Pedestrians pushing a crosswalk button near the University of Washington earlier this week got to listen to “Bezos” spout on about not taxing the rich and even reference Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United Healthcare’s CEO last year. Forbes money in politics reporter Kyle Khan-Mullins joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss.
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00:00Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me now is my
00:08Forbes colleague, money and politics reporter, Kyle Conmullens. Kyle, thanks so much for joining
00:13me. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me. You have a bit of boots on the
00:18ground reporting. You were crossing the street in Seattle earlier this week. You heard a familiar
00:24voice booming through the crosswalk. What did you hear bring us to the moment? Yeah, so I walk my
00:31wife to class most mornings. We live near the University of Washington Law School, and I'm
00:37walking along. We go to the crosswalk. I hit the button that alerts the crosswalk that we're there
00:43and waiting to cross, and who do I hear speaking back to me but the voice of the second richest man
00:48in the world, Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder, and he is talking about how, and it was clearly an AI
00:56generated recording, talking about this crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime, and we shouldn't tax
01:04the rich very much, and otherwise we're all going to move to Florida, and it was a pretty surreal moment.
01:12Wow, so A, what I hear from that story, you're a great husband walking your wife to class every
01:18day, but B, the voice is talking about affordability in the city of Seattle. They also mentioned
01:25Luigi Mangione, but how has the cost of living in Seattle really changed in recent years?
01:32Yeah, so the recording talks about how wouldn't it be terrible if all the rich people left Seattle,
01:37and then normal people could afford to live here again. That was the wording of the recording. The
01:41wording also said something along the lines of, if all the rich people in Seattle got Luigi'd,
01:47which I believe is a reference to Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of the United Healthcare CEO in
01:52Manhattan last year. There's a lot to unpack there, I would say, but regardless, I'll just point out
01:59that there's a lot of frustration in Seattle and in cities across the country with the cost of living
02:04going up. There's not been enough housing construction relative to the amount of population
02:10increase. Seattle's been grown by something like 21% over the past 10 years, or between 2010
02:15and 2020. The U.S. as a whole grew about 7% in that time, so that shows you how fast Seattle and some of
02:21these other big cities, especially on the West Coast, are growing, and I don't think housing construction has
02:26really kept up with that. Rent in the city of Seattle, one bedroom goes for $2,200 now, a two-bedroom
02:32goes for $3,000. Now, I know I'm talking to a New Yorker here, so maybe that doesn't sound so bad, but
02:38to anyone else in the country, that might actually be somewhat high. So the cost of living is a serious
02:43issue here. I think there's a lot of frustration about it, and I think that there's some blame
02:46targeted at especially the ultra-wealthy. Housing affordability is a crisis that we're seeing crop up
02:52in cities across this country, but is this crosswalk hacking unique to Seattle? Are you seeing this
02:58happen and play out in other cities around the country? So that's the other reason this stuck out to
03:04me is that I had seen reports earlier in the week. There were some similar incidents down in the Bay
03:09Area around San Francisco. Some of the crosswalks there were hacked to sound like Elon Musk and Mark
03:15Zuckerberg, sort of similar-sounding political messages about the wealthy and billionaires and
03:21the billionaire class. And so when I heard this, I was like, ah, it's come to Seattle. Honestly,
03:26I might have guessed it would have been in Seattle first, and Bay Area beat us to it. So,
03:30you know, these cities have a particular culture that does stuff like this.
03:36So then you specifically heard it with your own two ears, but has the Seattle Department
03:41of Transportation responded at all to this hacking? Yes. So the Seattle Department of
03:47Transportation, they sent me a statement. They said, we're aware of the issue. We are addressing
03:52it. It has cropped up, they said, in multiple places around the city. It wasn't just in the
03:58university district where I live. And they also noted that they were concerned because these devices
04:06that were hacked are normally used by people who are blind or who can't see very well. And they're
04:13intended for those people to be able to cross the street and to know when it's safe to cross the
04:16street. And so they said in their statement that they were concerned that somebody would hijack those
04:19people's tools for those people to make a political statement.
04:23And it's also concerning to wonder how exactly the culprit was able to hack into the system here.
04:29Is there any indication of that or any indication of who is behind this?
04:35We don't know anything about who's behind it. As for how it was done, I saw some reporting from
04:42the Bay Area that these things often have Bluetooth signaling built into them. And Bluetooth is not the
04:50most secure of connectivity systems. I'm not a tech guy, so I'm not going to be able to answer this
04:56completely here. But my understanding is that's how it was done. And I did talk to us as he was
05:03trying there to fix the system, who told me that, yeah, they were told to change the password on the
05:08Bluetooth, among other things. So that might have been the issue.
05:12Kyle, I'm hoping that you continue to walk your wife to class the rest of the week.
05:17And if so, were you able to hear the crosswalk again? Is it fixed yet?
05:23So this was on Wednesday, and by noon of that day, I noticed that the crosswalk that we had used
05:29was completely disabled. Like, there was no audio when you hit the button at all.
05:34Not even the normal, please, you can cross now audio.
05:37However, one block away, I heard the sounds of the Bezos song continuing to play.
05:45So clearly, they hadn't gotten to all of them, or someone had re-hacked them after the workers
05:49had left. As of this morning, I didn't hear anything. And that second crosswalk that I heard
05:54of, that one was disabled entirely this morning. So that seems to be the strategy. The interim
05:59strategy seems to be shut off the audio entirely until we can figure out what's going on and put a stop
06:05it. Interesting stuff. Keep walking your wife to class to get us some more by-the-minute reports
06:12here. Kyle Connmullens, I appreciate your on-the-ground reporting. Thanks for joining me.
06:18Great to be here, Brittany. Thanks again.