Patching Humanity’s Security Hole - DTNSB 5083

0:00Meet Amazon Ads rising star Daryl Spencer, who set out to redefine men's self-care with his brand Crown Skin. Amazon Ads helped him grow.

0:08Huyen Tue Dao: I walked away from big tech to build a luxury brand in a category that no one was paying attention to. With the help of Amazon Ads, I'm reaching relevant audiences and competing with the biggest names in men's grooming. We've scaled to over$500 ,000 in monthly revenue. Watch Crown Skin's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. There are moments that reveal who we are and who we're meant to become. For those born to lead, such moments call for a vehicle of equal distinction. Dynamic by design, uncompromising in execution, the Range Rover Sport was engineered for those rare individuals who demand the world and possess the conviction to claim it.

0:50When your time to lead arrives, you need a vehicle that rises to meet it. The Range Rover Sport. Exclusive offers available now. Explore further at rangerover.com. Do you have an app idea you keep meaning to build someday? Well, someday just got a deadline. Ship-a-ton is back. The world's biggest mobile hackathon brought to you by Revenue Cap. It's simple. Launch a brand new app between August 1st and September 30th and compete for over$1 million in prizes. Win and your app could land on a billboard in Times Square, forever enshrined in app development glory. Join the fun at Ship-a-ton.com. This episode is sponsored by Morning Brew Daily.

1:33If you're anything like me, you want to stay informed about what's happening in business and finance, but you also don't have an hour every morning to sift through headlines. Morning Brew Daily is the go-to business news podcast for millions of people. It's a daily business news podcast that's a quick, fun, and easy way to start your day. Whether it's the latest in tech, markets, or the trends shaping the economy, the show breaks it all down in a way that's clear, engaging, and actually enjoyable to listen to. Hosts Neil Freiman and Toby Howell make the show feel like you're catching up with two friends while giving you the context you need to feel smarter and more confident throughout your day.

2:09New episodes drop every weekday wherever you get your podcasts. Tune into Morning Brew Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

2:19Huyen Tue Dao: This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, August 15th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know. We follow up on context. We help each other understand. We do it all. Well, today, Brian Brushwood thinks he knows how to patch the world's biggest security hole, humans. And Sam Altman dishes about everything with journalists over dinner. Oh, my dinner with Sam. I'm Tom Merritt. I'm Wintwet Doyle. Let's start with what you need to know with that big story. so thursday night open ai ceo sam altman held a dinner with several reporters in san francisco and let them ask anything they wanted on the record these are some of my least favorite kinds of stories to cover because unlike a typical press event every reporter has a different take it often casts the story as altman told me because well he did because you know they're all sitting around a dinner table uh they're kind of hard to sum up because of that and full of opinion and policy rather than straightforward announcements or decisions.

3:16Huyen Tue Dao: But this one's making all the headlines and may look like it's about a dozen different stories if you're looking online. So let's try to sum up the salient points and evaluate how significant they really are. You game? Yes, do it. All right. He said that if you project ChatGPT's current growth, quote, billions of people a day will be talking to ChatGPT and ChatGPT will say more words a day than all humans say. That's a great way to show how big chat GPT is. Current growth rates, however, don't always stay consistent. So I'm not sure if this is super useful or helpful, but it makes a great headline.

3:51I mean, the first part is impressive. The second part is it's a computer. It's software. It should do that. But yeah, billions of people a day would be very impressive for sure.

4:00Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, I guess. I mean, Facebook has billions of people a day using it. That's impressive, right? That is impressive. I'm not throwing shade when I say that. Like that's one of the things that makes Facebook so huge. So, okay. All right. He said, you should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on data center construction in the not very distant future. And I said, I'm not surprised. I mean, that's a big number, but it's not like it's a detailed projection meant for stock analysts or anything. Yeah, I would also expect this given the scale of everything. So that also tracks. I don't know if I'm impressed or horrified or both.

4:39Huyen Tue Dao: He could have said, we're going to spend a lot of money. And it would have meant the same thing, honestly. Yeah, pretty much. Jillions. He said, I suspect we can design a very interesting new kind of financial instrument for finance and compute that the world has not figured out yet. And I said, OK, cool, man. I mean, I wasn't at the dinner, but I would have said, good for you. I bet it's possible, too. If anybody can do it, you can. Yes. Agreed. Agreed. But not yes. But yes, anything is possible. And then he said, we can spend$300 billion and sell$400 billion in services, which is meant to be like we can be profitable.

5:16Huyen Tue Dao: But yeah, that's what every business believes. And many make it true. I don't see any reason not to believe OpenEye. I won't either. Yeah, most of what we're building out at this point is the inference. For those who don't know, inference is when you make a query and the system gives you back the answer, right? There's inference and there's training. There's a lot of other things, but those are the two big groups. So inference is answering the questions, not training it to answer questions. He said, we're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company.

5:50Huyen Tue Dao: We will be always training the next thing. But if we needed to run the company profitably and stay ahead, I think we probably could do that. Now, I would like more details on that, but that's a useful thing to think about. Uh, open AI is shifting from the expensive part, just train, train, train, uh, to the part that serves customers, which they can make money off of. That, and that makes a lot of sense, I think from just, I don't know much about AI, especially development of AI, but that makes a lot of sense, uh, in terms that the training would be the expensive part. but it's also the part that it's not like they have direct you know what I mean like there's definitely training techniques but there's a lot of indirectness to that whereas probably the inference they have a lot more control a lot more brain power can go into like a direct human brain power can go in it's just so ironic it feels like such an ironic thing to say we're complimenting the part where the brain the human brain goes in because the idea is that we could rely less on the human brains, but that it is still needed to prop up and continue to strengthen the chat GPT AI brain.

7:01That makes a lot of sense, I think. I think that's an interesting framing of AI as a business, especially the tech business. That's great. I like that part.

7:09Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah. I mean, sure. Would I like more details? Of course. But I'm taking Amanda's word that this isn't a bald-faced lie or anything. Especially because he also admitted that launching GPT-5 without the older models was not a good move. Here are his words. I think we totally screwed up some things on the rollout. We've learned a lesson about what it means to upgrade a product for hundreds of millions of people in one day and the differences in the kinds of attachments people have with this product versus previous products. You have people that are like, you took away my friend. You're horrible.

7:41Huyen Tue Dao: I need it back. But also there's scientists saying they can finally do real research using GPT-5, so it's not all bad. But I like that he didn't mince words. He's like, yeah, we didn't do that very well. I mean, that's also good to be kind of explicit about that also, but that's how product design works, regardless of whether it's intelligent or not. People do not like it when you change things. So change things suddenly, change things very suddenly. But yeah, I mean, that's fair. That's fair. Yeah. I like that the CEO of the company wasn't trying to spin it and go, well, he could have used that.

8:13Huyen Tue Dao: Product design always causes resistance and instead he's like no we screwed it up so i i appreciate that but the vibes were good as i as i hear nick turley over at uh open i said so unfortunately oh you know not not to be too mean about it but vibes don't always matter but yeah no i i do think that this kind of cannabis is very refreshing is is in and of itself very refreshing and needed especially during this particular time in history so um yeah yeah he also had a good answer when they asked him if we're in a bubble, like an AI investment bubble. He said, are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited by AI?

8:49Huyen Tue Dao: In my opinion, yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes. He thinks some current startup valuations are, in his words, insane, and that there is irrational behavior. And he added, someone's going to get burned there. I mean, that's useful insight. I don't think it's like, whoa, I never would have thought of that. But coming from the CEO of OpenAI, who you would expect to be like, no, AI is super strong and all the investment is worthwhile. Him saying like, no, some stuff's kind of insane. That's good to hear, too. No, absolutely. Especially from Sam Altman, who probably has some of the most futuristic, utopian kind of things that he's generally talking about all the time.

9:29It is impressive. I suppose if you wanted to be negative about it, you could, I don't know, pick it apart. But no, it's good to hear him say that, that at least even someone who is quite future thinking for better or for worse does see the weak links in the chain in terms of, I guess, the economics of it.

9:48Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, with the overheating of it. They also asked him if OpenAI would buy Chrome, the browser, if Google sold it, which some people are hoping that the court will order them to. I'm skeptical that's going to happen, but, you know, we had perplexity earlier this week say we'll buy it. And Altman said, if Chrome is really going to sell, we should take a look at it. I don't have a number in mind, but I would like to have it. So I'm like, OK, like that's nothing new, actually, beyond what was said in court in April by OpenAI's ChatGPT chief Nick Turley, which is like, sure, we'd love to have it. I don't know how much you ask it for.

10:27I mean, I would buy it if I could, but I really can't. Yeah, sure. Yeah, me too.

10:32Huyen Tue Dao: I imagine they have a better chance of affording it. But, you know, perplexity came with a number and all of that. So that's why he had to address that, I guess. They asked him about the brain computer interface company he's reportedly setting up. He said he thinks that's a cool idea. I was like, yeah, it is. Why else would you set up a company if you didn't think it was a cool idea? And he said it would likely be a separate company from OpenAI, but the structure hasn't been finalized, which is what was reported before. Not much different there. Some people make it a big deal out of that, that he confirmed it.

11:02Huyen Tue Dao: I'm like, well, I guess, I guess he confirmed it. He said he would love to work much more with Apple. And I think it's cool. Some of the stuff we're doing together, those were his words. That fuels my own crazy theory that Apple and open AI could merge someday, but it really just says he likes Apple, which is ultimately probably not surprising. I mean, that makes sense. Um, and it, the, I mean, I, okay. How would Apple, is it, is it, is it too, is it asking too much to kind of give me your elevator pitch on your crazy idea? Sure. Uh, Tim Cook needs a successor. Uh, Apple needs AI, uh, open AI, uh, once a different corporate structure, uh, and Altman is a big fanboy of Apple and would jump at the chance to be CEO of Apple someday.

11:50Huyen Tue Dao: So there you go. Connect the dots. I still think it's like a 17 % chance of happening. But yeah, I'm like, actually that could kind of make sense in a lot of ways. I think there is a multiverse out there where that might happen. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. He, Altman, also expects that the company will IPO someday, which we know he wants, so that's not shocking. But he did say another executive would handle the earnings calls because he called himself not well-suited to be CEO of a public company. But Tim Cook is. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, that kind of poured some cold water on the idea that he would take over as CEO of Apple someday if he's like, I don't want to do a public company, so maybe not.

12:35Huyen Tue Dao: He came down fairly firm with an answer on optimizing for engagement over usefulness. In other words, like not trying to just get people into a spiral of using ChatGPT all the time. He said, we are not going to do that. I do worry about it. The companies that are behind in getting AI adoption, this is the easiest way you can imagine to get more. So, yes, I think you will see that. And I think it's bad, really bad. That's more words than he needed, which makes me think he believes it or believes it's important. And I think generally that's a very good stance to take. because that is a problem that we have.

13:12And I think it's, it's sort of, it's, I mean, it's a problem very much from a human, like good of society perspective. It's not necessarily a problem from a company perspective, because a lot of times engagement either, and some percentage of this is, I think, inflated in my personal opinion, but some of it isn't that, you know, kind of engagement on any kind of like human interaction service increases revenue. And like, I see this on like a small scale and big scales, like is working in the industry. I do, I do appreciate that he said this and that it is important. I do worry how this kind of ties in though still, because I think, I think, I think there is something to engagement and usefulness being linked concepts.

13:51Um, and that the line can be blurry, but, um, I do appreciate, I mean, I genuinely appreciate that if anything that he said this publicly to a journalist, that's a good thing. Uh, and we should be more wary of it.

14:03Huyen Tue Dao: I said the next big model after GPT-5 will come faster than it took for GPT-5 to come after GPT-4, which is sort of vague, but at least it's giving a timeline of some sort. And he denies that he thinks progress on models has hit a wall, but he also agreed that there are limits to chat showing up. So it sounds like he thinks the progress is going to come outside of the chatting with the chatbot situation. It makes sense. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Honestly, a couple of nuggets in there. you know, interesting stuff, but, but nothing, nothing totally earth shattering. I mean, it always does feel a thing when I always feel like CEOs tend to be a little more reticent about sharing certain thoughts or even just speaking just casually, I guess, if you want to say to journalists.

14:50So that is impressive. And I do kind of take to heart some things that he said as like really big positives, but I think I, I don't disagree with your analysis and I appreciate, yes, the way that you frame this because I don't disagree on most of this. It was nice to hear, but, you know, kind of like, we'll wait and see.

15:06Huyen Tue Dao: It does more for OpenAI's relationships with the journalists that attended than anything else, I think. Well, it's not necessarily a bad thing. So, all right. Well, we love our relationship with you, the listener, because DTS is made possible by you, the listener. We want to thank Joni Hernandez, High Tech Oki, Chris Zaragoza, and welcome new patron, Dylan. Welcome, Dylan. Yay.

15:34Back to school is busy enough. The last thing you need is shopping that makes it harder. Whether you're moving into a dorm, your first apartment, or just getting organized for the semester, Wayfair makes it easy to get everything you need in one place. Furniture, bedding, storage, decor, study essentials, all at prices you'll love with fast shipping before move-in day. Get everything you need for back-to-school season. Shop Wayfair.com today. Hey guys, it's Drew Afualo from the comment section. Listen, it's time to stop settling for hair products that just don't work. With all the prestige brands at Sephora, upgrading your routine is easy.

16:14If your hair needs repair, they've got the K18 Leave-In Molecular Repair Hair Mask. If you're trying to level up your wash day, the Kerastase Elixir All-Time Hair Oil leaves your hair looking ridiculously shiny without feeling heavy. And if you're into that glossy, healthy hair vibe, the Gisu honey infused hair oil is a must have. Also, Sephora makes it super convenient with free shipping and same day delivery. Shop hair at Sephora and give your hair the upgrade it's been waiting for. You're a pro at running your life, at committing to your workout, at showing up every day. At Bombas, we're pros too.

16:47Pros at making socks. Our sport assortment has specialized socks for whatever sport you're committed to. Running, hiking, golf, Pilates, and so much more. Made with sweat wicking yarns, blister fighting details and targeted art support bombas sport is pro level socks from the pros of socks for another pro you go to bombas.com slash audio and use code audio for 20 off your first purchase that's bombas.com and use code audio when demand slowed for hydro jug amazon ads rising star hayden wadsworth pivoted when our bank account hit near zero my brother jake and i had one last shot to save hydro drug so we engineered the traveler a leak-proof coupler friendly tumbler amazon ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get.

17:32Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95 % of all of our sales. Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars. There's a reason millions of people start their day with Morning Brew Daily. Each morning, we break down the biggest news in business from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. All in a format that fits seamlessly into your day. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And we're ready to show you that business news doesn't have to be boring.

18:05So join us on Morning Brew Daily, available wherever you get your podcasts.

18:12Huyen Tue Dao: All right, there's more we need to do today. Let's get right into the briefs. All right, well, the Google Phone and Contacts app is rolling out customizable calling cards for some beta users. It gives you the option to have a full screen image instead of just the circle with the little picture. You can also pick a font and color for the name that appears near the top of the incoming call screen. That's nice. And then Android Authority reporting that Germany's WinFuture published an alleged spec sheet for the Pixel 10 Pro Fold, which we're expected to hear about at the Made by Google event next week.

18:43Huyen Tue Dao: If that's accurate, the spec sheet indicates it would be the first foldable phone with an IP68 rating. That would give you resistance to not only dust but also water. The Z Fold 7, by comparison, has an IP48 rating. The specs also say it supports 15-watt Qi 2 charging with the magnets with Pixel Snap accessories. Foxconn reported in its latest earnings report that it made 41 % of its revenue from cloud and networking products and 35 % from smart consumer products. You can also read that to mean it made more money off servers for NVIDIA and friends than it did making iPhones for Apple. And that will continue.

19:20Foxconn expects 170 % annual growth in the cloud and networking business, but lowered its expectations for smart consumer products.

19:29Huyen Tue Dao: That's good news for Foxconn, diversification, right? Mm-hmm. All right, get your big old spoonful of Morton's ready for this one. Bloomberg sources say the U.S. is in talks to buy a steak in Intel. Uh-huh. Let me say that again. Bloomberg sources say the U.S. government is in talks to buy a steak in Intel. Uh, supposedly that would mean Intel could speed up progress on its factory in Ohio, which has been delayed. Intel CEO Lip Bhutan met with the president of the United States earlier this week after the president had posted that he should resign. Intel did not comment on this. And the president's spokesman said discussion about hypothetical deals should be regarded as speculation unless officially announced by the administration.

20:09Huyen Tue Dao: Uh, as vague as this sounds, it's not the U.S. government's first move toward nationalizing its industries, though. Last month, the U.S. announced it would take a stake in a rare earth producer called MP Materials, making the U.S. the largest shareholder in that company. Well, Tom, I think you picked this story for me. But we have to thank RW Nash for tipping us off to the story on the subreddit. The Japanese hiragana character N shows up as a forward slash and N on some systems. And attackers are using that to make fake URLs look like they are legitimate links from Booking.com. The link goes to a page that claims someone has accessed the account maliciously with a button to terminate their access.

20:49And when you click the terminate button, it downloads a malicious installer that includes info sealers and remote access strogens.

20:56Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, keep an eye out on that. Even if that link looks right, look close. Yeah, it looks like a cursive N. Just don't click. A couple of legal stories regarding children and online behavior. The U.S. Supreme Court denied an application by NetChoice to put on hold a Mississippi law to check ages of users on social media. Now, that's getting reported as Supreme Court lets age checks continue, which is sort of true. But NetChoice is still suing about this in a lower court case. And Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that NetChoice has, in my view, demonstrated that it is likely to succeed on the merits.

21:32Huyen Tue Dao: So he just said, I'm not going to support a stay, but if this did come to the Supreme Court, it sounds like Kavanaugh would rule in NetChoice's favor. And over in Louisiana, the attorney general there is suing Roblox because it, quote, knowingly and intentionally fails to implement basic safety controls to protect child users from predators and also fails to provide notice to parents and child users of its dangers, allegedly by the attorney general of Louisiana. All right. And thanks to TaxiCab for pointing out this story on our subreddit. China's Biwin is making a mini solid state drive that is 15 millimeters by 17 millimeters by 1.4 millimeters, just a bit larger than a micro SD card.

22:16It comes in 512 gigabytes, 1 terabyte, and 2 terabyte capacities with maximum sequential read speeds of 3 ,700 megabytes per second. Two portable gaming PCs, the GPD Win 5 and OneNetbooks, one X player Super X, have ports to take the BiWin's mini SSD. No price or sale dates for the SSDs yet.

22:41Huyen Tue Dao: Little tiny SSDs? Little tiny, it's so cute. I mean, I guess it's not that different from an SD card, but just the idea that it's like, oh, no, it's actually a little tiny. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper. Well, Brian Bushwood was at DEF CON last week and was shocked by something he observed regarding security. Tom caught up with him to find out what it was. So, Brian, you've been going to DEF CON for, I don't know, how many years you've been going to DEF CON? A lot of years. This is the first time they let me out of my cage, though. Normally, I'm trapped in a vendor booth and my job is to sell trick wallets and trick decks and stuff.

23:19Huyen Tue Dao: So this time you got to walk around and talk to some security companies. And I know you started to realize something a little shocking to you. What was it? Well, yeah. So I've been dialed in on the weird things program. We were talking, you know, we speculate wildly about what AI is going to bring us. And one of the things about a year ago, I planted my flag that there's going to be a lot of AI powered scams. So I've been tracking that. And sure enough, I get phone calls from police detectives who are fans through World's Greatest Con asking, how do we handle this? And I was like, I don't think anybody's really leading the charge on this aspect of it.

23:56So sure enough, the numbers are staggering, like 2000 percent increase year over year. 2025 is a 500 percent increase or something over a previous year. Don't pin me down on the numbers. You can Google them yourself. But basically, yes, impersonation scams fueled by AI, deep fakes and research are off the charts, which means a new set of victims who are unsophisticated to these scams are getting targeted. And so then the question becomes, well, what are the protections against it in a world where, you know, 2025, we've already lost more reported money than all of 2024. And there are a lot of security companies out there.

24:35And yes, they all have classes, tutorials. They all have quizzes at the end to train your people up. That is all, if you've read Thinking Fast and Slow, that's all system two logic brain stuff. And it all relies on be diligent, which humans can do up to until they can't, at which point they slip and then stuff gets through the cracks. And so then I was thinking, well, what's a system one, a gut level, an instinctual thing? And Gavin DeBecker in his book, The Gift of Fear, says, look, system one gets a bad rap because you can fool it with logic puzzles. But at the end of the day, that's what kept humans alive.

25:12We ain't got scaly skin or fangs or claws. We have intuition and that's all we need to know when something's off. But in order to train your gut instinct, there's no substitute for doing the reps and not just doing the reps by book, but instead doing the reps with stakes attached to it. You can read all of the books in the world and know theoretically how to perform a magic trick. But when that spotlight hits you and you have to fool another person, it is a completely different routine when you're role playing as the deceiver. So at this point, I started to investigate, OK, instead of just force fed materials, is there anything out there that gamifies deception?

25:53And sure enough, there is, I think, 16 plus companies I found that have gamified systems where you get to play pretend fish a AI target or something. But the problem with that, that's training your humans on synthetic data. There are no stakes attached to it, which means the knowledge, the structural knowledge does not move from your logic brain down to the gut level, the instinctual. There are. So in other words, there are people who do penetration tests. They will come and do human on unsuspecting human. There's role play stuff where both parties know their role playing. But again, that doesn't that doesn't take the lesson from upstairs to the guts.

26:39And likewise, the people who are doing penetration tests, those people are, forgive me if anybody's doing this. I think it's awesome that you're doing it. But in terms of training up the students, yeah, the students, the actual employees, they essentially are watching a stunt spectacular and then getting a book report of all the cool tricks that they saw in the stunt spectacular. Yeah, yeah.

27:01Huyen Tue Dao: Well, it's like somebody identifying all the holes in the wall and saying, there they are. Make sure those are plugged. Yeah, you could look right through them, huh? Yeah, that's pretty great. Well, and so what I am proposing and what I have yet to find out there is something that is gamified peer-to-peer. And by peer-to-peer, I mean somebody role-playing as deceiver and somebody unwittingly, unwillingly playing as the deceived. And what this does is this changes the game completely because, number one, ask anybody who's learned a magic trick. There's one thing to learn it, and then you hand them the deck of cards and you watch them completely seize up.

27:43So it would have to be, I jotted down some notes, this is in progress. So it may sound like I've got a product. I do not.

27:51Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, this is just your reaction from DEF CON. You're sort of assembling this right in front of our eyes, right? Exactly. And you're going to hear iteration on this. But if you're interested, you can reach out to me and we can build it together maybe. But basically what I can picture, because part of the reason you don't have this and everybody correctly instantly says, oof, A-Shar, because yes, the whole purpose of this game, picture a secret Santa rotating thing where you're assigned a target and everything could be opt-in where you know you're going to be a target, but you don't know who's going to make you a target.

28:24And there'll be actual stakes because all scams move on the levers of fame and shame.

28:31Huyen Tue Dao: And just to back it up a little bit, what you're saying is you get the employees in the company. So the red team identifies the holes in the wall. You get the employees in the company to try to shoot arrows through the wall at each other so that you go, oh, we didn't plug that hole, right? Yes, yes. And so, again, so what you're doing is you're undergoing. It's like going to the gym. You go to the gym and you push against great resistance. Your cells tear apart and then they rebuild stronger. We're doing that with minor safe gotcha moments. Picture if you ever played the circle game, you know, you were constantly on the lookout for opportunities to trick your friends into seeing you make the circle.

29:08Or as a matter of fact, congratulations, everybody out there listening just lost the game, that kind of thing. But you want to figure out increasingly clever ways to do it. So the more reps you do with that, the more laps you take role playing as the deceiver, the more that institutional memory moves down into the gut. But you don't want it to be a terrible H.R. violation. So in the world of skepticism, when it comes to pseudoscience and the paranormal, this is the critical key that magic played. Because if you train scientists in the lab in all of the skills of being a magician, they were automatically on guard to catch them in the lab.

29:47Now, the James Randi solution, if anybody listened to World's Greatest Con, was, oh, just staple a James Randi to it. And that's kind of what everyone's doing right now is the solution is have a red team and staple that onto your organization. But I'm here to say, let's go BitTorrent on this. Let's go peer to peer. Now, of course, you're going to have to have guardrails. You're going to have to work in cooperation with HR. Everyone's going to have to be opt in on it at first until we figure out a way not to. But the punishment will quite simply be to have gotten got. You're going to at some point over the next month or whatever, click on a thing and then see whether it's a double thumbs up from the CEO that says you got got.

30:27That mild association repeated over time is what builds automatic defenses. And so what we have is an incoming financial crisis of AI powered scams. and what we need are automatic system one defenses. So I think, I guess what I've pieced together so far, and you can add moderators at all level of this, like somebody can propose to their coach the attack that they want to do, and then they can check with HR and sign off on it.

30:57Huyen Tue Dao: But for anybody who's not following, what Brian's proposing is the weakest link is always the humans, right? And so usually what you say is, well, you tell them to be diligent, but there's only going to be so good. So we need perimeter defenses. We need these other things to limit the exposure. And what's Brian saying is, what if we actually could improve the human's ability by having them play with each other so that they are always on guard that, you know, Pat next door might be trying to get them, which if they keep themselves from getting got by Pat next door, that'll also keep them from getting got by malicious actor who wants to steal the company's intellectual property.

31:35Exactly. And there's precedent for this in the animal kingdom. When you see two tiger cubs engaged in rough and tumble play, it's an adorable animated gif. But of course, what they're doing is they are learning by rote the exact same skills that will make them deadly predators and excellent defenders. That's why tickling is an intimacy bonding activity between humans is because now the punishment is this strange torture slash joy, this torture that makes you full of joy and love. But the point is, whether it's magic trick related, whether it's gentle fishing, circle game type activities, right now, the farthest I've gotten, and I do encourage other people to help me build this out or steal the idea and then hire me to help you do it.

32:22Actually, that's not – I prefer the former.

32:26Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, yeah. Let's start there. No, I would say like, and you were starting to address some of the problems with it. Like, okay, what if people feel abused? You know, what if people abuse the privilege of doing this? There are rules that have to be set and you need to figure out what those are. But if someone does have ideas of like, oh, I think you could set up this way. These are guardrails that I think would work. This is a challenge I can't solve. How do they get in touch with you to figure that out? Just brian at schwa.com, B-R-I-A-N at S-H-W-O-O-D.com. But as far as I've gotten that I could do today would be like a kickoff keynote briefing over YouTube or over Zoom.

33:03We could do two deception sprints with so many attempts, weekly lab sessions, real time coaching. You could do metrics of performance before and after. You could have a list of no goes. You've got ideas.

33:17Huyen Tue Dao: You've got ideas, but you're looking to gather more of them. So I think this is just part one of our conversation. I agree. I agree. Because kind of rolling out that concept that you identified of like, hey, what if we could actually improve people? And it's kind of fun and it becomes second nature because it is kind of fun. I think that's genius. Brian, thanks. Thanks for giving us the earliest peek at this. And feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com or BrianAtSchwood.com. Either way, if you got feedback on this. And we will definitely follow up with you, Brian, to figure out where this goes because I'm intrigued.

33:52Huyen Tue Dao: Awesome. So what do you think, Quinn?

34:22get training or are aware of it, but in very passive ways. Like I think any kind of security training I've had as someone who works in tech has been passive because I don't work in security. I presume it would be different if I did. And I do think that there is something to what Brian was insisting on that it needs to be a practice, almost like muscle memory, instinctual thing. And that we don't really provide human beings. We provide human beings a lot of warning, but not, but not a lot of training. I mean, that's what he's saying, but that to have a lot of practice, right yeah it's like active training yeah yeah yeah you need to be good at this good luck yeah yeah um and and so i think that part is extremely compelling like i do think it's extremely like because because um i said i said we have training like not passive training but active training and yeah like i think that is sorely needed it's just that we don't have structures i mean this is the problem that's why i think my feelings are mixed because we don't have good structures for this to be constructive and helpful and to build us up and i i only worry about how to do like the competition like this kind of like there's a little bit of competition in there there's a little bit of like the being got part is always a little bit dicey i think for human beings just because we're human beings um but i do think there is something here to letting people understand more deeply and from both sides i do like the idea and the james randy example with you know him being a magician that turned around to becoming a debunker of hoaxes and things like that that there is a lot of something to that because we do have to understand the mindset of these things coming.

35:54So I like that a lot. And especially now that AI is here, this is one of those things that it does accelerate, like just with all the possibilities out there right now. And just even the scale at which these kinds of things can be done is very frightening. So we do need, I don't know, hesitate to say like almost like a human being action vaccine. And that maybe this is what I, again, all caveats, like we really need to figure out to do this so that people aren't punished for getting got and that it's morally learning experience. But, and that's my concern, the HR thing, but I do think - Yeah, yeah.

36:25Huyen Tue Dao: No, and I think that's a valid concern. I think what Brian thinks is like, I bet I can solve that part, right? Yeah, no, I mean, yeah. And that's the next step is like trying to figure out how to solve that part. No, and I absolutely, humans are the biggest security hole, whether we like it or not. So I like a lot of the ideas for sure, Brian. So, yeah. One of the things I talked to off off the recording was you could have a leaderboard for people who didn't get caught them under the most attempts. Like there were 17 fishing attempts against Kelly and Kelly didn't fall for any. So, you know, it's all positive.

37:01Huyen Tue Dao: Whereas the negative things are just happening, you know, between you and your computer. Yeah. It's like only having a thumbs up and not a thumbs down. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. Well, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Follow up with us, folks, for any ideas you want to pass along to Brian. Just a heads up, if you haven't heard us talk about this all week long, there is no regular Daily Tech News show next week because it is our annual experiment week. We are swapping out our normal DTNS show and trying out some new ideas. In previous years, we launched shows like Behind the Data and The Tech John.

37:38Huyen Tue Dao: And this year, we have exclusive Android Faithful Reaction to the Pixel event, to the Made by Google event. We've got Roger interviewing Adam Sessler. That's just to name a few. There's also a beauty tech show coming from Nika Monford. It all starts next week on Monday. So you will get shows. They just won't be news because this is August, you know, the vacation time. All next week on the feed and then back to regular shows on the 25th, the week after that.

38:11Huyen Tue Dao: Your team just added its 67th AI tool and also your 67th security blind spot. The good news? The Vanta agent works like a GRC engineer in the background, finding every app your team uses, scoring the risk and drafting fixes for you. Vanta is the platform used by over 16 ,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp, Cursor, and Harvey, who are shaping the future with AI and staying ahead of AI risk. Get started at Vanta.com. When demand slowed for HydroJug, Amazon Ads rising star Hayden Wadsworth pivoted. When our bank account hit near zero, my brother Jake and I had one last shot to save HydroJug. So we engineered the Traveler, a leak-proof, cup holder-friendly Tumblr.

38:51Amazon Ads enables a business to be able to expand their product shelf because of the visibility and the reach you can get. Each week, our new-to-brand customers make up about 95 % of all of our sales. Watch HydroJug's story at advertising.amazon.com slash rising-stars.

39:11We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. Today, Allison has a very good question about Chrome.

39:18Huyen Tue Dao: Yeah, on DTNS, Jason and I talked at length about perplexity's offer to buy Chrome. And Allison says, it leveled me with one dumb question. Why does Chrome by itself have any value? It doesn't include search revenue. It doesn't include ad revenue. Chromium is still an open source project. So what is Chrome other than an interface to the internet? Like, what are they buying if they buy Chrome? and my answer I don't know if you've got an answer when but my answer is users you've got a huge user base that you can then put your product in front of the reason perplexity wants it is they want to build perplexities tools into that and possibly get some subscriptions the reason at google benefits from it is they get a bunch of users that they can put their search engine and their ads front and center.

40:11Huyen Tue Dao: And I assume OpenAI would get it and make it into a ChatGPT version of Chromium, right? Yeah. And I think that's hitting the nail on the head because it's hard because I think those of us who listen to DTNS are a bit more tech savvy and tech aware than anything else. The vast majority of people that use Chrome don't probably have many opinions about any other browser or may not even know of any other browsers. They just use Chrome because it's there it's present and it's convenient and they don't really have a lot of impetus or like information with which to change their browser and that's a big deal i think adoption of any software is a very very steep curve and if you buy chrome we just buy something that is recognizable that if even if people don't exactly know what it is they're familiar with it and then we kind of referenced that earlier too about with the chat gpt people don't like change so if chrome you know like if and people don't like change so it's very difficult there's like a lot of entropy in users.

41:05So if you could buy an entire built-in user base of millions, billions, millions of people, at least it, that's very valuable in and of itself. And then you just plug in your, your, your ad serving or AI, AI have an infrastructure behind that. You kind of have gotten the instant nitro button at the beginning of the race, more or less, I think. That's my thing.

41:29Huyen Tue Dao: It's the reason G4 bought Tech TV, if anybody remembers that. G4 had like, I don't know, 7 million homes and Tech TV was in something like 30 million homes. And suddenly overnight, G4 was in 37 million homes or less because there was some overlap. But yeah, you're just buying that user base. It is. But that's a really great question. Thank you so much, Allison. Well, what are you thinking about? You want to ask us something? You have insight into a story? please share it with us. Feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com. Big thanks to Brian Brushwood and Allison for contributing to today's show. Thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show.

42:08Huyen Tue Dao: You can keep us in business. Become a patron. Get exclusive episodes. Get early episodes. Patreon.com slash DTNS. It's cheaper than eggs.

42:24Huyen Tue Dao: This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show briefing were created by the following people. host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host and writer Jason Howell, co-host Rob Dunwood, co-host Jen Cutter, co-host Wen Tui Dao, producer Anthony Lemos, producer Roger Chang, editor Hammond Chamberlain, editor Victor Bognat, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Detterding, our mods, Beatmaster, W Scottus1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso, and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen.

42:59Huyen Tue Dao: Music provided by Martin Bell and Dan Luters. Art by Len Peralta. Acast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Bobby Wagner. Our guests this week were Bodie Grimm and Brian Brushwood. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.

43:16The DTNS family of podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.

43:30Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle, host of the Nutrition Diva podcast. Summer is here and with it, the hot and sticky weather. A morning working in the garden or maybe on the golf course can leave you more depleted than you realize. And plain water isn't always the most efficient way to restore the balance. That's where liquid IV comes in. Its science-backed formula is clinically proven to hydrate faster than water alone. Whether you're exercising, playing outside, or simply surviving a summer heat wave, it's an easy way to stay hydrated. Shop now at liquidiv.com. Liquid IV, hydration that goes wherever life takes you.

44:06Morning Brew Daily breaks down the biggest news in business every morning so it fits seamlessly in your day. I'm Toby Howell. And I'm Neil Freiman. And each morning we cover everything from the latest tech headlines to why nobody can afford a house right now. You'll leave each episode of Morning Brew Daily smarter and ready to take on the world around you. And some people are saying it's the best part of their morning. Because we know something you don't. Business news doesn't have to be boring. Join millions of monthly listeners and check out Morning Brew Daily wherever you get your podcasts.

44:49Thank you.