OpenAI Uncovers Spy Device, Apple x LG, Home Devices Tier List | Thomas Neckel, Kabir Jain, Danielle Axman, John Urschel, Nicolas Sharp, Jason Ballard, Erik Bernhardsson, Josh Tyrangiel, Aida Baradari

Jordi Hays (0:00)

You're watching TBPN.

John Coogan (0:02)

Today is Wednesday, October 14th, 2026 We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capitol of Capital.

Jordi Hays (0:14)

That's right.

John Coogan (0:14)

Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, use the used corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Ramp also donated, maybe more, they donated to Ben Wilson. $100,000. $100,000, very generous for them.

Jordi, can you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast.

Jordi Hays (0:39)

Yeah, so Ben Wilson is on David Sentra by David Sentra Today.

Ben very unfortunately has stage four cancer and four kids under the age of five. Sentra says I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work, studying history's greatest leaders, and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38 He's a good friend. He's a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations. So we just want to share this at the top of our show.

I've only met Ben once, but really, really amazing thinker and incredible show. And I recommend checking out the show as well.

John Coogan (1:29)

Yeah.

Well, moving on. Thank you to Ramp for supporting, and you should as well. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

We covered at the end of the show yesterday, but I mean, pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. OpenAI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs. And so this was all over the timeline. We discussed it at the end of yesterday's show. But Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan, the alleged OpenAI spy, used an AI-generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as his LinkedIn and X profiles, despite having no documented connection to the school. But there's a community note on this. There's a lot of people going back and forth. Apparently his actual profiles now show the real information. But there's a whole bunch of back and forth, but it seems like it was a pretty simple device. I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of television in an executive conference room and folks are saying that it cost maybe 15 bucks, something like that. So there's also a debate over, is he an American citizen? Is he a Saudi national? There's a picture of him alongside Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but anyone can stand in line for a photo op.

But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this and so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.

Jordi Hays (3:19)

Kylie Robinson called it Amateur Hour.

Chap bot account associated with the engineer's spouse which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding Wi-Fi connectivity, listening remotely and encrypting its memory card according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.

John Coogan (3:44)

Yeah, pretty simple, like, how do I commit a crime? Like typing that into the computer. And so not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching, how do I spy? How do I create a recording?

Jordi Hays (4:02)

Yeah, the whole thing is just very confusing. Like this would make it seem like he's a lone wolf, right? As if there was any type of like sophisticated operation.

John Coogan (4:14)

Yep.

Jordi Hays (4:14)

You would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, little bro. We got you.

John Coogan (4:20)

Yeah, totally. That is weird for sure. And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around nation states, it's usually around like stealing the weights or using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth in lawsuits around intellectual property, but you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference, right? An executive, there's no meeting between Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT-7, starting at the beginning, 0, 7, 5, 3, 2, 7, 9