Hacked - 2023 Year in Review

Episode Date: December 31, 2023

In which we look back on yet another hack-tacular year, and discuss the Open AI Coup, the "hacked Rockstar from a hotel room" guy, and a slew of other stories from a wild 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Well, the end of 20203 was eventful on our beat. Wouldn't you agree? Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I just think the entire year was an eventful year. It wasn't a sleepy one. Since we last talked, the open AI coup, the insomniac hack, now hacked rock star in a hotel room with a phone guy. It's been a few weeks, man.

It lapsed this guy. The insomniac hack is pretty fresh and pretty fresh. and pretty crazy. I thought it was like the story we were going to talk about about crazy stuff that happened in hacking games. And then like I turned the page and it's like, you wouldn't believe what this guy did with a fire stick or whatever he did it with.

Wild. Yeah. Yeah, it's been a wild ride. Not to mention the good old crypto. I was reading a crypto summary for this year the other day and it was just talking about the collapse of all of the Titans and like, you know, the SEC is like loosely pandering to the to the crypto market they haven't allowed or denied the

EFTs but there's like all of this sure discussion about whether it's a massive rug pull so like it's inflated the value of like Bitcoin obviously and now everybody's talking about like well if these EFTs don't get approved like that's essentially going to be a rug pull and it's like okay well I think I don't know this tends to tons to get into so we can get into that yeah it's been quite the year in quite the year in artificial intelligence, quite the year in hacking, quite the month, quite the end of the year. Happy New Year's to everyone listening to this. Let's get into it. This is the hacked year in review. Happy New Year's. Happy New Year's. How you doing, Jordan? I'm doing good, man. How are you doing? I know how you're doing. I have my annual sinus infection. It comes like clockwork every year at this time. And I, uh, I have my annual sinus infection. It comes like clockwork every year at this time. And, uh, I have. turns my sinuses into balloons and puts a bunch of pain in my head and makes me take a bunch

of, you know, non-prescription drugs and sleep a lot. So that's what I'm up to. Got those dark web smart drugs just pumping through your system. I think before we started recording, you said you're at a hard four, which is just very telling. I'm, I'm mostly on the neocitrin. That's my dark web drug of choice. So, uh, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, hardcore shit. I've got drugs in my body and coffee on my lips and that's keeping me going. So I hope that's good enough for you people. Yeah, I think, hey, man, it's the end of the year.

It's the end of like the limbo week when people will be listening to this. We're keeping it loose, man. We're just talking about the year we got through. Yeah. That's what we're here to do today. Is there a real name for holiday limbo week? I don't even know But I feel like

And maybe this is just me But I feel like this year It's not just this week I feel like holiday limbo week Dates back like to the 10th Like I feel like people started checking out this year Earlier than I'd ever seen It's just the vibe of the year

Just the vibe of the year Like I stopped getting response Like replies to emails And like if I did get a reply It was like Let's just pick this up in the new year And it's like Sure. There are 20 working days. There are 20 working days left in this year.

There are weeks left. That's funny. Meanwhile, I just came out of my last meeting of the year today. And for anyone listening to this, we recorded it a few days before when you're listening to it. But not that far before. So some people are working right up to the line. I think my fellow procrastinators, I see you and I appreciate you. But if you're listening to this, you've just gotten through Limbo Week. December 26th to January 1st, between which time is an illusion.

I hope you're well. I hope you treated yourself terribly. I hope you were lazy as heck. Yeah, I think it's the perfect time to look back on a pretty wild year. Totally. What do we talk about here? Tech, hacking, security, crypto, just internet nonsense. It's been quite the year, man.

Yeah, well, I think, I think, you know, we both instantly message each other on this story the other day. And it's the teenage leader of Lapsis. has just been given one of the most insane, like, prison sentences, if you want to call it that, I would call it that, I've ever seen. So he's 18 years old and was given a life sentence in essentially a secure hospital or, you know, I don't know what we call those these days, but essentially an institution. He's been institutionalized as he has demonstrated that he is unwilling to change

and has like a need to violate things in a socialized. cybersecurity sense. So they've deemed him on set to sand trial, and they've essentially committed him for as long as it needs, as he's such a high risk given the, I don't know, my brain is completely not functioning today. Hard for. Given the scale of the hacks that he is executed, which is crazy, crazy. Yeah.

It's a pretty wild story. The coverage of it is kind of its own little story. Arian Kurtage, 18-year-old hacker associated with Lapsis. The rest of this sentence is prickly because the BBC, Verge, a lot of really big-name places around the headline sentenced to life in prison. And there's a very important qualification. He's been placed under an indefinite hospital hold. Totally. Yes.

Which is wild. And the story is wild. And you don't need to go to, he will serve life in prison for it to be wild. And I think that is an important qualification to this whole wacky, kind of dark situation. The story that's been going around is British judge determines that Kirtas poses a high risk to the public due to his, as you said, stated intent to continue committing cyber crimes and has been placed under indefinite hold. This is after a cyber attack against several companies, including Rockstar Games, who makes GTA6, which dog, we got to talk about. Uber and Vidia. He's been deemed unfit to stand trial and has been sort of placed under this secure hospital hold indefinitely.

Kurtage was under, he was basically out under bail, staying in a hotel room. And he was able to use a smartphone and it sounds like an Amazon fire stick and a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse I've heard to do this rock star hack. quite quite as something something right there. I have questions about this. My first question is, yo, what's your rig? Like I want to know specifically what phone were you using. Were you running decks? Were you able to get Linux going on it? Were you using the fire stick as an external display? And it was basically just a computer. Like I specifically want to know what the rig was. but this teenager was able to get a hold of a bunch of Grand Theft Auto 6 footage back in September, leak it and causing an alleged financial and reputational damage of about $5 million to Rockstar

is the sort of number that's been floating around a little bit. It's quite the story. Let's just talk about the hack initially because Jordan's immediate response is like, oh my God, is this one? Is he the chosen one? Given the, but it's like, at the end of the day, smartphones, even like Android boxes for your TV at this point are essentially micro computers. Like they're completely full-blown, like an Android phone is a full-blown Unix like computer essentially with its own multiple radio internet connections. Like they're super computers, which is crazy.

Like if I go back to my youth, like the idea of what my iPhone is today is wild. But yeah, he, I assume his. for rig was fire stick to the TV projected from his phone, Bluetooth keyboard most, and probably rooted it, made it into a Unix box, and then went from there. But yeah, I don't know. I think crazy. Also, personal opinion, I don't think there was a lot of damage done to GTA6 and Rockstar. Sorry, guys. I think it'll be fine. I got very excited to see these leaks, so, which is, I think, a great transition to our next thing to talk about, which is GTA6 is coming. GTA6 is coming.

I want to briefly dwell on the fact, this is a small detail. The press photo that was going around for this story, I don't know why this was the only photo, was of Arian Kirtage on a boat holding a very large fish. And I'm glad his face was blurred. He was a minor at the time that this happened. And that's a huge qualifier to this whole story. But it is pretty funny, just the same photo of this fish. over and over and over and over again.

Anyway, yeah, Grand Theft Auto 6. I believe that was a shark. Is that a shark? I believe it's a small shark. He's holding a tiny shark. I misspoke. He's holding a tiny shark. The other thing I want to talk about images related to this story, like, in publishing,

is that a lot of the publications that I saw were actually just using Grand Theft Auto promo images. So there's this massive story running about this kid receiving this, like, you know, I would say contemporarily unprecedented institution sentence, medical sentence. Yeah. Sure. We'll let historians debate the language, but yes, a pretty wild outcome. And the imagery that they're running with it is like Grand Theft Auto 6 coming 2025. And I'm like, what are you talking about bad PR?

This is getting millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars in free PR. 100%. And then you look at the album art of the. Grand Theft Auto. If it didn't say Grand Theft Auto floating above these two characters' heads, you would think that this was the hackers. And you're like, wow, they're really thriving in that Miami Beach. I think perfect time to cue the sirens in the background for you as well. It's really fantastic. Yeah, we're in Limbo Week. Normally, I mute myself when the sirens go past my house. But they're thematic right now. But we're playing a loosed. They're thematic.

I think this is part of the vibe of the year and review episode. It's looser, isn't it? A little less edited, you might say, because we're on a break. Yeah, Grand Theft out of six. You catch that trailer, man? I did catch the trailer. It looks wild. Yeah. It looks wild.

Like the idea of doing like a Florida, because like Florida is a meme of its own, right? Like they chose. Yes. It's brilliantly. And it's like, like Florida man is like its own meme. But Florida in itself and like Dade County, if you like go on the internet and just look up anything,

think it to do with Florida. It's just endless reels of insane videos and photos and stories. And I think that that is just content heaven for the GTA team. So much of that trailer was really lovingly recreated like cell phone videos of crazy Florida stuff. Totally. And I saw someone assemble a sort of like mirror cut of all of, they found the original TikToks and reels and whatever it is. And they clearly had informed some of the stuff you're seeing in that trailer. Of course. And they sort of had them side by side.

Very entertaining. I think one of the characters from that trailer has threatened or is in the process of suing Rockstar. Oh my God. For allegedly using his appearance, which I'm reminded, I think actually happened on four or five with Lindsay Lohan. Yeah. Who alleged that one of the characters on the front of the cover was clearly inspired by

her. I would say the Florida Joker man might have a better case that it is riffing on him. But, you know, true life of strangers. than fiction, so I'm not really sure where that line lays. I don't know if you're a new listener to this podcast, but Jordan and I occasionally find ourselves discussing video games, and GTA has been a running theme for years. Just given the fact that GTA 5 was such a masterfully built game, and we're both very excited for GTA 6.

Totally. It wanted the best to do it. And yeah, I'm very excited to see what happens. Yeah, curious to see what's going to happen with the Aryan Khartage case. I thought that our discussion about games and game hacking was going to be the insomniac hack that it happened like four days ago. Yeah. I thought that was going to be the big end of year gaming story.

Ransomware group Rysidea announced that they're holding this massive trough of insomniac data, demanding 50 Bitcoin, which is about $2 million. Or they're going to drop this 1.67 terabytes of data, 1.3 million files, HR documents, Slack communications, employee passport scans, like a really, really big leak in doxing. I thought that was going to be the big story. It's pretty big.

It's pretty big. It's pretty big. Apparently there are playable versions of Wolverine floating around the internet at this point. They have dropped some of the data. Ooh, that's not really. And it's a big deal. Like this is a big, like maybe one of the large,

hacks I've seen in regards to they've taken something hostage. They didn't pay and then they actually released the entire thing. So I'm not entirely sure I haven't seen the exact pieces of data, but apparently there are fully playable, you know, alpha versions of the new Wolverine game for download on the internet, which is crazy. That's pretty wild. Yeah.

Yeah, it's looking like it was, a remote access fishing attack, which is pretty expected for this thing. It does create like a really interesting, these two stories dropping side by side. And in such recent history, we've had rock steady studios hacks, Warner Bros. Hacks. CD Project Red Hacks. Like large gaming institutions at this point have become some of the biggest targets for ransomware. And I think probably because there's like a lot of overlap culturally between cybersecurity infosec type communities, like hacker spaces. And people that just really really. love games and they want to see what games coming out next.

There's a big prickly complicated conversation about the impact these things have on the staff and the teams, what it means to even report on them. It's complicated, but it's definitely accelerating. Yeah. Is the thing that I feel like I'm noticing is that games companies are becoming the sort of like target de jour for a lot of these groups because they're both culturally relevant and they got a lot of money. It is like this,

this hack is fascinating. I agree with you largely that this, they do seem to be accelerating in this space. I do also agree that like hacking is a very interesting puzzle game. And if you like puzzle games, you probably play other puzzle games. That's a great point. That's a really good point.

No, that is. It's like, it's, there's a self-selecting group thing going on. Exactly. Exactly. This,

this, like, there's been other releases and other hacks and like, you know, some, some pre-Alpha gameplay videos. and things like that. Like there's been a bunch of what I would call less serious.

They're still very serious, but like less serious, where this was like, you know, all of the texture art files, the 3D, the engine projects, the level designs, the code and the logic in the gameplay. Like this is, they got access, it seems like, to the entire build of the game and a bunch of other stuff. Like it wasn't just. Wolverine.

Like, I think they have Spider-Man stuff in the data. Like, it was terabytes and terabytes of data, apparently, and, like, critical stuff, like, high-value IP stuff. So it's, like, really, really, really bad. I feel terrible for the Insomiac team. I actually know somebody on the Insomniac team, and probably should fire him a message and see if he's doing okay. But it's bad news, bad news.

I think what I've really learned from this is we shouldn't have fire sticks and hotel rooms anymore. I think you get you can buy them at like 7-11s. I know. I know. It is interesting to think about how much that whole, shouldn't keep calling it a rig, how much that setup probably ended up costing. The truth is the fire stick was only saving his eyes so he didn't have to look at the tiny screen on his smartphone. That's really, that's really true. Yeah, you're just using, it did make me think when I read that story. I kind of just glanced over at my phone and I was thinking about Dex. I was thinking about that Samsung, I think it's Samsung's proprietary idea of the smartphone that you can connect to a display and connect the peripherals and it just

functions as a computer. Yeah. Yeah, I'm like, oh, that's an interesting road to go down. That's something that I wouldn't be mad about. If suddenly iPhones could kick out an iPad OS signal to an external display in a few years, I think that would be cool. I thought I had this idea probably 2004. I was like at some point we're going to quit having, you know, centralized servers and sit down and log in with credentials and it logs you into like a terminal session in, like, you know, when you're on a university campus and you like go into a computer lab and you like log into a computer and it like, you know, it's kind of your profile, but it's like kind of on the network. It's like, I just carry my computer with me everywhere. Like, when am I just going to get to

sit down and like jack this thing and do a little like terminal and then boom? You know, originally I thought it would be like a USB key, but then once smartphones came out, it's like bang. Totally. It's like everything you need is right here. Your entire profile can go with you everywhere, especially with things like ICloud and Google Cloud and the cloud. So, but yeah. Yeah, it's already got a, it's already got all the routers in it. It's already happened to have a really good camera in it.

I can already connect a Bluetooth keyboard to it. A lot of these people have already figured out how to get mouse input working on a mobile interface that isn't, I mean, it's not great, but it's not terrible. Yeah. We're a better part of the way there. Yeah. And when Apple decides they like money less and don't want to sell you two devices, they could probably slap a, you know, a nice, a reasonable desktop computer inside of an iPhone.

And I'm sure that day will happen any minute now. I think they're making the one that goes on your face first because the... Yes, this is true. I'd be intrigued if they had actually, they probably must have given the people at Apple and what they do. I would have assumed that somebody inside of Apple, built essentially an iPad dock for your phone. And you just slide your phone in. It has an extra battery life, has a bigger screen.

And essentially, you just dock your phone into it. And it turns your phone from a 7-inch device into a 14-inch device. Like, I don't, they must have played with that idea or built it. I would imagine the second they got a working USBC iPhone, they're like, well, we're 95% of the way here. Like, we already know how to make this. this desktop basically scale up to, this OS basically scale up to a desktop with iPad OS.

Totally. Let's just give it a run. And I'm sure it's working somewhere in an office in Cooper Tino. MacBook. MacBook Airs are essentially running iPad Pro components. So, you know, the Apple ecosystem is so, you know, integrated that they could, you can run OSX on your, probably on your iPad of your phone. I wouldn't run great. but essentially

iOS is a tuned down version of that so it's like the same same thing it's all you know FreeBSD coloneled Unix with a pretty interface so so quite the end of the year in terms of hacking specifically hacking gaming stories

quite quite the year in terms of big hacks we've talked a lot about a lot of them you had the Vegas hack the other two big stories I think this year that we really need to talk a little bit about, are going to be AI and crypto. We spent a lot of time, which one of those should we start with?

Where do we go next? I think a really easy one for us to go into is AI. I think there's a lot of things that we could chat about in AI where... Oh, did something happen since we've last chatted in the world of AI? You know what? I just had a memory of us doing last year's end of year wrap up. And it was right after chat CPD. was announced. And it was like we, we chatted about it during the end of the year wrap up. And it's

interesting, here we are one calendar year later, looking at the impact that it's made, not only the like shit show that the business community is having, but the actual impact that it's made. So. Yeah. Yeah, we can talk about the open AI coup. I'm Kay. I have a name for that. I'm trying. Everyone called it the failed coup. And I think that that is a failure of imagination. I've been calling at the Open AI, Kudea nah, never mind. Kudea. I like that.

Kuday nah, never mind. Bring it back. I think that's what happened there. Kana. Forget it. Get back in here, Sam. That's what I'm calling that. That's what I'm calling that.

That's good. That's like, Kuday nah, never mind. Yeah. Kuday nah. Yeah. It's swinging big. I appreciate that. Yeah, it's been quite the year.

I was thinking about that too. Like there was this little New Year's Eve AI sandwich where mid-journey had come out and chat GPT was like being murmured a little I think it was right at the end of last year. Yeah. It was something like that. Yeah. And then in November, the previous year, we'd gotten Dolly and Mid Journey.

There was a sense that something was going to be happening. Also, if anyone's interested, wants to hear us talking about sort of the discourse state about image generation a year into it. Check out our last episode with Sean. It's a really fun conversation with him about a bit of the response to that. But Open AI and ChatGPT represented this massive shift. and how we see AI in these tools. Microsoft being a significant owner of OpenAI, it also represented the beginning of battle lines

being drawn in traditional big tech. Microsoft has aligned itself with OpenAI. Google, meanwhile, has just been Googling all year, just Googling it up in a very Googly way. They're like, we have 19 different products. Would you like Google Assistant powered by Bard built on top of Gemini Turbo? which is, it's like, whoa, guys, you got it.

They've dropped 17 things. The thing I found interesting, so there's this benchmark called MMLU. It stands for massive multitask language understanding. It's a set of discipline-based tests. You could have one for econ, physics, social sciences, pick a thing. And it can be done by both a model and a human. It combines multiple choice text, reading, comprehension, university, level math. it's a really good thing for comparing how humans are doing it something to how these models are doing it something.

The benchmark for a human expert in a field, say you gave a law one to an MMLU or a physics one or something. A human expert, I think the number we've been using for a few years is 89%. That's what you're looking for for like really good expertise. Really good. An average human on like a niche thing, like you give me an MMLU on like American law. I'm going to get 30%. I'm just guessing, basically. Expert 89. Chat GPT, over the course of the year, had bumped, I think a spread of about five points on the MMLU. I believe 3.5 was clocking in at like in the 80s

and then four was in the mid 80s, which is really remarkable. Google, and this announcement comes with a lot of asterisk because it was a very flawed announcement that played a video that kind of misrepresented some of what the tech can do. But their new model, at the end of this big first year, They're saying it just cooked past 90%. That's crazy. Human expertise, 89. Google saying they hit 90. I think if you told us that anecdote three years ago, we would say, oh, you're like crossed some sort of delta.

And that just sort of casually happened in a press release at the end of this year. And I think it speaks to what a wacky year it's been in AI. Yeah. I think there's, I think AI is, I think it's become such a talking point like in the finance world. Like if you're a tech company and you don't have AI, if you went into a quarterly earnings call and we're not talking about AI, your stock fell 4%. If you went into a quarterly call and you said that you had the latest, greatest AI, your stock popped 4%. And it's like I feel like we see that. Like every company is creating an AI product.

Whether it's good or not, you know, you've got Twitter X is making one. You've got Google's got 18. You've got Apple and apparent rumor to have one coming. You know, Microsoft's partnered with OpenAI. I don't know. It just seems I'm still excited to see one of these things actually do something for me that I don't hate. Interesting. Actually, I'll say mid-journey, like when I'm talking about text-based things.

And actually, I should recall that. But getting it to write basic pieces of code for you, very helpful. Be like, hey, you know, I need a sort and search function for this, blah, blah, blah, you know, optimize it for this and bang, it, like, pumps it out. Pretty great. You know, very threatening to my career as a software developer. But, like, mid-journey, I will say that some of the art that I've seen coming out of those things, like, compared to the early days of, like, Dolly and stuff, very, very good.

They're very cool. V6 is, yeah, is. making the rounds right now and it's like, oh, you're, you're trudging up on, they're all starting to specialize on different things. I saw some doing a comparison of prompt understanding and Doleys, the new version of Dolly's, which is producing, I think, meaningfully worse results than Mid Journey has significantly better prompt understanding. It was able to like parse through the text and make a very, very good, it got it. It got exactly what the person was asking for. Yeah, yeah. It knew what you wanted with a level of like. But just couldn't make it. It just didn't, it

didn't do as great a job. But meanwhile, mid-jurney, which has, I think, worse, really in-depth granular prompt understanding, like not great at text, is getting the photorealism on a totally different level. Yeah. Those V6 images that are coming out right now are out of control. Yeah. Not even just photorealistic stuff.

Like, just everything. Like, anything that I see coming on a mid-jurney now, I'm like, wow, this actually looks pretty good. It's quite good. Yeah. and it's being generated very quickly. And it's built on a problematic foundation. Yeah.

It sure is. And anyway, there's a very dark story. I don't think, I don't know if this is the vibe. There's a very dark story about the Lyon 5B training data set. You don't need to get into it. It's worth a Google, though. We're starting to learn more about the massive repositories of data that these things are based on. I have essentially been black boxes up into this point.

there's information that is inside of those training sets that we're all using tools built on that we just don't know what's in there and people are starting to find some of the stuff that's in there and it is pretty bad on the topic of different companies rolling out these new models Amazon is a small one but I noticed that Amazon's play in this they're rolling out one called bedrock and I found this really interesting their observation seems to have been these tools are powerful, but they're a privacy nightmare. Recent explorations into prompt injection with chat GPT's new agents have revealed that some of the prompt injecting hacks can actually reveal training data, which is catastrophic for privacy. The one that everyone was using was getting it to repeat a word infinitely.

And at a certain point, the model will start kicking back nonsense, it seemed like. after it says the word toaster 50 times, it just starts saying chaos. And people started figuring out that in some cases that chaos was training data. It was stuff that it had been trained on. People were finding like email, phone number, and signatures buried in the stuff that referred to real people. Crazy. So there's some privacy issues.

And Amazon's response to that seems to be, well, what if we let you build your own models using corporate data without accidentally contributing that data to the underlying? model. That is the way they're specializing. Yeah. It's just your stuff isn't going to get fed into the monster that someone else might be able to, with a good prompt hack, pull back out. Like, oh, so the emergence of the privacy specialization in these models is beginning. That's new.

That's very interesting. Well, I think, like, again, like, we've talked about that a number of times where I think the natural, the natural next big first step for this is, like, internal models. for law firms and for sure people like that who can train it you know teach it teach it what policies and procedures look like and then just generate them in real time and things like that like I think that's where there's going to be a ton of value add in the short term long term you know yes that's a different conversation who does yeah but part of the part of the adoption and the training of these models part of the the power that we will give them we'll start with small steps to

make our lives easier. Yeah. Yeah, we'll just hand over more and more to old Sammy. Sammy. Which is... Cudena. Sammy. The Cudena.

We should talk about that. It's funny, we did two episodes where we were like, let's go bring in some other people to talk with us. And we talked with Sean about Nightshade. And we talked with Talking Sasquatch about Flipper Zero. And meanwhile, one of the biggest new tech companies on the world was losing its goddamn mind. mind. Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, was fired by the Open AI board for, quote, not being consistently

candid with the board. We still don't know what that means. I believe to date, we still haven't received a public statement from the board that digs into why any of this happened. But about a week later, after a series of Sam is taking meetings at the building. Yeah. Sam is talking with the board level of like, kind of breathless coverage, a sort of very public Twitter campaign. from a bunch of AI staff, you know, pledging their support to him. Sam Altman was then brought back as the CEO of Microsoft watched from a tower somewhere, making sure it was so. I'm sure the Microsoft jet was fueled and sitting on the runway waiting to fly in and scoop up

the entire Open AI team the second they all quit. 100%. Well, because he was briefly hired by them. I think that they like put this, put a piece down on the playing board saying like, he will just come do an open AI at Microsoft if you stand by this decision. We have given him a $200 million profit share or equity check or contract, and we are bringing him in the entire team on board, and Open AI will now be just Microsoft's AI.

But that didn't happen. But that didn't happen. It didn't end up needing to happen. Yeah. So instead, the coup d'et na resulted in former president of the board, Greg Brockman, who is now resigned. There is now a new board that consists of Brett Taylor,

Larry Summers, and Adam DeAngelo, some folks that are a little bit more aligned with Sam Altman. The big meta-narrative that came out of all this was that this was a conflict between the sort of safety-oriented

side of the company and the more forge-ahead side of the company. I don't want to, there's a lot of terms floating around Silicon Valley about effective altruists versus effective accelerationists. I don't want to get into that world, quite yet. But the sort of, that was the big story that framed this was this idea that,

and it concerns the mystery of the Q model, which no one quite knows what it does yet. But the idea was that sort of Altman and some cohorts had crossed some big sort of boundary and were accelerating forward and taking a big massive step. The safety-oriented side of the board was concerned about this. And that's where the conflict started to emerge. Who knows, that could turn out to be what it was. It feels that story emerged so quickly in all this that it, my gut was that it was a drastic like oversimplification of what was probably actually going on. Totally. It seems too clean that it was the like futurists versus the fearful. I'm like, no, that's too simple. Like that I don't think that's probably what actually happened.

Could there be shades of that? Yeah, I guess we'll see in 2024. Well, the, the Q is actually a, like an AI term, like in machine learning. Hmm. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's, it's when essentially in reinforcement learning, the, the algorithm understands the value of output of a certain action. So it kind of allows itself to start valuing things. So it, it, it, yeah, I wonder if that's what they've done.

I wonder if that's where they're going. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Anyway. Huh. I feel like a big, silly nerd. because I assumed, I guess like a lot of people, I'm guessing like many would,

that it was a Star Trek next generation. Oh, maybe it is. It could be that too. No mean? Yeah. See, the first time I heard it, I thought we were talking about QAnon, so I was less excited.

Like, the vibe of this show is going to be really different in 2020. Yeah, like, they've made a QAnon model. It's like, great. Oh, no. Oh, no. I bet it's full of great ideas. The other big story, I think from, I mean, the other big story from AI this year. It was a wild year in AI this year.

Another one that felt representative of something. And when we started talking about this at the end of last year, started this year, it was, you know, chat GPT 3.5 was the vanguard of the tech. And then partway through the year we got four. And we said, I don't need this pesky 3.5. end of this year, Mistral, a French AI company, big one, estimated value of about a couple billion bucks, decided at the end of this year to release its latest large language model via a torrent. They just gave it out. No prior explanation.

He just dropped it. They just put it out there in the world. I like that. Mistral X, 8X7B. It's currently outperforming some of the other open source models like Meta's Lama 2. And it seems to be beating chat GPT 3.5 in certain benchmarks, which means that in the course of a year, the cutting edge state of the art of that technology that's, you know, sent open AI off on this crazy trajectory is now, a similar product is now functionally open source. And I think that tells you a lot about the development of where this is going. In our conversation with Sean, we talked about, you know, the sort of liminal space between what the tech is doing and what the regulation needs to be doing.

in that really constantly changing shape. And I think it's just very telling that we also have to now contend with the open source side of this. That is going to become increasingly less niche and increasingly more of a viable option for people to just run their own LLMs locally using open source models. That's just going to get easier and easier and easier. Yeah, I think that, yeah, I completely agree. I think now that you're seeing more of these things, exist in a space where you can get them locally. They're not just kind of controlled.

I think it creates a pool of interesting problems for, you know, codifying morality and ethics into them as well as, like it's just once they're out in the wild, they're going to learn and be, you know, it's like, it's like pets. If you have, you know, if you're good dog owners and you train the dog well, you know, dogs behave. properly in social situations. If you're a bad dog owner, you train the dog poorly,

you know, you give it a lot of like negative reinforcements and stuff like that. All of a sudden, the dog becomes a bad dog. And then that has external implications. I feel like we're going to see that in AI as well. You know, we're going to have good AI owners and bad AI owners. Sure. All of our ability, I think there's a very real chance a lot of the regulation will come in the shape of, well, these are the bumpers. You've got to put this bumper in your system, you got to put this bumper into your system. Wow. But we saw how fast they ripped those bumpers off with chat GPG3.

That's the thing. Exactly. And that's using their product. That's not even talking about running your own version of a similar open source model. That's just breaking the one that has all the bumpers built into it. Totally. So it's, I think that prompt injection and prompt hack, like that world of figuring out how to talk these models into breaking themselves, it's going to kind of fork off from the,

or you could just run your own model. and have it do precisely whatever the heck you want. Yeah. And we're going to see that more and more in the coming years. Yeah, very, very. I'm intrigued, given how far we've come in one year, how far we'll come next year. Yeah. Yeah.

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The last one that seems before we just maybe tear off on some small, strange, funny little stories to wrap it up, should probably talk about crypto, quite the year in crypto. Yeah. The year that crypto got in grown-up trouble, I would say. That makes me smile. I like that. That makes me laugh. I think it was, I think, you know, I was reading an article by Arce Technica.

It was the 2023, the year of the falling crypto, bro. I was laying in bed reading it this morning. And I was like, oh, this. That a hard for. It's true because, like, you know, this time last year, we were making jokes about how, you know, Sam Bankman freed. was had essentially fallen from grace. And then,

and then, um, it's the other guy's named CZ. He runs, uh, Iran. Oh, by,

it's, Chang, Peng, yeah. He's the, he's what I want to talk about. Yeah. Champ,

hangs out. He, he has now fallen from grace. And, yeah, I think we're just, I don't, I don't understand.

I don't understand. It's like the, uh, like people should just go read this article it just kind of summarizes all of these insane things and like collapses like it actually talks about a lot of things that we talked about too over the course of the year but it's just the the amount of scamming is still so alive in the crypto space that the lack of regulation and the lack of control has just caused such an issue you know the the I don't I don't know I don't know how they just continue to to turn a blind eye to it. And I feel like people are pushing them on both sides. People don't want them to regulate it and don't want it. They want more libertarianism, more wild, wild west,

which they don't allow people to do in the normal equity space. Like, I can't just go sell shares in my company to anybody on the side of the street corner. But it's like I can create a fake security called an ICO, sell a bunch of tokens off, which doesn't give you any equity and consideration. control in my company. And then people have zero regulation of that. It's like how is this any different to like, you know, old stock scams and frauds? Like, and I, I just don't understand how

people have let it get this far. People that are in power have let it get this far. And I don't understand why they're even remotely considering allowing exchange traded funds to spot price cryptocurrencies on regulated exchanges where people will trade regulated money. I just, it blows me away. It blows me, like I just do not understand. It's interesting. I feel like the FTX story this year, I feel like a generation of people that have certainly awareness of,

you know, economic crime, for lack of a better word, are getting a little bit of a speed run through it in the context of the crypto space. Yeah. We won't get too much into FTX because we've talked about it at length on the show. But to make the distinction between it and what happened with finance. And I think it is important to make is that FTCS was like a fund misappropriation based crime. Totally.

It was that the money was supposed to go over here and it didn't. Like that, if you zoom out far enough, that's what that was about. Yep. How much of that money has ever been recovered, will be recovered. A complicated, interesting story. But that's what that was about. Binance is sort of a case study in the, is a very, very different crime. And it's so useful to look at them as part of like a like a dichot.

to me because finance wasn't about what the money was going towards. It was about where the money was coming from. There are laws about doing transactions with certain countries based on what country you're in, doing financial transactions with Iran, Russia, Cuba. If you're in the U.S., that's just not legal. You can think whatever you want about that, but there's a law against it. And for a very long time, if you existed in this crypto space, those laws didn't really apply to you. And for the first time this year they applied billions of dollars in what are illegal transactions inside of Binance it came to a head and Chang Peng Zhao pleaded guilty resigned and along with the company faces significant financial penalties because not only were they knowingly accepting money

from people that they weren't supposed to receive money from there's a lot of detail to dig into in that they were shopping for those clients they were going out of their their way to secure that money. Of course. And those initial lax policies led to significant, allegedly, violations of U.S. money laundering laws. In any other space on earth, we would understand those as financial crimes. And for the last decade, there's been this little corner carved out where they were

just sort of like special internet whoopsies. And this year, we all kind of went, those are money crimes. If you're saying this is money, those are money crimes. It's just, this is, hmm, I'm just going to go to my happy place. You're trying to decide how hard to go. It's just like, you allow the creation of a shadow financial system. Yes.

That is completely unregulated, that has, you know, elements of privacy and security. Like, it has become the de facto tradable, I'm going to use quotes, air quotes here, currency, of online crime, of fraud, of money. of money laundering, of human trafficking, of, you name it. Why did we let this happen? Like you sit down, you find me somebody out there. Somebody out there come and tell me, aside from the fact that cryptocurrency allows the transfer of money faster than traditional bank systems, a fault in our existing

banking systems, not a fault in the currency. What other value does it offer? that traditional currency doesn't, except for if you're human trafficking, buying firearms, buying illegal drugs, it is bad. We have allowed something bad to happen, and people should be shutting this down rather than promoting it and sponsoring it. Like when I hear of people who work for large investment companies that are now starting crypto divisions, it's like, sure, there's money to be made, especially because it's unregulated. Like, why do you think rugpoles exist? Like, these used to exist. Like, these used to exist.

existence in stock problems a hundred years ago until the Securities Exchange Commission came around and said, we're going to allow something called a qualified investor. If you're going to invest seed capital in a company, then you have to beat these certain requirements to show that you can accept this loss. We don't have those in the crypto space. We don't even consider them securities, but we allow people to use them like securities. And it's like if I'm a lawmaker in this situation, like I'm talking to you politicians, like you're the fucking problem. Like this is not okay.

What you have done is not okay. I'm going to pull up coin market cap right now. Coin market cap, there's $1.7 trillion in cryptocurrency right now. That means that you have allowed a shadow economy to generate $1.7 trillion in wealth that typically wouldn't have existed. It's like that, I don't know, blows me away. Binance shopping for bad clients who have. lots of money makes total sense to me. It's totally unregulated. They don't have to respond

to anything. Like, it's money for them. It's like, why wouldn't they? You know, creating a platform where they get rewarded based on people doing bad things. Of course, they're going to go look for people to do bad things. I tend to agree. I take the, like to try and be generous, I get that currency that does not reinforce or depend on the power of the state is different from wanting a currency explicitly to do illegal things, things that are illegal in accordance with the state. I get why that would be appealing to someone. We talked about this in a previous episode. Like I get that root.

I don't hold it. I'm not concerned about it, but I get why a libertarian person would feel that way. Maybe that's a good way of putting it. I'm not a libertarian. I get why you would feel that way. We are so far away from that right now when we're talking about taking that asset and turning it into an exchange traded fund that is like the whole point is that that is regulated by the state that you are trying to escape. And it's like, right, but it'll really pop off in value.

Yeah. It's like, so I come back to the thing I've said before, which is that it's not about that to a lot of you, to a lot of people, it's not about it. Yeah, it's a speculative asset. It's a speculative asset. And like, you've, if you want me to take any of this discussion seriously, we got to at least acknowledge that. It's a speculative asset. Oh, it's a, I want the speculative asset to go up in value because then it'll get more people into it and then that reinforces my libertarian views. It's like, so you're cuddling up to the state to stick it to the state? It's money. And it's good money and it might really be profitable.

I'm not saying it won't go up. It might go to the moon. But I do take exception to that philosophical argument. Yeah, absolutely. There's an old saying in like startup worlds and tech where it's like if your company is a feature of another product, it's not going to be a good product. you know like i think we've had this conversation we've talked about this and that's true here too yeah that's a good point and everybody when i'm like what is the value of cryptocurrency they explain to me how it's better than a feature of the existing currency and i'm like sure

but but like what is the like as as a functional product what what value does it bring the world, aside from a bunch of negative value. Like, where are the offsetting externalities in the positive space? Like, it is entirely, to me, it is such a speculative asset that the SEC has just turned a blind eye and the governments have turned a blind eye to regulating, that it's allowed it to create such a problem that it's now covered on major financial news. Like, if we turn into CNBC right now, we will see a bug on the screen that shows us the current value of specific cryptocurrencies. That is crazy to me. Like we're treating it like it's the valuation of Apple and Microsoft, companies that have balance sheets, intellectual property, reoccurring cash flows. When you

buy equity in them, you become a part owner. They have reporting responsibilities to you, dividend responsibilities to you, if so declared, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, gives you power as a shareholder. If I go buy a crypto, like I take whatever, 42,000. and go buy a Bitcoin today, this is a good chance it'll just be stolen from me in a year. Like, and by no means of my own, or I'll lose it. I'll put it on a USB key or a cold storage device that I forget the passcode to. Like it's, I don't know, whatever. Let's change the topic.

I'm done. 2023. Fuck crypto. I'm fucking done with it. I don't ever want to talk about it again. Dude, we got to record it a hard four more often. This is great. My goal for 2024.

I think in 2024, maybe what I'm going to do is I'm going to start another podcast where I just bring people on. And we just talk about crypto every month. And I just like, I want to get somebody in from an investment bank who works in like an investor role. And I want them to sit across from me and explain to me the value that cryptocurrency brings to their portfolio. Except for that it's a highly speculative asset that is completely unregulated. It allows for manipulation. It's like I just and then vice versa. I want to bring on somebody who's like a climate justice advocate and be like,

explain to me why you like crypto because all it's doing is consuming real utility, i.e. power, people's time, etc. And turning it into useless digital tokens. It's like, anyway, I'm going off. On this episode of the Scott Winder Crypto Rage Cage to the Top Tech podcast, we're spinning off. I think we get a winkle. I think we get one or both of the winkle loss.

Oh, my God. On next year. I think that's my goal. In terms of big ticket interviews, I would like to get a Winkle Vey on. I have so many questions. And you are right. We need to move on.

Just tacking that to the end of that sentence. Okay. So we've talked. Let me should probably cut some of that. Talk to about AI. You'll know if we did if you didn't just hear that. Talked about cybersecurity. I just want to do some miscellaneous.

ones, man. Yeah. We're at an hour. I want to talk about some of these. My favorite little story at the end of this year, or one of them, has been the Sega of the Blue Bubbles on Android. Have you been following the like 1,700 stories about this? Loosely.

Very, very loosely. No, good. It pops up in my news feed. And I largely ignore it, as I kind of understand it. Wise. And don't care about it. Good. That's great. Well, I do. And I'm going to talk about it now. It's so dumb and so unimportant, but I find it so interesting. And this idea of like, yeah, messaging app protectionism.

It's so petty. So like two months ago, nothing, the Android phone OEM that makes like clear phones, I think it was Carl Pay, the one plus guys spun it up. They're cool, cool Android phones. They kind of just look like clear iPhones. Yeah. They have a wacky user interface. They announced that they're nothing phone two's messaging. app is going to support iMessage. You're going to be able to receive iMessages in the nothing phone app. They had partnered with a secondary company whose basic business model involved logging into iCloud on a computer somewhere that they control.

It would be like a virtual machine or like a Mac Mini somewhere sitting. They log in and they forward you the messages. That was their entire business model. Nothing announces their partnering with this company. that will be brought natively to their nothing messages app. Nothing. The first Android phone that has IMessage, wait, never mind, because everyone freaks out at the massive privacy implications

of logging into some random computer with your ICloud account. Totally. That gets shuttered immediately. One of the fastest turnarounds on a story that I think I'd seen in a while, almost faster than the OpenAI Kudena. Then like a week later, another company called BEPER Mini says, but we've actually figured out a way to get iMessage onto Android, and it doesn't involve logging into an account.

It involves like, it's a hack, basically. We figured out a way to get this working. And Apple will not be able to fix it. Boom, Apple immediately patches it. Beeper Mini gets taken down. In his, like, in two weeks, we had two, someone's coming for the blue bubble, wait, never mind. Someone's coming for the blue bubble, wait, never mind.

And meanwhile, the really exciting story, which is that iOS is probably going to support RCS, next year, bringing more data to messaging, responses, typing indicators, all the good stuff about iMessage except for the color. That just kind of went under the radar. And that's the really exciting story, I think, in the world of messaging. And I just wanted to talk about that. Well, I think, I think, I think here we sit again with a, with a company that is a feature,

not a product. And it's like, 100%. If, like, I like it. Good for you guys. Leaper and everybody else. Like all you're doing is forcing Apple's hand. If one of you actually solves it, bingo. All that's going to happen is that I message for Android will be released 24 hours later. I'm sure they already have it built. Like, let's be honest. So, yeah, I don't know. I think it's, I think it is interesting. I think that the RCS supports the real big news there. You know,

even, even I've noticed in the last probably 90 days, how good. group messaging with people on cross platforms has gotten better on iOS. So I'm assuming that that's probably, again, just byproduct of people forcing their hands, which I like because not everybody has an iPhone. Not everybody has an Android. And I don't particularly love WhatsApp and don't particularly like, you know,

any of the other messaging platforms. So I prefer to keep it all local, you know? Agreed. You should be able to talk to anybody on any platform. I think the more interoperability we have. I think interoperability. That's my software goals for 2024. I want everything talking to everything else,

as much as is safely possible. So there's a story that I want to talk about, which is about a sleep. So I don't know how you and your partner sleep, Jordan, but I sleep very warmly and my wife sleeps very coldly. And we have looked at great detail about getting and eight sleep. I have a friend of mine that has one, and he swears by it. He swears that you can have both sides of the bed, like one can be a minus 10 and one can be a plus 10. And both parties that

share of bed can have perfect sleeps. Like I wear a whoop. So I track a lot of my like heart and skin, respiratory rates, etc. Heart rate variability. I track all of that stuff and how well my sleeps are. And if I sleep in a warm room and a hot bed, my sleep is probably 50% worth. worse than if I sleep in a cold room in a cold bed. So it's like the value of that, like the value of the tech. The reason why I haven't got an eight sleep is the point of the story. I think I know where you're going with this. Because it's like they're expensive.

So an eight sleep is essentially a water cooler heater that goes on your mattress. And it has two zones and one half of the bed can be hot and one half of the bed can be cold. They cost a ridiculous amount of money like three, four thousand dollars. but then they charge you a monthly subscription fee and I refuse to pay a monthly subscription fee to have a $4,000 product I just bought work and that drives me crazy. Oh, okay, yes, I got you.

But the reason why they charge that fee is because they collect all your data. Yep. They sure do. I was like, wait, is he getting towards the data thing? Because if it's just about subscriptions, I'm like, I feel you dog.

No, no. But also there's a pretty big story about this product specifically. Yes. Yes. Yes. So not only am I paying a monthly fee for like no value to me, but I'm then just giving them access to all of my sleep information, quality in my sleep, what my preferred sleep temperatures are, health information that I don't particularly want to give a mattress

cooler brand. And it's like, I don't know. So anyway, do you want to talk about the actual release of the data and when the story started from because I can just segue straight into that. But I feel like you know that part of it. I mean, I'm happy to spike it off. Totally. It was the weird, I made a little link towards this. I was like, we got to talk about this. Back when I thought we were going to talk about the open AI league. So during the sort of crescendo of the Sam Altman Open AI coup, the CEO of that company, Mateo Frankis Chetty, Frankis Chetty?

Francis Chetty. Frank, Frankish, I'm Italian. I should know how to pronounce this. Yeah, no, you're, you watched right into that one. It's Kenny. He had all my practice rounds, too. Kennedy. Francis Kennedy.

Francis Kennedy. Mateo drops a tweet. He's the CEO of this company that says, breaking news, the open AI drama is real. We checked our data. And last night, San Francisco saw a spike in low quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting. getting under five hours of sleep. We need to fix this.

Source, eight sleep data. And I've never really seen a confession nested in the works cited of a tweet quite like that before. But the real point of that is not that people in San Francisco aren't sleeping good is, hey, do you want to tell us more about this window you have that tells us where people were sleeping well based on geography? Totally. Mateo, maybe?

You want to tell us a little bit more about that? you just have this portal of access to personal information regarding people's like health and recovery. Totally. It'd be like if Apple started like pumping out blind stats about people's like Apple watch health things, which honestly might just be good if they did. The average person walks 7,000 feet steps a day. You only walk four. Maybe you should.

Totally. But it's the like it's the sharing of information based on geography. Like San Francisco is a big place. I get that no one is. was doxed by that, but there's something very ominous about it. I don't particularly like it when things that don't need to be on the internet are on the internet, like your washing machine, your coffee maker. I don't want those things.

Like, I forgot how I was looking at the other day, like a fridge. And it was like, it can go on your Wi-Fi. I'm like, I don't want it on my Wi-Fi. And it's like, this is one of those things where it's like, A, I don't know why I have to pay you a monthly fee to use the. hard physical product that you've put in my house. And then I have to give it internet access so that you can steal information on me about it from it. It's like not only am I paying a stupid monthly fee for nothing that's no value added to my like,

you know, sleep, the product is functioning as expected, whether it has an internet connection or not. I'm literally just paying to give you more information about me. And it's like I don't love that. I don't love that business model. It's like if I'm going to give you, pay you a monthly fee. then I want the product for free. If I'm going to pay you a monthly fee and give you personal information,

then I want, you know, value from that information. I agree. I think that that's, it's almost like a, you're in a ranty vibe. I think that,

uh, there's three pick two type approach. To this feels reasonable. Yeah. You can charge me money up front. You can charge me a subscription. You can gather my data, but so help you God if you try and do all three.

I'm not even sure I'm comfortable with two. The idea of charging me for a, maybe it's just one. Now that I really think about it, it might be pick one. Yeah. Because if you're going to charge me up front for the product, there's edge cases where a recurring subscription becomes necessary. I would hope you could figure out the cost of providing the service and bake it into the upfront price.

I'd prefer that, but I at least get that. But to be like, also we're going to harvest data on you. It's like, well, then you can fuck right off with your fancy bed. Like, I have not, no thank you. Not for me. Um, yeah, pretty, pretty wild one. Weird showing of your hand, Mateo, because it's now the second you said eight sleep is the only thing that popped into my head. And it was a self-inflicted injury.

I don't know why he did that. Um, kind of adjacent to that. There was this other story that, uh, I think it was Joseph Cox over at four or phone media. Great new tech media property. Totally. That everyone should check out, broke this. They're just crushing it right now. They're so good.

Um, they, they drop. a story and it has to do with a marketing company. And I wanted to talk to you about this one because it seems relevant to this eight sleep story. And it was that a marketing company had announced. So there's always been this, I'd go as far as to call it a myth that the reason your ads seem shockingly serendipitously accurate is because they're activating the microphone on your phone and listening to you. A lot of people are walking around with a vague sense this is the case. As we've talked about in the show before, the truth is much more insidious. It's just the fact that your activity and the activity of other people on your sometimes literally same network

can be triangulated so accurately as to give it the sense of listening to you when in reality it's just predicting future behavior based on past behavior on the internet. Generally speaking, that's what's actually going on. They're not actively listening to you. This marketing company had a thing on their website claiming that it actually listens to your phone and smart speakers to target you with ads. And the story went quite viral as a result. The company CMG had this page on their website. By the time I got over to their website to try and find it, it had been taken down. But I was able to find it on the web archive, which I was quite pleased about. And the website reads, it's true. Your devices are listening to you. With active listening, CMG can now use

voice data to target advertising to the exact people you are looking for. Imagine this. Someone says the car lease ends in a month, we need a plan, or do I see mold on the ceiling? And suddenly they're being targeted with ads for mold removal services or car leases. This is the sales pitch that CMG was putting out. This story goes viral. My initial instinct when I read this was that I actually think that CMG is probably just buying a massive repo of data purchased from somewhere else that includes audio-based data from exceptionally low-cost products that have somewhere in their terms of conditions that they're allowed to listen to you. Like person with $19 automated cat feeder that has a microphone doesn't realize it is legally

allowed to listen, that that quality data is getting into this thing that they have purchased, that they are reselling to people. That was my guess, not that CMG had developed a nation-state actor-level compromise of all phones. That's kind of where I figured it was going. And the CEO shortly after confirmed that that was the case. This was them sort of upselling a repo of data they'd bought. And they did it in a really bad way and it got them in a lot of hot, a lot of heat. When I first saw this, I thought this is a troll. Like I thought it was like, oh, interesting. Like we have a friend who is a strong ethical vegan. and he once was making a troll website about a restaurant where they fed dogs to people.

I don't know if you remember this. Oh, I more than remember it, but continue. Yes. As a way to troll meat eaters is like a way of like, you know, what is the difference between eating one animal from eating another, you know, man's best friend? Of course. And I felt like. Artful trolling.

Artful trolling. I feel like this is, was, when I first saw this, I thought this was the same thing. I was like, this is my mom's worst nightmare. This is a bit. This is it. Yeah, sure. Like someone's talked to their mother enough to be like, yeah, the phones are listening to you.

They definitely do. And it's like we've known for a long time. And then I found out I should actually backtrack there. And then I found out that it's actually owned by like a massive, you know, conglomerate of companies. Cox Enterprises, they own ISP, Cox Communications in the States, which we're not Americans, but a lot of people know Cox. It's like the equivalent of our like Rogers.

and it's a big, like a big company. And I was like, oh, this isn't a troll. This is real. This is like a subcompany of this massive conglomerate. And that I was like, well, this is, I guess, not unfamiliar. Like, we've done so many discussions about, I remember it would have been, what, about two years ago we were talking about, like, micro-targeting, like, the ability to deliver ads when you, like, you know, go into a specific Starbucks or geo-fenced area.

and all of these third-party apps that allow, you have to sign off on their rights. A lot of them are microphone access. Like if you open up your settings in your smartphone and go to privacy microphone, you'll see what apps have access to it. And if you've given one of those apps permission to listen to you, chances are they are listening to you.

It's probably been anonymized so that they can't track it back to you in like a personal perspective, but they can track it back to your advertising ID. So if you mentioned something like car lease is expiring, I'm yelling at my phone now. I'm excited to see what I'm going to get back. Just another in a weird long line of companies inadvertently inviting a bunch of trouble on themselves by confessing that they're doing something sort of dodgy, but trying to spit it up as being even dodgier because they think it sounds cool.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, very interesting one. I'm trying to think if there's anything else. So we've got to active listening. We've talked about all the big tent stuff. I ranted about crypto for way too long. You ran into about crypto for a hot second. I'm sure there's something we're forgetting.

Folks in our Discord have been dropping some really fantastic stories. Totally. I know there was one from that that I wanted to mention that I'm totally ghosting on. Oh, the nuclear story. Nuclear story. I was going to say we should also thank patrons. That's a great. But we can talk about the nuclear story.

Let's go to patrons and save the nuclear story maybe for the new year. I actually think that there could be maybe an interview to be done on that. So why don't we save that, my boy, and go ahead and thank some patrons on Patreon. It's been a minute. We've dropped two interview episodes since we've done this. We got some names to get through, my dude. Yeah, I'm trying to remember. I think our last one was P.

So which means was P. That I would like to thank and welcome. Broderick Duncan. Thank you, Broderick. Broderick Duncan. Thank you so much for your support. Mike Sanchise, thank you for your support. Scott, drop that great name.

Diego Fierro, thank you for your support. Daniel Fletcher, quality. Thank you for your support. Everett W. Thank you for your support. I'm going to throw this one back to you, buddy. I saw that coming.

Agatostasiak, thank you so much for your support. Ian May, thank you for your support. I saw this one come in and I practiced it. Wurzelbrst. Wait. Thank you for your support. Wurzelbermft. Yeah.

It has no vowels. If anyone's trying to guess, I'm not going to spell it. It has no vowels. It's challenging. Wurzelbrimf, appreciate it. Robert Hunt, thank you so much. And this last one, we're going to say it in perfect sync to ring in the new year. Give me a on zero.

Three, two, one. Martin. Amazing. I hope there's slight. staggered, aka Marty. Thank you all so much for your support, aka Big Marty. Thank you for your support. That was disastrous, but this has been a really fun year making the show.

We've experimented a lot in the, like, format and what kinds of stories we cover and who we interview, and everyone's just kind of kept up and stuck with us through the whole thing. And it just means a lot. And we really appreciate you being here. Did we miss someone? No, but I'm just going to give a personal shout out to Tonsko. He's very active. a person in our audience and is what I would now call emperor of our discord.

And he's been a great help. And I think we just need to give him a real solid shout out and a thank you from both of us. So thank you, Tonsko. Yeah, that's a really good point. Thank you, Tonsko. Like holding it down in that community and just like bringing cool story. Just a cool dude, bring in cool stories. And we really appreciate it.

Yeah. Yeah, thank you so much. Next time we're in the UK. Beers are on us. Oh, heck yeah. Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm excited for next year. I think we've got some really fun interviews and stories lined up.

Got some little stuff we might check out. I think it's going to be a really fun year. We've got Hotline Hacked. We've got all that content in the hopper. Just sitting there. Simmering like a stew. Getting tastier every single day. Do we want to maybe talk a little bit about plans for next year?

Do we want to maybe mention that we're planning on trying and doing a few more different kind of styles of episodes. So maybe going to do like an entire episode on gaming one of these days because Jordan and I, and we obviously chatter about it at length during these episodes. Yeah. So hacked gaming could be like a special episode format that we might create and try on the Patreon and then maybe drop it if people like it. So just a thing.

Pretty excited about that. I think I'm excited about this year is the potential. So Hotline Hacked some more gaming content. We naturally just because of our beat had to expand a little bit and talk about things like AI and Crypto this year. I think they're very relevant to the themes that have always dominated this show. And I'm sure that's going to continue into the new year. I don't want to speak ahead, but I'm excited. I won't say where, but I'm excited to do some boots on the ground reporting this upcoming year.

Nice. Maybe we hit the road a little bit. We go to Russia. We go to Russia. We're going to Russia. We're going to go find all the ransomware gangs, and we're going to make a documentary, docuseries about them. That'd actually be great content. I'd watch that.

That would actually be very, very good content. Netflix hit us up. Yeah, Netflix hit us up. Yeah, I don't know. I'm excited to try some of that. Holland, I think it's going to be fun. I think it's going to be a fun 2024 for the hacked community. Yeah.

for sure, for sure. Okay, happy, happy new year. Happy holidays. Happy New Year, my friend. I hope everyone listening had a good, good holidays. We're going to catch you in the next one. I'll see you soon.