Scott Duffy interviews Walter “Scorpion” O’Brien, On Hacking, Business & Burgers: Season 1 Ep. 18

I'm Alan Taylor. My buddy Scott Duffy and I are in search of the best burger in America. Each month we visit a new city to try some of the top restaurants, pubs, and brewhouses while sitting down for a candid conversation with some of the top entrepreneurs, athletes, entertainers, and celebrities. I don't know about you, but I love talking business over a burger. Welcome to business and burgers.

We're back at Cassell's to try another one of Chef Christian's delicious burgers. Today we're sitting down with Walter O' Brien to talk about the business of cybersecurity. Walter's IQ of 197 is the fifth highest in the world. And his genius started showing itself at a young age. After being introduced to computers, Walter hacked into NASA and was promptly busted by Interpol and the nsa. Instead of throwing him in a cell, they offered Walter a job. He became a government contractor and helped them with all things cybersecurity. Today, Walter is a multimillionaire who continues his cybersecurity work with his company, Scorpion Computer Services.

How did you get the name Scorpion?

Well, we have to rewind a little bit for that. There's a tradition in Ireland, at least in the schools I went to to nickname kids after animals with the same traits. I was heavily bullied for being different and I didn't really react. I turned the other cheek for a long time, and then one time I did react pretty severely. And I'd been doing full contact martial arts. Gave one of the kids a pretty spectacular ass kicking.

From there. They called me Scorp, which is a docile creature until pushed too far and is fiercely loyal to its cyclone or family. So I was the protector of the geeks. And to this day, the company is still a home for the mentally enabled. So then when I was doing the NASA hack, I had to log into the ARPANET before it was called the Internet. And I need a username, so I used my school nickname. So when I got busted, I was now Scorpion the hacker. And they say there's no such thing as bad press, so we kept it.

Wow, that's funny. Let's talk about your friends a little bit. You said you hired your geek friends, right? What was that like?

Well, it was great when I'd send them individually out on projects, but then we get a bigger project and I sent two of them out together and they tried to kill each other while insulting the customer. And that's when, thankfully, I learned this lesson at a young age that often the higher the IQ the lower the eq, emotional intelligence, common sense, social skills. I had to go out and hire people. Single moms, elementary school teachers and psychologists who have high eq, often with PMP certifications, project management professionals. And they would babysit the geniuses and the customers, which is why we called them the super nannies. So now we had the best communicators working with the best thinkers and a lot of the higher IQ individuals suck at branding, marketing, sales, accounting, legal, taxes, because they just don't care about those things. But I valued IQ above all else. A precious commodity like gold or silver, and no one else seemed to feel that way about it. They felt these guys were a pain in the ass to deal with. So I tried to gather that precious commodity together in one place, incubate them from all the things they suck at, hire companies to do accounting, branding, legal, taxes, etc. So they only had to think and then fronted them with super nannies that people love to emotionally bond with. So now instead of an organization full of people who are half iq, half eq, I had fused together both ends of the bell curve to go up with a consultancy organization that could solve any problem.

I see you on the news all the time. I know that your career is, I mean, it's skyrocketing to the moon because everything is coming to you. I think even you know, the government looks at you as, thank God we have Walter o'.

Brien.

I know you can't talk about everything that you do, but maybe give us some examples of how you've saved lives.

Well, thanks to WikiLeaks and other things, certain things that we do have been released now. So we do video analytics for anti terrorism work. We have run artificial intelligence software on the command and control Systems for the U.S. navy and found bugs in there that could cause friendly fire incidents. We work on drug distribution systems for the same reason. So people cannot be killed by drugs that conflict with each other or that they have allergies to. We worked on ballistic missile defense and targeting systems. Those systems are very, very important for their targeting accuracy because if they're slightly off, they can kill over 2000 people and innocent civilians. We also worked on the war game planning for Afghanistan where we used artificial intelligence to predict what are all the possible war games. So we predicted chemical warfare and biological warfare in advance, like putting arsenic in the water supply to the the basis. And by predicting it three months in advance, they could set up a defense and detection mechanism for that. So then when it turns out it actually happened, nobody died. Right.

Which actually Happened.

Yes. I was also the architect of the NORAD cloud, which is a system kind of like our nuclear defenses, but in the cyber world that we've been proposing to Capitol Hill to stop state sponsored hacking from overseas from countries like China and stop them stealing another trillion dollars of IP this year.

I do a lot of work with kids in schools and elementary schools and things. And for those kids that are getting bullied or they feel like they don't necessarily fit, what are one or two pieces of advice that you give to them? What can we share with them to help improve their confidence?

So what I found helps with the kids is to help them and give them messages that other people won't give them. For example, if a kid is a 150 IQ, that means statistically they're 1 in 10,000 people. So that means if everyone in their 30 person class disagrees with them or everyone in their 2,000 person school disagrees with them, there's still more than a 50% chance they're right and everyone else is wrong. It also means by about 12 they've surpassed their parents and they think there's something odd or wrong with them, when in fact there's something odd or wrong with the entire village around them. And they just haven't met more people of their species, they now can relax a little bit going, they're not alone. And the TV show sends out the three messages that A there's a place for everyone who never fit in, B every problem has a solution and C, being smart is cool, that we should celebrate intelligence instead of punishing it.

So this show is really about us understanding the secret to your success. And I think that a lot of people with small businesses, they follow their passions and then they get to this point where they're like, I don't know what to do. And I think you just gave a big piece of advice that's really important. Find other like minded people.

You're absolutely right. But it's beyond that. It's to be conscious of the EQ versus IQ thing. Carnegie Mellon had a report and said 85% of your success is your EQ, 15% is your IQ. So if I didn't learn to recognize that, I was screwed. Steve Jobs said point of view is worth 20 IQ points, seeing things from the customer's point of view. So one of the issues with many business owners is they're so busy going down the rabbit hole of what they do and it doesn't matter if you're a plumber or a carpenter or whatever, it is you do. We know you know plumbing. You're good at plumbing. Nobody's questioning your plumbing. Don't spend any more time getting good at plumbing. Pull yourself out and deal with all the stuff you're terrible at, like marketing plumbing and business cards for plumbing and websites for plumbing and Yelp ratings for plumbing. And recognize that if you walk into any large company here, downtown, take a Bank of America or Farmers Insurance, the guy in charge is not the guy with the highest IQ or the person who knows the most about banking. The CEO is the highest eq. The other guys are in the basement doing the taxes. So don't be the basement guy in your business. Pull yourself out and focus on the stuff that you don't like, that you suck at, that you're terrible at. And it will turn your business around.

In order to get time with the busy guy Walter is, we had to meet him early in the morning. So we're trying one of Cassell's breakfast burgers. An Angus burger patty with a fried egg, avocado, spicy mayo, and a hash brown bun. The bun is 100% potato. I'll tell you one thing, this burger is messy. We had to knife and fork it. And another thing, it's absolutely delicious.

Walter, I'd love to know how you got going with the Scorpion TV show. Because, I mean, it's. It's got huge audience. People love it.

We just kicked off season three. How it came about, like everything else with us was logical. We had opened up a business called Concierge up, and we ended up getting more requests than we had geniuses available to solve them. So our problem became, how do we find more geniuses? We analyzed the situation, and if I wrote a book, the millennials probably wouldn't read it. If I made a movie, they'll forget my name in six months. But if we replace CSI as the number one show on the air for the next 10 years, then the geniuses will come find us, and the kids will grow up wanting to be scientists rather than wanting to be Kim Kardashian. So I thought that can only be good for the country. Yeah.

So what is concierge app?

So for 20 years, we've solved any technical problem because that was our background and our training. I had a bit of an epiphany where I realized that the mechanisms of methodology and training around solving technical problems and creating software is years of engineering around. How do you take something very ambiguous and turn it into something very absolute? Well, that should apply to hacking life, not just hacking systems. So we Come up with the idea of what if instead of scorpion solving any technical problem, we simply just solve any problem. So as an experiment, we opened up a portal called conciergeup.com and we started getting requests. And they got as high as 2,000 requests. Oh, my gosh. Within two weeks.

Give me an example of a problem.

One person wrote a book, they wanted to get on the New York Times bestseller list. Someone else wanted to choose a winning racehorse based on its DNA and other factors. That's basically moneyballing horses.

Yeah.

Wow. And any number of other things. Someone often will come to us because they invented a new product, a new idea, and they have their life savings to start a business. They've never run a business before. They know it's a one shot deal and they don't want to screw this up.

Is there any problem that you can't solve?

We don't work on stuff that's bad for the planet. We only do things that are positive or neutral. And it's not so much that we can't solve a problem. It's a case of the person not having the resources. So there are problems you may come to us with and we go, that's a billion dollar problem.

So let's talk about Syngen. Tell us what is Syngen and how can it benefit us?

Cengn I did degrees in artificial intelligence. Part of our homework was to program a chess computer. The boys in the lab are a little bit competitive, so they turn the computers on each other. And when you turn two chess computers on each other, they rapidly and exhaustively start playing every possible game of chess. And I looked at that and I thought that was a pretty interesting behavior. So I built a double headed chess engine and abstracted from it the rules of chess into a modeling language. So I can now build a model of any scenario on the planet and have it play out every possible outcome. And there's software out there that can be used for automatically testing software. Well, those automate the running of the tests. But who thought of those tests? And that was humans, or as we call them, 3 percenters because they make 3% human error. Ceng not only automates the running of the tests, but it automates the thinking of the tests.

So what do you see kind of when you look into our future, our near future?

Well, some things seem pretty obvious to me on how they'll play out, but we don't seem to be planning for them. For example, we use our cars about 3% of the time on average. Uber survives on closing that 97% gap. If you look at when revolutions have happened in the past, including the French Revolution, it was when we were at about 20% unemployment. Functionally, we're at about 18% now. What happens if Uber tomorrow decide to turn on self driving cars? First of all, the drivers are out of work, so they're turned off. If those self driving cars are centrally maintained downtown like our buses are, and they're all electric and they have no driver, first of all, their cost of an Uber trip goes down to about 2 bucks, which means as a student, you can get everywhere all year for two grand. Why would you spend 10 times that on a car? So dealerships go out of business, gas stations go out of business, tire centers, brake centers, Pep Boys, O'Reilly's, the Whole Food chain's not needed. So start with that. Pushing your unemployment beyond 20%. And when one in three people can't feed their family, they turn into very violent people. Secondly, you take some blue collar worker right now who's packing items into a box. The robot arm that can do that job was invented five, ten years ago, but it's 250 grand and that worker is 16 grand a year, plus health benefits, union fees, etc. So fully loaded, we'll call them 33 grand a year. So the human is cheaper. However, with Moore's law, that technology will get half as cheap every 18 months. And that arm is now 100 grand. But it can work three shifts of production with no union fees, no smoke breaks, and no ability to sue the owner. Guess what? Now you have massive layoffs in the blue collar worker. Uber has partnered with Volvo for exactly this purpose. And they're offering driverless car rides now in Pittsburgh. And I think driverless cars are legal in two states, Nevada and New York.

So I have daughters that are 6 and 8 years old. And one of the things that I worry about is what job is going to be left, what are they going to do? Are there any areas of education maybe that we should have them focused on more than others?

Biotech, nanotechnology.

Cybersecurity, programming in general, learning and focusing on those areas that robots can't do now or in the near foreseeable future? Obviously in the medical field, doctors and nurses and so on, they'll be all safe for about another 29 years.

How should a small company, a small business, protect themselves, would you say?

Well, the number one protection is to have snapshot backups at their location and 20 miles away for disaster recovery if there's an earthquake, chemical spill, or any other outage and take complete snapshots, not keep overriding and using the same tapes because if you get infected, you don't know you're infected. And the ransomware, actually, even though it'll change your files, it doesn't change the last modified stamp. So you'll look at files going, well, that file hasn't changed in two years, so that must be safe. No, it's been changed. It just made the stamp and reset it to two years ago. Wow. So it's getting very nasty and very clever now if you have an entirely separate hard drive that you backed up six months ago and never touched since it's definitely not on that drive. If you're not great at cyber, outsource it, have firewall as a service. Use the cloud. I'm tired of small business owners saying, well, the cloud isn't safe. You think a server under your desk that everyone in the shop has full access to with a cup of coffee on top of it is safe? No, absolutely not. Stick your stuff in a cloud where you're mixed in with 80 million other users and at least you're harder to find.

And I think one other thing to do is to watch Scorpion on cbs.

Thank you so much.

You are awesome. Absolutely awesome.

I think it's safe to say that Scott and I just spoke to one of the most intelligent people we've ever met. Our talk with Walter left us with some serious food for thought. Emotional intelligence, or eq, is just as important as iq. Being able to see things from a customer's perspective is worth 20 IQ points. Avoid fields that could be overtaken by automation in the near future.

Next time, we're at Quinn's Pub in Seattle to meet with Jim Brizimitzis. Jim has over 16 years of startup experience with companies such as Bell Canada, Oracle, and Microsoft. He is currently the General Manager of the Microsoft Startup Program in the US and he and his team work with leading startup accelerators and incubators to help startups all over the country grow their business. Join us as we pick Jim's brain to get some of the best tips for your startup. Next time right here on Business and Burgers.

Check out more episodes of Business and Burgers and our B and B blog at our website, businessandburgers.com and don't forget, visit Business and Burgers on Facebook and give us a big thumbs up. We'll see you next time right here on Business and Burgers.