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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.
October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas. Totally. And it's because everyone is gonna be looking at But there's a distraction.
Speaker 2:So far.
Speaker 1:But but there's a distraction.
Speaker 2:And... Yeah. You're right.
Speaker 1:Halloween. Halloween. If you go up to somebody and say, hey. There's only eighty days till Christmas. They'll be like, why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween?
Speaker 1:They'll start looking at you like you're crazy. You're not crazy. They're crazy for thinking that it's not worth counting the days till Christmas in October. There's only eighty days. Get ready.
Speaker 1:Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's what I've always said. So keep counting down those days. Ignore the distractions.
Speaker 2:Or don't, but we will.
Speaker 1:Okay. Who wants to play these AI generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted a, article that said, I don't wanna play your mind... Your AI generated mod that puts Gate three inside Modern Warfare two inside of Minecraft.
Speaker 1:They don't wanna play them. Tyler, what do you think? Do you wanna play these, or did I have to force you?
Speaker 3:I wanna play these.
Speaker 1:You wanna play these?
Speaker 3:I'm actually playing it right now.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, Tyler's playing one of these AI generated mods, and it's very interesting because we've seen a lot of these. We talked about them. We pulled up a random one, that we actually did an Instagram reel of of... I think it was Minecraft in Elden Ring.
Speaker 1:I've never been a big Minecraft person, so it wasn't, it wasn't big for me. This, is, Tyler's playing Modern Warfare two in Minecraft. But what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain, like, how did you get this installed? What is what is this?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so from my understanding, it's basically, like, the... There's no... You're not really, like, putting one game into another. It's fully, like, a a Rust engine, and then you're pulling assets from both games
Speaker 1:and, like,
Speaker 3:kind of pulling them together somehow. Interesting. So, like, it... I I had to buy Modern Warfare two on Steam. Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's using the actual game assets. Mhmm. And the same thing for Minecraft. Like, it's using the actual assets. It it found them online.
Speaker 3:Interesting. And I, obviously, had codecs, like, set it up, wired up, so, like, I can run it on Mac. Yeah. But it's, like, fully featured. Like, I can I can mine?
Speaker 3:I can build.
Speaker 1:You can build.
Speaker 3:Using the...
Speaker 1:Can you get a nuke?
Speaker 3:I don't know if I can get a kill streak.
Speaker 1:That's the question.
Speaker 3:I gotta figure that
Speaker 1:out. Kill streak's not enough, it's not Modern Warfare two. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. There are actually a whole bunch of different different ways people are modding things.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. Like, the classic... Like, the most... Like, the the most approved or, like, company approved mod might just be something like... You know, there's a Fortnite skin, and you get to...
Speaker 1:And I don't know if they actually did, like, a Batman skin or a Spider Man skin, but those skins come over, and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over. It's purely just, okay. The Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider Man looks like. They made a Fortnite model out of the Spider Man, like, character, and then you can play as them, and everything is integrated fully.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Now these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm
Speaker 2:playing. Could you try swimming?
Speaker 3:Okay. Yes. Swimming is a little bit broken.
Speaker 1:And that's the nature of the the vibe coated slops.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's over for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you drowning,
Speaker 3:though? I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no
Speaker 1:water. No... Yeah. The the the mechanic is because, yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare two, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. Others are actually merging two games. For that Mario in Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, the mod actually borrows a subsystem called lib s m 64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll
Speaker 2:We keep politics out of video games. We...
Speaker 3:Oh, Yeah. Please.
Speaker 1:So what they'll do is they'll they'll they'll download the actual binary, like the code that is on the cartridge. They will convert that into just a file that's on a computer. You can run that in an emulator, but then they can actually reverse engineer the underlying code from what has been compiled. So you get basically a bunch of ones and zeros, and there are tools that will look at that and work backwards to understand what the actual game logic is. And so an example is, like, in the game code, you might have, like, health equals 100.
Speaker 1:But in the compiled code, it might just be, like, some memory address, like X like zero X one two three four FC, and then you might work backwards in the decompilation step to figure out that that's the health. So a bunch of things happen in the game, game's played, as things are changed and updated, that game state is then is then sucked out into the decompilation file. Interestingly, the NSA is involved. So, no, we can't keep politics out of game development because they're actually... A lot of these game modders are actually using software from the National Security Administration, the NSA.
Speaker 1:So the NSA has a GitHub with an open source project called... It's called Ghidra, and it's a... It's on the National Security Agency's GitHub. It's an... It's a software framework for reverse engineering software.
Speaker 1:And so you point this thing at the game, and you wind up getting more of the code, then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler?
Speaker 3:Okay. I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can
Speaker 1:cut this up. Trick shot.
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 1:Oh, he did it. He did it.
Speaker 2:Come on, Tyler. Why? Little... Can we get a can we get a content warning? Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I think it's mine...
Speaker 1:Minecraft's
Speaker 2:Anyone at home?
Speaker 1:Focused game. But there there is something else going on now that I hadn't seen before. I don't know if this was popular in the modding community before, but there there is a there is a version, you might have seen. We we can try and pull it up. Arc Web.
Speaker 1:It's Batman Arkham Knight Pass Through Spider Man mod. So you play as Spider Man in the Batman game, and you're... So you're in Arkham. And what's funny about this is that the two games feel very similar, so they mesh very well together. But from an intellectual property perspective, this should never happen because, of course, Marvel is DC...
Speaker 1:Or it's Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney, and Batman is owned by Warner Brothers. These two companies are direct competitors, and so they should never really be collabing in this way. But the fascinating thing about this is that it's not just they took the Batman game and created a Spider Man character. It's actually running both games, and then it's passing data between the games to create this experience of being Spider Man in Arkham Knight.
Speaker 1:So what's happening is, like, the mod goes into the Batman City, Gotham, grabs all the geometry, all the collision data, all the all the geometry of, like, where that building is. It takes that, and in real time, it passes it to the Spider Man game, which is actually running a different physics engine. So it has to translate all of that. Also, the two games use different coordinate conventions, different axes, different units of length, so it has to translate all of that, create that in Spider Man, and then and then also keep both of them running, like, the controller input, because normally, if you have a controller on a video game, it'll just be on one one game at a time. And if something's in the background...
Speaker 1:But you can see there's, like, yeah, bugs already, and this is part of the problem. And then it needs to actually merge the graphics, and so the games use different graphics systems, too. This feels like it would be so much easier if it was two games that were built on the same underlying technologies, But through the power of Slop, they're able to sort of merge these two in real time and get them actually running at, seems like, near 60 FPS. And then even when you go into they don't show the fighting, but I think when you go into the fighting, you switch into the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider Man system. So you're using Arkham's free flow free flow combat.
Speaker 1:It's very, very odd. But the end result, it looks great, and it feels like it's almost ready to serve as a reason to be like, oh, I I love that game. I wanna play it again. Why don't I give it another spin? Sort of a new game plus.
Speaker 1:You get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered, rebuilt. Could be an interesting reason to go back into a game that you loved with a different twist this time. And stuff like this happens all the time. I mean, the the...
Speaker 1:Even, like, the latest sequel to Spider Man was the same city, but just a different character. And so some different mechanics, some different story elements, but a lot of the same assets. But it was still a reason to jump back in for a lot of players. But all of this is the classic 9090 rule. Have you heard of this?
Speaker 1:Coined by one of the greatest of all time, Tom Cargill at Bell Labs. He said, when it comes to software engineering, the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time, and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time. Because you get 90% of the way there, you're like, Great, I only have 10%. And then you spend even more time on that last 10%, no matter how much you estimate it. Things always grow in scope.
Speaker 1:And so when you think about the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything relative to, like, You're looking at five years. What?
Speaker 2:You're looking at five years.
Speaker 1:You're looking at five years. Yeah. Here's Minecraft in GTA. Similar
Speaker 2:structure. The sort of multiplayer first person shooters
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You could imagine actually that being, like, relatively relatively straightforward straightforward to to get get a a a working version that would be fun.
Speaker 1:It all just depends on how you scope it. Yeah. Because if you're just talking about... You're only changing the textures, like, you're using the same model from from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not gonna introduce too many bugs. But as you as you include a different physics mechanic, a different explosion, like, all of a sudden, you're introducing so much risk that you could fall through the map or things could not collide correctly.
Speaker 1:You gotta go rewrite that collision software. That triggers something else. Then... And and all of these demos, none of them show the actual, like, playing the full game. Like, there's a mod to bring Minecraft into Skyrim.
Speaker 1:It's called Skycraft, I think. And in the developer's documentation for, like, the open source implementation of this mod, it says, like, don't start the game normally. Like, do not try and play the opening sequence. It will break. You should start with, like, the alternate starting point that starts you further into the game because it's it's so broken.
Speaker 1:And that's just the nature of being in the slop era. So the interesting thing is that all these mashups, they they feel like tailor made for the short form video era because you watch one of these for thirty seconds, sixty seconds, and you're like, oh, wow. That's amazing. I have dual nostalgia. I love GTA five.
Speaker 1:I love Minecraft. Put them together, double, love. It's amazing. Everybody is, you know, getting, like, millions of likes on these videos, but, no one has actually played these all the way through. No one is sitting back down and being like, okay.
Speaker 1:Yes. This is actually as good as GTA V, which a lot of people played for one hundred hours or more. Same thing with Minecraft. The base game remains dominant in terms of actual entertainment value. This is pure meme value.
Speaker 1:And so, it feels like it's another Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, but for video games. And the Harry Potter Balenciaga video by Demon Flying Fox, that was released 03/15/2023. Wow. Can you believe it's been three and a half years since that? That's a while.
Speaker 1:Right? That's a while.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It makes me think, how did they make it at that time?
Speaker 1:That was AI video. That was the best AI video was. But what they did was it was you would train a dedicated model on every character. So they would train a model on Mhmm. Harry Potter or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically, just his face.
Speaker 1:And then they would use AI generated imagery to generate something that looked like a sort of art station style Balenciaga runway show in a Harry Potter scenario, like at Hogwarts. And Midjourney at the time was pretty good at that style, dark, like, sort of odd backgrounds. Like, it was okay if it had some hallucinations in the background because it leaned into that because it's a dark fashion show in a castle. You don't really have a strong reference point for that. And then they would run the face swap, and then they would animate that image just a little bit.
Speaker 1:And then there was a ton of editing to actually... To to make it so that you would never linger on a single frame for more than a second or two, and so you'd move on. But what was the conclusion from seeing that? There... I mean, at the time, people were like, we're gonna be watching in full AI movies next year.
Speaker 1:What what was your conclusion? Did you have one?
Speaker 3:From the Balenciaga? Yeah. I mean, it's just like... These are all, like, very novel ideas, but at some point, like, now I've seen, like... I've seen a bunch of different games that have been ported to each other, and it's like, okay.
Speaker 3:There's another... It's like, oh, yeah. You put Minecraft and Mario, and I kinda get
Speaker 1:the idea. It's notable that, like, Flying Fox did many, many sequels and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree and and still has a YouTube channel and, think, post a bunch of stuff. But we didn't get Daniel Radcliffe at a Balenciaga runway show, and we also didn't get a fully AI generated movie within three and a half years. And so it was still a heavily important tech demo, though. And I do think, you know, there will be a breakout video game mod that sees heavy assistance from AI in the near future.
Speaker 1:But the key is, like, crafting a really innovative strategy loop. Like, that's what DOTA two was. It was a spin off of World of Warcraft, I believe. It was mod. There are plenty I mean, Counter Strike started as a Half Life mod.
Speaker 1:Like, there are clearly games that can be birthed from that. And the fact that you have AI tooling to speed that up, you're just moving a lot of people into the indie developer category who can move things faster. They're still going to wind up spending 99.999% of their time in the last 1% if they want to break through. But it's it's cool that many people will see this and be like, gotta make a mod. I gotta make something.
Speaker 1:I've always had this idea for this game, and now I can actually go and get started, although they will obviously need to lock in for a long time to get something actually polished. Theo is optimistic about this. Millennial age gamers are about to become more pro AI than the average SF tech bro because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare two. I I do think some people will see this and be like, oh, this is cool. I like this.
Speaker 1:But, there are still plenty of gamers who are like, I don't like AI at all for a bunch of reasons, and and they and they bring that over. There was an interesting chart
Speaker 2:of I think I think for I think for the gaming community to become broadly pro AI, a very well loved franchise has to release a new game that is noticeably better or bigger because of the technology.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And until then, I think people are just gonna be like, you know, again, these sort of combinations are cool, but until... Well, one, I don't think they can really get users because of all the IP
Speaker 1:issues. Just waiting IP.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, I I think you're gonna need to see, like, GTA seven and it's the entire world. Yeah. Right? And and for for people to get excited. And I don't I don't know that that that's even a path that they'll take.
Speaker 1:I like that lawyers are extremely pro AI now because they're like, I'm gonna get so much business from this. How serious do you think the risks of AI are of AI causing serious harm? Everyone is basically moving to the right. They're more they're more worried just in the past two weeks, three weeks, just through from August 28 to September 18, except for millennials age 30 to 44. They saw Jacob Coxen.
Speaker 1:They saw Dario Hamade. They saw the SNL sketch. They saw, you know, the Ezra Klein interview, and they were like, yeah. I was worried before, but I'm good now, which is kinda
Speaker 2:worried than ever.
Speaker 1:Less worried than ever, apparently, according to The Economist.
Speaker 2:No. It's it's
Speaker 1:It's a narrative violation. Yeah. A narrative violation. Yeah, everyone else is is is getting increasingly more worried. And, of course, the top of that chart, that is the voter base, 45 and up.
Speaker 1:So if you're if you're seeing even 65 plus move to, you know, 40% very serious, that's gonna move that's gonna move some elections.
Speaker 2:Jim Prosser says, it's a fascinating outlier. My hypothesis, we're the gen most comfortable with this degree of technology change and uncertainty due to coming of age through the Internet and mobile.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, lot of millennials are are in a are in a very fortunate position with, like, not getting not getting caught off guard by brain rot and slop and and screen time addiction. It's like we sort of got brought up in the craziest era and then have and then have seen the the the the the children data and can fight back on that. So I think a lot of people in their thirties and forties are like, yeah, I'm set up for success. I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one, that type of thing.
Speaker 1:So Yep. It feels a little bit more like there there's a danger, but it's known. It's like it's like we also grew up with cigarettes, but we were like, yeah, we knew we knew the risks of cigarettes. So we were like, yeah, we're we're gonna treat that accordingly.
Speaker 2:The other resource people haven't really been talking about at all, maybe they should, is construction paper. Celine says, you don't really hear about construction paper much anymore. Back in my day, this was always... Felt like it was top of mind almost constantly Top
Speaker 1:of mind.
Speaker 2:As a child. Certainly.
Speaker 1:So I know construction paper useful for just drawing on. It's thicker. Yeah. The ink doesn't go through the paper. That's a benefit.
Speaker 1:But were people actually constructing things with it? I know people would make those those loops, like those chain... Daisy chains around holidays, perhaps Christmas. I don't know that I I... It it feels like if you were building, like, a real diorama, you would get out the cardboard.
Speaker 1:So maybe maybe maybe cardboard just squeezed construction paper a little bit. And, I mean, have you seen those cardboard cutting saws? They're... It's like a saw designed to rip through cardboard because people get a lot of boxes, but that's also had the knock on effects of... If you're if you're an ambitious child and you're trying to construct something significant that might last the test of time, you might forego the construction paper in lieu of the cardboard.
Speaker 1:What do you think? Is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper?
Speaker 2:That's interesting. Because we... Because because there's an eco angle there, John. Right? It's like people getting a lot more ecommerce products today.
Speaker 2:There's boxes coming through the house all the time.
Speaker 1:We're post scarcity on cardboard in most households. Yeah. Especially ones with children because you're ordering a lot of things online. There's a lot more cardboard around. I know the last few construction projects I did, cardboard was my material of choice.
Speaker 1:So maybe that's what's going on here. Yep. I'm glad we got to the bottom of it.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to find the best way to get exposure in the market to
Speaker 1:Construction. Construction papers. Wanna go long?
Speaker 2:It's almost a perfect store of value over the last five years. There's fab... Fabrica Italiana Okay. Lapiz, Ed Afina... Afini.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It's been completely... It's a $500,000,000 company completely flat for the last five years. So more on this on the next episode. We gotta talk about topic crawler. Okay.
Speaker 2:I'm on... Spent half an hour going back and forth with chatty bitty, so it could make me a tool that spits out link for any topic he's researching. And it actually gave me exactly what I wanted in the picture below.
Speaker 1:And then the follow-up, only two minutes in, and I realized how dumb this is. Reinventing the wheel.
Speaker 2:Reinventing the Using the tool to create use use the tool to create the exact same tool.
Speaker 1:I mean, the funny thing is I I don't know if this was I don't know if this was, like, created as joke from the start, and the whole idea was, like, let's just be funny, in the first post because the the the punch line will be in the second post, or if he actually went through this. But, it does speak to the fact that, like, a lot of the a lot of the functionality is really buried. Like, just the just the ability to, like, put something on a cron job is, like, not advertised anywhere. You know this. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, if you if if you if you want to, like, get a a weekly digest of, like, where the swells are the biggest across the world for surfing, like, you can totally do that. You don't need to build a tool. You don't need to write a lot of code. You don't need to host anything.
Speaker 1:It doesn't need to anything else other than Shashi BT, but you would never know that from any of the marketing, really. Because there has never been just like a
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cron jobs are here or, like, whatever you'd call it. Like, scheduled tasks are here, and there's, a national campaign. Very, very difficult as the models get and the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people.
Speaker 2:I mean, Delta just taking blow after blow because you can now watch cheeky pint on your United flight. Again, really really just showing that United is is a, you know, is a serious, highly commercial airline. Yeah. They don't want you watching movies, TV, music. They want you watching the Cheeky Pint archive.
Speaker 1:You gotta learn from Susan Lee.
Speaker 2:And I'm hoping this means that we're gonna see more episodes of Cheeky Pint hitting the timeline. Been about a Really? Feels like a six month holiday, but it's
Speaker 1:We call them a hangover.
Speaker 2:What's
Speaker 1:that? You take a break.
Speaker 2:They come out the hangover. That's right.
Speaker 1:Hangover. They're taking a break, resting it off, sleeping it off.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:They'll get back in the pub soon. The Brits have turned their back on their day ones. British people are apparently buying Chinese knockoff Land Rovers, especially look alike Range Rovers. They love Chinese cars. The j coo seven made by Chinese Cherry.
Speaker 1:I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week now.
Speaker 2:We got mosquitoes in the ultra.
Speaker 1:Let's take off.
Speaker 2:We got mosquitoes.
Speaker 1:Get the flies,
Speaker 3:bud.
Speaker 2:Heads up, John.
Speaker 1:You think you get it?
Speaker 2:No. I don't wanna
Speaker 1:Go for it. Run around. I'll read this while you fight the mosquitoes. It's a nice little side quest. Get the tracking cam on him while he goes and hunts it down.
Speaker 1:When Mark Theulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jakku seven was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. The 33 year old from England's South Coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese SUV at the equivalent of around 50 k, half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is visually similar? Its resemblance to the 56 year old British luxury brand has earned the Jaicu a double edged nickname, the TEMU Range Rover. My first reaction was, what's the catch?
Speaker 1:He said a test drive convinced him that buying the Jaicu was a no brainer. No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than The United Kingdom, where Brits like him are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status signaling, styling, and technology. It does look pretty good inside.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Calling it a TIMU Range Rover doesn't quite work because I would expect that the car is just better in most ways than the rain... You know, when when you think about, like, a... You know, that the TEMU branding for a product, you think, like, it looks good in the image Yeah. And then in person, it's like...
Speaker 2:Like, falls apart. Yeah. Falls apart. It's a mess. I would expect this car to be actually pretty solid.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Probably Very good. Reliable.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They're very good at making products.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder how much these Chinese brands have rolled out dealerships and service departments because that seems like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that potential buyers are worried. Whenever you're whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand, it can be really tricky if the brand goes under while you own the car because there's just nothing really to work on. A lot of people went through that with the Fisker Ocean. The Fisker Fisker Ocean, I think.
Speaker 1:Fisker maybe went through restructuring, and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Every every once in a while I'll see a Fisker on the road. I'm just like, incredible.
Speaker 1:Well, not the ocean. No. The Fisker Karma. Yeah. Which I saw Jay Leno in one recently.
Speaker 1:And the Fisker Karma, it does look like... I don't know. I would expect it to be like the modern Back to the Future car. Like, it's like the new DeLorean. It's so so unique.
Speaker 1:It's not quite as striking, but it's still very cool. The UK, a cradle of the car industry showcases what could happen if in America if Chinese cars were let in. Range over began a press release trumpeting Jiayu's early six... Sales success. Is that a press release from them?
Speaker 1:Are they just dancing on their enemies' gravestones?
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. We gotta figure out who actually posted this Range Rover thing, winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque, the smaller one. The manage... Managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire, said the appeal was simple. It looks expensive.
Speaker 1:It feels expensive, and then you find out how much it costs. For now, Chinese cars are essentially shut out of the large US market by high tariffs and restrictions on Chinese software. President Trump in September repeated his openness to Chinese cars produced in American factories, alarming Detroit. Oh, that's interesting. He wants the jobs.
Speaker 1:He wants the manufacturing base, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers just don't want more competition. So there's actually some tension there. Interesting. Congress is debating a bill that would permanently ban Chinese cars on US roads. The spectacular growth of Chinese brands in Britain this year has been led by Cherry, China's top vehicle exporter.
Speaker 1:Through September, its sales more than tripled compared to the previous term. The last story we gotta get to is Apple plans to introduce new privacy controls for Mac users warning of the risks growing around granting broad data access to third party software, including AI agents. So your iMessage data is not... I don't think it's encrypted when it's on your hard drive. So you can potentially, like, give an agent access, like, yeah, just read...
Speaker 1:Just just be able to edit my files. And then it can also read your messages, and maybe you don't want it to, and maybe you want that to be a specific permission. And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, Ben Thompson seems like he's on the verge of going Linux on the desktop because he's been very frustrated because he runs a a headless Mac mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen. But most of the time, he's just having an AI agent write pieces of software for him, but those pieces of software need permissions, and the permissions are UI pop ups.
Speaker 1:So you have to jump in and click the button and say, yes, I allow it to read from the network or, you know, inter interact with the screen or interact with the file system. And so he's been very frustrated by this and and is sort of questioning whether Apple... They're so clearly set up on the hardware side to take advantage of the the hardware boom, the the hacker boom. But he went back to Paul Graham talking about the moment, maybe twenty years ago, where, like, all the best hacker software developers were using Macs. Mac became dominant in, like, the startup ecosystem, and then it just became, like, every company just provisions and MacBook Pros for basically everyone, regardless of what they're doing.
Speaker 1:And there's there's this question. Apple's in this, like, tense moment of, you know, how much freedom should they give? How much privacy should they give? How much flexibility should they give to the user? How responsible is that?
Speaker 1:If you take all the guardrails off and you're on Linux, you can... The agent can just do anything. That's a benefit, but it's also a risk. He also shares a fascinating anecdote that he... His his Mac Mini got hacked.
Speaker 1:Like, he... The... There was some system that was on an open port, came in, and installed a CryptoMiner. But his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said, like, urgent. You've been hacked.
Speaker 1:We should do something about this. And the AI agent was like, oh, no. No. No. You don't need...
Speaker 1:You shouldn't use me right now. I should set this one out. And he was like, you're dead wrong, man. You're fixing this. And it did.
Speaker 1:And it went and reset the Mac, like, you know, cleared all the closed the port that was that was opened so it couldn't... So the hackers couldn't get back in and then also cleared out the crypto miner. But it's very funny that it was like this referendum on, like, you creating more vulnerabilities, but you're also able to fight them because typically that's something, like, if there was a crypto miner on your computer, you wouldn't find out until you were like, oh, I'm trying to do some stuff. It's slow. Let me go figure it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay. It got... It fixed it.
Speaker 1:It detected it later downstream. Instead, it's like fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2:Such a wild scheme Yeah. Where where you're hacking, I'm sure, millions
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's just like
Speaker 2:You know, if if if they're getting to to millions of devices, they would actually have a meaningful amount of compute. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:And it's and it's free. That's our show. Can we can close it out. Thank you for tuning in
Speaker 1:to TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter.
Speaker 2:This might.
Speaker 1:Tbpn.com.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, it's
Speaker 1:well. Goodbye.