OpenAI Bugging Incident, Are Your Devices Listening? Xbox Launches Remix Lab | 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?

  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?

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  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 want to help him as much as possible, so I invited 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. He's a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. So we just want us to share this at the top of our show, and I've only met Ben once,

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  but really, really amazing thinker and incredible show, and I recommend checking out the show as well.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  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. And so this was all over the timeline. We discussed it at the end of yesterday's show, but Abdul Rahman 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. But there's a community note on this. There's a lot of people going back and forth.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  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 a television in an executive conference room. And folks are saying that it cost maybe 15 bucks, something like that. And so there's also debate over, you know, 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.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this. And so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  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 Wi-Fi 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.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  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, how do I spy? How do I create a recording?

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole thing is just very confusing. Like, this would make it seem like he's a lone wolf, right? As if there was any type of, like, sophisticated operation.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  You would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro. We got you.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, 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, usually around, like, stealing the weights, or, and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes, or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth in lawsuits around intellectual property. But you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference. There's no meeting between, like, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT-7, starting at the beginning, 0, 7, 5.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  They're doing a table reading. They're doing a table reading.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  7, 9. No, like, they don't, that's, you're not going to 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 going to listen in on a conversation and be like, okay, I know how, I just, yeah, 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 Senra that just slammed down. We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Looking good.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Always with us.

• 4:55John Coogan?

  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 the FBI will investigate and will have more information. But I don't really have a strong take, other than, like, it's bad, don't spy. And it reinforces the stakes, like, security is really important. We know this. We've been talking about this. 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 listen to my phone.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny, like, covering up, covering it up with toilet paper.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Toilet paper rule.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Would that not, 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 just like...

• 5:43John Coogan?

  If it was just a USB stick, I would be like, oh, somebody left a USB stick because they were looking at photos on the, or, if they just put, like, a fire, an Amazon Fire stick back there, or Chromecast.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't notice it.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  You wouldn't notice it.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  You would only notice it if you were actually sweeping.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  And you're just like, go back there, and it's like glue and tongue depressors and Lincoln Logs and some Legos back there. It's like, yeah, it's going to draw your eye, because you're like, toilet paper should never be in an electronics cabinet, period. Like, there's no reason for it to be there, as opposed to, like, USB cables are, they belong back there.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's something that looks like an HDMI cord.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, anything. Put an Xbox back there. Yeah, I mean, you could literally put, like, something in the shell of an Apple TV, or in the shell of a Nintendo Switch, and somebody would just be like, oh, it's a Nintendo Switch. And you could put something inside of the device. Sorry, we're giving spies, like, ideas now. This is bad. Forget what I said. 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, like, you know, the Instagram ads are, like, so good now. But, and, like, you know, obviously, 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 to be uncovered. It was just like a given. It was just like, oh, yeah, that's like one of the strategies and one of the features.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  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, it wasn't, it wasn't like, and I'm mad about it. It was just like, and it obviously happens.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  Just business.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  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 reaction's actually funny. We should pull up the video.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  Let me ask you about this, because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation about something. The microphone thing. Is that real? No. It's not real? No, no. I mean... I don't believe him. Do you believe me?

• 7:42Speaker 02

  I haven't searched for it at all.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  And I got an ad for it. Something me and you were talking about.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  What was it?

• 7:49Speaker 02

  If I remember right, and I couldn't remember, but it was something we were talking about after the show, six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Here's what I'd bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website, not only that... One of us. So if I do, he gets an ad?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, potentially, yeah.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  How? Because it has your geolocation, which is also kind of crazy. But if it 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, and 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. Like, it just inferred that. And then it shows you, like, 10,000 ads a day, and so five of them are going to be, like, creepily accurate. Are you going to put on a tinfoil hat? Are you a truther on this, or are you a plan truster?

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Plan truster.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  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. So sometimes, like, if you are...

• 8:49John Coogan?

  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 it does have that data. And like if you, if you upload a bunch of video of you talking about all the products you love.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  I would, 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. 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 the, like the opportunity to whistleblow is just so huge that you could be just like a rank and file meta employee. If you find out that they're actually doing the, the ambient voice recording and using

• 10:01John Coogan?

  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.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  Power of capitalism.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think it's probably, uh, like, 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, uh, that handles business phone calls. 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

• 10:56John Coogan?

  you're on the phone with Bottega Veneta and you're talking about products that you like, then that could wind up getting retargeted.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  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, it's direct to that particular, uh, that particular brand. And so it wouldn't be the really like, whoa, 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, uh, last month?

• 11:26Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Do you remember this? Okay, so, uh, 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 want to be like updated every, every like five days when you use the TV. It's like, we need a software update and they have so many different like thick 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 like aggressively using spyware effectively. That's the allegation. So, uh, they scanned the local network for third party phones and other devices. The LG G5, uh, crawled the entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including

• 12:10John Coogan?

  smartwatches and phones of the staff who didn't even know we were working on the, this investigation. Uh, 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." Uh, this is because there's enough wifi hotspots in most neighborhoods now that are just like public basically through like a Comcast or a Spectrum that it can like hop on something and just say, oh, okay, I got access to the internet. It's, it's crazy. Like, um, and so, uh.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think we need to go down the whole, like, you can see through walls with wifi.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's crazy too. Yeah. So, uh, 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, uh, like hard drives and memory have gotten so, so cheap that you can basically be recording, recording the audio, transcribing into 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 that as plain text and it can store like years and years of ambient text on like, you know, like one gig drive, basically. Like it's, it's just so small. And so, uh, LG responded and said like, look, we're not really doing all of that, but, uh, they said, "We don't do continuous conversation recording."

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Now, if you push the button.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry, we take a break when you're not talking.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Uh, if 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're actively want to do it, it will pick up conversations that are happening in the background. So, you know, the, the, the, the privacy implications are like, 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.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  Xfinity has a feature that turns your home wifi router into a motion sensor.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Hmm. That's interesting, they actually productized it. That's kind of, I don't know. Yeah, if you're away, why not just have your wifi, see if there's motion in your, uh, in your vicinity? Can it detect aura too, or just motion?

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, I mean, that's the most important question.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  So, um, uh, 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.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, rewind, saying that your LG TV might be listening and then they might be passing that?

• 14:59John Coogan?

  They say they're not, but they are listening. They have an ads product and it can connect to meta. So like, we're like, the technology exists, but they haven't turned it on, I think is like the claim.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Or they could have stopped doing it while they responded to that article saying, "We are not currently doing this." And then re.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Potentially. Personally, I don't really mind it that much. I, I kind of just don't care if the ads are scarily accurate. I'm used to it, but, but it is, it is odd. And also it's just like, TV, stay in your lane. Just show me the thing. I don't, I don't want, I don't want a bunch of other junk, just charge me what it costs to make the TV. But, uh, what, what's interesting is that amid all this like 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. I think it is like pretty clear that they're not actually just full open channel all the time piping it everywhere.

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so on that note, how likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward?

• 16:00John Coogan?

  I already did, they're the best. Like I, I just don't want to mind it. It's just gonna listen to my, my, you know, voice recordings and be like, wow, this is sick, like this guy's awesome.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, motion detected.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Motion detected, exactly. But, uh, 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. 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 go one by one?

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  C tier.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  C tier, okay. But compare that to the Home View.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we compare to this ad of this new ad for the Apple Home View?

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, the ad was, was a little rough. We can pull it up and play it. If it's tracking. So I didn't realize this, but you can just.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm the guy that does food, you're the guy that what? You, you, uh, you start a hundred different businesses and that's your follow. Carmen, I need you to check the brancino. I feel like that was a shock, huh? This is why, this is why I didn't want to come home. This is why. Fuck you. What the fuck? What? What the fuck would you say?

• 17:16John Coogan?

  You have a sensor button?

• 17:25John Coogan?

  That's so annoying.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  That is such a good, such a good.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Remarkably annoying, but great edit by whoever put that together. Very, very fun. We have a doorbell, a thermostat, a camera, and a few other.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry. Partnering with LG does not count as having a.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  It does if it works as well as an Apple product. If it works like Beats where like it's actually.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  But what are they, what are they like either take the category seriously and deliver an amazing product?

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Buy Sonos, buy a bunch of stuff.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me Apple can't make like a doorbell?

• 18:06John Coogan?

  They don't know how. They literally don't know.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  They don't know how. They don't know how anymore.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Let 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 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. 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. Uh, where, where does that sit for you tier, tier wise?

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  B tier.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  That's B tier?

• 18:51Jordi Hays?

  B tier.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  B tier. That's not so bad. You like the chaos.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, uh, whatever's below F.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  Below, okay. F tier is the chaos mode, random chaos. Okay. Now let's, let's do, you're going all in on Google. So you got the Google lock.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  A tier.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  A tier. Okay. Even though you carry an iPhone, you like the all Google product. Now, Amazon, you get the Ring camera. You can get the little drone that flies around your house. You know that one? They have a drone that is like for home defense inside. That's a plus. 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?

• 19:30John Coogan?

  We're getting the dog sound effect.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  S tier.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  S tier for 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.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm not signing up for global spy services.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  It's all global spy services. It's all global. They're all global spy services. The, Apple is maybe the least.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  We just spent 20 minutes talking about how LG is absolutely the worst.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  LG is the worst, but Apple's the best. And so it averages out to like Google and Amazon quality, in my opinion.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point. That's actually a good point.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  And, and specifically, 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 router who unencrypts it for him now. No, it is encrypted. I, I have faith in Apple's security. But, but how do you feel? I don't want to influence you too much.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Trey says Apple LG is Hublot tier.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  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. 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. 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. Is it homemade? And they're like, yeah, I did make it myself. I didn't buy this. I didn't pay the royalty.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  And you get their name and then you generate a lawsuit and you say, I'm, I'm, I'm here, uh, to serve you with intellectual property theft, uh, small claims lawsuit.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  So John, LG actually makes a pocket photo printer. And so why not generate the lawsuit on the fly?

• 21:36John Coogan?

  And print it there. Exactly. Serve them. Serve them, right? And so then they're gonna be, oh no, I don't, I don't want to get sued. Uh, 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, um, on the street over Venmo or something, wildly illegal. Uh, but then there's a second step. So once you have all of these, uh, 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. And they're gonna look at you like, are you insane? You're gonna ruin our brand. Uh, homemade costumes are the lifeblood of our fandom.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  If this gets out, it will destroy our brand. We will look like an evil corporation. And then you'll say, yeah, it'd be a shame if this got out.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Let's settle. Over Venmo. So you can Venmo me to make this go away. I won't release the footage of lawsuits for the kids who are wearing intellectually.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Sitting there like this, like you got, you got them pinned over here.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Exactly, 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, everyday devices. Like they did some studies that show that like 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. You might only think like the Neo cloud, the, the GPU cluster is, uh, important. But, uh, the, the Financial Times, um, put it in a very funny way, very different language from what Anthropic said.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  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 in swarm or something.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  What's going on over at Xbox?

• 23:42John Coogan?

  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, uh, Asha Sharma over at Xbox is, uh, winning accolades. 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 in some fun things that you can like click buttons to change the, the style.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Uh, 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. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple silicon, ported to run inside of a web browser using web, web assembly. Uh, 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've 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, will 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

• 25:04John Coogan?

  of decompiled Halo with a Forge mode and a marketplace slash discovery of mods akin to how Roblox works, they would make $1 trillion. Okay. Maybe a little hyperbolic since, uh, you can do a lot of these mods for free, but, um, it is, it is very interesting that they're at this threshold of, uh, do you wanna completely burn down the old business model in favor of something new? Uh, or do you want to try and fight it out and squeeze the, the last egg out of the golden goose that is the traditional model? I don't know. Well, there's a deep dive on, uh, on GTA 6 in Bloomberg. It's pretty fun. Should we go through?

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Read the highlights.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Let's read the highlights. GTA 6 has been in development for eight years. I thought it was longer. I thought they started it like right after GTA V, but I guess it's only been eight years. It's still a really long time. 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, uh, was established by 2019. Wow. They locked the story seven years ago. That's crazy. Uh, GTA 6 features Rockstar's most realistic and detailed open world yet, building heavily on systems introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2. They invested heavily in making NPCs feel believable rather than simply populating the world with generic characters.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  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. Um, very fun. There's a whole bunch more. Wow. There are so many, so many takeaways. This, uh, this synth potato thread is really, really long. Um, anyway, interesting. I'm excited to play when it comes out. Uh, also Xbox introduced a new controller, the Xbox Nano Controller for, uh, $49.99. The controller works on Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, mobile devices and TVs.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  This looks like it's for casuals?

• 27:04John Coogan?

  It does. It's for casuals.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, uh, I'm sure people will hack this to work with everything and probably run everything as well. Uh, I saw, I saw some people vibe coding different controllers. Uh, there's a Star Wars pod racing game and someone had really sweet controls that, uh, mimicked the actual movie pretty effectively. Uh, whatever your vibe coding, do it with Codex. 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

• 27:51John Coogan?

  and the post hit the timeline like a thermonuclear explosion. Did you follow this? You said you were getting a lot of fake news? We got a truth news coming in.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea what happened here, other than what you've already told me.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  It's pretty aggressive. It'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. So

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Kelly Clarkson started with a post on October 10th that kind of put this on the timeline. So 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.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  "If you enjoy being treated like Julia, like Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman, for sure, check it out. Thumbs down."

• 29:09John Coogan?

  And Eliano from Palantir says, "Kelly, you would never be treated this way in the Palantir pop-up shop in Seoul, South Korea."

• 29:16John Coogan?

  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. 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 a 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. Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by eight million

• 30:00John Coogan?

  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. 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. I want to be able to buy it if I want to buy the chairs, the floor, the 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.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  More simple solution from Alexander in the X chat. Just don't go to Brooklyn.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  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." Very general area. Opposite side of the world, okay? And he said, "Oh man, like, clubs where I come from are very different. You can do anything in the clubs." And I'm like, "Okay, what?" And he's like, "Uh, like bottle service?" And I'm, "Yeah, yeah, they'll, they'll bring out bottle service with the sparklers." And he's like, but they go further. "There's one club that will allow you to burn the club down. 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

• 31:25John Coogan?

  ground. And it's going to cost you a ton of money because the club's going to 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."

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  It's on the menu.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  And this is the way business should be done. Global spending on alcohol is still larger than AI infrastructure spending this year. $1.7 trillion spent on alcohol, $1.5 trillion spent on AI infrastructure. So if we all band together and start teetotoeing, we got another leg up.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  We got another leg up. We might have to do it. Uh, no, really, really puts in perspective. I, I had no idea that the alcohol market was so huge, but it in fact is. It's bigger than AI.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see how it goes. Well, there's what, 71 days till Christmas? How many days until Christmas we got? Let's count it down. We got plenty of stuff going on. Here we go.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.