How To Accidentally Get A Job In InfoSec

so we always like to kick off higher ground with someone who's a bit of a you know icon in the industry where did he go he disappeared on me he's hiding in the corner piacere no no I'll pay me coglioni so without further ado I turn it over to Johnny Christmas Mic Check there we go ice freaked him out how you doing guys this is woo woo I get 11 eleven thirty woo this is kind of a weird room in that we've got like a ton of people talking in the back so we're gonna have to just kind of cope with that it's that kind of place I'm gonna be doing something weird technically and none technically up here

using sheets of paper and a computer and so we're gonna see how that goes I this whole day is going to be pretty much mostly recruiter's up here and a few people who work in the industry kind of throwing death by PowerPoint at you lots of bullet points lots of things to take notes on lots of to do's to take back with you on Monday and so I thought that I would at least like start the day off with something that was absolutely none of that and just kind of hang out and be weird and tell you guys a story I've been getting into like just open mic storytelling lately and I was like I'll just come do that there cuz that's

the easiest things we've like stories anyone want like story time with Uncle Johnny okay yeah let's do that um I am inevitably gonna use some foul language because that's what I do in my natural state I hope you understand it's because I'm just hanging out and being me and not like trying to like shock anybody with the the SH word so just fair warning this story was 23 pages when I first did like a stream of consciousness dump of it so there's gonna be kind of like a lot of leaps over content that I had cut out because we only got 25 minutes or so I can affirm that's what's left is true and accurate to the best of my

memory I did commit this from memory during a 16-hour flight from Boston to the Gobi Desert in China it was a trip that was dropped into my lap by way of some amazing friends I've made over the years in this community I do a lot of things like that where I turn up in weird places and people think it's funny and they've started calling it John eing it because I just turn up and have a good time for free it's something that I've called called for a long time controlled serendipity and that's what I kind of wanted to tell you this story about today so sometime last spring I received a not unusual text message from

my friend Steve McGrath who here know Steve he's pretty popular he's out there running the Doppler right now he looks exactly like this I think he's wearing the same hat and definitely a lay this is a text message I received from his diabetic cat it's a picture of him as cat sends me pictures it's weird Steve's message was one that comes in anywhere two to five times a year though more so lately for reasons I won't call Jack out on and it just says JD is in town lost like around 9 the JD here is of course Jack Daniels Jack in the room no he's a good thing he's in the NOC doing this thing

so the JD here Jack Daniel who you all know and Lost Lake is one of his all-time favorite TV lounges which is saying something obviously given that we insist on and the Tiki theme this year this is the most Jack Daniel besides I've ever been to it also happens to be a short walk for my house so Steven the gang assemble a small intimate group each time he comes around and we hang out until the shop closes up swapping stories of life love the universe and everything I first met Steve maybe 6 or 7 years ago at one of the Chicago burbs tech meetups who here knows burbs SEC who here knows Birds egg is not from Chicago that's a substantial

number I think I met him at burg SEC prime which at the time was just called Byrd SEC because that was the only one we had and now there's four Andy Andy runs throw hand up Andy Andy runs Byrd SEC West more or less whenever Jacobs not alive which is most of the time Steve is a level-headed honest caring human being of a level I will forever be striving to become over the years he and his longtime girlfriend Diane have left their marks of my life turning me on to cigars and bourbon which is two great habits to get into new board games do people homeownership and as Diane would call it getting lost to the dance I'm not dumping all this to

try and make Steve some friends these were and are all things that just came from me being in the right place at the right time with Steve and have open doors in my life many of which were career related so let's let's talk about that let's talk about right place at the right time because I hear that so much with people when I'm talking about them about career networking and making friends of the cons and making relationships with the cons they call me out on Johnny in it and this like being at the right place the right time it's like oh yeah man you're just a really lucky guy so let's talk about it this

good thing I happened to be there thing we call it luck we call it serendipity serendipity it's like it's such a flowery spiritual word it it lets us shrug off what's going on without having anything too hard about how weird it is here's another word we use all the time for things like that randomness what is what really is random what is randomness to quote Douglas Adams is microservices read micro search this is a good old book about the rise of like Microsoft and such in the 90s this is just loaded with lung one-liners like the picture says randomness it's an easy word we use to describe patterns that are too large for us to be able to

identify what's cool about serendipity is you can call it whatever you want you can call it God if you want God a God angels spirits just good luck you might even be right you can make up whatever rationale you want for it and it doesn't matter because why it happens isn't at all relevant only that it does happen so long as you let it happen as long as you don't get in its way so let's use as an example I don't know my career path seems maybe appropriate for the room good yes Andy likes it oh man we're getting weird so there's my first computer there I still have it I think I got that when I

was like four or five that is a VTech Wizkid and it like literally had cartridges and programs you would put into it it used magnetic stripes to load the programs in and this was for like kindergarteners it still works I will never get rid of this thing it's awesome so I've spent and did idea also did a lot of terrible things to it and tried to figure out how to make it do things it shouldn't by like putting the magnetic stripe in halfway or like overlaying two cards and putting them in backwards this is what I'm like five or six I've spent my entire life hacking electronics for the sake of time I won't go into it I've got videos on my youtube

channel you can go check out if you want that backstory the bottom line is since when I was about 4 or so in the olden days of 1983 I've been fascinating fascinated by hacking electronics not necessarily like theft or piracy but just making them do things they weren't supposed to just seeing what they'll do when you impose yourself on them when you but what happens when you make them uniquely yours by something possibly terrible you've done to them I grew up in the most stereotypical blue-collar household possible I'm the son of a truck mechanic and a hairstylist needless to say we didn't have computer money back in the 80s and 90s computer in the 80s and runni of

them the modern equivalent of like thousand to two thousand dollars for one that did anything more than have a basic disk operating system on it I even recalling late 90s I think a good computer running about a grand that was a lot of money and a grand is a steal forego a good one luckily and it took me far far too long to realize this one I had a set of parents who loved me and wanted to nurture that fascination as best they could with what little they had this meant serendipity would bring things into my life like a new uncle who did computers as we used to say because that was the thing back then ago I do

computers who remembers doing computers and like oh you should talk to my son he knows computers that was a very like late 90s thing my mom had sell me out to the whole neighborhood so serendipity bring this uncle who made me an old 486 DX at a time when that bordered on worthless seriously like it was still easier to type my school papers on the IBM Selectric the electric typewriter that my mom had versus this 486 he had given me but I found some old batch strips that he had written to launch race programs on there and from that I kind of reverse engineered how to write bash scripts and learn to write a ton of

my own shell scripting in ms-dos is a very old sentence eventually though that meant having to build my own computer but I still didn't actually have that level of cash so one of my first jobs out of high school was at Best Buy where I worked in the computers department we had a computer repair shop there too and but I didn't get to work in the computer repair shop because those kids were too cooler too cool for me but they had a policy of disposing of any equipment that had lied around for more than while here 12 months without being picked up so after a few weeks of just dumpster diving I had amassed enough functional though

ancient parts to build a basic Pentium machine this was in the when the Pentium threes were just coming out so like still a modest computer but not could at least get on the internet with thanks guys by putting you to sleep I feel like we should probably do something about the fire alarm so let's all go do that this is a real fire drill please walk out either that entrance or this entrance please thank you seriously please go over to this entrance over here those folks please go over there thank you we will resume our talk after the fire drill okay they just said it's no a false alarm you can come back in we will just hope that

they can turn off the sirens Yeah right I I think someone probably over at the CTF set it off see how you can be disruptive technology and disrupt a con you will be advised once we have determined the source of dr.seuss isn't gonna stop though I think they're on fire we'll fix it in post right alright I hope everyone saw the solid no he gave me yeah so we've confirmed that this is a false alarm they do know that the lights are still going we don't know when those will be turned off so Johnny do you need another shot tequila yeah well yeah I mean all of this stress I was just in a fire I didn't bring any

milord cuz I didn't check my bags that's a creepy background

this is called serendipity and how do you respond to stress what's a kiwa [Music] that's one way here comes Matt with your tequila I'm at with my tequila look at this that better be chilled sir I'm Johnny Christmas no that's my tequila [Laughter] how distracting are these lights and a scale of 1 to really do yeah I don't get like a creepy like here hold on I could really just take this off right it's fine no I'm supposed to be talking about good serendipity this is not where were we we were at Best Buy right I just bought something at Best Buy like a brick-and-mortar like I made it out alive I bought a Matic pro and we took some

gorgeous shots of it I pay an elephant mountain with it okay how are we doing AV guy just keep keep rolling keep rolling where was a Best Buy you worked in the computer department cuz you're computer guy yeah I guess right so I worked in best by the computers department and garbage picked myself a penny a machine from the dumpster like outside mind you like totally outside of the building and long story short I'm the best bye I cut it out but now I'm gonna buy myself some time because the fire alarm we Best Buy had a program going on where any LP manager who busted an employee stealing got $100 spit like that's that's just totally fine right I mean it

was I understand where they're coming from because they'd estimated like 93 percent of all of our loss in all of the stores was related to internal theft like 93 percent is due to your own employees stealing your crap so they put this spiff out and man like wouldn't you know it like I worked at a Best Buy with an LP manager who had like the best morals and he called the cops on me and had me arrested from the store like while I was on shift because I had taken incredibly old like three generations old computer parts from the dumpster outside of the building and that didn't that did not fly that's not how that

works and there was no the police would not accept charges from him but yeah so I that that job didn't last too long maybe I shouldn't been dumpster diving in the first place that's your call so anyway because of that I was able to throw together that penny and machine but at least get on the internet with a modem that didn't use the word baud to describe itself and I got to learn how many pages a phone bill has to be before they start sending it in the big eight and a half by or the 11 by 14 manila envelopes it's 23 pages if anyone was wondering so all this was going on I was

also attending college out of pocket because I had read the student loan paperwork and couldn't fathom how anyone would agree to any that was written in there unfortunately that also meant I was I had like two classes a semester I was taking CIS and chemistry which yes is weird but it was because by then like computers wasn't thought to be like a career yet like nobody thought that computers were going to explode like they did this is like late 90s remember like 97 98 a lot of people thought computers were just gonna be another fad like you know smartphones like something that's just going to be like flash in the pan and just a gimmick

computer uncle had begun doing IT at a pharmacy where he got my mom a job doing data entry and I was always interested in chemistry since I had got my first chemistry set when I was seven and set the garage on fire because that's I think how that always works I did well in it in school lungs biology and again computers that really thinks those like I'm gonna go to school I want to learn computers I'm gonna learn CIS but I really think that pharmacology is gonna be the way that I'm going to end up while I was doing that I worked in the school's IT department for extra income along with Best Buy like I mentioned briefly and also at a

pharmacy because any blue-collar parents going to tell you like you're not going to be able to get a job in the real world unless you have experience so I was going to college and working in the field that I wanted to eventually have a better job in so Best Buy had me arrested for the garbage picking the pharmacy was boring as hell and it was literally like an Oscar pharmacy like go take the pills put him in the thing and then hand them to the person and you just do that all day and somehow that's supposed to educate you about how pharmacology works and computers at least turned out to be like the best thing ever I spent every possible second

in the computer labs at school with their crazy t1 connection just madness just t1 like I could download PDFs it was insanity I was sniffing traffic I was writing viruses like was optimizing the instrument infrastructure configuration while I wasn't even on the clock for the IT department because the school IT offered very few hours for students and it was pretty much just changing toner cartridges rebooting pcs swapping mice out because nobody knew how to clean the rollers and the ball mice and he knows and he knows about cleaning mice balls we're gonna nod in that head and the maybe still now even the IT admins were [ __ ] who didn't want to teach anyone

anything because anyone who isn't them is an idiot is it still like that out there is that still just general IT how many are that IT admin hey Joe hi Joe it's funny Joe taught me a shitload of stuff that was pretty great time except for the fact that I was eventually expelled due to reasons I'm literally legally barred from discussing but the company that sued me is long gone so [ __ ] em I'll keep it sort of safe and just mention that they they were a vendor partner of the school and I irresponsibly disclosed some seriously messed-up stuff that they were doing with the students PII that company that vendor sued me for slander which is not

what had happened because what I had reported was in fact actually objectively provably what they were actually doing but we live in America where whoever has the most money in the courtroom wins and so it was me versus big corporation I was forced to settle out of court I didn't have finished paying that settlement off until I was 33 I will definitely not discuss how I did that right around that time the pharmacy called me and asked me to resign as I had gotten into the habit of getting on my hours away for the other texts because I hated the job and I was averaging like four hours a week total which was keeping other text from being

able to hit full-time and get benefits it was a bad situation I was I totally accepted that I was like you're right I'm a dick piece I hadn't brought it up before but I didn't think it was relevant but now it's probably a great time to mention that at this point I was also officially homeless I was living in an abandoned Bollywood theater in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood called the Adelphi it was really an opera house around the turn of the century really cool inside they used an old World War one battleship steam engines to heat the place and we had found him in the basement and I can give a hold to our talk with all the pictures I have of

that place but I've been couchsurfing and squatting since running away from my parents house and I ended up here with a friend who insisted that we could turn this place into a rock venue with our no money here when we had brought like people in to inspect the place and I needed about 2 million dollars worth of work to be just up to code like let alone the money it needed to actually be a rock venue and so my buddy who has had not been employed since he was 16 it's like yeah that's doable I can get a loan for two million dollars but in the meantime is a free place to stay I was

sleeping on a mattress in the projection booth I got there I guess I went in here and I was like oh this is this is my room this is we're all set here Thanks and then the mattress was already there when I moved in but if you see the door in the back there that's all taped up shut we found a pirate radio station back there like we broke the door open and there was all this like FM transmission equipment and we're looking at everything and it was transmitting on frequencies they were like very definitely used by wfy are the fire 103 5 Chicago the blaze it turned out to be who's from Chicago okay oh hey Pete yep

all right yeah who do you remember anybody remember rebel radio rebel radio they'd play metal at like 2:00 a.m. on like Wednesdays this was one of their broadcast points we found one of the pirate broadcast points a rebel radio so it had not been used in years but also it wasn't rated so I wasn't sure why they abandoned it totally irrelevant needs story I guess anyway my mom had heard about this new computer retail store called Micro Center and discovered their computer repair department with this is like way out in Westmont this was like a hike out into the burbs but she verbally sent my homeless freeloading ass down there to apply for a job as moms do I passed the phone

interview and they asked me to come in and so I put on my best interview outfit which at the time was some ill-fitting khaki shorts and a t-shirt with some nerdy slogan we none of us have those anymore and and a Hawaiian button-up just probably appropriate for the Tiki theme here and this was what I went to my first interview and tagged yellow swag I showed up three hours late as we didn't have GPS back then and if you took the wrong highway exit we'd have GPS our back then and so like if you took the wrong highway exit like your whole day was ruined like forget it you had to stop at gas stations and they'd be like you take

this street to this street to the apple tree with a Johnson boy I felt it fell out of the tree broke his arm like and you were just gone for us to the day we're passing carriers out I guess is this banshee pissing I'll put them on I need a picture of the front row but can't do that the stock's gonna run long guys oh I'm gonna have to give one of each my fishel speaker request was an armed entourage to lead me to and from all of my talks and I guess this is my arm doctor yeah I mean I've been armed with cat ears and it got me this part oh man where was I anyway all right so I

showed this job interview like three hours late looking like Jack Daniel and they hired me they got may be enough for on the spot Yolo swag so micro Centre Micro Center was mine that is me I want to point out that I had to dye my hair black which is why I have that like pitchblack heroin addict like British pop stock star here because I used to have red and purple and silver all in it and they were like well you're a manager now you kind of should maybe take all your piercings out and quit it with the hair and so that's the end result it's what I look like clean shaven enjoy just take it in take it in that bit that's

high was given to me by a customer who felt bad for me because I had no good ties I guess that's a good tie I go by many names in many places and I didn't want to confuse anybody this company who is a Micro Center near them this company is awesome they paid for all the major applicable certification exams and vendor training they gave you a dollar an hour raise immediately for each certification you obtained like right out of the gate and it was like act like they would prorate it to the day that you got certified on your paycheck they expected you to be constantly learning and growing it was incredible it was all

I wanted in my life I stayed at micro Center for seven years working my way up to level 3 tech two shot lead to tech support to tech support lead and eventually I was the service department manager I cried like a [ __ ] baby when I got that management role I thought I had made it I was raking in a cool thirty six thousand dollars a year that's grown-up money I was making grown-up money however one sort of sad day my lead technician Jerry who was also a good friend mine and who many of you have heard terrible terrible stories about took me out to lunch and he handed in his resignation my heart and my

stomach sank he was a beast of a tech he was an absolute tank he we won so many awards from corporate due mostly to his work he had found a job doing warranty printer repairs for an IT asset recovery warehouse which is like when your company gets rid of all its computers like when it does like a refresh sends them all to this company and they figure out what's broken what's not wipe the hard drive sell some recycle the rest and the job paid fifty thousand dollars a year every year and they would pay you like every two weeks like a little chunks of that it was insanity it was [ __ ] bananas and my immediate

response his resignation was do they need more text they did not jerry however was totally on board with my response and he hated to stop working with me as much as I hated him having to do it everything he knew he learned from me and because of this he was almost as good of a tech as I was I know this because he put it right in his letter of resignation which I still have and it's in my safe and I still pull it out read it sometimes and I miss Jerry Jerry is [ __ ] awesome with both of us desperate to keep working together we put together a ploy to convince the management of this new company to create

a second position at which point he would highly recommend me for the role I would later discovered that this was called social engineering and it by any name it worked flawlessly and with much sort of sorrow I resigned from micro Center and went to go work with Jerry the new jobs it was a horrible warehouse job where the supervisor treated us the same way he treated the temp workers that he had to separate into different departments based on their the game colours that they wore and he just like he treated us like worthless subhuman [ __ ] also since we had conned the company into creating a second job for me there wasn't actually any work for me

do it seems cool at first right you get getting 50 grand a year to do literally nothing just surf the internet all day but the internet wasn't that the exact it back then I beat the last boss in like six months so I started I started doing contract jobs that the local assisted minute that company was would kick my way just to like for the excuse of taking vacation days to get the hell out of there they were mainly like one-off network site surveys modem and router and switch installs and decommissions for retail stores nothing teaches you network networking like trying to crowbar modern networking equipment into 30 year old stores even if it did mean that I got to

be the only dude the Victoria's Secret rummaging around behind the underwear bins trying to find a cable run like no I'm just looking for network cables don't don't mind me just covered in underwear as I've come to be known so but beg of the warehouse I take it upon myself to learn how this mainframe stuff that was coming and worked because new stuff to learn like who wouldn't want to learn mainframes they're right here who doesn't want to learn mainframes correct [Music] alright so I taught myself general Hardware management stuff eventually I used one to hack out a massive Bay for managing harddrive data or education which made and save the company like a ton of money but erasing hard drives all

Degas old what now so what now what now indeed serendipity as we'll call it had provided me with a literal warehouse full of enterprise IT equipment just collecting dust I use it to completely turn the PC auditing line on its head I saved the company oh I shouldn't go to Joliet I'm gonna go back it devised an entire infrastructure for it out of things that were literally just going to be thrown in the garbage it was a lot of hacking it was making things do stuff they weren't necessarily supposed to do but it had to because that's all we had available the increased audit line efficiency by some it increased the other language efficiency by some huge

person up in the thousands which saved the company a very significant amount of money added the bottom line and they were so happy with it they asked me to build out and install nearly the entire infrastructure for a second warehouse that they were about to open however it came to pass if you've been following along that that company decided they didn't need me anymore despite EPA laws being passed that guaranteed them to make money hand-over-fist they managed that place straight into the ground and I was unemployed this was actually really awesome because serendipity again through a long story revolving around me buying a motorcycle landed me living in a huge house with a bunch of amazing

friends that Joe knows I had I'll be honest I played a lot of video games during that period of time but it gets really boring like especially when you don't have the money to really go do anything entertainer sell I was a bartender for a while I learned race like car drifting from a professional racer who had a crush on me but believe it or not I missed working I missed hacking for a living I missed working with computers I developed this very real fear that I was never going to get a job making grown-up money ever again because I had no real IT experience to put on my resume like all that stuff I did of these

companies wasn't part of my job descriptions of those companies so like that's not valid for your resume right like I can't put that on there right no yes I can am I wrong okay Andy says I'm wrong so I took all my savings and I signed up for a CCNA bootcamp an exam praying that that would at least get me like some kind of like basic Network admin job and in the meantime I kept hacking not for experience or a resume fodder because back then like hacking as a hobby wasn't really resume fodder that you could use I learned about a new tool or technique and showed in myself some targets and some countries where the

rule of law was maybe a bit lower on their to-do list and just play around yeah that's illegal no I'm not suggesting anyone here do it it's just what I did I even sometimes managed to speak at a few cons when I had the time and was able to like pinch pennies and scrape them out of the cushions so I was still hacking at home I was still learning things I was still researching I would still go to hacker conferences and present with like every last dime I had like I literally literally empty my bank account and come to DEFCON 9 10 11 I haven't missed a hope since hope mm I was broke and we would scratch together

gas money and I would sleep on hotel floors hope had an awesome hammock village where you could just sleep in a hammock if that's where you needed to sleep because he didn't have a hotel room it's a cool place it still does they brought it back it was gone for Dan's here dan is one of the first people I ever met at Hope when I meet you to hope 4 or 5 3 some [ __ ] second whatever to stave off the cabin fever I pretty much say yes to like any free event that got me out of the house my roommates had some friends in the next town over who had been hosting board game nights for the past couple of

years I met a lot of people those nights but I made one huge cardinal mistake at those board game nights so as I never asked anybody what they did for work why would I bring up work at a board game night we're just hanging out that's a dumb idea nobody wants to talk about work but then in comes once again a serendipity one boring Saturday my roommate received what seemed to be a Hail Mary email from a friend Joe let's even get back to Joe here throw up a hand Joe I haven't seen Joe in years and he shows up the Mikey know tuck and be [ __ ] Vegas asking if by some remote

chance my roommate newb anybody could be a good fit for a position they've been trying to fill for like 18 months it required a skill set or at least like a familiarity with in the information security room that was difficult to find in the ancient days of 2011 specifically he asked my roommate knew anybody with IT experience who was also interested to slash into hacking the response of course was like yeah so do you the guy you've been playing board games with for like months we my roommate ratted by we mean we had a really good laugh because I was supposed to go play board games with Joe that night so I spoke with Joe briefly about the

position and it was a our dream come true it turns out this was a big a big retail corporation there it is this is my slide deck guys it was like fortune 500 global 1000 big like six largest online retailer on earth big I knew you could actually be paid like grown-up money learning new hacking techniques and engineering systems to defend against them it was crazy bananas hey guys can we keep it down in the back a little Thanks I send in my resume that probably looked like a fourth grader with a head injury wrote it and he somehow convinced the company to hire me so thank you Joe and we've hired Andy to throw Hannah but we eventually

hired Andy there who is a fourth grader with a hedge and head injury 18 months in they even fought to promote me to senior despite me not meeting what the HR experienced requirements so there's a lesson for you like [ __ ] the HR requirements if they want you to work there they'll likely be able to figure out a way around it I've been doing senior level work since pretty much the moment I started I found out right around then I wasn't even the most qualified person they had interviewed for that role back then I wasn't even the second most qualified person that they hired for that role back then so why did they hire me the less funny

version of the story is this because I was passionate and I was able to provide metric metrics to demonstrate that passion they knew that you can hire in someone and teach them to perform a task but you can't teach them to give a [ __ ] about that task you can hire in someone with no experience but a huge passion and in the long run you're gonna get exponentially better output from that passionate worker so put your passions down on your resumes like if you're doing all these projects at home and learning new things make sure that sunny resume and come in and talk about it when you do these interviews is serendipity serendipity would once again have it or possibly

just excellent hiring practices that come buddy ended up having what I would eventually discover was some of the best IT specifically in some info like leadership and team members ever seriously you guys were [ __ ] awesome like I'm ruined now like I can't work anywhere else because everyone's terrible compared to you guys it was just the best that job never jumped the shark I never got to that feeling of like I don't want to be here I never woke up like I don't want to go to work so I'm gonna have to wrap this up for you guys the the point of all of this is that in a unit infinite universe with infinite possibilities there's an

infinite number of things that can happen to you and they're only limited by the context in which you find yourself if you rarely put yourself in the social situations then you're rarely going to have anyone present anything to you that's beneficial to your life like no one's waking you up when you're in bed like hey man hey do you want a job like me and I mean maybe that happens sometimes don't take that job don't do not take that job that's not going to pan out for you in the long run if you rarely put yourself into social situations you're rarely going to have anyone present anything to you that's beneficial to your life if you never say

yes to those things that are presented to you you never know where the where they may have led you'll never benefit from what the payoffs may have been 15 years down the road one of the big things officemax liked in my first phone interview was that I had seven years of retail management experience like who'd have thought retail management would have got me a job in corporate IT and they're like oh well you'll understand what's going on in the stores you'll be able to communicate with them better it's things like that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take anyway okay so I guess I should get back to the story I started 20 minutes ago

where we left left last left our heroes Jack and Steve McGrath in the gang imbibing and just a bit too much Tiki flavored goodness over at Lost Lake somewhere around 1:30 in the morning I leaned in to Jack Daniel and I asked with a little slurring as all the rum and banana cream liquor would allow hey are you guys ever need me playing at b-sides lb2 like I'm seeing offense or like help run a game show or something I love to be able to help you guys oh is that because you do so much for us that's drunk Johnny impression and like without even thinking Jack responds to me with you know why don't you come keynote this

year and so in my head was the stream of like shocked excited profanity blessed me like holy [ __ ] b-sides Las Vegas like this is like the mecca of b-sides and this is Jack Daniel and he's like a man like why don't you come kina with us it'll be totally cool and so like my total or school cool response is like oh yeah sure man like what do you want me to talk about and that's secretly that's what I ask everyone who asked me to speak at cons because I don't feel like doing any work I go just tell me what to talk about cuz I'm just a dancing monkey and like you give me a topic and I'll

come up here dance for you guys it's completely cheating so anyway again like without even having to think about it jack says to me well you've had like such a weird career path getting to where you are why don't you just like come out and tell that story and so I did thank you [Applause]