#39 - Mr. Robot's Technical Producer and Writer - Kor Adana

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's Podcast. Today's guest is Kor Adana. Kor is a writer and technical producer on the show Mr. Robot. And if you're a Mr. Robot fan, or you want to watch the show and don't mind skipping ahead, season three is actually premiering tonight, October 11th. So that's on USA, and I think you can also find it online.
And as always, we're posting the transcript and the video up on the blog, so that's blog.ycombinator.com. All right, here we go.
Okay, so Kor, how did you get into hacking?

**Kor Adana** (0:30)
Well, when I was younger, I always took things apart. I'm the son of an engineer, so I always had tools around the house, I had soldering irons, stuff like that. I'd take apart TVs and VCRs and just figure out how things worked.
And I remember my dad had this old 48666 PC. It's like the first PC that I started working with and learning, like just messing around with. And that kind of evolved into building my own machines. I was fascinated by just ordering the different components, motherboard, RAM, the hard drive, putting it all together. And it was a very painful process of like, oh, I accidentally reformatted the wrong partition and lost all my files, or I have to reformat because I infected myself with some bullshit virus. So it was a great learning experience of just learning how hardware and software worked.
And then by the time I was in middle school, I was more interested in like breaking into systems and learning how I wanted to be the cool hacker that was portrayed in, you know, war games.

**Craig Cannon** (1:38)
What was the media that you were consuming at that point that you're like, oh, that's me.

**Kor Adana** (1:43)
I'm ashamed. Not ashamed. It's a great movie. I'm not ashamed. Ashamed is the wrong word. Hackers was a big influence. War games was a big influence.
So I wanted to be that cool hacker guy that knew more than you did when it came to technology and computers. So that was like a driving force in my stupid adolescent mind.
And it was cool, though, because I had that kind of mindset of like, how do things work? I want to figure out how things work, and I want to use systems in a way that they weren't supposed to be used for, which is a definition of hacking, so to speak. So I remember I would like get in trouble on purpose in middle school, so I could go into the principal's office, because the secretaries in the principal's office, when he waited there, were using the computers to log in to this AS400 system.

**Craig Cannon** (2:37)
Okay.

**Kor Adana** (2:37)
So I would talk to them, I would look at their screens, I would hover over their shoulders, and I would get as much information as I possibly could. And my first real hack, so to speak, was in middle school when I broke into this AS400 system.

**Craig Cannon** (2:50)
So is this like through the school's intranet, or are you doing this from home?

**Kor Adana** (2:54)
Through the school's intranet. The only thing, I didn't really do anything from home until I started, like, dialing into our library, like we had a public library that had a dial-up service connection, so I could dial into those servers. But I did it from the school intranet, which was fun, which was awesome. Didn't really cause any major damage.
But what's interesting is...

**Craig Cannon** (3:13)
Wait, what were you trying to do, like change your class schedule?

**Kor Adana** (3:15)
I just wanted to get in. I didn't want to change anything. I didn't want to get caught. I was really paranoid and nervous about getting caught.
Just wanted to get in. Getting in was enough.
And it was awesome because years later in the writer's room for Mr. Robot, and you'll see this in season two, I think it's the fourth episode, fourth or fifth episode, in the beginning where there's this VO of Elliot talking about his first major hack. And he's like, I broke into my library's, or I can't remember if it was a library or school, but I broke into this AS400 system using a vulnerable FTP service. And that's his first hack, and that was my first hack, and it was just fun to kind of incorporate that into the show in that way. So around that time, I would say middle school, high school, I also really got interested in print calls, and I would get together with my friends and call different businesses, impersonate different people, and really terrible way to spend your time, and not really thoughtful. But it was honestly a boot camp for social engineering. And I think I would like, my writer brain was attracted to the character side of it and the narrative side of it, and building out a story, getting the person on the other line to buy whatever bullshit story that you're feeding them, and in this kind of weird twisted sense of manipulation that's taking place.