From Street to State

Speaker 1: The story of Tandai Lin starts in China in the early 2000s. The Internet was still new and confined to university campuses. But as is the case pretty much everywhere around the world where the Internet was starting to take hold, that little bit of access was enough to spawn a whole generation of young self taught hackers. But hacker wasn't the word. The etymology of this, like, Mandarin English lone hybrid word is a little bit above my head. But I think the basic idea is that if you take a version of the Mandarin word for red, which is Hong, and combine it with the Western word hacker, Hong plus hacker gets you honker. The story of Tan is the story of something called the Honker Union. The Great Firewall, which is China's, like, big, sprawling system of kind of Internet control, is already taking shape at that time. Foreign news sites, forums, western tech platforms, they're increasingly kind of blocked. That's still true today. And loopholes existed then as well. Honkers would use proxy tools to access foreign servers, dig around for vulnerabilities, and importantly, watch how global hackers operate. It became a big part of how they learned. And pretty quickly, a culture that's kind of unique in the hacking ecosystem starts to emerge. A hacking culture that's really centered around this very patriotic hacktivism. Someone does something to China on the world stage and the honkers are there. They're immediately into the work of representing not like a specific individual handle or a hacking crew, but their nation in this newly emerging cyberspace. Inside the country, and this is obviously based on secondhand account, they're quite quickly seen by many as like patriotic heroes as opposed to like Internet ne'er do wells. Government officers are publicly praising their zeal, and for years, they operate in this kind of legal gray zone. Not exactly sanctioned, but not exactly outlawed. But around 2005, something shifts. And the government shifts their policy towards the honkers union. If uncontrolled vigilante hackers were to continue operating unregulated basically, they could and were becoming a liability. So instead of chasing them down, the state starts to recruit. Which is where we meet our main subject, a guy named Tan Dai Lin. He's 20 years old at the time, a grad student at Sichuan University. On the forums, he goes by Wicked Rose, and his footprint is really familiar. He's writing code, he's bragging about hacks, he's digging around, he's learning, and importantly, he's blogging about all of it, very openly, about infiltrating like foreign Japanese systems. And that blog post gets noticed. Rather than getting in trouble, Tan gets invited to a People Liberation Army sponsored hacking contest, and he wins the whole thing. And in that moment, Tan is one of the first people to set off down this path that a lot of people around the world have since embarked down. He's sent to this months long, like, military cyber boot camp, and goes on this road from becoming a university age hacker to a state operative. We are talking about this because of a new defense report out of Switzerland that traces the history of the honkers. These patriotic teens and 20 in the late nineteen nineties and early two thousands who started out as, like, independent hacktivists, and who over the last couple decades have morphed into, like, the key architects of China's cyber espionage apparatus. Let's start there with the history of how the honker movement morphed into one of the most powerful cyber espionage forces in the world, here on hacked.

Speaker 2: How you doing, Scott? I'm good, buddy. How are you?

Speaker 1: I'm doing good. I'm doing good. I'm keeping busy. It's warm in this apartment. My cat is yelling. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: It is not warm in my house. I have the air conditioning jacked, but it's actually raining today. So it's very wet outside, which is sad for the the sportsman inside of me who wants to go outside and do things after work today, but we'll see. We'll see. But I don't know if

Speaker 1: that's You like to hit the links? That's what they call them.

Speaker 2: Right? That's good. Like, listeners to the show will know that I'm a disproportionately large tennis fan. And, just this year, I've started playing tennis. And I've gotten my wife into it, which is the biggest shock because she typically does not like tennis, but has given my tennis fanship, she has kind of, like, been exposed to it and has started watching tennis and, like, now knows a lot of the WTA, like, the women's tennis professionals.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: And she, like, gets engaged in the matches. And then now she's playing it with me, which is awesome. That's fine. Couldn't be happier about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1: I love that. My partner, who is the jock in our relationship, has not gotten me successfully. Hiking, I guess, with the exception of hiking, which is barely a sport.

Speaker 2: But you're not out on the pickleball courts.

Speaker 1: I'm not on the pickleball courts. I'm out on the softball courts, softball pitch. I'm not softballing. Diamond? Diamond? I should know. I haven't yet, but the time is near. There it is. It's waiting for me.

Speaker 2: Welcome back to another episode of Hacks. Mhmm. As Jordan and I catch up. Yes.

Speaker 1: Happy to have y'all here. Brought to you as always by Push Security.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: We got a couple different stories we wanna talk about. I wanna talk about this honkers union report that came out because I think it's fascinating, and I just I spent a lot of time reading about it, and I wanna share it. I've got some interesting kinda AI chat GPT news after the break. Classic. Classic. I think we that's pretty much it. Ready to dive in. Next week's, next episode is gonna be a kind of a different one, a little chill one. I'm gonna be traveling for the next two weeks. You'll hear about where in the next episode. This is a total aside, but I just found out that there's a new alien television show that I am now downloading for my flight this week. I'm very excited. Are you an Alien fan, Scott?

Speaker 2: No. No. You're not? Okay. I I have seen them, but I'm not like

Speaker 1: You're not you're not you don't know the lore.

Speaker 2: You you saying that there's a new Alien TV show, nothing to my, like, my blood pressure or my

Speaker 1: We had a very different internal experience about that Yeah. Because I'm pretty pumped. So I'm definitely not Like, I think

Speaker 2: I think alien versus predator to me was, like, the peak.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Very different relationship to the franchise. I love that. Very fun. It's going back that way. Anyway, I bring it up here so that if anyone here is also excited about alien earth, comment. Babble with me about it. I wanna talk about it. But for now, hard hard pivot. Hard pivot to honkers. To honkers. Let's talk about, let's talk about the journey from patriotic hackers to state cyber spies and the rise of, the honker honker union.

Speaker 2: Let's do it.

Speaker 1: Let's get into it. So, yeah. We're talking about this because of a new cyber defense report out of Switzerland that sort of traced the evolution of this group and one of its key architects, this guy, Tandai Lin. It was a report published by a researcher named Eugenio Benincasa of ETH Zurich, that digs into this. And the term has a couple different translations, but red hackers basically laid the groundwork for China's modern cyber cape cyber capabilities before eventually just getting absorbed by the state. Have you ever, like, heard about this general story, Scott?

Speaker 2: I I I haven't followed the the Chinese hacker scene, honker scene. So I don't know any specifics of it, but the story is as old as time. Yes. I think there's many as sci fi TV shows and state run cybersecurity programs that are full of people like this.

Speaker 1: Yeah. There's shades of, like, American stories we've told on this show. There's shades of Russian stories we've told on this show. This practice of identifying talent coming up organically from, like, a young hacker community and fostering it and bring it into the government in different all sorts of different ways with different outcomes is, like like you said, a very old story. I think

Speaker 2: I think if you're a nation state that's not doing this, you're just, you know, cutting your Achilles tendon

Speaker 1: A little bit.

Speaker 2: For, like, lack of better.

Speaker 1: And it you can see this starting back in the nineteen nineties. Like, they got on it early, and it it has yielded results, let's say. So let's go back to the nineties. China first connects to the global Internet in 1994. It's largely limited to, like, universities and research centers, which means that students are getting online before the rest of the country. Again, a very familiar story.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. You got a lot of, like, self taught enthusiasts hanging out on, like, dial up bulletin boards, swapping know how. They're, like, forming little crews. They're doing what young people, young tinkerers, and hackers on the Internet do. They start the honker union of China. They start a few more. There's the China eagle China Eagle Union. We'll talk about the green army, ex focus. But that name honker, I wanna dig into this because I took a bunch of etymology classes in university, and this one was, like, a fun little a fun little return to that. Yeah. So I struggle with the exact etymology of this. I've seen different readings on it. As a non Mandarin speaker, it's like both a hybrid word and a lone it's it's complicated. There's two different ways I've seen it broken down. One is what I said, which is hong, which refers to red and then hacker. So you get red hacker, hong, hacker, honker. There's another one that is that it's a contraction of hong and the word key, k, k e, which kind of refers to, like, guest, maybe intruder. I think it has multiple meanings. So it's like

Speaker 2: Uninvited guest.

Speaker 1: Exactly. So it's like it kind of it's like a double meaning hybrid loan word. If anyone, long shot, is in an etymology class in university right now, like, here's your paper. This is a really interesting word. Or

Speaker 2: if there's any listeners that are actually in the honkers union, please, you know, hit us up.

Speaker 1: Drop us

Speaker 2: the email, and let us know what the the full background is.

Speaker 1: Yeah. We're fascinated by the history and, like, just wanna understand. In the early days, the honker group were, like it was self governing. It's very loose. It's like an underground hacking community. Ironically, a very influential Taiwanese hacker known as Lin Zhenlong, otherwise known as Coolfire in that time, kinda, like, shaped the ethos of the whole thing. His argument was, like, these are really remarkable skills. They should be used to strengthen cyber defense of the nation. Like, go out, learn all the tricks that people around the world are doing, bring them back to make our stuff a lot stronger. He wrote this, like, really widely read hacking manual, kind of, like, espousing this philosophy. At the time, formal cybersecurity training in China was basically nonexistent. There weren't, like, capture the flag events. All of those state sponsored, like, competitions were years down the road. So people are just online learning by doing.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Importantly, for, you know, the ability of all of this to grow, hacking wasn't explicitly illegal in China back then except for, like, internal specific sectors like government, military, scientific research systems. And Lin's guidelines basically said, like, honkers. Steer clear of government or defense targets. Don't permanently break anything. Fix anything that you do break. At the time, in that world, a pretty, like, thoughtful, idealistic code, I would say.

Speaker 2: I feel like that code was the same in North America and Europe too. Yeah. That's just when when hacking kinda came about. It was a lot about exploration and, you know, puzzle solving, things like that, and it had very little to do with destruction. I think that, like, wave of, like, you know, early two thousands, twenty tens when you've got, like, Indonesian hacking groups just like mass blanketing WordPress sites with Yeah. You know, hack call it hacktivism, but it's not really. It's more just like, I don't know, mischief, online mischief.

Speaker 1: It's you, it's funny you paint that timeline because some, like, real world stuff's coming down the pipeline that's gonna, test that restraint and shift the vibe pretty considerably. Late nineties, early two thousands, there was a series of, like, non cyber real world international incidents that stirred a very intense reaction inside of China,

Speaker 2: and

Speaker 1: the honkers were there responding online. This became known as was a discreet term used in the report. It's the beginning of what is known as the patriotic hacker wars,

Speaker 2: and

Speaker 1: it quite the term. And it forged, like, a new identity for this community. I alluded to these in the intro, but there was instance. So the the honkers at one point launched, like, a coordinated attack on Japanese government and corporate websites defacing pages and going after servers after in 2000, a group of Japanese soldiers publicly questioned the scale of the Nanjing Massacre, which was a World War two atrocity where hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed. Something happens, they respond. In 1999, Taiwan's then president described Taiwan and China as two states. Honkers retaliated with one China defacements on their polls on their websites. In 2001, a US surveillance plane collided with a Chinese fighter, mid air. We're gonna talk about that one later because it was a really big one in this whole story.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: These were the patriotic cyber wars, these waves of hacking events that these real world incidents spurred.

Speaker 2: So it was a form of hacktivism. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It was it was politically moded hacktivism in response to real world events.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Nationalistic. Exactly. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Interesting. It gave them, like, a unifying cause beyond, like, curiosity and mischief. It kept them kind of focused on that purpose. It was a manifest there was a manifesto from one of the honker groups. It was the China Eagle Union that it was this vow that they all made to, quote, put the interest of the Chinese nation above everything else. The publicity about their response like, this wasn't underground. This was reported on in China, and it caused the, like, kind of unofficial number of members to swell like a crate. It became a bit of a pop culture thing. Yeah. Hong Kong Union of China reported the group to, like, 80,000 people at one point at its, like, height. There was other groups with thousands of members. Most of these are, like, casual enthusiasts who sort of like align with it, like young people just learning to tinker. But within that huge pool of the honkers union, there was this core circle of like really highly skilled leaders. Ben and Casa's research identifies about 40 influential red hackers. He dubbed them the red 40, who were, like, the really talented ones, the leaders of the group. They would go on to become really important figures at, like, big cyber security companies in China, leading state sponsored hacking teams. It's important to note, and this is flagged multiple times in the report, up until this point, there's no hard evidence of Beijing directly orchestrating any of this stuff. Sure. It's all underground. It just happens to align with Chinese state interests, and, like, officials are paying attention at this point. One survey found that 84% of Chinese Internet users supported the honkers actions during that patriotic cyber war period of time, there were, like, a they were a big popular cultural moment. Like, in a in

Speaker 2: a political sense, 84% is, like, ruling party. Like Yeah. Exactly. Dominant public perception. Yeah. No leadership candidate in any, like, you know, national election has got that kind of favorability ratings. Mhmm. It's also nice, like, if you're the government that there's this, like, independent group of highly skilled people, like, out doing things on your behalf that you're kind of totally chill with.

Speaker 1: Yes. You keep setting these up beautifully.

Speaker 2: Oh, thank you.

Speaker 1: You do, because the next turn is that snake kind of eating its own tail a little bit and that unofficial tolerance not lasting that much longer. The end of this period of time, April 2001, that there was this major geopolitical flare up that altered the government's attitude towards the honkers. I alluded to this earlier. 04/01/2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided mid air with a US Navy surveillance plane near Hainan Island, China. Chinese pilot is killed. The damaged US EP three plane made an emergency landing on the island where the crew is detained by Chinese authorities. This, like, international incident inflamed nationalist, like, sentiment on both sides of the issue. Outraged American hackers were attacking, like, Chinese sites. The Chinese honkers retaliating against, like, US targets. It's, like, tit for tat cyber skirmishes happening. Again, outside the purview of the government. So Beijing's leadership gets really alarmed by this. They go, okay. So seems like we have hundreds, if not thousands, of uncontrolled hackers effectively waging a private cyber war A

Speaker 2: digital militia.

Speaker 1: That is threatening very delicate US China diplomatic relations that are happening in the real government. Hard vibe shift. The People's Daily, that's like the official newspaper, ran commentary likening the attacks to web terrorism, like, hard pivot in how we're thinking about all this. Head of the Internet Society of China issued statements condemning the attacks. That PLA admirable who'd been saying, like, I love their patriotic zeal is now saying this could jeopardize international diplomacy. The mood is different. And the message is really unmistakable, and that community starts to, like, really lower their profile. Kinda starting to stand down a little bit. With that core motivation and the sort of sense of safety removed, the group fragments. There's, like, conflicts about what to do next. What do do we go pro and do legitimate work? Do we go sell malware and exploit some profit on the black

Speaker 2: market? Russia.

Speaker 1: We move to Russia. Like, what do we do, gang? And it the the honkers in that red 40 in particular splinter off. You get cybersecurity professionals that go get scooped up by, like

Speaker 2: Yeah. The big coup.

Speaker 1: Alibaba Yeah.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Tencent, Huawei. Like, there's that route. There's the the, go do crimes route. They just develop malware, steal stuff. And then there's the covert state hacker route, which is really the focus of Ben and Castle's report, which is a bunch of them go off and end up working for, you know, the espionage apparatus there. Sure. They stop being independent. They get absorbed into the state.

Speaker 2: It's like the, what's the dark knight thing? It's like you die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain. Yes. Yes. It's like the government's like we love what you guys are up to, and we were really happy about it. But now, you know, you're becoming a diplomatic headache, so we need you guys to roll into this so we can tell you when you're allowed to do this mischief. Exactly. Yeah.

Speaker 1: We need a little bit more control. We're gonna Harvey Dent this situation. Exactly. Yeah. Struggling to remember who said that, which kinda brings us to to Tandai Lin, This guy Wicked Rose. Wicked Rose, Wicked Rose, I saw both translations. Summer two thousand five, Tan, who came up in that scene is like a young teenager, basically. He's like 20 years old. He come up at during that patriotic cyber war period of time. He's pursuing a graduate degree in Sichuan University of Science and Engineering. He'd been, like, active in honker forums. He'd been blogging about the things he'd done in the past, Japanese breaches and stuff. PLAs see those posts and invite him and some friends to come to this military run hacking contest. Tan shows up, crushes it, comes in first place, wins the whole thing. He's, like, 20 years old. So him and a few of his peers get just, like, scooped up and brought into this, like, months long training camp run by the PLA. They go through several weeks to go through the cyber boot camp. They're, like, practicing simulated cyber attacks under, like, military and strength, like, heavy duty. Building custom tools for what they're trying to do. Tan gets out of this training, and he's, like, even more formidable. And he forms his he forms a new hacking group called NCPH, the network crack program hacker, to go do more of these contests in these competitions. So, like, not going off doing the things that was getting people mad at them, but really trying to just thrive and win inside of this growing military ecosystem.

Speaker 2: It it was this a business, or was it a, like, a just a group?

Speaker 1: I can't really tell. I think that it was a business. They started developing, like they developed something called the Jinwe root kit, which was, like, the first locally made in China remote access trojan, and they start stockpiling, like, zero day exploits. I don't know if they were monetizing it yet. At a later point in the story, there there's documents of them getting paid, I think, by the I can't remember if it's the PLA or the MSS. So they were charging someone in the military for something they were doing at some point Sure.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Well in advance of just getting fully absorbed.

Speaker 2: A little arm's length? A little arm's length. Just a

Speaker 1: lot arm's length. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And this is why The United States trade policy is so worried about Chinese made electronics. Right here,

Speaker 1: the story. Over the spring and summer of two thousand six, NCPH, this group, is part of, like, a bunch of attacks against US targets. They're going after car like, companies, government agencies, US and around the world. In this report, you have, like, a bunch of quotes from cybersecurity experts talking about, like, really the kind of remarkable scale for 2006 of this kind of international hacking that's going on. There'd always been stuff, but it was still very it was that early two thousands. It was underground. This was seemingly very well funded in very, like, large scale. Tan and his crew were we would discover later actively working on behalf of the PLA during that 2006 spree.

Speaker 2: Shocker. Shocker. Shocker.

Speaker 1: There's some stuff that happens between then and now. Tandai Lin and it is the the timeline is murky here, but it's looking at some point while working for the PLA, Tan Dai Lin starts facing a seven and a half year cybercrime sentence from the Ministry of State Security. A different group is getting mad at him, and he he actually makes the jump. He jumps from working for the PLA to the MSS, which is where he goes on to like, he becomes a contract hacker for them and eventually becomes part of APT forty one, which is a group we've talked about on this show several times, Advanced Persistent Threat forty one, also known as Wicked Panda, which is this Chinese hacking squad that works for the government and is blamed, for, like, financially motivated global hacks, state espionage, all sorts of interesting stuff.

Speaker 2: I love how he's facing a seven year charge. So he just goes to work for them. Like, he's just chasing the same dragon. Just like, oh, I'm in trouble. Yeah. I'll come work for you. I'm in trouble. I'll come work for you.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. How do I make this go away? It's like, how do

Speaker 2: I make this go away?

Speaker 1: Exactly what you're trying to make go away. Come do that over here.

Speaker 2: It's like, okay. We don't like your current bosses. You need new bosses, our bosses.

Speaker 1: Because, like, could you just do a transfer? I feel like you're both the government. Could you just requisition me? Do you have to charge me with a crime?

Speaker 2: Your union benefits still apply?

Speaker 1: Totally. Like, just change my job title. There was, like, this big shit another I found this interesting. The two thousand eight Beijing games also apparently represented, like, a pretty big there was a big push to get more of the former honkers into the state run organizations because it was like, okay. We have a bunch of stuff we wanna look at. We have a bunch of stuff we don't wanna go wrong during this. The world's gonna be looking at us. Let's just oh, a rug. Let's do some sweeping. 2009, criminal law amendment seven outlawed all unauthorized hacking and banned hacking tool creation. Basically, saying if you were gonna do any of this stuff, it's either a crime or you come work for us. Yeah. You get that. You get the 2009 switch to the MSS and then the slow development of APT 41. I would imagine that has sort of been, you know, the last fifteen years of his life, is kind of being the grandfather in our one of the grandfathers and architects of that group, which brings us to now. Twenty years after he started as, like, a patriotic hacker, Tan Dai Lin is no longer, an underground in the shadows kind of figure. In 2020, the US Department of Justice charged him in the APT forty one crew with more than a 100 different cyberattacks around the world, hospitals, telecom giants, US government networks. His story, and the reason I think this report, which is quite good, it's worth a read, focuses on him is that it really mirrors so many of those people during that honker era.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Starts out as a teen vigilante in the nineties, gets recruited or kind of pushed into China's cyber forces. Some were joining the PLA, other working for the Ministry of State Security. Some were hiding inside of private security firms. Subcontractors. Subcontractors. But it's a model that's still working there today, which is this blend of, like, ex hackers, contractors, uniformed officers, all funneling and delivering talent, providing a little bit of deniability, and keeping that original honker legacy alive. There's still that DNA there, the tools, the tactics, and those personal relationships.

Speaker 2: I feel I feel like the parallels. Yeah. I feel like the parallels here to like, when you say PLA and MSS, all I'm thinking about is, like, CIA and NSA. Like, the Totally. The American parallels are deep. Yeah. It's like they're I I feel like most developed first world, like, nations or, like, fully developed, you know, actors on the military and diplomatic stages have these structures. And I feel like they're all recruiting out of the same pool of, like, tech savvy youth who are showing strong technical competency in these in these areas.

Speaker 1: So Yeah. It feels like there's this fork thing where it's either you you do something big enough to get everyone's attention, and either you have a example made out of you or you have a job offered to you. Totally. Those are kind of the two things that happen if you cause a big enough of a ruckus. We've I

Speaker 2: feel like that happens

Speaker 1: shows where it's the former,

Speaker 2: but this one's the latter. I feel like this happens probably a lot in, like, police stations or, like, boardrooms inside of, like, it's like, hey, you're gonna go to jail for, like, forty five years

Speaker 1: or Yeah.

Speaker 2: Accept this offer and come, like, be a spy.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally.

Speaker 2: And if you're in North Korea, it's like, come be a, like, a crypto malware guy. Guy. Like, come make us money. You're now part of the Department of Revenue.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. I wonder that one's so interesting because I'm like, I wonder if you even have to show an aptitude or an interest or they're like, you do crypto scams now. Mhmm. Like, I'm a baker. They're like, no. You do crypto scams now.

Speaker 2: The, when you mentioned the the Beijing Olympics Yeah. It just made me think that, like, there really isn't so, like, the, Esports World Cup is on, like, gaming. And it's actually insane. Like like, I've never really followed that much, like, hyper competitive stuff, but this year, it's, like, really nuts.

Speaker 1: Okay. Like, it's in my way. Like, it's scale

Speaker 2: Oh, scale. Like, they had an opening ceremony that had, like Oh, yeah. Wow. Post Malone saying, and, like, they paid a bunch of artists to make custom music. And there was, like, choreography dancers and, like, big sets. Anyway, just it's becoming, like, a real event. Mhmm. Like, it it's kinda like the global Olympic games of, like, esports. And, like, they spent so much money. The trophies are so insane. Everything about it is, like, the scale that they're doing it at is, like, crazy. So So the thing for me is, like, when you said Beijing Olympics, I was like, man, imagine there was a global hacking Olympics, like, every year or two, like, a Euro Cup

Speaker 3: or a World Cup of hacking.

Speaker 1: Like, just the best capture the flag person. It's, like, not regionally, globally. Like, you you send your best.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Like, everybody sets submits a team, and there's, like, you know, all the different types and facets of it. It's not just capture the flags, but there's, like, various other things. And and just, like, everybody wins medals. And then at the end of the thing, you see that, like, China got 12 golds and two silvers. And and it just I think it would be fascinating. You know, talking about TV show ideas to roll back to your Yeah. Sure.

Speaker 1: We really just wanna make a game show. This is I'm it seems. Like, it's just sensing I'm sensing why.

Speaker 2: Becomes a game show.

Speaker 1: Everything is yeah. Everything. All pass lead to a game show. Twenty twenty five Esports World Cup. This is pretty wild seeming. We had Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 2: It's not I

Speaker 1: think the only game

Speaker 2: here the opening ceremony.

Speaker 1: I'm curious to watch it now. I don't play Valorant or Crossfire. I played a little Call of Duty. EA Sports, Football Club twenty twenty five

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Which we

Speaker 2: We which we know. Which one of my favorites with. A Guinness World Record, raising money for a hospital by playing this game for way too long.

Speaker 1: Yep. They're, like, over a decade ago now. We spent forty eight hours sitting inside of a wall playing a soccer video game, and that's all I'll say about that.

Speaker 2: But could you imagine a Hacker's World Cup? Do you imagine how cool that would be?

Speaker 1: I'd watch. Ugh. Do you so it'd be it'd be the because what's the setup at the esport? We're transitioning into chatty chat now, just a heads up to everyone, just so no one's worried. Like like, I'm waiting for the end. Like, the end was about four minutes ago. Esports World Cup, like, what's the setup? It's, in Riad Riyadh? Yeah. It's in Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 3: Saudi Arabia.

Speaker 1: I think I see

Speaker 2: say Riyadh. Yeah. They have a massive complex. Oh my god.

Speaker 1: This looks like the Hunger Games.

Speaker 3: This is insane looking.

Speaker 2: And it's based on teams. So the teams accrue medals in different games and different, like, and the the teams every every game has a a prize pool, and, like, there's substantial prize pools. Yeah. Like, a million plus, I think. Anyway and they go in for, like, two or three weeks. There's always a game tournament going on, and then the winner of that tournament wins the trophy. So if you're a member of some of these bigger teams like, I think the I think last year was won by a team called the Falcons, and I think they're out of Saudi Arabia if I'm not mistaken. Correct. But they they only, like, contract the best players of all the games in the world because their intention

Speaker 1: is to win

Speaker 2: this tournament every year.

Speaker 1: I I'm curious what the prizes are. I'm just looking at the week by week breakdown, and it's pretty funny. Mhmm. Because it's it's this big grid, and it has the logos of all the different games. It's like Apex Legends, very graphic design. Call of Duty Black Ops six, Call of Duty Warzone, and then just in, like, Helvetica, chess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're like, oh, that one's different.

Speaker 2: The Magnus Carlsen, like, the Yeah. Yeah. Guy, he was in the opening ceremony. Oh. But it's becoming anyway, so this Of course. It's it's it's really chess is a huge e

Speaker 1: sport now, which is interesting to say.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Chess.com is, like, one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world.

Speaker 1: Could we

Speaker 2: It is amazing. It's definitely like, I would love to see that structure applied to so many other things. Like and hacking would be one of those.

Speaker 1: Yeah. You can imagine. There must be I'm curious what the, like, current because that's a big community of people that take part in those competitions has been for, as we've seen, twenty five years, and it's like, there must be an apex of that. There must be the top of the pyramid.

Speaker 2: And I'm

Speaker 1: I'm curious what it is. Even if you can't well filmed it is.

Speaker 2: So many so many of the organizations that play in this space, you know, red teams, blue teams. Yeah. The CTA people, the teams, like, at, Defcon last year, there was, like, a big CTA competition. They were all in teams. It would be fascinating to see that all put together into one contest and then executed at a global scale.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The thing that I loved about Defcon was the fact that you would find very formal competitions, and then you would find, like, weird kind of almost improvised competitions. It would be like, there's just a a car here and hack into it. Mhmm.

Speaker 2: Oh,

Speaker 1: that's different. You could imagine all the different types of, contest and structure you could cook up for something like that.

Speaker 2: Totally. So if you're interested, call us as we seem to really want to make a game show.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It looks from googling the biggest hacking contest in the world, the thing that keeps coming up a lot is the capture the flag at Defcon

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Which is really interesting. If you would like a more televisable version and, again, are in the business of funding our hair brand scheme.

Speaker 2: We gotta go to ads.

Speaker 1: You should get at us. Get at us. In the meantime, do you wanna just take a really fast rip down the the ad waterfall and then we can just we can just chat about some stories, do a little chatty chat?

Speaker 2: Let's do

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Speaker 1: And we're back. We are. We're still here. We're still

Speaker 2: here. Back. We're just still here.

Speaker 1: You never left. My cat's still yelling. My air conditioner is still turned off. I'm locked in.

Speaker 2: The preparation is starting to perspire.

Speaker 1: It's happening.

Speaker 2: I got big news, Jordan.

Speaker 1: Oh, tell me.

Speaker 2: I think we're reaching peak euphoria as I have invested in a cryptocurrency company.

Speaker 1: I'm just throwing stuff.

Speaker 2: That's the appropriate response.

Speaker 1: I'm throwing I'm I'm throwing pens. What? That is

Speaker 2: I don't even know what I cannot.

Speaker 1: Say more.

Speaker 2: Oh, I'm so glad you saved this for on Mike. Yeah. I had to. I had to. And the listeners needed to hear it too. The, K.

Speaker 1: Let's let's let's try let's tread carefully in not getting into, like and that's why you should have it's like No. No. Keep it cryptic here.

Speaker 2: Let's Yeah.

Speaker 1: Let's keep it a little vague, but give me the broad strokes

Speaker 2: Broad strokes.

Speaker 1: On the the hardest about turn of all time.

Speaker 2: Broad strokes. A friend of mine was like, hey. I'm gonna buy into this Ethereum business. It's traded on, like, the Nasdaq. Like, it's like a real thing. And, anyway, they they're the single largest holder of Ethereum now. And he's like, I'm doing it as, like, a short term play. It should be, like, good. He's like, I've put a bunch of money in. He's like, you should come play. And I was like,

Speaker 1: nah. I'm quite well documented as thinking this sucks. So

Speaker 2: So strictly as a as a speculative play, I did buy, I didn't buy any equity. I just bought options so that I could limit my downside losses knowing how wild, crypto swings are. But it literally eight hours later, I was up a 100%. Goddamn it. Goddamn it. Crypto crypto speculation.

Speaker 1: Bad right now.

Speaker 2: You should be. I'm still holding my options. They've come down a bit more. But, it's funny. Like, I I messaged him right after the initial big bump. And I was like, so, like, if I remember correctly, the crypto the crypto recipe is, like, when you see green, sell, and when you see red, buy. Like, buy on the decline, sell on an uptrend. Yeah. I'm like, should I be doing that here? And he was like, you could do whatever you want. He's like, I'm gonna hold for a bit. I was like, I don't know. So I've been holding it. I don't know a lot of it. It's just so funny that it's but it swings. Like Sure. It was You went

Speaker 1: to the casino. This wasn't even like I had an epiphany about the value. This is I just wanted to clarify.

Speaker 2: I'm just straight up speculatively gambling.

Speaker 1: No. Hey. You know what? You had a good night

Speaker 2: at the casino, man. That's Okay.

Speaker 1: I'm not upset about the I'm not upset about any of it. He shouted. I just it's I wanted to clarify. Is it is it an about face, or is it a, like, I'm putting it all on

Speaker 2: this one? No. No. No. Even putting

Speaker 1: some on the ponies kind of thing.

Speaker 4: Like, this is just me

Speaker 2: straight up gambling. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even if you ask me Well, that'd have

Speaker 1: happened for you.

Speaker 2: The name of this company, I would not even be able to tell you. Sure. I've done no research into it. I put a a marginal amount of money as a bet down in call options.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 2: And it it went up 30% the first day. It went down 10%. Like, it was started today. The market opened. It was up 12 and a half percent. Now it's down 2%. Like, it's just 15% swings in, like, a Nasdaq traded stock within a like, an eight hour trading window is nuts. It's it's it is all of the insanity of crypto come to the real stock market. Oh my god. It's not even on the Nasdaq. It's on the NYSE. That's even crazier.

Speaker 1: I'm we'll talk about this offline. I I quite enjoy this.

Speaker 2: I quite enjoy this. I can't ask any follow-up questions because I don't So my my points get into the specifics of it.

Speaker 1: We must be

Speaker 2: at peak euphoria if I've been baiting into investing in something that I'm so cynical about. Yes. We've gotta be close to a top.

Speaker 1: I don't trust that horse at all, but I think it'll win the race. It's a little bit of that. It's like, that's a sketchy horse. I'm not even sure it's a horse. I think it's five guys in a horse outfit, but they're really amped up on something, and they seem to be moving quickly. So I think they're gonna win.

Speaker 2: I'm, like, I'm by no means an evangelist. Like, I have no belief that, like, crypto is what the world needs for freedom and all the rest of the jazz. And, like, we're helping impoverished countries through income inequality. Like, I have none of those beliefs. This is just, like, me walking into a casino and putting money on, like, black on the roulette table. Sure. You don't have

Speaker 1: to have a face that it's gonna come up red. You just gotta be willing to willing to give it a spin. That's really, really funny. I don't know how to get to a different story from that other than

Speaker 2: I had to tell you.

Speaker 1: It's really good.

Speaker 2: And I have so the listeners because I get so much, like, chastising about being so cynical of to crypto.

Speaker 1: Well, now that that just that's ammunition. It's just Totally. Anytime you talk it, it's just like, well,

Speaker 2: but how's it how's it doing? Like I know my vices. I know that I like gambling. And and I got baited into the gambling part of it, not the not the cultural part of it. Sure. Sure. I think this valueless thing

Speaker 1: is gonna go to the moon. Oh, I love it. Yeah. Fantastic stuff.

Speaker 2: There you go. I have nothing that brightens somebody's day.

Speaker 1: I have nothing that interesting to talk. I have some stories, but I don't have, like, a personal one.

Speaker 2: The, we could talk about as a as a as a clean pivot from this, what Trump just did to AMD and NVIDIA.

Speaker 1: I'm unfamiliar. Enlighten me.

Speaker 2: So NVIDIA being an American corporation, I'm air quoting to Jordan because largely it's Taiwanese based, but, does operate out of America trades on the American stock market. Trump was slapping all kinds of restrictions about what NVIDIA could sell to China because they don't want China to win the AI arms race.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The graphics cards and stuff. Correct. Yeah.

Speaker 2: GPU units. GPUs. Yeah. So Oh. I it seems like I understand tariffs, and that's essentially a government shakedown where you've got to, like, pay the government. But Yeah. He actually signed a revenue share agreement. So NVIDIA and AMD are now allowed to sell their premium products into the Chinese market, but 15% of gross revenue needs to be remitted to the American government, which to me is just like a shakedown. Like, I was so shocked to see it. Like, they could have done it through reverse tariffs and other economic, you know, nascent state or anything.

Speaker 1: Just a, like, a a a toll.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This is literally just like a we are you want access to a market that we don't wanna let you go into, pay for it.

Speaker 1: He said he would allow, NVIDIA to sell its h 20 chips. I'm reading from Bloomberg right now. Sell its h 20 chips to China in exchange for the US government receiving a 15% cut of the company's sales, some advanced chips in that country. He made a similar deal with Nvidia's smaller rival, AMD. Interesting.

Speaker 2: Yeah. This is the first time in my life that I can recall a deal like this being cut where the government has essentially taken a licensing royalty.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's very pay for play. Like, it's kind of like, hey. You'd give us money. You could do that. And it's like but wasn't it prevented because it represented some sort of a national security risk? It's like, that's worth less than that money you'll give us. I guess, it's just, that's interesting.

Speaker 2: I'm assuming that, like, they couldn't have done it through tariffs because the chips are probably manufactured in Taiwan. So maybe there was no, like, export of a real good coming from America, so they couldn't do it through reverse tariffs. So they had to figure out a different way to do it. It's gonna be very fascinating to watch what happens from this because, essentially, he just put a social tax on a private corporation in America. Like, I assume that's gonna go into general revenues for the tax base and help pay for Medicare and all the rest of the stuff. Yeah. But it's like, I've never heard of it's not well, I'll say this. It's not typically something that I would associate with capitalism, but he just did.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's like the question of how much a company needs to spend to receive an export license is like, that's a weird different question. Like, that's not normally how that works at all. You either like, the thing is regulated whether you can export or import it, not are you willing to pay us. It's like that's

Speaker 2: just is that legal? I don't I don't know. That's just really different. I and, like, I think I think NVIDIA like, I read some articles about it, and they were like, they understand how large the revenue pool it's selling to China is. Right. They were willing to be like, yeah. $33,000,000,000 is worth it for us. Wow. So, like, we so we will pay to play.

Speaker 1: Yeah. A remittance model for exports. That would be I'm curious if that will get extended to other technology. Like, I appreciate GPUs that have application in AI development are a uniquely sensitive type of it's true for a lot of silicon, but, like, they're they have sensitive applications in addition to consumer applications. I get treating them differently.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: I'm curious if this is the beginning of, like, a door being opened on if you can designate something that it becomes essentially, like, well, pay to pay to play. It's Mhmm. Pay us money, we'll we'll let you sell it to those people. It makes it harder to say out of the other side of your mouth that there's these grave security concerns about selling these products. It's like, well, they can't be that grave if a 15% tithe gets you past it.

Speaker 2: Good find. Appropriate appropriate term.

Speaker 1: Bit. Like, it good find.

Speaker 2: I can't help but feel that they knew that the product would end up there anyway. That

Speaker 1: feels like it is would be part

Speaker 2: of it. Has that kind of, like, do we legalize? Do we not legalize? You know, people are still gonna get access to it. People are still gonna be able to buy the drugs. Like, should we at least tax the drugs?

Speaker 1: What a metaphor. I love that. I'm not sure I love the situation, but I like that that comparison. Mhmm. That's an interesting Yeah. Okay. Well, good

Speaker 2: time to make a pivot.

Speaker 1: That's a it's a good pivot. Let let let me do another one.

Speaker 2: Okay. Keep going.

Speaker 1: Let's keep going. There's an interesting thing about a 100,000 shared chat g p t conversations appearing in Google search. So chat GPT has, like, a share link button.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: It lets you make, like, a public URL to share a conversation with people. And for a while, they had this toggle that they have, I think, since had an epiphany isn't a great idea

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Which is just you can just leave it on, which is make this chat discoverable and allowed those shared like, like, the shared version of the page to be indexed by search engines. You know, your chat gbt conversation, if that box is checked, can appear in Google results. OpenAI has now removed that functionality because of the high potential for accidentally leaving it clicked and exposing what is supposed to be a private conversation, and has been working on the process of trying to deindex any of the conversations that were originally indexed. A security researcher was able to collect, one over 100,000 shared conversations that were appearing inside of Google searches very, very recently. You got, like, the really mundane stuff that is most of ChatGPT, like cleaning up an email. And then you got super sensitive documents and deeply personal dilemmas people were tackling with ChatGPT, which there's another story there. Four zero four Media was reporting on this. They did a really good coverage. It's worth checking out. There was, like, uploaded nondisclosure agreements to, like, for visitors to open AI. Like, the call is coming from inside the house. There's, like, mental health chats. There's, like, contracts being drafted by, like, businesses of various sizes. It's a there's been, like, different numbers of these reported, but it's looking in that, like, 100 k range of these things that were, that were publicly indexed and are still up. I just Fascinating.

Speaker 2: To me, it just seems like feeding the robot its own output to learn and grow from. Yeah. It's like exponential hallucinations.

Speaker 1: When you say that, are you referring to by its outputs being indexed on Google and Google being fed into the system? That k. I understand.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like Yeah. It's a great goop situation. Yeah. Exactly. If Gemini is consuming ChatGPT's outputs and vice versa, all of a sudden, you've got hallucinations that are then compounding off previous hallucinations and just, like Sure. It's like, where will we end up?

Speaker 1: That was a thing when, oh my god. What was that open source model that everyone was talking about six months, us included?

Speaker 2: Gwen? Llama?

Speaker 1: Let not Llama. It's the, like, oh

Speaker 2: Who made it?

Speaker 1: It came out of China.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Probably Gwen.

Speaker 6: Was it Gwen?

Speaker 2: Was that the name of it? Q q w q. There's a bunch of Chinese models. Alibaba puts one out.

Speaker 1: DeepSeek. GSDSeek.

Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. The big one.

Speaker 1: The big one. That was the big one. I remember when that came out, there was a lot of speculation that the training data that they might have used on that was largely, text outputted by other models. You would have, like, models write you just tons of different styles of writing on different subjects, and then ingest those into the system as part of to make the training data set bigger than just what was already available. So I think that's already kind of happening.

Speaker 2: That is one of the ways that they fine tune these things now. Yeah. Totally. So that's gone from, like, a like, an intellectual property best discussion to a

Speaker 1: Best. Like, standard practice.

Speaker 2: Like, an incremental augmentation of existing models. Bingo.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Super interesting. And they're just they're indexed on the Internet. And now probably have been fed into other systems as well because they were indexed, which is less of a question. It's like, this is tricky because it's like you there was technically a box that you checked that said make this be Googleable. So, like, the point at which this goes from just being, like, bad user interface design to a privacy breach is, like, very blurry in something like this. But it's, like, the thing I'll say as a as a OpenAI product user is it's changing all the time. So just, like, when it changes, look at it. See what's changed. See if there's a toggle. Make sure you don't check the one that says, index this on Google if it ever reappeared. Like, just keep an eye on the tool you're using because that you're feeding it a lot of data.

Speaker 2: Similar to all the applications on my phone that add new notification types. Love that. Turned off all the notifications. Mhmm. It's like turned off all the notifications. Mhmm. It's like, hey. You add a new price of settings. Yep. They're all defaulted on. Yeah. Yeah. The as somebody who kind of passively enjoys peering into the darkness of the Internet, I occasionally go on Reddit. And the slash r slash grok, since they've released their animated companions, there have been I'm not gonna get into the details on any of them because some of them are pretty adult. Yeah. I've seen the I've seen them. But slash r slash grok has Yeah. Made me laugh dozens of time in the last week Okay. With people having, like, remorseful posts about what they've Oh. Done and shared with Annie and and, Valentine and all the rest of the people. And I'm like, oh my god. Apparently, there's a camera mode where you can turn on your camera, and Annie will see you and comments about you and talks to you. And

Speaker 1: That's darker than you investing in a crypto company. That's extremely dark. So

Speaker 2: so, anyway, if you if you need some, dark humor Yeah. Slash r slash grok.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I'm I'm going to sub. I mean, that's interesting because there was another thing just on the opening eye front that feels really relevant to that which was, so I didn't watch the whole interview. I just saw a clip of it. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI appeared on this past weekend with Theo Vaughn, extremely popular podcast.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: And in there's a section that where he talked about, like, the privacy. He acknowledged that people are using it as a therapist, and then that had started out as, like, a marketing copy thing of, like, you can use it as a personal fit. And now we're at the point of like, there's a problem with people using this as a therapist. And he spoke the quote was people talk about the most personal shit in their lives to chat g p t, which was a quote from Altman. He was talking about how young people are, like, treating it as a therapist, a life coach, asking these very personal questions. And he brought up something that I found really interesting, which is that, doctor privileged confidentiality and the fact that a doctor cannot be subpoenaed in the vast, vast majority of situations disclose something a patient told them sure does not apply to a chatbot. Totally. The quote that I liked was, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor, there is doctor patient confidentiality. There is legal confidentiality. We have not figured that out yet for when you talk to chat GPT. Quote, I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have the same concept of privacy for our conversations with the AI that we have with a therapist or whatever, and no one had to think about that even a year ago.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: I find I'm like, this is a very interesting conversation of, like, there is a great deal of support for the development of AI as an industry within, the government broadly, But at what point does there become resistance to, like, okay, when we can offer people privacy given the breadth of uses that exist inside this technology. And, like, is that going to become a conflict at some point in the future? Are there gonna be people to start pushing for that? It's, I think this is, like I'm seeing the beginning of a story I think we're gonna be living with for a while.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. There's, a, that's weird and shocking, but not shocking at the same time. B, a fun game to play. If you go to the bar with your friends k. Is you all open up your ChatCBT, Grok, whatever AI, Gemini, and you pass your phones around, and you get to look at the conversations that your friends have are having with these things. God. You'll learn more about your friends in that those twenty minutes than you will over a lifetime.

Speaker 1: It invites a, like, an emotional, like, back and forth. It's very different than Google, I'll say. Like, it because Google was always the thing that, like, if someone could see your Google searches, they could truly get to know you. But the fact that chat gbt, like, responds and asks more questions, it's like you drill down to stuff a lot quicker with these tools. Yeah. I won't I don't really use it on my phone very much.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: I use it in browser, and I tend to like, I don't want every dumb little email rewrite to be stored. So I I'm in, temp mode the vast majority of the time because I'm like, quickly clean the sentence up. Quickly do this and then just go away. Yeah. So the vast majority of it is just vanished into the ether to an extent. And thank god for that.

Speaker 2: I have a a friend of the pod. I won't call any names out, but they've been using so I put them on to Perplexity, like, Perplexity Labs and how cool it is and stuff. And Yeah. They've been using perplexity spaces to be their executive coach. So they uploaded

Speaker 1: Yes. Okay.

Speaker 2: They uploaded their personality test scores. They uploaded just so much stuff about themselves into the space, so kept it in contextual memory. And now they, like, have conversations with it as an executive coach. Yeah. Apparently, it's been wildly good. So even even, like, in in the office, like, you know, a meeting comes up that is with a senior superior that's gonna have some conflict in it. They'll have a discussion with the the coach Sure. To prepare them for that meeting and kind of talk through how to address it, how to best, you know, coach it and build the context for it and all the rest of this jazz. And And it's been wildly good for them. They have nothing but rave positive things to say about it. So

Speaker 1: That's what

Speaker 2: people are still, I think, finding, and people will continue to have not that that's a new use for it, but it's just very cool, I think.

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's fascinating. Did they check a box that makes it indexable by Google?

Speaker 6: I hope so.

Speaker 1: I really hope not. Yeah. Can you imagine Googling your, like, team member and finding conversations being, like, how do I break it to when you read your name? And I'm, like, I'm upset about

Speaker 2: this thing. It's like, oh, no. Yeah. I'm gonna say wait. If you're one of those people that Googles your own name, eventually, you start seeing other people's, like, chat conversations. That's the hell. That's so bad.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's pretty that's a good one. Yeah. I was I those those two stories about the chat gbt being indexed and the privacy statements, that Alma made on Theo Vaughn felt of some kind of a set.

Speaker 2: The, I got a I got a knock on to this. Mhmm. Not sure if you kept up on the comments of the last episode. Somebody took great, offense to me stating that our children would be trained by LLMs or taught by LLMs in the next coming years. And they needed to they needed to really really let me know that they were opposed to that and that I I don't know if they called me a shill for the AI industry, but it wasn't far from it.

Speaker 1: Oh, interesting. Yeah. Like, I don't I I'll say I don't want that to be

Speaker 4: the case, but

Speaker 1: I don't think that someone acknowledging that there will be probably people that wanna realize that, is Oh,

Speaker 2: well, thanks, Jordan.

Speaker 1: A value at all. It's like, yeah. I don't know. Are you wait. Are you a shield for the AI industry?

Speaker 2: Not yet. I'm becoming a shield of the crypto industry first.

Speaker 1: Sure. Yeah. But it's a long tail thing. You were in yeah. Right. Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2: But the the more conversations I have with people around AI

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: The different perspectives you see, and I think the different amount of consumption of knowledge around it, you you decipher from your people you're talking to. Like, I feel like I read a lot with them. I I utilize them a lot. I do a lot with AI, and I've developed a pretty real understanding of where it could go. And I know some other friends of ours, another friend of the pod that you're going to Germany with. Mhmm. He he and I share very similar perspectives as to where this is going. Yeah. And I I can't help but think that being I'm not a doomer, but, like, I think I have a realistic perspective on it and the power that it can hold. And I think we're only seeing that now with people utilizing it as therapists, as executive coaches. It's actively and continuously replacing small menial tasks that people used to get paid to do. And it those tasks are gonna get bigger and bigger like the coding space every week. Like, cloud, Anthropic just announced today that they've expanded the context memory for cloud so large that you can essentially feed it a massive software systems code base, and it will keep it all in context. So Mhmm. That means it will be the largest and best programmer on your team. Because if you have a 10,000,000 line software project, no single coder knows all of those lines. So, anyway

Speaker 1: Yeah. It's interesting. I hope how do I put this? I hope it is embraced as a tool to make the jobs that people do better and less menial to borrow that word. And I hope that it is not used as a tool to not have to do important roles in society. Like, I I want there to I I want there to be teachers. I want there to be thing it's like I think that there's, a human touch is needed for a lot of really important things and they can be using those tools to eradicate menial tasks. And I'm sure students will end up using them. Like, we give kids Chromebooks. It will become part of pedagogy. I think those can both be true.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I wrote something a few months ago

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 2: That kinda talked about how my entire life has existed during, like, the technological revolution. Yes. And, you know, it's increased our economic productivity. We got email on our phones. We're accessible everywhere. Back in the day, you used to have to, like, you know, go to an office, send things by mail, fax machines. You know, we've constantly got better at getting more productivity out of people. And I'm hoping that AI is the thing that inverts that correlation. So instead of there being an expectation that you're always working, that you're always available, that you can always be reached, that maybe AI facilitates it so we can have a bit more of our life back, but keep the similar productivity level. I don't don't know if that's where we're gonna end up, but, boy, would it be nice. Like, I would love us as a society to to utilize AI not to replace, you know, the things that bring us joy, but allow us to focus on them better and also maybe get us to a two or three day work week. This is my this is my hope.

Speaker 1: This is your hope.

Speaker 2: This is my hope.

Speaker 1: I hope for a world where everyone works two days a week and gets paid like they work five. Yeah. Because the two day work week without the pay for five is a is a new much larger problem

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 1: Called exploding unemployment.

Speaker 2: Knowing you and and myself, Jordan Yes. I feel like if our day jobs went down to two days a week, we would just find two more jobs to put in the work week.

Speaker 1: Yeah. The things that are wrong with me are aplenty and well documented. And that's pretty much top of the list. Yep.

Speaker 2: And on that bombshell. And on that note We'll see you next week.

Speaker 1: What an episode. Honkers Union, Chad GPT Scrapin'. All sorts of stuff this has been a fun one brought to you of course as always by push security I'll be back we'll be back for the next episode it'll be a little bit different but hope you come along for the ride and until then we're gonna catch you in the next one Take

Speaker 2: care.