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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Jordy, can you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast?
Jordi:Yeah, so Ben Wilson is on David Senra, by David Senra today. Ben, very unfortunately, has stage four cancer in four kids under the age of five. Senra says I wanna help him as much as possible, so I invite him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history's greatest leaders, and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38. He's a good friend, a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Speaker 2:Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine introductions or donations. So we just want to share this at the top of our show. And I've only met Ben once, but really, really amazing thinker and and incredible show. And and I recommend checking out the show as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, moving on. Thank you to RAMP for supporting, and you should as well. We covered at the end of the show yesterday, but I mean, pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. OpenAI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs.
Speaker 1:And so this was all over the timeline we discussed at the end of yesterday's show. But Abdulrahman Al Fazan, the alleged OpenAI spy, used an AI generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as his LinkedIn and X profiles despite having no documented connection to the school. So... But there's a community note on this. There there's a lot of people going back and forth.
Speaker 1:Apparently, his actual profiles now show the real information, but there's a whole bunch of back and forth. But it seems like it was a pretty simple device. I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of television in an executive conference room. And folks are saying that it cost maybe $15, something like that. And so there's also debate over, you know, is he he's...
Speaker 1:Is he an American citizen? Is he a Saudi national? There's a picture of him alongside crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but, you know, anyone can stand in line for a photo for a photo op. But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this.
Speaker 1:And so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.
Speaker 2:Kylie Robinson called it amateur hour, a chatbot account associated with the engineer's spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding WiFi connectivity, listening remotely, and encrypting its memory card according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Pretty simple. Like, how do I commit a crime? Like, typing that into the computer. And so, not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching.
Speaker 1:How do I spy? How do I
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Create a recording?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The whole thing the whole thing is just very con... Confusing. Like, it is... Yeah.
Speaker 2:Would this would make it seem like he's a a lone wolf. Right? Because if there was any type of, like, sophisticated operation Yep. You would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro. We got you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. That is weird for sure. And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around or nation states, it's usually around like stealing the weights or and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes or stealing the intellectual property.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of back and forth lawsuits around intellectual property. But you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference. There's no meeting between Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, Let's read off the weights to GPT-seven, starting at the beginning. Zero seven five.
Speaker 2:They're doing a table reading. Two. They're doing a table reading.
Speaker 1:Nine. No. Like, they don't... That... That's...
Speaker 1:You're not gonna get anything. You're going to get, like, strategy, like, corporate strategy, which is maybe valuable if you're, like, trading the stock market, but it's not it's not like you're gonna listen in on a conversation and be like, okay. I know how... I I I I just... Yeah.
Speaker 1:I can just reverse engineer the next model, which is very odd. So the motivations here are complicated. Like, it could be purely financial, could be something more nefarious. We'll let the FBI investigate. I think that's the photo of David Center that just slammed down.
Speaker 1:We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.
Speaker 2:Very good. Looking good. Always with us.
Speaker 1:Anyway, the OpenAI spy listening device story, I mean, it's all over the timeline. People are having fun with it. People are worried about it. I'm sure FBI will investigate and we'll have more information. But I don't really have a strong take other than like, it's bad.
Speaker 1:Don't spy. And it reinforces the stakes. Like, security is really important. We know this. We've been talking about this.
Speaker 1:But it was weird because yesterday, I was talking to somebody and they were, and they were saying, oh, yeah. The Instagram meta ads are so good, you know, because they... You know, obviously, because they they listen to my
Speaker 2:It's so funny. Phone. Like, covering up covering it up with toilet paper. Toilet paper. Like, would that not...
Speaker 2:If you're looking behind a TV and you're like, what's that electronic device covered up with toilet paper? Like, that to me is much more interesting and concerning than
Speaker 1:If it was just a USB stick
Speaker 2:You would never
Speaker 1:Oh, somebody left a USB stick because they were looking at photos on the Yeah. On the... Or if they just put, like, a fire... An Amazon Fire Stick back there.
Speaker 2:You wouldn't know. You would just be like, oh, it's notice it.
Speaker 1:You wouldn't notice it. You would
Speaker 2:only notice it if you were actually sweeping
Speaker 1:floor. Go back there and it's, like, glue and tongue depressors and Lincoln logs and some Legos back there. It's like, what... Yeah. It's gonna draw your eye because you're like, toilet paper should never be in an electronics cabinet, period.
Speaker 1:Like, there's no reason for it to be there. As opposed to, like, USB cables are... They belong back there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Something that looks like an HDMI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Anything. Put put a...
Speaker 1:Put an Xbox back there. Put... Yeah. I mean, you could literally put, like, a... Something in the shell of an Apple TV or in the shell of a of of of a Nintendo Switch, and somebody would just be, oh, it's a Nintendo Switch.
Speaker 1:And you could put something inside of the device. Sorry. We're giving spies like ideas now. This is bad. Forget what I said.
Speaker 1:Don't do this. Don't spy. You're going to go to jail. It's really, really bad. Anyway, yesterday, I was just laughing because somebody was like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, the Instagram ads are like so good now. But... And, like, you know, obviously, like, they're listening to they're listening to the audio around my phone, like, ambiently, and that's why it's so good. And they weren't, like, alleging this as like a conspiracy theory that needs... Needed to be uncovered.
Speaker 1:It was just like a given. It was just oh, yeah. That's like one of the strategies and one of the features. Like, it's like, of course, they, like, listen to everything you say, and then they target ads and the ads are better. And it was just like...
Speaker 1:It wasn't it wasn't like, and I'm mad about it. It was just like... And it it obviously happens when
Speaker 2:Just business.
Speaker 1:This has been debunked many times. It was investigated by Wired in 2017. Antonio Garcia Martinez talked about it on Joe Rogan in 2022. His his reaction is actually funny. We should pull up the video.
Speaker 3:Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation
Speaker 1:about Oh,
Speaker 2:The microphone thing. The mic...
Speaker 3:Is that real?
Speaker 2:No. It's not real. No. No. I mean...
Speaker 2:I don't believe him. Do you believe...
Speaker 1:I was just talking
Speaker 2:about other day. I haven't searched for it at all. Okay. And I got an ad for it. It's something me and you were talking about.
Speaker 3:What was it?
Speaker 2:I I... If I remember right, I remember, but it was something we were talking about after the show, six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it. Here's what I bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website, not only that.
Speaker 1:One of us.
Speaker 3:What? So if I do, he gets an ad?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. How?
Speaker 1:Because it has your geolocation, which is also kind of crazy. But if has your geolocation, your friend's geolocation, there's so many times when someone will recommend a product to me, and then I'll see an ad for it, I'll be like, it was listening. And it's like, no. It has the receipt from the person that I'm connected with on Instagram, and then it saw that we were both in the same place. So clearly, we talked about that.
Speaker 1:Like, it just inferred that. And then it shows you, like, 10,000 ads a day, and so five of them are gonna be, like, creepily accurate. Are you gonna put on a tinfoil hat? Are you are you a truther on this, or are you are you a plan truster?
Speaker 2:Plan truster.
Speaker 1:Plan truster. Okay. Okay. Facebook, like, straight up has on their, like, about page. Like, we don't use your microphone unless you've given us permission and are actively using a feature that requires the microphone.
Speaker 1:So sometimes, like, if you are in a Meta product and you turn on the microphone, like, yes, it is listening then. And so there are instances where people have, like, accidentally left that open and then obviously does have that data. And, like, if you if you upload a bunch of video of you talking about all the products you love...
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you turn on the microphone for a split second, there's an alert that goes off in Meta HQ. 10 people run into a room and they just listen, and then they sort of brainstorm ads that they could, you know, deliver based on that that... I would
Speaker 1:I would like a social network that was like handcrafted ads. Like, there's a guy who's like, you know, a Don Draper. He, like, sips a couple martinis, smokes a cigar, and then really thinks about, like, okay. What would be the perfect ad for this person to see? And they pick it.
Speaker 1:Curation. That's the future. I I was wondering, like, like, how far are we from this actually happening? Because I know Meta will hold the line on it, and they're not just gonna, like, go in the background of the phone because it would be such a scandal. And, like, after seeing the social reckoning, like, the in...
Speaker 1:The, like, the opportunity to whistleblow is just so huge that you could be just, like, a a rank and file Meta employee. If you find out that they're actually doing the the ambient voice recording and using that for ad targeting, it's just quit your job immediately, get the whistleblower status, Netflix doc, book, tour. Like, you're gonna make way more money. Like, the like, the incentive to whistleblow on that is just so high. I think that it's
Speaker 2:Hour of capitalism.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think it's probably, like, that's a that's a huge pushback. But I was wondering, like, is it possible that ambient voice recording does wind up influencing your meta ads somehow? And I found a chain that actually can make this happen. So, there is a company that handles that handles business phone calls.
Speaker 1:So, if you're on the call with a with a particular company and they use a particular AI AI system, they will actually transcribe that, and then they put that data, I think, through LiveRamp, which can actually get into a Meta ad... Ads Manager as an audience. But this is a little bit... It's not quite what you think because it would be like if you're on the phone with Bottega Veneta and you're talking about products that you like, then that could wind up getting retargeted, which you normally wouldn't think it would be retargeted because you're like, there's no pixel on the phone, but they are transcribing that. But it's direct to that particular brand.
Speaker 1:And so it wouldn't be the really like, woah. Like, I wasn't talking... I wasn't even talking to a company. It's like you are talking to a company. But do you remember the LG drama that happened, like, last month?
Speaker 1:No. Do you remember this? Okay. So Palmer came on our show, I think last year and was like talking about how terrible smart TVs are. And I think everyone sort of agrees that at the very least, they're like clunky and they have too many features and they wanna be like updated every every like five days when you use the TV.
Speaker 1:It's like, we need a software update and they have so many different like things and they want to show you ads. And it's all very annoying even though the TVs, like, look nice these days. But last month, Gamers Nexus, they put out this two hour YouTube video showing that LG TVs are, aggressively using spyware effectively. That's the allegation. So they scanned the local network for third party phones and other devices.
Speaker 1:The LG G5 crawled the entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones, of the staff who didn't even know we were working on this investigation. Even when the TV wasn't online, the LG TV they tested was able to record sound around it. Quote, we were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network. This is because there's enough Wi Fi hotspots in most neighborhoods now that are just, like, public, basically, through, like, a Comcast or a Spectrum that they can, like, hop on something and just say, oh, okay. I I got access to the Internet.
Speaker 1:It's it's crazy. Like... And so... I don't think we need
Speaker 2:to go down the whole, like, you can see through walls with the wall.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's crazy too. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're So good.
Speaker 1:Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plain text, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG if the TV connects online again. And so, like, hard drives and memory have gotten so so cheap that you can basically be recording recording the audio, transcribing the text using, like, basically, like a local transcription model. It's not like running a big GPU. It's just, like, transcribing text pretty easy, and then it's just storing those plain text. And it can store, like, years and years of ambient text on, like, you know, like, one gig drive, basically.
Speaker 1:Like, it's it's just so small. And so LG responded and said, like, look, we're not really doing all of that, but they said, we don't do continuous conversation recording. Now, if you push the button
Speaker 2:Don't worry. We take a break when you're not talking. If
Speaker 1:you're if you do active voice session, which is where you, like, press the button to talk to the TV, so you so you actively wanna do it, it will pick up conversations that are happening in the background. So, you know, the the the the privacy implications are, you know, your roommate is pushing the button and saying, like, put on Red Bull TV or something or the X Games. And and in the background, you're talking about your plans for the weekend and then that that gets saved in the in the data. But that seems kind of obvious, like, you've turned on the microphone.
Speaker 2:Xfinity has a feature that turns your home WiFi router into a motion sensor.
Speaker 1:That's interesting. They actually productized it. That's kind of... I don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're away, why not just have your WiFi, see if there's motion in your in your vicinity? Can it detect aura too or just motion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That... I mean,
Speaker 1:that's that's the most important question. So so LG has this ad solutions product, which can potentially feed into meta ads and make your Instagram ads scarily accurate. But they say they're not doing the full chain yet. But... So there's still a confirmation bias where you see a bunch of ads, but you see one ad for the thing that you were talking about and you're like, oh, it's so scarily accurate.
Speaker 2:Wait. Rewind. Saying that your LG TV might be listening and then they might be passing that.
Speaker 1:They say they're not, but they are listening. They have an ads product and it can connect to Meta. So like, we're we're like the technology exists, but they haven't turned it on, I think is like the claim.
Speaker 2:Or they could have stopped doing it while they responded to that article saying we are not currently doing this and then re...
Speaker 1:Potentially. Personally, I don't really mind it that much. I I kinda just don't care if the ads are scarily accurate. I'm used to it, but it is odd. And also, it's just like TV, stay in your lane.
Speaker 1:Just show me the thing. I don't want a bunch of other junk. Just charge me what it costs to make the TV. But what's interesting is that amid all these privacy concerns around LG and it potentially listening to you and some backlash there, I think they fire... I I think they did the crisis BR effectively.
Speaker 1:I think it is, like, pretty clear that they're not actually just full open channel all the time piping it everywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So on that note, how likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward?
Speaker 1:I already did. They're the best. Like, I I just don't wanna mind it. It's just gonna listen to my my, you know, voice recordings and be like, wow. This is sick.
Speaker 1:Like, this guy's awesome. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Motion detected.
Speaker 1:Motion detected. Exactly. But what's interesting is that LG has this drama. And then like last week, we touched on it briefly, Apple partnered with LG. And Apple has this like, you know, really solid brand.
Speaker 1:So they did this really deep partnership with LG and like two other manufacturers where I think they look nice. And I think if you are an iPhone user, there's probably a benefit to going all in on one on one system. And I think if you went with these devices, the integration into HomeKit would be solid. What tier are you putting it in? Should we
Speaker 2:go one by C tier.
Speaker 1:C tier. Okay. But compare that to the home view.
Speaker 2:Why don't we compare to this ad of... This new ad for the Apple home view?
Speaker 1:Yeah. The ad was was a little rough. We can pull it up and play it. It's tracking. So I didn't realize this, but you can just...
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm the guy that does food. You're the guy that what? You you you start a 100 different businesses and have zero follow-up. Carmen, I need you to check the friends.
Speaker 1:You know? I feel like that was a shock, Carmen.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying. This is why this is why I didn't wanna come home. This is why
Speaker 1:I'm like...
Speaker 2:Oh, fuck you. Oh. Fuck. What? What?
Speaker 2:What's your face?
Speaker 1:Do have a sensor button? Remarkably annoying, but great edit by whoever put that together. Very, very fun. We have a doorbell, a thermostat, camera, and few other
Speaker 2:I'm sorry. Partnering with LG does not count as having a
Speaker 1:It does if it works as well as an Apple product. If it works like Beats, where, like, it's actually
Speaker 2:But what are they what are they... Like, either take the category seriously and deliver an amazing product
Speaker 1:Buy Sonos. Buy a bunch
Speaker 2:of You're telling me Apple can't make, like, a doorbell?
Speaker 1:They don't know how.
Speaker 2:They don't know how.
Speaker 1:They literally
Speaker 2:don't know We... They don't know how anymore.
Speaker 1:Me give you four options for a theoretical smart home. You can put them in a tier tier list. Everything must be a tier list. Okay. So the first option is going...
Speaker 1:The the the cornerstone of your... The the the first option is just chaos. The first option is just you get whatever. Somebody gives you an Amazon Echo. It goes on the countertop.
Speaker 1:You got an Amazon Echo. Then you buy a Nest thermostat, you got Google over there. Then you got an iPhone in your pocket, you got an iPad over here. It's just chaos. It's just random.
Speaker 1:What what... Where does that sit for you tier tier wise? That that life? That's b tier?
Speaker 2:B tier.
Speaker 1:B tier. That's not so bad. You like chaos.
Speaker 2:What... Whatever is below f.
Speaker 1:Below... Okay. F tier is the chaos mode. Random chaos. Okay.
Speaker 1:Now let's let's do... You're going all in on Google. So you got the Google lock.
Speaker 2:A tier.
Speaker 1:A tier. Okay. Even though you carry an iPhone, you like the all Google products. Now Amazon. You get the Ring camera.
Speaker 1:You can get the little drone that flies around your house. You know that one? They have a drone Yeah. That is, like, for home defense inside. That's a plus.
Speaker 1:You get Amazon Echo, though. So you're talking to Rufus a lot. How are you feeling about the Amazon ecosystem? Where does that go? We're getting the dog sound effects.
Speaker 2:S tier.
Speaker 1:S tier.
Speaker 2:S tier.
Speaker 1:You're Amazon. Okay. And then the last one is Apple. Apple, you already carry an iPhone, but you're going all in on Apple, and that means an LG lock. But it all connects to home home
Speaker 2:I'm not kit. Signing up for spy services.
Speaker 1:It's all global spy services. It's all global. They're all global spy services. The... Apple is maybe the least
Speaker 2:We just spent twenty minutes talking about how LG is absolutely the worst.
Speaker 1:LG is the worst, but Apple's the best, and so it averages out to, like, Google and Amazon quality in my opinion.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:That's actually a good point.
Speaker 1:And and since Apple Apple came, they brought their sterling reputation, crystal clear messaging, and they said data is encrypted end to end in Apple Home. So your your your voice, your your secretly recorded voice is encrypted, and then it's transferred to the data broker who unencrypted it for you. No. No. It is encrypted.
Speaker 1:I I have faith in Apple security. But but what... How do you feel? Don't wanna influence you too much.
Speaker 2:Trey says Apple LG is Hublotier.
Speaker 1:Apple LG is Hublotier.
Speaker 2:Shots fired.
Speaker 1:Oh, no. I got a fun business idea, a way to make a little extra money this Halloween. With the power of artificial intelligence, it's easier than ever to file a lawsuit. So here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna go to popular places where trick or treaters are.
Speaker 1:You're gonna find the kids that have handmade costumes from characters that are not in the public domain yet. So Iron Man, that's still Disney intellectual property. Yep. So you show up and you act like you're doing one of those TikTok, like, man on the street, oh, I love your costume. Serve the magic.
Speaker 1:Is it homemade? And they're like, yeah, did make it myself. I didn't buy this. I didn't pay the royalty. And you get their name, and then you generate a lawsuit and you say, I'm I'm here to serve you with intellectual property theft, small claims lawsuit.
Speaker 2:So, John, LG actually makes a pocket photo printer. Really? And so why not generate the lawsuit on the fly and print
Speaker 1:it there? Exactly.
Speaker 2:Serve them. Serve the parents.
Speaker 1:Serve them. Right? Yeah. And so then they're gonna be, oh, no. I don't I don't wanna get sued.
Speaker 1:You know, do you work for Disney? And you have to be like, oh, don't worry about that. And then... So then you you you offer to settle the lawsuit on the street over Venmo or something. Wildly illegal.
Speaker 1:But then there's a second step. So once you have all of these, you know, adorable kids with their homemade but intellectual property infringing, you go to the studios. You take the meeting with Disney, and you say, Look what I've done. I've found so many instances of intellectual property infringement. We can clean up here.
Speaker 1:And they're gonna look at you like, are you insane? You're gonna ruin our brand. Homemade costumes are the lifeblood of our fandom. If this gets out, it will destroy our brand. We will look like an evil corporation.
Speaker 1:And then you'll say, yeah. It'd be a shame if this got out. Let's settle over Venmo. So you Venmo me to make this go away. I won't release the footage of lawsuits for the kids who are wearing Kinda sit...
Speaker 1:Intellectually improperly.... This. Like, you
Speaker 2:got got them pinned over here.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Easy money this Halloween. Oh, yeah. The... Oh, the other thing with the IoT discussion is just like Anthropic is warning that rogue AI agents may self replicate and hijack every...
Speaker 1:Everyday devices. Like, they did some studies that show that inference can run on commodity hardware. Think like a PlayStation, an Xbox, even a doorbell. It'll be really slow, but it could potentially self replicate. And so, it's another vector of like, you might not think security is important.
Speaker 1:You might only think, like, the neo cloud, the GPU cluster is important, but the Financial Times put it in a very funny way, very different language from what Anthropics said. They said, Self replicating AI worms will be able to hijack smart homes, Anthropic says. So, yeah, maybe maybe the analog home is the future. Maybe you do need to have no smart doorbells because it'll just be ringing doorbells constantly trying to communicate with the other agents and swarm or something.
Speaker 2:What's going on over Xbox?
Speaker 1:Xbox. They started a lab to lean into vibe coding and decompiled games. They recognize that it's good for players, but it might challenge the business model. But they're in a unique position being owned by Microsoft to potentially change their business model and not be so reliant on quarterly earnings. And so Asha Sharma over at Xbox is winning accolades.
Speaker 1:A lot of love on the timeline for her. So she said, Today, we're standing up Xbox Labs, labs.xbox.com. And you should pull up the website because it's very, very cool design showing all the different Xbox intellectual property and some fun things that you can, like, click buttons to change the the style. But she sent this note to the team. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally intended to support.
Speaker 1:Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon, ported to run inside of a web browser using web WebAssembly. But perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. We saw this with Call of Duty and Minecraft. Right? They stood up Xbox Labs, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job it is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience.
Speaker 1:We'll build in the open, learn what... From what people can do. And so people are excited. John Palmer said, if Xbox launched an official version of decompiled Halo with a forge mode and a marketplacediscovery of mods akin to how Roblox works, they would make $1,000,000,000,000 That may be a little hyperbolic since you can do a lot of these mods for free, but it is very interesting that they're at this threshold of do you want to completely burn down the old business model in favor of something new? Or do you want to try and fight it out and squeeze the last egg out of the golden goose that is the traditional model?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Well, there's a deep dive on on GTA six in Bloomberg. It's pretty fun. Should we go through...
Speaker 2:Read the highlights.
Speaker 1:Let's read the highlights. GTA six has been in development for eight years. I thought it was longer. I thought they started it like right after GTA five, but I guess it's only been eight years. It's still a really long time.
Speaker 1:The original version included large areas of North And South America, but the scope was eventually reduced to Vice City, Miami, and its surrounding regions. The game's basic story was established by 2019. Wow. They locked the story seven years ago. That's crazy.
Speaker 1:GTA VI features Rockstar's most realistic and detailed open world yet, heavily on systems introduced in Red Dead Redemption two. They invested heavily in making NPCs feel believable rather than simply populating the world with generic characters. The developers struggled to balance realism and entertainment, debating how interactive everyday activity should be, such as purchasing drinks or preparing food. Jason and Lucia can spend time together throughout the open world rather than interacting only during scripted missions. Very fun.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch more. Wow. There are so many so many takeaways. This this synth potato thread is really, really long. Anyway, I'm excited to play when it comes out.
Speaker 1:Also, Xbox introduced a new controller, the Xbox Nano controller for $49.99. The controller works on Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.
Speaker 2:This looks like it's for casuals?
Speaker 1:It does. It's for casuals.
Speaker 2:And I'm a casual. I'm potentially the most casual player. And even I look at this, and I think, I don't know if that's for me.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, I'm sure people will hack this to work with everything and probably run everything as well. I saw some people vibe coding different controllers. There's a Star Wars pod racing game, and some had really sweet controls that mimicked the actual movie pretty effectively. Whatever you're vibe coding, do it with Codex.
Speaker 1:Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. A Brooklyn store employee prevented Kelly Clarkson from buying an animatronic bird, and the post hit the timeline like a thermonuclear explosion. Did you follow this? You said you were getting a lot of fake news.
Speaker 1:We have a truth nerd coming in.
Speaker 2:I have no idea what happened here other than what you've already told me.
Speaker 1:It's pretty aggressive. That's still not fast enough. Still not my tempo. So Pablo Torre actually went and did a deep dive on this. I don't know where we should start, but it's a it's a it's a pretty wild, wild story.
Speaker 1:So Kelly Clarkson started with a post on October 10 that kind of put this on the timeline. She said, Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy and literally was looked at as if I couldn't afford it and was told he could find something comparable for me. Wow, dude. You're an idiot and just lost a huge sale, But, y'all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn, and she name drops them. If you enjoy being treated like Roberts' character in Pretty Woman, for sure, check it out.
Speaker 1:Thumbs down. And Eliano from Palantir says, Kelly, you would never be treated this way in the Palantir pop up shop in Seoul, South Korea. That's very funny. And so, Art of Play fired back. They said yesterday, Kelly Clarkson visited us in Brooklyn and inquired about buying Molly, a one of a kind singing and dancing bird automaton who plays an important role in the magic shows we host here.
Speaker 1:Molly is permanently attached to the wall and isn't for sale. However, the negative experience Kelly described on Twitter would resonate with anyone who has felt judged in the shop. At Art of Play, whether someone comes in to make a purchase or simply look around for a while, they are equally welcome. We greet everyone who walks in the door with the invitation to pick things up and play, and they do. Many stay for hours enjoying our puzzles, games and toys.
Speaker 1:Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by 8,000,000 people who have never visited our store. Yeah. They're getting review bombed and, like, a lot of a lot of negative messages. As a talented popular singer once said, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Clever response.
Speaker 1:Hot take. I think if you go in a store, everything should be for sale. I think you should be able to buy the point of sale system. If I want that Square reader, you gotta sell it to me. Put it in the spreadsheet, discount it with a cost of capital, and get me a number.
Speaker 1:I wanna be able to buy it if I wanna buy the chairs.
Speaker 2:It's always
Speaker 1:number. Countertops, the ceiling tiles. I should be able to buy anything when I go in a store, whether or not it's something that people normally buy. Let me tell you a story.
Speaker 2:More simple solution What? From Alexander in the ex chat. Just don't go to Brooklyn.
Speaker 1:That works too. Let me tell you a story. I had a buddy from the old country. He was from Eastern Europe, Middle Eastern area, and he said, oh, man. Clubs are different.
Speaker 1:Very general area. Opposite side of the world. Okay? And he said, oh, man. Like, clubs where I come from are very different.
Speaker 1:You can do anything in the clubs. And I'm like, okay. What? And he's like, like bottle service? And I'm like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They'll they'll bring out bottle service with sparklers. And he's like... But they go further. There's one club that will allow you to burn the club down.
Speaker 1:They have figured out how much it costs to rebuild the club from the ground up. So if you have the money, at the end of the night, they will evacuate the building, and you can start a fire that burns the club to the ground. And it's gonna cost you a ton of money because the club's gonna be out of business for six months while they rebuild. But they have thought of that, and they have priced it, and it's an option.
Speaker 2:It's on the
Speaker 1:menu. And this is the way business should be done. Global spending on alcohol is still larger than AI infrastructure spending this year. $1,700,000,000,000 spent on alcohol, $1,500,000,000,000 spent on AI infrastructure. So if we all band together and start teetotaling, we got another leg up.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:We got another leg up. We might have to do it. No. Really, really puts in perspective. I I had no idea that the alcohol market was so huge, but it in fact is.
Speaker 1:It's bigger than AI. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:Really is.
Speaker 1:See how it goes. Well, there's what? Seventy one days till Christmas? How many days until Christmas we got? Let's count it down.
Speaker 1:We got plenty of stuff going on. Here we go. Merry Christmas.
Speaker 2:Alright. Rolling flashback.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars, have a
Speaker 2:fun day. Bye.