How North Korea Infiltrated American Companies With Fake Tech Workers - EP 29 Bob McMillan

**Ashlee Vance** (0:00)
Are you still doing the crazy swimming? I am, in fact. So you're like a cold water, you go in the San Francisco Bay.

**Bob McMillan** (0:08)
I do, I just did the Beta Breakers.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:10)
Wow.

**Bob McMillan** (0:11)
I did the Beta Breakers last year, the race, as a fish, running, you go the wrong way. You know, like Salmon going upstream.
So you wear a fish costume and you go the wrong way.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:24)
Do you actually wear a fish costume?

**Bob McMillan** (0:25)
Yeah, I wore a fish costume. Yeah, I did a story on what's called race banditry, where people who run in racists without registering, basically.
And the whole premise was in... I found this guy in Miami who hated race bandits, and he pulled them out of his marathons and just shamed them. He had a wall of shame kind of videos he would take of these race bandits.

**Ashlee Vance** (0:51)
Why are they? They just don't want to pay the fee?

**Bob McMillan** (0:53)
They don't want to pay the fee? Yeah.
I'm on team race bandit a little bit, so I was like, okay, so I've got this guy that just hates the race bandit. I need somebody who loves the race bandits. At the Beta Breakers, there are these salmon that have run the wrong way for like 20 years, and they're treated like gods. They're race bandits, but everybody, I did it with them. I got high-fived like 140 times in one blot.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:22)
So you were a race bandit.

**Bob McMillan** (1:24)
Well, actually, Wall Street Journal Ethics, I paid to register, but I ran with the race bandits.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:30)
Okay.

**Bob McMillan** (1:32)
So I did that, and then this year, I swam from the Bay Bridge to the end of Beta Breakers, 10-mile swim, which was a big swim.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:39)
The water is what temperature?

**Bob McMillan** (1:41)
It's like 60s now. It's nice.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:43)
Then you've been to homeless for years. I have. How many times a week do you go in the bay?

**Bob McMillan** (1:48)
Three times. Three or four, maybe.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:51)
Yeah.

**Bob McMillan** (1:51)
We're actually doing a journalism swim. All the journalists who want to swim, you're invited.

**Ashlee Vance** (1:57)
Sounds horrible. Bob McMillan, you go by Robert McMillan when you're a dignified reporter on The Wall Street Journal.

**Bob McMillan** (2:19)
That's to separate the people who know me from the people who don't. It's what we call a hack.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:26)
Well, we have known each other for a long time. We kind of covered very similar stuff for many, many years.

**Bob McMillan** (2:34)
Enterprise.

**Ashlee Vance** (2:35)
Yes, data center, technology, and I followed your work. I've known you as a friend. Well, I'm going to set the stage for people a little bit. We've known each other for a long time. You're a fantastic reporter. I know people don't all love reporters, but Bob is one of the good ones. He actually does his work and does his homework and great reporting for years on all kinds of different subjects, which you've been doing focused on security for a while now.

**Bob McMillan** (3:04)
Yeah. It's been off and on 15 years or so, probably. Yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (3:08)
And so I just thought this would be a, you're always doing great stories, but there are a couple buckets of stories you pursued over the last 18 months or so that really jumped out at me and I wanted to kind of get into these pieces in a way maybe you can do on a podcast. This will be a little different than our usual fare. But yeah, I wanted to dig in to a couple of these worlds, these underworlds you've uncovered. Just to give people some context, I mean, this first one, we're going to spend a lot of time on it, but it's North Koreans becoming remote workers in the United States through these surrogates in the US and doing these remote jobs at, I mean, the names are not disclosed, but it's companies like Nike is disclosed and pretty prominent US corporations.

**Bob McMillan** (4:04)
I think pretty much anyone that hires a remote worker in the US has at very least received an application from a North Korean fake IT worker.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:15)
Okay. So there's a ton to get to it here. Another part of this is this odd fascination with despicable me that these workers seem to have.

**Bob McMillan** (4:26)
You want to talk about that, yeah.

**Ashlee Vance** (4:27)
These online minion personas. So let's get into it, man. Then there's a whole other set of stuff that I want to get into after, but let's start in North Korea. So what you just mentioned, like anyone who may have received an application for these remote workers, when I read your stories and you read what the FBI is claiming, and they are saying this is a massive thing. Why don't you set us up on the context of how you've started to learn about this?