George Hotz Hacked Everything (tinycorp)

**John Coogan** (0:00)
George was this funny little kid, really chatty. He did whatever he wanted all the time. Really weird and quirky. He used to approach fellow students and try and sell them his home-built computers. He made his own motorized scooter and would ride around our little town from house to house fixing people's computers. Though we don't actually know what he did. We had him over one day to fix our computer, but he didn't fix our computer. He definitely messed it up. Here's another quote. About George, I'm pretty sure he had an ad in the town paper. He came over to our house one afternoon when our computer had been acting particularly fussy. He babbled for a bit about what was wrong with it. And I remember being so intrigued by his knowledge that I just sat there and watched him work. The 14-year-old Hotz proceeded to tamper with our computer for the next couple of hours. When he finished, he received a pretty hefty compensation, I believe around $70 and scooted down our street on his way.
The problem with our new computer, whatever was worsened by his visit. Eventually, we had to trade it in for a new one, but I never blamed him. He was just too damn adorable. So our episode today is about George Hotz, one of the most famous hackers in the world and a really fascinating entrepreneur. I've met George a few times and really enjoyed spending time with him, and he's done, he's touched so many different things, big tech, the hacking community. He's at the center of the AI boom right now because of the latest company he's building. He's worked in self-driving cars and met Elon Musk, and he's just a fascinating character. I think he's also one of the few people that's been on Lex Friedman three times. So there's nine hours of this guy talking that I listened to in preparation for this episode. He's just such a fascinating character. He keeps a list on his personal website of companies that have sued him and recommends that you never buy products from those companies, and we'll go into those lawsuits in a little bit. He's also almost worked with Elon multiple times, but never quite made it work, which is very interesting. And then he's obviously, he really talented technical mind. He's built really impressive technologies as we'll go into, but he's never been one to really game the financial markets and play the fundraising game ultra effectively and take companies public like so many other people in his position might be tempted to. And so I think that really speaks to his character and who he is as a person. And that's what I really want to understand, like what drives him, what makes him unique in a world of cynical technology people sometimes who just want to focus on what will help them raise the next round or cash out. George is always optimizing for something else. Sometimes I think it's just for entertainment value, but a lot of times it's not quite ideology. It's his view of the world is very unique and he expresses his view of the world through the work that he does. So let's go through his history. He's born in 1989, same age as me. Grows up in New Jersey and writes his first computer program at age five on his dad's Apple II. And by fifth grade, he's building his own video game console with an electronics kit that he got from RadioShack. And he's just like a very impressive hacker from a very early age. So in 2004, he becomes a finalist at the Intel International Science and Engineering fair. And he creates this robot that's really impressive. There's footage of it because he was featured on the Today Show and he got a Larry King interview out of it where he built this robot that could go and use camera sensors and take in and map an area. And he put it in the air ducts of his school and mapped out all the air ducts. And Katie kirk is interviewing him and saying, Oh, this is really fascinating. Like, what could this be used for? And she's expecting him to say some trite humanitarian issue, but he immediately jumps to like, the military could use this to put the robot in a building that they're about to break down the door of and raid. And he's just maybe trolling her. Maybe he believes that's just the best application. And you'll see a lot of these robots, they wind up getting used in the military before they become consumer technology. And obviously the mapping stuff that ties to the work that he does in self-driving cars later. But in high school, he's hacking on so many different projects. There's just a whole list of them here. He builds this kind of segue, but you control it with your brain waves. I have no idea how real that was, but it certainly made him kind of an icon on campus as he rode around on this hacked together segue. And then in 2005, he's a finalist in another hacking competition. He builds this 3D imaging project called I Wanna Holladeck, and he wins something like $15,000, $20,000 in a scholarship. And this is the theme in his life, is just hacking a crazy thing, getting a little check, and then moving on to the next thing. So in 2007, he's 17 years old, and he becomes the first person reported to unlock an iPhone. Now, when the iPhone was first released, it was only for AT&T, and George Hotz had T-Mobile, and he wanted to use an iPhone because it was the coolest new gadget, so he figured out how to hack it, and I'll read you this quote from how he actually did it because it's really fascinating. He used a Phillips head eyeglass screwdriver to undo the two screws in the back of the phone. Then he slid a guitar pick around the tiny groove and twisted free the shell with a snap. Eventually, he found his target, the square sliver of black plastic called a baseband processor, the chip that limited the carriers with which it could work.