Jordi, can you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast?
Yeah. So, Ben Wilson is on Founders by David Senra today. Ben very unfortunately has stage four cancer and four kids under the age of five. Senra says, "I want to help him as much as possible." So, I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history's greatest leaders and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38. He's a good friend. He's a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine introductions or donations. So, we just wanted to share this at the top of our show. And I've only met Ben once, but a really, really amazing thinker and an incredible show, and I recommend checking out the show as well.
Yeah. Well, moving on. Thank you to Ramp for supporting, and you should as well.
We covered at the end of the show yesterday, but I mean, pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. OpenAI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs. And so this was all over the timeline. We discussed it at the end of yesterday's show, but Abdulrahman Alzahrani, the alleged OpenAI spy, used an AI-generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as his LinkedIn and X profile photo, despite having no documented connection to the school. But there's a community note on this. There's a lot of people going back and forth. Apparently his actual profiles now show the real information, but there's a whole bunch of back and forth. But it seems like it was a pretty simple device. I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of a television in an executive conference room. And folks are saying that it cost maybe 15 bucks, something like that. And so there's also debate over, you know, is he an American citizen? Is he a Saudi national? There's a picture of him alongside Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but you know, anyone can stand in line for a photo op. But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this. And so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was. Kylie Robinson called it amateur hour. A chatbot account associated with the engineer's spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding Wi-Fi connectivity, listening remotely, and encrypting its memory card, according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.
Yeah, pretty simple. Like, how do I commit a crime? Like typing that into the computer. And so, not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching. How do I spy? How do I create a recording?
Yeah. The whole thing is just very confusing. Like, this would make it seem like he's a lone wolf, right? As if there was any type of sophisticated operation. You would think they'd be like, "Don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro. We got you."
Yeah. Yeah, totally. That is weird for sure. And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around or nation states, it's usually around like stealing the weights and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth and lawsuits around intellectual property, but you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference. There's no meeting between like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT-7 starting at the beginning, zero, seven, five...
They're doing a table reading.
They're doing a table reading. Seven, nine... No, like, you're not going to get anything. You're going to get like strategy, like corporate strategy, which is maybe valuable if you're like trading the stock market, but it's not like you're going to listen in on a conversation and be like, "Okay, I know how... I just, yeah, I can just reverse engineer the next model." Which is very odd. So, the motivations here are complicated. Like, it could be purely financial, could be something more nefarious. We'll let the FBI investigate.
I think that's the photo of David Senra that just slammed down. We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.
Anyway, the OpenAI spying, spy listening device story, I mean, it's all over the timeline. People are having fun with it. People are worried about it. I'm sure the FBI will investigate and we'll have more information, but I don't really have a strong take other than like, it's bad. Don't spy. And it reinforces the stakes, like security is really important. We know this. We've been talking about this. But it was weird because LA yesterday I was talking to somebody and they were saying, "Oh yeah, the Instagram Meta ads are so good." You know, because they, you know, obviously because like they listen to my...
It's so funny and covering it up with toilet paper.
Would that not, if you're looking behind a TV and you're like, "What's that electronic device covered up with toilet paper?" Like that to me is much more interesting and concerning than if it was just a USB stick. Oh, somebody left a USB stick because they were looking at photos on the... or if they just put like an Amazon Fire Stick back there, you wouldn't notice it. You would only notice it if you were actually sweeping and you just like go back there and it's like glue and tongue depressors and Lincoln Logs and some Legos back there. It's like, what? It's going to draw your eye because you're like, toilet paper should never be in an electronics cabinet, period. Like there's no reason for it to be there as opposed to like USB cables, they belong back there.
Yeah. Something that looks like an HDMI.
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Anything. Put an Xbox back there. Put, I mean, you could literally put something in the shell of an Apple TV or in the shell of a Nintendo Switch and somebody would just be like, "Oh, it's a Nintendo Switch." And you could put something inside of the device. Sorry, we're giving spies like ideas now. This is bad. Forget what I said. Don't do this. Don't spy. You're going to go to jail. It's really, really bad.
Anyway, yesterday I was just laughing because somebody was like, "Oh yeah, like you know, the Instagram ads are like so good now, but and like you know, obviously like they're listening to the audio around my phone like ambiently and that's why it's so good." And they weren't like alleging this as like a conspiracy theory that needed to be uncovered. It was just like a given. It was just like, "Oh yeah, that's like one of the strategies and one of the features." Like it's like, of course they like listen to everything you say and then they target ads and the ads are better. And it was just like, it wasn't like, and I'm mad about it. It was just like, and it obviously happens with...
This has been debunked many times. It was investigated by Wired in 2017. Antonio Garcia Martinez talked about it on Joe Rogan in 2022. His reaction is actually funny. We should pull up the video.
Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times on the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation about...
No, it's not real. No. No, I mean, I don't believe him. Do you believe... the other day I haven't searched for it at all.
And I got an ad for it. Something me and you were talking about.
If I remember right, I couldn't remember, but it was something we were talking about after the show. Six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it.
Here's what I'd bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website.
Not only that, one of us.
So if I do, he gets an ad.
Potentially. Yeah. Potentially. Yeah.
Because it has your geolocation, which is also kind of crazy. But if it has your geolocation, your friend's geolocation... There's so many times when someone will recommend a product to me and then I'll see an ad for it and I'll be like, "It was listening." And it's like, "No, it has the receipt from the person that I'm connected with on Instagram and then it saw that we were both in the same place. So clearly we talked about that." Like it just inferred that. And then it shows you like 10,000 ads a day and so five of them are going to be like creepily accurate. Are you gonna put on the tinfoil hat? Are you a truther on this or are you a plan truster?
Plan truster. Okay. Okay, Facebook like straight up has on their about page like, we don't use your microphone unless you've given us permission and are actively using a feature that requires the microphone. So sometimes like if you are in a Meta product and you turn on the microphone, like yes, it is listening then. And so there are instances where people have like accidentally left that open and then obviously it does have that data. And like if you upload a bunch of video of you talking about all the products you love...
Yeah, if you turn on the microphone for a split second, there's an alert that goes off in Meta HQ. Ten people run into a room and they just listen and then they sort of brainstorm ads that they could, you know, deliver based on that.
I would like a social network that was like handcrafted ads. Like there's a guy who's like, you know, a Don Draper, he like sips a couple martinis, smokes a cigar, and then really thinks about like, okay, what would be the perfect ad for this person to see? And they pick it. Curation, that's the future. I was wondering like, how far are we from this actually happening because I know Meta will hold the line on it and they're not just gonna like go in the background of the phone because it would be such a scandal. And like after seeing the social reckoning, like the opportunity to whistleblow is just so huge that you could be just like a rank and file Meta employee if you find out that they're actually doing the ambient voice recording and using that for ad targeting. It's just quit your job immediately, get the whistleblower status, Netflix doc, book tour, like you're gonna make way more money. Like the incentive to whistleblow on that is just so high. I think that it's...
Yeah. I think it's probably like, that's a huge pushback. But I was wondering like, is it possible that ambient voice recording does wind up influencing your Meta ads somehow. And I found a chain that actually can make this happen. So there is a company that handles business phone calls. So if you're on the call with a particular company and they use a particular AI system, they will actually transcribe that and then they put that data I think through LiveRamp which can actually get into Meta Ads Manager as an audience. But this is a little bit, it's not quite what you think because it would be like if you're on the phone with Bottega Veneta and you're talking about products that you like, then that could wind up getting retargeted.
Which you normally wouldn't think it would be retargeted because you're like, there's no pixel on the phone, but they are transcribing that, but it's direct to that particular brand. And so it wouldn't be the really like, whoa, like I wasn't even talking to a company. It's like, you are talking to a company.
But do you remember the LG drama that happened like last month?
Do you remember this? Okay. So, Palmer Luckey came on our show, I think last year, and was talking about how terrible smart TVs are. And I think everyone sort of agrees that at the very least they're like clunky and they have too many features and they want to be updated every like five days when you use the TV. It's like, we need a software update and they have so many different things and they want to show you ads and it's all very annoying even though the TVs look nice these days. But last month, Gamers Nexus, they put out this two-hour YouTube video showing that LG TVs are like aggressively using spyware, effectively. That's the allegation. So, they scan the local network for third-party phones and other devices. The LG G5 crawled the entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones, of the staff who didn't even know we were working on this investigation. Even when the TV wasn't online, the LG TV they tested was able to record sound around it. Quote, "We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network." This is because there's enough Wi-Fi hotspots in most neighborhoods now that are just like public basically through like a Comcast or a Spectrum that they can like hop on something and just say, "Oh, okay. I got access to the internet." It's crazy.
I don't even think we need to go down the whole like you can see through walls with Wi-Fi.
That's crazy, too. Yeah. So, Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plain text, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG if the TV connects online again. And so, like hard drives and memory have gotten so cheap that you can basically be recording the audio, transcribing it to text using basically a local transcription model. It's not like running a big GPU. It's just like transcribing text, pretty easy, and then it's just storing that as plain text and it can store like years and years of ambient text on like one gig drive basically. Like it's just so small. And so, LG responded and said like, "Look, we're not really doing all of that," but they said we don't do continuous conversation recording. Now, if you push the button...
Don't worry, we take a break when you're not talking.
If you're in an active voice session, which is where you like press the button to talk to the TV, so you actively want to do it, it will pick up conversations that are happening in the background. So, you know, the privacy implications are like, you know, your roommate is pushing the button and saying like put on Red Bull TV or something or the X Games and in the background you're talking about your plans for the weekend and then that gets saved in the data. But that seems kind of obvious, like you've turned on the microphone.
Xfinity has a feature that turns your home Wi-Fi router into a motion sensor.
That's interesting. They actually productized it. That's kind of, I don't know. Yeah. If you're away, why not just have your Wi-Fi see if there's motion in your vicinity?
Can it detect aura too or just motion?
Yeah, I mean, that's the most important question.
So LG has this ad solutions product which can potentially feed into Meta ads and make your Instagram ads scarily accurate, but they say they're not doing the full chain yet. But so there's still like confirmation bias where you see a bunch of ads, but you see one ad for the thing that you were talking about and you're like, "Oh, it's so scarily accurate."
Wait, rewind. Saying that your LG TV might be listening and then they might be passing that...
They say they're not, but they are listening. They have an ads product and it can connect to Meta. So like, the technology exists, but they haven't turned it on, I think, is like the claim. Or they could have stopped doing it while they responded to that article saying we are not currently doing this and then read...
Potentially. Personally, I don't really mind it that much. I kind of just don't care if the ads are scarily accurate. I'm used to it. But it is odd. And also, it's just like TV, stay in your lane. Just show me the thing. I don't want a bunch of other junk. Just charge me what it costs to make the TV.
But what's interesting is that amid all this privacy concerns around LG and it potentially listening to you and some backlash there, I think they did the crisis PR effectively. I think it is like pretty clear that they're not actually just full open channel all the time piping it everywhere.
Yeah. So on that note, how likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward?
I already did. They're the best. Like I just don't mind it. It's just gonna listen to my voice recordings and be like, "Wow, this is sick. This guy's awesome."
