Mark Allen Weber wrote. Imagine you're starting from scratch with no assets income or skills in today's world. How would you go about Building Wealth? Where would you choose to live and what specific steps would you take to achieve
financial success? This actually is a pretty easy one for me because I feel like this was me. I mean I was, I had declared bankruptcy and the year 2000 because I had a surgery that I couldn't pay for. It was too expensive. I got my car repossessed, you know, shortly thereafter.
After so I had no money and I was like, okay, I need to figure out my. I didn't come from a wealthy family. I need to figure this out. Like how can I like, you know, chart a course for a better life and I immediately knew because I was into Tech that I needed to be in the center of that Arena. And the only way to be in the center of that arena is to say, where is the highest density of people that are in this profession? So Choose Your Own Adventure here, you'll know where it is for whatever.
Profession might be for me, that was San Francisco. So I had to move to San Francisco so I took any job I could to get enough money to move to San Francisco. It wasn't, I got a really low end. Well I worked at a start-up first. Got that had a kind of okay, salary was like 55k and then I actually had to take a job for 38k year. This is working as a production assistant tech TV and I had
to move into the the sunset which is for people that know, San Francisco's kind of, you know, way out there and I lived in someone's garage, they had a bad like made-up in-law unit. That was just not really an in-law unit was not legal and they charged me $500 a month for rent, which was insane, but I paid it and there were rats underneath my floorboards. I shit you not, I'm not making that up and I actually found a little hole where you could pull up the board and I put rat poison down there. Dumbest thing I've ever done in my entire
Because I came the next I was sleeping and I wake up and I hear the rats running into the floorboards and it's freaking really like you're like okay are they actually out right? Because if they're out above the floorboards, I'm going to freak the fuck out, right? Because there's rats running around, they were under the floorboards. I put poison in their mind, get these fuckers, right? They eat it all and then they died under the floorboards. And so I had the worst smell. It took about a month and a half for them to decompose to the point to where they didn't smell any bad anymore. But anyway it was horrible. So
Anyway, the point being is that because I moved there, I had collisions and collisions. Meaning I would go to coffee shops. I would go to meetups, I would go to different things and I would run into people that were senior to me, or that were my peers who I could start to network with. Oh, what do you seeing like, what kind of stuff do you work? At blah blah and I would have these conversations. It was difficult for me because I wasn't a very introverted person. So I would often times have a couple drinks like loose enough to even be able to talk to anyone. Thankfully, I made some friends at the
As well as working at
and, you know, from there. Once I got into tech TV, I said, okay I'm not going to win here based on I had no degree. I'm not going to win here based on my book knowledge. I'm not going to go work at Google, right, because that they had a, really strict intake for college degrees, back in the day. And actually, I think it was one of the first to get around that. But anyway, why I said to myself, I'm going to win with creativity. So, when I went to tech TV, even though I was a production assistant was interested in video production,
I discovered a vulnerability in Windows, they thankfully through the grace of Paul block, the executive producer and Leo, Laporte. They put me on TV for one episode just 2 for 10 minutes. Not even that like five-minute segments to describe the vulnerability, I'd found in Windows.
There are many services running by default on the installations of Windows NT, 2000 and XP. And we have found out, there's a service running that lets us spammers equivalents Famers bombard you with messages now, Kevin Rose. You all know, he's usually over there in the netcam Cineplex but he's a guy who found this and
people probably don't know this about you Kevin but you're very sophisticated computer user,
you run out of rooms at home. You play with Linux and and how did you find this whole? Well, just playing around a couple friends, you know? We like to take apart computers as hack them, get into it and play around Chris.
Oz me, it Department good friend of mine and just started playing around and actually started spamming some machines, you found out something called the Nets and command the show us how this works, used by somebody, who doesn't have your best interests at heart? Okay, so what's involved? Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to do a port scan to find out which machines can be hacked, you need my IP address, you can't do it without it, right? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a range of IP addresses, write, and run a port scan for Port 139. Now, this is open on a lot of machines. This is the netbios port. Correct. Okay and
Anytime that the messenger service is turned on, it will be found in that port. Number is Messenger Service turned on by default. Yes, it is on 98 2082 72,000. So if you have an XP box chances are this port. This Messenger Service is on right now, it is right now, regardless of whether you're on a corporate Network. So you scan it, the software comes back with people who that's turned on, right? The race. If you'll send us can out to all these machines, certain machines will come back. Now machines, like Linux and MAC machines, they might have that Port closed, right? Because we're not going to have that service turned on, right? But the majority.
Machines are going to get the, you're going to get the message coming back saying this machine can now receive an attack. So this software is going to give me a list of machines at that are open exactly what do I do. Now you dumped into a batch file, the all the IP address the IP addresses along with the command in front of it, the net space and space and the IP address, that's open, right? And then the spam message that you want to send. Now not only could this be used for spam but you can send so many messages. You can effectively shut my machine down, right? You can buy a bump on your machine with so many messages you're going to have like denial service attack to denial of service and then afterwards the
- rooster said, I think you could do that every once in a while. Just come on TV and do that. Every once while I was like, I can do that. And so then I was like, okay what can I do? That's the best for TV. And so I came up with an Xbox controller that I had re-soldered so that when you were actually getting hit you know the vibration, what happened? Yeah. The rumble it would actually shock you. And so we had this really funny segment where two people were playing Mortal Kombat and like when they got hit they would actually get like a micro like almost like a stun gun like kind of shocked.
And drop their controllers, and it was hilarious. And they're like, do more of those segments that led to be hosting the television show. Eventually are becoming a regular eventually hosting a television show. And I went from there, so creativity and networking, and being in that essential place, for the collisions was essential. And then we eventually, when I started dig, I became friends with the other Founders. So, you know, I got to meet Zuckerberg and you want dinner a few times and, you know, got to be friendly with Evan Jack and that those lead to Investments, right? And so it was like, just like this snowballing of
Of collisions. So that for me was very important. And then lastly, the thing that I always come back to is this idea?
