would drive to an out-of-the-way spot not too far from his work. It's kind of like an industrial area, you know, like office buildings and industrial, you know, thing. And then kind of, and then real quickly try to hit it.

I think I didn't use like IV. I use IV long enough to have a lot of problems with like veins collapsing and stuff. It's like a pretty reliably hit, you know, in my forearm or the crook of my arm on one side or the other. And then kind of do that kind of quickly cap, cap up and hide the syringe in case I passed out. Cause I'm like a cop comes by like the thing you don't want for them to find you passed out in your front seat with IV.

you know, like a string in your lap because that's a very easy case for them to make. So I would try to like quickly set aside and then like give myself a few minutes. It takes like 10, 15 seconds to really hit. And then, but then they give myself like, okay, five, 10 minutes, like have a cigarette, like see how this is going to hit me. If it's too much, then maybe I'm going to hang out here a little longer or like figure out something about, you know, to deal with the situation and then kind of go back in.

You can see where this is heading and it's not anywhere good. John does cut back on the heroin a bit for a while. So he's not using it every day. But, you know, he has to increase his benzos to counteract. And then he's still taking opioids in one form or another. And then he has to resupply. There's, you know, groups of people who use opiates and coordinate online.

I met someone online and they met up for the first time and I drove them down to LA with me. So I picked this person up and drove down. You drive from Bakersfield to LA, you go over a mountain range on a stretch of road called the Grapevine. So kind of like a windy road. It goes from sea level to

up to, you know, kind of 3 or 4,000 feet down the LA basin. You know, it's a very large highway, but kind of windy and dark. I was driving very quickly, I think not realizing the effects the Benzos were having on me. I think I, in retrospect, just like talked this person's ear off for the entire, like, ride to LA.

I think they were probably by the end of the ship, like by the time we were like actually there getting ready to buy, you know, like probably convinced they were in a car, trapped with a car with a crazy person. So we met the person down there. Let's try to introduce this person to that person. I bought an undisclosed quantity of heroin. And the three of us were like, well, we all wanted to get high.

They hit the road, John in the back seat, the dealer up front, reaching over to hand him a syringe. His eye for what the right amount is is different than mine. And as we were driving down the road and I shot up and I remember putting the, like capping the needle back up and saying, like, I gotta clean this stuff up, like meeting like the stuff in the back of the car.

And then the next thing I remember, I'm coming to, laying on my back on a parking lot, and there was a paramedic over me. I guess they just hit me with Narcan or something. And they're asking some questions to orient me and basically saying, like a passerby reported that you were like, you know,

passed out in the back of your car and they called 911 and we came and like got into your car which was unlocked and you know da da da da and as it turned out what happened is like they had been talking in the front seat like you know and not really paying attention to what was going on and when I looked back my face was blue I wasn't breathing

So he just pulled over and, like, took all this shit out of the car and left it locked. And then, like, from, you know, they were literally standing over there, you know, called 911. So he was unconscious for about 10 to 15 minutes, which is not, like, as far as these things go, not the worst. John makes it back to Bakersfield, although the details of how are a little bit fuzzy.

And he phoned somebody in the recovery community. He knows that things aren't good. And, you know, he decides he's not going to go into work the next day. He needs to find a way to get clean. If there was any way to continue using opiates in a controlled way, the way that was working, I would have done that. But like even just, I've been reading a bunch of stuff about the complications of IV drug use and like the mortality rates and all these things, like the actuarial table type things. And like, there's no

You could tell yourself, like, you can use OxyContin for your whole life and not have a bad life, 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, like, 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. Like, this is the reason that I use drugs. And it felt like I'm just trapped now. Like, I can't, like, I can't continue to use drugs without dying. And I'm just a mess, you know, kind of like in a million ways kind of thing. It just felt like, oh, my back's to the wall as far as like, I can't go back to the, you know, the drug use route pretty much.

Okay, but 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 made for TV movie. Well, the problem is that the made for TV movies focus on the wrong thing, right? Because that's like, that's the beginning of recovery. So recovery starts when it's like, okay, like I can't continue to use drugs anymore, but my fucking head is a mess.

And like I 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, that's a few like, you know, whatever, four or five days, depending on who you like, you know, you're kind of you're pretty good shape by 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 do that white knuckling thing of forcing myself to be in an office and not have a panic attack. But I just sort of like was so unable to navigate regular life without these things that it was literally like going to the office would be a panic attack very quickly.

So John switched to working remotely. He managed projects and he kept in touch with his team through chat and email and phone calls. And unfortunately, again, you know, very fortunate that, you know, AJ kind of like patient with this stuff. But so the recovery process was...

the process of months and years there figuring out like how do I not want to kill myself every day and the work was all like no longer using heroin part was very actually the easiest part of all of it I think it's like a lot of people's experience really but like it doesn't make for a good movie

In recovery, John found weightlifting and bodybuilding, but he also rediscovered an outlet for his tendencies. I think these scraper problems would be an example of that. Like for me, like security research, hacking type stuff is like, it's an incredibly open-ended and complex problem that requires full attention. And critically, like there's a lot of like dopamine hits and stimulation along the way. There's all these ups and downs of like poking into things. Oh shit, like if I submit something to a forum in this way,

I get back a cookie that looks like I could use over here, you know, in this place where it's not letting me go to this site because I'm going to, I'm jumping like right to step three of a process. But that cookie, it looks like, you know, the kind of cookie I could use over here on step three of this thing, right? And it's kind of like these ups and downs to it, like the joy of discovery, or that you end up like in a dead end. It's like, oh, fuck, I just wasted everything.

four hours, this is never going to be done. In some ways it is, it's chaotic in the way that drug use or other things are, but in a much more controlled, at the end of the day, it's nothing. Oh, there's still going to be able to go home, right? Or no one's going to be dead, no one's going to be whatever. I think anything in the security research hacking space, which I include the hacking in the broad sense,

that's kind of open-ended hard problems like rt because the thing that like are in some ways i guess another addiction or thing for me and i find that when it when there's like a complexity level is high enough and like there's like pressure and stakes and open-ended and the problem is engaging enough like the voice of my head kind of shuts up finally you know and there's a sense of like newness and excitement i think there's also like a dopamine hit thing to it of like because it is like

especially security research, it's like, you know, handle on 10 things for a very long time and like nine of them don't pan out. And then you finally hit the one and say, oh, you know, like, you know, they get kind of like a big hit of like, you know, I'm not a crazy person. So John slowly found ways to cope with sobriety. Remote work was a big part of it. And so was, you know, the standard hard work of recovery that John says, you know, usually isn't included in the movies.

But yeah, he left the data mining place for a couple of reasons. One was he wanted a clean start. And another was because he wanted to work in cybersecurity. So he started at Tenable and I worked with him there. I didn't know anything about these drug struggles, but I did know something about him. I mean, I spent a lot of time with him and I felt like I knew something that really related to his struggles.

And I wanted to confront him about it. Well, because I've known you for, I don't know, it's some amount of years at this point. About 10, no, I think. A little less than 10. Nine, nine, I think. That's wild. I knew when I said I wanted to interview, like, I knew that one of the things I wanted to ask you about

was autism because I had this sense, I don't like, I feel like saying this seems rude. I 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.

I don't want to draw too strong a parallel because I don't want to like, you know, cheapen 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 there's no way to describe it except denial, right? Like in the same way that someone is...

you know, maybe I just like hooking up with men from time to time, but I'm not like, because the reason for, for dithering blood, they ask you, are you a man who has sex with men? Not are you a homosexual or are you bisexual or whatever? And the reason for that is,

There'd be people who regularly have sex with men would not fill out that box, not because they were lying, but because in their head, like, oh, I just have all these behaviors, but that's not who I am identity-wise. And I think sort of with autism, I could probably tell you, oh, I'm socially awkward, and I'm this and I'm that, but I'm not really an autistic person.

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. I think, like, the way that I internalized a lot of my problems before is basically, like, I'm not good enough. Because I think, if you think of, like, a technical problem or, like, a sports problem or something, the problem is that you're not good enough, right? Like, you've got to run harder or, you know, you have to, like, you know, get better at X thing or get better at handling pointers, right? And it's just like, you know, it's like that mentality works great for getting better and better and better at those things and putting a lot of pressure on myself and...

pointing out all the areas that are wrong and, you know, I still keep like dereferencing pointers and, you know, in sloppy ways, it's causing my application to crash. I'm going to get better at that. If you apply that mentality to yourself, I think the thing I found is incredibly self-destructive and toxic because like that was like, for me, like socialization was that sort of problem. I'm on the verge of cracking it, right? I just like remember all these things like, you know, I'm not going to be as weird, you know?

And that's incredibly like, I think that creates a self-image that's very toxic. Like it's only helpful for you to identify with that identity if like it actually helps you overcome things, right? But like if it helps you understand that, oh, there's a like, my struggles to work in the workplace, maybe it's not a code for me to crack. I'm just like, I'm this person.

I think if I had been at the point where I could have accepted that, then it would have been so much easier. But at the point someone applying the label to me was not enough to make me... I think that I am finding that accepting it is helping with a lot of those things. Yeah, I do think it being much more visible has helped me a lot. There was much more people being diagnosed. Oh, 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. It's still like the last few years that I've finally accepting it. Like, and still there's some days where I wonder about it. So I'm still very much in like the coming to terms with that phase. 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. 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, you know, engineering as a job, but, like, I think I would encourage, you know, people who are on a similar life path to, like, find, if they are, you know, spectrum-y people, to find other people in the spectrum to get along with and develop relationships and talk with those people and kind of get an understanding of themselves better

And do more of that rather than like, you know, reading of diagnoses and stereotypes and these sorts of things. Because I think that's like a key step to me for like finding community of a sort. You know, I found community in the technical world, but then needed that other kind of community as well, you know, that kind of helped balance things out.

So it's years later and John is doing well and he's got a friend who's also on the spectrum. And that's sort of how he started to understand who he is in a way that doctors telling him he might be on the spectrum really did not.

And he's now a chief research scientist at a stealth startup that poached him away from Beyond Trust, who took him away from CrowdStrike before that. 11 years clean at this point, like, you know, I'm not having mental health crises. I cannot imagine kind of going back to that, you know,

that kind of way of living. 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 in the past few years, finally starting to come to terms with is I am kind of weird in some ways. I do have some social difficulties, but that's an acceptable way to exist as a human being. And seeing other people like that that are acceptant

That was the show.

Thank you so much, John, for being so honest and so real with us. I think it takes guts to talk about addiction and anxiety and the messy path of self-acceptance. It takes guts to share that. I think a lot of us will see a bit of ourselves in your story. If you want to reach out to John, you'll find him on Twitter or on 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 co-workers of 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. And there's also a newsletter. But if you really want to support the show and help me to keep bringing you these kind of conversations, please go to co-workers.com slash supporters. And until next time, thank you so much for listening.