Hello, everyone. My name is Jason Scott. I'm the director of the DEF CON documentary. And I'm Rachel Levinger. I'm the co‑producer of this documentary. So what we're going to do here is we're going to do a breakdown of the creation of this thing, how we ended up with this project in our hands, how we spent basically the last year and a half putting it together, and the resulting lessons we learned from it, along with hopefully at the end maybe a little bit of bonus footage and strange stuff that didn't get into the documentary and or in some cases doesn't exist anywhere except for in this room. So let's get started with the fun. You know, so basically what happened was like last February I was on a trip with Rachel in Helsinki. She was doing a presentation at a conference and I said, okay, I'm doing some documentaries of my own. I want to go too. So we were in Helsinki and what you see there is my smallest documentary set up where I have a tripod and some equipment in a bag and it is frigging cold in Helsinki. Enough that when I wanted to interview people they would say, yeah, you're going to come here. I'm not going outside. And so I was in the middle of it and we get this phone call. And the phone call came from Russ Rogers of DEF CON. And through a Skype call I talked to him and he put forward this interesting idea and he said, well, you know, we're coming up in the 20th DEF CON and I said, great. And he said, and we've been thinking we want to do a documentary about it and I can think of no finer person than yourself. And I said, and he's like, and we'll pay you. Now I've been attending DEF CON for basically since 1999. I gave a presentation there about running text files dot com, the website that I run. And I have progressively spoken pretty much every year since then with a few exceptions. So I've been to many of the DEF CONs. I think I've only missed one and I was, so I was a part of the group. I knew what it was. But I was also well aware of the rule that there are no cameras running around taking pictures of everybody and that they will be punched in the face. So the problem here was, you know, we have this wonderful event and did I want to take on that pain? And then Russ mentioned the money again. And it was a no. And the funny part was I came up with a number of like, all right, for this I do it. And that was the number he offered, like on the button. And I said, okay, you obviously know me very well. So I said, I think I shall do this. But now bearing in mind that at the time I was shooting three other documentaries. So we'll talk about how I handled that. But, you know, I was busy. It wasn't like, hooray, my first documentary. So I made two other documentaries that people have seen. One called BBS, The Documentary, which is about computerized bulletin board systems. That one took four years, had 205 hours of footage, ended up being seven hours, split across eight episodes. And then Gitlamp, because I thought BBS was just way too general. I made a high definition documentary about text adventures. And I went out and interviewed people from Infocom and that history. And that one took four years. That had 120 hours of interviews. And had gone out very well, went out in 2010. And so I had decided to do more. But I had some experience with technical documentaries and making things about computer people and getting people who weren't used to cameras to talk on the camera and so on. So I had that experience. And I had done a Kickstarter. And, you know, so yeah, signed on, went for it. But there were some fundamental issues that I wanted to know about. The thing was that I knew my previous films had been about subjects that were general, like text adventures. Well, I'll just talk to people about text adventures until I have so much footage, I have a movie about it. And same thing with bulletin board systems. But this was about a finite event that happens between four and five days depending on how you perceive it in the middle of the summer in Las Vegas and then never happens again. Any moment you don't film is lost forever, which is an enormous amount of pressure and completely different than how I make my films.  How about the fact that everyone doesn't want to be filmed?   There's been many stories of people talking. One person talked about he was running a booth and how he has talked to one of the goons and suddenly the goon turned and said, you will stop that. And it was somebody up in one of the sky boxes in the old Riviera aiming down at the booth. So they were pretty strict about let's not get with the cameras. And now we were going to say let's film everything. So that was a bit of a nightmare to consider. And finally, how do I make this not suck?  How am I going to do that? How am I going to bring something special to it? How are we going to put a movie together? And originally it was I'm going to direct this and again I'm in Helsinki with Rachel and Rachel was like, I'm going to help you. I know, but you know, she said I'll help you do this and we'll approach it together from the beginning. Like this wasn't where I got weird and then I said, what do I do? From the beginning she said, I want a piece of this too. And I was like, is this something you do? And she reminded me that she also had a degree in film and had done films. Yeah, maybe she wants to help with this. And finally, how do you do it in six months? Because they wanted me to release the film on Christmas as a Christmas present to the gang. How am I going to shoot a film where we have less than that to film, edit, and put it together? So we ended up moving straight into planning and I'm going to let Rachel describe her thought process on how she started to bring this together for this unbelievably huge project. Okay, so there's me in Helsinki. It was very cold, as Jason said. One of the reasons I thought I could help out with this is I actually really like planning. I really like documentaries and I like planning things. So this is an example of a spreadsheet that I made of, at my office at work I show a documentary once a month. And my colleague and I brainstormed the kind of documentaries that we want to show. We have a list of enough documentaries we could show once a month for like seven years. We tracked which ones we've seen, what they're about, how long they are, all that kind of stuff. Just to give you an example that I like planning things. She really likes planning things. I've also been to DEF CON a few times before that, so I kind of had some idea of what to expect that I think was helpful. I've known Jason for a long time. So that's his senior year high school yearbook photo and I took that photo. Yeah, if you go back just very quickly for this gang. So what do you pose with to show your fine times in high school? Well, your Roger Waters Radio Chaos album. If you look in the upper right, sorry, upper left you can see my pigment cap from when they used to sell those in Epcot Center. A stolen highway flasher, a stolen pay phone, just there, just evidence thrown into my high school yearbook photo and then of course holding in my hand a lineman's test set. So this is basically an evidence photo. And a dust buster. Oh and the dust buster, because every single photo, there's five photos of me in the high school yearbook and in each one I'm holding a dust buster. Why? Because I could. We had a very permissive high school. So the first question that we set out to tackle was how are we going to film all of this in this constrained period of time. And of course we realized there's no way that just between the two of us we could film everything. We need to bring on some additional people to have multiple cameras in multiple places. So Jason mentioned he had this Kickstarter. He put out a call to his Kickstarter backers. Yeah, so the Kickstarter backers thing. So here I made this thing called the Jason's Got documentary three pack. I'm going to make three documentaries where you fund it.  They were like, you're asking for $100,000. You're not going to get that. And also you don't have any rewards under $100. And I was like, well my counteroffer is I'm changing nothing. And we're going to put it up anyway. And it got 40 grand in 24 hours. So I knew my audience. And I have a very strong connection to this audience. They know I work hard on these films. They know why I want to make them and what I'm about. And I felt very bad that I might take on this other film. So I turned it around and said instead, guess what? You get another film for the amount of money you put in. And you're going to get some advanced notice of some of the pieces in it and everything else. So I had to turn it around into, actually this is a good thing. Plus I get more practice. And in some ways I get more equipment that'll help. So that was how I mitigated it. People were basically excited. Is this where I mentioned the recruitment? Yeah. So what I did was I said, I need crew. If you were supporting adjacent Scott documentary, do you want to make one with him?  You know, yes, I will do this.  I didn't even tell them that.  I didn't make it clear we were going to pay for anything. I didn't want, because I didn't want somebody treating it as a free trip to Vegas. So I just said, oh, we're going to shoot. You want in. And we had, I think eight people sign up. And I chose what ended up being, I believe, five. And I had one person bow out because of work commitment. No hard feelings with him. And so I ended up with four people from my Kickstarter group who had, who literally the way I met them in a few cases was when they flew here. Anyway, that's how we handled that. We'll come back to them too. Yeah, we will. So once we knew we would have multiple people filming, we started trying to figure out okay, what are all the things that we want to cover? So we sort of poured through the schedule. But we knew we weren't going to focus so much on filming all the talks. A lot of those are filmed anyway. So we, you know, it was actually more helpful was looking through the forums where we got information about all of the parties and the contests and the events and the unofficial as well as the official events and where they were going to be and when they were starting. And that was incredibly useful. Anybody who uses DefCon or goes to DefCon, I'm sure you know this, right?  And you don't do it or you go yeah. And there's so many people for whom DefCon is a very limited experience. And so we suddenly had to become the omniscient awareness pack of all aspects of DefCon 20. Everything from like how do they set up the rooms through to every event that was even peripherally being planned in the forums. Because some of them are very, very liquid in the beginning. Like I'm thinking of doing a thing and I think I got someone tell me it was okay and we're like well I've got to get them on the list. All right guy with thing. You may be a movie star soon. So that was a very strange experience to pull that much together. So we pulled that all together into this. Again the spreadsheet and we captured what things were happening, when and where they were going to be. And tried to sort of sketch out what are the things that we think we want to film about this event to sort of in order to tell that story. And some of these are going to be things that are going to be happening all weekend. So we know like okay we want to be there when Jeff explains what the tamper evident contest is. This thing is a fantastic document. This is Rachel's work. And part of her professional job is constructing data in a way that makes sense and understanding the underlying pieces of it. And she's very good at it. And so we had a real gift here because if you look at it there's a color coding to indicate will we get in trouble if this is not filmed down to if the camera swings across it everything's good. And then followed by what's the narrative? What do we think the narrative is? Like what's the narrative of the toxic barbecue? That needs to be told about a speaker is. And then followed by who do we think are the players in the story? Do we know who the organizers are? Do we know who the big people are? And then finally notes where I write I don't understand anything. And everything else on the side. And this goes on this we only have one slide but it goes on for like a dozen pages at least. It's a huge massive document. And there's also you know it highlighted things that we didn't know that we could reach out to Pyro or ask people what's going on with this? Is the beard contest happening this week? So that's how we found out things like the cannon ball run wasn't happening and other times we would get surprised and find out that something was happening that we didn't know. But we were really this was our secret weapon. One of the secret weapons is where is the work? It's like well here it was. Here was months of screaming work trying to track and what is it? So we had if you want to say the Bible that DEF CON doesn't have as to what DEF CON is as a reference document. The encyclopedia of DEF CON. So that got us about as prepared as we could about the events. The next question we tried to tackle is how are we going to film everyone you know film an audience of people that doesn't necessarily want to be filmed or hasn't traditionally want to be filmed. And we went through a number of ideas. I think one thing we had an idea at one point to like give out paper masks. Yeah we were going to give out paper.  So instead we decided just to make ourselves really identifiable and that anyone would be able to see us coming and could get out of the way or kind of indicate they weren't interested. So our first idea was we'd get everyone orange jumpsuits and then we quickly realized that 103 degrees plus jumpsuits equals we have three crew members at the end. Yeah and everyone running around all day in these we didn't want to kill the volunteers. So we went instead with these nice light mesh orange vests. Well Jason we'll show off for you. They have lots of nice pockets in them for carrying things and we spray painted the logo and the word documentary on them so there would be no question that you know who we were and the side benefit of this was that we were really easy to spot by each other so if we were like we're looking for one of our crew members we could always find them and you'll see them throughout the film actually. To this day people in these and go like I wonder what they're filming. And then we entered the real official pre-production stage so I want to call out here to Russ Rogers Jason mentioned Russ called him but he was also really our like primary liaison so Russ and Dark tangent were our co-executive producers but Russ was the guy like our day-to-day contact if we needed anything from the conference if we had any questions beforehand while we were here he was our guy. Yeah Russ and I talked when all was said and done I think Russ and I talked for roughly between 100 and 200 hours over the past 18 months just over time I mean he was there every time to give me heads up to tell me something's going on to get back to me on every aspect I mean you know this isn't something where it says executive producer and that means they wrote the check it's literally this guy was working on it equally as hard as me especially some months especially as we started to move towards where is this thing going to end up and how are we going to publish it he was right there so he's not here right now I don't think but believe me he was as critical as any other component this guy. So then we had our crew so we want to introduce you to them guys and then Jason and myself these are actually the photos that we sent to the goons, the security goons so in addition to having our vests they wanted to make sure that they knew what all of our crew looked like and so nobody could impersonate them. So there wouldn't be a documentary crew within six hours of the documentary crew being there running around a rough shot I don't think anyone tried to impersonate us though that I know of. No we were not, I don't believe anybody actually impersonated us but we had people once because somebody with an orange shirt was kind of a dick and somebody was like the documentary crew was harassing me and it was like no they don't have the time to harass anybody and I mentioned this to one of the goons and they said welcome to our world and everyone who has a red shirt so we actually I looked back on it we gave them shockingly little preparation for what they were going to experience at DEF CON during most of them had never been to DEF CON and now we're asking them to cover everything about it. One thing we did ask them was to watch Morgan Spurlock's Comic Con documentary had recently come out and not for the same topics exactly but and not even the same story arc but we knew like this was a good example of what it's like to try to capture on film an event with massive amounts of people and tons of things going on at once and you'll have a little sense of what you're in for and then aside from that we just wanted them to be comfortable and safe and I do say I had met Morgan Spurlock at a conference and so we recognized each other and then he was at a presentation of Comic Con Episode 4 and we went there and so I watched it like oh somebody did sort of the same thing I want to do and we watched it and afterwards and himself were there and I actually asked them a lot of way too technical questions personally like when they were just chatting not Q and A and I have a question here please teach me how to film but I did get some hints from him and what they were shooting for and they did open my mind they came up with some ideas that they never had work and I just want to mention one because it was kind of brilliant he wanted to so they do a more story arc thing than I would ever do where they would actually went out they got 20 they had applicants send in a recording of I'm going to be at Comic Con and here is my story and then they chose like the 8 or 9 most compelling stories and then sent crews and then they ended up using 4 of them or 3 of them and what they wanted to do if you know of Comic Con it's got this massive many many thousands of square feet it's like 3 football fields massive thing and what he wanted to do was as a transition you would be following someone's story they would walk out on the floor and a camera would pile back from them and zoom down Comic Con's floor and then follow the next person as a transition and when he got there they were like no no there's no line of sight anywhere in the Comic Con floor that does that he could have done that with drones I bet the next thing they want is helicopter drones flying over people nope with massive banners so it just looks like Star Wars episode for trench scene but anyway he was thinking out of the box too how do I make this exciting it was very inspiring thanks Morgan we also had in our pocket one ringer Eddie Codell he is a professional as well and he's done a lot of work with Boing Boing TV and MakerBot TV and he's filmed at Comic Con at South by Southwest he's kind of familiar with being dropped into these kind of crazy situations and being able to handle it we wanted to know we had a clutch just in case it got really hot because there were so many unknowns we wanted to know we can send a guy in and he's going to hold the camera steady who's going to follow what's going on and we don't have to worry so if we really need footage and we're scared and everyone's falling apart we know Eddie will at least barrel through so that was just us taking a little precaution for the good and I insisted he be paid at close to his regular rate and treated like this was a perfect not hey buddy come in and do hard work for free we did yeah, a little tired Eddie is here so why don't you tell them about the equipment so where are you going to go about when you're putting this thing together and a lot of people when they see a movie there's a certain range of people whose their responses will now tell me exactly every last piece of equipment you use to make this film because that's kind of what we all like to do I know a number of filmmakers who also make geek documentaries and after I got my Kickstarter money I sat down with them Paul of two player productions who were the ones doing the double fine documentary right now but they've also done Mojang, the story of Minecraft they've also done the the 8-bit movie about chiptune artists and I also have become really good friends with James Swersky and Lisanne Peugeot who are the creators of Indie Game the movie and I just basically did con call with James and Paul and said your camera what is it and they tell me your sound what was it well how did you get this shot what lens did you buy and so I shopping list shopping list shopping list and I bought everything they had so I had some really good stuff like the cannons and I had some really good lenses and everything else now just to explain what we're going about here so the problem was is that the best camera to shoot with is the Canon 5D Mark II I don't mean in life I'm not going to play that fucking game I hate that game but it's the camera I found would produce really good footage under a certain circumstance but the body is like 4,000 and then the lenses are thousands and so I had one because I got the from my movie but I knew that we're going to have three crews and I couldn't be giving away three Canon 5Ds plus they're really weird to work with and so we settled on something called the Vixia which I'll show you more of in a moment and so we basically had Rachel had a Canon I had a Canon 5D I had a 5D and then we had three Vixias and then we also this was one of our ideas was let's get little play sports and so what you see there in the center there's an orange one and two black ones let's get play sports and give them to people at the con and get other footage and see what comes of that with the hope that we would get something utterly disgusting something horrifying where there would be a moment where you were like is it more of a crime that it can be seen and not just vaguely remembered and drank away is it terrible and we didn't know and of course we figured they'd come back and they would have been destroyed or someone would never come back with them or whatever but we got 11 of them just in case and they were very cheap we got them on special they were under 100 bucks they're waterproof, they shoot in high definition they can take shock and dust they're just tough little bastards and we figured okay this one will survive and we'll see how much footage we get from them so that was like our little secret sauce wild card like as opposed to the documentary crew runs in obviously we'll still respect people and we wanted shots that were evocative and people might have but we didn't want to lose crew for like six hours if somebody went on a road trip and this also lets us be in places where we would never know to be if we give them out to people we gave them to like some goons some long time attendees and like some of the people that we're competing in like Peter Hunt and some of the other contests where we just couldn't be with them all the time right so we ended up with a bunch of these cameras and obviously the lenses and other pieces and it was all going to be filmed on digital there's no analog in here there's no video tape in here there's no anything like that and we also have Zoom H4n recorders which are my favorite recorders they're little guys, they're really tough as well but they're really cool so we have three when we let's look at the next one here's the setup that we ended up going for or a variation of it and what this is this is me at another convention this is me at a comic book grouping in New York City to test this I just ran around with it filming and we have a monopod sitting on these little canon Vixia G10s the item in my pocket we ended up just getting rid of and slimming down and getting rid of the external microphone and using the internal microphone and just having our guys put the microphone right here and try not to get in the shot and that actually worked out spectacularly well so what you see there is a setup that is infinitely portable is really fast to set up can get anywhere takes really good shots in the action in just a really really intense way so it turned out to be a really nice combination we had three of these going at any given time is there another one? I think there's another one so with that we kind of said okay well or I should really say Rachel said we should have a presence online you know let's get people excited it's not what you do with a campaign let's build up a here's what's going on Facebook group let's do a Twitter stream let's let people know what's going on and build a YouTube channel let's build a presence for the DEF CON documentary in anticipation and there's a very interesting thing about that which is that nobody gives a shit about DEF CON until like a month before like a few people do a few insiders do but on the general nobody's like better check the Twitter stream they don't start getting excited until right before we had a lot of conflict internally between us about this because we you know she's like we should treat this well and I'm like but nobody's giving a shit and we're not getting responses and I'd rather focus on this and this and so we had a lot of conflict and it just turns out for anybody who's doing anything like this again or any kind of a deal it's just DEF CON is something that people put a lot of energy on but they put a lot of energy either on their projects or three weeks before to get more info so it's better to like back load your stuff and have it ready to go and start dropping hints like a week or two before or three weeks before you know work on it do your projects but they don't really start paying attention to like day by day reloading what's going on until just before that was a hard one lesson we wasted a little bit of energy on that alright I think production I think I do production too how do you capture the spirit of DEF CON past and present says the slide so my concern was this like in capturing DEF CON like I said first of all no G4 crap second of all I wasn't overly interested in doing a what I was going to call sparky goes to DEF CON story where I find some kid first DEF CON I go to his house find out his mom and dad are still married and then he likes computers and he has one in his house and then he's going to go to DEF CON where he will be found naked floating down with the bubble stopping sometime on the second day I just wasn't interested in that narrative and it like forces it's a perfectly valid narrative to do that and do a story that way but I didn't think I wanted to do that I wasn't comfortable with that I just wanted to have authoritative voices in a mosaic discussing what DEF CON means to them and then the best we can illustrate all of that in the material over the course of the next course of the movie and there was another mystery factor and I know the joke which was what if DEF CON gets canceled and it was there's ways to be canceled without being canceled I mean hotel gets smoke bombed there's a problem because of something there's nobody able to attend the talks in the same way they run into a security issue there might not be a DEF CON to film and that would be an interesting story DEF CON is canceled and it just credits organ music a 70 fade 17 minute movie and so I was worried and so I front loaded with as many interviews as I could handle especially of staff that I knew would be balls to the wall so what you're seeing here is one of my setups this is in a hotel at Hope and Hope really appreciated that I was filming a DEF CON documentary at Hope I was like yeah I'm filming some people for DEF CON documentary I was able to do one thing we were able to fly in Dead Attic Toronto and I wanted to be able to film him but I didn't want to go to Toronto to film him so I brought him to New York so for the first time one of the only one of four people who have been to every DEF CON got to go to Hope for the first time because he never got a chance to go before so that was kind of nice and we're filming in the hotel room I got for him so it was a re-use and I filmed interviews with Dualcore and Deviant Olam and Dead Attic at Hope and was able to use this kind of a setup and this is my setup so you can see my canon you can see how I use a boom mic and then I like to use halogen lights and really flood the room with light and bounce it off I mean this is a shitty hotel room let's be clear the hotel Pennsylvania is one of the worst pieces of property in an urban area outside of a fire bombing or World War II but I was able to get some mileage out of moving it if you've seen the shining it feels a lot like it feels exactly like the shining plus ass rape anyway so alright move so like here's me filming Jeff and this is like kind of how I would do this so here's me I'm filming him aiming it at his desk this is one of only two locations we could use the other one was truly unusable this one had an echo but I filmed him randomly and so I went to Seattle I went to Los Angeles I went to Colorado Denver area and I went to a couple of houses in California and a couple houses on the east coast and Washington DC and you know basically did about 50 interviews with people that made it into the movie in some cases some cases didn't get into the movie and so they're all filmed under different circumstances Hacker spaces like Denhack and 23 and Black Lodge up in Seattle you know they opened up their spaces to me and then would have their members come over and one by one I'd interview them and just do these interviews and try to do my best to make them all interesting locations and you know by the time I was done before DEF CON before minute one of DEF CON it started I had roughly I want to say between 30 and 40 hours of DEF CON footage about DEF CON and senior staff explaining why DEF CON meant things to them what it was about and everything so I knew I wouldn't have to track those people down and then there were people who used to be part of DEF CON and are never going back again or were rarely go back like death vegetable and swamp rat and other people I wanted their voices in this thing even though I knew they weren't attending so this was a real, this was part of the hard work it took me about 60 days to get flown around and do these interviews and preload it so if it all blew up I could have all of this and then say ironically it never happened but the thing is is that the first documentary I did BBS documentary has a lot of talking heads and yeah they're weaved well and I worked really hard on it but it is talking heads and the same thing with Get Lamp a lot of talking heads and a lot of illustrations of games and I knew that I wanted this film to be kinetic I wanted it that you were seeing things happen DEF CON is a thing of motion and activity and throngs and people moving around and so I resolved that even though I had 30 or 40 hours of people sitting telling you DEF CON is awesome I couldn't see by Saturday it is fantastic I wanted it that you would see somebody blind drunk on Saturday or see that people were working hard or soldering and it was on my list to make sure that it would have that feeling so that was all in the lead up time to DEF CON and then finally last July we assembled our whole crew at DEF CON there we are yeah that's a pretty I love that shot with our fearless leader fearless leader and Wendy Lady and the Lost Boys and this is us all assembling we all have our outfits we all have our own and I just love this shot so it's everywhere because it just really captures it oh yeah what's up with the fucking segue Jason so I've been known for having a segue in previous years because I like segues and I discovered or I realized that we were going to have situations where we'd be over here in track three and then something would happen in Penn and Teller and I'd have to go there and so I'm like I want to get a segue so I can get from one to the other really quickly because we don't know if we're going to get radios and we won't know if we're going to get communication so the segue became the catch-all solution so we got here we we checked all our equipment we had a couple hotel rooms one of them became our sort of HQ our production HQ and we made sure everything was there made sure it was all working we took our crew around we did like a walkthrough of the space to show them where everything was going to be and we had them take the equipment with them and kind of you know test it out and get comfortable with it and be able to ask some questions and stuff like that so we did a whole walkthrough of this area I think that was really helpful we did like a sort of a boot camp but you know mostly it was just to again make sure that we're going to be safe and comfortable and bring the footage back to day and that sort of thing with the conference a bunch of things some walkie-talkies which ended up being a little you don't really want to keep walkie-talkies on while you're filming because you don't want someone suddenly like we even know where room 4 is yeah that can kind of screw up the footage so these ended up being of limited use to us mostly just because we didn't want it screwing up our shots I seem to have some vague memory of us doing something really enjoyable with those radios like some sort of message I'm now forgetting I don't know we mostly use them to prank each other so we ended up like does anyone even know where Kyle is Kyle here you don't need to find me they lent as a printer and of course the hotel rooms yeah the hotel rooms came from Def Con himself not even in the budget and that was really appreciated we had a couple hotel rooms I think we had three three hotel rooms to put our staff in and have us the thing so we went out and bought some supplies we got a lot of water and caffeine and food and posted notes and things like that and this is how I learned that if you go to two different pharmacies or drug stores in Las Vegas and spend about a hundred dollars at each one sometimes your bank turns off your credit card for no good reason that was awkward then we had our production meetings in the HQ every day our room and this is where so you know we had our big list of all the things that were going on and we had assembled our crew into three pairs of two people so we'd have one person and we actually figured this out during the boot camp sort of like who liked doing using the camera who liked doing audio we figured out who was a morning person who was a night person and we kind of paired them up together and we had three groups of one cameraman and one audio recorder and we colors we nicknamed them team red, green and blue and each you know when we knew what things need to be filmed each day we wanted to make sure like you know is this something you're going to be interested in so that we would kind of go through okay here are the things that are happening tomorrow who wants to film this and then we would make up these shot lists for each day so they knew like okay at 10 o'clock this is happening and where it's happening and then we had a bunch of things that were like you know at some point go by the you know hardware hacking village and that sort of thing so there are things that happen at a certain time and things that were just happening all day but they all had their lists and then we had like the master list on the wall which we had every every event that was going on up there and by the end we wanted to kind of check off all the ones that we had gotten coverage of and if we had ones that hadn't gotten covered but they were continuing the next day we'd just move those over to the next day yeah we had team red, team green, team blue we renamed red team breaking bald so that's what their name became after a while because it was two bald guys and we paired up our least experienced member with our most experienced member so it was Alex who had not been in Vegas to Def Con or done any shooting up with Eddie who had done all of that with the idea being that it would balance out to a reasonably talented person and actually you know I mean obviously like everything else you know Alex learned really quickly and Eddie worked with Alex and it went pretty well and then the other teams they really worked well team breaking bald turned out to be a real gift because these guys were getting up at 8 and they would go to bed at 2 or 3 over and over and Steve on that team the camera guy would just film endless establishing shots of everything so if you picked up the groceries he would film the bag, you grabbing the groceries you holding the groceries the groceries the groceries in the fridge the house the fridge is in the sun and the town and the factory the fridge was manufactured in and that was a real gift to me down the line because I would have someone talk in the editing room and I'd be like do I have a shot of course I have a shot of that because there was just shots of room shots of people shots of stuff so each team started to take on a character of what they wanted to do and it just kind of organically that part was organic but as you can see thanks to Rachel's planning there was a lot that was not organic they don't come in with preformed questions for interviews and yet here it was like what is everyone doing and we knew as opposed to you should just walk out again and shoot things and come back so that's just the people who see this movie I'm fractally pulling out here but I'm just saying when people see this movie and they see the stuff they're like wow it's because she did this amazing matrix all these items of stuff so that we were always aware of what we needed and that's the real secret hard work that's not obvious on the screen it's not just oh they filmed until they made a movie it's like that's what was really there so unfortunately guess there is no secret get movie quick scheme so we also another part of our HQ this was sort of like our information hub we every time the guys dropped off their memory cards we copied them onto multiple hard drives to make sure we had many copies of it and nothing would get lost we had three hard drives every piece of footage went on three hard drives and then when we got it home we put them in six hard drives in three locations to verify that we would never lose the footage due to a hard drive going south and just to understand like how much space these things have the cameras the Vixia's had two 32 gig cards in them and they could record 25 hours of high definition video without having to be swapped out and the audio could do 36 hours of full audio before having to be swapped out so even though we did it every day we didn't have situations where people were like I don't want to film so we really really over engineered that part that part turned out to be really good alright then we finally started filming the gang was set out on this really strange journey these guys were put out into this thing for some of them they've never been to Vegas before for some of them they've never been to Def Con before and it is really strange to experience the world where you have essentially carte blanche to walk into anything it was a really bizarre experience for me especially because I'd been there but for the others they hadn't even been there so it was like try to imagine you walk into a room and people are talking and you're like well I think I'll just go on stage yeah this needs me and I'm going to go sit behind this person and film the back of their head because I feel like it will never until he goes into the hallway and oh it's this thing oh the goon security center sure let's hop in there let's go talk to them what the hell so that was like a massive emotional thing for me but for the others it was like okay I guess I'm going to film this part you know they were able to film inside and outside here's an example of unused footage we filmed Scotland at the toxic barbecue but you can see here how the setup be where they would set up the camera they're listening to what's going on and then they're talking to Scotland about the toxic barbecue and so these little setups were everywhere for me I ran into an additional bonus which was I started filming from the Segway what this did was this afforded me crane shots to give me the kinetic energy that I wanted in the shots and the film is loaded with these these are post-processed stabilized crane shots shot all over and I'm wearing a hat because I tried to make myself even more obvious like I see a weird cowboy hat and bright orange and what the hell oh god it's the camera guy and looking back I probably should have also had a steady cam Merlin which was a weight balanced thing but I didn't do that I would just be driving along and literally go like this go around people and that segway gave me enormous ability there's a scene you'll see in the movie where it goes around a discussion it goes around the speaker party on the roof and you see me just zooming through people like I'm on some sort of weird rails like right by people's heads and I only ran over one person the whole con which was really amazing I was really surprised only once and it was his fault because he was sitting on his on the front row with his feet like way way way out and it was dark and I flew over and he yelled and I gave him a red card and kept going and don't touch my segway and um anyway that turned out to be a very besides being a good transport mechanism it turned out to be a really good filming mechanism so it really added to the film I guess I'll mention here I believe in tone poems which is where you look at pieces of work and say why do I feel this when I look at it how do I create this and how do I get that feel and for me believe it or not a lot of the tone poem for the movie for me comes from action scenes in Sherlock Holmes to Game of Shadows and if you watch that film if you watch the forest scene and a lot of the a lot of the kinetic sense of that movie I wanted this to have and so I used that as a template kind of a rough feeling of what would feel like to go through DEF CON this thing so the segway helped a lot anyway so the crew went everywhere and they weren't afraid to go everywhere and in a lot of different shots you will see them because one crew will catch another by mistake because they're moving around so much so you can see here just all these different cases where they're filming and this is in many cases these are screenshots from other team members catching other team members on the way and I watched great improvement I keep making the joke about Kyle because in the beginning Kyle was like could you please talk about the DEF CON documentary and I'd like to understand you working on this and by Saturday he's like yo sup what's this thing and people just be like yes I'm working on this thing and so by the end they are like an unstoppable information gathering force like a news program on steroids just slamming through this place to get all the info and sometimes just miracles of stepping in and getting a perfect shot of this event happening like perfectly framed beautiful so Jason mentioned like we had some team that was more in the morning and some more in the evening but really everybody was shooting like we were working from 8 o'clock in the morning until sometimes 2 o'clock in the morning then we would go back to the room and have our debrief and production and planning for the next day so I think we got probably three or four hours of sleep at night right and one of the things I I mean I was very strong about treating the crew with as much respect as possible so again we paid for the flights and so nobody's putting any money in and I insisted that we go on a really nice dinner the night before DEF CON started so we went to the Italian place here to talk more but just mostly to let them have whatever they want on the menu because they're going to get terrible sleep and terrible eating and I wanted them to have a memory of at least oh yeah Las Vegas was kind of fun once while they're stuck on the ground trying to get this one shot of somebody talking I was happy once I'll be happy again so I because again this is the first time I have people working for me in this capacity and I can do whatever I want to I had filmed things where I go a thousand miles in four days and that's fine there's only one guy getting punched in the face from that but I'm punching people in the face by doing this and I wanted them to know I respected them as people they're not just for higher machines that I can run into the ground and then drop back in the recycling bin when I'm done they worked very hard yeah really hard this is my lovely Alex falling asleep during an interview and it's very adorable because if you listen to the footage they're like do we wake him? nah just keep talking again this was Alex's first time in Las Vegas and Alex is 18 and so he would finish a day at two in the morning and then go back out again so that's what you do when you're 18 because why not and so recto a few times but he's great he definitely has work to show for beautiful work it was rough on him so yeah this is one of my favorite shots of him you just want to hug him and so we had a lot of really impressive response in places that we were going this is from the Def Con Kid sequence and the crew would always make sure to get some really nicely framed interviews and do interviews like I had done to seamlessly fit them in and record them under all sorts of circumstances so what would happen is it wasn't just here's some people talking and here's a shot of a key and here's a shot of a room door it was also sitting down and interviewing them straight up with the same approach that I was trying to get them to of like why are you here what does Def Con mean to you what's a funny story and so here like these kids they're explaining what work they're doing on the badge and so there's a lot of stories that are not just mine I would estimate something like 70 to 100 interviews that came back from the footage and of course we really like shooting outside I think didn't think it need to be and you know this was funny because this is one where Kyle got lost I believe right was it the other one? he didn't get lost going there they arrived back here and he was trying to find the parking lot and going around Las Vegas was the problem he took a wrong turn with the rental car and showed up like an hour and a half later with the haunted face of a Vietnam vet and I was prepared to let him have the rest of the day off like I was like if he comes back and he's let him rest and we'll just work with what we have then he turned around and went with us to the toxic barbecue and it went right out like it was nothing after the initial haunting and just pro just fucking took it and so we got all these wonderful shots we wanted, I really wanted and Rachel really wanted to capture these events that were on the periphery of DEF CON and not just make it about this beige room has these people and I also knew for us attendees many of us never go to the toxic barbecue many of us never go to the shoot so what does that thing look like and so this kind of footage to me was a real gift and why the movie starts with them because otherwise you would never know that this was happening this is interesting because what you're seeing here is you're seeing general Alexander and Jeff walking but what you're really seeing is a new cameraman Steve Fish learning how to do the walk and talk and I saw this guy he was walking backwards through many different hallways with people clearing the way while the two of these guys talked about DEF CON and I had no use for this in the main movie but I made it the beginning of the preview because in it Jeff is basically general Alexander he says what's up with the guys is this like crew, do you have news crews and he's like no this is our people general Alexander who would be number one on the list of people who would not give a shit about this the nature of the DEF CON documentary and why the DEF CON documentary was made and what the planning was and why they're doing it so I made that the introduction of the preview because I just thought it was hilarious and he's like so general Alexander while you're off doing whatever you do here's why we made the DEF CON documentary and the DEF CON documentary is going to be an explanation and it was crazy and the whole time backwards filming people it's a Stanley Kubrick one take masterpiece of not getting hit with anything so it's crazy and so anyway I would say it probably helped that general Alexander like Secret Service people were screaming get clear the hall clear the hall they weren't doing that for us not for us they should have been when you see the interviews that are done with the DEF CON logo behind them here's wins what would happen is that in our hotel room this is our hotel headquarters again I moved the couch stole a DEF CON banner hung it up behind it with basically my light gear and a microphone stand and a chair and then swung it behind them and these are kind of the more pro this so that's why it's here and I conducted most of these on the Monday afterwards these were people like Wynn and Dan Kaminsky and others who had been there and I hadn't had a chance to interview them otherwise and they sat, Dan Kaminsky moved the flight to be interviewed and I was able to get a whole bunch more interviews so in the movie you'll see a lot of these with the DEF CON logo this is the setup that I would use and what I would do is I would do a whole bunch of things and then interviewing the person through a whole bunch of questions and so a bunch of people sat this way and this was how we were able to get a few more quote-unquote pro interviews without too much trouble I also filmed over in one of the rooms here and if you listen on the soundtrack you can hear DEF CON just kind of like floating in the background just the sound thrushing sound of people and things and I had to do editing which I'll go on afterwards but this is kind of the setup from the side it was always fun when Russ would see me and be like, where's Jason? I have Ms. Giddy she's ready to interview right now and then we had to find you and I was also just kind of walking up to people and going, hey, want to be interviewed? and many people would say yes and many would say no and I would drag them off and interview them so it was like completely random like that and I was doing that through a lot of it so I was spending my day and again, people were pulling out play sports that we had given them in all sorts of different locations so we were getting little tiny bonus with the exception of the SCAB hunt who produced about 20 hours of it we had most people produced between three and seven minutes because they're in DEF CON they don't want to film it so they're shooting their thing and they're doing a collection of little shots and fucking with things and then being done with it so there wasn't a whole lot to go through at the end but there were people actually using these and they were very usable so it actually turned out to be a pretty good gamble for what it was there was a couple of times that we would film people and then they would sober up and they would find us and be like you can't put that in there the most common thing was people would idly say to their bosses and I'm in a documentary and their boss would say and you're not um sometimes they were government employees sometimes they I don't know got the fear of God in them and thought they had said something stupid or incriminating and so they would come and find us and I think we'd delete it we would bodily delete the files because to be honest like 99.9% of the people had no problem with us filming right so you can't be like well how dare you we filmed it it's ours now I wanted to respect these people I didn't want anyone to regret being in our film or at least minimize it and one way to minimize it was to respect people who were like no I don't want to be in this it turns out or I'm not comfortable with it it only happened a few times I only had a couple people who I'd sit down interviewed can you not put in any part where I discussed this subject I decided not that's not a good idea and I said okay fine um you know I don't like playing that game of you said this was okay and now we own the footage and we're gonna use it I mean you were making the wrong movie you are making movies wrong as far as I'm concerned in general if you're doing that if you have to be that you know don't act like you're friggin exposing some underground orchid ring you know don't act like you're friggin morally safer and you've just caught people out that's not the movie I want to make so minimal deletion happened but it did happen um one of the ways you should never don't do this um I thought I was interviewing some drunk people and drunk people are funny and I said and they were gonna give me the post-mortem of how they won or lost the hacker jeopardy and so they are toasted right they're they're they're supersized drunk right and so I said it would be funnier to do it in the bathroom it got weird so so what happened here is that basically and there's footage of this right cause it's on and I go alright let's go into the bathroom and let's do this so we go in and there's the casino host who had been using the bathroom to get out and said no um this didn't make it into the movie but I will always remember it's not the guy with the white pants but the one next to him he's a little obscured here the camera comes around they're lined up to present and the guy looks over and goes oh what the fuck like just that exasperation true I am pissing anyway didn't make it into the movie don't go into a bathroom you know the only time we weren't really allowed to film was because at one point we unwittingly I swear to God unwittingly we wandered up one of the crews wandered up in the beginning behind some goons who were talking never approach a goon from the back and the goons turned around and said whoa whoa whoa you can't be filming us with no no and so we made sure from that point to literally approach them from the front or to film from a distance and not to record them because if they're working and they're busy and they're making decisions and they're discussing it and what do we do with this you know even at the screening last night there was a goon incident but you didn't hear it right he didn't need to go all the way to the bathroom and so he just pissed himself pissed the area and fell off his chair asleep thanks for the free beer Jeff and a goon had to get up and quietly go over there during this movie while the goons are talking about how hard their job is and roll this drunk and get him out of there so you don't hear about that yeah great place so the goons are always working like this they're working on things you don't have to see and so they asked that we not have their internal discussions otherwise it was free and clear free and clear best quote of the whole thing was we had this happen and so I'm not going to tell you how they were but yeah so we said okay we won't shoot this you know the best moment for me will always be where I was shooting you can see me here shooting behind Render Man and Render Man uses this slide which is the Kaminsky problem I'm always put up across Dan Kaminsky so I never see his talks and it's really silly and he wants to see my talks I never get to see them live he doesn't get to see my life he doesn't care and Dan Kaminsky for his bit is a rather famed speaker and I consider Render Man a classic DEF CON speaker but so is Kaminsky and I realized that I had aimed all of my team towards Render Man's talk and had nobody assigned to Kaminsky's talk which I was not aware of where it was being held so and I said last night this is like the kind of dream sequence you do this in your dreams standing behind somebody at his presentation he mentioned something I'm like I must be there now and I run off the stage onto my segue, onto my winged beast and fly through DEF CON at like 20 miles an hour like as fast as a thing goes and I pass Eddie and I'm like Eddie go to Penn & Teller and film Kaminsky and I fly further and I think I hit Drew somewhere up there and I was like Drew also see if you can film Kaminsky in Penn & Teller and I zoom into the Penn & Teller space Kaminsky has packed Penn & Teller and there are a hundred people 40 minutes or 20 minutes into his own talk waiting to maybe get into Kaminsky's speech that's how for some places their job requirement is you must see Kaminsky's speech live I zoom past them and it's nothing see ya bitches go through the doors the double dutch doors where there's Kaminsky's speech in the Penn & Teller room drop my segue run down the center aisle and jump on stage and get behind Kaminsky and start filming him as if it was no thing and nobody shot me I could just do this hack Defcon and ended up behind him and there's a really funny tweet from somebody going what the fuck is up with the cowboy like somebody is on like watching this up from their room and they saw the shot with Kaminsky and they're like what's up with the cowboy and then later lol Jason Scott so that was one of my things otherwise this would have never happened and we ended up using both of them and putting them together in the movie Eddie came in started filming and I actually zoomed back and forth a couple of times to get both and get as much as I could of the footage and the goodbyes and everything else so it was purely luck and that he even mentioned Kaminsky at all otherwise we would have missed it weird moment thank you so much so our crew after we finished we sort of debriefed they had all been asked a lot of the same questions over and over and over again as they were doing this so some of those questions were pretty straightforward a lot of these things up here we've either already answered or will answer by the time we get to the end of this presentation there were some that were a little bit more out there so I want to talk about those for a minute so the first one people really wanted to know when we wanted to film them if I agree to be in this I end up feeling embarrassed for being in this movie get rid of it so the answer there is of course like as Jason was talking about we did not set out to intentionally embarrass anyone this is not a kind of movie of like look at the weird hackers or that kind of thing so we also know that there's a lot of crazy shit that goes on at DEF CON and we wanted to capture that but everybody who was doing stuff like what you saw in this slide they knew what they were getting themselves into we made sure of that people who were here last year they had these badges people wanted to know what our badge was because one of the parts of the aspect of the badge challenge was you could take the human badge and hold it up next to another badge and they would kind of communicate with each other and they had an aspect of the challenge was to communicate it with all of the different kinds of badges so we had a press badge which was a little bit rare I guess to find so people wanted to scan them and at first we found this was a little bit disruptive like we couldn't get down the hall once people started doing it and then we realized we could just interview these people so when people would come up and ask to scan the badge we'd say alright you can scan it but then talk to us about what you're doing here at DEF CON and that worked out pretty nicely this one was a little weird we got a lot of people asking us for help and my only they would ask for directions they would ask us about the schedule somebody came up to me during one of the talks and said a guy popped his knee and he needs a wheelchair and I was like I'm filming a documentary in no position to do that and so we would point them towards the goons or towards other people that we thought we could help could actually help them it was a little weird and the only reason sometimes we had the walkie-talkies and we looked like authority figures but it's strange to me at DEF CON where people seemed pretty conscious of that they would just be like walkie-talkie authority figure like this guy is wearing silk pajamas for Christ's sake like this is not someone you should be putting all your faith in speaking of those vests there was a lot of interest in them not too many people wanted a Rufius but people did want everybody wanted a Rufius they wanted to know where can I get one of those vests as I mentioned at the beginning these vests were custom made for this we just made them for our crew but of course you can order orange vests anywhere but this was a one time thing a lot of friendly people at DEF CON offered our crew drinks at all times of the day most of the time we were like oh we're working thanks no thank you maybe later sometimes towards the end of the night we were known to accept a beer cocktail or in this case a swig of homemade absinthe but um two words that need to go together yes so it was very very friendly and I guess we were lucky that nobody roofied us and took our vests no there's a great footage I had to watch every second of footage so there's one footage with Eddie which is someone's like Jason I have no choice I'm sorry Jason it all worked out a lot of people suggested we should make this documentary every year no comment but in the end we didn't break anything we didn't lose any of our equipment we didn't lose any of our footage we didn't get in too much trouble I think it was a success after we were done we took our crew out to relax in Las Vegas for a couple days like a day and a half they got about a day after we basically said we have no requirement for you for Monday and so I made sure the rooms were booked from Monday to Tuesday morning and that they would flat on Tuesday so they could have a day of their own they did go karting and went out to eat and went to places and we went to Peppermill and you know just generally got to see Vegas because again for a couple of them this was it this was their first time in Vegas so we took them to the Encore and Peppermill and I took them over to Luxor just so you could actually see get your head up out of DEF CON and there's actually a Vegas here so just a little gift okay just so you know so just as a thing we're going to go through this we're going to show a little bit of footage at the end but if you have places to go totally understood and we'll do this until they kick us out of the room but anyway so editing and finalizing so now suddenly I ended up with all this footage at one point Rachel said how are you making the plot of this and I'm like here's how you do it and this is literally what I drew in the restaurant and this was my plan and she was not happy but the way that I approach these things is pretty straight forward I tend to take all the footage and I watch all the footage and then I put clips out I go like you know render man colon I don't get nervous and it'll be like that's what it's described there'll be another one going like shot walking from here to here or it'll be like guy starts to get angry but then realizes who we are or things like that so they'll be like shots and things and I start to put them into a classification and I start building up these little sequences where I'm like here's a bunch of people talking about there's lots of drinking at DEF CON and it's hard to put together or I'm here to meet people or these people are my family and I start assembling them in great amounts and then eventually it starts getting to the point that I end up like trying to put together like-minded shots over these sequences to illustrate things until finally this is actually what the final piece looks like before I printed it and so as you can see in the movie this is what took me it took me two and a half months to go through the ultimate it was 278 hours of footage I went through that and produced from it 6,000 clips the 6,000 clips then I probably used probably 1,500 of them and then those 1,500 had something like 3,000 edits done to them in many cases I fix what people are saying I take away ums and ahs I remove weird sounds we've had a lot of progression software wise so I could remove clangs or phone rings or in a couple of cases unintended air conditioning sounds I would only do this at the end just to remove the air conditioning sound so you couldn't hear what the person was saying over it and then steadying the shots and removing line noise or I should say video noise I was very pleased I got one sequence done and we were like okay there's going to be a movie here and that was the speaker sequence with render man and Kaminsky we were like yep there's a movie here they were shot with all different footage it all works there's no question we have a movie here and I was very happy so that was months and months and months of work I put the final touch on the final thing for this thing on June so I was editing I took a month off and I would come back to it I estimate I've probably seen the full movie about 170 times so I mean I've seen this movie I can just sit here I do this with a lot of my movies I can just sit in the back just kind of mouthing everything everyone is saying and then anticipating it because I just know it by heart and there's a syndrome that I call which is over familiarity syndrome months and when I see the guy at this I'll be like buddy who the fuck is this guy and why is he acting like we're lovers and the answer is because I've been looking at your lovely face for three months like some sort of errant creepy fan so how do you get it in for Christmas you don't we got up to Christmas and we were like ah fuck no way and it was a big stress because he was like I made a promise I put that out but ultimately the movie did take I mean considering that the movie was more footage than I'd ever dealt with before and the previous ones were like over a year of editing the fact that I was able to edit it in about nine months is crazy and an enormous amount of work well over a thousand something hours of editing and fixing and refining and finding things and dealing with it there was surprisingly little control executed upon me by Jeff who had written the check for this and for paying me Jeff's check paid all I took a flat fee up front that paid all of my credit cards off and paid off my car and so I was debt free which is the biggest gift in this world and so I was debt free and I that made a huge difference in my life so for me the amount of work done was irrelevant because my life was so much better he didn't there was one part that mentioned a specific number of how much something cost they asked that go out because it could cause contract problems to be publicizing that there was one sequence he asked to be taken down from two minutes and 30 seconds and I returned with a sequence that was two minutes and 30 seconds so that didn't work and there was like a couple other shots where they were like does it have to be this it's like really no honestly for the fact that he completely paid for it pretty much none none zero so that went really well it ended up being available here I had nothing to do with how they put it together and I'm really amazed at what they came up with so you can download the whole movie for free the torrent is either up now or will be up today at media.defcon.org and they have a I wanted it on a USB stick there was debates almost up to a few months ago of it being on Blu-ray and I'm like Blu-ray is not the way things could happen now it's USB stick make it a downloadable thing and so they created this crazy deluxe lunchbox hard drive thing without telling me and it's amazing and they thought they were only I'll say this amount they thought they were only ever going to sell 50 and they sold 50 the first day on pre-order it was like yeah people love this friggin thing so I'm really happy that it's gotten that beautiful amount of reception conclusions it's hard doubly hard this is them literally recording me asleep bastards segway turned out to be a really good idea throw a segway into the mix Alex will always get in a shot Alex will always get in a shot now to be fair I think Alex was just so excited to be he got a little swept up in the he got a little so what would happen is a couple of times something would be going on he'd like get right in it he's so adorable but he's everywhere and you know we didn't ever look at this thing as something we had to finish like oh we're going to film people let's film people and that's a movie we're done here we're going to make it we'll film it and we'll be done with the movie I wanted a movie that changed people's perceptions of DEF CON or changed their own love of DEF CON to something even stronger or encouraged people to understand how magical this thing is and how it happens and I gave a year of my life to get that story out and that was what we tried to do and this is our crew getting their vows during the closing ceremonies for one moment and then running back into their places to keep filming I think some of them were filming still while we were on stage yeah still filming they left it going and everything else so that is the main part of our talk let me just yeah let's swap so we're going to sneak this until they kick us out let me just quickly so alright oh wow oh wow so I won't be able to do that that's amazing do it they're all in nope not that alright wait wait wait this is exciting do this alright which one do I want to start with alright let's do this I know it's exactly like karaoke click on extra bits that one on the right so let me show you an example of something that's wonderful and beautiful and I didn't use it it would be top left the first one it's actually been really awesome I've met through the people who I've been going before me I've met a lot of other really interesting awesome people I I'd go to dinner with somebody and find out later that it was somebody extremely important that I had no idea they just got to mention or something but sorry I'm getting a little excited um yeah so it's like there's somebody who what he's saying is I found a place where I belong and people respect and trust me and it's a beautiful moment and I didn't put it in the end because I had all these other beautiful moments which beautiful moment is going to get screwed without turning this movie even longer it happened all the time let's skip that one go to the third one this is the kind of great stuff what happened was Motherfuckers that basically you know we would always get those kind of helpful responses let's go with second to the bottom on the left I have to hear every second footage of things like this it's not narrow it's just so as soon as we're done with this interview I can wait till we're done I don't want to stay so you're talking to Jason Scott that you need to take a dump yeah pretty much we're done you know and you have to listen because you don't know what you're going to miss that was the red crew so um what's the oh yeah here's a case of me taking some footage I didn't expect and I decided to do something with it a very special moment let's do the professional thing remember he said some of the most emotional meaningful things sorry I don't know what's happening that's good do it turn it off if you can it's dead to me he looked at his phone to see his notes on how he was going to do an answer and we just destroy him we have the same phone oh this part here I made the most friends when I was working the scavenger hunt this was it's very important to me I changed my lift sorry I'm tweeting sorry I'm tweeting are you tweeting that the deaf guy I'm tweeting Scandinavian hunt charged my wig penis part part part I was going to tell you some things that you may not realize alright we'll show you bring it out are you ready let's fucking do this I am so ready I want you to think of this interview as a scrotum a broken a broken at this fucking nail I'm just going to scratch it gently bring it out grab the left nut of this story just tug gently let's not get hurt so fucking balls we're trying to be professionals here fucking professionals hi alright so so what's great about that is if you see the movie that's what came just before it before he talks about it he came out with some great stuff here's footage there's a time lapse where somebody goes from Los Angeles to Las Vegas it's the bottom one yeah do it so basically what happened was those media players decided it does not love you or care about you so what happened here was that basically I ended up with this beautiful time lapse and then I ended up I had this other one here where somebody sent me a beautiful time lapse of the sundown at the Rio it's flickering because it just completely made my shit flip out it was like three gigs of jpegs and I tried to stuff them in the thing and as you can I mean a little bit but after a while I said this was going to be like Friday night now whatever and it was going to go down so it's this absolutely beautiful footage that I just never got a chance to use alright knock that one out this was the greatest thing that ever happened in the entire world just click on it third one up on the right here's the deal just pull this one up boom so here's the deal with this guy in the original footage they're shooting here one of the other team members go get that guy which guy that guy that guy and they turn and there's this guy alright now I don't know this guy I don't know we never know who he was bless this man so we're shooting party footage and we're shooting this guy now I mean this guy he's a little bit you know he's what's the word he's a little height weight non ratio bound he's dancing and he's listening to this music and he's dancing and he doesn't stop and now most people would be in this situation would go okay I got my shit done and then like walk or calm down leave you can see the other people in the back you know the guy in the back look at him he's a little wiry stick and he's like yeah yeah right and then this happens if you look down at the crawler you know we're nowhere and you're done this guy just keeps on going so whenever we would have lagging energy on any of the teams it'd be like doing the morning it'd be like I don't know if we can put your fucking hands up and we'd like run back into the crowd and do more filming and just for the rest of the whole week put your fucking hands in the second or two seconds of him dancing in the Saturday night sequence as a tribute to him so we have no idea who this guy is I mean someday I'm sure we'll hear from him but he is incredible and I know he's probably at his desk right now looking at this thing in December going by on the videos let me see let's do underwater just because it has a great line from Rachel we were testing the underwater ability so we mentioned that these cameras were usually able to go underwater but we weren't positive so guess what? the spliceboards are actually pretty awesome so we actually were able to put a few in there um did we did we fix the crash? the crash footage? good this is a PDP crash it was a hardware crash that's what of we definitely found time to pop out why don't we go up out let's go into one of the bonus things and then the bonus these are bonus features this is all on the USB sticks so all these pieces here the ones you just saw were not those are ones that are not in the thing let me see if there's one that captures the a lot of these are meant to be varying states of informative and I have very long things on CDC and things on the hacking for charity things that were important stories and then there's yeah I know you're like poor and santa but let's make him the last thing wait wait down one and to the right there you go then there's this story saved for all time alright so we had went to the New York that terrible Asian restaurant they have in there that terrible Chinese joint and I had Mongolian beef and then we went back and through the party in the room and so I got a little bit too drunk shall we say and at the end of the night as everybody was you know the party rolled down I ended up in my bathroom in my bedroom and I just lost all of it it looked like somebody grabbed a big old plate of Mongolian beef and just threw it around the entire bathroom and we looked it was awful I mean while it looked like it was just normal Mongolian beef of course it didn't smell that way so you know we wake up the next morning and I'm intending to clean it up but everyone was like let's go get breakfast we'll clean it up after we're rolling back to the hotel and we're walking up to the hotel room and this poor maid the look on her face was awful she walks out of the room and she looks at us because she knows we have the hotel room and she's like someone in there go blah it's so bad I go blah we made the maid Defconn vomit I felt so bad for this poor lady I think we handed her $60 or something it was a tip I just apologized and that is, that's the Mongolian beef story right there in a nutshell oh yes I came up to offer you water cause you've been thrown up and you sit naked I'm like you want some water fuck me fuck me oh yeah the AC had frozen and the smell was awful and I was just sweating bullets you know naked laying in a pile of my own vomit on the floor yeah that's woo yeah that's a high moment you were gonna let me walk out of here without that golden footage you were just gonna be like I had a big time and I had to do some parties Defconn was good for some reason I stopped going good bye congratulations for the years Def I support you very good what I love about that is at that moment there's like 12 other people in the room cause I'm going through this whole crowd and they're all trying to stay as quiet as possible while he tells this disgusting story and then they just lose it as soon as I start talking let's do the upper right one top quality production you're like you need a blooper reel alright blooper reel one of the things that I don't know quality production I look forward to seeing this in the film yeah but are there principles and oh Jesus balls I told you it's the it's the quiet one it's the quiet one watch it's the metro link it's the quiet one oh that's the Chicago train have fun in Chicago on Wednesday not that I know anything about the train during the night here not creepy at all good shot here of the room and you know us putting things together and doing stuff and then you know what this needs this needs a close up it's also blew out the transformer but everything's on batteries so it's still recording I'm a nice guy but sometimes I'm not a nice guy and I'm just like shut up that's rust giggling in the darkness I just didn't want you to break a cord awesome you know what the best part is I have that completely on camera I use balls a lot do we okay so oh yeah porn santa the epic story the epic story of porn santa was to go out into the vendor area and just hand out all the porn you found events like this it's really kind of neat to have this little piece of DEF CON history saved for msv sticks and torrents around the world who doesn't need porn dude take it you jerk just fucking take it damn it santa claus has so many children to deliver to this year yeah sure the epic journey of porn santa people are now coming in to like clear the room for the next crowd so again thanks so much um if anyone has like a burning burning question I'll answer it right now if there is anyone have a burning question they're like what you did the screening is tonight at 8 o'clock in track 3 I believe it's the track that hacker jeopardy is not happening but it's at 8 o'clock tonight and we'll screen the whole movie and even answer some questions afterwards we'll play a little other bonus footage if people are still up for it and have a good time was it worth it, of course it was worth it it was a wonderful time Rachel and I had a lot of fights over many things and a lot of screaming about getting this and that done but I think at the end the product speaks for itself and I think that we have a really special piece of work and without you know Kyle and Drew and Alex can we get them to come up here you're smart people stage, stage, get on the stage we won't be able to see you so here's our gang lovely Alex and so here's our gang who are here and Drew was here yesterday for the premiere but he had to go back to Hawaii where he lives now and Rick is busy in Florida it was without these people without Alex and Rick and Drew and Rachel and everyone else we wouldn't have this movie no way so thank you so much do you want to say anything Rachel? nope okay alright well thank you so much for sitting through


It was the most naked, I think, and cranked description of the gold standard position. You can't substitute paper for the real thing. An idea can't be a thing. A thing has to be something material. But of course, in fact, it's an economy where a house-in-lot is just a piece of paper. And in fact, the ownership of the house-in-lot is purely a fictional paper title. Ownership doesn't exist physically. It only exists in law. It only exists in custom. And for the purposes of the market, a paper representation of a house-in-lot is exactly as good as a house-in-lot. And so that was sort of interesting to me. The cow, obviously you can't milk a piece of paper, but you can buy and sell symbolic cows, which are nothing more than pieces of paper. And from the perspective of the greenbackers, the money itself is an embodiment of all these other tangible physical goods, which are part of the United States. So it seemed like a nice way to get at both a really strong expression of the gold standard position and some of the incoherences of it at the same time. The first thing I'd ask him is why did he choose to make paper money into a rag doll? What are the rhetorical strategies of this thing? And the claim that paper money is a rag baby is an interesting claim to make. Why does he choose to symbolize it that way? Why not call it a scarecrow? Why a rag baby? And then I'd ask, why would he want to have it in the form of this weird impossible situation of shelf with signs put around it? I mean, I would want to ask them why the argument takes that form. And I'd get them to say, well, maybe it has something to do with the commercial street and the world of signs and advertising. If I had to describe a methodology, I would say you have to have some factual context. You have to understand why certain terms appear. You have to know what's going on in the era that the document appeared in. But beyond that, you want an attitude of skepticism about the rhetoric, about the strategies of argument that the document makes. You want to be able to question not just the points the argument makes, but the means by which the arguments gets there. The more complicated way to say it is to say you don't want just the answer to the question, you want to know what does asking that question do? What effects does asking that question produce? What kind of outcomes does that question always point towards? The first thing I do when I'm talking about reading images is I say there's absolutely nothing in an image that can be taken for granted. And if you're going to read it, you have to really go sector by sector. You have to ask the why question about every piece of an image. Why is this particular thing here and not somewhere else? Why do you choose to draw it this way? Did you have to really interrogate images? I mean, that's the basic method I want to bring when I'm using an image. There's nothing in it that's a product of chance. Well, or if there is something in it that's a product of chance, it might be more interesting than the things that are in there deliberately. The first thing they want to do is take careful notes either on paper or mentally about what the thing depicts and how it depicts it. And sometimes just writing it down is a big help. It's a baby, and I find when I'm taking notes that when I write down the image, I often learn a lot about it. So the first thing they want to do is give it a careful formal study of the structure of the thing. What is it depicting and how?


Happy almost Valentine's Day everybody! I was eating popcorn, now I have a bunch of it in my teeth, which is not the best way to start a video. Why am I eating more popcorn? I think I'm sickness. Hi there my loves! Today I'm doing a video called A Letter to My Exes. I'm going to be going in chronological order of the different major relationships I've had. I want to start with my first love, my first real major relationship. So dear ex. I was 17 years old when I met you and I had just started to become a sexually active woman at the time. I did not have a handle on my sex life or on how my body functioned and I was really confused in trying to figure it out. You came into my life at exactly that time. So as a result I made our relationship pretty early on about sex and then ended up resenting you for joining in on that. When I really think back to the time that we shared, I honestly can't remember over the you know it was a long time maybe four or five years. I can't remember much other than sexual experiences which is really sad to say because that was what really heart broke me the most about our interaction is I felt that you never found me worth more than my body. I think amongst my friends you were known as a bad person and of course we had that on and off again relationship in which a lot of the times I felt like you weren't choosing me but ultimately you were always honest and I appreciate you for that. When you didn't want a relationship you told me I didn't want a relationship and if I chose to consent in a sexual relationship just as some type of consolation prize then that's on me. That shouldn't have been you who was held accountable or held at fault when all you were was honest you know not necessarily the most fun first love but definitely a very virtuous and honest one. Moving on this is an awkward one dear ex we had a very unhealthy relationship that again was based a lot around sex similarly I was still a teenager at the time and some things happened between us that were non consensual where I still feel a bit rattled is that in my lack of confronting you on what happened between us I remained in relation to you and heard you tell more stories of things that I could tell were non consensual acts and I never called you out on it and I may have caused other women pain by refusing to be brave by not standing up to you and not pointing out your faults not only did I stop you from developing in the way that you naturally should have I could have prevented pain for others so my regret in that was not being brave enough and not being strong enough but I thank you for despite that situation for ultimately being a good friend you weren't a terrible person you had terrible instincts and maybe terrible education when it came to women and respecting women but aside from that on a sexual side you you were a good friend and I know today if I sat down and talked with you we'd probably have a really good conversation about it and so I guess this is my first step in doing so and that's what I want to say to you dear ex rolling into my 20s I miss you I miss you as a friend I miss you just as a light in my life you were awesome just a really cool fun to be around person and you taught me a really big lesson that when two become one there is no one left to connect to I made the grave mistake in our relationship of trying too hard to please and of sacrificing my individuality myself in the process and I always remember this story because it just it's one of those beautiful metaphors that just like it wasn't a metaphor it was a real thing that happened but just stood out in my life um when we were dating over the winter of I don't even know a few years ago we're dating over the winter time and I was constantly driving over to you because you didn't ever come to me because I never really held you accountable to do so so I was always driving over to you and I remember I drove over once in a snowstorm and in the snowstorm you had just bought a new car and I drove over because I wanted to see a new car with you and you were so excited and I was like I want to give you a gift and so I went into my car and I took out my snow brush and I handed it to you and you said don't you need this and I was like no no no I have two don't worry about it don't worry about it and you're like thank you and just to see the joy on your face like even though I knew it would be dangerous for me to drive home or it was dangerous the winter just see the joy on your face was like kind of enough for me and I remember things got a bit rocky between us where I wasn't hearing from you as much and a few days later you finally asked me to go to the movies and I was so excited and again it was snowing and I drove over there we went to the movies and things weren't the same and something was off and you just seemed disinterested in a way that really deeply hurt but I wasn't able to put you know mature words on that and at the end of the movie you're like it's snowing where's your car and I was like oh in the parking lot at the back you know and he was like okay I'm gonna go brush the cars off and then we can leave and so you left and I was waiting for you and I remember waiting for a long time and thinking it's taking him a while to brush the snow off and so I walked out to the parking lot and as I did I saw you using your sleeve and my heart sunk and you were like I thought you said you had two snow brushes and I was like oh I guess I thought I did and he's like why didn't you tell me because I would have given yours back to you and I was like oh I don't guess I forgot he's like as soon as we go back to my place I'm giving you back your snow brush and you did and I think that was the last time I saw you um and that was a great lesson to learn and it was a painful one but I had to learn individuality and I was so angry at you for not wanting to connect with me but ultimately I should have been a little disappointed in myself for not creating somebody worth connecting and not honoring what was valuable about me to be worked for and I gave too much and in the end I lost everything um it just obviously is not a fit but I want to say thank you just for being somebody who I did feel inspired to give a lot to and for the lessons that you taught me which when I met somebody else you know who I felt inspired to connect to I wasn't such a pushover and that was a great lesson dear ex from college hi you were such a bright awesome cool educational spot in my life you're the reason that I felt confident enough to start writing my book late um you gave me a lot of support and emotional stability at a time when I was deeply insecure unsure young woman and thank you for that I want to say sorry to you for allowing me opinions of my friends and family to sway how I felt about you I thought you were kind and cool and awesome and everybody else thought that you were all of those things but not very exciting and so a lot of people just said that I don't think use your type I don't think use your type I just don't seem as being your type and even though I felt differently about that I think I allowed their opinions to really infiltrate me and so I grew distant from you because I grew embarrassed of you and that's unfair to say uh because you never did anything wrong or negatively and you were always kind I do think that there was a lack of maybe passion and more of just a deep respect and love for you but I regret not keeping up a friendship you know after I broke up with you because I was so ashamed you know for for leaving somebody who was so kind I just put a lot of space between us I am glad that in later years we reconnected and I do wish you all the best you know that I'm a support system there for you and thank you for being a great example of what good love is that's annoying dear ex I struggle with this we were never meant to be more than friends we were never meant to try to have a romantic relationship because of the clear and compatibilities based on your personality type in mind that I knew existed in the very beginning but you gave me attention at a time that I felt nobody else was and you gave me a lot of certainty and you did something that at the time not a lot of people did you asked me for a committed relationship which back then I wanted so bad that I was willing to overlook other things in order to attain that if I ultimately look back my biggest regret is saying yes to begin with maybe to this day we will still be cool if I didn't do that but in our relationship and in the efforts and in the trying there's really not a lot that I feel sorry for I gave good effort I was honest I remained vigilant I devoted myself to you in several ways you know I believed in you but here is where my biggest regret is the final year of our not so great relationship I fucking hated your guts I really did I used to like search and try so hard to find out if you were cheating not because I really cared but because I just needed an excuse to get away from you and that is foul because I should have just been strong enough to say I want to get away from you I was so afraid of acknowledging that I was not capable of unconditional love which I learned through the experience that I am not capable of unconditional love my love absolutely has conditions I mean there are absolutely rules and standards in there but at that time I was afraid to admit that I wasn't capable of that and so I would rather have it been your fault and so I was almost waiting for you to slip up so that I could leave without having to be the one who did it and I was so heavily of course riddled with addiction that it was hard for me to get out but I loved you I did not like you and I think about that right now because in my current relationship so much of it is based on genuine life when my partner does certain things I look at them and I smile and they make me feel like oh it's so cute and when they do silly things I'm like oh it's so cute and given that person that space even if it isn't verbal just every time I look at him I think good things and I looked at you and I didn't feel the same I thought really not nice things um little things everything that you did bothered me I just didn't give you a warm environment to improve it whether or not you came with your own set of mistakes or your own set of faults um especially the last year I did not give a hospitable environment for anybody to thrive or improve in and there's no wonder things ended the way that they did I learned a lot from you and thank you and I know I talk a lot of shit about you but thank you um thank you for giving me the emphasis on thank you for re-energizing me when I was sort of lost in my career you know four years ago or so he was the one who was like I think you should devote yourself to relationships you seem to give a lot of care to that um and while you did give that initial encouragement it didn't help you know during the relationship where you constantly said I shouldn't be one because I don't know anything but I'm gonna ignore that and focus on the positive um thank you for the encouragement to get back into it thank you for teaching me how to dress you know thank you for teaching me the importance of putting myself together I think that you have great skills and a great talent and it's hard for me to truthfully say that I wish the best for you so I think I shouldn't say anything at all I don't think we should talk at all um which is a cool thing to say out loud because for a while there my hurt and unresolved feelings towards you I felt like should be talked out or I should reach out and talk to you as I sit here today I realized that just that's just not a good idea and thank you for the lessons that's all that's all this video is so much weirder than I thought it would be um so I'm gonna do a tag right now because I don't know how else to end this this is I guess an opportunity I would I hope that you guys kind of see there's a difference a juxtaposition so when it says letter to my exes I know on my cover photo I was all like fuck you and really it's the opposite if you had to write a letter to your ex and lament on the positive and take away the good things from it and find where you messed up and as I said in my previous video accountability is king when you know where you went wrong or where you could have improved you can change the future when the world is happening to you or people are happening to you and you didn't do anything wrong you can't take any of those lessons forth into a relationship and be better because of them so I want you guys to do the same if you were to write a letter to five exes that deeply changed you and adjusted the way that you perceive love and relationships forever and you were to focus mostly on the positive or where you were at fault what would you say to them so make a tag video I'm gonna tag in this Hannah Witton Ari Fitz Maya Washington Megan T and Amber's closet so oh also Jackie Aina so let's tag you guys before valentine's day or on valentine's day do a letter to five of your exes and see where it goes put the camera on to see where it goes I didn't expect this but I'm happy with the result and I'm very happy that you guys stayed with me throughout this process and I encourage you to do your own happy almost valentine's day baby