0:00

A

0:00

little over a year ago, right

0:02

as Super

0:04

Bowl ads were spreading the gospel

0:06

of a new era of finance akin

0:09

to the invention of the wheel, we

0:11

started to see hints, Scott. Hints

0:14

that a group of nerds in a penthouse in the

0:16

Bahamas had allegedly set off a

0:18

financial landmine of their own design

0:21

that would vaporize billions of dollars,

0:24

real and imagined, of other people's

0:26

money. And

0:28

you know what today is? The

0:30

reckoning?

0:31

Today is the day we can stop saying allegedly.

0:37

That is true. One of the joys of being any

0:39

kind of media is that you have to use the

0:41

word allegedly a lot.

0:43

You say it a lot, but not today. Not

0:47

us. Last Thursday, Sam Bankman-Fried,

0:49

co-founder of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX,

0:52

was found guilty on a bunch of charges,

0:54

including fraud, conspiracy,

0:56

and money laundering. We got to get into it. It's

0:58

a big day. It is. It

1:01

is a big day. We're going to do that and a few

1:03

other stories. Some interesting game

1:06

cheat story that came to us from our distorts.

1:08

So thank you, Boyd, for that one. I have to cover

1:11

it. Fascinating, fascinating topic.

1:13

Yeah, it's a really interesting one. An

1:16

unstoppable force and a movable object

1:18

in the world of video game shooting. It's

1:20

a great story.

1:22

And then I want to talk about a little story

1:24

that came out of Europe's spyware regulation,

1:27

Amnesty International report into something called the Predator

1:29

Files. It is a pretty wild

1:31

story. FTX, crypto,

1:35

Europe spyware, Roblox. Let's

1:38

get into all of it on this chatty episode

1:40

of

1:41

Hacked.

1:55

Scribbledy boop bop

1:57

boom. We're

2:00

doing drum and bass now. We're doing drum and bass for the theme music.

2:02

It's drum and bass. It's fast. 160 beats

2:04

per minute. Strap in. Strap in. Get

2:07

ready. Come with us. Come

2:09

with us. All the time. Yeah.

2:12

How you doing, man? We recorded 360 BPM and

2:14

then slow it down. Is this true?

2:16

You got that woozy... Yeah, totally. Yeah.

2:19

I'm good. I'm good. How

2:22

you doing? I'm doing good. It's been a second since we did

2:24

one of these. We had our great conversation

2:26

with Jack Resider from Darknet Diaries.

2:29

Check it out if you missed it. And then I went on vacation.

2:31

You did. You did. I'm

2:34

going vacation. And now I'm back. I'm

2:36

currently on vacation. I

2:39

am out on vacation. I'm very close to you. I've

2:41

been living your Pacific Northwest

2:44

rain lifestyle and I got to say it. I don't

2:46

love it. I don't love it. Not for

2:48

me. It's rainy, huh? It's very, very

2:51

wet and cold. And I don't

2:53

dig it. Yeah. It's

2:56

a lot. You want to get the sun lamp. You

2:58

want to get that vitamin D. We've talked

3:00

about this before, but you got to take steps. You

3:04

don't have to deal with snow, but you do have to deal with seasonal

3:06

depression on the scale I've never really experienced before.

3:09

So it kind of all comes out in the wash. The

3:11

thing I've been noticing is where

3:13

you are in Vancouver, you know, Arcterix,

3:16

Gore-Tex jackets. See,

3:18

I'm even further west and it's like

3:20

you can tell the tourists because we're all

3:22

in Arcterix and Gore-Tex jackets

3:25

and the locals are literally

3:27

wearing deep sea fishing like

3:29

outfits. Full rubber

3:31

rain suits, you know, huge

3:34

bib pants, like massive

3:37

rain boots. It's like they pulled no

3:39

stops out. Only the tourists are the ones who were

3:41

like, oh, Gore-Tex will keep me dry. And

3:44

they're like, no idea. Yeah. You

3:46

need those, yeah, those giant fishing

3:49

boots that go up to your shins. I

3:52

know what you're talking about. That makes a lot of sense. Waiters.

3:55

You need waiters, basically. Yes. You

3:57

need Paddington Bear. You need the whole outfit. It's

4:00

a little bucky hat That's

4:04

a good look That's a very west

4:06

coast look that's a very far side of the island

4:08

look I'm glad glad

4:10

to have you out here even if only for a little while. Oh,

4:13

thanks, buddy We

4:16

should thank our patrons Jordan over you

4:19

are they really lovely

4:21

patrons and We should

4:23

probably talk about the merch store which has been

4:25

going great store got a hack podcast I know

4:27

I love hats. Enjoy your hand. No,

4:30

I love a mug bunch. We get

4:32

people been buying it I don't mind. Hacks merge really

4:34

so sick you get a bunch of orders every day,

4:36

which is amazing. Love to see it Hope

4:39

you guys love the merch Merch

4:41

is like one of those things that I know we could have

4:43

just slapped the logo on something But we wanted to

4:45

like there's some fun designs in there We

4:48

wanted to work with our designer to make something cool And

4:51

that's part of why it took such a dang long Seeing

4:54

that people are still down. I'm

4:56

still excited for merch means a lot almost

5:00

as much equal to as

5:03

Much as it means when you support us on patreon hacked

5:05

podcast comm redirect short patreon great way

5:07

to support the show Oh, we got some new patrons

5:09

me too. We've lost on a shout out to think I would like

5:11

to thank Jacob

5:14

Jacob Jacob Casper

5:16

Moncie. I Thank you so

5:18

much. Thank you so much And

5:21

means a lot You've left it

5:23

just just Thank

5:25

you P the letter P You

5:28

know just the letter lowercase lowercase

5:30

letter P you are there's like a swagger

5:33

of One letter lowercase.

5:36

It's like Q on Star Trek. I'm not

5:38

like a lowercase. I'm that Thank

5:41

you so much The

5:44

world to us Broderick Duncan. Thank you Thank

5:48

you, Broderick Becca

5:50

Sanchez. Thank you so much. Micah. I

5:52

think set a Micah. I think like I like

5:54

my apologies. Okay? My my my my

5:57

is messing up the name, so it's I'm glad this time

5:59

it might be you You got me. This is we

6:01

support one another during this trying time. This is Micah.

6:03

Thank you so much I think these next two were pretty

6:05

good on Quincy Z Love

6:09

you and Diego Fierro. I think

6:12

I think it's hard to mess up Quincy in

6:14

Diego Diego

6:16

Fierro congratulations. That's a That's

6:20

a name. I'm a big appreciator of Of

6:23

a name with flow and Diego Fierro and

6:26

Quincy, you know one of my favorite fruits

6:29

I love a quince. So be

6:31

Quincy Jones guy thriller

6:35

Thank you all so much support the

6:37

show kicking on over to Patreon

6:40

hacked podcast calm to find our patreon and if we

6:43

if we miss you or buy a bucket hat Yeah, I bucket

6:45

or a visor by a bucket It's

6:48

all good. The if we did miss

6:50

you as a patron we apologize as

6:52

fire us a note I DM us on

6:55

on X or Or fire

6:57

us and the hunted discord But

7:00

yeah, if we did miss anyway, we greatly

7:02

apologize But I think just

7:05

aside from that we should maybe plug

7:07

hotline hacked Yes

7:11

So we're sitting on some

7:14

Killer content we got to decide

7:16

when we want to drop the first one But

7:19

we've gotten enough that I we're gonna at least

7:21

do a hotline hacked Maybe

7:24

a couple and if you want to get your strange

7:26

tale of technology It can be

7:28

a hack you were a part of it can be a funny

7:30

little little computer Whoopsie

7:32

doodle that you did if you just got a funny

7:35

interesting story about technology. Do you want

7:37

to share with us? hotline hacked

7:39

calm You

7:41

can see a chat GPT generated website

7:45

that is in no way shape or form optimized

7:47

for mobile very proud of it It

7:50

took me minutes to make and I think

7:52

I have a future in web death Yeah,

7:55

how I'm at calm check it out. And

7:57

yeah, let's just go with

8:00

the show. But

8:02

yeah, it seems like it's been a while. We

8:04

recorded that episode with Jack prior to Halloween.

8:07

I think that was the last episode that we recorded.

8:09

So it feels like it's been a hot

8:12

minute since we've done one of these. So it's

8:14

nice to be back behind the mic. Yeah,

8:17

a lot of stuff has happened. We

8:19

got to talk about the FTX trial. That

8:21

one's pretty crazy. There's some stories that

8:24

have started but haven't quite gotten to a point

8:26

to talk about it. In

8:28

the state's executive order, President

8:30

Joe Biden signed an executive order on October 30th

8:33

to establish the first substantial US

8:35

regulation on AI. We're

8:37

not really talking about that today because it

8:39

hasn't really fully happened yet. But

8:43

I did want to bring up the fact that the White House

8:45

revealed that a pretty big influence

8:48

on this like most recent push was the

8:51

bad guy in the new Mission Impossible

8:53

movie. I'm

8:55

not sure if you had followed this story or

8:58

it seemed the new Tom Cruise motion

9:00

picture Mission Impossible. You

9:03

know, I haven't. So please enlighten me with

9:06

how this is more of a joke than it already sounds.

9:10

It's pretty much all right on the surface. In

9:13

that movie, the bad guy and spoiler

9:15

alert, if you haven't seen, seen

9:18

the new Mission Impossible, the

9:20

villain is a sentient AI. And

9:23

apparently, amongst other

9:26

things, that movie

9:28

was a big part of why there is now

9:30

a push for substantial US regulation

9:33

governing artificial intelligence. And

9:35

that's really fun to me because that's the first part

9:37

of a two part movie.

9:41

It's the first of two and the second one hasn't come

9:43

out yet, which makes me feel like there's probably an immense

9:45

amount of pressure on Tom Cruise to get that

9:48

right, given that it seems to be informing

9:50

domestic policy. It's

9:53

funny that they've completely overlooked

9:55

the warning signs that were given to us in

9:58

1984 in Terminator. Yeah,

10:01

and they're only paying attention now to Mission

10:03

Impossible It's

10:06

got that star power, you know what I mean?

10:08

They saw yeah Hey,

10:11

our Arnie was like a senator

10:13

wasn't he? He was a senator Yeah,

10:16

he was California. Yes. He was

10:18

exactly See he knew

10:20

our great AI fighting movie

10:22

stars are The game We

10:25

didn't need to bring that up, but I just thought it was fun. That

10:28

was a good time it and That

10:30

is a good one. Yeah, so we're good. We're gonna follow

10:32

that story I think a little bit more seriously

10:35

as it starts to develop but

10:37

I feel like we're entering into that that

10:39

first era of Regulations

10:42

and guidelines governing AI it's gonna be a whole

10:44

big mess. We're gonna talk about it as it unfolds

10:46

a good contrast

10:49

to the Policy and

10:51

you know the regulations that they're putting

10:53

on AI then they're doing it quite quickly when you

10:55

compare that to something like crypto Whether

10:58

this episode will be speaking of

11:00

yeah speaking of The

11:03

you know, we're decades in

11:05

at this point or at least and

11:07

still no regulation Surprising how that

11:09

works. Maybe Tom Cruise needs to make

11:12

crypto movie. That's first

11:14

energy you just put out into Yeah Most

11:19

people run from that Tom Yeah,

11:24

it's I'm sure it's bound to happen and

11:26

I see you have a story in here that suggests

11:28

I think that I Think far

11:30

side the FTX trial which we're gonna get to we're gonna

11:33

start seeing more of it Yeah increased

11:35

financialization of crypto by the financial

11:37

industry that it was trying to get away from seems

11:40

to be maybe the new actor But

11:42

we'll get there we'll get there we get it there

11:44

we'll get there we get there the What

11:48

else that's out about quick the humane AI

11:51

pin have you seen this thing? I have seen

11:53

this thing I followed it. I watched

11:55

the very very very dry

11:58

announcement video the last like anti-salesmanship

12:01

launch video is pretty great. So

12:05

yeah, a company called Humane, helmed

12:08

by X Apple employees, yeah, Humane, helmed

12:10

by X Apple employees, Imran Shoudry

12:12

and Bethany Bongiorno, which

12:15

had been sort of operating a little bit in stealth mode

12:17

with this product that everyone knew the basic

12:19

idea behind it. It was a, my

12:22

phrase not there is a screenless smartphone

12:26

empowered by artificial

12:28

intelligence. Everyone knew they'd

12:30

been working on it. Everyone knew that's kind of where it was going. It finally got announced

12:33

last week. We get the big kickoff

12:35

video and the takes, the

12:37

hot takes, they are a coming. What do you think of

12:40

this thing? Honestly?

12:42

Yeah. You here for it? I

12:45

think it's, yeah, I think it's. You

12:47

already have one. You bought it in the midnight black.

12:50

Yeah, I've already bought it, yeah. I'm talking

12:52

to it right now. It's actually recording my podcast

12:54

for me. I

12:59

think it's a neat concept. I just don't

13:01

know if it's gonna

13:03

be the smartphone killer. Like it seems like

13:07

a 10th of the product or

13:09

a hundredth of the product of a smartphone. Sure.

13:12

So it's

13:13

like, obviously we have Siri and

13:16

one of these days Siri will be GPT

13:19

enabled and will be much more functional.

13:22

And it seems like what they've done

13:24

is create essentially a pin on pseudo

13:27

Siri. Like, I don't know. I

13:31

see this being a much

13:33

worse implementation than a smart glasses

13:36

or a smartphone

13:39

or a, I don't know, it

13:41

just feels half cut. And

13:45

I just don't know how it's gonna compete with some of the

13:47

larger, more sophisticated solutions.

13:51

Yes. So for anyone that hasn't seen

13:53

this product, it's a pin with,

13:55

I think they called a laser ink. It's small

13:58

projector on it essentially. The pin. it's on

14:00

your lapel, it listens to you,

14:02

you talk to it primarily through voice commands.

14:06

When you do need to see something, it has this little projector

14:08

that you put your hand in front of. That's,

14:11

that's kind of the whole product here. And I guess if I was

14:13

trying to think of the most generous thing I could

14:15

say about it, because I

14:17

like a big swing. I

14:20

think this is if you are a person that struggles

14:23

with chronic phone addiction, and you need

14:25

to have a small portable computer with you.

14:28

This is a really interesting way of taking

14:30

the addicting part, the screen out of a phone

14:32

and trying to preserve as much of utilities humanly possible.

14:36

They're using so that's, that's okay,

14:39

I can see that being useful for that person.

14:42

In order to empower that, the big idea

14:44

idea here is what if we used GPT

14:47

style AI, natural voice

14:49

computing, as like a layer of

14:51

mediation between you and the device, instead of

14:53

having to take the device out and actually use it, you can

14:56

talk to it using GPT,

14:58

literally chat GPT as a service.

15:01

That's a cool, that's a really, really

15:04

cool idea. There's

15:06

a thing in like tech product design about

15:08

don't build features, build products.

15:11

And that to me, unfortunately feels like a feature

15:14

that in a generation of Android or two,

15:17

they'll have just woven in all of the bard

15:19

style natural, like language

15:21

computing into the phone at that level, to

15:24

the point that you could just talk to it like it's a humane

15:26

pin totally and have it work the same

15:28

way. The

15:31

issue for me is that like, when

15:34

I do need that really

15:36

high information bandwidth

15:39

thing that only a screen can offer, like if I

15:41

need a map with five locations

15:44

pegged on the map that I can see all at once, when

15:47

I need to be able to see seven products with their prices,

15:50

and I want to be able to see them all at the same time, that

15:52

really high information bandwidth thing. I just

15:55

want the thing to have a screen on it totally. Like,

15:58

could you so I'm not sure how this improves on and Imagine

16:00

booking an Airbnb with this thing. Hell.

16:04

Hell. Actual hell. Yeah.

16:07

Like, hey, I need an Airbnb in Vancouver, in the West

16:09

End. Yeah. And they'd be

16:11

like, found these 76 listings. Yeah. I

16:14

have... Can you describe them to you? Can you describe

16:16

them to you? Well, one

16:18

of the example

16:20

cases they give is like, you know, you can talk

16:23

to it and have it do things. Like, go through my contacts

16:25

list and find this person's phone number. Go

16:27

through my mailbox and find this piece of data.

16:31

But it's like, what if it doesn't do it well? Like

16:33

what if it gives you your

16:36

confirmation code for your flight from three

16:38

years ago rather than your confirmation code from the flight

16:40

from this week? And it's like, and there's no... All

16:43

of a sudden you're like having an argument with this

16:46

four inch piece of glass that's pinned to your coat.

16:49

I just... Yes. I don't know. And

16:53

further to that point, why isn't that something

16:55

that I could say into my AirPod or

16:57

my Google Bud? Totally. Like that

17:00

way of interacting with the computer is

17:02

a forward looking,

17:05

very humane, gets you off your phone

17:07

feature. It's not... I

17:09

haven't seen proof that this needs to be its own product.

17:12

It's a great feature at an OS level

17:14

for phones.

17:18

I think that question of like, well, what is the unique

17:20

use case that this empowers? I

17:23

was reminded anytime people talk about an iPhone

17:25

killer, my brain goes back

17:28

to the famous like the iPhone launch event

17:30

where he does the thing where he says it's

17:32

an iPod, it's a phone, it's a

17:35

revolutionary internet communicator. And he keeps

17:37

saying those three things and you realize he's talking about one

17:39

product, the iPhone. Boom, we have mobile

17:41

computing. That's how that event

17:43

starts with these three use

17:45

cases that are now in one device. This

17:48

video starts with the colors

17:50

that it's available in. Like

17:53

they're not... It's like you haven't... You

17:55

don't know what that killer app is, that use

17:57

case, that reason I have to have

17:59

this.

18:00

as opposed to a phone.

18:04

Unless I just can't

18:06

deal with the responsibility of having a screen in my pocket,

18:08

which is real. I'm belittling

18:10

that for some people. I think this

18:12

has real utility of just, you can't

18:15

handle owning a phone, try

18:18

this out, fair enough. I

18:21

wonder why it's not on your wrist. That seems

18:23

maybe a little more useful, but that's just a minor

18:25

detail. It does have, yeah,

18:27

exactly. It does have a camera. It

18:29

does have other little functions,

18:32

but yeah, to me, I don't

18:34

know. It feels, when

18:37

I think of Meta Ray-Bans, the

18:39

ultimate output of the Meta Ray-Bans

18:41

is essentially this

18:45

built into a set of glasses, but also with

18:47

the ability to show you basic

18:49

pieces of information. Have a basic HUD,

18:52

or the ability to not

18:54

project into your

18:56

hand in single color,

18:59

some form of functionality.

19:02

It's like, I don't know. Yeah,

19:04

I agree with you on the function versus product

19:06

thing. This does feel like

19:09

WinCiri and like Google

19:11

AI, get fully integrated, that

19:14

you'll be able to list Hey Siri

19:16

on your AirPods, and then boom, oh no, my

19:18

iPhone's lit up. The-

19:22

A lot of people's iPhones just lit up and I don't believe

19:24

that. But

19:28

the, yeah, I don't know. I just can't see it, I

19:30

don't know. Maybe I'm missing

19:33

some extensible nature. Like the thing that made the

19:35

iPhone so successful was the App Store, right?

19:37

The ability to take it and use it as a platform.

19:40

And I'm seeing lots of those platform-ish

19:44

devices. Those are the ones that really changed

19:46

the world. I just don't know how you would

19:48

use this as a platform. Suppose you could

19:51

ingrain new UIs and GPTs

19:54

and, or sorry, AIs into it, but

19:57

yeah, I don't know. It's interesting.

20:01

But if I had to bet on it, I probably

20:03

wouldn't. I

20:05

imagine that I think you nailed it.

20:10

I think that GPT is an intermediary layer between

20:12

you and your computer. It's

20:15

a cool idea that will slowly be implemented

20:17

in devices that will be probably much more successful.

20:20

And as a form factor goes, I would much

20:22

rather have a pair of glasses I can pop

20:24

on. Because the amount of fidelity

20:27

and information that you're getting out of that laser ink

20:29

projector feels kind

20:32

of about as much information as we could probably

20:34

get into a heads-up display on a transparent pair

20:36

of glasses in the next five years. I'd

20:40

much rather just see it in the corner of my

20:42

eye. You

20:45

brought up the App Store, and that's maybe worth one last thing we touched on before

20:47

we dive into some other stories, and

20:50

we launched GPTs, their

20:52

version of essentially an App Store. You

20:55

can now create these little custom versions of Chat

20:57

GPT that take prompts, instructions,

20:59

information you've given it, and save it as

21:01

its own little agent you can come back to. Pretty

21:04

cool. You know

21:06

what? I've got to take a victory lap on this, son.

21:09

I feel like I called this. I feel like

21:11

I called this. Domain-specific

21:14

GPTs, you just sense it's

21:16

going to come. So soon there will be an

21:18

HR policy GPT that you buy

21:21

a subscription to that will write all your HR

21:23

policies, like basic

21:25

legal contract review, stuff like that.

21:30

You can see this

21:32

coming a mile away, and I think it's actually brilliant,

21:35

honestly, to train a domain-specific

21:38

AI to really know the intricacies

21:41

of a specific piece

21:43

of language. This makes sense. Yeah.

21:46

The second this got rolled out publicly,

21:48

so it's only available for folks that have, I

21:50

think, GPT Plus or Pro or whatever they call

21:52

it, I have a little

21:55

folder that has emerged over the last while of

21:57

saved prompts, basically.

22:00

It's very useful to be able to write

22:03

out a paragraph, slowly finesse it over time,

22:05

and then just keep coming back to it. Say you want to make

22:07

notes about an article or process

22:10

a large piece of text down into a specific format. Day

22:14

one just immediately took all those prompts. One

22:16

by one created GPTs based on each one of them,

22:18

saved them as little agents, and now

22:21

they're just there. It's

22:23

a small thing, but it really does radically

22:25

change that user experience of

22:27

working with these chatbots because now I suddenly have these little

22:30

programs, these little apps I can use. Sure,

22:32

that have retained the context of the discussions

22:35

you've had with them. Exactly. Yeah.

22:38

I noticed when you give it your

22:40

prompts, it's not just doing a copy paste.

22:42

It actually refines the prompt. It

22:45

asks you a series of questions that it then uses

22:47

to refine your original prompt to more

22:50

accurately give it instructions

22:52

to itself. Smart. For lack of

22:54

a better way of putting it. It is refining

22:56

itself to make sure that you're getting the result

22:59

it understands you want, not just doing the

23:01

letter of the initial prompt, which

23:03

is I think different than when you just feed it the

23:05

prompt. So far, pretty good. Even

23:08

I think four or five months ago, you

23:10

started seeing a lot of TikTok videos and things

23:12

coming out with people who

23:14

were trying to tell you the best way to use

23:17

chat GPT. A lot of them was starting

23:20

to interact with it, being like, ask

23:22

me the questions that you need to

23:24

know to write me the best cover letter for this

23:26

job application. Yeah. And

23:29

then it asks you a prompt of 10 questions and then

23:31

you answer those and then bang, like, knocks

23:34

you out this perfect cover letter. And it's like, okay, like

23:36

I, you could see where we were going for

23:38

sure. I'd been off social

23:41

media just because I was on vacation.

23:43

But when I came back to it, it was right around

23:45

when those were being announced. And

23:48

the number of people who

23:50

at some point had been like all about dropshipping

23:53

and then we're all about creating internet. We're

23:55

all about that. But who

23:57

had like moved on to. This

24:00

is the new app store. It doesn't require

24:02

any code and here's how everyone's

24:05

gonna make all the money in the world. And then I went

24:07

and made one. I was like, nah, dog, this is too easy. The

24:09

barrier of entry for this is way

24:12

too low for this to be the new grift. There's

24:14

zero friction to making this thing.

24:17

Like

24:18

it's just too easy to make a GPT

24:21

for you to be able to do any kind of real hustle.

24:24

Aside from like selling courses,

24:26

teaching people how to make GPTs for money

24:29

or something like, there's no actual utility

24:31

here, I think. Yeah. As

24:33

a money making grift, I think it's just a good

24:36

useful thing to wire GPT into

24:38

itself and let you save the results. But

24:40

I don't think it's gonna be, it might be a bit of a

24:42

gold rush, but I don't know. I think you'll

24:44

see some really, just like everything, right?

24:47

Like there's, for every YouTube

24:49

channel that's successful, there's a 10

24:51

million of them that aren't. And I think you'll

24:53

see that here. You'll see a lot of garbage get

24:55

created quickly, probably around like

24:59

marketing stuff, like writing content for

25:02

websites that give fake

25:04

reviews about products so that they get referral commissions.

25:07

I think you'll see a lot of that usage. But

25:10

also I think you'll see some people

25:12

take it and really drive it, you know,

25:15

like really train an AI on a specific

25:18

domain topic that most people spend money

25:20

on, like legal help and

25:23

HR stuff. And you

25:26

pick one of those relative

25:28

categories that cost you, every time you pick up the

25:30

phone and call your lawyer, it costs you $1,100. All

25:33

of a sudden, if you can replace that

25:37

in a small sense, like obviously not entirely,

25:39

but just if you need something quick

25:41

and you can replace it for like 30 bucks

25:44

a month, like why not? Yeah. Why not?

25:46

Yeah, there was, I think a lot of startups,

25:49

I think that's true and like cataclysmic

25:52

for a couple of companies. Where

25:54

there were, I'd spoken with a couple

25:57

of people who were doing

25:59

some kind of a, kind of an AI based startup

26:02

that was basically just a chat GPT

26:04

wrapper with a different training set like

26:06

woven into it. Sure. Like,

26:09

oh, that's a bad day. See you got

26:11

a bad day for those companies. Yeah, you just got

26:14

got like, oof. Because

26:18

those just got really easy to make like

26:20

GPT wrappers are no longer a thing

26:22

you can monetize in the

26:24

same way. There will definitely be a market for it. Some

26:27

people will get very rich. I

26:29

can go to venture capitalists and raise $50 million

26:32

for my AI company. I

26:35

don't think that's going to work the same way today

26:38

that it did yesterday. You are completely

26:40

out of the Microsoft world, right? You're entirely Mac? I

26:42

am. Yes, I am not.

26:45

I don't currently own any Windows device.

26:47

Yes, I have a few. And

26:50

I've gotten a new preview release of Windows 11. I

26:52

feel like this just touches into this. And

26:55

it's got their AI built

26:57

into it now. So you

26:59

get this, why can I not remember what it's

27:01

called, Co-Pilot. So

27:03

you essentially have chat GPT woven

27:06

into Edge and the OS

27:09

at a base level. So you can just ask it all kinds

27:11

of things. So this is going to be

27:13

interesting. How do you find

27:15

it? Because I've heard mixed results about

27:17

the first gen of it. Is it

27:19

like, wow, what a brilliant idea executed

27:21

at about 20% operating like

27:23

potential. That's pretty much how I find

27:26

it. Let's just say that I hit it away and

27:28

put it away pretty quick. But

27:31

the idea is that eventually

27:34

it will be very functional. And

27:36

that's going to be interesting. It's

27:39

going to be an interesting little revolution we go through here

27:41

as we figure out the uses for these things

27:43

as well as figure out how to best

27:45

implement them into our life and into our existing

27:48

processes. Like I will say, if

27:50

you do go on social media, the

27:52

amount of obviously AI

27:54

generated images I now see is crazy.

27:58

Like you can. miss fingers of the

28:01

spellings wrong on a t-shirt or something. You

28:03

can just tell that they're AI generated. But every

28:07

garbage marketing post you see or

28:09

memes, tons of them are AI generated

28:11

now. So just saving

28:15

so much time in generation

28:17

and artistic design, I guess. People

28:20

are not doing them anymore. They're just getting them generated.

28:22

Yeah. We

28:25

mentioned earlier that we were on vacation recently. Partway

28:28

through the trip, a little background game emerged,

28:30

which is

28:32

the photo in that giant billboard or

28:35

sign or whatever we're looking at of

28:37

real people. As

28:40

we were in Mexico City, big density, things

28:42

about door advertising.

28:45

A lot. Like a lot, dude. I

28:48

was pretty bowled over once I started trying

28:50

to pay attention to it of like, no, that

28:52

doesn't look real. That was generated. Yeah.

28:57

Like that the way that they've all sort of because

28:59

so many of the images in the training sets are of

29:02

models, their understanding of what

29:04

humanity looks like is far too pretty. Like

29:06

everyone has the cheekbone structure and

29:09

just like that squint, the model squint.

29:12

It's kind of uncanny. And then you start really

29:14

paying attention to it. You start to

29:17

see it everywhere. And it's like, well, it

29:19

makes sense that eyeglass

29:22

store would have hired models. So the

29:24

fact that GPT produced humans

29:26

that look like models is OK. But why

29:28

does the guy squinty eyes have so many wrinkles

29:30

around them that are like looping all the way back

29:32

around the eyeball into the forehead? Like weird

29:35

stuff that doesn't actually happen.

29:38

I guess there were probably only a generation of AI

29:41

away from that not really being I think

29:43

it's going to become increasingly less recognizable. This

29:46

is this sweet spot where there's all these like first

29:48

computer ghost peppering are

29:52

like out of home advertising ecosystem. It's great.

29:55

It was a good time. Well, the I don't think it's

29:57

just an advertising like the whole the. The

30:00

demise of body image

30:02

is upon us, but it

30:05

started with Snapchat filters and

30:07

Instagram filters is now AI makeovers.

30:11

So you upload your photos to these things and

30:13

these AIs essentially make

30:15

you perfect. And then it's like then you just

30:17

use that as your profile photo. And it's like that is not

30:19

what you look like. The

30:22

new Pixel phone. There's

30:25

like a lot of great discussion

30:27

about like what is a photo, but the

30:29

new Google Pixel phone really like port

30:31

a lot of kerosene on that discussion with

30:34

the inclusion of AI. They're

30:36

increasingly adding AI photo

30:39

editing features into the photos

30:41

app, which is one step

30:44

away from being added to the shutter button,

30:47

where when you press the button, you are not you're capturing

30:50

something based on what really happened.

30:52

But all of that face smoothing and

30:55

you know, subtle aesthetic tweaks

30:57

are moving increasingly like it used

31:00

to be, you would take a photo, you would

31:02

export it out of the photos app into the editing app.

31:04

Now it's moved out of the editing app into the photos

31:07

app, it will inevitably move into

31:09

the shutter button itself. Where

31:11

you're never really capturing, you're never opening

31:14

a sensor capturing light and closing it. You're

31:16

kind of just gathering information with which to synthesize

31:19

a really nice looking image. And

31:21

that's like a really big meaningful shift

31:23

in like what it means to take a photo.

31:26

Because for most people, they just want a good photo of their family.

31:29

And if everyone's been like, had Vaseline

31:31

smeared over the lens by an artificial intelligence

31:34

to make sure that they're looking at the camera and they're smiling

31:36

and you can see their teeth and there's the right number of them.

31:39

For most people, that's a cool thing. But it is it

31:41

is weird and it is different. Just

31:43

like whitens the teeth, straightens them,

31:46

replaces the eyes, smooths

31:49

any of the wrinkles, it's

31:51

like it adds makeup, just color neutralizes

31:54

and balances you, takes any sheen

31:56

away, maybe does your hair for you. Yeah,

31:59

it's very great.

33:59

Yeah,

34:01

that's selfie that first

34:03

time you see the selfie cam not flipped

34:06

in reverse. Oh, you know what I mean? We're like this

34:08

where zoom reverses you so that

34:10

it doesn't break your brain and then you see yourself

34:12

just filmed and you're the wrong direction.

34:15

Yeah. What you're used to. Yeah, just

34:17

the sort of like baby version of that. Why

34:20

don't we move on to something somehow

34:23

less dystopian than that

34:25

deal a vast international

34:29

spyware network. Predator

34:32

files. So Amnesty International a couple

34:35

of weeks ago, we never got a chance to talk about this, published

34:38

this really incredible investigation

34:42

into this series of spyware attacks

34:44

using a piece of spyware called Predator that

34:46

had targeted not government

34:48

people, not just government folks, members

34:51

of civil society, journalists, politicians

34:53

and academics throughout the European Union,

34:55

the United States and Asia.

34:58

There's a couple of really interesting things to

35:01

this story that

35:03

are why I wanted to talk about it. So

35:06

story concerns something called the Intelexa Alliance.

35:09

All of the names here are ominous. Try and keep track.

35:11

They're the Europe based developer of

35:15

Predator and a series of other surveillance

35:17

based derivatives of this piece of

35:19

spyware that have according

35:22

to I'm just going to borrow the quote from Agnes Calamard,

35:25

secretary general at Amnesty International

35:28

have done quote nothing to limit who was

35:30

able to use the spyware and for what purpose.

35:35

The report published October 9th by Amnesty International

35:37

Security Lab outlined

35:40

how it targeted though not necessarily infected

35:42

members of US Congress, president

35:45

of the European Parliament Roberta Metzola,

35:48

Taiwan president Tsai Ing Wen

35:50

and German ambassador to the US Emily Haber

35:53

is a much longer list. Big fancy

35:55

people all targeted through this. The

35:58

investigation done a partnership with the European Union. European investigative

36:01

collaborations and backed in

36:04

depth by additional reporting by MediaPart under Spiegel.

36:09

Dug into the mechanics of how Predator works,

36:11

it is a zero-day based highly invasive

36:14

spyware that gives

36:16

access to the device's microphone, camera,

36:19

all of its stored local data,

36:21

contacts, messages, photos, videos, and

36:24

the user will be unaware that it has been infiltrated

36:26

by this. It's February

36:29

and June of 2023. Yeah, it's good stuff. Amnesty

36:31

International said that social media platforms

36:33

were being used to publicly

36:35

target 50 accounts belonging

36:38

to 27 individuals and 23 institutions. Essentially,

36:41

this is just a click on a link piece of spyware. So

36:44

these were very public appeals

36:47

to people to try and click on a link that would

36:49

have infected their devices with this Predator

36:51

spyware as part of a

36:53

campaign called ReplySpy. Part

36:55

of the reason I was intrigued by this is

36:58

that Europe is governed by a series of

37:00

regulations that are meant to prevent Europe-based

37:04

and regulated companies like

37:07

the Intellect Cell Alliance, which is this network of companies,

37:09

all based and regulated in Europe from

37:12

producing products like this and then selling

37:14

them to countries that

37:16

they have good reason to believe will use them to

37:18

target citizens, journalists,

37:21

and political dissidents. There is supposed

37:23

to be a regulatory framework in

37:26

Europe preventing the use and development

37:28

of these tools by those

37:30

types of people. And I

37:32

think this is a really important story because

37:35

it reveals that there is a large Europe-based

37:37

international conglomerate that is manufacturing

37:40

these products and selling them to

37:43

regimes all over the world with

37:45

seemingly zero friction from that regulatory

37:48

framework.

37:51

I just found it very interesting. It's a long

37:53

read. It's

37:55

not a light one, but it is worth looking at. I

38:00

don't know, it feels similar

38:02

to DDoS as

38:04

a service and stuff, and this is just spyware as

38:06

a service, private company that makes these

38:09

things. There's a lot

38:11

of companies that make stuff like this and

38:13

then license it to governments,

38:16

and whether you like it or not depends on where

38:19

your political allegiances lie. For

38:22

sure. So it's the world we

38:24

live in, you know? It

38:26

is. And I feel

38:28

like we don't, I haven't heard a lot of conversation

38:31

about, you know, this is a, it's

38:33

a product, it's manufactured in one

38:35

place and it's exported in other places,

38:38

and yet it's one that like has

38:40

legal implications that are

38:42

a little bit different than, you know, I make a chair

38:45

and I sell it overseas. It's like, it's

38:47

a chair that can be used to spy on

38:51

a political dissident or a journalist. And

38:55

like you said, where your politics

38:57

fall probably dictates whether or not you think that's a good or

38:59

bad thing, but it probably shouldn't because

39:02

as much as you might be okay with a

39:04

certain group of people being targeted

39:06

by these things, there's probably some group of people

39:09

you think shouldn't be targeted by these

39:11

tools. As long as they can

39:14

be sold as liberally as a chair, you're

39:16

never going to be able to make sure that that's the case. You know

39:18

what I mean? Yeah. I think the

39:21

big, I think the big shift is, is that I think back

39:23

in the, like if we, if we look at this through the lens

39:26

of history, you know, when

39:28

a nation state or something, a three letter agency

39:31

decided that they needed to track and

39:33

focus on somebody, there's regulatory

39:35

involvement, legislative and judicial involvement,

39:38

you know, you need it warrant, all

39:40

this stuff. And now

39:43

this, you know, there

39:45

was always private investigators, so companies

39:47

could kind of do something like

39:50

this. And now I feel like

39:52

in the digital age, it's like, that's

39:54

kind of the mirror of this is like three

39:57

letter agencies and nation states are still using

39:59

software. like this. They might not be buying this piece,

40:01

but they might have other pieces. But then

40:05

at the same time, you've got other bodies that

40:07

would typically go to... The entire

40:10

domain of private investigation needs

40:12

to be largely digital now. If I had to meet with

40:14

a PI that didn't know anything about digital stuff,

40:16

I would be like, absolutely not. So it's... Yeah.

40:20

What does that guy even do? I go through

40:23

garbage. I just look at trash. I

40:25

follow people around. They're on their phones lots.

40:27

I don't know what they're doing on them. Exactly.

40:32

So the... See, yeah, it's just...

40:34

I don't know. It's just one of those things. Obviously, not

40:36

great. Don't love it. Don't love violations

40:38

of people's privacy, but it doesn't

40:42

surprise me. Let's just say that. It

40:44

doesn't surprise me. No. I

40:46

get that. Yeah. I sense that you are... Yeah. It's

40:49

like, yeah, bad, but

40:51

we knew... I feel like we kind of knew about

40:53

this and it's not... It isn't surprising.

40:55

Yeah. Which

40:58

is itself surprising. You

41:01

know? Is it

41:03

though? Yeah. It is... You bring

41:06

up a really interesting point that at a certain scale,

41:09

nation states probably don't need to... The

41:11

sufficiently large actors don't really need to

41:14

license these tools because they're developing their own.

41:16

They don't need to go to someone that found the zero days because

41:18

they have their own zero days. But there's

41:21

this sort of like middle band of

41:24

regimes and governments and actors who

41:26

don't have those things, but do have the resources

41:28

to try and deploy a tool like this. They can't

41:31

make it, but they can use it. And

41:34

the market has just sort of like, yeah,

41:37

self-selected for that. Cool. So

41:40

we'll make that. You're big enough to

41:42

buy it, but you're not big enough to manufacture it. We'll manufacture

41:44

it for you. Yeah. Not a lot of people can make their

41:46

own space rockets, but a lot of people want to go to space.

41:49

So someone will make it. It's

41:52

like anything.

41:53

Yeah. I'm reminded of that crypto AG

41:55

story, the Swiss company coming out of World

41:57

War II. It was manufactured.

41:59

for all of

42:01

these different countries on either side of the iron curtain

42:03

for decades. And then

42:05

decades and decades later,

42:07

it turned out that the CIA had bought, secretly bought

42:11

a share in the company and was installing backdoors

42:13

into the encryption device the entire

42:16

time. And when I read something like this, and this very insidiously named

42:19

InteleXa Alliance

42:21

producing this Predator spyware, God the names. Near

42:24

the names. Near

42:26

the names. And you do wonder,

42:28

you're like, in like a decade, who are we going to find

42:31

out owned this? Like that's the question

42:33

I have. Like who's really behind

42:35

this? The tinfoil

42:38

hat part of me

42:40

starts to raise its hand.

42:42

Yeah, I don't know. Nothing

42:45

surprises me. Not much surprises me anymore these days, especially

42:48

when it comes to this stuff. I find like the spouse

42:50

where, you know, I

42:53

find that segment more

42:55

disturbing, maybe because

42:57

it's more personal than something like this. This just seems

43:00

like a corporate service offered to large

43:03

entities and governments to do what they

43:05

were going to do anyway. So this is

43:07

capitalism, you know? Yeah.

43:11

This is supply for the demand. Well, I mean, that's

43:13

a good way of putting it. You have, it was bound

43:15

to turn into something like this, where if a

43:18

zero day is as valuable

43:20

as we all understand it, a vulnerability

43:22

that the manufacturer of a device we

43:24

all carry doesn't even know about is worth that much.

43:27

It would make sense that an ecosystem of businesses,

43:30

suppliers and buyers would naturally

43:32

start to grow

43:34

like moss around that incredibly high

43:36

value thing. That's

43:39

just what happens when those emerge.

43:42

So I think you're right that it sort of feels inevitable

43:44

in a way that spouse where and stalker

43:46

where I

43:49

guess are inevitable in a different way that when you zoom

43:52

in close enough, humans tend to do icky

43:54

things to one another and find technology

43:56

to empower them. But that feels like a different.

43:59

I feel like you don't even have to. to zoom in that close.

44:02

Feel like it's a pretty macro thing that we're

44:05

taking part in. That's true,

44:07

that is true. Well, that's

44:09

Amnesty International's Predator Files. Give it a look,

44:12

look it up. It is a really fascinating read.

44:14

It's a long PDF they've put out, but

44:16

I think it's important,

44:18

it's an interesting one. Yeah. Okay,

44:21

where do we wanna go next? A break, or should

44:23

we just keep going? You know

44:26

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ad break, advertisements. Listen

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We're back.

49:25

Where do we want to go now? Do we want to go to the video

49:28

game cheating quarter or do we want to dive into the crypto

49:30

pit? No, let's leave

49:32

the, I feel like we

49:34

had such a heavy intro piece, like

49:37

the pieces, they were pretty socially

49:39

and ethically heavy. I think we

49:41

go to the video

49:43

game cheating because it's more insane. And

49:46

then let's go back to crypto, which is inevitably

49:48

morally heavy. But

49:52

honestly, I think it's kind of a good news story today,

49:55

but we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Yes. This

49:57

is a fascinating one. You flagged that. a

50:00

member of our Discord found this story.

50:04

I'm really excited to talk about this. You wanna lay it down for

50:06

people? Yeah, absolutely. So,

50:08

void in our Discord brought

50:10

the story forward. I dropped

50:13

a few questions out, and we had a little lengthy chat about it one

50:15

night, and it was, I'm shocked.

50:19

Let's just say that. So,

50:23

Roblox, video

50:26

game, obviously. That can't be how we say it

50:28

this whole time. Roblox, Roblox, I don't

50:30

even know how you say it. Roblox?

50:33

No one's ever heard it said out loud, actually, weirdly enough.

50:35

I say Roblox as in robot. Yeah,

50:38

I think that's right. And I didn't wanna just say Roblox

50:40

later, like I was passive-aggressively correcting

50:42

you, so we had to get

50:45

in front of it. So, I

50:48

have been saying Roblox forever because

50:50

I think it sounds funnier, even though I

50:53

think, or more funny. I think Deep

50:55

Dine knows that that's not it. Yeah, sure,

50:57

I got you. I've been saying it for so long that it's now

51:00

in my lexicon. No, you're a lexicon? So,

51:03

for the sake of this episode, I will say Roblox.

51:06

Just, just for. I hope I'm right, but yeah,

51:08

okay, okay. Roblox. I

51:11

feel like an asshole if this pronounced Roblox. Roblox.

51:16

Anyway, okay, so Roblox has

51:19

just signed a partnership to

51:22

reduce the amount of cheating going on in

51:24

the Roblox environment. Oh,

51:26

thank God. With the company that

51:28

makes the cheat, the biggest known

51:31

cheat, Synapse, so

51:33

they have, and when Voight

51:36

had written initially through the story out, I

51:38

was like, where's the proof that this is the company

51:41

that makes the cheat?

51:43

Like, I see them talking, but no, they never

51:46

directly mentioned that Synapse is the cheatmaker,

51:49

to which he replied with a developer

51:53

link from the dev forum for Roblox,

51:55

where they essentially go on to say, we

51:57

understand how strange this might be. but

52:00

you know this is for the best. The

52:05

biggest cheat manufacturer for

52:07

the game has just been hired

52:10

to prevent cheating in the game. It

52:12

just feels like a shakedown

52:15

that I've never seen before. A shakedown?

52:19

Yeah, the

52:21

developer post that you

52:23

mentioned has some really great stuff in it. It

52:28

reads like that scene in a movie where the

52:30

person answers the door and there's

52:32

a cop talking to them. They have this conversation

52:35

and it gets sinister partway through when you realize

52:37

that the kidnapper is standing just outside

52:39

of you pointing a gun at the

52:42

person talking's back. A very

52:44

blink if you're okay type of situation.

52:48

To read from user BitDancer

52:50

Roblox staff on this developer forum, as

52:52

made clear that we said at RDC 2023,

52:55

cheating and exploiting are not welcome on our

52:57

platform. We are using every measure

52:59

within our power to combat it. Let's start with the next

53:02

paragraph. To take another step towards

53:04

this goal, we are pleased and excited to share

53:06

that we have entered into a close partnership with Synapse

53:09

Softworks, LLC. Synapse

53:11

is well known in the reverse engineering scene,

53:14

which is a very polite euphemism for they're

53:16

one of the single largest cheating

53:19

actors that

53:21

exists on our platform. We have

53:24

hired them in order to stop

53:26

people from cheating on our platform. It's

53:30

the end of Catch Me If You Can. It's

53:34

the end of Catch Me If You Can. I

53:36

have to read the beginning of the next paragraph in

53:38

this post because it's actually my favorite set

53:41

of sentences. Oh,

53:43

yeah. It

53:46

might seem strange that we're teaming up with Synapse,

53:49

but we believe it will be the most fruitful option

53:51

when it comes to reinforcing the platform's security.

53:54

For the longest time, we've been on

53:56

opposite sides of the battlefield. We've

54:00

grown to respect their skills and they've

54:02

grown to respect our vision. Oh my

54:06

god It's

54:08

like our vision of making this end please

54:11

make it end for the longest time we've

54:13

been trying to shut them down and

54:16

We've respected and we think we've grown

54:19

to respect how good they are

54:21

at getting around our anti-cheat and

54:23

so therefore They've grown to respect

54:26

our vision of giving them money to stop Creating

54:29

cheats is what I feel like that says

54:31

allegedly. Yeah what that says I'm

54:34

so tired of this fly that's been buzzing around

54:36

my face. I've decided to offer an equity

54:39

in my face To

54:41

pay off of the fly. Yeah, I've just given honestly

54:44

like what this I have

54:47

to think that there was a

54:49

Countdown

54:50

like a security update countdown

54:53

of like they did this So now

54:55

we're gonna try and do this and then

54:57

you release that update and then they find another way around

54:59

it and at a certain Point you would say if this happens

55:02

seven more times Where we put out a

55:04

patch and then they get around the patch We're

55:06

just buying them and it went seven six

55:08

five four three two fuck it. We're buying synapse

55:11

Yeah, like I I feel like

55:13

this was something that someone knew was coming

55:15

and then October

55:18

27th, we got to just drop the update. It's

55:20

happening. It's just it's but to me it's just

55:23

It's it's literally negotiating

55:25

the terrorists like like the

55:28

if this becomes like

55:30

Activision like if you if you Parallel

55:33

this to like what's going on with like Activision

55:36

engine owning big Call of Duty cheat

55:38

manufacturer They're like

55:41

locked up in court. They're suing each other

55:43

but the engine owning is still releasing

55:45

cheats and still kind of Causing

55:48

damage to the Call of Duty environment,

55:50

but like they're like trying to destroy like

55:53

Activision is trying to destroy engine owning

55:56

Which is like, you know what you would kind

55:58

of expect You

56:01

know, where

56:03

Roblox is taking the opposite initiative

56:05

where they're saying, you know what, we're just

56:07

going to give them a bunch of money. And

56:11

granted, I'm sure they're going to deliver some

56:13

services and be like, hey, you know, this is how

56:16

we always get around your anti-cheats

56:18

and here's like, here's some things we can do to tighten

56:20

up where some of the information goes and how you can

56:23

secure it against modification, etc., etc.

56:26

So I'm sure the get value out of it, which

56:29

is good, but I'm sure most of the engineers

56:32

that work on Roblox knew a good

56:34

chunk of it anyway. So the,

56:37

I feel like you're just setting and paving a path

56:40

for like, like,

56:42

hey, you want to get rich, Jordan? It's

56:46

like, let's just build a cheat for a major free

56:48

to play video game until the developer

56:50

comes along with a check and says how much for you

56:52

guys to piss off. And it's

56:54

like, I feel like that becomes, that

56:57

becomes their biggest problem is they might have taken out

56:59

one, you know, one

57:02

problem, but they might have created hundreds more,

57:04

especially because the people that play Roblox,

57:08

the developers and content creators in it

57:10

are used to creating things for money. And

57:13

they've all developed significant technical

57:15

skills. All

57:18

it's going to take is like 50 of them to be like, you know, what's

57:20

better than making a hundred grand

57:22

making these things inside of this platform is just

57:24

hack the platform and wait for the millions to show

57:27

up. Totally. It's

57:29

like, yeah, it feels like you've

57:31

kind of hired a really good blue team at a

57:33

certain point where it was like, for years, we've waited

57:36

for you to post an update and then we reverse

57:38

engineer it and create exploits for it. Now,

57:42

while you're working on it, we can be

57:44

doing that process of reverse engineering and how

57:47

people will crack it so that you

57:49

can hopefully ship it without that vulnerability.

57:52

Like you almost want to keep these folks

57:54

in like a separate building off

57:57

to the side and they just get like

57:59

an early. It's totally alpha of everything and it's like

58:01

your job, just keep doing what you were doing. Totally.

58:05

We don't want to hear you. We'll see you in the cafeteria

58:07

and we won't make eye contact and

58:09

your whole job is just to fuck up our shit before

58:11

someone else has the chance to do

58:13

it. Honestly, pretty good idea. Patch

58:16

the code and send the patch over to the

58:18

master branch please. Exactly.

58:21

But even then, I feel like they've

58:23

created a new financially rewarding ecosystem. It's

58:29

like why would I build content in the game when I can

58:31

just try and hack the game and then wait for them to

58:33

buy me too? I

58:35

don't know. It feels like a more extreme

58:38

version of a bug bounty almost where it's just

58:40

like, yeah, you could crack us and try and sell it

58:42

but if you don't want to break the law, maybe you

58:45

crack us and then sell

58:47

it to us. It's like kind

58:49

of that a little but

58:52

it is different. It's different. Great.

58:55

I love it. Talk

58:59

about bug bounties quick because I'm

59:02

always A, surprised when companies don't

59:04

have bug bounties and B,

59:07

I'm generally surprised at how little

59:10

the rewards are for some of them. Sure.

59:13

There's some critical systems out there that even if they

59:15

do have a bug bounty, the bug bounty is like $4,000 and

59:20

it's like, okay, it's like really? I

59:23

don't know. If I get a zero

59:26

day into your infrastructure platform

59:28

or whatever it is, it could cost millions

59:31

and millions and millions of dollars and losses

59:33

and lawsuits and you're going to give me $4,000. I

59:36

don't know if this is just a total

59:39

digression but I'm always kind of generally surprised

59:41

at the level that bug bounties rewards are

59:43

for critical things. Some have big

59:45

ones like some of them are. I think Tesla,

59:47

historically used to have a pretty massive

59:50

one. If you could hack the

59:52

car. Yeah. You

59:55

want that. Yeah. You want a

59:57

big bounty on something on a thing

59:59

that. drive. Yeah,

1:00:03

that's true. Every so often you see one, you're like, that

1:00:05

doesn't seem worth a the effort

1:00:07

and be the damage. Oh,

1:00:13

well, we shall we inevitably

1:00:15

Yeah, let's take

1:00:17

it to the crypto corner. The

1:00:20

crypto pit. Talk

1:00:23

about crypto but a fun one. Maybe

1:00:25

not fun. A lot of people lost a lot of money. Yeah,

1:00:28

a starting moment in the world of cryptocurrency.

1:00:32

Sam Bankman free co founder of the cryptocurrency

1:00:34

exchange, FDX found guilty on charges, fraud,

1:00:37

conspiracy and money laundering for following

1:00:39

a month long trial in New York where Bankman

1:00:41

free to face accusations of orchestrating

1:00:44

one of the largest financial frauds in

1:00:46

history.

1:00:48

We've been following the story for a while. A

1:00:50

lot of people have been following

1:00:52

this story. We've never done the big

1:00:55

deep dive episode, the big interview

1:00:57

because it's it's the

1:01:00

story is just being so thoroughly told

1:01:02

so well by so many different people. And that's

1:01:05

kind of one of the important things about it, I think is

1:01:07

that this was one of the first large crypto

1:01:10

scam, grift, crime, whatever you want to call

1:01:12

it, it got really, really

1:01:15

mainstream attention. And

1:01:18

it kind of finally came to a head. They

1:01:20

paid for mainstream attention, you know, their

1:01:22

name on F1 cars, their name

1:01:25

on stadiums, their Larry

1:01:27

David. People, bull ads, man. Yeah. Yeah.

1:01:29

He does the new wheel. Yeah, the world's

1:01:32

best quarterback out there pounding the pavement

1:01:34

for you. You've got, you know,

1:01:36

they, they definitely didn't hide

1:01:38

away from the limelight. So I think

1:01:41

that all that did was amplify

1:01:43

the the collapse.

1:01:46

Yes. So so a little

1:01:48

over a year, a little less than a year ago, FTX

1:01:52

cryptocurrency exchange, sort of the darling

1:01:54

of the crypto world collapsed. And

1:01:56

the very broad, we

1:01:59

can now kind of say this, users

1:02:02

tried to collectively withdraw billions of dollars

1:02:04

from FTX and they were unable to do

1:02:07

so. And as it was kind

1:02:09

of soon after revealed that the money from

1:02:12

FTX had ended up over in the coffers

1:02:14

of a supposed

1:02:16

to be independent but unfortunately

1:02:18

woven together company called Alameda

1:02:21

Research, which was Bankman Fried's training

1:02:23

firm that had made these enormous

1:02:26

bets on various parts of the crypto

1:02:29

ecosystem, some of which were owned by

1:02:31

Bankman Fried and FTX itself. So

1:02:34

when the story broke in this, I think it was a coin

1:02:37

desk report making

1:02:39

these early allegations there

1:02:41

was, you know, naturally a run on FTX,

1:02:43

the idea that FTX might not have their money

1:02:45

made everyone take out their money, which meant suddenly

1:02:47

FTX didn't have any money. It

1:02:49

was revealed over the course of the trial,

1:02:52

primarily by this one of the sort of three,

1:02:55

two to three other major players in this drama.

1:02:58

FTX co-founder and executive Gary Wang

1:03:02

testified that from FTX's inception in 2019,

1:03:04

customers funds had pretty much the entire

1:03:06

time always been flowing between

1:03:09

FTX and into the bank accounts owned

1:03:11

by Alameda, which was then able to

1:03:13

sort of do whatever they wanted to

1:03:15

with those user funds. A

1:03:19

really important revelation. And

1:03:21

this is really the story of Sam Bankman's Fried's

1:03:24

like kind of main compatriots at Alameda

1:03:26

and FTX, people that had been with

1:03:28

him since the beginning turning on him over

1:03:30

the course of this trial. This was

1:03:33

a sort of a I don't know if I want

1:03:35

to call the story of betrayal because I don't have a ton

1:03:37

of sympathy for the betrayal, but really it was it

1:03:39

was people turning against one another. Yeah.

1:03:42

Under the threat of a massive legal repercussion. But

1:03:46

one of the big really interesting moments that

1:03:48

we learned about over the course of this trial

1:03:50

was that Gary

1:03:52

Wang had hard coded an exception,

1:03:55

this really important exception into FTX

1:03:58

that made it so that Alameda. research

1:04:01

was the only user on the exchange

1:04:03

that was allowed to have a negative

1:04:05

balance, which functionally

1:04:07

meant they were able to borrow from customer

1:04:10

funds.

1:04:12

This sort of negative balance

1:04:14

exception turned out to be the thing

1:04:17

that the whole collapse turned on. And

1:04:19

a major part of this trial was Wang's

1:04:21

allegations that Bankman Fried directed

1:04:24

him explicitly to

1:04:26

create that exception to allow

1:04:28

Alameda to borrow basically

1:04:30

unlimited money from FTX, which

1:04:33

is what resulted in the whole thing collapsing.

1:04:35

You know, I just got to jump in. I

1:04:38

got to take another victory lap because

1:04:40

I didn't know you said this. And we initially

1:04:42

talked about this. I said, I bet what they did

1:04:44

is they allowed them to never be margin

1:04:47

called. They allowed them to bypass

1:04:49

the margin called safety limits. And

1:04:51

that's exactly what we were talking about. And

1:04:54

that's exactly what they did. And that's exactly what

1:04:56

they're doing. Another lap around the track. Who knows? No,

1:04:59

it would seem you called it. One

1:05:02

of the things that I did find really interesting about

1:05:04

this, if you did pay close attention to the trial,

1:05:07

is they started releasing all of the private

1:05:11

kind of like DM groups, like text

1:05:13

message groups, WhatsApp

1:05:15

groups that had a bunch of

1:05:18

the key players, including SPF's

1:05:20

dad, who I think, and

1:05:23

this is, I've seen some coverage of this coming

1:05:25

out of it, that I think he

1:05:29

might be in some trouble.

1:05:32

At least that's what I've read a few things talking

1:05:34

about it. His involvement

1:05:37

with it was not as, you know,

1:05:40

innocent. Oh, arm's length as originally.

1:05:43

Yeah. So I

1:05:45

think there could be some knock on, at least

1:05:49

what I've read a few opinion pieces there could be

1:05:51

some knock on

1:05:52

lawsuits and civil suits

1:05:55

and things like that coming down the pipe, which

1:05:57

I think is to be expected given the size

1:05:59

of it.

1:05:59

the fraud. So yeah, sure.

1:06:02

Yeah, there's inevitably going to be a round

1:06:05

of appeals. I'm sure that this

1:06:07

story isn't actually done. And all

1:06:09

these people are going to continue to exist as we

1:06:11

should talk about in a second. But

1:06:15

it does feel like a little bit of a chapter closing.

1:06:17

Totally. It felt like there was this group of

1:06:19

people who were running this ecosystem

1:06:21

of companies spending lavish sums of other people's

1:06:24

money. And it all collapsed.

1:06:26

And the result of that was that they turned

1:06:29

on each other. It is an

1:06:31

architect of turning on each other. I'm sure it was again,

1:06:34

under the immense weight of, you know,

1:06:36

legal fallout. But they all turned

1:06:38

on each other and they all started attacking each other. And

1:06:40

the result was that Sam Bankman freed while

1:06:45

he has plans to appeal has been charged with

1:06:48

two counts of wire fraud, four counts of conspiracy

1:06:50

to commit fraud, one count of conspiracy

1:06:52

to commit money laundering, and is staring

1:06:55

down the barrel of a lengthy prison sentence.

1:06:57

That sentencing is set to conclude on March 28.

1:07:00

So we'll probably do a minor check back on what

1:07:02

happened. But that's not

1:07:04

really the interesting part to me. 110 years is

1:07:08

what his maximum sentence is or something

1:07:10

like that. It's pretty

1:07:12

gnarly. Yeah, I doubt

1:07:14

it'll be that. But who knows? I'm

1:07:16

not sure that I honestly don't. I'm not

1:07:19

even sure that it should be. I think the

1:07:21

important part.

1:07:23

Yeah,

1:07:24

I'm not sure what the important part is. It's an extreme

1:07:27

waste of a bunch of capital and

1:07:29

time and human utility. It's a big

1:07:31

dumb, shitty, bad thing. Which I cannot

1:07:34

wait. Glad he didn't get away with it. In

1:07:37

Michael Lewis's new book, Going Infinite,

1:07:39

which I've just started. Interesting.

1:07:41

I am a big Michael Lewis fan as somebody who enjoys

1:07:44

economics and finance as well as

1:07:48

good story. Michael Lewis generally

1:07:51

delivers on that. If you don't know, he wrote

1:07:53

the Big Short and a bunch

1:07:55

of other great books. I've

1:07:57

read them all. And this is his newest

1:07:59

one. Just came out. It's about Sam make my

1:08:01

freed can't wait to read it and would

1:08:04

love to have him on the podcast So I just need to

1:08:06

find out how to get a hold of him, but he'd

1:08:08

I feel it would be a great great chat I'm

1:08:11

curious how I know a lot of that book was written

1:08:15

I'm not sure what it was, but I think it was it was a while

1:08:17

ago Like I think it was written maybe

1:08:20

prior to the collapse of FTX Or

1:08:23

during the early days of it. So I'm really curious

1:08:25

to read He's

1:08:28

both such a like hawkish

1:08:30

critic of structural abuse but

1:08:34

also loves a good character like and I

1:08:37

could see it going either way like does he fall in love

1:08:39

with the character of SPF or is he

1:08:41

Taken aback by the scale of fraud

1:08:43

and blah blah blah blah everything we've been talking about Like

1:08:46

I could imagine a Michael Lewis book that goes one

1:08:48

of two directions about Sam Bankman Frieda I'm

1:08:51

really curious which direction it goes What

1:08:54

it hopes to hear what you think about it? And I

1:08:56

would love to talk I'd love to read

1:08:58

it and talk about it with him on

1:09:00

the show I think if I'm not

1:09:03

mistaken, I think I remember in

1:09:05

some of the group text messages that came

1:09:07

public through the trial Yeah, Michael

1:09:10

Lewis was like in the Bahamas

1:09:13

to interview Sam when

1:09:15

it blew up and If

1:09:18

I could be making that up, but

1:09:20

I feel like I did read

1:09:22

that Access

1:09:26

journalism is so interesting. I The

1:09:30

idea of it's something I'd love to get

1:09:32

to do and you just have to find the right subject But to really

1:09:34

just be like no, I'm gonna spend three weeks with you Let's put

1:09:36

a month with you. I'm gonna document everything

1:09:38

and we're gonna create something that's really Like

1:09:41

you need not rooted in like the hour

1:09:43

or two that you sat down for an interview and you and I

1:09:45

have done so Many interviews like that. This is

1:09:47

great But the idea of just embedding

1:09:50

with a person to try and tell their story so

1:09:52

compelling and such a massive

1:09:54

threat to your ability To be honest and objective

1:09:57

what was going on because you're like,

1:09:59

this is my roommate

1:09:59

like I hang out with them all day. It's

1:10:02

such a fascinating thing. I'm excited

1:10:04

to read that book. And I'm excited for

1:10:07

the end, for now, of

1:10:10

the saga of

1:10:12

Sam Bankman freed FTX and the

1:10:15

Bahamas-based financial nuclear

1:10:17

bomb. To speak

1:10:20

of how it's not ending, let's

1:10:22

just talk about how a few

1:10:25

of the former FTX executives,

1:10:27

fresh off the stands of testifying

1:10:30

at the trial, are creating

1:10:32

their own crypto exchange.

1:10:35

What could go wrong? What could go wrong? Here's

1:10:37

the best part. They are putting it in

1:10:39

Dubai, which, as we've covered

1:10:42

previously on the show, is the, and

1:10:44

this is not any indication of whether

1:10:46

this is trustworthy or not. I'm just stating

1:10:48

it as a fact that Dubai houses

1:10:51

most of the scams and multi-level

1:10:53

marketing scams that exist in the world. A

1:10:55

lot of them are headquartered out of Dubai. And

1:10:58

this new exchange, which

1:11:00

is titled Trek Labs,

1:11:04

Trek Labs is also founded

1:11:07

and headquartered out of Dubai. So

1:11:10

I think,

1:11:11

yeah,

1:11:12

I don't know if it's the greatest look. Correlation,

1:11:15

not causation. Yeah,

1:11:22

two former colleagues of Sam Bankman who are

1:11:24

now starting a crypto exchange

1:11:27

days after he was found guilty on seven

1:11:29

charges of fraud, which is a wild

1:11:31

look. Wait a month. Yeah. Like

1:11:34

I'm not saying you're up to anything fishy. That's not fair. You're

1:11:36

allowed to have another job. You're allowed to start new businesses.

1:11:39

A hundred percent with you on that. There's

1:11:42

no indication that any of these people had anything

1:11:44

to do with anything. All

1:11:46

of the benefits of doubts

1:11:49

being given from a purely

1:11:51

optics and marketing perspective, give

1:11:54

it a fortnight. Give it a little bit

1:11:56

before you send out the press release saying

1:11:58

that you are. starting this

1:12:01

cryptocurrency exchange that had previously

1:12:03

received funding from anti-ex's

1:12:06

venture arm. It's just not

1:12:08

a good look. Yeah,

1:12:10

I feel, but yeah,

1:12:13

I guess it's to be expected, you know, people were involved,

1:12:16

they saw the success, they saw how to replicate

1:12:18

the success, they saw what worked, they have that knowledge,

1:12:20

that domain knowledge, you have to expect

1:12:23

that they're gonna take it and go with it. I

1:12:25

assume they probably won't do the whole

1:12:27

Alameda, you know, piece

1:12:29

of it, but

1:12:32

I think that being a large crypto exchange

1:12:34

is a very viable business, I believe, at this point,

1:12:36

so it is as expected.

1:12:38

It's just it's a interesting

1:12:41

knock-on and yes, I do agree that maybe waiting

1:12:44

until at least the sentencing is

1:12:46

over would have been maybe a beneficial

1:12:50

to the look, to the optics.

1:12:53

A generous read of this could be that they

1:12:55

know explicitly how not

1:12:58

to commit a very specific set of crimes. I'm

1:13:02

articulating that as a joke, but there's a there's

1:13:05

an actual thing there of like we know

1:13:07

what it looks like when you have corruption

1:13:09

inside one of these organizations, we know

1:13:11

what it looks like when one hand is like talking to

1:13:13

the other behind its back, like we we know what that

1:13:15

looks like we're not going to do that. Yeah.

1:13:18

We've seen the pitfalls, like maybe that's it, maybe

1:13:20

it's this is we all had this

1:13:22

experience, we saw the good that

1:13:24

can be done according to them, but we

1:13:27

also saw the pitfalls now watch us

1:13:29

do all of the good and make all the money without stepping

1:13:31

in the pitfalls. Yeah, they also saw what

1:13:33

brought it down and saw what they

1:13:35

tell what we needed evidence to ruin

1:13:37

them. Yeah, totally. Seeing

1:13:40

what not to do and seeing how not to get caught are very

1:13:43

distinct things. They're really importantly different

1:13:45

than each other. I think

1:13:47

just to kind of wrap

1:13:50

up the Bitcoin

1:13:52

stuff. I think we got an NFT thing to chat

1:13:54

about, but the there's been

1:13:56

a lot of speculation. I don't know if you follow the crypto

1:13:59

market, but the crypto market. market's been very volatile,

1:14:01

typically in an up trajectory the last couple

1:14:03

months or last month. Yeah.

1:14:06

And a lot of it has to do with

1:14:09

the potential

1:14:11

approval and launch of a bunch of ETFs,

1:14:14

exchange traded funds that

1:14:16

will kind of spot price crypto

1:14:19

into real regulated securities

1:14:21

markets, which

1:14:24

is to me, I can't

1:14:26

fathom how either,

1:14:29

I know right now it's in front of the UK Securities

1:14:31

and Exchange Commission, their SEC as well, it's the

1:14:34

American one, but I can't fathom how they'll approve

1:14:36

these things as

1:14:38

it essentially will, it's a

1:14:40

tacit acceptance that they are securities

1:14:43

and always have been securities, but

1:14:47

will not regulate the actual internal

1:14:50

security like the Bitcoin itself,

1:14:52

but it will allow us to create

1:14:55

securities around those

1:14:57

unregulated securities. Yeah.

1:15:02

So it's a weird, it would be a strange

1:15:05

step towards the legitimization of crypto.

1:15:07

It's already very legitimate right now, hundreds of billions

1:15:09

of dollars, Super Bowl ads, but from

1:15:11

a purely financial perspective, it's a really

1:15:14

big step to say that this is just

1:15:16

a security now. For

1:15:19

anyone that doesn't know an ETF,

1:15:21

I think a lot of people listening to this would, but an ETF

1:15:23

is just essentially a pooled investment that holds

1:15:25

a bunch of other assets instead of just

1:15:28

one. So you're not just buying one stock,

1:15:30

you're buying a thing that's got a bunch of other stuff

1:15:32

inside of it, doesn't have to be just stocks, but

1:15:35

you're buying a basket. I think is that a fair way

1:15:37

of describing an ETF for a person

1:15:39

that's unfamiliar? Yeah, it holds a bunch of like,

1:15:41

well, typically an exchange traded fund

1:15:43

will hold like an S&P 500 ETF,

1:15:48

will hold a percentage weighted

1:15:52

of all of the things that make up the SPF

1:15:54

500 basket. Crypto,

1:15:56

like if they do a Bitcoin ETF, it will just

1:15:59

strictly hold 50. So we'll only

1:16:01

probably own one one

1:16:03

asset class inside of it or one asset inside

1:16:06

of it but the issue Well,

1:16:09

there could be a crypto ETF that holds a bad

1:16:13

Why wouldn't you just have the full crypto ETF

1:16:15

that's like the SMP 500 of crypto.

1:16:18

It's got a theorem. It's got Like

1:16:20

it's just got all of them in it. But but the but

1:16:23

the thing a thing that blows me

1:16:25

away is just that it's like a a

1:16:29

You know the largely the crypto community

1:16:32

since I've been witnessing

1:16:34

it so I don't know what that would be 2009 and

1:16:38

onwards 10 onwards like I'm making these dates

1:16:40

up the top my head but They

1:16:43

have not wanted to regulate, you know they enjoy

1:16:45

the fact that they're outside of the regulations a

1:16:48

from my hyperspeculative standpoint

1:16:50

where there's no regulations and they

1:16:52

can be crazy and they can do massive

1:16:55

leveraged investments and You

1:16:57

know to the moon To

1:16:59

the moon, but also on the other side the

1:17:03

They don't really pay philosophical perspective.

1:17:05

Yeah, philosophically they they they're

1:17:08

they're kind of anti Massive

1:17:11

big big government finance regulation, etc

1:17:15

the regulatory people have

1:17:17

let them Live and exist

1:17:19

in this like gray area I would say because

1:17:22

it's not like they don't treat it as a security the

1:17:24

more and more like the SEC is getting involved

1:17:27

in crypto Stuff, but they're still unregulated

1:17:30

So they've kind of let them Exist

1:17:32

in this gray area for so

1:17:35

long

1:17:38

And now

1:17:40

Letting them

1:17:42

create ETFs Full

1:17:45

of this asset that they don't regulate

1:17:48

it seems I just can't see how

1:17:50

they're gonna do it You know, like there's a lot of speculation

1:17:52

if they're gonna approve these ETFs, but I just can't

1:17:56

For the life of me see how they're gonna allow it Yeah

1:18:01

I'm you've been following the regulatory

1:18:04

response to cryptocurrency for a while and that's

1:18:06

been something you've been talking about Kind of prior

1:18:08

to even me realizing that was an interesting element

1:18:10

of the story of cryptocurrency And

1:18:13

that's definitely a huge part of this

1:18:15

like will a crypto based ETF

1:18:18

ever get approved? And what does it say about

1:18:20

institutional finances? Relationship

1:18:23

with crypto is like a big important That's

1:18:27

that's kind of what this is really about the

1:18:29

second thing. It's about that. I find interesting

1:18:31

and Wondered about for a long

1:18:33

time with crypto is that I

1:18:36

was introduced to crypto as

1:18:38

a bold defiant libertarian oppositional

1:18:41

Idea to traditional

1:18:43

finance. Yes traditional finance is

1:18:46

this big corrupt thing and it's dealing in commodities

1:18:48

They're being produced by central banks and Bob but like

1:18:50

that Crypto is supposed to exist

1:18:54

Across a big raging river

1:18:56

from that whole world of traditional finance And

1:18:59

it was supposed to be empowering to people not

1:19:01

your keys not your crypto, but here's this

1:19:04

thing it's the digital version of a duffel bag full

1:19:06

of gold buried in the back of the And

1:19:09

to suddenly say but you know What's even better than

1:19:11

duffel bag full of gold if we put that duffel

1:19:13

bag in a bank and bought stocks in the bank

1:19:15

And then come like yeah, yeah, make stocks together

1:19:18

and made an ETF out of it like So

1:19:20

that wasn't about that for some of you it was

1:19:22

about the line going up It was about

1:19:25

a world where the value of a bunch of other things had

1:19:27

already gone up before you've gotten it But here's a new

1:19:29

thing that you can ride to riches. It

1:19:31

wasn't about the philosophical stuff. It was just

1:19:33

about that line And

1:19:36

then ETF would mean more people could buy that

1:19:38

asset

1:19:40

Making your line go up further like it

1:19:42

to me This feels like kind of saying that

1:19:44

quiet part out loud a little bit totally that's

1:19:47

exactly exactly it But yeah, I don't

1:19:49

know the second it goes ETF it can

1:19:51

attract you know institutional great

1:19:54

investors You know like tensions

1:19:56

could you imagine? Dipping it's

1:19:58

like it's like something like the S&P 500

1:20:01

when a company gets rolled into the S&P 500,

1:20:04

usually their stock goes up quite a bit because

1:20:07

all of a sudden these ETFs need to acquire

1:20:11

millions of shares in it because they're holding

1:20:13

a basket of equities made up of the

1:20:15

members of the S&P 500. So same

1:20:18

thing will happen here is that if these

1:20:20

become real ETFs, the more

1:20:22

people that buy them, the more Bitcoin will need

1:20:25

to be secured and held by the ETF and

1:20:28

it will cause the line to go up. But

1:20:30

here's the thing is like Bitcoin, should

1:20:35

I just say has no utility? Is

1:20:38

that too far? You said it before. I don't know why

1:20:40

you would, I don't know why you'd waffle suddenly

1:20:42

at the finish line. Say

1:20:44

that it's utility versus,

1:20:48

Yes, dubious. many other ways

1:20:50

that we can trade in

1:20:53

fiat currencies and utility in

1:20:55

society. It offers very

1:20:58

low little utility to the world. The

1:21:01

fact that it needs to be held in an ETF

1:21:04

as an unregulated asset, it just blows.

1:21:06

I just can't fathom an

1:21:09

SEC that allows this to happen. I'll be curious.

1:21:11

You'll have to keep us, I feel like you're tuned

1:21:14

into this regulatory response to crypto

1:21:16

stories. You're gonna have to keep us posted on

1:21:19

if one of these things exists and

1:21:23

whose pension suddenly is going towards it. So

1:21:27

bleak. But

1:21:30

you know, it's not bleak and we should end on. Yeah. I

1:21:33

think we can put a pin in it with this one. This

1:21:35

is just a little one. This is a petty, like petty

1:21:38

alarm bell warning at

1:21:40

a large board ape NFT event in Hong

1:21:42

Kong last Saturday. Attendees

1:21:45

had their eyeballs burned when ultraviolet

1:21:48

lights typically used for tanning were used

1:21:50

as part of a onscreen display. I'm

1:21:54

not happy those people got hurt. That part's not funny.

1:21:57

No. That part isn't funny. But

1:22:01

some part of it's, I'm not sure which part of it's funny,

1:22:03

but I'm laughing, because NFTs gave people snow

1:22:05

blindness. Tell me that's not fucking funny. It

1:22:08

just is. I think that

1:22:11

the fact that board a Bia club managed

1:22:13

to still have a conference in today, like

1:22:16

I'm not sure what's going on with NFT values.

1:22:18

I'm sure it's largely manufactured

1:22:21

by people just refusing to sell, but the,

1:22:25

yeah, I just, I'm not sure

1:22:27

what that conference is. Is it just a party? Like, I've

1:22:30

seen people walking around with like board a Bia clubs,

1:22:32

hoodies and stuff on. Is it just a brand now?

1:22:34

I feel like it is. Yeah, I think it was

1:22:36

a speculative commodity that's

1:22:39

value was based on a story about

1:22:41

how valuable the brand is going to be. And now the value

1:22:44

of the commodity crashed and all

1:22:46

that's left is the brand and some people kind

1:22:48

of holding on for dear life. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:22:50

For lack of a better way of putting it like I think

1:22:53

people still own them and I think people

1:22:55

are still excited about it. And honestly, like if

1:22:58

its value isn't up and it's just a

1:23:00

media IP play of like people being

1:23:02

like, we like these apes and making cartoons

1:23:04

and comic books about them. I don't begrudge

1:23:07

that even a little.

1:23:10

It's the second they all assemble

1:23:12

and say this is gonna be worth more than Disney

1:23:15

because XY and I'm like, this

1:23:17

is just self-delusion. I'm not happy

1:23:19

that you gave

1:23:21

your eyes a sunburn staring at

1:23:23

the apes writ large 300 feet

1:23:25

tall in front of you. I'm

1:23:28

just saying it's quite the fucking picture. It's quite

1:23:30

the scene. Do you have to did you

1:23:32

have to own an ape to go to this conference?

1:23:34

That's a great question.

1:23:37

I wonder.

1:23:38

Ape Fest, a three day annual meet up of people

1:23:40

who own board a band and which

1:23:43

still sell for tens of thousands of dollars. Yeah.

1:23:46

Oh, amid the 2021 NFT craze.

1:23:50

Got it. Yeah. I don't

1:23:52

know. I think you had to own a board ape NFT.

1:23:54

I feel

1:23:57

like I feel like that's just like Like

1:24:00

if I was a grifter, I feel like that's the conference.

1:24:03

I want to go there Like I feel

1:24:05

like a room full of people that paid $75,000 for

1:24:09

an image that was digitally

1:24:11

generated of a monkey Yeah,

1:24:15

it would certainly be those are what

1:24:17

we call that a high-influenced group hot

1:24:19

hot leads hot leads for

1:24:22

a grifter It's

1:24:24

probably a sick event. It's in Hong Kong Yeah,

1:24:26

I'll give him credit the graphic design on the websites

1:24:29

is pretty It's pretty bang and

1:24:31

it looks good. Yeah Totally.

1:24:34

Yeah. Yeah, it just it

1:24:36

feels like a metaphor I haven't

1:24:38

taken the time because I just got back from vacation

1:24:40

of articulating exactly how that

1:24:42

metaphor works, but staring

1:24:45

into a glowing Symbol

1:24:48

that inadvertently hurts you there's something

1:24:50

to that. I don't know what it is Okay

1:24:55

Okay FTX Roblox

1:24:58

and European spyware Human

1:25:00

AI pin mission impossible is

1:25:03

influencing domestic policy terminator term

1:25:05

covered a lot Terminator

1:25:07

we got through a lot. I'm

1:25:10

happy to be back. Hopefully you guys made it this

1:25:12

far and If

1:25:14

you didn't totally understand if you didn't

1:25:17

I get it. Yeah, that's

1:25:19

real. That's really valid

1:25:21

I think that's everything. I think that's another one in the

1:25:23

bucket. I Think

1:25:26

we'll catch you in the next one Godspeed

1:25:28

I Think I need to make Godspeed

1:25:30

my sign off. Godspeed. Yeah, Godspeed.

1:25:33

You said Godspeed. I was like, oh, that's

1:25:35

got that's got a nice Godspeed Godspeed

1:25:38

safe travels. I could go with safe travels

1:25:41

and you could do Godspeed That's

1:25:44

so this really intense like it's something

1:25:47

about to happen like are we good This

1:25:49

podcast left me with an ominous taste

1:25:52

in my Thanks

1:26:01

for watching!