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The claim that an LLM could be conscious or not is just inherently ludicrous because it would first require you to understand what consciousness is. And it's like whatever computer scientist at NVIDIA or OpenAI or Anthropic, which would make the claims like we've achieved consciousness internally. No, you didn't because you like probably don't even understand what that is. Even like the greatest minds on this issue don't fully understand what it is.

Hello, and welcome to the four zero four Media Podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds both online and IRL. Four zero four Media is a journalist family 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. Get access to that content at 404media.co.

Also, remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can watch all of our podcast episodes. Subscribe at youtube.com/404mediaco. I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are four zero four Media co founders, Sam Cole. Hello. Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello. And our regular contributor, Matthew Gault.

Hello. Hello.

Alright. So this first story, really, really fun, really, really interesting. The headline, which is probably also just gonna be the title of the podcast, to be honest, is if AI is sentient, then so is Age of Empires two. Before we get into this, what's everybody's experience of Age of Empires? Matthew, I'll ask you first as you wrote this, like, you a big Age of Empires guy?

I played Age of Empires, but I was not a big Age of Empires guy. In this space, I was much more of a Starcraft. There was a lot of Starcraft growing up that kind of filled the Age of Empires niche for me.

Gotcha. Sam, were were you into it?

Not really. I mean, I, like, I was aware of it. I wasn't like, Age of Empires head. I guess I was I don't know. I was into, like, command and conquer and stuff like that.

I wasn't super into the the the world building games.

I'm kind of blown away by the lack of response to Age of Empires here. Emmanuel, please say save us, surely.

I've played it a bit. Agree everyone else that it's like I've played other and I would argue better strategy games at the time. However, what I do remember about Age of Empires more than anything is that it had really amazing cheat codes. Do you remember this?

I do. Yes. I'm like E equals MC E equals MC squared to get the robot or the car, right? In Age of Empires Yeah.

There's the car that shoots lasers, which I always thought was very fun because you're playing like a historical game and there's like Iron Age, whatever, spearmen, and then you spawn a car that shoots lasers and melt them. And I I thought that was fun.

I fucking loved it. I played so much Age of Empires one using the Cheetos often because I was a literal child and very, very bad at the game. I would start it with, oh, you know, build a fishing hut and then do this. And then by the start of the second age, we're okay, it's time to bring out the robots, I think, and that sort. And then Age of Empires two, played an absolute ton of as well.

I'm actually going back now because they've re released some of them, yeah.

They just remastered it, right? It's a little bit updated and nicer.

Right. And that would be very interesting to see if the person we're going to talk about could build their goat based LLM in the remaster of Age of Empires. We have this paper which we're going to talk about, and the title is If LLMs have human like attributes, then so does Age of Empires two. Obviously, this is surreal. It is supposed to annoy people and I'm sure it did.

It really did.

Yeah.

It really did. Yes. In a very, very good way. We'll get into the arguments, but who wrote it first of all, Matthew, and like what is their affiliation? Because that's pretty important.

His name is Adrian De Winter, and he is an AI scientist working at Microsoft and the University of York. He's like kind of a top level applied scientist and researcher. This didn't come Microsoft. No. Is his own independent study, I would say.

That's a good

way to tell you.

And he's got If you go back and like look at his website and like other thing paper that he's written, and he has like a substack version of this paper that kind of breaks it down into more, I guess, non scientific language that's pretty entertaining and like mixes some memes and such in there. He's got a couple different experiments and things that he's done, experiments, couple different like white papers that he's written about different topics that are pretty entertaining. A lot of absurdism kind of just all over everything.

Yeah. And I'll just pull out this quote from the piece that he told you. He said, I have this tendency to dial up things to eleven when I really think I need to make a point. I should also note that absurdism is pretty standard in philosophy and theoretical computer science. I mean, that first bit of the quote is the energy we definitely need.

Absolutely. Yeah. And it's kind of interesting because he he was very entertaining to talk to actually. It was like we were talking back and forth through emails and like a lot of, you know, you guys a lot of subjects are kind of like, oh, wrote, and you get the basic standard stuff. There was a whimsy and chaos to him that I found very engaging and entertaining even in, like, written communication.

Nice. So I'm gonna massively oversimplify, obviously, just to get us there. But basically, he built an LLM with the goats in Age of Empires, to make this point, we'll go on about. Just drill down, what did he actually do to build this LLM with goats? In a way that, you know, listeners are gonna be able to grasp without necessarily reading the paper, which is a fine line to draw, And I

there are visual aids in the paper and on his website and in our story that'll that'll kind of help you see see it if you need that. Essentially, what he did is he built a very, very basic the kind of the underpinnings of the way of like a neural network in Age of Empires two. The way you do that is you go to the sandbox mode, which is the thing that Age of Empires has that allows you to make your own maps and crucially your own quests so you can set conditional gates along the way. So if a condition is met, then open this door and let something through. And what he did was basically built a bunch of very simple logic gates, literally like gates that would open, and goats would move along a path and go through the gates.

And the way you kind of visualize it is like you've got All computer code is broken down into ones and zeros, and he had two different tracks. One was for one and one was for zero. And the goats moving along these tracks are like the signal carrier. They're the bits. And doing that, he was able to kind of build out a very, very basic one bit perceptron, which is like a sorting thing, like a thing that takes binary code and sorts it, which is like the very, very basic building block of all of the large language models that we use today.

But if you visualize it in

your head, you

imagine just these tracks with grass in them, and the goats just move down the tracks and they hit a gate, and the gate opens or closes and kind of sorts them into different areas.

And that's

very simply all that it is.

Yeah. And it is very similar, as you mentioned in piece. It's very similar to what people make in Minecraft often.

Using redstone?

Yeah. And like, I mean, people have made some absolutely crazy shit in Minecraft, like fully functional computers basically. But people aren't then going and saying, you know, this is conscious or they're making a surreal point or anything. They're doing it for other reasons. So it makes this LLM or like the foundation of an LLM in Age of Empires II.

How does this relate exactly to the LLMs we all know, and maybe don't use, but we all know about them, like Claude or ChatGPT, like what is the link there or the argument he's trying to like draw between those?

So essentially what he's trying to do is that he's it's very interesting because when I talked to him, was very careful to say that like, it is not that these things are not conscious. It is that if we believe that they if we think that they have sentient traits, then we must understand that the sentient traits that are presenting are also present in other things that have the same underlying technology. And he did that by picking like the most absurd version of what the similar traits would be. The place that he kind of started in was he reads a lot of these philosophical arguments in papers, and he started to notice that around like 50% of the time, the people that are writing similar white papers just kind of take as given at the beginning of their research that an LLM is conscious or has some sort of sentient traits. And his point was like, if we're starting there, then something's already kind of broken.

And we need to step back and realize that the reason we're reading these things as sentient is because we're interacting with them through a chat window, and there's something about that chat window that makes us anthropomorphize them. But if you pull away the chat window, which is just like the interaction layer for this technology, and you're just looking at a pure form of the tech that's underneath it, then you don't anthropomorphize it. Nobody's going to look at these goat tracks and say like, Oh my God, it's sentient. Even though it has many of the similar traits that these like ChatGPT and Claw do. Like Richard Dawkins is not gonna sit down with Age of Empires two goat tracks and then write like a lengthy op ed about it.

Yeah. And right at the beginning of your piece, you throw to this Atlantic essay, which I miss Lee, it's in my to read list, my very long to read list, I really wanna sit down at the weekend and go through it. But they make the comparison of like, I'm going to butcher this, well, if we think that LMs are conscious, we need to give that same sort of consideration to like Microsoft Word.

But

you wouldn't do that because that would be stupid. So it's very, very similar sort of argument. It's just here, the absurdity has obviously turned up to 11, as we say.

Turning it into goats makes it The point is to knock you out of that place where interacting with that chat window and anthropomorphizing the technology, And that's what that's what he's trying to do.

Right. And maybe I'll just read out, a quote from them as well that he gave to you. The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphize too readily and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong. It's not an easy task given that human like attributes is a bit of an abstract term. Emmanuel or Sam, do either of you edit this or is it Jason who's not here?

I'm just wondering what you guys think on this paper.

It was Jason's I'll

let the philosopher Emmanuel speak.

So a few was it a month ago now? I wrote about this paper that came out of of Google DeepMind or at least one Google DeepMind researcher, but it was like on Google defined letterhead, which claimed that and let me try to be accurate, that LLMs can never be conscious. Crucially, the paper argued that they still could be AGI, but they can never be conscious, and I don't even want to attempt to argue or or, like, make the argument that the paper is making because it's very complicated. And I'm wondering if Galt had the same experience when he was reporting this story, which is like, when you get down to it and you are trying to argue whether LLMs can be conscious or not, you're really

You've already lost.

You've already it's it's it's you get into the much bigger, more complicated, arguably impossible task of defining what consciousness is.

Exactly. We haven't even done that after literal hundreds, if not millennia of philosophical study. We haven't landed. Yeah.

But but it's like, what you do understand, and obviously, it's like we're we're we're journalists, we're laymen, we're not philosophers, and we haven't researched this our entire life, which is what many, many people have done for hundreds of years. But what you do understand is that, like, once you kind of dip your toe into that question, you realize that the claim that an LLM could be conscious or not is just like inherently ludicrous because it would first require you to understand what consciousness is. It's like, whatever computer scientist at NVIDIA or OpenAI or Anthropic, which would make the claim, it's like, we've achieved consciousness internally. It's like, no, you didn't because you like probably don't even understand what that is because even like the greatest minds on this issue don't fully understand what it is. But certainly, they disagree with you.

There's kind of Hundreds of books arguing what the definition is. Right?

Right.

Did you have that experience going through it?

No. Absolutely. And I really appreciated DeWinter because he was very One of the things that struck me like when I was first reading the paper is the only place that the words artificial intelligence appear in the paper is when he's citing someone else that uses that phrase, he doesn't say it. He always calls them LLMs, and he's like, I want to be very precise about all of this. And he also brought up, speaking of this consciousness question specifically in like Sentient's, that study that was in science like a couple weeks ago where they found out that bees have like rudimentary problem solving capabilities.

And he was like, know, we look at this and you know, some people are shocked and they're like, Oh, does this mean the bee is conscious? He's like, No, it means that it has rudimentary problem solving capabilities. And it probably has some sort of awareness and interacts with the world in some way, but probably not in a way that we would think of as consciousness. And like we do ourselves a disservice by kind of constantly attempting to throw this We tend to believe that like the way the humans view the world is prime, I guess, is maybe the way to put it, and that anything that we build should be kind of working to that model. That's what we think of when we The way that humans interact with the world is consciousness.

When there's all these other different ways to interact with the world and solve problems that don't necessarily rise to that level, then you get into the then you get into all the discussions of like, what is this consciousness? Does a dog have the same thing, etcetera, etcetera. And like that's when things start to fall apart, and people start to believe their LLMs are are talking to them.

Yeah. Especially if you're trying to as as you mentioned in piece, especially if you're trying to do it on a binary model, which is like conscious or not, and you're going to get into a real trap with that sort of approach. People should definitely go read the full article for a more technical breakdown. I think we link to the GitHub as well. But with that, we'll have a quick break.

And then when we come back, we're gonna talk about another of Matthew's stories about the fight around the data center or rather how a city basically stole land. I'm saying that. Doesn't use the word steal. We'll be right back after this. Alright.

This is another one. As I said, Matthew wrote, and the headline is a farmer donated land to turn into a park. The city is building a massive data center instead. You wrote this a little while ago, Matthew, and I edited it and I like really wanted to save it for a slot on the pod. So we're talking about now so we can give it some the proper attention it deserves.

I'm just going to read out the lead of the article so first of people see where we're going. And I mean, I think it just fully captures the issue here. So it says, almost thirty years ago, a farming family deeded lands to the city of Taylor in Texas on one condition, The city use it for a public park. For the nominal fee of $10 the farmers granted the 87 acres to a public trust in 1999. Taylor, the city, then sold it to Blueprint, a data center developer for $10,000,000 in 2025.

Now, the land that was supposed to belong to the community will become 135,000 square foot data center. That kind of sums it up. Obviously, there's a lot more to it than that. They sort of go chronologically or at least the order of the article. So who is Pamela Griffin?

She's sort of one of the main people you spoke to for this piece who's connected to this story.

So Pamela Griffin is a woman who lives in Taylor who owns a house that abuts the field where this data center is being built, currently being built right now. She has lived there her and her family have lived there for generations. Basically, story that she told me is that her grandmother purchased a bunch of land in that area of Taylor several generations ago, back in a time where in Texas, cities were like segregated, like legally segregated, and if you were buying land and you were black and Griffin's family's black, you had to buy it in a certain part of town. And so this was the site of Taylor that's like literally right next to the railroad tracks and next to a power substation. And her grandmother and then subsequent generations of the family basically bought a street in this little division, and the family has lived there for several generations now.

And she's kind of the woman at the center of all of this.

Like the fighting back the raising issues and that sort of thing. So that lays groundwork and the family owns this land, as you say, in this area where they were essentially forced to, then a person called Mr. Bland comes in. What is Pamela's memory of Mr. Bland?

Who is this person? Sort of what happens when he comes into the picture?

So I'll back up just a little bit. Yeah. So Pamela told me that like she had no idea what a data center was until like people were canvassing after the, you know, the the city went through the normal thing that happens with these this is like a 20,000 person town, and it went through all the normal things that we're hearing that happen with data centers. Like developers come, make people sign NDAs, or the city council sign NDAs, and then it kind of like happens in a rush. The concerns of the citizens aren't listened to, etcetera, etcetera.

Kind of see this playbook over and over. Activists concerned about the data center start going to the neighborhood where it's going to be, like, built next to, which is where Pamela lives, start knocking on doors. Pamela opens the door. She's never she'd she hadn't heard this thing was being built, didn't know what a data center was. They start looking into it with her and her family, and they're like, This is terrible.

This is bad. And Pamela has a memory from when she was a child. She's like, Wait. Isn't that Mr. Bland's land?

Isn't it supposed to be a park? And she remembers this conversation between Mr. Bland and her father. And Mr. Bland and the Bland family owned the land where this data center is being built, and they were farmers.

And Pamela and her family would play kind of in that field where the data center is being built and had for a bunch of years, and the farmer would be out there on his tractor and he would see them, and he would wave, and he was friendly and kind. And she remembers when she was a child, her father having a conversation with Mr. Bland, and Mr. Bland's saying, Hey, my family, we're selling, and we're leaving. We're going to move somewhere else.

I know that this area and this land is important to your family and that your children need a place to play. So when I leave, I'm going to leave it to the city for them to turn into a park. And it's you know, one of these kinds of things that's like this half remembered childhood conversation, and like there could there be any truth to this? Who knows? And, you know, spoiler, it turns out that she was correct, that this actually had happened.

Yeah. And we'll get to that. So Pamela sees this, has this, memory. What happens next? Because you see documents which like corroborate this account.

Like, what are those documents? How did they come about? And like, what did you see when you saw them?

So it's all like it's all in the public record. The Bland's leave in 1999, and they deed 87 acres to a public trust that specifically I can't remember the exact name of the public trust, but it's a trust that specifically develops parks in Texas. They deed it to them for a nominal fee of $10 which is like a normal Like if you're going do a real estate transaction for the lowest possible amount, it's like $10.

Yeah, like a lawsuit for $1

or something.

Exactly. It's one of those kinds of situations. And it's a very short deed. It's a very short grant that says like, The Bland family is deeding this land to this foundation specifically so it can be built and turned into a public park. It's like very clear.

It's just a couple sentences. It doesn't get turned into a park. Yes. That trust, a few years after they leave in 1999, then turns around and sells it or deeds it to the county, again for $10 and they kind of copy paste that same language again.

With the condition.

With the condition. The county then, a few years after that, sells it to the city. The city sells it to like its own economic development zone corporation that it'd set up, and sells it to And every time they're doing this, they're just taking the same deed with the same language over and over again. That EDC, that economic development corporation, sells it to Blueprint, who is the data center developer, like in 2025, for $10,000,000. So from $10 deeded to turn into a park to $10,000,000 sold to a data center developer.

And now it's being built. It's gonna be 500 feet away from Griffin's fence from her property.

Yeah. I I still have a bunch of questions about that. I mean, maybe just to get out of the way first, straight up is this legal? Because from reading your article, it seems that in Texas, deeds are pretty important. And you know, Pamela says that like multiple times in multiple different ways.

It's like, they didn't think this would be possible. You can't have a deed with a condition and then like sort of the condition just evaporates somehow. So like, what is the legality here, at least according to the people you you spoke to?

So the legality is murky, but it doesn't seem good for the data center developer. But the thing that's happening is, so Griffin and her family like pulled a bunch of money together. They got a lawyer. They told the lawyer the story. The lawyer was like, I don't know, this seems like a long shot.

And they find the deed and he sees all the paperwork and he's like, Oh, yeah, you have a case because in Texas, as Griffin and many other people said, and like I lived in Texas, so I know there's too, like land deeds and what people want to do with their land and what's written down or sacrosanct. Land deed stuff is very complicated, and people are very aggressive about it in court there. So the lawyers, they are in the process of trying to get a judge to look at it. The first judge, which was at the local level, looked at it, said, I'm just not going to rule on this. I know that you're going to appeal, but this is above my head basically, and kind of tossed it out.

And they're in the appeals process now. They're still waiting on another court date, which I think is a couple months from now to kind of do the next process. But yeah, they're in court right now, the court of appeals, trying to get somebody to look at this and say like, yes, this was not the intended use of this land when it was deeded thirty years ago for $10 for what is granted, you know, to the city to turn into a park. So, you know, I don't know how that'll all play out. It's kind of this race right now because Blueprint is out there.

They've started, they're building. Oh, wow. Okay. They're working on it, you know? And the city, when I spoke to them, kind of didn't have a comment specifically on that and like referred me to Blueprint, and were much more interested in talking about like the benefits to Taylor of the data center.

And so that is like, is this legal? People on the face seem to say no, but it has to work its way through the courts.

Yes. And I mean, I was gonna ask what the city says, and you say they want to comment on this specifically, but just to hear them out, because I figured it might be interesting, what benefits are they claiming of building a data center on this land that wasn't for this purpose? Like, what benefits are they claiming? Jobs and that sort of thing? No.

So I actually thought this was really interesting because, of all of the people I've talked to when I've asked that question, I think Taylor has been the most honest. I was kind of shocked because I was just like, No one ever says this. I talked to a guy at the city and, you know, I was like, Why are you doing this? Why do you think this is going to be good for Taylor? And he's like, We're going to clear, oh god, I think the number is like $30,000,000 a year on tax revenue, and we basically won't have to do anything for that money.

He's like, it's not gonna make any he's like, no. It's not gonna make any new jobs, but that's good actually because that means we don't have to build housing or any other infrastructure for for people that are moving. And remember, this is a town of, like, 20,000 people. It's like, we don't have to build any new housing. We don't have to build, like, schools or anything.

It's not going to create any jobs. There's not going to be any increased traffic out there, so there won't be like accidents or anything to go like deal with. Like, they're, you know, they're going to kind of take care of themselves. So it's just this building that's gonna get built that generates money for us, tax revenue, and that's great. And that you know?

Like, because you so often you hear these people are building these things, and the developer comes in and the city council says like, oh, it's gonna create 200 new jobs in X, Y, and Z. And Taylor was like, no. They're just giving us tax money every year, and that's it. I was like, okay. It's honest.

I think that's really important to call out in this story, and I'm glad you did. Yeah. Of course, you would, but, like, it's just it's it really highlights how just, like, this is just a black hole of a facility. It's just pure extraction. The tax thing is whatever.

It's like you spend the whole story explaining how, like, they've created these loopholes and these deed fuckeries, and then they're like, but the taxes. It's like, this is all a lie. Feel like this is not actually happening.

The other interesting thing that is like every So I've been looking at a lot of these, you know, and I asked the city who was like, We don't know. Ask Blueprint. I asked Blueprint, like, Who is the client for the compute in this data center? Who is going to be using it? And Blueprint straight up just didn't return my just ghosted me.

And Taylor said, We don't know. They didn't say. And that is a thing so like I key I've noticed this pattern where there's a lot of big data centers that are built by Google and Meta and X and Amazon, and you tend to know where they are. They're reasonably public about where they're being constructed and what they're doing. The Stargate one in Michigan that they just broke ground on was like a huge event, and we know who's going to be in there.

But a lot of these smaller ones where they're kind of coming into a town, it's a developer that was a setup through an LLC six months ago, go to a town that's like 20,000 people. They make the entire city council sign NDAs, and they start building. And every time I ask who the client is for this thing, no one knows the answer over and over again. And I think that's so interesting.

I mean, do you think there is one, or is it one of these speculative data centers?

I think this is, and again, this is just me, I don't know this for a fact. This is me intuiting based on like having looked at all of this for a while. I think that there is a speculative construction boom on these buildings, that a lot of these people are building them without having clients lined up. And I don't know like what happens in a year or two or three when a lot of these buildings are built and maybe they don't have They're expecting compute clients to show up and maybe they don't have that all lined up. The biggest one of these that I know about is in the one in Amarillo, where the guy wants to build like the four Westinghouse nuclear reactors in the desert to power it.

And again, that's one where like they don't have clients. And at least the guy building that one is like, Well, the people will come. It'll be fine. But yeah, a lot of these are being, I think, built on spec, which is

crazy. That's gonna be interesting when look, don't know if AI industry is gonna crash, but for various other stories that we have coming in the week, there is, some people getting nervous about it. And who knows if this data center is being built in this person's backyard is actually going to be there or be fruitful or be useful in any sort of capacity in the near future. Everybody definitely go read the article very much for the personal story of these people as well because Matthew did a great job speaking to them. If you are listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

But if you are a paying four zero four media subscriber, we're gonna talk about the big Madison Square Garden hack. We've got a bunch of stories on that and some of us coming as well. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at four zero four media dot c o. We'll be right back after this.

Entering us in.

No. No. No. Sorry. Leave this in, Alyssa.

I was gonna say, plea please, yeah, you ask me the questions, Sam.

Okay.

But but first of all, this thing about the Knicks, who watched the Knicks? Dude, I I legit love basketball now. Really? I'm not even joking. So

You got accidentally got into the basketball via the Knicks?

Really? Really? It's like the only sport I've ever watched, like, seriously is football or soccer, I guess, you know, obviously, being English, just Premier League, Champions League, World Cup, all of that sort of thing. And like, you're lucky if the game is like one all or one nil. Ninety minutes of that.

Basketball is like on crack. It is absolutely insane. There are goals all the time. Sorry, not goals, points. And people are like doing interesting plays all the time.

But the biggest thing for me is that, I think it was the final when they were playing in San Antonio and the Knicks come on and the local stadium plays like a dumbass song, like, like like sad trombone shit. And it's like, this is wild. They're doing like mocking music as the enemy team comes on. I fucking love this. It's like straight up toxic shit in a professional sports game.

I was like, this sport is legit amazing. And I'm I'm not even joking. Like, I am gonna watch more basketball now.

I love that for you. I we gotta get you into baseball because that is just a sideshow the entire game because it's so slow.

I'll definitely try it. Like, is that the fun well, we've spoken about it with the AI and stuff. Like, I wanna go

so see that. Funny. Baseball is so funny, but basketball is also really funny. It's I find it too fast paced because I I like to wander about and not pay attention to a game, and you can't really do that, in my opinion, in basketball. You have to be paying attention somewhere.

Yeah. You have to be paying attention because as we saw, anything could happen in like the last few minutes of a game or another thing I just really like about this sport now is like anything could happen in literally the last ten seconds. And it's like, this really matters now. It's crazy. The stakes are so so high.

Yeah. I really enjoy it. Sorry, Sam. Take us through these stories. I just had to say that because now I'm a basketball fan.

I'm so happy for you. This is a beautiful passion that you have. Yeah. So, the the first story we're gonna talk about two stories regarding MSG at Madison Square Garden. But, the first story is the headline is hackers published NICS and Madison Square Garden data online.

This I feel like you published this kind of, like, during like, while while the finals are happening. So I it was a huge story, but everyone was also very excited about. There was, like, don't talk to me depressing hacks and scary things. Talk to me about the Knicks. But it was a huge breach.

Do you wanna just walk us through what actually was hacked? Like, are we talking about the facility? Are we talking about, like, data that was held by MSG? Like, what exactly was stolen?

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned that because I was working on one of these other pieces today, and I was just googling around and there's a headline in Puck, Puck. News, another outlet, and the headline is the MSG hack that got buried by the Knicks Yeah.

It kinda did.

Yeah. Yeah. And like, I jumped on it because, well, I was watching the Knicks anyway. Wow.

As a fan?

Yeah. Yeah. As a long time Knicks fan of at least

Of two weeks?

Of at least two weeks, at least, maybe less. But I jumped on it because of that. And this will probably come out in a story that we publish around the time this goes out, at least on the free feed. So free listeners won't hear this, full subscribers about how it was hacked and the hackers actually kind of kept that in mind that people are looking at MSG now and maybe they'll make them pay or something like that. Anyway, so I did it for that and it did get buried, as you said, still very interesting.

So what was hacked was 45 gigabytes of data related to MSG, Madison Square Garden. And it's like not really the facility, but it's the company itself. And I got a sample of the data beforehand, which I'll talk about in a minute. That's very, very small. There's just a few spreadsheets and that sort of thing.

Later, I was going through the whole dump and there's like a specific employee's OneDrive in there, the Microsoft version of Google Drive or whatever, right? And a SharePoint as well, which is like their shared server for collaboration. And there's like a lot of company stuff in there. I wouldn't say it's the most sensitive stuff in the world, but like, I don't know, there's some W2s in there and some very, very personal information and there's a lot of like internal, not communications, but internal documents about how we're going to market it. We have the junior Knicks team or whatever, where I think kids play at the stadium or whatever.

So a lot of organizational stuff. That's not great for any company to have put out there, but yeah, it's mostly basically like internal documents and that sort of thing, and then some specific interesting stuff as well, which I I think we'll talk about.

Yeah. Yeah. Like you said, it's not it's, not like damning information about anything, but it is like it's for for such a huge institution, for such a huge company, it's crazy that it was even hacked in the first place. So, yeah, what exactly was in the data? Because you mentioned, like like, Ben Stiller is somehow implicated.

Yeah. Implicated is a good word. Yeah. But Ben Stiller's fault. No.

So when I got this sample, again, it was more like, well, I'll just verify if there was a breach at MSG. And, like, that's already a story by itself. As you say, this big institution got hacked and like that's the story. As I was going through, there was this file, I think it was just a CSV file called talent or something like that. And that included information on a bunch of, like, Knicks related personalities.

So it's, like, former coaches in there. I think former players. Maybe I saw one or two current players. Like, I haven't read every single line in that spreadsheet. I was like control effing Knicks and just going through it because it was a breaking news story.

Mhmm. But I went through there and that there was definitely stuff about celebrities where I found like Ben Stiller in there because I'd seen him, obviously on the TV, every Knicks game. And like, he's a huge Knicks fan. He's there all the time. But what happens if I search for Ben Stiller?

Lo and behold, he's in this spreadsheet. And it has maybe contact information for reps or something and that sort of thing, cost of talent or whatever. I don't think there was anything really for Ben Stiller in that, but there was something very interesting, which says a risk score. So all of these celebrities and all of these talents and all of these Knicks people, whoever, have been given some sort of risk score. And Ben Stiller was low risk presumably because he's a very nice guy and just, you know, wants to go see the game or whatever.

And then there was, you know, a rapper in there as well who admittedly I'm less familiar with, who and it said high risk for them. Now, I don't know what that means, like in of itself, but it's very interesting when you read terms like that, when you look at the context of sort of the second story we'll talk about, which is about, you know, surveillance and monitoring people. Like, I don't know whether people who are marked as high risk get surveilled. Like, I I really don't know. But the fact that that field was in these spreadsheets linked to specific celebrities is pretty interesting in my opinion.

Yeah. That's interesting. Risk, I feel, could also mean several things. You know? It's like, are we like, would Ben Stiller be high risk because he's a celebrity?

Is Taylor Swift high risk because she's, like, portside?

And she

was in the game? Security detail, is it, like, high risk? Like, we're gonna, like, negatively surveil this person, which is also bad. I mean, MSG is, like, such it's probably the most surveilled spot in all of New York, if I had to guess. But it's yeah.

You walk in there and every everything about you is are already getting scanned, which is the point of the next story that you wrote, which is the headline is Madison Square Garden made dossier on activists who opposed facial recognition. So, yeah, MSG basically made this list of activists who had publicly criticized their use of facial recognition tech. So I guess, first of all, how did you get ahold of this this document in the first place?

Yeah. So after I got the sample, I spent a lot of time trying to download the actual data and I should say this this, should be clear. Yes. MSG was hacked. It wasn't just that.

The hackers from the extortion group, shiny hunters, and one of the members of that group stressed to me there's no space between shiny and hunters because otherwise, if you put a space, it sounds like you're describing a Pokemon card.

Right. Still still what it sounds like doesn't help.

Yeah. It's fine. I'm fine. I'm actually I'm fine doing broadly speaking, I'm fine doing like hacker name branding in the format. Yeah.

They prefer if that in the same way we would do it to a company, like Sure. I don't know. There's a completely

You're hoping you

and Lorenzo wrote that story that was like all the dumbest fucking hacker group names.

All the all the dumbest hacker group names, and we didn't put our names on it for some reason. Yeah. But anyway, so the extortion group, shiny hunters, they break into a lot of companies. They publish the data online. If the company does not pay, very long established contact note, tactics now goes all the way back to the dark overlord who I was covering in like

2020. Overlord. That's another good one.

Yeah. That's a pretty good one. And they were aggressive as well. But then then they dump the information online if the company doesn't pay. Well, they dumped the Madison Square Garden data online, which means MSG didn't pay.

I then downloaded it after a while because it was a real pain to get a hold of, like you go to the Torhin service, the dark website, shiny hunters, you try to download it and then direct you to another server. And it's like, hey, this is gonna take eight hours to download or like even more. And that's because the server isn't particularly good at handling traffic and then your download fails or whatever. And I mentioned this in the behind the blog recently, but they the hackers actually upgraded their infrastructure, so it got easier to download. I tried it again, I got shoved into a queue.

It says you're like eight out of nine in position to download the file or something. And then eventually, I was able to just get a direct link that could use curl or w get or whatever in the command line to just grab it and say, oh, well, that's way quicker. So I download that data is what I'm trying to say. And then I just start manually going through it. I'm still doing this.

It's 45 gigs of data. Lot lot of like videos in there, which are probably taking a lot of space, but I find a folder on the SharePoint called activists. I was like, well, that's pretty fucking interesting. I then go in there and the the title of the document is like facial recognition activists. So like, it's very on its face, you know, and it's very clear what it's talking about.

Open that up and just to give more specifics on what the document is. Yeah. So list of free activists from fight for the future, EFF, and then stop like a New York surveillance activist organization. And it lists names, their bios, some background information, in some cases, their contact information, phone numbers, email addresses, social media profiles, like here's their Twitter account with the number of followers. This was back in 2022.

So it was like, Twitter, not X, that sort of thing. Has that and then in the fight for the future's case, it had Evan Gears tweets, like screenshots of them. And clearly some of them being taken at the around the time of the creation of the document because it was like sixteen hours ago, fifteen hours ago, something like that. So MSG, and I don't know who wrote the document there. I couldn't find any metadata, associated with it.

But clearly they are keeping an eye on these people, at least trying to figure out what they're saying about MSG and the facial recognition, program and sort of their criticisms of it, which are also included, in the document.

Yeah. I mean, I guess, like, I think a question people would ask, listening to this is why make this list? Why are they tracking who is criticizing the venue and the use of surveillance technology. But MSG has denied entry to people who who they want to deny entry to based on facial recognition, which I think is really interesting.

Yeah. So for years and years now, MSG has used facial recognition. When you go in, it scans your face, compares it to a list of banked images. And if you are scammed and they don't want you in, security then comes over and says, hey, you were trespassing. Here's a trespassing notice.

You need to leave. And we know that because there's been cases in local New York media, like a local NBC affiliate. And the New York Times as well where a lawyer who worked for a law firm that was working on litigation with the MSG parent company was denied entry. She wasn't working on the litigation itself, she just worked out the same law firm. I know law firms have a lot of lawyers in them, you know, presumably.

So that was their policy. MSG is like, we're not allowing any lawyers in from this law firm that is in litigation with us. There was also a case or like a potential case of a guy who made, a t shirt criticizing Jim Dolan, who's like the operator of MSG and the owner of the Knicks. I hope I got that right. Again, there's a lot of context I have to catch up on as a relatively new fan.

I was like, oh, I have to hate Jim Dolan. Okay. Cool. I hate Jim Dolan. No.

Don't. Yeah. Well, I I I'm very, very late to all of this, so I hope I got that accurate. But like, that's the context in which MSG is keeping eyes on these activists. Now I don't know, have they been added to the facial recognition database?

I have absolutely no idea. All I would do is point people and I link to it in our story to this wired piece, which came out recently, which was really in-depth about the MSG surveillance play apparatus. And in that, Jim Dolan's head of security went to like the websites of 90 law firms and scrapes like more than a thousand images of lawyers and put those into the database. That's like a shit ton of people. This isn't like one or two.

That's like a massive amount of people who've been added to this database who we don't want you in this venue. So that's the context of this sort of, dossier. You know what

I mean?

So weird. So petty.

Yeah. And and and Jim Dunlin apparently has a reputation for, you know, being pernicious and not great with his perceived enemies. But, like, that's kind of the extent that we know. But after we've recorded this, I'm probably going to go back in the data and see if I find anything else. But I don't know.

I I saw that and that that jumped out to me. Have you been to MSG?

I have. Yeah.

Yeah. What did you see?

I saw Kylie Minogue most recently.

Hell yeah.

That was awesome. I saw Charlie XCX. Uh-huh. Yeah. So so good.

Both shows. Kylie, probably my favorite. But, yeah, it's don't like I'm not a big arenas person. I don't I would prefer not to see anything in an arena because it's scary. Do you see somebody fell at MSU this week and died from, like, one of the high levels,

which is Oh my god.

Very, very,

very sad.

So they've been in the news a lot this week. I feel like, you know, between the Knicks and this hack and now this, it's like, shit is going down over there. I avoid the area unless I'm going to a show.

Right.

For a lot of reasons. But, yeah, it's it's crazy. Emmanuel, are you are you a basketball fan now? No. Emmanuel just

don't give

us fucking flying shit.

Yeah. Lickerbockers. Sorry. Dude, in our in our gaming

group chat,

I I I, like, wouldn't even really joke about the Knicks and what shit. I'm just like, this is not the right space for this. Like, this is not this is not gonna go down well. You know?

Yeah. I'm not used to people climbing the greasing the poles climbing the greased poles in Philly. So

I have been to MSG, though.

What'd you say?

What'd you say?

I saw some people play Counter Strike.

Are you serious? Sick.

It was sick. It was very weird because MSG is obviously gigantic and it was an ESL, which was this big esports org doing an event there, and motherboard sent me to to cover it. There was some labor thing going on at the time. And I was like, oh my god. This huge esports event.

And it was like, I don't know. They cordoned off like a tiny section of like one part of the garden. It was like not big at all. It was like, I don't know, 300 people in the crowd max.

Yeah. You're all crowded around one guy's one guy's computer like

this CRT, some people playing smash. Yeah.

I mean, that sounds sick.

That's amazing. Alright.

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