AI Video Game Mods, Chinese Cars Take Over UK, Apple Tightens Mac Data Controls | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  And it's because everyone is gonna be looking at you.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  We're so close.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  But there's a distraction.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  You feel so far.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  But, but there's a distraction.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, you're right.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Halloween, Halloween. If you go up to someone, you say, hey, there's only 80 days till Christmas, they'll be like, why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween? 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 80 days. Get ready. Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  That's what I've always said. So keep counting down those days. Ignore distractions.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Or don't, but we will.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Okay, who wants to play these AI-generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted a article that said, I don't want to play your AI-generated mod that puts Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2 inside of Minecraft. They don't want to play them. Tyler, what do you think? Do you want to play these? Or did I have to force you?

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  I want to play these.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  You want to play them?

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually playing it right now.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  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. I think it was Minecraft in Elden Ring. 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 2 in Minecraft. But what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain, like, how did you get this installed? What is, what is this?

• 1:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so from my understanding, it's basically like, there's no, you're not really like putting one game into another. It's fully like a Rust engine and then you're pulling assets from both games and like, kind of pulling them together somehow.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  So like, I had to buy Modern Warfare 2 on Steam.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  It's using the actual game assets. And the same thing for Minecraft, like it's using the actual assets. It found them online.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  And I obviously had Codex like set it up, wired it up, so I can run it on Mac.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  But it's like fully featured, like I can, I can mine, I can build.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  You can build.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Using the.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Can you get a nuke?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I don't know if I can get a kill streak.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  That's the question.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I gotta figure it out.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  If kill streaks aren't in it, it's not Modern Warfare 2.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Doesn't make any sense. There are actually a whole bunch of different, different ways people are modding things. 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 most approved or like company-approved mod might just be something like, you know, there's a Fortnite skin and you get to, and I don't know if they actually did like a Batman skin or 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.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  You're not going to 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.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm playing. Could you try swimming? Yeah, swimming is a little bit broken.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  And that's the nature of the vibe-coded slops.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's over for you.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you drowning, though?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  There's no, yeah, the mechanic is, because, yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare 2, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know. 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 SM64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  We keep politics out of video games. Please. Please.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  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. But in the compiled code, it might just be like some memory address, like X, like 0X1234FC.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  And, 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. So the NSA has a GitHub with an open source project called, it's called GIDRA. And it's a, it's on the National Security Agency's GitHub. It's a, it's a software framework for reverse engineering software. And so you point this thing at the game and you wind up getting more of the code. And then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler?

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can. No, no.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Oh, he did it. He did it.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Come on, Tyler.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Why?

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  Little, can we get a, can we get a content warning?

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I think it's fine.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Anyone at home?

• 5:57John Coogan?

  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, there is a version you might have seen, and we can try and pull it up, Arcweb. It's a Batman Arkham Knight Pass Through Spider-Man mod. So you play a 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, or it's Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney and Batman is owned by Warner Brothers.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  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. 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.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  So it has to translate all of that. Also, the two games use different coordinate conventions, different axes and 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, but you can see there's like, yeah, bugs already. And this is like 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.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  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 like the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider-Man system. So you're using Arkham's free flow, free flow combat. 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 love that game. I want to play it again. Why don't I give it another spin? Sort of a new game plus, you get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered, rebuilt.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  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, 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 1990 rule. Have you heard of this? 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

• 9:25John Coogan?

  and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time. Because you, 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. And so when you think about the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything relative to like.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  You're looking at five years.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  What?

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  You're looking at five years.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  You're looking at five years, yeah. Here's Minecraft in GTA. Similar structure.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  The sort of multiplayer first-person shooters.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine actually that being like relatively straightforward to get a a working version that would be fun.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  It all just depends on how you scope it.

• 10:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Because if you're just talking about, you're only changing the textures. Like, you're using the same model from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not going to 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, 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, it's called SkyCraft, I think. And in the developer's documentation for like the open source implementation of this

• 10:51John Coogan?

  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. 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 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and you're like, "Wow, that's amazing, I have dual nostalgia, I love GTA V, 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.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  No one is sitting back down and being like, "Okay, yes, this is actually as good as GTA V," which a lot of people played for 100 hours or more. Same thing with Minecraft. The base game remains dominant in terms of like actual entertainment value. This is, this is pure meme value. 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 March 15th, 2023.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 12:03John Coogan?

  Can you believe it's been three and a half years since that? That's a while, right? That's a while.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes me think, how did they make it at that time?

• 12:13John Coogan?

  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 Harry Potter, or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically. Just his face. And then they would use AI-generated imagery to, to generate something that looked like a, you know, sort of art station-style Balenciaga runway show in a, in a Harry Potter scenario, like at Hogwarts. And Mid Journey at the time was pretty good at that style, the, the, the, the dark, like,

• 12:54John Coogan?

  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, 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 full AI movies next year." What was your conclusion? Did you have one?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  From the Balenciaga?

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  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, there's another, it's like, oh yeah, you put Minecraft and Mario, and I kinda get the idea.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's notable that like Demon Flying Fox did many, many sequels, and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree. And, and still has a YouTube channel and I think posts 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. But the key is like crafting a really innovative strategy loop, like, that's what Dota 2 was. It was a spinoff of World of Warcraft, I believe. It was, it was a mod.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  There are plenty, I mean, Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod. 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 gonna wind up spending, you know, 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, "I gotta make a mod, I gotta make something, 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,"

• 15:12John Coogan?

  because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare 2. I, I do think some people will see this and be like, "Oh, this is cool, I like this," 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 of-

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:47Jordi Hays?

  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 issues.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Just blatant IP.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, I, I think you're gonna need to see like GTA 7, and it's the entire world, right? 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.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, 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 28th to September 18th, except for millennials aged 30 to 44. They saw Jacob Coxon, they saw Dario Hamaday, 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 crazy.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Less worried than ever.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Less worried than ever, apparently, according to The Economist.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's-

• 17:03John Coogan?

  It's a narrative violation.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  It's a narrative violation. But, 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, 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.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  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."

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a 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 children data and can fight back on that. So I think a lot of people in their 30s and 40s are like, "Yeah, I'm set up for success, I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one," that type of thing. So, 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."

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  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."

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Top of mind.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  As a child, certainly.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  So, I know construction paper useful for just drawing on, it's thicker.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  The ink doesn't go through the paper, that's a benefit, 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. 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,

• 19:30John Coogan?

  you might forego the construction paper in lieu of the cardboard. What do you think? Is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper?

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Because we-

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Because, because there's an eco angle there, John, right? It's like people getting a lot more e-commerce products today, the boxes coming through the house all the time.

• 19:51John Coogan?

  We're post-sarcity on cardboard in most households.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  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. So, maybe that's what's going on here.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  I'm glad we got to the bottom of it.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to find the best way to get exposure in the market to-

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Construction paper? You wanna go long?

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  It's almost a perfect store of value over the last five years. There's Fabbrica Italiana, La Pisc, Ed Affina, Affini.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  It's been completely, it's a half a billion-dollar company, completely flat for the last five years, so. More on this on the next episode. We gotta talk about topic crawler.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Iman spent half an hour going back and forth with ChatGPT 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.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  And then the follow-up, only two minutes in, and I realized how dumb this is.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Reinvent.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Using the tool to create, use, use the tool to create the exact same tool.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  I mean, the funny thing is, I, I don't know if this was, I don't know if this was like created as a joke from the start and the whole idea was like, let's just be funny. Uh, in the first post, because the, the punchline will be in the second post. Or if he actually went through this, but, uh, 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?

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  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. It doesn't need to use anything else other than chat GPT. But you would never know that from any of the marketing really. Cause there has never been just like a cron jobs are here or like whatever you'd call it, like scheduled tasks are here and there's like a national campaign. Very, very difficult as the models get, uh, and the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  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. They don't want you watching movies, TV, music. They want you watching the cheeky pint archive.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  You gotta learn from Susan Lee.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  And I'm hoping this means that we're going to see more episodes of cheeky pint hitting the timeline. It's been about a, feels like a six month holiday, but it's time to come back. What's that?

• 22:45John Coogan?

  We take a break.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Hangover.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Hangover, they're taking a break, resting it off, sleeping it off.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  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, uh, especially lookalike Range Rovers. They love Chinese cars. The J Coo seven made by Chinese cherry. I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week now.

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  We got mosquitoes in the old.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Take off.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  We got mosquitoes.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Get the flies.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Heads up, heads up.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  You think you can get it?

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't want to.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  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. When Mark Thulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the Jaiku 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 50K. Half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is visually similar? Uh, its resemblance to the 56 year old British luxury brand has earned the Jaiku a double edged nickname, the Timu Range Rover.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  My first reaction was what's the catch? He said a test drive convinced him that buying the Jaiku 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.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  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 range, you know? When, when you think about like a, you know, that the Timu branding for a product, you think like it looks good in the image.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  And then in person, it's like, yeah, it falls apart. It's a mess. I would expect this car to be actually pretty solid.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  Very good. Yeah, they're very good at making products.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much these Chinese brands have rolled out, uh, dealerships and service departments. Because that seems, uh, like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that, uh, potential buyers are, are worried. Whenever you're, whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand, um, 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. Fisker maybe went through restructuring, uh, and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every, every once in a while I'll see a Fisker on the road and I'm just like, incredible.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Well, not the ocean.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  The Fisker Karma.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Which I saw Jay Leno in one recently. And the Fisker Karma, it does look like, I don't know. I would expect it to be like the modern, uh, Back to the Future car. Like it's like the new DeLorean. It's so, so unique. 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 Jaiku's early sales success. Is that a press release from them? Are they just dancing on their enemy's gravestones?

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  That's crazy. We gotta figure out who actually posted this range over thing. Winking at its likeness to the Range Rover evoke the smaller one. The manager, managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire, said the appeal was simple. It looks expensive, 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. He wants the manufacturing base, uh, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers just don't want more competition. So there's actually some tension there.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  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. 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, uh, 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, 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

• 27:46John Coogan?

  want that to be a specific, uh, permission. And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, uh, 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, uh, Mac mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen. But most of the time he's just having, uh, an AI agent write pieces of software for him. But those pieces of software need permissions and the permissions are UI popups. 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.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  And so, uh, 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 20 years ago, where like all the best hackers, software developers were using Macs. Mac became dominant in like the startup ecosystem. And then it just became like every company just provisions Macs and Macbooks for basically everyone, uh, regardless of what they're doing. And there's a, 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?

• 29:11John Coogan?

  How responsible is that? 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. Like it, he, there was some system that was on an open port, came in and installed a crypto miner. But his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said like, urgent, you've been hacked. We should do something about this. And the AI agent was like, oh, no, no, you don't need, you shouldn't use me right now. I should set this one out. And he was like, you're dead wrong there. You're fixing this and it did. And it went and, uh, reset the Mac, like, uh, you know, cleared all the, it closed the port that was, that was opened. So it couldn't, so the hackers couldn't get back in.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  And then also, uh, 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. Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay, it got, it fixed it. It detected it later downstream. Instead it's like 15 minutes.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Such a wild scheme.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  Where, where you're hacking, I'm sure millions.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. It's just like.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  If, if, if they're getting to, to millions of devices, they would actually have a meaningful amount of compute.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's, uh, free. That's our show. We can, we can close it out.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning into TBPN. We will see you tomorrow, 11 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  This might scare the dog. Hopefully it's well trained.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye.