The Company Secretly Turning Your Zoom Meetings into Podcasts

0:01This episode is brought to you by Focus Features. On March 27th, Focus Features invites you to be a part of the most explosive movie of this year's Sundance and South by Southwest film festivals. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse, is being called supremely entertaining and the most urgent movie of our time. The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse, rated PG-13, only in theaters March 27th.

0:33Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media Podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist-bounded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me today are two of the other 404 Media co-founders, the first being Emmanuel Mayberg. Hello. And Jason Kebler. Hello. Any housekeeping, Jason? I feel like no. I feel we're good on all fronts.

1:19Yeah, I don't know. Nothing comes to mind. Well, in that case... Let's get on with it. Yeah, I won't waste anybody's time. Let's go straight to the stories. The first one this week is from Emmanuel. It's frankly really, really wild. The headline is, this company is secretly turning your Zoom meetings into AI podcasts. So obviously we'll get into the specifics in a minute, Emmanuel. But as with a lot of good stories, this actually started with a tip from a 404 Media reader What did they say? What did they see? And what did they tell you? Yeah, so this reader's name is Tom Radmatcher. I'm hoping I'm pronouncing that correctly.

2:04He is a former teacher and somebody who is just very involved in education more broadly. And shortly after we saw a lot of ICE activity around schools and teachers being really worried about how to protect some kids in their community, he put together a Zoom call for other teachers he knows, some local officials in his area. and yeah, anyone who wanted to know how to protect these kids during an ICE raid. And the link to this Zoom meeting was shared only via email. And he assumed that it was private for that reason, even though technically the private settings didn't require a password or anything like that.

3:05He had the meeting, everything went well. And then a few months later, he gets an email from someone called Sarah Blair from a company called Webinar.TV. And she tells him, hey, just so you know, this webinar you did is featured on our website. And we also turned it into a podcast called the Phil and Amy Highlights Show. and he was obviously very surprised because he didn't know anyone he didn't invite to this call had access and was pretty concerned that it was featured somewhere and turned into a podcast because some of the people who were on the call would not want to be publicly associated with something that may appear like anti-Trump or anti-administration yeah this is a very sensitive conversation even though there's no password on it you can totally understand the reasoning that well this is like de facto a private conversation because it's only been shared as far as they know like via email and that sort of thing there's no again as far as they know third party listening in but somehow and we'll get to potential methods in a bit but somehow this company listened in recorded the zoom meeting which again was pretty damn sensitive and then turned it into like some weird AI podcast.

4:28So you go then to webinar.tv's website. What do you see there? It's almost like a low-tech YouTube, if I was to describe the UI. There is a counter in the top right corner of the website that says they have over 200 ,000 webinars hosted there. and you can browse them by category or tag. And they each have a thumbnail and a short description and title. And you'll click on any one of them. You'll usually get three things. You'll get a short AI-generated summary, like video summary of what the call is about. You'll get the contents of the webinar or meeting broken up into chapters. And you can jump to any point in the meeting that way.

5:30And then in some cases, not all cases, there is this Phil and Amy podcast, which is two AI-generated personalities who are discussing the content of the meeting. including podcast banter and little lame jokes and everything like that. I don't know for a fact how this is generated, but it very much sounds like a notebook LM type of output where you can give it any text or video or whatever and it will turn it into a podcast. And those are like 15 minutes long or something like that. Yeah, I was going to bring up notebook. Notebook LM? I believe so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that is probably the AI podcast product that most people are familiar with, right?

6:25That came out somewhat recently, several months ago, maybe a little bit longer than that. And the idea was that you could feed your notes into this and it would generate an audio podcast for you. So you could have some friendly podcast voice basically regurgitating your notes or your study material or whatever to you. and sure, okay, some people might benefit from that. Maybe they want to put their research in there or whatever or they're a student and they're trying to cram all of their work in, whatever it might be. That's one thing. This is taking other people's Zoom meetings and basically doing the same thing.

7:03Obviously, without asking them, it's just emailing them after the fact and being like, hey, you're now in this random-ass clip show. Before we get into more of the specifics, just to check with that initial story. Did the reader manage to get that sort of material or webinar taken down at all? Yeah, he replied right away. He was like, what the hell is this? Please remove this. I didn't allow this. And the person who emailed him directed him to a takedown form, which is the type of thing we see on many platforms. He filled it out. And within a few days, it was removed. And yeah, by the time he reached out to me, it was already gone.

7:44Yeah, maybe you don't know this because it might be hard to tell from the outside. But like, is anyone watching this crap? Like either? Well, I mean, there's two things, right? There's the original webinar itself, which is basically being captured and published on online. And some people might watch that because maybe, I don't know, there's some internal machinations or a speech or something that somebody may want to watch. There's that. And then there's the AI stuff as well. Is there any indication of whether they're actually being viewed or not? Or we can't tell? What do you make of that? Yeah, good question.

8:20Short answer is we can't tell. Unlike YouTube, there's nothing on the website that indicates how many views a video has. They don't have comments. You can't see how much engagement they're getting or anything like that. So we really don't know. I will just say briefly, in terms of monetization, as far as I can tell, While Webinar TV does not sell ads against any of these, that is not the plan. It appears that the plan is to upsell people to promote their webinars on Webinar.TV. So the whole reason they're reaching out to Tom, they're not just telling him out of the goodness of their hearts that they took his Zoom meeting and turned it into a podcast.

9:08they're saying, hey, you're featured here. And then they have a bunch of services to promote your webinar on webinar.tv. Whether anyone is interested in that, also, I have no idea. Yeah, it's very weird because maybe to be charitable for just a second, maybe they did think, oh, there's a market gap and a market fit. There's all these interesting webinars happening at companies, but then they forget to record them or they don't promote them enough, we can go in there and we can help these companies promote it. That is not the same when you are essentially somehow infiltrating Zoom meetings that people at least believe are private.

9:53I mean, presumably it's automated in some capacity. So maybe that's the reason. But obviously, they are going to piss off a lot of people by doing this. you found one of my webinars as well or rather one I was in what was the deal with that? Sorry Jason, go ahead Since you published this someone sent me one of mine as well Oh, which one is yours? Something I did with PBS like a few months ago so yeah we're on there Well, just on that Jason because it sounds kind of similar to mine mine was it was designed to be public. Like it was like sort of a, maybe not an invite only, but you're supposed to RSVP to this webinar that I did with Freedom of the Press Foundation about, hey, here's how we file for new information requests, that sort of thing.

10:45It's definitely supposed to be public. So it's different to the ICE meeting that Emmanuel opened the story with. Jason, if yours was with PBS, it sounds like that's also supposed to be public, but I kind of doubt... It was not. No, it's not. So it's interesting because it was like this thing with teachers about AI in schools. And so PBS has this... I don't really know what it is. I was surprised to learn about it. But basically, they have an educational arm where they do meetings with teachers sometimes to talk with people who are making news. And it's similar in that they do circulate the link to the webinar kind of publicly, but you're supposed to be a school teacher to join it.

11:35And the one that I went to, as far as I knew, there were only school teachers there. And you had to register for it, but the link was gettable. But it wasn't something where it was like, this is made for the masses. And it was also something where it was... I mean, I didn't care. I was happy to have what I said be public, but I guess because some of the teachers didn't want to get in trouble necessarily because they were talking about troubles that they were having in their school, it was supposed to be a space for teachers to be able to talk about these struggles without that being circulated widely, essentially.

12:19Yeah. So not ideal. A short thing about that, I didn't say this in the story because it is maybe a lot of editorializing. But Joe, I don't know if you would call the thing you did with Freedom of the Press, which I found on Webinar TV. I don't know if you would call it a webinar. Jason, I don't know if you would call the thing you did with PBS a webinar. Webinar is kind of an outdated term. When I think about webinar, I think about like, I don't know, 10 years ago, you would sign up for a class that you do online. And that is a webinar. And 10 years ago, the way you would use Zoom and other video conferencing software is either at work or for something that is one of these old school webinars.

13:21The thing that makes this service so weird right now is that post-COVID, there is this whole other category of Zoom meeting. I'm sure we all remember and cringe about having Zoom drinks during the pandemic. You mean the best time of my life, but yeah. Yeah, but it's like, that has stuck... Zoom as having this third utility where you can get a bunch of teachers together and discuss a thing happening in your community. And it's not quote-unquote private in the technical sense or by the strict definition of it. But it's not a class that people are signed up for. It's a thing where you're inviting a specific group of people to meet on a video conferencing tool.

14:19I talked to another group of people whose Zoom call was scraped by Webinar TV. They were a bunch of paralegals in Canada. They obviously had no idea that they were up on that website. And they said like, hey, technically, this is in private. it like we didn't make it a secret but it's like it's not for everyone right it's like we didn't invite the public to come to this thing we invited like other paralegals to discuss a thing in our profession specifically and they were like i guess we can't sue them but they did make it clear that it made them very uncomfortable that that it was happening and it's like there's another case where people are like yeah this is open to everyone but the point is to make it free and accessible and to not allow anyone to monetize it.

15:11And we're not sure that we're cool with another company trying to monetize it without our permission. Yeah. It is absolutely in the same bucket as Zoom bombing, which is what happened a lot during the pandemic. And then after, as you say, when people continue to use Zoom and you have... I know Jason covered it. A lot of these, what was it, city council meetings, Jason, where people would join and then hurl horrible insults during meetings, that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting though, because as Emanuel reported, they have, I assume, a bot that joins, obviously. And it's like, so the bot is not disrupting.

15:49And I think for the most part, it seems like the people that you talk to, they don't realize that this bot is in there necessarily. And so it's not disruptive to the actual webinar experience, but I even hesitate to call it webinar, but to the Zoom call experience. But it is then after the fact, the organizers find out or people who participate in it find out that they've been turned into this weird AI podcast and then they feel quite violated. Yeah. I feel like I bring up this example a lot, but it really was formative to my understanding of data and privacy. But years and years ago, when we worked at Motherboard, I covered the work of this researcher who made a profile on a dating website and then scraped all of the data, which was just behind a login wall.

16:43He believed it was public data. You just had to make an account on a dating site and log in. He scraped all of that data, then he made it public. And that was obviously an extreme recontextualization of that data that people believed it was private. You know, yeah, it's not end-to-end encrypted, but it's like behind a login wall and account on a dating site, and now it's public. It's very similar here where, yeah, sure, there might not be a password on the Zoom, which is allowing some sort of technical access from this company. But in the context of the conversation, they are treating it like a private conversation.

17:16I think that's absolutely reasonable. So Jason mentioned a bot. I'll say, kind of beyond that, or maybe even including that, we don't fully know what is happening here in a technical sense, right, Emmanuel? So like, what do we know? What were you able to figure out? And ultimately, do we know how Webinar TV is actually like recording this stuff? Or is it still sort of unclear? Yeah, we don't really know. There's a few theories. It's interesting because every person that I talked to had a different theory for how this happened. I talked to the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They obviously have people who know a lot about privacy and cybersecurity and all that.

18:05But they speculated that they were doing it through one of the Zoom APIs that was allowing them to see what meetings were public and jumped into them based on that. There is an organization in Alberta called Cyber Alberta, which is just a bunch of local cybersecurity professionals. they did a report about this. And they theorized that Webinar TV was actually doing this via some Chrome browser extensions that were letting them know when people were in a Zoom call and doing it that way. And then finally, what everyone I talked to said was that these calls were not private technically, as in they didn't require a password.

18:58and there were enough people in the Zoom meeting. So when I asked, do you think there could have been a bot in there recording the meeting? They said, yeah, it's possible. So we're not sure exactly what the mechanism is. Those are just some theories. Yeah. Again, I'm also speculating. You know more about it than me. But just going on the story that you started with and that person in the ICE teachers meeting sharing the link only via email and then somehow it's still being recorded. I don't know, that maybe leads some ammo to the browser extension argument that someone in that meeting had some sort of browser extension that is doing this somehow.

19:43And then, but I don't know. Or, I mean, frankly, there is also, of course, a possibility that, yes, they believe it was only shared by email, but then maybe one person shared it outside. Somebody put it on LinkedIn. Right, we don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. but very, very interesting. So I guess just to wrap up this section, what did Zoom tell you? Because it is not a Zoom issue. It's just this is happening on Zoom. But what did the company tell you? Zoom is well aware. They know about this company specifically. And all they said basically is we have privacy settings and you should use them. That makes a lot of sense.

20:23I would also note that because of COVID, Zoom has been subject to a lot of press coverage. And a lot of that press coverage did focus on Zoom bombing. And they said, verify the identity of the people that you're inviting to Zoom calls, which I think is totally fair. I think it's not necessarily Zoom's problem to solve. It's not their responsibility. But I also think that putting the onus on this teacher who is just trying to get with other teachers and discuss an important issue and then have them verify the identity of every single person who joins. Maybe some of those people don't want to verify their identity.

21:17that's not a good solution either. I think really what we're talking about is a really cynical bad actor finding software with a vulnerability and exploiting it in a super douchey cynical way. Yeah. I wouldn't be surprised if Zoom sues this company in the same sort of way that Meta has sued people selling Instagram followers. or so like, yes, it's not really like their problem, but it's a brand reputation issue. And it really sucks for these people as well. Yeah. If anyone has any more information on that, of course, please reach out to Emmanuel. We'll leave that there. When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one of my stories about what drove a millionaire who already had a lot of money, what drove him to become a, Cocaine Kingpin.

22:16We'll be right back after this.

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25:34Okay, we're back. And our next story is from Joe. The headline is An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire's Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin. Joe, who is Marty Tibbetts? I've never said his name out loud. I have. Tibbetts is what I say. And I think in the... No, maybe it was an earlier version. I just said Marty because I kind of liked it. But we can also just say Marty as well. I think it's a good name. So Marty is, sorry, was, and I'll explain that in a minute, a very, very successful executive. He ran these companies which were basically like back office customer support, almost, I think, a prison used them, you know, basically call centers.

26:26And he had a couple of those and they were, you know, apparently successful and brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars for him. Became very rich. But he was also very eccentric as well. He did all sorts of things and especially he loved to fly Cold War airplanes. So he ran an air museum and he, I think, owned around a dozen aircraft. And there's the sort of the collection aspect of it, like, hey, I'm going to travel to get this really, really rare Cold War jet and then bring it to the States or bring it to the museum or whatever. But then he would also fly them as well. He taught himself the banjo.

27:15He spoke all of these different languages. He was just always, it seems, looking for a new thing to get obsessed with, get very good at. And although he made a lot of money, it wasn't always about money. It seems it was like... It doesn't really cost money to learn the banjo, but he was very obsessed, it seems, with developing new skills and just trying to better himself, I think is the sort of nicest way to put it. And obviously that'll change as the story continues. Yeah, so very wealthy, a bit of a thrill seeker. I think we've all heard about people getting their pilot's license as a hobby.

27:59That's not a too crazy thing to do, but he kind of piloted exotic, rare planes and that eventually led to his demise, right? Yeah, this is not a normal Cessna aircraft that lots of beginners will learn to use and then fly as a hobby or short domestic flights or something like that. One aircraft he flew and he owned it was a DH-112 Venom, which I had not known about until I wrote this story, but I did a fair amount of research on it. And it is this Cold War aircraft that's very, very striking to look at. It sometimes has this black and red paint job. It actually has like two tails at the back. If you imagine a catamaran as in the boat, and that's like, you know, two vessels essentially attached by a platform in the middle, it almost looks like the aircraft version of a catamaran.

29:00And it's supposed to be pretty powerful, but it can have issues at high speeds and that was of relevance to marty because in july 2018 he is flying this aircraft he's about to take off there's like one of these air shows and he's taking the graph to a location and lots of enthusiasts are flying their own planes and that sort of thing one plane takes off he is behind it in the venom he takes off i think a few seconds earlier than he's supposed to um it doesn't actually say this in the article but this is due to the really really extensive FAA investigation into what I'm going to talk about so this was based on um multiple witnesses there who saw the plane take off I actually got the 9-1-1 audio as well through a public records request with local authorities so the quotes from the 911 calls are from that.

29:57But Marty takes off and nearly immediately, it's as clear something is wrong, the wings are shaking, there's a strange sound coming from the engine and then the plane just starts to descend while its nose is still in the air. It crashes into a barn. There is a huge explosion. There are actually people inside the barn as well who are injured and Marty dies in that plane crash. in 2018 because he was, you know, doing this thing, which he, I don't know if he'd done that a million times before, but like he was used to flying these sorts of planes, but that time it went, you know, very tragically wrong.

30:38So, yeah, I mean, at this point, pretty strange, but I don't think we would write about an eccentric millionaire dying in a jet crash. The reason we are writing about it is that it turned out Marty was leading a secret life for many years before his death. What was he up to? Yeah. So, it later emerged in a court case, which we'll talk about, that Marty was also very actively trying to become a cocaine kingpin. more specifically he was working with a fairly high level cocaine trafficker and they were working on a plan to build a submersible drone that would carry something like a ton of cocaine latch onto a ship with magnets when it arrives at its destination it would then detach and the team would come pick it up that sort of thing he was the money and the brains behind that operation um and i think this is clear from the story and i think it's clear from what the investigators show and the evidence as well but it wasn't just an idea this was very much like actively working on this in very close coordination with his drug trafficking partner.

32:08And it very much nearly came to fruition. It's just that he died in this plane crash, essentially. But he'd been doing that for years and years and years and years without the knowledge of his wife, his family, his friends, it appears as well. So the entire time he was doing all that very eccentric stuff with the planes and the traveling and all of that. He's also doing this, maybe in his eyes, also eccentric thing of trying to be a very innovative cocaine trafficker as well. Like someone at the top financing an operation like this. So the submarine is obviously a very crazy story. We know that submarines, like DIY submarines, are used in drug smuggling.