The AI is in the computer

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Every sample has a story. Learn more at 10xgenomics.com. Hello and welcome to the broadcast. The flagship podcast of Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Plus Max. A new streaming service coming to you in 2020.

You leave her alone. Somehow this is all Max's fault. You've named your daughter Skydance from 100%. She's very wealthy. It's going very well.

Her dad has no largesse. It's a real shame. I will never buy her a media company. Ellison's Skydance is a real Taylor Sheridan name. Hi, I'm Ellison's Skydance.

Just putting it out there. I'm hearing a Netflix Western. Yeah, it's good stuff. I'm into it. I'm in front of you.

I'm here. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to be here. How have things been? They've been good.

I did. I did a good job. The people love David to a point that was really alarming for my own ego. A lot of love for David and Mel in place. We missed you, man.

We'll find a way to make David and Mel part of the Verge extended universe. We missed you. I missed you. I'm glad you're back. It sounds like a family's doing good.

Yeah, things are good. It's three is a lot of children. In a very strange way. The first thing that happens when you three kids is people immediately start being like, well, you might as well, you might as well have a fourth. I just don't understand.

But it is now to the point where I feel like I have infinity children. Every time I turn around, there's just another one. That's been interesting to get used to. But it's good. We had two weeks of no one sleeping.

No, just no one. But now we're coming out of that. And I feel alive again. We last year we had children at the same time. And I do not feel like we have exited the bad part of having a baby with our second one.

But you are just back in it. My number one parenting recommendation now is don't have two kids who can't walk. And it's like, there's a real thing that is like, we were talking to a family who had kids at about the same gap as ours. And they were like, oh, once it's so fun because they'll have each other and they'll be so close to the age that they'll feel the grow up is peers. And I'm very excited about that.

And it's like in five years, I'm like, oh my God, five years. And instead, I'm like, I have not had an arm free in two months in a way that is like very hard to describe. I've gotten good at doing everything with my elbows now because that's what I have to accomplish goals while I carry two children. It's a lot. I don't recommend having two tiny children at the same time if you can avoid it.

But they're real cute and it works out. I've also a lot of time to catch up on TV shows and movies over the last seven weeks, which is if you'd like to talk about any major emotion picture from mid to late 2025, I am ready for it. I know we're there. We should talk about lanterns for like the full hour, but there's like a lot of gajnes. There's a lot of gajnes.

That is primarily what we are here to talk about. So we have Amazon gadget news. It's a big week for what is a computer in a way that is actually very fun and I'm excited to be back for Amazon is doing tablets again. Microsoft is doing AI computers. Google books are here.

I have one I am desperate to talk about them. You guys have been talking about them. I have so many feelings and all of you are wrong. And I want to talk about all of them. Apple is how just announced today is we're recording that its big home event is next week on the 13th.

There's just a lot of new ideas about how we're supposed to use technology happening all at once. And Skydance owns Hollywood. Literally that is coming at the very end of the show is how many gadgets there are. Should we start with Amazon? Amazon feels to me like kind of the most immediately newsy.

It drops today as we're recording. I also this is like a perfectly knee-like coded gadget announcement because the big thing today is the Alexa tablets, a new vastly superior line of tablets. They're not fire tablets. They're actually phasing out the fire tablet brand in favor of a better higher end set of tablets that people will actually like to use. And the question of like what does it mean for Amazon to be a good hardware company?

I think it's really interesting. It's also entirely about the display. Like I had a call with Panos Benet who runs all of the devices on Amazon. About all of the Alexa tablets. All we talked about the whole call was this new Mano Matt display that Amazon has built that they swear is like the greatest tablet screen you've ever seen in your life.

It does look amazing in all of the photos and videos. It does. So the idea is that it takes some of the matte texture that is often just put on as a film and actually like bakes it into the glass. And Terrence Orion on our team saw it said it looks great. We'll get one review.

Very excited to see it. What do you make of just the existence of Alexa tablets? Oh, I have so many thoughts on this. You talked about Panos. I didn't, but I talked to Panos many times over years.

I have a sense of Panos decisions. Yes. But you can identify Panos decisions. You can just see them at a distance. And I think that's a lot of the things that are really important.

One, he just leveled the hardware. And I say this as a person who has fire tablets, right? We've got kids. We have a sono system. There's just a fire tablet sitting around, so control the sono system.

And that's what it does. And the only reason we have it is because it's one of the few tablets you can get that has Pogo pin charging. So it can just sit in a dock all day. Sure. And you can open the app and just stay charged.

And so like this is an odd piece of weird technology that interact with all the time. But you're just not expecting me to be a fire tablet. I would not. That is genuinely is brother. But it is literally because you can just like put it in the document charges and then you can just put it in the document charges.

And the two decisions are one, none of that hardware is any good, besides from the fact that you can put it in the document charges. It appears this hardware is very good. He wants it to be premium hardware. That is just a panel decision. You can hear him in the meeting being like, why is it bad?

You know, that's his personality. That's not a like dig on the old tablets. It's a strategy shift. Like Amazon never aspired to make good tablets before. They wanted them to be dirt cheap.

And 29 dollars. Amazon kids. And then I was a subscription and that was a whole strategy because it couldn't compete with the iPad. And this is the second big panel decision that I'm utterly curious about. They have the Play Store.

They got rid of their dumb Amazon App Store and they're just straight up Android tablets that are part of Google's ecosystem, which comes with a bunch of Google stuff. And the fact that they're called Alexa tablets that you are meant to talk to Amazon's assistant, which has some amount of agent capability and presumably more to come, I can just hear a panel is being like, well, apps are boring. They're the past. Just give people Google. Why are we fighting that fight?

We're going to fight the next war. And I don't know if Lex is good enough to fight the next war. But those are the two decisions where, you know, at least a distance, I can see Amazon Eyre panels, and he is very opinionated and very crisp in his decision making. And those are the two changes. The hardware is nicer and we're leaving the apps in the past.

Well, I would put it differently, which is I think the mistake that a lot of people have made is deciding that apps are the past. And what it actually is is apps are solved, right? Everybody needs apps. It turns out that you have to have an app store or else nothing else matters, right? Like if you decide apps don't matter, agent to AI is the only thing you build the humane pin and your company dies and you sell it and you go make printers.

Like that's what happens when you decide that apps are dead. But going and trying to compete in app stores is a complete waste of time. Like many have tried, none have succeeded. And the only way to the next thing is to acknowledge that, right? So you say, okay, we're not going to try to play the app game.

We're not going to try to build a bunch of new things. We're going to have a couple of new ideas around this fundamentally solved problem, which is the Google Play Store. We can't beat it. We're not even going to try. But we're going to use it to spring to the next thing.

And I think that is the right bet. And it's the bet way too many companies forget to make because apps are not the past. They are the present in a super duper real way. And the only way to bet that it's the future is to actually do the app thing in the first place. And I think, again, that's where we're going to get to Google.

But that's the Google story too, right? They're like, oh, we think, agent to AI and the web can solve all of your problems. And everybody's like, I would like apps, please. And they're like, okay, here's some apps. Now we can do the other things.

And so I think Amazon is trying to do the same thing here. Yeah, we're two sides of the same coin here. If you believe that there is a future past apps that apps are solved, then you give up and put the Play Store on these apps. 100%. Because you have to put all of your focus on the next thing.

But until that next thing took any shape, you had to make your own app store. Because otherwise, you were just handing your business to Google. And so that's what I'm getting at is they're willing to concede the past, perhaps the present to Google. And right, like the Play Store comes with a bunch of in-app purchase fees and all that stuff that Google had sued for. I have no idea if Amazon was able to negotiate different rates with Google.

But if you have the Play Store, the app developers are going to pay Google for in-app purchases, they're probably not going to pay Amazon. So you've just conceded the revenue model of the present. Right. And then you're going to be able to make your way to Alexa should be, you're all encompassing AGI agent to do all of the economic activity of the future. And you're probably better off making that bet.

And that's what I mean. Yes, it's the past and that I don't think there's going to be a lot of innovation there. There's a lot of emphasis on the AI part. Whether that's good or bad, like fully remains to be seen. Yeah.

But it is. And I think the tablet to me is super interesting because it sort of clears the deck for that question in a way that I think is really exciting. If the hardware is as good as advertised, and I think it probably is, like a company like Amazon certainly has the resources to make great products if it wants to. It has gotten in its way many times, but I think this thing by all accounts so far seems to be a good piece of hardware. If you remove the, why doesn't it have this thing by giving it, you know, a decent keyboard case and a decent stylus and all of the Android apps that you want, you've gotten to the point where it's like, okay, now can our thing, and in this case, that thing is Alexa plus actually win, right?

Like, do we have the next thing here? And now in a certain way, it's going to actually get to answer that question because the other stuff is just sort of solved. So if you can just make a good tablet with Android apps, great. That is, turns out, easy thing to do if you just do it. Is this good enough to be like what you would call the default Android tablet?

I think default Android tablet is such an insult of the thing. I mean, this is the problem. But you know, like for years, you'd be like, what's the default Windows computer? Sure. And maybe it was.

It's the XPS 13. It's the XPS 13 some years and it's the Surface laptop some other years. And, but I mean, we, we made a lot of hay back in the end, gadget days talking about the default Windows laptop. Yeah. Join us for an empire on the default Windows laptop.

And then it was the XPS 13 for like years and years and years. If you asked me, what is the default Android tablet? I would some Galaxy tab? No, I think you would like deep sigh and then say it's a fire salad. No, not a fire.

No, no, no, no, because it doesn't have a play store. It's like, right now. But it is. Okay, go ahead. Make sure.

Make your argument. If the fire. No, I think that my argument is less in favor of the fire tablet and more against the entire ecosystem of Android tablets. I mean, realistically, I don't think anyone was looking for an Android tablet. You're either looking for an iPad or you didn't want to spend the money on an iPad until you lay your fire.

There's like five Android tablet fans just furiously writing emails right now. They're all right. Okay. Okay. And listen, the pixel tablet had a chance to be that thing if Google had content Google can't care about Android tablets.

Like Google is on Google books because it's no longer interested in Android tablet. This is not this is not a small thing for anyone to try and get involved in. I think this will almost immediately become the default Android tablet. Amazon is so big and successful and the price on these is really good. The eight inch one starts at $229 and the like very fanciest 12 inch one with the fancy screen is $549.

Like you're looking at like $1000 iPad territory for $550 and that's that's meaningful. And so I think Amazon, unless these things have some spectacular failure in them that we don't know about, I think they immediately become the obvious tablet to I for a while. So now I have to ask the obvious question. Every piece of Amazon hardware does it show you ads on the home screen by default? Good question.

There aren't any in the well. Okay, there's I'm trying to think about just the photos I've seen. There's a little prime widget up in the top left corner that is ostensibly there to show you like what you're reading and watching. And then there's a whole thing you can you can swipe right on the home screen to get to this big shelf of stuff. I assume that shelf will be a mix of things you're watching and reading and recommendations from Amazon.com.

I do think it's possible that Amazon is going to just slather shopping all over this thing in a way that is really upsetting. One of the things they're going to do is make it so that you can just at any time be like how do I buy this and it'll look at what Alex will look at whatever is on the screen and put it in your Amazon cart. It's a real flow Amazon imagine. And that might be awful. It really honestly might be awful in a way that is kind of pernicious and off-putting.

If it has just stayed on the right side of that line, I think these things are almost by default going to be a huge hit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, anybody with a kid who needs a plain tablet, this is the one you buy. If it's a nice piece of hardware that can run Disney Plus and then get your kids to immediately convert everything they're watching on Disney Plus and to purchase this on Amazon Prime.

This is going to be a huge one for everyone. But that's the danger. At $5.50 for the nice one, that price is subsidized. And the only way Amazon is subsidized as a price is with intrusive advertising. That is the entire experience of the Fire TV.

I asked Panos about the price and he said something to the effect of I don't want to talk about how we got there. Do with that. Do with that what you will. Okay. I was so ominous.

It really is. It's like don't ask me questions about how we got Ram. Okay. I understood. Wow.

He's like in a large conference room. He's like blown out by the window behind him. He's like, don't ask me questions about that. It's primary drones launching some strikes. I wonder how you feel about the Nanomat display.

But first I have a question that has been rattling around in my brain ever since I found out about this thing. And I want you to actually think about this. Has Amazon ever and I mean sincerely ever made a great product? It has made a lot of successful products. Has it ever made an out and out great product?

It's made so many products. It's almost impossible to answer that question because prior to Panos when Dave Limp was running devices, he would have those rapid fire product launch moments where he'd be like, it's a washer dryer. It's a stove. It's a microwave. All things Alexa.

Have they made a truly great product? I would argue the very first Kindle. That was the only one that came to mind for me. I'm not sure it was great, but I think it had an argument. It's just we should make a version history about it.

It's such an iconic product and it was so weird, the scroll strip on the side. The first Alexa was not a great product. I remember the day it came out, you and I were in the office together and we were the only two people who thought it was a good idea. And then it turns out like a decade later it was still the same idea. Those are the two that I would call it.

I think the original echo definitively not a great product. Kindle maybe. I think this is such a huge new path for Amazon. It is just and again, it's not a knock on Amazon's inability to make great products. It is never tried.

Amazon.com is. I have a question. Do ring cameras count as great products? Amazon products? I'm sure if you want to.

They are fully there. I mean, people have a lot of feelings about ring and everything associated with ring, but they relentlessly iterate. The new thing is very good. That is true. Yeah.

That's not so good. You also get your rest of the sign. Yeah. Yeah. But I think Amazon has just never cared all that much about building great things.

Amazon.com is very successful. No one up to and including Andy Jassy would tell you what is like a beautifully engineered and executed and lovely user experience product. Using Amazon.com is awful, but it's Amazon a lot of money. It works for Amazon. This is maybe the most ambitious swing at like, can we make great stuff on its own merits and can that work for us that I've seen Amazon do?

I think that's just going to be fascinating. We have a couple more. I have the new, I have a purple Kindle here that is the aluminum one that they just came out with. It's very nice. There's almost certainly some echo stuff coming that I think might be high-end in the same way.

Amazon has just up-leveled in a big way and whether that changes its fortunes in this space, I think it's going to be really fascinating to watch. Again, I think the impetus here is there's a platform shift potentially afoot. The way we use computers might be changing. I'm saying this with as much skepticism as I can muster into a microphone. This is not sure.

Right. But the idea that you're going to talk to the computer or issue natural language commands and it's going to go off and do something for you, creates an opportunity to sell new hardware. The same way that, I don't know, Apple sold a lot of iMacs in the 90s because people wanted web browsers and they didn't care so much about wind-tail programs running on Windows 3.1 or whatever. That was a platform shift that enabled a new hardware entrant, same with the phones, same with whatever else. This is the opportunity for Amazon.

It's to say, hey, you don't care about apps anymore. You care about talking to Alexa. Yeah. Here's some of the best hardware you can get for talking to Alexa. Will this work?

Many questions for me. Will Alexa be as capable as Muse? It certainly isn't. Now, I had Jen too. He was on the show yesterday talking about this and she put up her big one year in review of testing Alexa Plus piece today, Thursday.

And, yeah, the read is like it's gotten very good at smart home stuff and is still nowhere near where it needs to be to do all of that other stuff. It is nowhere near as good as Muse at Muse things. Today, I told my news that if it doesn't stop reading my email, it has to pay me $250 each time it per actively reads my email. And I just thought about how to make money for like a long time. It's like, this is worth it if I can figure out how to get this is how the hugging face hacks starts.

Your Muse is just off somewhere making money now. I kind of wanted to see if I could run a cryptoscan on that as servers. I was like, please, I've given you permission to read my email for two things because it's only connected to my spam Gmail. I'm excited to read for updates to Class Action lawsuits where it should have signed up, a new Class Action lawsuit which I might wish to sign up. And by the way, there's one week.

We're making like annualized if you do an opening eye style and make $10 billion a year in the Class Action lawsuits. But then every now and again, it's like, hey, some other nonsense span email can be interested. I'm always like, I want you to stop. And so today I was like, what if you had to pay me money every time you read my email and I didn't give you permission? And I was like, I made a ledger for you.

And I was like, no, but make the money. And I just want to be able to throw some of my then- Get at me. It didn't get anywhere. But I'm working on it. And if I can get a lecture to do it, we'll be in a much happier place.

That's true. Do you have any thoughts on this Nanomat display? I was talking to Panos about this and reading about this and thinking about you at the Apple launch event standing there in front of the two studio displays, the one and the fancier one and just like staring in awe trying to find the two differences. And I was just like, I'm, Neil, I was getting here in the word Nanomat and have a lot of feelings. I want to see it.

It's funny. I was thinking about the last level that I went to, which is the Afton Duo launch. And the opening the duo and seeing that it's a matte display was just a collective gasp in that room. Like everyone had that experience. We're not expecting it to be matte.

A lot of reasons for that, including hiding the crease. It feels like we're about to have a little matte display fad in consumer devices. I really enjoyed looking at the matte display on the duo. I haven't seen this one in person. There's something about it, especially for a very portable device that you have in like sunny spaces, bright spaces, whether it's reflections, where it's going to be great.

But we'll see, especially for a cheap device that kids might use, it is much easier to clean a glossy screen. That's what you're going to find out. Yeah, I can definitely see my children doing bad things to this display. Maybe that's why it's only in the highest end device. that if you're buying the fancy 12-inch one, you're probably not buying it to just stick in front of your kid on a plane.

Well, I'm curious, I mean, you talked to them, what was Amazon's argument driving them out this way? Essentially, just that it's better, right? Like, Panos started with the argument that the screen is the only thing you absolutely cannot compromise on, on a tablet. And I agree with that fundamentally. But I think they also are really into this being a device that does lots of things and goes lots of places, right?

That it is a productivity device and it has the keyboard case and Panos was very proud of the fact that he uses it as a main work computer. But then also, it is a thing you will hold in your hands and read books on. And so it has some of the tone shifting that it can do automatically when you open the Kindle app. They really like the idea of using it to watch movies. Like, they understand, I think, pretty thoroughly how many things people use tablets for.

And so we need something that looks good and feels good in all of these different use cases. I think does kind of inevitably lead you to a map display, if you can pull it off. And they seem to believe they have. Yeah, I wonder how fast they will end up at a folding phone. I think if Amazon hadn't made the Fire Phone, they would have shipped a phone instead of a tablet.

But I think this to me feels so much like one toe into that water. And then if this works, there will be an Alexa phone in 12 months. Yeah, especially if you're talking about, I want to go all these places and do all these things. You're just going to end up with a folding phone. Yes, but I think the Hill 4.0 God Amazon made another phone is so high that unless they have this huge hit tablet on their hands, it might feel insurmountable.

So I see why you do this first. But I also like, remember, Panos Pene, long time advocate of folding devices made a bunch of them at Microsoft killed a bunch of them, shipped a bunch of them. Like that nobody loved the Surface Duo and the Microsoft career like Panos Pene. I know part of me believes he doesn't want to work on that at Amazon too. It's super clear that that's coming.

It's taking a lot of time. Yeah, especially if you buy the notion that the entire paradigm of computing is shifting and this is your opportunity to try something new. Yep, 100%. Real quick before we switch gears to everybody else's ideas about computers, right next to all of this is whatever Apple is about to do in this space, right? Where Apple is having some kind of something next Tuesday.

That's as specific as I'm able to be. They sent an invitation to some people. It was mysterious. It had Yarn, did made an Apple logo. We're expecting Apple to launch a bunch of smart home things.

Yeah, they invited Gen 2E. Yeah, right. America's smart home reporter. Yeah, I feel like I know what's going on. What are you looking for here?

I still have in my head this social video you made the other day with a screenshot of you scrolling through the insanity of your smart home. This is very much Apple running towards what Amazon and Alexa have been doing successfully for some time while Amazon is trying to do what Apple has been doing successfully for some time. Are you bullish on whatever Apple is about to do here? So the rumor is Apple is going to announce the homepad. That's what we've all agreed to call this product.

No, we have. I don't love it. We've not to be able to call it that. That's what we're calling it. You know, some sort of Siri AI device that lives in your kitchen and does video conferencing.

And we just had Mark Urban on the coder and he was like, this device isn't ready to go. But they held it because Siri I was not ready to do the thing. Mm hmm. And it's fascinating that Apple believes Siri is not ready to do the thing. When Siri AI is now about as capable as 2023 Gemini because it is distilled from Gemini.

Yep. You know, I mean, like that's where we've gotten like I've had a nest hub in my house for ages to control the smart home and answer natural language query. And then it has an ad for itself on the screen all the time. It says start a live chat with Gemini and I'm always like, but isn't that what I'm doing? It makes no sense.

That's awful. It's truly if anyone to go and explain what they think the difference in those things are, I would love to hear it. But we're at the agent part of the conversation now. Yeah. Grogbot and dots and muse.

And I think watching a device like this and being like, it can do lights and locks and we've partnered with LG a company that just got in a huge scandal for listening to. Yeah. All of that seems very, it just seems from yesterday and maybe Apple just got slowed up because Siri wasn't ready and they would have released this if Siri had been ready. But the yeah, there's just some part of this where Apple Apple is the company that one apps and they might be trapped by apps. Interesting.

That's a theory. So yes, I'm a huge smart home nerd. Yes, I want to see what Apple's a riff on a smart lock with LG looks like. I don't know that you can convince me to get rid of my Schlage locks that run on thread with a battery last for 500 years and they're already installed in the doors. Is it possible that the reason Apple is partnering with LG on this stuff is because it knows that that like even even Apple knows that it is probably not going to convince most people to rip out their front door lock just because Apple made a new product.

There's some level of humility somewhere in Apple Park that prevents them from believing that. And so they're happy to voice that stuff on other people and be like, what we're going to be is the control layer in the middle and that's where Siri I becomes important. Yeah, I mean, I can already, you know, if you want to go straight to Apple announcement, you're like, this will work with the huge ecosystem of matter door locks that run on thread. And, you know, we had some great ideas. We partnered with LG on making some with Apple flare them, whatever John Turners is going to say.

Yeah, two chips in them or whatever. Yeah, like the no buttons or whatever that is, whatever Apple thing is, but it needs to work with the big ecosystem of matter devices. There's some reporting out there that, you know, this is a big reset for matter to and get in general. But the point that I have just been making for ages that Jen has been for ages is that you cannot sell a smart home in a box, right? Like sort of definitionally, everyone's house is an edge case.

So you cannot sell in a box, something that works for everyone. Just in my house, the basement door doesn't get any wifi signal. So now you got to add a repeater or an ear or a mesh note, like it's already done. Like it's already gotten more complicated than any normal human would ever deal with replacing light switches is easy, but also complicated. Like it's not actually very challenging to replace light switch, but then you got to flip your breakers off and you absolutely have to flip the breakers off.

Just take it from each turn. Breakers off. Don't do it hot. I'm stuck on yourself. Yeah.

You got to do it. And like not everybody wants to do that or call a nutrition and pay the money to do it. Like you just end up with, oh, this is getting complicated really fast. Yeah. And I don't, I'm very curious to see how Apple repositions home kit in this device and a bunch of second party accessories from LG as an actual product solution, not just some fun stuff you can nerd out with.

And just to say it again, I love this stuff and I love nerding out on it and I'm a sicko and I don't think any of this is ready for primetime because there's just no way to sell it to anyone else. Right. You just end up being the systems administrator for your house or your Apple and you try to convince everybody that Siri AI is ready to be that thing. And and unless there is some enormous advance coming next week, it isn't. Like the more I use Siri AI, the less impressed I am by Siri.

I it is. I think Gemini in 2023 is actually the exact right place to situate it because it does some of the things right? Like some very basic thing Siri used to not be able to do like answer questions or find information for you. It can now do and that's not nothing. That's that's useful.

It can search your text messages and email like never before. Sure can and it actually does that passively well. That is not bleeding a AI technology, but it does work. All of this other stuff that like just make sense of the world around me stuff actually is bleeding a AI technology and I don't see any other in theory right now. Yeah.

And you know, you can say there's a lot of reasons Apple was behind, but to me, the number one thing is that Apple makes an awful lot of money on in-app purchases in the app store and disrupting the app paradigm is fully disruptive to Apple's business. And you know, there's reporting out there that says John Turner's actually wants to make more money from services. I mean, of course he does. Sure. But like John Turner's will get fired if he doesn't figure out how to make more money from service.

It's just a real thing. Well, he can also make new devices people want to buy it. It's another choice. It's always to make money. And so of course, Meta was out with news.

Of course, Meta put an app on your phone that means you don't have to use other apps. Right. They've got nothing to lose. Right. And like I just I think that it's going to be one of those things.

I mean, this is the classic innovators dilemma. Like Apple is trapped by the scale of its own success here. And they probably should be the company that gives everybody eight gigs of RAM in the cloud to run a little web browser so you can tell Siri to go do stuff for you and figure out how to do that in a privacy first way. And then, you know, Siri will shop for you and they can take 30% of that. But they're not going to.

It's going to be a they're going to say Siri can use the apps on your phone. That's their model. And they're even Google to some extent is sticking with that model. They know it's Gemini Spark, which is an agent at IO. Yeah.

They are not running NFL ads for Gemini Spark. No, Spark is so funny because every time anybody has a conversation about all of these devices and the sort of AI assistance, everybody mentions, you know, muse instincts is kind of up there. Gropot. And then there's a couple others prokling around. And then every time there is one commenter who from like several rooms away is like, what about Spark though?

And it's just like, oh, that's the Google employee in the room. Like, and like Google was out in front of this and just didn't didn't do the thing. Like, as ever, Google's ability to coherently make and ship and market products remains to be seen. But okay, last thing on this, then we need to take a break. I'm going to call this Yay or Nae right now.

Are you going to be able to play Candy Crush with in-app purchases on the homepad? No. Okay. Look, here's the number one thing. I think the billions left on the table by that decision.

So well, here's my number one question on the other. They're reporting on it all suggests that it's going to have a camera on and it will recognize you as you walk up to it. And then pop up some personal stuff. First of all, now you have a camera in your kitchen. They're just like looking for people looking for faces.

Big questions for Apple there. Like, I don't like having cameras in my house. Camera's outside the house. Camera's outside the house. We just like don't have it.

Even though baby monitor, I won't get a Wi-Fi baby monitor. It's not a thing I'm comfortable with. Apple's like, yeah, we're going to do facial recognition in real time. Such that when you walk up to it, we will switch to your accounts. There is not a device anywhere in Apple's ecosystem that can do fast user switching at that speed.

Right. So like my number one question is how is that going to work? And then if it works, like sure, now you're in your app store account, you can do Gandy Crush. But if this is a single player experience with one app store, like it's never going to work. Right.

Yeah, I agree. Even I haven't even thought about that because what you actually want in that situation is something that can actually be used simultaneously by multiple different people. And if it's trying to essentially context switch every time, it's going to be a mess. But it also kind of has to if it's going to have the permissions that it's asking for. That is complicated.

Yeah. I mean, Apple could have saw this a million years ago by doing user profiles on the iPad, which I believe all of us have begged them to like every writer at the verge like it gets their wings when they write, why doesn't the iPad have multiple user accounts? You've written it. I've written it. I've written it.

Deeter's written like we've all written it. But this device, at least from what they're telling what the reporting is, that like that's the future. So maybe they'll just be fixed idea. I'm not. But that sucks.

Yeah. Having to do one more step every time you want to touch it feels bad. All right. Whatever it is next week, we will inevitably talk a lot about it. For right now, let's take a break.

And we're going to go back to the laptop stock. We're back. Do you wish you could hand off Cloud code lives where you already work, your terminal, your ID the desktop app, the web and GitHub.

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Visit Sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system. All right, we're back. So after all of that, two companies this week with some more traditional, I would say, ideas about laptops that are also weird ideas about laptops. Let's start with Microsoft.

Microsoft had an event this week. They teased it by saying something to the effect if we have something new from Windows. That's something new. It turned out to be a couple of new devices. They reannounced and announced a ship date for the Surface laptop Ultra.

They announced a thing called the Surface RTX Spark DevBox, which really just rolls off the tongue. A lot of this stuff is its sort of AI forward laptops built in particular on the RTX Spark platform from NVIDIA. Let's start with the Surface laptop Ultra, which they've talked about before. This is by a mile, the most powerful Surface they've ever built. It's intended to be for local AI development for people who want to build it AI.

There were a bunch of new Windows features about how Co-pilot will be able to use your computer more. The thing that happened, by the way, while I was on the is Co-pilot just became a joke. Like, I don't know if everybody noticed this while you were in it every day, but Co-pilot is now the AI that everybody makes fun of. And I'm like, there but for the grace of God, go every other AI tool on the planet. But Microsoft is still doing it.

They're plugging Co-pilot into everything. They're giving it more control over your files over Windows. The Surface laptop Ultra, I mean, is this a real laptop to be interested in? Or is this just like a super computer play thing for nobody? We had a number of local AI conversations where you were out, you know, Apple announced a bunch of Macs and they made a lot of noise about how they were great for running local AI models.

There's something there that is super interesting that you don't want to rent your compute in a cloud. You don't want to pay the enormous token fees. You want control of your data, do you care about privacy. And then the right next to that is, boy, a lot of people have to rethink the fundamental paradigm of computing that they have been swimming in for ages. I'll just give you a really dumb example.

I'm writing this to Code-Rbook, right? And so there's like 320 odd decoder transcripts from the last five or six years. Like obviously this is a thing for AI to do. I should just make it a code research tool. And I'm like doing a thing.

I'm like, find me a quote, when something said blah blah blah, then I should go find it for me. So I built the tool and I just built it in a clip. And it didn't even occur to me that that tool lived on my computer, right? Like the artifacts and the transcripts, that was all just on my computer. And I was using it great.

And then I was traveling and I opened my laptop and I opened my laptop and I was like, where the? Is it? Right? Because you're just so used to the stuff being everywhere. Yeah.

Right? And I figured it out and I made it work and it's all fine. But there's something about this paradigm of computing that makes you really reconsider where it's going to happen. In a way that, I think, you know, unless you had a files and folders job, you were not thinking about that a lot with your computer until recently. And I'm fascinated to see if Microsoft's selling an NVIDIA platform, I mean, it's expensive.

It's with $2,600. Yeah. But is there like massive demand for a high end in video laptop that might be able to do local AI? And is that a glimmer of a signal that actually local computing is gonna be back in mode when we've all just been trained to be like, it's all in the cloud. Nothing is actually happening here.

Right? Why do you need 16 gigs of ram in a laptop? Because Chrome is shit. Like, there wasn't a reason before. And now there's like a lot of good reasons.

Yeah, part of me wonders if what we're missing there is the sort of simple use case, right? Like what you're describing in a lot of ways is sort of an interface problem that I think is much more easily solved by downloading, you know, Gemini or Muz to your computer and it will use your computer, but also go to the cloud when it needs to. Yeah. The like, how to get a local model onto your computer is still sort of opaque in a lot of ways. And then what do I do with it?

And how do I interact? Like, nobody has packaged that in quite the right way. I don't think, and maybe that's Microsoft's chance, is we make the operating system. We can do this, like Apple's trying to do this with Apple Intelligence, but it's so narrow and incomplete in that way. Microsoft could be the one to be like, well, we've just baked this whole thing into your computer and now it works offline.

Like, it is a very funny switch from the company that just spent the last decade. From the Azure company? The Azure company that also spent all of Satya Nadella's tenure moving office to the web, moving windows to the web, everything is in the cloud now. Satya Nadella once looked me in the eyes and said, if I could rename windows, I'd rename it Azure Edge. To really?

Yeah, I'd be like whatever, man. Like Satya Nadella, by the way, not great at naming products. I don't know if any of them are at this point. But I mean, again, I think it's a fascinating device. The idea of a really high end Nvidia Arm laptop that is optimized for running models locally is new.

Like, I am taken by the idea of new kinds of computers. I'm curious about them, I'm interested in them. And then you're just like, well, the paradigm of this, especially in a laptop is kind of weird, right? Like, okay, I'm gonna have a bunch of compute in my house. I don't want the models to be in a cloud.

I don't want my data to go down through I'm gonna put a server in the basement. Right, you have a headless Mac studio. Like that is understandable. Yeah. And then wherever I am in the world, I can use that because it's sitting here on my connection.

This is a laptop. It's like, I need to take the model with me to do what in the coffee shop? Low-prey. Like, I'm just dying to see what use cases emerge for that thing. Yeah, yeah.

I was like, I think there's a version of this that is just finally Microsoft made an honest to God out and out MacBook Pro competitor that can hang at that level. That is all on its own, very exciting. Like it's expensive, but so is the MacBook Pro. You can spec it up to death. Like if the RTX work platform is as good as advertised, this thing is, it looks great, it has the specs.

Microsoft got very excited about how many ports it has. It got so excited that it spelled the word surface wrong on the slide of all ports. It's really good. Really a lot going on. I say copilot has become a bit of a joke.

What I know is that it was active while those slides are being made and it said nothing. No, it's like, oh, sir, I love that. I say rather computer. Thank you, copilot. But yeah, it does seem like if you just take this as the true sort of Surface Pro, fine.

But I do think Microsoft is trying to make an argument that there is a next way of using computers inside of this device that you can build and use on this laptop. And yeah, I agree with you. I'm not sure anyone has quite figured out what that product is supposed to look like. And maybe that's fine because this is a developer for developers and in this rev, everyone who gets it, will know how to make it work. And maybe that's enough.

Yeah, or there's a market for $26,000 Windows laptops that look nice and perform like a Mac with Pro. And people are going to buy them just for that. Maybe the battery life is great and performance is great. And that Windows on ARM will have solved it. Bg as Nvidia brought to bear a whole new platform.

Like, that's reasonable too. I'm just fascinated by the idea of, okay, it is not clear if the models commoditize, if you can run the still models locally, there's all this stuff, right? Where the compute can and should live. Yeah. And I actually think that's totally up for grabs right now.

Yeah, I agree. And I think it's actually a really huge, interesting product opportunity for all of these companies. Well, also it's like if it turns out to live on a laptop in your backpack, maybe that doesn't mean it needs to live in a data center. Which maybe that's not a bubble pops. Like edge computing, baby, Azure Edge.

Yeah, I love it. There is one spec of the laptop that we should talk about. And it's apparently the most important thing about it, which is that it is the first, I have to read this to make sure that I get all of the words correct. It has built in magnetic USB C charging. And if you were to say, David, why is that an interesting milestone?

I would not have a great answer for you. But that's apparently a thing. It's MagSafe. Do you not watch our video? It goes pink?

Yeah, but instead of being MagSafe, it's just a USB cable. It goes pink. Does it actually make the noise? I missed the video. Yeah, because it's like physically going into the thing.

Do you hear? Are you getting a normal system? One more time? I get it now. I never use a MagSafe for it on my Mac with Chrome.

Never. Not once. Even though I was like, psyched to see it come back, because I'm always just in place with USB C. I'm not going to carry another done cable. This is like a perfect solution.

Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. I think this is great. And I think it replaces Microsoft's kind of long term janky surface connect port with something that makes a lot more sense. And if this spurs everybody to start doing magnetic USB C, I will be a happy, happy man.

That would be awesome. OK, the other laptop we should talk about is Google Books. Google Books are here. Can you just go? I know you have like a five hour monologue now.

I do. I have a lot of thoughts. But OK, my actual question for you is very simple, which is why on earth did Google ship this now? And I want you to try to hash this out with me, because the story of Google Books so far, right? There's five devices out.

You guys have talked about this on the show. They're an Android first to take on laptops. There is nothing. Not one thing about this platform that is finished. There are some weird interface edges.

No apps understand what a Google book is, or how to use them, or what's supposed to be like nothing. It's just an Android tablet pretending to be a laptop in a way that completely drives me crazy. And I just keep looking around, trying to figure out why Google shipped this now, and what it feels like it needs to be out in front of, or what wave it's trying to kill. Well, that one's obvious. I know the answer to that one.

Do you just get the holidays are coming? OK, that's when people buy these things. So you got to get them out now. Developers have to have them. Hopefully you get a wave of software updates.

People buy cheap laptops for holidays off you go. Black Friday is coming. You know what I mean? Are they ready? I haven't actually heard anyone describe this in Android.

Tablet all dressed up as a laptop. That's a very good. It's what it is. OK, let me give you an example. So you open Netflix.

Netflix, App I was very excited about. This is like the reason you want to desktop app is so you can download things to your computer and watch them on planes. This is an annoyance with my Mac. Some apps exist for the Mac that will let me down. Like Prime Video has an app that will let me download it's locally, Netflix doesn't.

Very annoying. So it's great that I just have Android apps. I can download it's locally. This thing does not understand that it's not an Android tablet. It only runs full screen, or 169, just down the middle of the thing.

It doesn't interact with any other windows. It can't be resized. It's just these are tablet apps. And to some extent, this is Google's ongoing problem, which is that it can't make anyone care about Android apps. I've sort of danced around saying this for a long time because every time I denigrate that state of Android apps, a lot of people send me emails and get mad.

But this to me is such a blistering indictment of how much developers care about making good apps for Android that even after all this time, Android is pretty good on a Google book. It's pretty good on a television. It's pretty good on lots of things. Android apps suck everywhere with phones. And it is so much more obvious to me on a Google book than it has ever been on anything else.

And I just look at this thing. Maybe this is just a completely unsolvable problem, and Google is host. It's funny because all I want back is a Chromebook Pixel from 10 years ago. They just had a web browser. But there's infinity research that people want apps.

They don't just want to browse the web, even though that's what they do on their computers all along. They don't think that's what they want, even though it is what they want. Google has now complicated the idea of a Chromebook to the point where what is a computer is an existential crisis. But there are a bunch of things about this that work for me. Like the Google book has a concept of a home screen in a way that laptops really don't.

Like you can come and you can see widgets and it'll show you you can array apps like you were on your phone. And there's something about that that is immediately like, oh, this is actually a good idea. Like we should use my desktop for things instead of just being a mess of files that I've downloaded. That's smart. The control center is laid out like my phone and is actually much more understandable than how to find settings all over the Mac in a lot of ways.

Like a lot of these things make sense to me to bring Android and Chrome OS together works. The Chrome on the Google book seems a little worse in a way that we're all still trying to figure out. It's like desktop-ish Chrome. Oh, no. It's not.

No, no, no, no, no. If someone can actually put the pieces together in this format, please call me and do it. But it is not just they lifted desktop Chrome and put it on here, which essentially what Chrome OS is. Like it's is full-able or Chrome with some software. I would argue there's actually nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser.

It's yes. I mean, this thing runs extensions. It has some of the extra features. I haven't found any websites that are broken. But there are a bunch of little pieces of the interface that aren't there.

There are a couple of little tweaks to the way that things work that don't feel quite right the way. Windows is a little bit different. It's just it just feels somewhat less than Chrome. And to me, it's like the one thing this thing needs to be is full-ass Chrome. Yeah, if you see a laptop, you're like, I'm running full-fat Chrome.

Like we're doing it. Yeah. That's the whole thing. Yeah. When I say there's nothing worse than a desktop-ish browser, it's like when you're using a mobile browser, like a baby browser for babies, at least you know.

You know? You're going to get kicked out over here and you're not going to end up in some mobile web backwater because the site automatically detected a blog. But you know, this is the experience using iPad for me. All the time, it's like, oh, it's so close to your real browser. And then everyone knows it's not, you know, like what you're going to get people.

Like there's nothing worse than that because you're like, oh, I'm so close. I'm using a thing that feels like a laptop. I want you to be a laptop. For Google to do it with Chrome, a thing called Chrome, on a thing called a Google book that looks like a laptop, it's going to confuse lots of people in lots of ways. Yeah, it is kind of crazy making.

But it occurs to me that the sort of reason for existence of basically every gadget we've talked about so far is the same. And I don't think I processed that until we were sitting here talking about this. That the idea underpinning all of these is some kind of new hardware on which your AI agent is allowed to just run a mock, right? Whether it's Siri AI or Alexa Plus or Copilot or Gemini, whether it's a laptop or a tablet or a weird home. Like everyone's hardware idea boils down to, we need to give you surface on which to let your AI agent do things on your behalf.

But the right surface for that is 8 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of storage in the cloud. Like Metaphone- The botany Linux computer? Yeah, it's like fine. We'll just give you a little cloud VM. And it's kind of a browser in it.

And I think that is approach to like, it's just your computer. You can do whatever you want in your system. It's neat. I think that was so smart, by the way. Even just in the way that it is describable in the way that you just described it is so smart.

They're like, we just gave you a little tiny Linux computer in the cloud. Immediately your brain goes, oh, I understand that. I will say you missed some drama while you were out, because I think they kind of recond their way to that. Oh, yeah, I don't think that's real at all. But I think it's a good experience.

No, I mean, like they announced Muse and then people found that they could talk about the filesystem. And then they're like, no, it was always meant to do that. And then they could quietly change the behavior of Muse to make it actually go. Oh, that's all because you got really pissy about it on threads. Because you got to fight with somebody.

And then you double down. And then they double down. And then everybody's mad at everybody. And then you think you won? I'm not positive.

Then I demanded a statement on the record from Metaphone saying what the intended behavior was. And they declined. Say I won mark. Say I won. I was like, put your money right around this.

Say that this was always the intended behavior on the record. And then it was dead silence. But whatever, they got to the right answer. Like a cool ass answer. Yeah.

OK, right. The idea that you have a little computer in the cloud and you can use it. And this is kind of what I mean about where is the computer going to live, especially for consumers. The only answer is in the cloud managed by an IT professional. We get to pay a lot of money to make sure that your agent stays in the sandbox and other than that.

Right? There's no way a regular consumer should have a Mac mini in the basement with open collage. Just fire it away. Right. I don't know if you saw the Ben Thompson piece this past week.

Like it opened with I got a virus. It's because I made my basement. I opened my door. And but he's like, but the only reason I found out I had a virus is because I'd open a clock on my Mac mini and it detected the virus. And it's like, all of this is a swirl of problems, right?

There's something there that I just find utterly fascinating. Like all of these devices are there to get you through a platform shift. Yeah. Right. The Google book, the idea that it can sort of like silently stream apps from your Android phone onto that display.

All of the walls between these app paradigms are being torn down because they don't matter anymore. But Google is pretty reticent to do that. The app vendors are reticent to do that. And over the past years, everyone's like screw it. Just run the app server.

You want everything's everything. It's fine because the next thing is coming. And that's actually the battle worth fighting. I just don't know that I want the AI agent to click around on Chrome on my Google book in front of me. Like go do that somewhere else.

Yeah. Yeah, that's where things like Instinct and Muse feel good to me. It's like, I actually don't most of the time want to see you doing the work. Just let me know when you need me. And it'll be fine.

But that's very hard to do because then you get the thing where it's like, open up this weird browser inside of a messaging app and click around like you're a desktop user with your finger. It's bad. But again, there's a million interesting product that you see here. And then I can't help but wonder if this is where open AI and anthropic start looking around being like, do we need to do laptops? If this is the thing, if it's give people a browser, the Android app store, and our AI agent system, we can win on the merits if that's the next thing.

And maybe there's a tablet coming from anthropic in six months. And it's going to actually make a kind of sense. Maybe. I'm just going to inject this skepticism back into this. Because we have bought a lot of the framing.

And these companies, and I do think this is a strategy they're chasing. Just to say it, none of these agents actually work perfectly yet. They're all brittle and fascinating ways. Amazon is blocking muse. It seems very likely that some combination of Cloudflare and every other major website in the world are going to be blocking every other agent soon unless there's money exchanged.

We're in a very interesting and fun period right now where there are no rules. And it's very easy to imagine the future. And then especially because it's e-commerce, all of the walls are going to go up until people make the appropriate business deals. And then maybe the joy of having an agent that can just click around the browser on your behalf and do anything will fall apart. Yeah.

And I don't know. I don't know. I think that's going to play out. I just see all these companies are like, well, we could never beat the phone. Is this our chance to beat the phone?

Yeah. It's the only realistic chance they've had in ages. Yeah. This is what you have to do if you own a company. It's the only chance.

And I think, I mean, I look at a lot of this stuff. And I, even using some of these devices, I've been using a Google book pretty extensively this week. And I just can't build the bring Gemini in muscle memory. Like, I know how to use computers. And adding this brand new layer on top of it that does things sometimes faster, but sometimes slower.

And the circle to search thing that Google has been doing, I think, is spectacular and useful. That is just like, what is this? And where can I buy it? It's like surprisingly a question I ask a lot. Do you get an answer to this?

Hidden miss. I have like a 50% hit rate on this. 50% is not bad, though, right? And that's kind of my point. I think it's horrible.

Well, let me give you an example. So my three-year-old goes to preschool. And every day at preschool, he rides this little blue and yellow and red plastic motorcycle on the playground. It's just one of those little balance bikes. It looks like a motorcycle.

He rides around with all his friends. And he desperately wants one to have it home. I don't know what it's called. I don't really know how to look for it if you just like Google blue balance bike, you get nowhere. But they took a picture of him riding it at preschool and sent it to us in the app.

So I crapped the thing, sent it to me, and I was like, what is this? And where do I buy it? And it found it on like a Dutch school supply website for me to buy, never in a million years of Googling would I have found it. I went to go and try and do it on my own and didn't find it. And it went and found it for me.

And like, sometimes it fails, spectacularly. And sometimes it doesn't. But like, it is a genuinely useful thing in spots. And that is about the extent of the actual muscle behavior I've been able to build to use this stuff. But it would take just as long and be vastly more complicated.

Like, most things don't take that long. It's a thing that I keep discovering. Most things that we do are not that hard and don't take that long. And the idea of learning some new thing also to AI, just because it's sort of there waiting for me, is not compelling. This is like when you get your first internship and you're sort of like wander around someone else's office and you're like, do you have anything for me to do?

And everyone's like, no. Like even just telling you what to do would take too long. It's that. I was at Mustafa for Microsoft, which obviously I'm in for Microsoft was on the cover recently. And we were like in the thick of AI safety pacing in frontier conversation.

And just as a throwaway, he's like, you mean, you have to admit the models are getting better. Like we don't even talk about hallucinations anymore. And I was like, I can't do this with you right now, but do these things hallucinate all the time? Yeah. Constantly all the time.

Like one of the reasons that I'm so skeptical about all of the agent promises that are being made is all day long, they are just making stuff up. And then they do that quad apology. We're like, you're so right. And it's like, no, I'm matter at you now. This isn't helping.

Fair. M-dash, that's my bad. It immediately just gives me hives as soon as it appears in my conversations. Yeah, there's something about it. Again, I agree to you.

It is a thing they have to do. There's no choice but to say, well, you eyes around it so that if it does emerge, we might be the winner. But there's nothing to say that it will get there on the time frame that people are talking about. Yeah. And the fact that Muse, I think right now, is a phone app that looks like a messaging app and is the one that has really escaped containment, is fascinating.

Like Muse is not some giant mainstream thing but it's the only one of these that people outside of this world have asked me about and tried and talked about. And it is not some big new idea about things. It's a messaging app and a tiny computer in the cloud. Yeah. I mean, Matt does have the world's greatest advertising ecosystem.

It sure does. I felt really bad for opening when they launched dots because then they had to pay me for Instagram ads for dots. And I was like, oh man, we are all just way behind here. Yeah. But then, Matt comes out with glasses and everybody says, no, thank you.

These are perfect glasses. I'm out. No, no, no, phones don't have a light, David. It's fine. They have a light.

There were a few things that I was really grateful to not be at work to have to reckon with. And Mark Zuckerberg saying no phones don't have a light was one of them. Oh, we're going to reckon with phones don't have a light almost every week for the rest of our lives on the show. I promise you. We're going to have a dedicated segment, what theme you say, programming, like sponsors.

Oh, 27. Oh, God. Well, in the meantime, let's take another break so I can go collect myself. Then we're going to go back and do the lighting round. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. After seven weeks off, Neil, is it, are we still doing this? Is it still time? It's time. Today's is really good.

It's time for back-to-sader podcast. It's been podcast. Brendan Carr's a tummy. Brendan Carr's a tummy. Hopefully, just after a bit, we get it on the show.

Then, just away from what we get. Perhaps it breaks down the squad. There's a special treat we had the offspring record. Brendan Carr's a tummy keeps on. The people that realize that you like pop-onk.

The people get me, and I appreciate that. This one comes from Corey Wright, who wrote, Neil and I are around the same age. So I felt like this is a fitting tribute to our era of pop-onk. You have to understand that I love pop-onk. Neil, I like sad boy music.

That's important to understand. I'm just an older generation of pop-onk. Brendan, you clash song. We're going to be very happy. But that does not mean you have license to do white-boy reggae.

We excuse the clash of doing white-boy reggae. Very few other people get that excuse. Correct. Also, see also, scott music. We will leave that.

I feel like we're really close to getting a scott running car. I'm like, we're at every week, we are inching along, and now we've just dipped them over. All right, there are two this week. One classic sort of First Amendment Brendan Carr battle. And then the second one is delicious.

There's not even another word for it. The first one is we've been covering over and over on Brendan Carr's Donnie America's Fair Podcast on the podcast. Brendan keeps threatening our nation's broadcasters over the content that he says their use of the public airways, its subject to public interest. And that means late night comedians are bad. Something.

Yeah, seems basically right. It's always been unclear what he actually means here. He's hauled in a bunch of ABC stations owned by Disney for early license renewal, which he is not supposed to do. That case is in court. And ABC's lawyers this week on Tuesday said, quote, we sit with our head on the guillotine.

We are watching everything we do. He likes to. So over and over and over again, we have pointed out that the point of governance each regulation is often not the actual regulation. It is the chilling effect. It is the prevention of speech.

But just by saying the government will punish you for your speech, you will not speak. And so here you have ABC very clearly saying by hauling our licenses in for earlier view against the nebulous standard and off schedule. You are chilling our speech. We are watching what we do in our news networks in a way that is impermissibly viewpoint based, especially in the United States where we have a First Amendment. The government should not be doing those things that court that cases in court.

It seems like that judge understands what's going on. We'll see what happens as it winds to resolution, which it should ahead of the thick of election season. I mean, it is happening right now. Yeah, we're in it in a real way right now. I'm in a swing state and it's a mess.

I watched the Packers game last week on NFL Sunday ticket. And somehow in New York state, I was getting ads for Ken Paxton. Like that's how much money his being just shotgunned into the ecosystem that they broke in ad targeting. I was like, look, I'm not voting in the Texas Senate. I was like, please stop showing me this advertising.

OK, the second one, the one that I find delicious. OK. If you've been paying attention, you know that the thesis of our segment, Brendan Carr is a dummy, American's favorite podcast within the podcast, is that Brendan Carr is very dumb. It's the foundational principle of the show, if you will. Well, one thing that happens with Brendan is that sometimes he's so corrupt, he comes all the way back around and irritates the people for whom he is generally corrupt.

Are you going to agree with Brendan Carr again? This is my favorite when this accidentally happens. So Brendan waved the ownership cap on local TV stations. So in the statute, written by Congress, there's a 39% cap. You are not allowed to own more than 39% of the local TV stations in the market.

This is designed to protect competition. You don't want all the media in a market to be owned by one company. Brendan's argument is, well, Google exists. And so surely Sinclair must be able to buy all the local TV stations. You reason that out however you want.

You wave the cap. This might be illegal. Guess who's suing him, David? Sinclair. Cable TV operators.

Everyone's favorite. The lobbying groups were our nation's largest. And dare I say most beloved cable TV operators have realized that by allowing Sinclair and next are to get huge, they will not be competing for rights in prices. They will just be able to demand rates. So the lobbying groups were cocks and Comcast and all the rest have filed a lawsuit.

And they have said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have the leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in higher TV bills for consumers. The FCC order, quote, arbitrarily and capriciously ignores the harms that will surely follow from allowing broadcast station groups to exceed the national cap. You come all the time. You're so close to getting it. You're so close.

Just say the word antitrust. Just say it. Just say it. I just say Brendan, you did corruption for one group, but you forgot that you're supposed to be in the pocket of the big cable companies, the big ISPs. They're the ones who are paying the bills.

That's great. But no. So now everyone's bad, Brendan. You know, this makes me think up for no reason. There's this headline today on Variety that says, um, this is a variety is owned by our parent company.

Oh, yeah, that's right. Our friends at Variety that says, Glenn Powell is staying quiet on politics because, quote, I do not like the discourse says running man flopped after Paramount laid off entire marketing department. And I just all posted a screenshot of that headline and said, God, he's so close to understanding that business decisions are political in this environment. And it's just like, yep, we're so close to him, Brendan. We're both so close.

Anyhow, Brendan, I would love to see you come on the show and thread this particular needle. Cause I mean, who are you going to be more corrupt for? I'm just not just to come on. Let's hang out. It's going to be here.

Is it going to be Comcast or is it going to be Sinclair, buddy? Quite a lot of triangle you find yourself in. Okay. So here's an idea I'm going to pitch you very quickly. Uh, our new parent company also on Southwest.

So I'm, I'm proposing that it's not by Southwest. Uh, we get one of those things where like you have two people on either side and then you put the dog in the middle and see who they run to, but it's Brendan Carr in the middle and it's the Trump administration on one side. It's cable operators on the other side. And they all try to lure him in and see who he runs to first main stage Southwest to be huge. We can, Brendan, I can make this happen.

We literally can do that. I was just an Austin with the South by people. We can figure this out. And yeah, that has been Brendan Carr's a dummy. America's favorite podcast in podcast.

Brendan Carr is a Tommy. It's a cleansed. We're going to have to make a Spotify playlist very soon. I think I think so. It's going to be, it's going to be very long and very confusing to anyone who finds it by accident.

That's our midterm election package. It's not substantive coverage of the issues. It's a Spotify playlist of pop punk songs calling the chairman of the federal communications commission, the dummy. Large. Uh, my first lady round item is in this swirl of insanity.

Um, Paramount and Warner Brothers discovery finally completed this long awaited, messy, expensive, complicated merger. Um, yet another thing I'm glad to frankly have missed many of the recent machinations out there that many machinations. Uh, will they won't they? Who's going to be in charge? What's Netflix going to do?

We're going to move to Nashville. Yeah. Like fights with various governments, all of whom kind of whisked out at the end. It seems like what middle age man hasn't woken up one day and threatened to be Nashville. That's real.

Just a thing to do. This deal is now done and it puts paramount in control of one of others discovery, uh, which is now a company known as Skydance in a, in a turn that makes perfect sense to everybody. Uh, what do you get when you put Paramount and Warner Brothers discovery together? You get Skydance. Uh, this is now just an absolutely monstrous Hollywood company.

It owns, it owns huge news businesses, like CBS news and CNN. It owns vast swaths of the, the studio movies that get made every year. They've made big promises about how many movies they're going to make. It owns lots of channels. It importantly now owns and operates two very big and very competitive streaming services and there's been a lot of speculation about whether that's going to continue to be the case.

Oh, there's no specular. They've announced they are emerging these streaming services sort of. They, they, even they have talked out both sides of their mouth on this, where like there have been people who have said things like we're going to emerge them and then there have been other people who are like, well, actually that's going to be more like a bundle than a merger. And step one is a bundle. Okay.

Step two is one big streaming show. David Elson was on CBC this morning and he announced that they're going to compete with Silicon Valley with, with tech. Well, that doesn't mean anything. You know what I heard. Sure.

I'm thrilled for them. Congratulations. Like they, they too have iPhones to make movies on, I guess. Um, okay. So the idea is eventually one single streamer.

Somewhere or somehow? Yep. I, I'm what timeline I do not know. Sure. But the idea that they, they have a lot of debt to service, like an enormous amount of debt to service, which I would point out is exactly what happened when one of brothers discovery combined and nearly killed it.

Oh, yeah. And it's what happened. AT&T as well. That, yeah, that company made a lot of really bad decisions because it had to service debt. And now it's a richer guy with a lot of debt to service, but still a hell of a lot of debt to service.

Oh, no, we are just rolling over this over finance Nissan Altima into a new Nissan Altima a couple of years. Like $10,000 payment on this ultimate. We're just going to keep going. Like it's, that's where we are. Uh, but they also have to make 30 movies a year or pay $30 million a year per movie.

They don't make into like a healthcare fund run by the biggest unions. Like they have to spend a lot of money and they got to pay off a lot of debt. And the only way they're going to do is cut costs and there's just no way they're going to run redundant marketing budgets, redundant customer support, redundant AWS layoffs, they're going to lay a bunch of people off and they're going to cut anything that looks duplicative. So two streaming services just simply cannot be in the media. That's fair.

I also think it's very clear that Paramount Plus is not going to win. And if, if this company is actually going to like make smart ruthless decisions, they'll just cut Paramount Plus. Yeah. They hired a, this is a real decoder or PhD thesis. David Ellison is the CEO of Skydance and then Enon Kreeze, who used to be the CEO of Mattel and before that of maker studios, his title is Co CEO.

So there's a CEO, not too co CEO. There's a CEO and a co CEO. And also as a CEO, Enon's title is Co CEO. This is real. Like Dwight Schrute is assistant to the regional manager.

Kind of. That's, we just have Peter Kafka on to code or he just wrote a profile of Enon. He's deep in it. You should listen to it. If you want more for that, but that just like, what are we doing?

It's very good. I mean, yeah, I think I bring this one up in part because there are obviously a lot of important news questions about what's going to happen to CNN. Now there are a lot of obviously worried people who work with these companies who are worried about last, but the play here, if you just take David Ellison at his word is to build something that is so big, it can compete with specifically Netflix. I would not say anything that has happened at the already combined company of Paramount and Skydance suggests that this company is equipped to do that. I don't think it's Netflix.

I think I think he knows that's YouTube and TikTok, which by the way, has a stake in TikTok. Yeah. The way he was talking on CNBC this morning was very much Silicon Valley came in. I mean, this is the quote, Silicon Valley came into media with platform technology, whatever you think that means. And it took it away from us, but now I've assembled the biggest and best bundle of IP the world has ever seen along with sports and news.

And we're going to put together a tech platform that can compete with Silicon Valley and win. I think they mean Netflix when they say that. Maybe they mean TikTok and YouTube. Maybe I'm wrong, but like it is going to be interesting to see if they try to make user-generated content work at scale, which is a thing all of these companies keep trying and keep failing at. Oh, yeah.

I think we Disney has already announced that creators can use their IP to make vertical videos or Disney Plus. I think that is a partnership with TikTok. It would not surprise me at all if the Ellison family finds a way to get TikTok content into whatever forthcoming after is. Yeah. Absolutely.

We'll see, but I will just say this again. I say it so many times. The problem for Hollywood is that everyone is actually watching vertical video and none of those platforms pay a dime for it. And they have to pay actors and actresses. They got to pay Glen Powell and then apparently they need to pay Glen Powell's marketing department.

Right. Like that's just a lot of money for every minute of video that they produce. And Instagram doesn't pay anyone to die. Or or you realize that actually there's a lot of really positive signs that people want to go back out into the world and watch movies and you go make good movies. Like I, a grand theory that I am percolating is that actually the company that is in trouble here is Netflix because it's going to be caught in the middle of it.

It doesn't have the vast quantity of free content, nor does it have the event content that people will actually go out of their way and pay for. And so it's turning into, and this is true on the platform. It's turning into just chum. Right. It is reality.

TV. It is ours to fill. And I think everybody looks at Netflix as like this unstoppable behemoth. I look at Netflix less every month than every month before because there's just increasingly nothing on it. Oh boy.

Okay. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We're we're first episode back after you're leaving David, but we're doing it. Go 90 stale of doing streaming services.

So if no one remembers anymore, because a hundred years ago, we've rise and launched a streaming service called go 90. It was innovation was that you could turn your phone sideways. Also, I believe you could join a gang. Was there a version of the cruise or the gangs? I think it was cruise.

I think it was gangs. It was the gang. That's going to be our app. When we do when we do the verd video app, it's going to be it's going to be gangs. Anyway, go 90 quickly failed.

There's no other way to describe what happened to that platform. And thus, the go 90 scale doing services are born where you start at zero. That's live in 90 is dead. Many, many, many streaming services have gone 90 quickly, famously, I believe, is the the paradigmatic example of it. We all knew we all knew what direction that thing was going and to 90, it arrived.

Yeah. All right. Netflix has been sitting at zero on a go 90 scale of doing streaming services since Netflix existed. You are making it sound like it's not zero anymore. I mean, it's hard because it's it is so big and it has so much money that it is.

It's like betting on Netflix to cease to exist is is ridiculous. And yet, I think net you only get to be a zero if you are also an unstoppable cultural force and Netflix is not that. Whoo. And if it's not, it's it's no, I'll say that it is losing that rapidly. Like it was a cultural force because Stranger Things was a cultural force and Wednesday kind of was and it has it has inched along through a few things that have been huge.

And now it is just betting that you will go on and there will be so much reality stuff to watch that you'll find something and you won't cancel. I would put it like a like a 15. Like it's still somewhere in the green zone here, but it is like also, remember, Netflix spends an unbelievable amount of money on content. It is it is forever hugely expensive. It is forever at the mercy of continuing to grow.

And I think I think things could get ugly the minute anything starts to turn for Netflix. So again, I'm not moving it towards it might disappear from existence, but I think this idea that Netflix is the like unstoppable behemoth of the future of entertainment is wrong. Wow, that's bold. I think only you two for me on this scale. Oh, you can use it.

It's not anywhere. Although if they continue to swap up YouTube in a way that they appear to want to swap up YouTube, I would actually I would move it. I'm like, do you like am I just way over my skis on Netflix? I think Netflix is an aggressively well-run company. Sure.

And the danger for Netflix, in my opinion, is that everyone has realized that their library of like good movies from 2000s is valuable and they don't just dump it on Netflix anymore. Yes. That's not an engine to make a bunch of those movies anymore. Right. Like this is like the problem.

You can go watch that Netflix clip about DVD sales and like why they don't make movies like that anymore. By the way, Ben Affleck this week gave like amazing interviews about how DP is an AI. We should spend an hour just talking about that everybody like Ben Affleck, please come on the first cast. I know you listen, come on the show. Tell us about your Python scripts.

We can make this happen. But Netflix is also slave to data. And I think there's a reason every Netflix movie looks the same and is kind of bland and every Netflix TV like there's a Netflix look. And I think it's fine. It is you can watch TikTok, we watch Netflix.

They got to get over that. They got to make things worth watching or find a way to win the licensing battle. If everybody else some buy things worth watching and I just know that's that's their danger, but I don't think that they're confused. Maybe not. Yeah, that might be right.

I mean, yeah, that might be right. We should talk more about Netflix sometimes. But by the way, while we're looking at the scale here, my read of this is Paramount Plus immediately goes to like an 85 on the scale. Oh, yeah. Cause it's going to be an emergency and HBO Max.

Yeah. And I think HBO Max is like a five like HBO Max, I think is the clear end state of all of this for this giant new company. It's a big thing. Yeah. Where do you see?

Casey Bloys, who was running HBO into in charge of all of this stuff, like the bet here is very clearly on HBO, both like the people and the brand. Yeah. It's the right bet to be clear. Like people don't have feelings about Paramount the way that they do about HBO. We have never had to contend with does being merged in HBO Max constitute going 90.

We have because it's going away. It's going to be gone. This is the Hulu thing, right? Like Hulu still exists, even though it's also still been merged, but it that's still kind of a bundle, but eventually Hulu will just be a tab in the Disney Plus app. And when that happens, Hulu has gone 90.

Yes. I think that's correct. All right. Last one Disney Plus. So that's the other one of note here.

Yeah. Disney Plus is like a two or three. It's it's, I think it is as close to being the cultural force that you have to reckon with as a very obvious that you're three. I mean, I have young children, but also like the the the start where stuff keeps working, Marvel keeps working. Like the they have the IP that no one else has.

And it'll be interesting. Like Amazon is out there spending all this money on James Bond. Can that vault it up this list a little bit? But Disney is just the one you can make theme parks out of. Like it's that's not that's not changing anytime soon.

Yeah. We can do all that. So it's interesting to see where you put Netflix here because Netflix was a rock solid zero for the last five years. Yeah. It just it feels it feels like it has lost something.

And maybe right. The company is as well run as any we'll find in this space. So maybe it'll figure it out. But I don't know. It feels like just to say this is clearly as I can.

I think Netflix is run by essentially saying people and all of these other companies are crazy. I yes, that I like I don't know how else to say that. Like we don't we don't know much about Josh tomorrow at Disney. But you know, this past few weeks while you're out on leave, did you see Bob Chepek reappeared? He wrote like an angry memoir, right?

He wrote a tell all book. And you know, his theory is that he was only made CEO. So Bob Iger didn't have to do COVID layoffs until spell it your hands and black when it was coming out and streaming. And then he's like, I knew I was a I was done for when he gave that interview to Ben Smith. And I was like, I know Ben Smith, what happened to the CEO?

I think more CEOs should write pissy books. Like I really very upset. Yeah. And then something clearly happened because he was all over the place, talking to stuff and then he disappeared. He's no longer available.

I did notice that. It's good stuff. All right. This is officially the slowest lightning round we've ever done. Uh, what's your next lightning round item?

I want to talk about intelligent UI, which we sort of have been talking about, uh, through all the computer stuff, but Chatshimi this week did an update. GPT six. And now the responses can include interactive elements right in line, buttons, I'm guessing buzz because is they love to pretend we're all smart. So they're like, here's a color picker for clothes and like an interactive chart where you can do a slider to learn something. I'm like, tell me who the five sexiest presents were, like whatever, whatever buzzfeed nonsense.

I'm fascinated by this, right? The idea that you would get multi-modal interactives has been an idea that's in floating around for a long time. As with everything, Google announced this at IO two years ago. Yeah. I mean, there's like a little bit of it in AI mode.

Uh, the idea that it will, it will sort of, it will gin up a spreadsheet for you rather than just write you a bunch of numbers. Like there's little pieces of that coming to fruition. But this is the idea that everyone has had for a long time, right? It's like, what if it wasn't just text and then every product, everybody ships is just more texts. Yeah.

But even though like it made you a spreadsheet, it's mostly been like, yes, we, we do, we can do tables and bullet points. Everyone is axios now, right? Yeah. This is very much, yeah, sometimes this is very much like we've made an interactive bicycle for you because you guys are my school works. And there's something about this, which if you put right next to agents and natural language interfaces is the dream, right?

The computer will naturally adapt to you and give you exactly what you need right at the right moment. And we have been covering this industry for 500 years. So many people have tried to build this thing. Yes. In so many different ways.

And what it always runs into is people just want the controls to be fixed. You like you actually want the computer to be vastly more predictable than any adaptive UI system can ever give to you. And the comparison that I will make is we just went through, I don't know, five years of car makers being like, you don't need a trite controls. You need a button on a screen that says auto. And every single person was like, no, I want physical buttons that turn the fan up and down and move the temperature, stop taking them away because you don't think I don't want them or worse intelligently assuming when I should want them and making them appear in disappear at random.

So I can't tell if this intelligent UI update for Chatch BT is brilliant in the future or we're just going to recapitulate every adaptive UI conversation we've ever had or whether there's something else happening here. I think all of these companies are kind of dancing around the wrong idea, which is, which is this constant reinventing the wheel of user interface. Like not only is it what if it was just a button that said auto, it was what if every time you got in the car, that button was in a different place and looked different, wouldn't you like that? And this is what it has been with all of these companies, right? You can, you can build this AI UI on the fly.

And what it actually does is build it in a slightly different way, in a slightly different place every single time. And I think I was talking to some product person a couple of years ago when, when we were really first starting to talk about AI code and he was like, the reason I'm so bullish about building code with AI is that I can do it once. I can use the AI to build something that I then understand and then I can go use that thing and I don't have to keep using the AI. I don't have to keep burning tokens. I don't have to keep guessing how this thing is going to work or reinventing my problems.

I can build a thing that I understand and then I can go use the thing that I understand. And this to me is trying kind of to be too clever by half. And in some ways it will work and it'll be very cool. Like an information retrieval system that it's like, show me company earnings, which is like, I think people care about from time to time, right? It will show you that in a more dynamic way.

And that's all fine and good. Or like, show me how to split the bill between these people, like show me that in some nicer visual way. Fine. I don't think it goes beyond that at all in a way that's going to work for people. And I think actually a lot of people prefer text because text is a thing that is there that I understand that I can refer to that works in a predictable way that makes sense.

And all of this generative UI stuff, I think just feels like mess to people. Yeah. And I think that's what the buttons are and they don't pay any attention. And this is why, you know, the average number of apps done, like the average person is zero. Well, and when you do learn how to do them, you learn how to do the two things that you need to do.

And then your brain ceases to even see everything else in the app. Yeah. And I think this is why Chappos generating text was like, well, at least I can just read this, right? Yeah. But like it's going to make you an app and it might have a crazy UI idea in it.

I don't know. There's something about this. Well, again, I find it fascinating. It has been the industry's dream stretching back decades, right? Like the computer will adapt to you and present to you exactly the right interface at the right time based on its understanding of you just speaking to it.

Boy, every single executive we've ever talked to has issued some proclamation that this will be the future. Yeah. And so maybe we're in the cusp of it, but I'm looking at it. I'm like, huh? Like actually, you know, all the actual users we talk to might not want this.

So I think this I think this feature as expressed in Chappos today is cool. Like, yes, it will make you a chart and graph and a new thing. And like it is funny that Google and answers a hundred years ago and open actually. Yeah. That's right.

What are we doing, everybody? But the next turn when you have an opening at hardware device that has an agent in the cloud and it's like making you custom UI and adapting the UI to you, that's the one I'm interested in because it's going to be the HVAC problem in like massive scale. Yes. Yes. Completely agree.

And that, yeah. And figuring out how to do that in a way that is build something that is sort of permanent and that you can refer to and find and use again and share is like, it's not necessarily impossible, but no one has come anywhere near that yet. Yeah. But I do think it's a fun idea. Like it's fun to watch people try this thing.

Like, how do I, how do I deliver you information in new and better ways is great. Lots of people learn and retain information. Lots of ways to keep trying this, but I am not at all convinced that let's redo some, let's reinvent the wheel every single time is in fact the answer here. That's fine because everyone knows that, but the, like, it just seems like you're a product designer at an entire company. You were required to forget it on a three year cadence.

Yes. I say you're promoted. You read the wheel, you get promoted. You take a vacation and then you come back and you start to reinvent the wheel. Yeah.

That's right. I think. All right. We really need to get out of here. But before we do, I just want to talk about one, one thing very brief.

I just want to get your temperature on this thing. So, Sam Altman did an interview on a new political podcast, the name of which I will not say out loud for reasons that anyone who knows the name of the podcast will understand. You know, Sam Altman is the way you're sitting in our fancy company. So, Sam Altman on this podcast is talking about all the things Sam Altman likes to talk about. And he says at one point that some bad things are going to happen with AI and that we have to be okay with some bad things happening because, and this is a quote, people will do tremendously orders of magnitude, more good stuff.

This became a whole kerfuffle, right? Everybody's spent a couple of days being various degrees of mad about Sam Altman being like, I accept some bad stuff because there's also going to be all kinds of good stuff happening. I confess my immediate instinct is to be like, this is such a nothing burger of a statement. Like everything that has ever happened has some bad things and some good things. And we try to lessen the bad things and increase the good things, but this is just how every advancement we've ever had in history has worked.

Yeah. What do you make of this? Like, is this a real thing for people to be angry about the same moment is saying? I don't think so. I think the way he framed it was particularly awkward.

So the exact quote is, we believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency. And I'm like, yeah, when you put it like that, I don't care what the benefits of this technology. Like the point, the technology is whatever, like, I get what he's trying to say. There's a big technological revolution and we're going to give people a lot more capability and some people will do bad things. And then negative consequences will be far outweighed by the positive run.

You can apply that as you're saying, you can apply that to anything from everything that's ever happened to cars to whatever it is, right? You're going to give people cars or increase mobility. You're going to also have some car crashes and then the anti car movement in the city since 2026 will be a loud and vocal potent force. And then we're going to do congestion, whatever. Like some swirl of decisions will have to be made because cars exist.

Okay. Like if that is what he's trying to say, straightforward, I think is fine. But for the benefits of this technology is the entire problem with how the AI industry communicates is as though they are not in control of what they are doing. Right. And so either we're going to have AGI or not.

And if I don't get there first, then something bad will happen. And so some bad things have to happen. Like that's how he sounds. Yeah. I know that's just how he sounds to people that he has to get there.

We've got to do this. So you deal with it. Deal with the data centers, deal with the, the, the, the teens getting AI psychosis, like all of that is fine because like we have to do this and I can't possibly slow down or be more careful. And so if he's talking about the, the straight up societal trade off, like the reason the decoder tagline is big idea is not a problem is it's like it is embedded in the very notion of the big idea that you will have to answer for some problems that you have caused. Yep.

Okay. But of course I buy it. But the way this industry talks about the thing that they're making is that they have completely lost control of their own ambition. And we all just have to, like, yeah, man, I think data centers and surveillance are going to tip the election in this round. And a large part of it is because the industry cannot help itself.

Right. Yeah. And they also, well, at some point, at some point, you and I are going to have a long deep conversation that may or may not ever make it onto a podcast about this thing, where they've all decided that AI is alive and deserves feelings and fair treatment and all of this. We like the fact that the Claude terms now prohibit you from being mean to Claude for too long is just like, book wild in a way that I'm actually like just out of mind about. But in this one, I just kept thinking about the fact that Sam Altman, in this case, and in basically every case is just completely unable to articulate the good thing that AI is going to do.

He's like, yes, all this bad stuff is going to happen, but it's going to do so much more good stuff. And it's like, well, what, Sam, it's going to put everybody on jobs. It might kill all of us. What's the good part? Well, I'm monitoring email for a class.

It's going to like do sick math. And that's cool. I like math, but yeah, it's going to be for class action settlements. I just, I don't know, again, just as a watcher of this over the last couple of months, I just kept looking out and it's like, nobody has a better idea for AI than it can help you book trips and everybody has ideas about how it might kill us all. And like, boy, is that a bad trade?

If you can, if you can give me the trade that is good enough that I will accept a 10% chance that we're all going to die, that's actually a really fun conversation to have. I would really, really like someone to make that argument once. And no one can do it, including Sam Altman. And they're going to cure all diseases, but they also might kill you. Don't say that.

Give us a sabis out here being like, we're going to cure all diseases. Sam Altman doesn't, he's like, I don't know, weapons, maybe. I don't know. And I think that to me was just like this thing that like, yes, there are negative consequences to technological innovation is just true. But like even Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook was like, we're going to connect people and that's good.

And that's bad in lots of ways and good in lots of ways. I think there's a famous memo from Bos at meta called the ugly. And he's like, you're all of the bad things that will happen if we connect everyone in the world and we're going to do it anyway. And there's a lot of lore around this letter. You should go and read it.

But the sort of most important part of the lore was Bos saying, it's important for me to just say it all out loud. So this whole company can react to it. I've written this as a provocation. And then the company did not react to it by trying to stop any of the things, which is maybe a strategic mistake. But there's no question that the tech industry understands that it has negative consequences when it reorgers society.

Right. And I think here, Sam, again, if you're just saying that conceptually, fine, like truly the steam engine, like whatever it is. But to say it is like a toss off, which is, I think, how much people read it. Yeah. Yeah.

That's fair. I agree with that. And also for what, Sam, 10% chance I'm going to die. I'm going to put my own slides. Video of Heath voters, Joker, doing a ukulele wrap with Batman the other day.

All right. You got me a 2% chance on the time. We're going to go from there. That's what happens. That's a real thing that happens.

All right. We have gone way over. Send me that link, by the way. I appreciate that. We have gone way over as we once do it.

It's good to be back. I miss you. I'm glad to be back here doing this. We should get out here. Before we do vote for our show in the signal awards, it's a podcasting awards thing.

We would very much like to win. This show is nominated for technology podcasts, version history is nominated for history podcasts, decoder is nominated for business podcasts, not to brag. That's all of our podcasts. Please go vote. We'd really like to win all the links in the show notes.

Also, we have a bunch of cool decoder stuff coming up next week. Me like, who's going to be third? So go listen to the Peter coffee episode. If you want more on Scottance, he really did just profile the CoCio Scottance. He's deep in it.

And then then Jordan is on to talk about fault cameras and surveillance and his experience testifying before Congress. And I'm just going to say, I'm a huge fan boy and you can just sense that I was delighted the whole time that he was even talking to me. That's awesome. I'm excited about that one. This weekend on version history, Gen 2E is coming on to talk about the Leepad Gen 2A and Angel Marino to talk about this weird little reading device that taught millions of kids how to read in the early 2000s.

Also, if you haven't watched the Chromebook episode, if you want to know the source of all of my feelings about Google Books, go watch last week's episode. You and me and Marquez Brownlee on the Chromebook. It's great time. We've got a lot of feedback on that episode. I enjoyed it very much.

Remember to subscribe to the Verge to get all of our podcasts ad free, all of the videos that we do here. Also, send us email, Vergecast.com, as email 866-1-1 is the hotline. We love hearing from you about all this and everything else. Vergecast is a Verge production and part of Vox Media podcast network. This show is produced by Josh Cau has Eric Gomez, Randy Keefer and Travis Larchock.

We will see you next week. Neil, I haven't heard it in a while. Give it to me. The next person sitting in the break room could be you with O.L.G. Winnie happens here.

Winner, Daniel. That was a two-on-one odd man rush, but you're rushing to get game day deals on Uber Eats. Keep everyone at tonight's Watch Party Fed with deals from your go-to restaurants or stock up on your favorite snacks and groceries. Whatever the occasion, get game day deals on Uber Eats all season long. Hockey is for the hungry Uber Eats order now.

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