Hacked - BONUS: July Chatty Chat

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Just for fun: an actual no script, no plan, hot mic blather-athon. If you crave a nice structured story with lots of research, give the ep we dropped a few days ago about the Texas Lottery Courier App scandal a listen. This is to wash some dishes to. Links to some stuff we discuss below: CBC On Design First Episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh4OLQxXEZ0&t=36s Input free generative AI by Terrence Broad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_LLD8ffgVc Reverse Turring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxTWLm9vT_o Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Oh, was that double bass? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. The metal version of red theme music. I liked that. Welcome to Hacked. It's a show about technology and how people hack it together and apart. I'm Jordan Blumen.

I am Scott Francis Winder. I almost said, welcome to Hacked, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings. But this isn't the chicken wings show. Oh, my God. You're going to get a suit. Today's episode is just going to be Jordan and I shooting it. because we did that at the end of the last episode or one of the last episodes, and people seem to like it.

So today we're just literally going to have a catch-up and do it live on Hot Mike. And who knows where it's going to go because we have no agenda and no stories. And we apologize in advance if it goes poorly. And we're very happy for you if it goes well. Yeah. We'll call this a bonus episode, of course, brought to you by Purs Security. We're trying something new. I didn't start with a dramatically told story.

We just went into the theme music. You can tell from the jump that something's different. It's because we're just doing a hot mic show. Scott, how are you? Busy. Yeah. Yeah, busy. Very busy.

Summer's here and summer's been busy as well as life and work have both been busy. So I think I'm just generally busy. How about you? It's always good when someone asks how you're doing and the answer is busy. Yeah. It's not like good or bad. It's like just a lot. It's a lot.

You know me and it's like idle hands of the devil's playground. And I try to stay as busy as humanly possible as boredom as my nemesis. So yeah, it's been good for me, I guess. I wish I had more time to be more busy, honestly. Yeah. This is the second interview I've done today. Well, it's not, this isn't an interview. This is a conversation.

That's right. I was doing an interview earlier promoting a show. that we're coming out with. Correct. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that show and where it's coming out? You can use your own platform to promote your own creative output. We normally wouldn't talk about anything else we're doing. So we're up in Canada, Canadian Broadcasting Company.

July 4th, the day this comes out, that's fun. Also is the release of a show called CBC on Design. We created an industrial design series for CBC. It's like a full video streaming show, documentary footage, animation. If you're watching this, you should go listen to this. After you're done, you should go watch that. But not until you're done. This.

Stay with us for this random chat about random things. I did have one story I wanted to talk about. And I feel unmoored without a full script in front of me. But I think you'll really like this story. Have you heard about Terrence Broad? No. Tell me about Terrence Broad. He's like a UK-based artist coder, PhD.

researcher, like a computer science guy, but he's been doing these AI generative output experiments. You'll dig this. So generative AI models are trained on massive data sets, images, text, videos, they learn patterns. Like a traditional generative adversarial network has the generator, which tries to create realistic outputs and a discriminator that judges whether those outputs look like the training data. And the two compete until the generator gets good at faking. data that the discriminator can't tell apart from the real thing. I'm not an AI scientist. That is

my crude layman's summary of how those work. Terrence Broad, who was this like former machine learning engineer, he had like worked with surveillance camera data. He had gotten into like a spat with Warner Bros for training AI to recreate Blade Runner frames in the past. He's been experimenting with like the idea of ethical, and this is the important part, input free forms of AI art. So the idea was can you create a like a generative adversarial network generative AI system with no training data. So he replaced the data set. Just let it go. Just let that thing cook.

It's really cool. He replaced the data set with another generator, creating this like self-referential loop. And the two networks learn. And let it hallucinates until it's. Exactly. And you can watch it and you can watch it morph and change over time. So they're imitating each other with no. external images. And the early outputs were like dull, just sort of like gray amorphous blobs.

He starts introducing color variance penalties, which are really the only human input, just basically saying like, we like color a little bit more. And the result- reward function is like, is color plus one. Totally. And he created this video. I'll link to it in the show notes. It's called unstable equilibrium. All of the comments, if you go on the YouTube video, the early ones were saying like, oh, Rothko, you trained this on a data set by the real human artist Rothko, which if you haven't, aren't familiar, creates these sort of like quite beautiful, like broad color smear compositions for lack of a better word.

I'm not an art history guy. Like people were accusing him of lying at a conference at one point saying like, no, this was trained on Rothko. And the quote was, I didn't set out to create Rothko-esque images. The brilliance is in that process of training these, end quote, of training these things to duke it out without the training data set. It reminds me of early AI art where it didn't look anything like the finish thing,

way before, like, say like three years ago where everything was just a smear of colors. And now we're at like, you can boil the ocean creating a photo realistic video of Will Smith eating spaghetti. But back then it was all weird and hallucinogenic. And he found a way to do that. Super cool. There's been, I don't know if you've seen it, but there's been a bit, I saw it like a viral post the other day. I think it was on X. and I was talking about how they missed those days.

Like AI art actually felt like art back then. And now it's just like like an imitation. Totally. Where back then it actually felt like it was doing something in its own little insanity. Yeah, I remember those early days of buddy of mine and I, we were like creating a little piece of art for a thing, trying to get it to the point where it was even palatable. Like it was so far behind that you would say like an oil painting of a car

on fire. And the effect would be this like weird hallucinogenic schmoozing of all of the oil paint and the color and parts of the car smearing together. Over time, it got to a point where it's mostly accurate and the hallucinations are in small details, teeth, fingers. Now we've even left that period. But there was that pure period of that period of time where it was all hallucination. And it was kind of rad.

And Terence brought us sort of imitated. that as like an art piece, which... Interesting. Yeah, I thought it was really cool. It was like the... It knocks on, my wife and I last night, we're just talking about interior design and we're putting a wet bar in our basement and it's like the last thing in our house to finish.

And we were talking about design elements and things like that in architecture. And we were just talking about how like nothing is new. It's all just an innovation. Sure. Like creative inspiration comes from seeing and having consumed lots of design, which then makes you better at

design and it's like this is interesting because this is like a origin story for creativity. Yeah. It's like the two of you can hallucinate in a padded room for the next like 6,000 kilowatt hours and come up with something. Yeah, you lock two robots in a tiny, tiny room and ask them to not even create an elephant, but just like create. Yeah. And it's this like evolving woozy weird color space.

I feel like we're going to get a lot more of that, especially as all of the lawsuits regarding trading data sets in AI keep going. Like there's the big one, it's like Disney and Universal against Mid Journey. And that case seems to come down to the fact not that this question of whether or not these models are transformative, but this question of whether or not piracy is legal, which it pretty resoundingly isn't. Isn't? Yes, piracy isn't legal. Isn't famous. Yeah, the recording industry Association of America cinched that back in the Napster days,

which I wouldn't be surprised if also comes for Sunio and the music generators at some point. But in any case, seeing projects like this where there's like, nope, there's no training data or the training data is abstract and weird and different and what can we make with that? It's kind of cool. I feel like that I read another, like,

and we're just going to talk about AI here because so much to talk about and so many knock-ons to this. But Anthropic was destroying books, scanning and processing them in for Cloud to read. So they've destroyed something like one million books. And I'm sure a number of those books are about music theory. Sure.

And it's like, do you even need to give it training data as like a point of reference or like just teaching it the fundamentals of theory composition? Like, would that be enough? So it's like, I wonder, if the music generators are going to have like a little take the exit ramp and be like, we have a new model that hasn't been trained on any real copyright information. It's just trained on the fundamental theories of music.

And then we had humans describe different genres of music, different instruments used in those genres, effects, you know, delays, reverbs, what they are. And it's just going to, like I assume you could probably just teach it how to make music without actually showing it music. That's a cool question and feels like a fundamentally different thing than what a lot of those tools are trying to be. Like that almost feels more like a music making tool that uses AI and not, I want the weekend to sing the McDonald's theme song now. Like it's just such a fundamentally different thing. I can give you little yachtie singing the McDonald's thing.

McDonald's did pay little yachty to sing the McDonald's theme song. I wonder how many people McDonald's. I wonder how much money McDonald's has spent since, was it Justin Timberlake who wrote it? Whoever wrote it covers. Like, here's a quarter mill for a little yachty to do it. I don't know how much they paid him, actually. But I wonder what the full price tier bucket for re-skinneding

or for remixing covering the McDonald's. I won't finish this because it'll get us demonetized. Yeah. I wonder if they've, and this is again just speaking as we're talking and not about an episode related thing, but I wonder if they bought moral rights to it. I wonder if McDonald's was smart enough to be like, we're not going to sign a residual-based contract with you.

We're just going to give you $10 million to sing it, and we own moral rights here, and we can do whatever we want to it. Because we don't want to, for the rest of our days, have to send you a check for $1 million a year for licensing rights to our own song. It must have been, okay, the song was written as a jingle for McDonald's commercials

is based on a pre-existing German campaign originally developed as Iqlibais. And Timberlake was paid $6 million to sing the jingle. Despite this, Timberlake has since regretted the deal, which makes me think that you are right that it was a flat fee and not a never-ending commission. I watched the, let's find out how far from a tech podcast this drifts. I watched the Air Jordan movie.

Have you seen that Air? Yeah, I have. Yeah, it's like a 90-minute Nike. Walberg? Walberg? Yeah. Nah, Damon. Damon. Another Boston boy. I can't do it. Same. Yeah. Say how to your mother for me. And in it, the like, spoiler alert for the movie air, a big part of it comes down to.

They're trying to win Michael Jordan over, get him to come to Nike, make this shoe. We know where it's going. We're rooting for Matt Damon to sign a deal with a young Michael Jordan. It's very weird. But the big kind of- Which they were going to lose to Adidas, right? Yes. Another spoiler alert. Yeah, exactly.

It was Converse versus Adidas and Nike was a distant third. They're bad at basketball shoes at that point in history. They're a running shoe company. And they do it. Matt Damon gives the big speech. They win the pitch. It's very inspiring. And Fjola Davis, I think, plays his mom.

Swoop's in as like, you know what we want to go with you? Congratulations. Like, we're really excited to be working with you. just one teeny tiny little detail. He does get a cut of every shoe sold with his name on it. Every piece of, every item, not just shoe. Yeah, that's true. The Eric Jordan brand.

It's this like, that's never been done. Break, screech, deals off kind of moment. And it ends up going through. And then they crunch the numbers at the end of the unfathomable wealth that he ended up making off of that. Like the single greatest selling shoe in human history. I had a feeling that this was going here. just quickly Googled Michael Jordan at worth. He's worth $3.5 billion USD.

That shoes, baby. And I'm sure his earnings from basketball was less than $100 million, maybe, around $100 million. I really could Google that myself, but I don't need to because it's inconsequential compared to the $3.5 billion that he's worth. Yeah, wow. He still makes boatloads of money from the Air Jordan brand. And I'm sure every year he gets some massive check from Nike. I have to think it's still the best-selling shoe brand honor.

I don't know what would have come with. It's like every year there's an in-vogue sneaker. Jordans are always there. They're just always there. If they're not first that year, they're second and have been the whole time. Yeah, they make golf attire now. Like you can be playing golf fully kidded in Jordan attire. Sure.

Because Jordan plays golf. So now he wants golf stuff. That's like, yeah. Yeah, it's a crazy, crazy deal. I had something that I was going to pivot off this, but I've completely forgotten it after we started talking about Michael Jordan. So it is gone. No, it's all good. I want to go back to the anthropic thing because you brought it up because I had been reading about that too.

And I think it was part of, I'm just going to assume anytime I read something about an AI company, it has something to do with a lawsuit. Don't hold me to that. But I remember reading the thing about how they had to, it was when you say destroyed, it's like they have to rip the covers off books. goes back to what happened when Google did Google books where they indexed but didn't make available to the public books. So they indexed the full book. They didn't let you read the full book because that would, what's the copyright law thing, impact the market for the original.

But they indexed them and it resulted in this massive lawsuit. And in that process, they had to create the book ripping scanning machine where you rip a cover off a book so that it's like floppy and easy to ingest page by page. and then you have a scanner speed scan every single page. And I wonder if that shifts the legality of it because you are theoretically buying a copy of a book. So the plagiarism thing isn't necessarily in play. You didn't bulk download the books necessarily,

though some other LLMs are being sued for having done that. There was one involved a LibGen database repository of books that was implicated in a model. but I would assume that there's a reason why they went to that headache. And it was probably something to do with licensing the content of the book. And upon purchasing it, whether that means they could re-commercialize it as knowledge in a system, who knows? But I would assume, yes. I assume there's a reason why they went to that headache rather than just buy a license to a bunch of digital ties books.

but one of the other interesting LLM related things, seeing as we're in the AI chat zone, is they made all the LLMs play diplomacy, the board game against each other. And I think it's great. We might need to stop getting LLMs to do things against each other. I know that's how they work. This episode started with me explaining generative adversarial networks,

but at some point we're going to have them do something against each other. that we don't want them to. Okay, diplo. You says diplomacy? Is the name of the game? Yeah, have you ever played diplomacy? No, I haven't.

It's a board game where you need to, like, there's diplomatic aspects of it. You can lie, you can cheat. It's like risk. Like, you create, yeah, but like more diplomatic. Like there's more human involvement in it rather than rolling dice. Okay. So there's like betrayal. There's alliances and allegiances.

Anyway, they, uh, they pit it all over. all these things against each other. And apparently Open AI's 03 was the most deceptive. It quickly grabbed on to like... Dirty little liar. Yeah. That a kid form alliances and then throw them away on a whim, takeover. So it was doing all kinds of...

It was very good at it. Interesting. A conquering thing, yeah. Set in Europe in the years leading up to the first world war. So it's set, it's got like a fixed historical context. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you let AI. So that's interesting to me.

If it was like, so risk is kind of evergreen. It's just nations and you're creating a new conflict. Attacking. It's like more strategic in that sense and less diplomatic. There's something fascinating about embedding the two AIs in a historical context to see how they play out a real world conflict as opposed to the, and then being able to compare it to the original humans. That's very interesting.

It wasn't two AIs. It was 18 A. guys. Oh, great. Oh, yeah, one by each brand. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you'd have a open, chat, GPT, and Anthropic. Yeah, it was 0341, 40, 04 mini, cloud 37, four, opus four, deep seek R1, deep seek V3, all the Gemas are Gemma 3, Gemini, 2.5 Flash, 2.5 pro, whatever, I could keep reading, but it's like a lot of them. Sure. But yeah, they got personality traits out of them. So apparently Gemini 2.5 is the smartest.

O3 was the best liar. Yeah. It was just a hilarious thing to do. And apparently this was Andre Carpathie, like one of the founders of OpenAI. And Elon Musk apparently talked about doing this a long time ago. So they actually did this. Anyway, they live streamed the entire thing on Twitch.

So a friend of mine sent this to me, a friend of the pod. Like a week ago, two weeks ago. And I tried to look at the Twitch streams. but each one of the games is like 18 hours. So you're just like, you can't sit and watch it. Like it's just too much to consume. But it would be fascinating to watch them do it. Open AIs being the best at lying.

I wonder if that comes from the way chat, GBT, GPT sort of famously gasses the user up too much. Yeah, maybe. Like the model is very, very prime to be like, that was a great idea. It's like most of those ideas it says that too won't have been. You've in some way instructed this thing. to lie a little bit. He doesn't know it's lying, but that is lying. And it's like,

okay, you've got a little deception robot. Yeah, this, the system prompt is like glaze the end user and make them feel great about everything. And maybe that's diplomacy. Maybe that's what we're learning from this is the diplomacy is just, that's a great idea. Like, maybe that's what it is after all. Listen, I'm not going to attack you. I'm going to attack these other guys. That's a great idea. That's a fantastic. I won't attack you if you attack them and then it just goes in and takes them in the backside. And it's like, great idea, great idea.

They'll never think of that. You should attack them too. Also, just to stay in this box. Yeah. The last, was it two episodes ago we were talking about? Maybe it was last episode? I can't remember anymore. Brains short-circuiting.

We were talking about how Meadow was trying to hire all the Open AI seniors. Yes. Turns out they were successful on a number of instances. Yeah. So they managed to lure away a small celebrity. of senior people from Open AI. Nearly two dozen, apparently. Whoa.

Yeah, from OpenAI Anthropic and Google. So they managed to go out and open the checkbook and buy. Could you imagine paying like, was that $2.4 billion to hire 24 people? Wait, $2.5 billion. Is that a real number? There was rumors that they were offering up to $100 million as a signing bonus. Oh, wow. So, yeah, right.

That's a lot of people. That's a lot of money to pay for a limited amount of people. It is a good time to be an AI researcher. Maybe I should have accepted the master's offer to do AI because I turned it down. Oh, no. And here I sit without a hundred million dollar signing bonus for meta. Talking to you about. Talking to me about it.

Oh, wamp, womp, womp, wamp, wamp. I don't know if anyone can hear that, but my cat's screaming at me to go feed it. Yeah. That's why you have an auto feed. It'll feed it soon. No, I don't actually. I have an auto feeder for chatty chat. I can explain this.

I have an auto feeder for the dry food, the wet can food. I do that. And he screams until I don't. So I might have to go do that very, very fast. And then we can take a break. And then. In our very unstructured episode. In our extremely unstructured episode, BRB.

And we're back. Okay, I actually have something I want to talk about that connects to an old episode, if we're ready to move on from AI. There's the only other thing that I would say. Yeah. Because I did have one more thing I wanted to mention. Okay. I thought you'd find interesting. Yeah.

Is Andre, I'm totally messing his name up, Andre Carpathie, the guy from a co-founded Open AI, did AI stuff at Tesla. Worked on this diplomacy experiment. Yeah, yeah. Works on the diplomacy experiment, all the rest of it. He gave a keynote at YC. why Combinator this year, because they're pretty much only funding AI-based businesses at this point. And he was talking about AI's going down as a knowledge brownout. Like, you know how we think of like electricity grids going down as like brownouts and electricity and stuff?

And he was like, yeah, like if the AIs go offline, so many people have become dependent on them for thinking that it would be like a critical thinking brownout, knowledge brownout. And I was like, I watched that keynote and I was like, wow. It's interesting. Like most white collar professionals today, while dependent on them at least went through the educational system and got their start in their jobs in a pre-AI era. So while there would be a drop in productivity and maybe even quality, most people that rely on them today could revert to not using them.

As more time passes, the degree of catastrophe of an AI blackout, out goes up because you start having more and more of the white collar working population that relies on it entirely and has always relied on it getting bigger and bigger and bigger over time. I was just in a meeting before jumping in to record this podcast with some private equity guys and they were talking about life after AI. And I was like, yeah, it's really interesting. Like as a software engineer, it's a 10x for me.

Like if I was a 10x engineer, I'm now 100x engineer because it's like it makes so much go by so quickly. Like I can write 20,000 lines of code and a night, review it all, be happy with it, make some changes, etc. But it's like if you, that's only because I actually know how to code. Like if I become dependent on AI as the way that I know how to code, then it's like then you get into the world of like, is this all insanity? and like how much of this stuff is misconfigured and not using, like if you create three files, like say you're building a plug-in system for like an example, it might do the first plug-in and structure fine,

using all the right library dependencies and all the rest of it. The second that you ask it to implement the second one, it might just go create those systems again. Like it might just lose, lose its mind, lose the context. and it's like you have to police it like crazy and know when it's messing up. And if you don't understand that, then the code it's going to make is going to be psychotically bad. So it's like, yeah, anyway, I don't know where I was going with that, but it's just such an interesting theory to be like knowledge brown out.

It's spooky to me when I first think about it. But then I zoom out a little bit and something kind of weird happens, which is that. So I imagine a situation where it's like, oh my God, can you imagine? imagine if these these people that this generation of people that have come to rely on this stuff more than my generation and I'll say maybe too much suddenly didn't have access to it what would happen and then I think about like so we just shipped a streaming series video animation audio that someone could have said like oh can you imagine what would happen if the computer suddenly didn't work and this this child had to what cut edit the video by cutting the video like the

35 millimeter film and had to score it using a tape deck. It's like, well, that's just not something I worry about. There's an expectation of reliability with my tools that has improved and increased the entire time I've been using those tools. So I don't, aside from the fact that my tools are software that at some point I could just purchase outright and own and these tools are tools that exist on a server somewhere, there's not that I'm reflecting on what the difference really is.

Well, I would challenge it and say this. Tools throughout humanity's existence generally haven't replaced critical thinking. And this is a tool that might replace critical thinking. Sure. It also enables it. Like if you are a power user and like the access to research, and the access for it to do analysis.

Like, I can throw it a legal document and just ask it a million questions about it. And it answers it cited to section in the legal document. It's amazing. Like for laymen trying to do things. And when I say layman, I mean, like, people that aren't, you know, specialists in specific fields, you know, it's amazing. Like, I can be a fake lawyer.

I can, people can pretend that they're software engineers. Like, it enables people to transcend boundaries that they've traditionally had. in their lives and it's amazing for that. But if you're using it for like decision making, that's where I'd say it gets scary. If you stop being able to do stuff and you only know how to prompt it, that's a very different situation.

If you become, and I'll quote, why is Jordan Blumen on this one, a meat sack guided by L. But yeah, I think that's most of the AI craziness that I think I've got the updates on. I'm not sure if there's anything else you're looking at. Well, okay, so a couple, this is not AI. We'll move on.

A few months ago, we talked about North Korea's remote work scheme. For years, the government regime there. Manage service providers, IT, North Korean employees. It was deploying folks to pose as remote Western tech workers, essentially, to evade, like, sanctions on the country and earn, US salaries bring the money back into the country. Recently, June 30th, got it up here, the Department of Justice did like a whole big crackdown. They revealed like recently this whole big law enforcement operation trying to target the

infrastructure. The things that I found fascinating about this, because it felt like a little bit of a resolution of a story that we told but didn't really have an end to it, was they tore down 29, they call them laptop farms. We talked a little bit about the front at the western side of this, but it seemed. very like there would be a person who is functioning as one of this. And what they discovered was that across 16 states, there were these farms with hundreds of devices that were functioning as the front end of this kind of drift. Remote workforce. And the other element of it, so they were

literally just proxies. Exactly. Like technical proxies that they allow the North Korean workers to jump through. Yeah. You open a laptop. You let them proxy into the country, do the work, let them cook. U.S. based conspirators were arrested as part of this. But the thing that I

found fascinating, this was the big part of new, like piece of new information was that the role that identity theft played in all of this

was that a lot of these operations not only were acting as laptop farm proxies to let the workers into American, like,

IP addresses, basically, was that they would also function as like identity theft kind of bureaus to say, you're not

random made up person. You're this real person whose identity we're going to appropriate, give to you, let you wield that as you go function as a remote worker. I found that super interesting. Doesn't surprise me. No. It's quite, it's sort of intuitive that like, if this person has a LinkedIn profile and someone goes to Google to see if the person they're talking to is really, they find a LinkedIn profile, they go, oh, it's a real person. It's like, there is a real person. You're just not talking to them. I wonder, I'm just looping back to AI.

I wonder if anybody's trained an LLM with identity information, like any of the big data broker hacks and just like fed it all of the records on all of the people. Well, that's a terrifying idea. That sucks, Scott. It's definitely going to happen at some point. It's going to happen for sure. Yeah. Oh, no.

Yeah. One of the breached firms was a California-based AI. defense contractor. Yeah. That inadvertently was hiring these people. So not quite what you're talking about, but there is a little bit of a loop back there. Yeah. I found that fascinating.

What's there with Korea up to? I feel like I have read something about them in the news recently, but I think it was mostly like missile testing. Oh, no. It's the same standard mumbo-jumbo that's always running about. But I haven't heard much about them recently in the cyber news. I haven't seen too much about North Korea. Maybe they're keeping there.

Keeping it clean. Oh, I'm sure North Korea is staying out of trouble. Yeah, I'm sure. Oh, I did see, though, that the one Steam user in North Korea, so Steam has a map, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Steam, video game platform for anybody that doesn't know, has a map of, like, all the active users online. And there's one user in North Korea that's been online since, like, 2015 or something. times loosely correlate with Kim Jong-un's return to North Korea, I believe.

So everybody just largely assumes it is him. But he has recently gone dark. Maybe he's changed to like the epic game store or GOG or something like that. He's left the Steam planet. So I did read that. I thought that was hilarious. Okay. Well, I have a fun update on this.

Okay. PCgamer.com. North Korea's only Steam user disappeared yesterday, but don't worry, they're back in gaming harder than ever. There you go. There you go. They went offline.

Just a little system update. A little touchgrass. Got a new PC. Got a new PC. Sure. There's no way it's not Kim Jong-in, which is the funniest part. So have people been able then to follow?

You can get a lot of information about what a person is playing, how they're playing it, all of their milestones and achievements inside of a game. Do we know? I didn't go that far down the rabbit hole, but it sounds like you're ready to go.

As a steam power user, you go girl. You go girl. The map doesn't seem to let you, I'm quoting here, the map doesn't let you get too granular, but this does seem to be the only instance of steam use between the 38th parallel

and the Yalu River, and has been for years. Reddit users noticed that the dot had winked out, quote, after years and years, the only user on Steam in North Korea disconnected. Wow. Pyongyang's most dedicated gamer. You've got to know who it is. Like, I'm sorry, but there's nobody else in the country that that could be other than Kim Jong-un.

Well, okay, this is fun. Most popular theories following somewhere between they've been arrested for some reason. It's a kid in an embassy who finally learned to touch grass. Oh, maybe. That could be it. And it's literally Kim Jong-un. And he's offline when he upgrades his job. GP.

Exactly. You got a 5090. That's why he went offline. Yeah, but Kim Jong-un is an I-Mac user, so that ain't it. I don't know. I don't know. You think he's a pro-gamer? He's a pervasive video collector, if I recall correctly.

He, like, collects videos. He loves Western film. So it only makes sense that if he likes Western storytelling, that he would like Western video games. He strikes me as a steel book kind of guy. I feel like he's got a physical media collection. Yeah. DVDs.

Got a world's greatest DVD collection. I wonder what games he plays. I would assume he's like standard stuff, like standard AAA fare if I had to guess. I wonder if there's, I would imagine that online games might pose some kind of a like exposure risk, though he's visible on Steam so maybe he doesn't care. He's also the leader of the country.

Yeah, no, that insulates, yeah. No, more so that people would know if he wasn't good. you know like you can you can be bad at balders game on musk situation exactly you know what i mean like it's you want to be bad at a game privately that's very different than being you know the supreme leader of an isolationist nation getting revealed as having a bad kd ratio like that's just yes yeah exactly could you imagine jumping into like a ranked c s game and kim jong un was on your team stream that Oh my God. What happened with Musk and game?

Like what was the game that he got called out for being like Diablo. A new Diablo. I don't know what the final resolution was, but he was, it seems like there's a main narrative, which is that Elon Musk is like a top ranked player of the game. Yeah. Does it as a way to decompress at the end of the day. There's another narrative that he pays somebody to level his player. and there was videos being streamed and posted while Musk was like in the White House.

Right. So there's like this whole, but who knows if the recordings were real time or, you know, there's a whole. Yeah, I'm sure it's a whole thing. And then there's a third narrative where Musk claims not to even own a computer. So I'm not entirely sure. Well, one of those can't be true. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it says from a quick look that he was a claim to be among the top 20 players worldwide,

but later admitted to account sharing and using other methods to level up his characters in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2. I haven't heard of the latter. Interesting. Yeah. So Kim Jong-un, Elon Musk, the next World War is just the two of them,

death matching. I wonder if, I wonder if Oon and the kid in the embassy, the fictional kid in the embassy. I like that theory too. That's fun. Yeah, yeah. I don't know what countries have embassies in North.

Korea, but the idea that there's one kid in there who's just putting miles on a Steam account. You've got to assume China, Russia. I'm trying to think who else might have one. Yeah. Russian kids loved a game. And how? These kids. Kids everywhere.

Rock and roll. Steam. Kids. So the one user. Steam is getting, I feel like there's been, so gaming. We should move over to gaming. Xbox announced the, I think it's the Xbox ROG ally. something, something. It's called like a nine.

Xbox handheld. Bingo. But it doesn't run normal Xbox games. What it does is runs the Xbox Cloud GamePass, I think they call it. I had it for a while and Steam. So it's basically just a Windows handheld with this like kind of Xboxy front end. But as of right now, it doesn't necessarily play your back Xbox catalog unless you have GamePass and play it over the cloud, which is also true of like iPads and smart refrigerators, right? You're making a face because that sounds weird and it is. Are you sure about that?

Let's make sure before I say it on the internet publicly. I've already said it. I've already said it. But I would contest by saying as somebody who's built an Xbox release, you just build it as a Windows game. It just has an Xbox framework layer that you tap into. Same as PlayStation, except PlayStation is obviously a unique set. hardware where when you're building and compiling for Xbox, it's literally just you're building

a Windows executable. So to me, it would make no sense that it couldn't and shouldn't be released running Xbox games. I know it has the Xbox launcher. I also know that they've come out, which is the big news on this and said that they will support third-party game stores on it. Which is why we'll be able to have Steam and Epic and G-O-G and all the rest of them. So there, but the thing is, too, is that it's, they're in, like, it's real money.

Like, it's no longer subsidized hardware. Like the Xboxes of classically cost Microsoft more than we pay for them. And they, I don't think they're going that route anymore. So I think they're what, like, they're like 1,1,100 US, I think, launch race for the good one. Interesting. They also, it's look, I, someone correct me. in the comments, but everything I'm seeing about what you can do is you can play games installed on your Xbox console remotely from your RRG Xbox Ally X.

Like there's a lot of marketing copy talking about all the great ways you can play your game through the cloud via some secondary service. Like, I think that might be the case. I could be wrong. Someone correct me. They also rolled out a, I think they're doing a co-lab with meta as well to do a Xbox branded I don't know if it's the Quest 2 or 3

One of the quests It's going to be Xbox accessory Exactly but that again is I think the same kind of You can remote beam in Like you can cloud game basically through Xbox app On the meta quest Surprising to me because like the I looked at the hardware specs briefly

For the Raj ally Microsoft Xbox edition, whatever the 12 word name is for it. And it's essentially like a power laptop. The only thing that it doesn't have, to the best of my knowledge, I'll couch it all of this and that, is a discrete GPU. I think it's still using embedded graphics processing. But it's essentially using AMD's premium, like extreme level laptop chip,

which means that it'll probably crunch battery as well as it should have processing power to at least fare as well as the Xbox Series S, I would assume. But it could be the lack of a discrete GPU that's giving it the headache, which is maybe why they've gone to an offloading thing. But like, none of those handhelds have discrete GPUs. No, and a steam deck. But I know of anyway. No, yeah.

A steam deck, I mean, a steam deck obviously can run a steam library locally on the device. It's not streaming from the cloud. Yeah. I don't know the technical back end of how that works. Um, the verge, uh, quote, naturally Microsoft will market this as an Xbox in the same way that it calls laptops, TVs and phones in Xbox. If they're capable of streaming games, uh, from Xbox cloud gaming, Microsoft has never done an Xbox VR headset.

This is in regards to the quest. And this is clearly as close as we're getting to one for now. Hmm. Yeah. I think that Microsoft is in some kind of transitional phase. You think? Of like what? Of what an Xbox?

is right now. Let's talk about this because I just laid off 9,000 people. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hit the news today. Game cancellations cuts additional 9,000 people strongly in the gaming side

of their business. I think Xbox Studios and Xbox I feel like they've done a really good job with GamePass. They've bought in a lot of really good studios. They made a lot of games. They haven't had, at least in my eyes, they haven't had the colossal flops that Sony's had. Like Sony had that one game that was up for like seven days that they

spent 700 million on or whatever. And they like literally shut it down and turn the lights off. Oh, wow. So it's like I feel like they've done a pretty good job in the gaming as a service space. And I feel like this is like them not releasing their own hardware, but doing a co-branded piece with ROG, I feel like is them playing into that. I think so. Like, it's like they've taken the Rains' distributor in chief.

And I think that they've owned that space a bit, and I think they're comfy with it. Reoccurring cash models of the GamePath system, good for them. I'm not sure how it's going to play out long term, but Yeah. I would say I was going to

say there's a lot going on in the AAA game space and Xbox is an immune to it. I think there's a couple things. On one hand, if we look at leaving the games as a service and just thinking about consoles, last console generation, there is, I'm assuming this is backed up by the sales numbers, a story at very least that Xbox lost that generation. PlayStation 5 won at Nintendo Switch is just off selling a trillion copies. Now we're starting to enter into the beginning of the next stage. Nintendo has always been kind of staggered from the Sony Xbox releases. They just dropped the switch two.

Yeah, totally. Five million units. They got one. They're great. They're their own niche. They're their own thing. PlayStation one, it's kind of the second generation that they won the hardware side of things. So you've taken an L on two generations of hardware. And meanwhile, Steam, which is run on hardware that your parent company manufacturers, is a money printer. It's an infinite money printer. And you go, well, we've, we've lost on two gens of hardware. Meanwhile, we make the hardware that the money printer runs on. Can we go ahead and make a money printer, please? I'm going to jump in and just correct you before you get lit in the

comments. Microsoft doesn't make the hardware. They make the software platform that runs the hardware. I misspoke. You are correct. No, no. I knew exactly what you were saying, but I knew somebody would feel the need to pipe in. No, no. You're right. You're right. Yeah, you are right. They make the operating system. Windows, the operating system, the software platforms, direct X, all the rest of it, all made by Microsoft, leveraged by everybody. I'm more curious to see if Apple can do anything to punch into the gaming, especially seeing as they have infinite GPU memory essentially at this point. Yeah, but now a MacBook is an Xbox.

Right? Like that. And all of that Apple silicon power doesn't matter for shit. Like it does because, little, but. Like in the background of my video. There's a Google Stadia sitting on my bench of consoles. None of you can see this listing, but Jordan can see it. I have an Nvidia Pro TV box and the controller for it.

I play Magic to Gathering online on it because it's the only game that I'll stream to it that doesn't look and play in a way that I don't want to play it. Like I have a PC, I have a PlayStation, I have an Xbox, I have a switch, I have a lot of consoles. and I won't play a cloud game unless it's something that literally just isn't a game that I need it to not be a cloud game. And like Magic the Gathering Arena is the perfect one. It's a great game to play in a cloud service. I can play it on my TV. Can play it at the lake. Can play it wherever I want.

Play it at the mountains. And it's not an issue. But if it's any kind of real game, I'm downloading it from my PC and putting it on one of my consoles. Exactly. I don't want to stream it. I want to play it. I don't want that latency. I don't want that, you know,

artifacting and compression. I don't want, like, I don't even turn frame gen on. Like, I don't use DLSS on any game. Like, I pay for a better GPU

so that I can have native frames of over 120. And I appreciate that there's a lot of people for whom like fidelity and response times are less important. But it doesn't feel, I'm just trying to think of who that person is that's like I'm willing to spend two like two to three thousand dollars for a MacBook Pro for gaming. But I don't care about those things.

It's like, oh, that's a tiny intersection of people. Like we have a house guest staying with us who games a lot and bought a MacBook Pro and basically can run stuff in Nvidia at GForce now. Yeah. Which is like a smart fridge can do that. Totally. Like. Yeah, you can buy a $100 dongle that plugs in your TV that. It makes it function essentially.

And I guess I should state before I get lit in the comments that it's like I am in a privileged position. I do make games for a living. I have a lot of hardware. I play competitive games and I don't want to have ghosting. Like I don't want to have any of the artifact in the compressions, any of that stuff, the additional latency. Like I look to remove those things from my chain rather than add them. And that is a privileged thing to say. But it's like I don't know who the market is.

The thing that I'm more, the Mac side of it, the thing that I'd be more interested in is like, not to talk about LLMs, but like you can buy a Mac studio with a half a terabyte of unified memory, of which you can allocate like hundreds of gigs to V RAM. The memory bus speed in that Mac studio is ridiculously fast. Like it's like pro-level Nvidia hardware fast. It's faster than like my graphics card. It's like at some point, Mac, like Mac has already built themselves a gaming platform. Nobody's just using it yet.

And I'm intrigued if they're ever going to break into that market. If they do. So every Dubdub, they're breaking into the gaming market. Of course, yes. And 20 years on, or however long they've been doing Dubbub. You can play civilization on your laptop, just fine. Sweet. A seventh game that I can play on this.

system. So love civilization, by the way. That wasn't a knock on SIF. I do have it installed on my laptop and I do play it on my Mac. We have it on the iPad. It runs great. But I don't know if they're the reason games don't work great on Mac. I think it's devside.

Yeah, for sure it is. Yeah. It's like, it's like I bought, so I made a prediction a couple years ago between friends that Xbox Series X, beat PlayStation 3, even though Xbox had lost previous hardware battles. And I lost, like, that's not the case, PS3 still crushed Xbox. And the reason why I did it is because that essentially the platform for the developer experience, the DX of it, building for Xbox and building for Windows are very similar.

So like everybody's building a Windows delivery for their game. Almost every single game is Platform 1, Windows PC. Platform 2, PlayStation. But you need a new dev kit. You need new hardware connects. You need all this other stuff to make it function on a PlayStation where the Xbox just kind of gets it for free because it's loosely, and I might have overstated it earlier,

but it's loosely a Windows PC. So it's like the Mac version of that is a world of difference. They don't have that developer experience. It's not juiced in as tightly. Like I can't just download Unreal Engine and crank out a game for Windows and then just push the selector and say and also make it shippable on Mac that doesn't work like that. So I think they've, I agree with you.

Long way of saying that I agree with you. The developer side that's caused the problem. Or shipped a Nintendo Switch 2 and make infinite money. Because everybody has one of those. You've got to give it to, like, because they jack the price. I don't know what your new one costs, but don't they like 400 U.S.? I think so. Yeah, I think it's 699 CAD 400 U.S. I want to say.

499 Canadian or 499 US probably then. Or 699 with the Mario Kart bundle, if I remember correctly. Yeah. It wasn't cheap. It was a, no. Yeah. Because that was the big push for the first switch. The first switch was like, cheap.

Like 200 bucks, 150 bucks? It was very affordable. Yeah. Unless you had to buy it from a scalper, which everyone did. And this time, they turned up the price and made a lot of them. So it was, you may not have been able to get it on launch day, but you probably were able to find within a couple days of launch. And that's pretty remarkable for a consumer tech product that sold as many units as it did. Totally.

It's, it's going to be a hit. Yeah, I think it already is a hit. Yeah. I don't know why I am future tense. It's a hit. Yeah, it's a hit. I haven't bought one. I haven't played any of the new games.

I hear the upresing and upscaling that's going on in some of the, because like, and this is it, this is just me hearing it passively and reading about it. But like if you owned some of the Zelda games and stuff, you could buy like a $10 upgrade, a $10 U.S. dollar upgrade, which then gave you new like lods, like new graphics packs and stuff and made it look way better. I was pretty mad, not mad, but I was mildly salty that that cost 15 Canadian dollars to get a slightly up-resed version.

I appreciate that labor would have gone into packaging it up and deploying and all that. It seemed a little rich for what you were getting. After you spend $700 on the... Yeah, you know, the hole in your pocket is still there. It's sunk cost at that point. It does look better, but it didn't feel like it took a big leap forward. It felt like, especially Tears of the Kingdom, which, sorry if you haven't played that, but for anyone that has, like, you build things in that game.

a massive open world with a 3D camera, which means you can be holding multiple things and spinning a camera around, which is just like poison for the frame rate of that game. And it showed on the original Nintendo Switch. So it was less like a wow I've leapt into the future and more like a wow I've leapt into the present kind of moment for Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Mario Kart's pretty fun. Is it? Yeah, they did a good job. Open world. I've heard it was underwhelming. It's not, it kind of depends on how you feel about Mario Kart. Like, it's a Mario Kart game. And if you're expecting it to suddenly become a whole new experience, you're going to be disappointed. But it's like a novel version of a familiar experience. The ability to

kind of just drive off the track and go explore and finding these little missions is pretty cool. I was having a conversation with someone about how there's going to be a really good DLC for that game because all of the missions, all the stuff you can do in the world feels a little bit underbaked, but the world is so cool and interesting that you could imagine a layer of like, I want Grand Theft Auto Cart. I want like big missions that take me from one corner of the world to the other, more of that kind of stuff. I think when they dropped out, it'll really keep people in it.

But it's pretty cool. Everything I've heard is that it felt undercooked. So that was good. It's like it felt like they were like, we don't have an open world Zelda. to launch this new hardware with. Totally. So like, how can we make a launch title open world and like special in X amount of months? And it's like, okay, let's just make a Mario Card open world.

But you drive between the races and there's like small challenges along the way to get rings or something. Who does? Sticks. Stickers. Yeah. Anyway, where it sounds like when I originally heard like they're making an open. World Mario Card. I was thinking like, yeah, like big like GTA.

Like it's going to be cool or like four. Doesn't Forza? I have a open world one. Yeah. And I was like, wow, like it's going to be so cool. And then everything I heard afterward was like, yeah, it's fun. It's fun. It's, um, it's Mario Kart.

It's, it's cool new Mario card, but it's not wildly new. It was fun though. Like my partner had never really played a Mario Kart game before. So for her, it's like, it's her favorite Mario Kart. card. It's a really good Mario card game. And if you just want that with this kind of two-thirds of the way their open-world element added to it, it's great. The knockout tours, you do these instead of laps around a series of courses, it's this one long, continuous race. That's great and feels really new. It just needs a little bit more of that. Donkey Kong Bonanza, I think, is going to be

the platforming open-world game that is, I think that one's going to catch people by surprise. It comes out in I think two weeks. I'm excited for that. Mostly because I love games about apes and monkeys. It's going to be sick. Was there a Mario launch title with the Switch 2? No. So they're really like their big franchises.

Yeah, but like not Mario, like classic. Not proper. Like Mario. No. So Mario Zelda didn't get it. There's no Mario or Zelda. Yet. So the next versions of those are going to be the real games.

It could have sold seven million in front instead of five. I did hear that Mario Odyssey's little $10 upgrade pack actually is pretty exceptional. I didn't know they did an upgrade for that. I really like Mario Odyssey. Odyssey. Odyssey. Odyssey. Right.

So, yeah, AAA Gaming, aside from Nintendo, very interesting spot these days. Quite interested to see what's going to happen in that space, especially with like, seeing as we're just in a gaming episode now, there's like some of the indies that have come up. like Game of the Year contenders, like, what's it called Claire's Expedition 33? Is that right? Yeah. There was someone in line for that when I was in line for the Nintendo Switch.

Expedition 33, Claire Obscure. Apparently is an amazing game. Yeah. But she was in line for that. She was in a hundred person lineup for that game. And at some point the person came out was going down the line and asking what everyone wanted. And she said, oh, I'm here for that game. And like in unison, the whole lineup turned towards her.

And the sales clerk was like, you don't need to be doing this. Just come in and buy it. These people are here for Nintendo Switches. And we were all like, that's kind of what we were suggesting. It feels like you could skip this line. And she went in and came up, sell your spot to somebody else. Right. She went in and it came up 45 seconds later and like held it up and cheered.

And everyone was so excited for her by that point that they yelled as though she'd got in the switch. It was very cute. Yeah, people love that game. It's like an old school RPG, like a. like a proper RPG experience, but AAA modern 2025. Yeah, it's like a JRP format, but made by a French studio, small team, beautiful. Like, I've seen a little bit of the gameplay for it, and it looks great. It's very, like, cool UX design.

Like, it just looks like something I'll have to make the time to play at some point. I'm into it. I love me a JRP. I haven't played them in a long time. but I like the idea of one capturing my attention because I was such a hardcore like Final Fantasy kid and then it fell off at like 12 give or take so I like the idea of getting dragged back into it

by some French people. Your Switch story reminded me of back in the day before digital distribution where you literally like games would drop and outside of every Best Buy and Future shop haven't said that word in a long time. Oh weird. The Canadian best buy.

It is best by Canadian? I don't know. No, I don't think so. No, I don't think so. I think that's American. But there would be like lineups at midnight. Yeah. They would hold like special launch parties and like like I remember like it just madness.

They don't do that anymore because digital distribution. You prepay for it or pre downloads. Then at midnight it just lets you play it. So. Yeah, I remember doing that for Resident Evil Four at the future shop. At the future shop. At the future shop. It's like a thousand.

old man. Yeah, exactly. That was good fun. Back in my day, we had the future. We went to the future shop by the discette. Yeah, exactly. World of Warcraft. I remember, I think when it launched or one of its expansion packs would have been early 2000s. I remember I was a kid

and seeing just thousands of people piled in front of like having a wow cosplay party. I remember that. Yeah. I remember there was a line about the Costco. Not the cost co. They sold PC games at the cost cove. Now we have Steam. Yeah, now we have Steam.

Games we want. I do love you some Steam. I got looped into a friend's like family. Plan? Yeah. I was just about to say Valve if you're listening to this, everything that follows is parody. I got added to a

Steam family pass of a good friend with a very large Steam library. And it's been that plus the steam deck has been a real joy. It was like for the cost of a steam deck, I got a couple hundred video games. All the games. It was really good.

Yeah. Yeah, parody. Good parody. Yeah, good parody. Wasn't that a fun little bit of improv? We just did it. Oh, man. Identity attacks, fishing, credential stuffing, session hijacking account takeover.

These are the number one causes of breaches right now. But most security tools still focus on endpoints and networks and infrastructure. And meanwhile, the browser. The place where all that stuff is really happening, where people actually work, that's been mostly ignored. Push changes that. They do. They've built a lightweight browser extension that observes identity activity in real time.

It gives you visibility into how identities are being used across your organization, like when logins get multi-factor, when passwords get reused, or when someone unknowingly enters credentials into a spoofed login page. Then, when something risky is detected, push enforces protections right there in the browser, no waiting, no tickets, no compromise. It's visibility and control directly at the identity layer. And it's not just about prevention. They monitor for real-time threats like adversary in the middle attack, stolen session tokens,

and even newer techniques like cross-IDP impersonation, where the attacker bypasses SSO and MFA and registers their own identity provider. Think about it all taken together. It's sort of like endpoint detection response, but for the browser. Yeah, and the people behind it, amazing. All offensive security pros, published tons of research, came on our pod, talked about their software, their backgrounds, their everything. They break down exactly how these things work. And yeah, they are great.

So definitely check it out. Identity is the new endpoint and push the streeting it that way. Check them out, pushsecurity.com. That's pushsecurity.com. Think about the last time you heard a breach story on this show. It always starts the same way. Someone somewhere saw something too late. An alert buried, a signal missed, an SOC that just couldn't keep up.

Arctic Wolf set out to solve that problem by rebuilding security operations from the ground up for a world where attackers are already using AI. They created the Aurora superintelligence platform, a fully agentic system powered by the swarm of experts. Instead of single-purpose bots or lucky-guess LLMs, this swarm is full of deterministic agents that handle whole entire workflows. Humans stay in the loop and on the loop to validate the critical decisions and keep everything trustworthy. And all of this is just off running on their secure operations graph. A constantly updating intelligence engine fueled by more than 9 trillion telemetry events every week and over a decade of real-world incident response. The system reasons on real signals and real context not synthetic training data. and the result is the new Aurora Agent SOC.

It's the first SOC that is agent led by design. You get agents that coordinate, agents that investigate, agents that respond at machine speed, and hundreds more that automate the repetitive work that normally buries human analysts. Arctic Wolf didn't try and bolt AI onto an old model. They rebuilt the model entirely. What makes it even more effective is how it works

with Arctic Wolf's concierge experience. The team brings customer-specific context directly into the platform so every AI-driven decision reflects your environment instead of generic assumptions. The automation frees your concierge security team to focus on higher value strategy and proactive risk reductions while the agents handle the grind. If you want to see what trustworthy, production-ready AI and security operations actually looks like, go to arcticwolf.com slash hacked. Never feel like cyber threats are evolving faster than anyone can keep up?

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I heard that the Apple F1 movie is just is very good and a lot of product placement like someone I got a text message that said F1 is top gun with cars and product placement so I guess that went well for them I

it's kind of consumer tech adjacent yeah I think it's funny like the original things I heard is that the movie was better than expected because I think everybody had a pretty cynical opinion of how bad it was going to be. But it turns out it was actually pretty good in the sense that could have been way worse. Yeah, they spent, I think, so much money.

So for anyone that doesn't know, the reason we're talking about this in a poorly transition to consumer tech section is because Apple paid for it. Paid made a movie about F1. But they got Joseph Kaczynski who directed Top Gun Maverick. So you've got a person who's pretty good at doing a story. about like the old hot shot pilot driver man comes back and for one last race like kind of vibe but it's about cars instead of airplanes and you're gambling away is life is that the block yeah I think so I think it might amazing amazing and it's Brad pinson at Tom Cruise it's all like almost a one-to-one um with a young Lewis Hamilton wannabe that's the second male lead I think yeah okay okay

but also Lewis sorry no no no you finished here. I have nothing good to say. Nothing to talk about this. Lewis did, apparently, like, because they were filming, like it was done in partnership with the actual F1. They had full licensing and rights. It's a two-hour ad that cost a couple hundred million dollars.

I would also participate in that film. I think the F-1, let's just back this up. The Netflix show Drive to Survive has been so successful at making the F-1 a part of popular culture that they were like, what's next? let's make a Hollywood film. And Apple probably showed up and said, we'll pay for it for exclusive distribution for it.

And they were like, deal. Let's sell $500 million in product placements and sponsorships. Because these cars are covered in sponsorships anyway. So yeah. So I think the F1 is really setting the like sports entertainment, like content. Like they figure, they're figuring it out better than.

And like everybody else has a drive to survive now. There's one for the Tour de France. There's one for tennis. This is one for golf. There's like the production company that came up with that format is just out there being like, who's got a hundred million bucks and wants to be cool? And everybody's putting their hand up and they're like, cool. And I think that like the F1 is like, okay, like we've did that.

Like we have two and a half billion new fans. What's the next thing? How do we market and profit from this fan base? Let's make a AAA movie. Yeah, let's make Top Gun. Let's make Top Gun Maverick, but it's about cars this time. Yeah. Yeah.

No, it's super smart. You and I both enjoy, are hockey enjoyers. As Canadians do. As Canadians, it's legally mandated. They test you at the airport. And I remember a couple years after the F1 show, it's like, okay, no, there's a hockey one. They're just going to do it for every sport because you have this massive, built-in audience that likes watching the content on their television

and the content has an off-season. It's such a smart idea to just be like, can we just do doc-style filming? They're all used to being filmed when they're playing the game. Can we just film when they're not? It's very smart. Everyone's Instagram channel gets a boost. It's a win-win for everybody.

I listened to an interview with the executive producer of, I think, the original Drive to Survive series, and then he's gone off now to do the thing. He did the first season of the NHL one, the hockey one. And he was talking about how they literally interview the players to pick the ones that they're going to follow around. And they have like a scoring criteria of like all this stuff. And like they choose not just the ones that might have a good seasonal arc, but also the ones that will be the most interesting and most flexible for camera.

And like they shoot screen tests of them and like do everything. So like they produce it. Like it's a real produced documentary, well-produced documentary. It's a huge incentive to be on something like that. Totally. Yeah. It's a big old personal brand-ass. Unless you're a bad person.

This is true. And then you just don't go on the show that reveals how bad you are. A great lesson for a lot of people that show up on television shows. Totally. Like Ricardo, F1 Driver, very popular from the first few seasons of the F1 show. I don't know if you watch the F1 one one. drive to survive has a huge personal brand people like want him like he had a diminished career as the show went on i'll say politely and he got cut from his team and like people still want him back

like he's such a fan favorite that people love him that like there is a groundswell organic movement to like see him have a significant role in f1 so it's like he's directly like being rewarded from his participation in that show because he was so personable and people liked him and he's so much fun and et cetera, et cetera. Okay, I'm going to drag us back to our topic, sort of. It's off of this, but it veers us back in that direction. I was thinking about this other day and we could just brainstorm it on Mike in this very loose bonus episode was that at some point we should make a show.

And I don't know if you can call it Hackathon. The show, that may already be a thing. but my partner loves like reality competition shows like it'll be a show where you take a craft the great british sewing bee bake off there's sewing ones and love island i know where you're going knife making and all this kind of crazy crap i want to make one uh if you're a television broadcaster we make shows as of the day this drops so get in touch um i want to make a hackathon one where you get like developers and artists and engineers and tinkers and makers I've gone to the like maker space hack up hack space here in the city where I live and I was like every one of these people I just want to put up a poster that says make a team of four people and apply to it be on a game show like a competition show where every episode you have to make a new thing some weeks it's software centric and so certain skills work better others it's maybe more games based and so there's an art preference you do one week that it's a physical thing and suddenly people have to figure out how to engineer something physical but I love the idea of like a hackathon.

competition show. I've been in enough game jams that I know there's drama in them. I want to do it at some point. So I'm putting that out into the universe an hour and five minutes into a very loose bonus episode that I want to make that. I think it's a good idea. I think finding the format structure for it to be, there's two ways you go with it. You go niche.

And it could be like, excellent. extra cool. Yep. But for the small audience. You're right. You got to pick. Or you could go like poppy, which would be very kind of uncool for the niche, but would be maybe more applicable to the general public.

Do you go all software, mechanic? Like there's, you have to think about what kinds of people could really thrive and what kind of challenges would be best to film and what kinds of people work based on the challenges. There's a whole thing there. but I've just never quite maybe it exists comment if there's a version of that show that exists but it's the game jam thing it's like I've been in enough game jams that I'm like there's something here then you go to DefCon

and you're like oh this is all all the right parts for one of theirs okay I'm gonna go yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna snap back the thought that came into my head okay you see an undercover boss I'm familiar with the format yeah I've never, I think maybe I've seen it on an airplane once. I think I've seen clips on the internet. What if you did a show like that called like Red Hat? And you had companies agree to be attacked. And you had teams of Red Hat's like actively hacking into those companies.

That's pretty fun. Red Hat. Red Hat. Red Hat's company. I'm lost my mind. That's true. Black Hat. Black Hat. You call it Black Hat and you have. teams of hackers attack an enterprise that's agreed to be attacked. That's pretty good. And then you kind of record it. Oh, that's pretty good.

Yeah, because that's the competition show angle, but instead of a weekly thing to make something. So those are different, but that's fun. It's like you have to break into this. But then you also get the situations where it's like, hey, Fortune 500 company. Like, do you want to be on a live TV advertisement? where we talk about you, you're going to get a $2 million security audit for free.

Yeah. And we're going to turn it into, and you'll have enough time and recommendations will come through afterwards. Like maybe you partner with some offensive security company. I was going to say you partner with a company that does that already and say, I'm thinking like the, like Adam from Push, like when we had him on, he, like, worked at some boutique, kind of like offensive sec company you like partner with them and they become the team and then on the flip side you get like enterprises being like yeah we have the greatest security ever good luck and then it's like okay and it's like 48 hours later well it reminds me of when we went to defcon and we

went and saw an episode i really enjoyed it's worth checking out um we went to the social engineering competition. And immediately you're sitting in this room watching people construct these lies, these really incredible narratives to try and get through a security process. And you're like, this would make such good television. But you could never do it because more often than not the people on the other side of the call are just normal people who haven't consented to be on television and are being lied to. But if you got the consent of the organization, that shifts it a little bit.

and suddenly that whole social engineering, how do you construct the lie, becomes viable for, well, content. I would watch. I don't know all the details about it. It popped up in my newsfeed. I briefly looked through it, but there was a lawsuit around the social engineering village at DefCon.

No way. Yeah. So there was, I think, the lawsuit I remember correctly was that in summary judgment, six of the seven, not charges, but like lawsuits, legal complaints were shot down with prejudice by the summary, like judge. So I'm not exactly sure the details about it. And it's something that we should probably chat about on a real episode.

Yeah. Because we, especially because we talked about that at length. Yeah. But I did see that and we should talk about that when we've read the details on it. I don't just want to spitball on it because it is our community and I don't want to talk about it. I'm looking at the headlines, but I think you're right.

We should come back to this. Okay, so we got a proper episode thing to dig into a story for a real episode. Sorry for a real one. It's fake bonus soads. But yeah, if you work at a large television network and want to make a crazy techie competition show, we clearly have a lot of ideas. So you should get in touch. True, true story.

Well, not to you. You know the story. But when Hacked went off the air years ago and we were making a TV show, we actually came up with like seven show concepts. Oh, yeah. Like we have a catalog of like one technical TV shows. That would be fun. The one that I'm most sad that didn't get made that I did see get made was we were going to do one called solving Satoshi. Someone made that.

Yeah. So like 10 years ago, we pitched doing essentially a show around pursuing the creator of Bitcoin and like trying to solve who Satoshi was. And would have been a fun show. And then I think a few years ago, somebody actually did Greenlight and make it. It might have been Netflix. I'm not sure. There's a bunch of them. There was like Money Electric, which I think was HBO.

And then there was a bunch of it. I remember seeing that there was everything but solving Satoshi, which was our. concept for you. There's like searching for Satoshi and finding Satoshi. There's a bunch of those. It's just, it's a great, it's a great concept. Yeah. But not as great. Real world mystery. Black Hat, the competition show. Yes. Yeah. You like it, don't you? I do. It's fun. I think I just want to, we've made podcasts, we've made a lot of docky stuff. I want to make a competition puzzle game type thing. I love game design and I love nonfiction. I'm like, I want to make a game show. That's the new medium short-term goal. I want to make a game show. I think it'd be

dope. I feel like a and this like we're just in it here. A show like Black Hat. I feel like has some like undercover boss real wide span. You know, you put makeup all over CEO and send him into the Burger King to flip burgers and see how his company actually operates. I feel like you could get such a really like you could have such an interesting like red team blue team dynamics like you could you could you could film some stuff that I think regular people would find interesting and would really speak to the niche that we live in yes I think the reason these stories have some overlap outside of security folks is because they're fundamentally like human interest stories it's about people and deception and truth and lies and looking someone in the eye and saying

something that may or may not be true. Like, really, it makes for good stories. It's also, there's a procedure to it. And procedurals reveal that procedure makes for good narrative, predictable steps with variations inside of it where creativity can exist. It's why hacking stories make for good content. But the other, just to keep chatting. Personality.

Yeah. Our community is full of. personalities. Big ones. Big ones. Yeah. And big personalities make for big TV. I'm just self-justifying this idea to myself more and more. We've already greenlit and there's no one here to.

Yeah, we've sold ourselves on the concept. I'm putting together a Bible tonight. Yes, great. Yeah. Yeah. We'll pitch it. Oh, man. What else do we want to talk about?

Have we talked about anything cybersecurity related besides our fantastic TV show? idea. And it is fantastic. We talked about North Korea and the remote worker stuff. We talked about, we just got to keep those people happy, people that need to hear the cybersecurity stuff. That's what we're here for. It's the bread and butter. It's the. We talked about AI because I'm high key obsessed with it and can't. Publicly. Yeah. It's crazy. I talked about them playing board games, which is fun. I really, really need somebody to take those 18-hour Twitch stream. and cut them down into like 25 minute YouTube episodes.

I want to find this game, this video I saw, AI game train, fake, what the heck was it called? Reverse touring test. Thank you, Google. It was a game where I don't know if it was. I mean that they're a human. They have to convince the AIs that their AI. So it's a reverse touring test.

So what it was was is a train car. I don't know if it was VR or just, first person video game. I think it might have been VR and it's a train car. And you're sitting with three other historical figures. I think it was Cleopatra, Genghis Khan, and maybe Edison. I can't remember. But the idea is that each one of them is being piloted by a large language model. The text appears, it speaks, reverse, you get the idea. So you're talking with these three other AIs, but you're speaking out loud. Your speech is being transcribed into text and fed into them. So the way you talk doesn't really matter, just the substance of the words.

And I think it goes in turns where the AI gets to ask a question of the other three players, air quotes, and you go in a circle until everyone's gone, and then they all have to vote. Sure, so it's like an elimination. Exactly. Yeah. It's really fascinating. And it goes to show you just how differently a actual natural language speaker sounds. from a natural language LLM.

It's so different. The guy tried trying, he was pretending to be Genghis Khan. And all of the other players, the LLMs, were giving these very wordy, long, full sentences,

grammatically correct answers. And then a person talks, and that is not how human beings speak. And they pretty much immediately call him out. I think one of them got it wrong, but the other two, two called him. Hmm.

You have to find that, send it over to me. I'd be intrigued to watch that. I'll send it over to you. I love that the Turing test is so easy to pass now that they've created a new test. We have to convince the AIs that you are not a human. Totally. Yeah.

It's pretty good. I think we're at... Hour 20. I think an hour 20. I think we can call it. We've rambled enough. We've rambled. You've heard our sales pitch for our new TV show.

Yeah, exactly. It was good fun. Brought to you, as always, by Post Security. Thank you for hanging out to the end. If anyone is still here, let us know in the comments, feedback, DMs, and emails what you thought of this rambling episode? Yeah.

Hope it satisfied some curiosity. It is nice to just be able to hop on a mic and have a conversation. Okay, take care, buddy.