LINUX saved his life! // ft. Shawn Powers

Key Takeaways

hey guys how's it going uh welcome back to the noobs podcast uh this is our episode five already uh with sean powers and uh what are we talking about today chuck sean is a good buddy of mine he's a linux guru and he has one of the most interesting and challenging stories i've ever heard the dude got in a car crash 23 years ago and literally forgot everything before that time and he had to relearn his entire trade which includes linux it was a pretty crazy story right it was it was insane and incredibly inspiring i think it'll be good for anyone who is even now at a point in their life that they want to change careers that even if you were to forget everything and start over it's possible yeah i mean because like everyone's at one point gonna have to start from zero and learn i.t whether that's when you're young or you're right now wanting to make a career change because your job sucks sean's a really good example of that because he was very uh he was already an i.t guy and then he forgot everything and had to start from scratch he'd even know how to turn a computer on which is kind of crazy um but sean is also more than just like a guy who had to relearn things he's also a fellow cbt nuggets instructor with me where we taught how to do it stuff he was the resident linux guy and now he's doing some really really fun stuff on his youtube channel and we talked about some crazy stuff like stuff that we didn't even know about yeah like crypto stuff this thing called file coin and ipfs dude we narrowed it out hardcore in this so you're in for a treat um shawn's a fantastic guy and um very interesting guy one of my good friends from cbt and uh yeah you're gonna have a good time so let's get right into it sean powers uh i've known you forever we've been friends for a long time uh but for those of you that don't know who you are who are you um i am gosh isn't it funny that we usually define ourselves by our jobs right like well i am a person who did this and this and this so i will try to do it the the correct way and say i am a husband and a father and um my kids are grown now i i it's amazing how old i'm getting i have three adult children and um my eldest just found out she's pregnant i'm gonna be a grandpa congrats that's amazing yeah thank you so uh i gosh i've been i'm a linux guy um but more than that i'm just a tech guy who linux is my tool of choice and as i talk through the podcast it'll maybe make some more sense why but uh i trained at cbt nuggets uh before and after chuck for a while i'm no longer a trainer at cbt nuggets but um now i'm doing training on youtube apparently i followed in your footsteps my my hairy face brother uh but yeah that's uh that tech tech wise or job wise that's it i mean i've done all sorts of things i was a i was a manager of a microsoft database department at a university i was the tech director at a k-12 school for like 12 years um i ran tech support i mean you have to right if you're in i.t that has to be your first job running tech support but my tech support was for dial-up internet users using trumpet winsock so uh yeah i saw a um a t-shirt trying to be like gofundme a while back and it was a trumpet winslock joke but no one got it yeah i don't get it see and i watched the the video that we did like back when we were both trainers right when we were we met at headquarters and and you interviewed me and the trumpet windsock thing came up there and and nobody in the comments i don't think at that point knew either so no no is it's a dinosaur thing now so if you know about it talk about it in the comments [Laughter] date yourself real quick it's going to be somebody in all caps who doesn't really know how the internet works well they have to type in all caps because they can't see the the text they're writing maybe that's it yeah yeah so uh sean i wanted to have you on because first of all you are like the linux guru but i think the reason you are a linux guru is probably the most interesting story i've heard ever and uh and nowadays you know everyone's learning linux because now it's just a part of it everywhere that hasn't always been the case you could get away without learning linux but now no matter what job you have in i.t linux is going to be there so i think it's people are like oh my gosh linux sounds really scary and overwhelming i think hearing your story and back when you had to learn it which was much harder back then versus how it is now they're going to be inspired by this so i want to jump straight into that your origin story because that and also like we're kind of on the anniversary of that it was a few days it is yeah that was i was gonna say yesterday actually what so today is the third of march right yeah i think so yes third march yeah i'll make sure that it right so yeah yesterday was 23 years ago on yesterday i had a car accident and it wasn't even a major accident to be honest i was alone i live in northern michigan so the roads were icy but they weren't even that icy it wasn't that bad and i went off the road nobody knows why my head went through the side window you know the passenger side window of the car and i don't remember anything before that my entire life was just gone i woke up literally shaking from the cold in a car covered in glass no idea who i was why i was there uh it was strange it was strange and that's uh that's kind of how my my story in it began i was so the the tech support job that i talked about the answering the phones i was doing that before it's actually on my way to that job in my car and i had a cell phone and i had a briefcase oddly enough i still can't imagine that but i had a briefcase on the seat next to me and a cell phone and it was uh man this is the date sean show apparently but i had a cell phone that uh it wasn't really a flip phone it was like a candy bar phone that like the mouthpiece opened up like flipped down it was the latest technology ever because it was the very first digital cell phone like most cell phones at that point were analog and uh this was a digital cell phone and the coolest part was outgoing calls were free for the first minute now i know now you know minutes and talking is nothing but that was huge man so anyway my phone was open when they found me i was apparently trying to make a call or answering a call or something briefcase is open i had even worse coffee than this that had dumped all over my lap it was gas station pumpkin spice cappuccino so not just pumpkin spice cappuccino this is the powder stuff in the gas station well not to make light of the situation but i think we found the reason for the crash yeah it could have been it was just depression it was you know so it to this it's funny to this day the smell of that gas station cappuccino just is it's disheartening it just bothers me it just gives me all sorts of ebgb's it's just normal for anybody yeah yeah yeah maybe it's just the exposure to the fumes there but anyway so i my first memory was actually in uh an ambulance i was looking up at a guy named steve first person i ever met guy named steve ambulance operator i was poked full of ivs glad i don't remember getting those they were already in when i when i was born if you don't mind like so i just want to point this out because like when you first told me i had to ask you like this same question you did not you still to this day don't remember anything before that crash no that's a complicated no uh in fact it's it's even more complicated since we last talked about it so so it's it's a it's a qualified no maybe that's the thing and um somebody yeah i went to the hospital i uh i had a wedding ring on um so i figured i was married positive i didn't have any kids i don't know why i was positive but i was positive i didn't have any kids and um a couple you know they didn't know who i was and and couldn't get a hold of anybody it was it was just a weird situation it turns out i was married and i did have a two-year-old daughter which was is still awkward for me to say sorry you know amanda i don't remember you at all you're being born uh now she has now she's the one that's pregnant so um she has forgiven me and still talks to me so anyway uh that uh yeah i eventually came back from the hospital they said oh it's just swelling you know you'll get your memory back i mean this kind of thing happens you hit your head and you know there's some swelling you don't see anything dangerous you know they gave me all sorts of like ct scans and stuff and we don't see we see some minor uh swelling and maybe some sort of damage but nothing bad and uh it'll probably take a day or two and you'll you know everything will just come back and so they my wife took me home and we were actually having really rough times i was um i don't know how much of this i told you in the last time but we were having actually marital issues and my wife was very pregnant with our second child uh we were living in my mother-in-law's house uh sleeping on a mattress on the floor it was a it was a rough it was a rough time in my life and then after the car accident i um i didn't i didn't remember anything but i remembered i didn't remember but i could do things for example my wife brought me home and i'm like i don't i don't recognize anything i don't know any of this and then i saw the computer that was sitting there i'm like oh oh can you make this go i can turn make it so that i can type something and she's like yeah and so she opened up i don't know what she opened up but she opened up something like oh i can type like the wind it was amazing right i still could touch type without any problem uh couldn't open a program didn't know what program i was unique to type with but uh yeah so things like that um i could i could sing along with songs on the radio i could i could tell you who the president was i could not tell you who i voted for because i didn't remember any of that i so i didn't remember personal things but i remembered strange factual things and apparently the brain stores information differently and um yeah one of my ram chips was just knock loose so do you think that like your personality may have changed so normally it does i mean you can imagine over the past 23 years we've done a lot of like research and stuff on that and uh normally people's personality changes oddly enough everybody i know says no not at all i've always been this weird it was uh that that's not a that's not a that's what i was getting too yeah you were hoping for a reason like it's okay guys it's there's a reason he's gonna make sense in the world here yeah no i'm just kidding sean is a wonderful man um that so that's that's terrifying and crazy uh and you so you didn't remember your wife you you assumed you were married you didn't remember your kid which is so insane because yeah i mean you'll find cameron's about to have a his first child here soon congrats that's a that's a momentous occasion like that's right that's stuck in your brain forever i couldn't imagine forgetting the process like finding out you're pregnant baby shower figuring out all that stuff and forgetting all that even forgetting the birth itself would be really strange and i guess what's what's most fascinating about this for me is like you mean you are a product of your experiences but you barely remember i mean you said it's different now more complex but i'm assuming at the at the point where right after you had it i still don't remember you didn't you didn't remember a lot of the stuff you that made you who you are but you still are who you are which is crazy to me that's yeah it is really bizarre it it's strange and um yeah and so yeah i mentioned it in passing but too my wife was like seven months pregnant well let's see it was march april may june july 5. so i guess she was five months pregnant which is pretty pregnant to be honest i mean that's you know five months is pretty pregnant and so uh she actually had to go back to work busting tables at a local restaurant because i was agoraphobic i couldn't leave the house i uh i didn't sleep for two months and if you're uh if you're a sleep person you're thinking well that's not possible if you don't sleep for that long you go crazy it's true also didn't sleep for two months no it it was um it was just it was a rough time but the good news is because of that and because the the car insurance that i had denied my claim uh so they didn't get me any help or any any rehabilitation or anything yeah that was that was pretty crappy to be quite honest um because it was cold when the ambulance found me i was shaking because i wasn't wearing a coat i was shaking and the ambulance said um or the report said like he's shaking possible seizure well they did all the scans i did not have a seizure absolutely no it's not like maybe he didn't i just did not have a seizure apparently that shows up on your brain scans and you know i didn't but the insurance company denied my claim and so i didn't get any help i didn't get any therapy i didn't get any rehabilitation again anything wow but again all things all things happen for a reason i guess and that is why i decided after like six months of just rehabilitating at home and like oh i can go outside now that's that's nice um i need to be able to do something with my life right i mean i have a family to support here and i started relearning my trade but i couldn't afford anything right my wife is literally bussing tables to pay for bills so all i could afford was linux because it was free now so what year was this that you were dealing with all this uh 1999 1999 so 1999. the internet was still very very young and and we were still dealing with floppy disks and things like that so yeah yeah so i learned with floppy disks and i mean yeah i mean i installed you know the uh i again i it's a long time ago i think that was about the time of the halloween version of red hat which was like one of the really famous versions but yeah installing uh linux over and over and ruining a windows install as i messed up the boot sector and all that kind of stuff i learned from the school of hard knocks because hard knocks is all i had and so um no i'm curious i don't think i asked this last time but um so you had to relearn a trade right so i mean how much of your trade did you remember uh did you remember anything besides touch typing no it's it's really bizarre i i think um so no none of the stuff that i did like how to do it unix stuff i mean it was all the internet stuff that i was doing tech support on was unix based like this huge array of isdn lines split up over or no a t1 line fractional t1 split up over a whole bunch of literal modems that you know had phone lines coming in i didn't remember how to do any of that stuff um but the troubleshooting skills and the the know-how to figure stuff out like i mean you guys are both i.t people right and so you know that the skill is not um the rope memorization the skill is to be able to use those tools that you have to accomplish something and thankfully the ability to utilize tools that came back pretty quick right i could i could troubleshoot like oh i messed up my hard drive you know now what you know and yeah partially because i have any other choice you know i had to figure it out but like most people when they encounter like an issue they're like oh yeah i don't even know where to begin with that they don't have that troubleshooting methodology that we just we learn over time and it's a skill we have so that's amazing you still had that yeah but what i'm curious about is like how did you know to go for linux how did you know that was the free cheap option because most people still to this day are like wait what's this linux there how'd you find linux back in 1999. yeah yeah yeah so um that was a luck on my part i mean i know it doesn't seem like a lucky story but it was luck because i um like i said i was working on a unix system that i think that i learned the unix system on the job like a guy that hired me is like okay this is what you gotta do and you gotta log in here so i knew that if i wanted to get my old job back which at that point i was like hey it'd be nice to have a job again so i'd love to get my tech support job back i need to learn unix but i couldn't even afford unix i don't know why i didn't go with freebsd to be quite honest i think linux and unix were about the same popularity wise but linux gosh it might even have been that there was a linux book at the library i honestly don't remember what made me choose linux over freebsd uh but that's the reason i went with the unix route is just because i had been working on tech support and i knew if i ever wanted to do that again i had to be able to do something uh how to relate how did your job handle that like when they found out they're like hey we have this guy who's a tech support guy and now he just forgets he doesn't know anything about his job anymore how did they handle that so i i didn't work directly the the isp was a local community college and i didn't work directly for the community college i worked for a company and the company was contracted to do support you know so like my boss wasn't really the person at the college my boss handled it really well actually he's uh still a friend a facebook friend you know he'll still comment on stuff i posted yesterday like it's the 23rd anniversary and he commented holy cow i remember that and i said wow way to brag i don't but so he was my boss he was great i mean you know he didn't pay me anymore i mean it was you know i couldn't work right but he was he was great and was a you know a great person the college though this is actually still gets my gizzard a little bit uh the next year later on in the story foreshadowing here i got an incredible job at a local k-12 school as a tech director right and when the school was checking my references and past jobs they called to college and the guy in charge of the college whose name i won't say but i really want it because he's still really uppity and really popular he said if you hire sean powers it'll be the worst mistake you've ever made whoa just because i stopped coming to work after i had a car accident and forgot my life so yeah like out of all the excuses that's one of the better i've heard like i didn't know i had a job [Laughter] yeah right like oh i didn't know you hired me so yeah yeah i got the job anyway but that was um people take it both ways so like a lot of people didn't believe me um oh sure you forgot everything huh like yeah no really i just want to sit home and do nothing and you know sleep on a mattress on the cement floor that's that's really my goal in life is to be that guy so i made this all up now it was um yeah it's been a mixed bag how people how people received it but you know i could have let that define me right i could have i could have said i had a horrible car accident so now i'm going to you know whatever that means you know i'll live on state assistance and i'll or i'll you know who knows what but i didn't want that to be the case i i wanted to work i wanted to support my family so i relearned linux of all things and then then i did not go and try to get my job back at the college or work for that guy actually the guy that i worked for ended up selling his business but i didn't try to get that job back i applied for a job that i would never get because you know they say like apply like dress for the job you want apply big and you know just go for it and i did and the local school district was hiring uh a technology director for like the entire district you know k-12 school and i put in my application and because i was local they agreed to interview me and i'm sure nobody expected to you know that they would hire me but i apparently interviewed really well and they hired me there was a lot there were lots of uh uh circuit breakers in the thing right i was hired on the condition that they could fire me at any moment with no i was on probation i was all these things like you're already a nice guy exactly yeah like we heard that it'll be the worst mistake we've ever made um but that boss uh the guy the superintendent who did hire me again still a friend of mine pretty close friend i really like him his name i will say dale rieker great guy um he uh he took a chance on me and it worked out well i was there for 12 years so now this is just a random thought in my head but i'm curious do you still list the experience from before your accident on your resume and does it i have to be honest i haven't created a resume since i uh left that that job and i i honestly don't remember probably not probably not it was probably uh oh because i did it i did a couple other things let's see uh they were all before my accident that's why that's why i forgot to mention them all day but yeah i like had a i had a computer business of my own power net computer services and if you're thinking i've never heard of that right a lot of things business guy is not one of them so i you know i had clients and i did all their work real estate um places was were kind of my bailiwick so i did a lot of real estate computer systems and networking um but yeah i i would not put that on my my resume i don't think no i the school was a my first career job and so that's like the first one you put on there right yeah so they hired you to be the technology director for the school district yes what were you actually doing what did the job entail boy uh it was a wide open job description it was the kind of job description that you know means we don't really know but we need you to make everything work and that's pretty much what it was anything like 2 000 right this was 2000 yeah like february of 2000 probably 11 months after the schools are probably really trying to now embrace technology and there's like we just need someone technical they had just gotten uh a bond like two years previous i don't know if you're familiar with school bonds but it's basically okay so they just got a big lump of money uh two years previous two or three years previous and whenever the original imac came out from steve jobs like the blueberry one whenever that happened they had just gotten a bond because they bought a crap ton of those right all over the school oh wow so not so i pictured a windows environment no there's a macintosh environment yeah yeah remind me that because i'll tell you about the interview part there too but um so they got all this equipment but in the bond they didn't do a whole lot of maintenance planning and so after about two or three years computers started to break down and need to be replaced and fixed and networking gear was wearing out and i mean it was all 10 megabit hubs and that wasn't really doing it anymore and um so the person who i replaced left and i inherited no money tons of equipment that needed to be fixed and a platform that i knew nothing about in fact it was a complete macintosh school district this was before os x so it's not unix it's it's mac os i mean this is you know oh yeah yeah yeah okay i i totally forgot that yeah the unix wasn't introduced until os x 10. oh my gosh did you at least have like a centralized like was the x serve around back then or that's what they called it apple server was the x server oh no that's way after os 10 even came out excerpt um yeah so no we just had uh some g3 servers that were a couple file servers but during the interview all of the tech questions had were about the macintosh right well i didn't have money for windows on my home computer so i obviously didn't have a mac right i mean love them or hate them they're pricey and what i did i knew that going into the interview and so i downloaded this uh emulator that ran on linux or windows i don't remember whatever i was running on my my home computer and it was like a super old version of mac os that it emulated but i did as much as i could in this tiny little emulation window and when they asked me questions i said ah i'm not terribly familiar with how things work right now historically what i would say is blah blah blah blah and i'd say and most of my experience is with an emulator i was i was honest i said i you know i i wanted to be able to get an understanding of what i'd be working on and so i did the best i could and actually that impressed them that i had gone and got an emulator and even though my questions or that my answers to their questions were several generations of technology outdated the fact that i had you know learned stuff about it was was impressive so yeah i got the job that i probably shouldn't have gotten and um after all of my uh probationary periods i i stayed on so that's yeah that's amazing and that's such good advice for someone who's like trying to apply for a job where they maybe can't afford to mess with cisco equipment or um windows or windows server or anything which is way easier nowadays to get your hands on but yeah just to show forth the effort of trying to do it so like back then doing an emulator sounds really really hard yeah it sounds complicated yeah and you're like why don't you just say virtualization that's because virtualization didn't work didn't exist there was no such thing yeah i'm supposed to emulation difference right surprise you had an emulator there i found an emulator yeah i found a way to do that because i mean i think we had one computer in my house at the time that's only because our dad was an ita guy and he's had an old computer that he brought home i can't imagine what it was like back then um and first of all how did you even get your hands on linux like you installed it via floppy drives right where did you get those yeah so i i honestly don't remember and i've tried to think about that for a while i don't know i think i had them because i think while i was you know in the job you know the unix job and stuff i i'm sure that my boss had given me stuff to you know like hey you should really learn this and stuff so i think i just i think it was sitting around the house i think is basically why i had it um i don't think i procured it from anywhere i lived in northern michigan there's no way that i could have gotten linux anywhere around right i mean there's just nowhere to go for that 1999. i'm just so curious about the process because like i mean i imagine you probably only had one computer in the house right and you you basically destroyed by putting linux on it and then you can't google anything to figure out how to fix it again so you said to figure it out that's so impressive like i'm i'm so helpless without google right now i don't know how you do that yeah it's um yeah it was i mean it's learning learning experience right there's a reason google exists now because that sucked [Laughter] so you got this technology director job uh yeah where do you go from there uh so from there and that was i mean 12 years it's a long time in a job um and a part of the it was a struggle uh i was a young guy i mean i was 23 um 23 24 23 i think uh and i i'm sorry i don't know how old you guys are but 24. yeah okay so imagine being in charge of an entire school district with you know full of computers and budgetary decisions and all of these things that you're like i didn't know so my budget was slashed like when i started i had no clout to like try to push for money or anything and the person with the bond left when the bond money ran out so there was just no money in technology so i actually implemented linux solutions in the school so we needed new file servers i didn't go for a powermax server because they're expensive what did i do i installed linux on hardware that was there or no i i that's not true i got old dell servers from ebay and this isn't a like professional environment right but i got old servers old dell servers and i installed linux and netatalk which is a file server for apple and that's where our files were stored and stuff i actually wrote software this is actually amazing to me even because it was pretty amazing software i wrote a login screen so when the computer would start up it would you would see a login screen and you would have to type your login and password to get in and then it would mount your thing just like a normal login procedure but imagine inventing all that from scratch right nothing existed there was no there was no centralized authentication i had to come up with all that so it was all based on linux servers because that's what i had learned that's what i knew and what the heck that's crazy what language was that written in uh oh because it was mac software i don't even remember whatever the i honestly don't even know what it's what it would be called part of it was applescript but i mean there was a gui portion of it probably still all applescript it was just really really big and intense and um and it wasn't secure i mean if you sat down with the computer and you're like i don't know if you're a mac but you do like the command it's not let's command not open apple but the command option escape and you know you can like cancel stuff out you could do that and just cancel the login window and then you just be there with nothing mounted and do whatever you wanted you could erase everything on the computer there was no security involved you'd get in trouble if the teacher caught you that was about it so um yeah it was a hack job but i mean it worked and it didn't cost any money and so i was there for 12 years and the only reason i left is because uh school school finances got worse and worse and worse and they were starting to do more contractors and for it work you know the the on staff i.t person was kind of going away the dodo bird and i needed i needed um insurance so so i left and i went from there to a university where i was uh a department manager of uh the database department for a university down in grand rapids michigan and i was so unqualified for that job it was a microsoft shop so it was all sql database servers and i was the boss of four different uh database developers it was the i i guess i just interviewed well because i should not have gotten that job either so this whole story is like how sean bested his way into all these jobs right that's pretty much that goes along with you know when we're done talking about my weird shady past i'll talk about what i'm my future desires are because uh yeah i got to try all these things that i shouldn't even have been qualified for but i did and um that's close to the where the part of the story that you know i i left after less than a year there i was only there for 10 months i think um and cbt nuggets hired me full time so they hired me away for like three times that i was making it was a no-brainer um we moved down to grand rapids but we weren't able to sell our house up here and so i got offered the job at cbt nuggets and i could move back to the house that we owned instead of paying rent in the city and make more money and still have insurance so yeah that's that's uh that's why we went up there i don't know how long let's see how long did i start cbt what's that what year did you start cbt so i started doing contract work in 2009. okay okay but i was still working at the school because i started in the school and i can do the math you know with you so i started in 2000 at the school and i worked there for 12 years so 2012 was when i left there i went to the university for a year so 2013 is when i started uh as a full-time trainer man and then i quit a year ago year about a year ago i guess year and a half ago something like that so yeah i want to jump into that i'm really curious now but um so i'm curious how did they find you how did you start training when did you yes um while i was at the school for all those years doing all those linux things in a mac environment most of the time nobody had any clue that it wasn't a mac server behind the scenes right because that's that's how you get linux into an environment everybody is you just do it and nobody knows but i also started writing for linux journal magazine um i i made contacts there i wrote an article i got i got the cover i like my okay what i did i'll tell you because it's kind of nerdy so i made an arcade game a main machine and i used linux for the operating system i bought an old arcade case from like some vendor around the area brought it home stripped it out put a computer and a monitor in it and then i i actually took apart a keyboard because there weren't really controllers for making name controllers you actually had to tear apart a keyboard and a keyboard has this grid it's like an xy coordinate grid that determines which key you're pressing and so i had to map out each individual one and then wire a grid to the joystick controller anyway it was super nerdy and really worth an article so i wrote an article on it uh with pictures and it got us accepted they put the picture of my uh thing on the cover i think can you see back there the red thing in the corner yeah yeah i see it okay that's the very first issue of linux journal i was ever in and um i wrote a couple other articles and then they hired me so then i was a staff writer and editor for several years until they they went out of business and that is how cbt nuggets found me they actually approached a really close friend of mine that was a writer at linux journal he had also written a bunch of linux books kyle rankin great guy um still really close friend and he said you know what i do not want to do videos it doesn't appeal to me at all but there's this guy from linux journal that um he's he's crazy in fact so if you go to linux journal online the youtube channel and you scroll back like 13 years you will see me doing non-stop youtube videos uh crazy product reviews and just the stupidest tech tips and really i mean 4x3 format because widescreen wasn't invented yet but um i was a video guy for linux journal and so kyle told cbt nuggets you should check this guy out they contacted me and the rest was history so i remember a while back i looked up your old stuff and it's it's amazing what what an archive to have because like it it definitely dates you and it's incredible it does it was awesome and the sad thing is i don't have control of that either that does make me sad right i mean it's not my channel if you go back on my channel you'll see my all-time most famous youtube video is me breaking into my van i show people how to break into a minivan and that's gotten the most views of any video i've ever made but external stuff physical penetration testing uh so anyway but yeah it's all out there still and you can see uh a very young me talking some really nerdy stuff and reviewing products and yeah it was a lot of fun we're going to enjoy a few of those clips on here because it was it's pretty awesome and hilarious um and you were doing some shits here and there and talking about linux back in the day it was fun yeah yeah and we did we did all sorts of things like uh we took a hundred of the tech tip videos that i did i mean i did so many of them 100 tech tips and we made a dvd that linux journal included in one of their yearly things i still have like dvds like 101 sean powers tech tips oh my god that's crazy that's hilarious that you made a dvd it's it's weird i know right it is weird that at that point so like 15 years ago i mean i was the guy that was recognized at conferences and i was you know a keynote speaker like ohio linuxfest and stuff and then i got the job at cbt nuggets and it's like a different sort of environment of uh i don't i wanna say fame but it's like you know i was known for something completely different so i'm looking forward to what the next stage of of sean powers is because i don't i get to make it up on my own no yeah yeah so like cbt definitely a cool job uh one of the best jobs i've ever had besides working for myself so the boss is a jerk and it's a different different situation and so you're saying that your fame in the linux world kind of changed when you worked at cbt like it didn't grow it went away it went away it completely went away and it's and again yeah i agree cbt nuggets my favorite job that i've ever had um but i'm separated from from the world right i mean i'm separated from the end user i'm separated from the consumer i'm separated from and i'm not speaking at conferences i'm not uh also the economy crashed i mean back then you know i was getting flown all over uh to conferences and stuff and then nobody had money anymore so i didn't get to fly all over uh but the the fame so to speak uh it went away and everyone's like oh i yeah i remember him and it's it's cool i i'm not upset though because um now i get to i get to start over and do just what i want and it's pretty great i still have a job i actually still uh tangentially work uh for cbt nuggets related stuff i'm just a sysadmin i'm not making videos anymore um i'm just a linux sysadmin uh doing some work there so uh right now um yeah i'm still doing linux it's crazy though so that's awesome you switch from and we we can include or not include parts of this in the actual podcast so you switched uh from being a trainer to just being a sys admin i i'm assuming you're managing the linux servers in aws no these are no um yeah i don't know what i should talk about i know i know um no actually i am so i know that i'm allowed to talk about some stuff there was some privacy issues for some of the projects i was doing behind the scenes before but that's not the case now right now um my my job is managing file coin servers uh crypto um i've done a lot of crypto work behind the scenes for a lot of years um i sold thousands of bitcoin for two dollars each you do the math um yeah i know um but anyway uh now i'm managing uh like five different data centers six if you count my farm um doing file coin mining and ipfs storage and stuff like that so that's just managing linux servers headless linux servers all over the you can said so many things that we're gonna have we're gonna have to like reverse sorry and you're part of this file coin what is filecoin what is that so filecoin is uh a crypto based storage thing so are you familiar with look let me take a sideways step or a step back further are you familiar with are you familiar with ipfs yes i'm not so someone here including this guy is not going to know what ipfs is so tell us okay i'll give you the very quick version of ipfs first of all yeah it's so incredible ipfs stands for interplanetary file system and that's because it's designed to work everywhere like if we get an ipfs node on mars it'll just work and the the core concept is you no longer address files based on where they're stored you only address them based on their hash now this is this concept isn't completely formed like a lot of times if you're doing like blob storage you just like reference the the actual hash well the way this merkle tree thing works you have a file or a folder full of files and it's broken up into this big elaborate hash that is kind of like a tree and the very top of the tree is a cid and i do not remember what that stands for but anyway see ideas and it's the you know it's just text you know it's just a hash um and that is how you reference your file so if you're going to move your file you move this hash like you know copy this hash to that hash or whatever to this hash and then the actual location of the file is on the ipfs network it's peer-to-peer kind of like bitcoin works it doesn't work as smoothly as bitcoin which is a very big frustration of mine it's still young but you reference a hash and then if you want to make sure that you have access to that hash you can pin that hash to your local node and then that hash is stored on your node but when you reference it you don't reference like the spot on my node you still reference the file on the ipfs network by its hash and then your node goes to the ipfs network and it says shut it right here you know it's right here if not it says okay ipfs network you know interplanetary system with billions of nodes i need this hash and any node that has it just sends it and it sends it over the same type of tcp connection that you would get it from your local node so from a from a abstracted point of view you don't know where it's stored apart from you can you can pin something to your local node so it's fast uh but it's just lives on the network and so whoa that's crazy the idea there is in storage essentially it yeah well we're not to we're not to um no we're not to file coin at all yet this is not crypto this is completely separate this is just file storage on people's computers right so just so how do they keep track of it without a ledger uh it's all a peer-to-peer network it's all hashes and so i when i create a file and i turn it into a hash like say i have a text file and i turn it into a hash then my node knows of that hash and so then there's routing between the nodes and if somebody else is like anybody have a file named this then it would say you know ask its node next to it it would say no and it would branch out with this you know complicated routing thing and eventually my note would say oh yeah i got that and send it along and ideally that happens super fast and happens with like if multiple people have it it works like bitcoin or not bitcoin i'm sorry it works like a bittorrent where everybody sends it so you get it super fast from all over the world okay and another really cool aspect of it is let's say that i wanted to uh make sure that i had a copy of my particular files that i have hashes for and if you have the hash you have a file right the file is the hash then i would say um let's spin up a note in aws or a company who's a pinning company say i want uh to make sure that these files are on the network so i need you to pin this hash this hash and this hash they pin it and all of a sudden as soon as it's done syncing off the network which at first it's just for me because i just created it then it's stored there so i know that it's always going to be on the ipfs network readily available because it's pinned on somebody's node man so the way i'm imagining it i like just kind of reiterating so it's a massive distributed file store or file server and then kind of also a database basically and um now when you is who is it for like are you do you have files that are like you may not want to share with someone like a company file and you could like not have that hash distributed or is that not for that case so ipfs itself does not offer any sort of protection what you could do is share the hash of an encrypted file okay okay it makes sense so essentially doesn't do anything for anybody if you're deciding to put it on ipfs your your intent is to have it spread around the world like that there's there's no control available everywhere right right okay okay it makes sense that's why it's a lot i mean yes and also no because nobody's gonna want you know my third grade powerpoint so it's never gonna leave my node right but it's if it's gonna be on the ipfs network it's going to be pinned on my node and if i want to have a backup i just set up another node and say pin all the same files and then it's synced between those two and then if i'm ever on mars and i say oh crap i forgot my third grid power point i just connect to the ipfs network and get the hash because it's on my nodes so last question before we jump into file point if we can um yeah actually where did that question go it was is it on mars now dang it can i fetch it do you know the hash oh yeah yeah so is there like a discovery mechanism to find files like searching or is it just you have to know the hash um no no because uh a file you create a hash by hashing a file right i mean that's that's how it's created and chunks the data up into different things so you know oh well i could go way into the weeds with how it's actually chunked out and i know you're like you're really just skimming it for us right now yeah but you know i'm curious you don't know what it is i mean all you know is it's a hash and there's data behind it you have no idea what it is unless um you know you get the whole hash and like you could scan the file that you've created with that hash you know on your local computer or whatever and maybe figure out it's a jpeg or it's a document but is there a hash is just a hash with data is there metadata on the hash at all or is it just just the hash if you put metadata on the hash there might be so yeah i mean most files the first few bytes are some sort of metadata you know like what kind of file is it and sometimes you can just you know if you take the extension off and you look at a hex you know editor you can see what a file is usually but no the point is not to discover files the point is to uh reference files in a in a by hash now location okay so it takes the location out of the out of the picture so you're running ipfs and you're you're managing multiple data centers that are running ipfs is that what they are yes and and part of that is uh so that we can provide for clients which we're not yet but i mean provide clients for redundant um multi-point connection to download i mean you'll download from multiple places at once ideally like bittorrent but you know for the good not the bittorrent choice for the bad but you know it gets a bad rap uh the idea is that we would pin files in multiple locations so that they're always available if one goes down it doesn't matter it's still pinned in multiple locations and the ipfs network can support it and that's where um and that's where filecoin comes in so filecoin adds a blockchain on top of the ipfs network that guarantees storage because let's say that i tell you um hey chuck cameron i need you guys to set up some nodes ipfs nodes and i want you to pin these hashes and i want to make sure that they're always there you could say sure take my money and not set up the node what am i gonna you know what am i gonna do um so filecoin is a way to guarantee the storage and basically it's a it's a blockchain so there's a record and then there's collateral that's put into a block of data that is stored the back end of filecoin is ipfs but you don't generally see ipfs when you're using filecoin it's just uh that's what the technology that filecoin uses so that's not the new rabbit hole to jump on yeah that's crazy yeah so uh no i'm curious now what's the point like so you're saying we is this like a new company or a new venture from a company that you're doing yeah i don't know how much i can talk about that it's uh right uh i mean filecoin is it's guaranteed storage that's what it is it's guaranteed uh storage that you can have you know guaranteed multiple copies guaranteed um longevity it's a contract type thing and it's all uh trustless it's all done via um collateral both the person who wants you to store data and the person storing data has to put collateral in uh the file coin currency a token in order to guarantee that um if i don't store it i lose money so i'm gonna store it because i'm financially motivated and yeah it's just a guaranteed archival storage a lot of nfts are being stored in filecoin right now so is that like whenever you store something is like the the amount of money you have to put in to guarantee its storage is that like bigger the bigger the file size is or the longevity of storage um yeah so yeah and it's a bidding system it's a peer-to-peer system it gets like that could get really deep into the weeds too and i'm i'll be honest i'm i'm not sure that it's the best system out there so so so you're running ipfs as the the back ends so to speak and then you have uh file coin kind of the front end and the distribution for it and i guess follow coin is the way that this venture is making money it's kind of like mining and they're separate to be honest like we're doing both um but ipfs is in itself is what filecoin is built on but i don't manage ipfs for the filecoin server stuff i manage ipfs because it's awesome and because it's awesome filecoin also uses ipfs it's just coincidence i guess so uh yeah so many questions i and i'm trying to choose them because we'll be here all day if i ask them all um uh dang i don't know yeah my brain is exploding with i'm sorry the possibilities of this and what is it i thought i told you you should have limited me what i could talk about no no this is awesome because you know cameron and i we've we've definitely gone down the crypto rabbit hole and i've never heard of filecoin oh that was my question is this like an open source well-aware thing or something that said company has invented what is this yeah so uh the company that came up with it is called protocol labs they are the people who came up with ipfs and they got a butt ton of funding i mean hundreds of millions of dollars of funding and they have developed ipfs but then on top of that they developed a you know a secure storage blockchain system too called filecoin so it's the same company that's developed both but they have um i hired developers and and they're making the system more and more robust but it's so brand new i mean i said i don't know that it's the best and that's because it's not done right i mean it's it's been a year or so but um you know hopefully they still keep making wise choices and it can be more and more usable because it's very much the back end there has to be some third-party front ends to make it usable for the person i'm trying to think like who is this for if i wanted to put a file on this i would have to know how to transact it with this blockchain and there's no fancy gui to do that no so what you would do is like use a third-party tool like um oh gosh what is the name of the company i don't remember but they bas