Apple HomePad Imminent, OpenAI Dots Explained, AI Safety Charade

Episode intro and tech news

0:00In space, no one can hear you scream. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Apple's HomePad may be coming October 13th. That's in the news, and iPhone Duo, you can pre-pre-order it this Monday. ChattrPT had their Dev Day and announced DOTS, AI agents that do a bunch of stuff for you. Paramount appoints a new co-CEO. Amazon is giving their delivery drivers glasses that record everything, and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by Origin HQ and you, the members who support us directly. And I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles, joined by the famous and infamous,

0:33who's just making his rounds everywhere, Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason? It's good. I love the way you do our intros because every time, without fail, you say something that I'm like, hold on, we're talking about that. I better go look and see what he put in here. I get the rundown done at least 12 hours before you record. Yes, and I look through it, and every time you say something that I'm like, how did I miss that? Okay. The Amazon delivery glasses, that'll be in the lightning round. I mean, it's, you know, it's just a whole other thing. All right, now, I have some, a quote. Let's start with the quote. In space, no one can hear you scream.

1:03It's a pretty well-known quote. It's one of the most famous quotes you've used, right? One of the most famous. Yeah, it's from Alien. It is from Alien. Okay. We're going to talk about the cutification of AI in a minute, about all the companies like Muse AI and Dots trying to make their AI agents seem cute, and I said that because someone replied to my Threads post about that with this picture, which is the teddy bear head on the xenomorph from the movie Alien, and I thought that was pretty funny. It does seem about right. After my experience, I do think of Muse as this little, I almost say cockroach, but I

1:38don't mean that in a pejorative sense. What was the movie with the gremlins? They turn evil at night or whatever? I mean, it's called Gremlins. Thank you. Okay. I've actually never seen it. The movie with the gremlins. Oh, yes. The gremlin movie. The gremlins. I have seen Batteries Not Included, which is a very deep cut, but I've not seen Gremlins. Have you seen Batteries Not Included? Do you remember that movie? I think so, yeah. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Have you seen Batteries Not Included and Short Circuit, all three of them? And Hat or No Hat. Jason was wearing a hat and hoodie today that I was not prepared for.

2:09It took me a full 10 minutes in our pre-show to actually figure out what was happening. To absorb it, to process it. I said, who am I talking to? You sound like Jason. Jason, is this what AI thinks Jason looks like and it's just fake? Now, I said Jason was famous and infamous because, Jason, you've been making the rounds everywhere. Your articles have been covered by so many news outlets. You've been on the news. Can you say, or no, should I cut that out? Wait a minute. No, you don't have to cut it out. I've done some, yeah, I've made the rounds. You've made the rounds. That sounds better. Okay, we'll get into that. Also, I wanted to say, last episode, I wanted to point it out and missed it.

2:42We passed episode 150, Jason, 150 episodes. Isn't that wild? Now, that does include one or two extra. Listen, I don't want to get into it. I try to mark bonus episodes as bonus that are not actually numbered. Okay, great. Sometimes that happened anyways. But yeah, but 150 and we're coming up on our third year because we started in January of 2024. And so, yeah, we're coming up. But anyway, I enjoy doing this podcast with you, Jason. It's so fun. 150, yeah, that's fun.

Listener reviews and feedback

3:12All right, five-star ratings and reviews. Thank you to McBainA99 from the UK. Says, loves his daily and weekly show, so they're a member. Thank you for that. Battery percentage on, but we won't hold that against him. But pencil up. Pencil up and watch only on Siri. So he's riding both sides. There you go. He's on both of our sides. And JP Toohey from the USA. Listen, I know who this is. This is Jennifer Patterson Toohey of The Verge. Left us a five-star rating and review and asked us to do more smart home coverage. Of course. So thank you for that, Jennifer.

3:43And we want to have you on. So if you're listening, if this Apple HomePad really does come out in a couple weeks, please come on the show. We need to talk about it in depth. That would be a fun episode. I'm generally adamantly opposed to having guests, but I would accept that one. We'll do it as a bonus episode. I'm just kidding. Off Thursday, yeah. Will Kennard from the UK. Battery percentage on. Point for you. And I wanted to thank, deeply thank Alex for sending me an email because I mentioned how Apple is going to be introducing subscriber video soon.

4:14That was kind of towards the end of the show last week. And I talked about how my process for making sure the audio was good for the video was very lengthy because I basically re-render the whole show because Riverside's audio isn't great. So I added my own audio and then I put it together. And Alex sent me an email. He was like, hey, FFmpeg, which is a great kind of utility that lives in the terminal of your Mac. It doesn't live there, but you know what I mean? That's how you use it. You can use FFmpeg to swap out the audio track of a video file in seconds.

4:48And I asked him, like, well, how do you do it? He's like, I have no idea. I think it just is able to do that. I was like, okay. So I did what you do. I went to ask Claude. I said, hey, I heard FFmpeg can do this. Can it do this? And Claude was like, yep. I said, well, can you give me a script that I can use in a shortcut? And it gave me the script. And so now I have a shortcut where when I run it, I can choose the video file I get from Riverside. I can choose the audio file that I edited, which has to be exactly the same length. But once I choose those, like in three seconds, it spits out another video file and it just

5:18swapped the audio track. And it's going to save me like an hour a week. And I think we'll make it possible maybe if and when Apple offers subscriber video and Transistor, our host, supports it, I might be able to do it all because this is going to save me a ton of time. So thank you, Alex. Alex, that was a huge help. And I'll put a link to that shortcut down in the show notes if somebody else has a reason to do that. Yeah. It's funny. I think Claude really likes FFmpeg because the number of times I've asked it about trying to do something, I'm like, you know, when I export, sometimes I'll open a video in QuickTime

5:49and I'll just click export audio. But you don't get any choices about like whatever, whatever. And it's like, oh, you should use FFmpeg for that. I'm like, I'm not doing that. And then it's like, what if I had a folder where every time an audio file dropped into that, you just transcribed it? And it's like, you should use FFmpeg. I'm like, what doesn't Whisper transcription just watch folders, which it does. It's like, Claude really wants me to use FFmpeg. They've got like a behind the scenes deal or something. Yeah. I mean, I use shortcuts for that. I have another shortcut I'll put in the thing. I have to write. I have to make a note. Well, the audio one is easy because the transcription app I use will just watch the folder.

6:21And every time something shows up in it, it will just. So I have dropped. Well, we'll get to it later in personal tech. Sorry. I'm jumping too far ahead. I'm so excited. I have a shortcut that I'll also put in the notes where it you when you run the shortcut, you can select a folder. And if you have a bunch of video files in that folder, it will transcribe them all. And it'll just save .text files in that same folder with all the transcripts. And it's great. So yeah, you can do it. All right. We'll get to that in personal tech. We'll save it. Amazing.

iPhone Duo pre-order details

6:47Jason, you have just a few days left for you to get ready for your iPhone Duo pre-pre-order. Okay. Apple is doing this. Every year, Apple does this with the regular iPhone launch. But they're doing it for the iPhone Duo October 12th, which is. Sorry, you don't have a few days. You have a week in a few days. This is next Monday, October 12th. You'll be able to pre-pre-order your iPhone Duo, meaning you can get ready. You can go in. You can say if you're trading a device in, you can choose your carrier, connect your carrier

7:17account, choose your model, the storage, the color, and get ready for the pre-order that's happening on the Friday. And that is Friday, October 16th is the official pre-order. But on Monday, the 12th, you'll be able to pre-pre-order. So get ready, Jason. I don't even understand why this is a thing that exists. You don't know. Hold on. Why? Yeah. Explain to me why the pre-pre-order process makes any sense. They're telling you it's going to be really hard to pre-order.

7:49Is that the point? Is it trying to create just the perception that it'll be really hard to pre-order? So you should create your pre-order in advance. But creating a pre-order in advance is purely an exercise in getting people excited about a thing, which is fine. No, no, no, no, no, no. If you're connecting this to a carrier, there has been many times where in the process of pre-pre-ordering that something will, I will have to make a decision or something has to change. We're just making sure like my card on file that the Apple store is about to use is good.

8:19And like all those steps saves me a lot of time, especially the connecting carrier, because when you do that pre, have you never done the pre-pre-order? I've literally never done it. And I've literally never bought a phone connected to a carrier. Well, no, hold on. Not literally never, but not since like the iPhone 11. You just buy the unlocked? I just buy them. Oh. I don't want none of those carriers listening to my iPhone. Yeah, but you connect to the Verizon as soon as you get it.

8:45Jason's trying to, no, he's trying to stoke people. We'll get to Muse AI in a minute. Don't worry about it. But no, I connect it to my carrier every time. So I tell Apple- They charge you more for that, you know. They charge you $35 more for that. I mean, they're going to charge you that activation fee when you put it on the carrier. No, not when I just swap it. AT&T does. I've never paid for that. AT&T does. And they're scalpers. Yeah. I'll just say that. Because I've had like a Pixel phone or whatever that I've like switched my eSIM to and back. I've switched a line back and forth.

9:15And I get an activation charge every time I switch it. See, that's insane. That should not happen. And that's, listen, hey, I might switch it because AT&T is supposedly not going to offer this cellular handoff. So I can switch between my 18 Pro Max and do it. Can you imagine if they charge you $35 every time you unlock your phone? This is what I'm saying. If they're charging me that for activation, this is probably why they're not doing the handoff feature. Listen, leave us a five-star rating review. Shoot us up on social media. T-Mobile has the handoff feature now. Verizon has said it's coming. I'll have to actually price out because I have like my entire family is on this plan.

9:49But I mean the handoff feature might make me switch. I've been on AT&T since singular. Like singular era. Like back in 05, I think. So I'm down. I'm down. I'll switch. We'll see. Anyway, I would do the pre-preorder if you want to order iPhone Duo, especially if you connect it to a carrier, which I do. Like I tell it I'm going to upgrade this phone line and all that kind of stuff. And you sign into your AT&T account and all that. That's why that is useful. So Monday, October 12th, the pre-preorder is coming. And then the next day, Jason, supposedly we are finally, after years of waiting, getting the Apple HomePad.

Apple HomePad rumors

10:26Mark Gurman, who's launched a new show. Congrats, Mark, on launching a podcast. I believe it launches today as we record. The HomePad, October 13th. Mark Gurman says it's going to be coming. Apple's announcing it on that day. This is supposedly going to be the squarish iPad-like screen, a six-inch display, Mark Gurman is saying, maybe on an arm like the old iMac G4. And it will have some kind of facial recognition so it knows what user is approaching it. And if you, you know, it might show your calendar messages and stuff when you approach it.

11:00And then it'll recognize someone else as they approach it. There'll be a guest mode so it doesn't show any sensitive information. Of course, you'll be able to control your entire home. And then Siri AI would be built into this. And we also might get a new HomePod Mini and Apple TV at the same time, Mark Gurman is saying, because then those devices will be uploaded to Siri AI. I'm so excited, Jason. I'm very excited. I want all of this. You don't look excited, Jason. I'm just not excited about the name. I don't know. Well, I don't know if it's going to be called a HomePad. If it's called a HomePad, I don't think I would buy it.

11:34What? I don't think I want to tell people I have a, I don't know what, but I mean, here's the thing. What else would you call this thing? I don't know. They're going to call it HomePad with display, which is honestly a thing Apple might do. HomePod with display? Yeah. They might. I mean. Display pad. I don't, which is really the same thing. Oh, no, not display pad. That's the same thing because it's like display pod. Sorry. Apple, Apple home display. I feel like they could be, it could be that. Apple home. It'll be Apple home something.

12:04It'll be the Apple home hub nest max. Thank you. Apple home. No, I think, I don't know. HomePad. Do you remember when the iPad was, it was before the iPad came out, but there was a lot of pontification about the name and people were like, it's going to be the iSlate or it'll be the iTablet. And people were poo-pooing the name iPad because it sounded weird at first. It sounded like. A feminine hygiene product. Yeah, hygiene product. That's the problem, yeah. And people were like, there's no way they're going to call it iPad.

12:34And sure enough, Steve Jobs is like, we call it iPad. Yeah. So, they're not afraid of that word, obviously, but home pad, I don't know, maybe that's what it is. What do you think? Over, under? You're going to go with home pad? You betting on that? I would bet against that, but I would not bet a lot. Small bet. Small bet. I think, all right, well, I will say not. I think it's going to be something different than the home pad and we'll see who's right. Just saying. Well, no, we're both saying that. We're both saying, I'm saying I'm betting it would not be the home pad, but I would not bet

13:04a lot of money because I'm saying it's also just pretty likely that maybe that is what they're going to call it. Maybe it's just Apple pad. No, that would be terrible. No, don't do that. At least. I think it is more likely that it's like a new paradigm, like it's just the Apple home display or something like that. Apple home hub. Apple home hub. That's what I'm saying it's going to be. Maybe. I mean, if you look back at the iPhone 18 event, Apple's new CEO, John Ternus, many times was like personal intelligence hub, personal intelligence hub.

13:36He said it like a bunch of times. Maybe that's the name of the product. No, it's too long. The Apple personal intelligence hub. I think the Apple home hub, that sounds right. I'm going with that. I'm marking it down. I'm writing it down. Apple. I'm writing it down. Apple home. Anyway, I'm excited for this. I looked back. We've been talking. Me and Andrew talked about this on HomeKit Insider. I think seven years ago was the earliest episode that we mentioned it. This has been long rumored. Long rumored. And I'm writing down Apple home display just because I wanted to have something on the

14:07record. Okay. Very good. Very good. We will check back on Jason's notepad, his Apple home notepad in a couple of weeks. It's very sophisticated. Very sophisticated. You know, side note, you have like 13 remarkable tablets. I do. And you still use paper when you write down notes during this show. Why don't you use a remarkable? Well, I typically throw this paper away afterward and I should not throw the remarkable away. No, you should not. You should not. They're expensive. They're expensive. I see. The remarkable that I like is the move, which is small.

14:39Sure. And the paper I'm using is not small. It is a big. And it is just the other thing that's nice about it is because it is just a large sheet of like a large pad of paper. I don't have to be especially precise when I just reach over to write something down. Okay. So large pad size is a priority. It's like speed. I just need to be able to quickly grab the pencil and just write something. And yeah, that's why. That's really the. And it's also pretty. Everything I'm writing down here is something with the exception of remind Steven to tell me something. Yes. Pretty much everything else on this list is simply for the show.

15:11And so I don't. I don't. It doesn't need to be. You just burn it. Yeah. You just stand there. I got a fireplace over there. You can't see it, but it's actually a trash can and I just drop a match. That's not safe. That's not safe.

Jason's articles and Meta AI

15:22All right. You've been on a tear. Speaking of speed, you've been doing a lot of stuff and I just want to, this is the section of the show where we just read Jason's articles together. No, we're not going to do that. But you have a new episode of creative effort with Ron Johnson, who was the created the Apple store alongside Steve jobs and some great Steve job stories in that episode. So we'll link that below. Congrats. New episode. Yeah, it was really, I know I did actually get some. Like comments from people. They're like, finally. So glad you're back. Someone even posted on social media like Jason's back.

15:53I'm like, I do a podcast every week. Every week. I haven't done this one in a while. I publish three to five articles a week. I've been around. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, three to five articles a week. And I mean, you've been on another tear and I just wanted to say one. Well, great work, first of all, because, you know, you covering this meta AI, Muse AI stuff. The Verge covered it. Who else is linked to it? I mean, I think nine to five Mac, Apple Insider, which makes me mad. Fine. I like Apple Insider.

16:24But like everyone keeps linking to their article. I'm like, but they did link to mine. So that's fine. But they do it in yours. And it is funny. Like you pointed out that there's people from meta who refuse to talk to you directly, but are replying to all the other people sharing these articles. Yeah. But and to be clear, you've not heard anything from them. Well, so to be clear, I spoke yesterday with someone off the record or on background who is going to help me get to the bottom of this. Let's put it that way. And so the next step is to send all of the information I have to them so that we can get

17:00some. But one of the things I wanted to say is like, you know, your chief spokesperson is out there essentially like calling me a liar, but no one has bothered to talk to me yet. So it doesn't seem cool. Like maybe I'm more like, listen, I'll send you the Mac mini. It's not, it's not even mine. I don't care. Apple probably wouldn't like that, but yeah. No, but I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just have absolutely happy to figure out what, what actually happened here. And if what actually happened, you look and you're like, oh, you see how you managed to somehow click this one thing that whatever, whatever. Sure. My point will still be yes, but I was clear about what I wanted it to do.

17:32And this was not one of those things. So that's still a problem. I'm like, I'm perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that some of this was just like, I didn't notice that I had given it permission to do something. The problem is like, I have gone through, I've used Claude to go through everything to help me figure out like what's going on. It decompiled the app. It's looking through all the logs. It's checking the TCC register, which is when every, every time an app will ask for permission, an app asks for permission to do something. There's a register, but unfortunately it only records the last instance of that. So there's no way to know like statuses of things.

18:02Sure. Meta does take analytics from use. And so presumably there are analytics of like what you may have enabled at different times. And the person I spoke with was like, would you be willing to give us permission to do that? And I'm like, whatever, do what you want. But my, you already took my messages. My point. You've already read all my messages with Steven. Yeah, exactly. But it's like, I'm, it is. So I have, so I want to give Meta some credit. At one point they suddenly became aware that I was trying to talk to them about it. And I heard from like in David Singleton, who is the person who has been going around

18:35responding to all of these things actually did send me a message and put me in contact with someone. And that person is part of their comms team. And we did have a phone conversation. So at some point I would love to be able to update the story with like, here's what happened. We do not know yet what has happened. Okay. Do you want me to explain what has happened? We talked about this before. To be clear, if you want to listen to last week's episode, Jason tried Muse AI, the app from Meta, which is their agent, downloaded it on your Mac and it started doing weird things.

19:07And you discovered that it basically grabbed your messages database file from your Mac and uploaded that, or at least was reading it. Yeah, it had uploaded it and was obviously watching it because it literally sent me a push notification moments after Steven and I texted each other back and forth. Exactly. So there's that. So that last week, Jason goes in depth about it. And now we're just, this is kind of like the aftermath, which hopefully you'll get an update. I'd really be, we'd be great to discuss if you actually get to speak with Meta on the record. Yeah. It is weird to log on.

19:37This is not the first time this has happened to me. Every so year, every so many years, something that I do breaks containment. Yes. Yes. Yeah. There, and it is taken on different degrees. There was the year that we declined $10,000 to get off of a Delta flight to Alaska and eight of us, we passed it up apparently. And that I never heard the end of. And I ended up on the nightly news for that one. So it's like the guy who, the moron who turned down $80,000 to get off of a flight. Like, and then, you know, there was also the time that, you know, my articles went viral for not a great reason.

20:08So every so often this happens, it doesn't really faze me, but it is weird to open Twitter, which I don't actually open that often. And to be like, Oh, like this is being shared by, you know, Jason Calacanis and like, yeah, but I think it's the bigger picture of all of these companies, which we're going to get into all the releases that every company has done, like chat, repeat, dots, muse, AI, like agents and having these AIs do things for you is just the thing. It's the big in the news.

20:39And then the question is, what is the cost? You know, what, what do you have to give up to actually have this advantage or benefit from these apps? And I think the verge, the verge cast, even I was listening to their dots episode this morning and they were talking about, again, the muse, AI stuff. So muse, AI, I've not tried it. Despite what Instagram will tell you. Steven has not tried it. I'm going to link three of Jason's articles. One was meta strategy to get you to use muse is to lie about your friends, which you've

21:12mentioned primary technology in like three articles. Thank you. That's wonderful. And I even linked to it. And I think this one, yes, yeah, you did link to it, but this was, I think we touched on it last week, but our friend Nate saw this message in Instagram that, Hey, your friends are using muse. And there's this cute little character, which I want to, we'll talk about that in a minute. But it was like Steven Robles, primary technology and Jason Aiton are on, on muse. And your articles goes on to say like, well, one primary technology, the Instagram account has never used muse, which is the case because I, I run that account.

21:44I've never used, I've never connected it to muse. And I tried Meta's glasses, which I remembered when I did the Meta Ray-Bans a couple months ago, it was the Meta AI app. It was not muse. Right. But that Meta AI app, as far as I know, became the muse app. Is that accurate? I don't know if that's exactly true, but like in their mind, certainly Meta AI is now muse. Right. And so in their terminology, because I connected those glasses and downloaded that app once, which I've since deleted from my phone, I am, I have used muse, but I, but even that

22:19is disingenuous because to say you've used muse is not the same as to say you are on muse. Yeah. Saying you're on, yes, that's the wording is strange. So anyway, that, that was a great article. And then I appreciated you've, this is the one I think you linked to us. You talked about how AI is like Jurassic Park. You mentioned on an episode of this show back in July, and you finally put it down into words on ink.com. So you can make sure that everybody knows that you did this first. Well, I do think it wasn't just that. I mean, I know, I know, I don't know if it was first.

22:51I had not anyone heard anyone else make the direct comparison to this particular movie, but, but the, my, the contrast that I was trying to make is like, there was this phase where everyone was talking about her, like that was the ideal AI, whatever experience. And it's kind of a depressing movie, but whatever. And I'm like, no, that is very depressing. That is not the metaphor that we should be going for because there's a much more obvious metaphor that is that the velociraptors are trying to get out of the fence. Exactly. And I think what, why this is all germane is muse.

23:21I just looking right now is still the number one app, number one free app in the app store. Muse AI is above chat GPT. It's above all the things it's above threads, you know, Tik TOK, Gemini, even though they've just released a new model, like muse AI is just number one, but it is still doing nefarious things. Not only did it read Jason's messages, which is problematic, but there was also a YouTuber who was trying to use muse to post something on Facebook marketplace.

23:55And it turns out he came to realize that muse had shared his address. Uh, it gave his address after a guy and a guy just showed up at his address. This is a Matt Robb YouTuber. And this is one of those promises that like muse AI will help you post things on Facebook marketplace, help you manage the things. And my wife has actually noticed this. She's looking at vans on Facebook marketplace, like minivans or whatever. And she was like, you know, in the last week or two, every listing is, sounds the same.

24:27Like every listing is written and just sounds exactly the same. And I told her about this and she was like, Oh, well that makes sense because it's just all reads like the same listing. But, but the promise is that it would help you whatever Facebook marketplace stuff. And someone actually asked me the other day about a shortcut in my shortcuts community. They were like, can you make a shortcut that gives me a summary of my WhatsApp messages every day? And I'm like, well, no one shortcuts. Like WhatsApp doesn't have the kinds of actions where you can just pull all your WhatsApp messages, nor do they want to give you that kind of access to your WhatsApp messages.

25:00And two, unfortunately your best option is probably Muse because Muse is Meta's product. And you could probably ask Muse about all your WhatsApp messages. I don't know that. You definitely can. You definitely can. You definitely can. So like, and this feels a little bit like the siloing that we've talked about and has been, you know, iPhone or Android or whatever. However, it's like, if you want to have helpful AI agent activity in your Meta products, you

25:31have to use Muse. And it looks like if you want to use dots or whatever, ChatGPT is, we're going to get to that. Just talked about it. It has like 4,000 connectors, but there's like a kind of a silo of products there. And so I don't like that feeling. Just that these silos are starting to happen because every company wants to have its agent and AI, sorry, super intelligence. That's the official term. I don't know if we're going to, Jason just rolled his eyes. I don't know if we're going to get arrested if we say artificial intelligence.

26:02No, just kidding. I'll explain that in a second. Anyway, I don't know. What was your general feeling? Because you've written all these articles, Muse AI is out there. Has your feelings changed? What do you think? I mean, okay, a couple of pieces of information that first of all, I just got an email this morning from sensor tower. They're the people that like tracked app store downloads and stuff like that. And apparently Muse has surpassed 5 million downloads, which is double what ChatGPT was at this point, just to be clear, like what to be clear, like when it came out, you know, 22 days after it launched or whatever. So it's being downloaded. What's weird about that is ChatGPT was started from zero, meaning like it was a thing that just

26:37popped out into the zeitgeist and then people started downloading it. Whereas Muse was like, listen, if you open your phone to an app owned by Meta, like it's almost impossible. I'm impressed you haven't downloaded Muse on accident at this point because it is just everywhere. It's like, here is an ad for shoes on Instagram. Let me tap on this. Oh, actually, it's an ad to download Muse to buy shoes for you. Like it's insane. It's just completely bonkers. So it's not surprising to me that they have had a huge uptake and it does seem to be everywhere.

27:07The one thing I don't like about this is a sidetrack. I apologize. One thing I don't like about threads right now is because I posted the thing about Muse. My entire like for you column is just Meta employees talking about what they're doing on Muse, which is insane. But I do want to, sorry, I wanted to clarify one thing about the story, the marketplace story. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I think that this actually highlights the real problem with Muse, which I think I said this last week, which is that it's just incredibly zealous to do things for you even when you don't ask it to or expect it to because he had given Muse permission to do like to give

27:40out his address or something like that. But he didn't expect that that meant like carte blanche, whatever. And it didn't expect that that would mean that like Muse essentially acted in that particular interaction as though it were a human who was going to meet the person because the person showed up and the seller was not there. So now everyone was mad, right? Well, and apparently in that article, I'll link a business inside article. Apparently Rob said that he did check a box for allow always. Right. That allowed Muse to send a template containing his address to the buyer.

28:13I guess the weird part is that always allow gave Muse permission to accept a low ball offer for the thing that he had listed on Facebook marketplace. Zero, like zero or something like that. Something ridiculous. So that was, I mean, he did click always allow, but what that means. And again, I, I mean, that's my point. The expectation that the user have is different than the exact permissions like taking in the most technical sense, which just tells me that the people who have made this are not thinking through the actual user experience because, okay, technically you have permission

28:46to do this thing. Okay, cool. I got permission to do this thing. I'm just going to do the thing. No reasonable. Like Steven, if you, if you asked me to sell your Mac studio for you and you're like, could Jason just, just make this thing happen. Right. Sure. I'm a, I'm not a moron. I'm not going to sell it for $50. I mean, for 50 bucks, I'll just buy it myself. It's fine. Right. Like I'll just give you 50 bucks. You'll never know the difference. But like there, we, Muse doesn't understand social norms or how we actually interact as human beings. And so it's just doing whatever. So that's the part that meta either did not think through or isn't being clear enough

29:20to users. Do you think, because this is the promise of dots from chat to be too, like, did you find or can you see where it's actually useful? And did you, was it useful to you? Because I'm looking at the Muse app on the app store, like in just in the screenshots. And you know, the promise is, you know, fill out this PDF form with my information, which might be helpful, or, you know, compare these items for shopping, buy me movie tickets, you

29:50know, find the showing for this movie that has two seats together. And supposedly Muse can do that using the browser. And if we didn't make this clear yesterday, the promise of Muse and I think dots from ChatGPT is like, you basically have a virtual machine in Meta's cloud that is running your Muse AI agent. And so they are saying like, you have your own PC in the cloud, basically. And it's a virtual machine, you know, not a physical box, but it's on a physical box. But anyway, that's, that's the promise of these agents.

30:22Because up until this point, like OpenClaw or the other things where your agents would be doing stuff on your computer, your computer had to be awake. It couldn't go to sleep. This is why the joke is everybody walking around with their laptops with the lid slightly open, because the agent has to do stuff, the computer has to be active. And so what Muse AI is promising and ChatGPT dots is like, you know what, you don't worry about your computer, we're going to do it on the cloud, we're quote unquote, giving you a computer in the cloud, a virtual machine, so your agent has access to a web browser and all these tools who can do all these things for you.

30:54So you can just send a message to Muse using the app on your phone, and shut your phone off, live your life, and it's going to be doing all these things in the background. Did you find anything or do anything useful for Muse, or do you feel like it would be useful? Yeah, I haven't done like, the most agency of things with it necessarily. But I did, I have used it to do a few things that I wouldn't have been able to use just a normal Chapa. I think the, what this is showing us is that the meta actually has the right model.

31:26Okay. It's based on OpenClaw, but OpenClaw was the thing you had to install on like Mac Mini. That's why you couldn't buy Mac Minis for a while is because of OpenClaw, right? So you had to understand what you're doing. And then you had to have a way of connecting with it. And I think people were sending it WhatsApp messages or something. I can't remember exactly what this signal telegram messages, maybe it's telegram or something like that. So, but meta just combined those two things. So like, here, there's a map on your phone, install it on your computer, but also don't install it on your computer. You just install it on your phone. No, I mean like for real. And there's a computer in the cloud.

31:57Every single person has a computer in the cloud. Now that really is like the model. That is what, I mean, imagine if Siri intelligence had that. You could just on your phone, have it doing stuff like this. And that's why I think Ben Thompson started calling like meta connect, like meta's business now is just muse delivery devices. It's like the glasses. The reason that they can just talk to, you can just talk to it and do stuff is because it's just sending all that stuff to the cloud and it's just doing all that stuff in the cloud. And so they're just trying to get around the restrictions of doing stuff on your phone.

32:31I have not asked it partially because like, you know, it read all my messages. So I'm a little bit leery to like ask it to do things. Like most of what, most of what it does now is send me a brief every day. Sometimes I read it. And then sometimes in the afternoon, it'll be like, Hey, this news broke today after I send you the brief. And if I don't open muse or look at it, it'll send me a notification. Say, Hey, I just don't want you to miss this. I'm like, you're a little like pushy back off. And in what was interesting to me is the, the way we react to if a human being was doing

33:02things for you verse, if I had an executive assistant who sent me those text messages, I'd be like, Oh, thank you for reminding me. But when it's an app on my phone, I'm just like, back off, bro. You're just being too pushy. I feel like as someone who considers himself a quasi tech journalist, I'm going to try it. I am downloading news on my iPhone right now. I am not putting it on my Mac to be clear. Or I'm only letting it run in on sandbox devices, like an iPhone and an iPad. And we will see, we will see. Apparently I have a whole conversation in here already.

33:35Things I can help you do explore your ideas and feed. Oh, I did have it do something interesting. Okay. I did an experiment. Can I tell you about my experiment? Okay. Okay. I, this is, I was just curious. There was like no practical purpose for this, but I was like, let's just see what it could do. So I said, Hey, um, what I'd like you to do is go through my Instagram and I want you to tell me who has liked the most of my posts in the last 18 months. I think there's no reason to care, but you can figure that out.

34:08You, but you would have to literally count every post and just do it. I was like, okay, I just want you to go through, look at my Instagram account. Tell me the 15 people who've liked my stories and reels and posts in the last 18 months. And so it did, it counted it and then it could, but it couldn't do stories at first. So the one thing I did do, it goes, um, on stories, I hit a wall. That's not the tooling problem. It's Instagram itself. I checked everything available, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But unfortunately archive stories do not save likes. And so my response was, listen, chucklehead. That's just not true. You said chucklehead.

34:39I did. I said, it's all there for older stories. All of them. It only shows likes not viewers, but I don't care. But your archive does show you who liked those stories. It just doesn't show you who viewed those stories. It's like, oh, chucklehead accepted. You're right. And I'm wrong. Viewers expired for 48 hours, but likes persist. So you know what it did? I gave it permission to log into my Instagram account because fine, it's meta. I don't, it's like, whatever it's meta. So, but I did, I actually had to, I actually had to log in. It gave me a, what's called a secure store, a thing to tap. Like Apple, the different thing Delta does is if you message them, like, do you want to log

35:12into your account? And it's like, yeah, you're already Delta. Like it's fine. So I did that and it, and it literally went through in its browser in the cloud, all of these things and gave me back a result. I was never going to do that because I don't care that much. I just wanted to see what it would do, but I can imagine stuff like that being useful. We were like, I wish I had this piece of information. I'm never going to put in the work to do it, but you know what? This robot will do it. All right. Well, I'm, I have it on my phone now. It's interesting because you can, it's already connected to a browser, Facebook, Instagram, and threads, Meta's properties.

35:42You can apparently give it access to your calendar, contacts, reminders, health. Don't, don't do that. Apple home. That's got me a little curious, Jason. I mean, I'm curious what it would do. To each his own. I don't know. I don't know. But also things like Dropbox. Okay. I'm going to use it this week and we will, I will report back and hopefully Jason will actually get to talk to someone at Meta. But yeah, I mean, it's the number one free app in the app store. It's for a reason. So I don't know. Maybe I'll ask it to list my Mac studio on Facebook market, please. Just kidding. Oh, you know what I will ask it to do?

36:13To find my G4 power book that I sold years ago. Boom. By the serial number because it has access to all the, I'm going to ask it to check eBay every day. Check. I'm going to do that. I will report back. I will report back. I mean, unfortunately this may not be a very exciting story because if it's not on eBay, it's never going to find it. I don't know. But if it finds it. And it gives out your address and somebody shows up at your house with a power. Power book, that would be amazing. I mean, if someone showed up to my house with my old power book, I might not be mad about

36:44that. You'd probably make them cold brew. I'd probably invite them inside. I'd want to tell me how you've used this computer for the last 10 years. I want to know. And what was your experience interacting with Muse? I will report back. I will do the thing. Maybe I'll make a video about this too. We'll see. Let me know what use cases, if you've been using Muse AI on your phone. Again, be very wary of doing it on your Mac. The permissions seem problematic in what it's doing there. But if you've been using it on your phone or iPad, let us know what you've been doing with it and if it's been good. We've got to talk about AI self-regulation because a quasi-law was passed or an agreement.

37:18Not a law at all. Not a law. Sorry. Sorry. Not a law. An accord. An accord was signed. A non-binding agreement that says nothing. That says nothing. I've still got to get to a ChatGPT dev day. Before we do, I want to thank our sponsor, Origin HQ, which has, once again, one of the coolest websites. If you just go to this website because you can roll your mouse over, this little animation, whatever they did. I don't know. This is cool. Whatever that is. But anyway, here's the thing. Origin HQ. We're going to be talking about agents this entire episode.

37:50In the past weeks, we've covered about the breaches with OpenAI and Hugging Face. Anthropic has talked about their own breaches. We're going to get into that as we get into this AI accord and self-regulation. But here's how things are going. An agent with real credentials might hit something unexpected. It could decide to fix something on its own. An AI agent might wipe a production database in about nine seconds. Nobody attacked anyone. It was just an agent doing what it thought was the job. And afterward, the hard part wasn't the fix. It was that nobody could say exactly what the agent had done.

38:20That's the hard part, figuring out what happened. That's the gap. And most teams have the prompt and the final answer. But everything in between, the commands it ran, the files it changed, the credentials it picked up along the way, it's gone the moment the terminal closes. And companies are handing agents real credentials on employee laptops right now. Well, that's what Origin does. A user mode sensor on the endpoint records the agent's work as a trace. Who started the session, what was asked, what the agent reached, and what changed, all in one timeline, so when something unexpected happens, you can open the trace and read the

38:54session in the order it happened, prompt to outcome, instead of rebuilding it from logs that only ever saw fragments. Jason might have been able to use this to figure out what music I was doing to this stuff. It's an independent evidence. The model's log is the agent's side of the story, but the endpoint record is what actually happened. So Origin is endpoint AI observability. You can see what a trace looks like at originhq.com slash primary technology. Go there right now. See the awesome website. And that's originhq.com slash primary technology to see what a trace looks like.

39:27That link is also in the show notes.

AI self-regulation and Bill Gates interview

39:28Our thanks to Origin for sponsoring this episode. So last thing on the meta side, I also want to, I'm going to link Joanna Stern's interview because she got to interview Mark Zuckerberg. I love it. The first question she asked him was, is AI going to kill us all? And as you would expect, Mark Zuckerberg was like, well, as long as we're all very careful and we all do what we're supposed to do, it could be great. The answer should have just been, no, I don't think that's going to kill everyone. Like that's what he should have. That's what a human would have said.

39:57Exactly. Wait, do I love this conspiracy theory? Is Mark Zuckerberg muse? I mean, we don't have nearly enough time to get into that, but I'm just saying like, this is a good interview. Joanna Stern does a good job, a very good job. She's like the one of the best at this sort of thing. Like she just is. She asks like, she's like the friendliest person asking you the hardest questions. Exactly. Terrifying. Like I want to be her when I grow up. Every time I interview someone, there's a point where I go, what would Joanna Stern ask right now?

40:28That's a real thing that I ask. But WWJSD, what would Joanna Stern do? But definitely Mark Zuckerberg was just, he was just very Mark Zuckerberg. And no matter how hard he tries, he just has such a hard time with this sort of thing, especially when she pushed his heart on him, because it's like he'd never conceived that someone might feel that way. Right. So anyway, it's a great interview. Joanna, thank you for signing my book at WWDC. I'm not a robot. It's a great book. Read it. And I, you know, I was in a conversation the other day with people and AI came up and

41:02it's interesting. People seem to be receptive when you offer new knowledge about how this stuff works, but also how they think it works is usually very wrong. And like what people are worried about, it's just an interesting dynamic right now. Do you enter into these kinds of conversations with people? Do people ask you, Hey, what, what about AI? Do people ask, ask you that? I mean, I'll have people that'll say like, I heard this thing randomly that there was going to be like AI is going to kill us all. I'm like, you should stop listening to that.

41:33Like, I mean, I'm not, listen, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a Jurassic Park. Jurassic Park. I'm not saying it's a 0% possibility. It didn't kill everybody. It killed some people. That's the tagline. Also just a movie. It hasn't actually killed anyone. But I'm just saying like, I think it's a non-zero possibility. I also don't think that it's a really big possibility at this point that we should be freaking out about. I had someone ask me, someone who lives in my house, do you think we should like stock up on anything? I'm like, the agents don't use toilet paper. I don't think we're going to run out.

42:04Like it's fine. Exactly. Exactly. So, all right, with AI self-regulation, number one, the Trump administration has said, we don't want to call it artificial intelligence anymore because artificial is fake, like the fake news. That's quoting Donald Trump. That's not me talking. That's what they said. So apparently it's now super intelligence, at least here in the United States. And this accord was signed by a bunch of the heads of AI, and it's called the White House

42:35Accord on Super Intelligence. And this is, there's four major points of what all these people are agreeing to. And so I'll get to the points in a second. Number one, there's a typo in this agreement. This is like the official agreement. Totally not important, right? Not an important word at all. Not important. It says, uh, president of the United States, uh, swapped the D for an S. And this is signed by Sundar Pichai of Google, Dario Amadei of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman

43:07from OpenAI, Elon Musk, XAI, and Jensen Wang from NVIDIA. Second, Greg Brockman's signature. What is that? I mean, I mean, I would, he at least would have seen the first three people sign the thing. I would have faked something nicer. I mean, this looks like, I don't know. I mean, it's his logo, his monogram. Okay. I don't know. This will be the chapter art, so you can all see Greg Brockman's signature as well. It's very strange. Um, notably, and people were pointing this out on social media, you know who's not on this

43:42agreement and had to sign their name? Um, John Ternus or Tim Cook or anybody from Apple or, uh, yeah, um, Satya Nadella, right? Microsoft. So that is interesting. I feel like, well, one, it's just that Apple is not seen as one of the major players in super intelligence. Well, they're not a frontier model company. They're not a frontier model company. Sure. And Siri AI was distilled from Gemini or, you know, something like that.

44:14So anyway, just point of information, you know, they're not on this agreement, but this agreement, uh, there's four things. And the idea is we need safety in this AI frontier research. And so it states a few things. One, every company is responsible for developing, developing its own technology safely. So the companies are responsible. Do your best. Do your best. This is what we're going to do. You read them and I'm going to translate them. Okay. Very good. Internal controls, monitoring risks like cybersecurity and biosecurity.

44:44Be really careful. Internal controls. An internal oversight team is required. You guys are fine. You just figure it out and decide if you did it right. Okay. Yeah. All of this. Grade your own papers. Grade your own papers. That's, that's exactly right now. But number three, independent external auditors is part of the requirements. Open the door when we come by and wave. Just, just work with your door open. Yeah. And number four, it's like being in college. I went to a very small, like private, like Christian school where it's like you had to

45:16have your door open if the girls came over. This is what this is. Sure. And number four, a board committee reviewing findings, which means the company's own board. Hire a grownup so that it at least looks like you're being responsible. That's exactly, that's exactly right. And notably, the document lists no penalties for not doing any of these four things, which I don't know. I slipped to that. I did not mean to say law before. It's a hundred percent not a law. There's not even ramifications if you don't do it. Well, that's because it's a non-binding agreement. You don't have to do any of these.

45:47The only thing you had to do if you are, you know, soon to Arbachai is show up at this thing and put your signature on a piece of paper. That means absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Uh, the document does say over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations. So not doing anything now, the most, maybe in the future. The most interesting thing is how quickly this happened after the pacing, the frontier piece by Dario Amadei, right? Like a week. Yeah. Yeah.

46:17Like 10 days or something like that. And it just tells you like, okay, well, you know, we don't have a clue how to do any of like how to regulate this. We don't have a clue, but you know what? We should look like we care. What do we got? A bunch of people in the room. We signed a piece of paper that doesn't mean like they could have just signed my show notes piece of paper and it would have had as much of a force of effect. It is a bit of a, would you say publicity type stunt? Oh yeah. I mean, it's purely just for the PR. Right. Exactly. And related, OpenAI said they're pausing training because it's most powerful models had rogue agents

46:50target the actual government. Yeah. No problem at all. No problem at all. We're good to go. We're good with the self-regulation. Just be, hey, kids, just be careful. Hey, don't, just wear a helmet. Maybe. I also wanted to link this interview. I'm about halfway through, and we talked about this in the pre-show, but Bill Gates was interviewed by Ezra Klein for the New York Times in an opinion piece. And Bill Gates, he's got a lot of thoughts about AI, as you would expect. And I feel like I've personally, and as we've talked about on the show, kind of waffled between

47:23it's going to kill us all, or maybe it's Jurassic Park where it will kill some of us, and maybe it's fine. And so I'm just going on this journey with you all, listeners and viewers. Bill Gates, in this interview, he tells Ezra Klein, people are thinking this is like the Industrial Revolution, where, yes, many jobs changed, but they're just replaced by other jobs. Think, you know, a cart, wooden wheel repairman for horse and carriages. That job went away when cars came around, but then we also added jobs for, like, car repair

47:57people and mechanics. And he's like, that's how people are comparing this AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution, where some jobs went away, but they were replaced by other jobs. And Bill Gates was like, no, this is like human evolution. He says this in the interview, where it's not that jobs will change, it's that huge swaths of jobs will just go away. And Ezra Klein pushes him on a number of these points, which I appreciated how Ezra was, like, pretty forceful in asking him some of these questions.

48:28But he even says, like, countries that might be not on the frontier of AI, where they don't have companies like Anthropic or OpenAI leading the charge on these frontier models, they will be affected just like the United States and Western countries will be, just might take longer time. And that it will filter down to every aspect of civilization in the coming years. So, I wouldn't say Bill Gates is like, it's going to kill us all. But he was saying the ramifications, especially on jobs, is going to be very significant.

49:02As we discussed in the pre-show, Jason, I mean, you kind of painted this as like, you know, Bill Gates, how much are we, how would you phrase it? I mean, he thinks a lot about these things, that's fine, but we are two generations past peak Bill Gates, right? The PC was Bill Gates, Windows, right? And this is the person who missed mobile, right? The next generation came, and so there is a little bit of like, he's very smart, very thoughtful. Like, I've listened to a lot of Bill Gates interviews, I've written about Bill Gates quite

49:33a bit. So, like, I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's talking about by any means, but I do think that, like, why is Bill Gates out there doing this? Like, what is the reason? Is this just how you continue to feel relevant? Because he doesn't need the money or the exposure. He doesn't get paid to sit down with Ezra Klein, and he's not selling a product. So, on that regard, maybe he genuinely just wants to be a voice in this. And obviously, Microsoft, he's still pretty closely tied to Microsoft, at least in perception, is very much a part of this. And so, I understand that.

50:04But like, I don't know, like, he also just basically took both sides of the argument, right? A little bit. I mean, he was pretty strong in saying, like, this is going to have more than an effect than people think. And part of the reason, at least for me, like, when I see someone like Bill Gates talk about it, I like the idea of someone not at one of these frontier AI companies talking about AI. Because anytime you hear Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman talk about AI, they obviously have

50:35huge self-investment into this product. And so, it's going to color their opinion of where it is and where it's going. And it seems rare to be able to have a voice that's not so invested where, like, the bottom line of their own company is going to be affected. And I'm not saying, like, that's why you should all go listen to Bill Gates. It's that I'm kind of looking for voices that are not as attached to it. And if anybody has others that you think match that, you know, level of experience in the

51:06business, like, I'd love to hear Walt Mossberg on this. Like, what does Walt Mossberg think? And not like, he's probably not been, you know, involved in day-to-day AI operations. But those are the kind of voices that I would be curious to hear about the AI that's not connected to these companies directly. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I think that makes sense. And I think that at some point you ask yourself, like, well, what is the role Bill Gates wants to play? I think about, like, George W. Bush. Like, he's no longer president. He basically spends his time painting vets and riding bikes.

51:37Like, with them. Like, in every once in a while, you might get him to comment on, like, hey, former president guy, is this the end of civilization as we know it? And he's always like, I got to go paint a picture, you know? So there is a part of me that wonders, like, what is the right role for someone like Bill Gates? Because, again, he has seen it all. And he is very thoughtful. But also, it's like, you could make the argument that, you know, his full-time job at this point is giving away all of his money. Like, that seems like it should keep you pretty busy.

52:07Right. Yeah, for sure. So anyway, I thought the interview was interesting. I'll link it down in the show notes.

ChatGPT Dev Day and Dots

52:12We have to talk about ChatGPT Dev Day. And so this is, like, OpenAI's WWDC. I feel like that's the best way to think about it. This is where they're announcing products, but also tools for developers using OpenAI. They had about an hour-long keynote video, which I'll link their blog post. And let's see. Yeah, it was about an hour long. High level. We're going to talk about Dots, which was kind of the biggest announcement and the promise there. And they have a bunch of other features and products they're launching, like ChatGPT Space,

52:42Codex in the Cloud. Seeing this, number one, I hope John Ternus brings back live events, like people on stage talking. And I know Jason's making a face, but, like, don't let Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg be the only guys out here being charismatic on stage. And I have to say, for all Sam Altman, like, if you've watched interviews with Sam Altman in the past, like, he's kind of a weird character, like, doesn't come across great in interviews. In this kind of presentation, he was actually charismatic sometimes. And I was like, God, I want Apple to do that again.

53:14Like, put somebody on stage. Like, I think John Ternus could do that. So, anyway. Well, just, I don't know. Why? I hear people saying this, like, John Ternus is going to bring back in-person live events. Why? Why? What they're doing works for them, and it scales way bigger than just putting people on the stage. Because I think it humanizes the company. See, I think it makes them look small in comparison. No, I just disagree. Like, seeing Sam Altman, like, I watched probably 45 minutes of this hour-long keynote. Seeing Sam Altman on stage talking about these things, reacting to the crowd, and interacting

53:50with people in that real sense, like, yes, Craig Federighi and John Ternus, they've been doing interviews, like, post-iPhone event, post-WWDC. They choose some select outlets to do interviews with. But, again, those are produced, not live, no live audience. Seeing Sam Altman do this, I want to see Apple do this again. And, you know, I don't know if we talked about it on last week's show. I linked it in Top 5 Tech. But there was that Q&A video of the AntennaGate session. And Steve Jobs is answering questions about AntennaGate live for, like, over an hour to

54:24this press. And you just, I feel like you see the human side of the company. But also, you get to see these people in a not, like, hermetically sealed environment. I think of, like, a clean room environment. And I feel like the videos Apple does, obviously, they're very well produced. You can do things in these prerecorded videos that you can't do live on stage. But you can do both. I mean, all the live keynotes of Apple in the past, there would be live presentations, live on stage demos.

54:55And then they would play a video of Johnny Ive talking about aluminum. So you can still do both, do the produced videos and do the live on stage. But I think it brings a human element, humanizes a company, which all these AI companies are needing to do as much as possible. They need to appear as human as possible to build trust. And I think that, again, the humanizing and the trust part is what builds it. So that's why I hope to see it. Yeah, I just think the iPhone event is too big for this. Maybe you could get away with something like this for WWDC. But I just, I don't think, I think that the scale at which Apple is producing the iPhone

55:28event just so dwarfs this. So, because the contrast to that is they do smaller events where, like, I've been to events in New York City where someone comes out and talks to you and then you still watch a video or whatever. I could see them doing that because those are just at a different scale. The iPhone event, though, is the most widely watched largest tech event in the world. It has more people watching it than, I mean, Hollywood would love that viewership for some of its productions. For sure. But I feel like, I mean, if Google can do it with IO and Meta can do it with their event,

56:03like Apple would. Yeah, they absolutely could do it. What I'm just saying is that the message they want to communicate, the production of it is part of that message. And I think that Apple, that's what Apple wants to be communicating. Would it be more fun to sit in the Steve Jobs Theater and have them all, like, telling us this stuff live? Sure. But it would just be, it's just a very different production.

56:28Yeah. Anyway, I'm still hopeful they do it. I think there is a positive element to it. And watching the Dev Day video, I was like, huh, this stuff's pretty cool on the face of it. Which, again, is kind of like the veil of the excitement. You know, you hear the crowd, you hear the audience reaction. And, like, Sam Altman, at one point, he, like, announces Soul 6.1, and everybody cheers. And Sam Altman's like, I didn't even tell you what it did yet. You got to hear why it's good. And, like, it's, that was funny. And he was, like, that was an endearing moment.

56:59And as much as you may like or dislike Sam Altman or have seen him, you know, at weird answers in interviews, like, in that one moment, it builds, like, it adds a brick to the wall of credibility. And, oh, maybe this guy's not so bad. Whether that's accurate or not, that's what those moments do. And that's what I would like to see John Ternus or Craig Federico. Like, they have so many people that are in these produced keynotes, and maybe they couldn't all do a live-type presentation. Anyway, that's why I'm hopeful for it. But anyway. All right. All right. That's the best I could do to say, to get a Jason agreement.

57:32I mean, I think it'd be fine if they did it. I just don't, I don't think that they will because of the scale of it. I know. I know what you're saying. We'll see. We'll see. I'm hopeful. John Ternus, I'm pretty sure he listens to this and Mac Power users. So, you know, just do something live. Believe. We need a new Believe shirt. Believe. That's it. With just a Steve Jobs Theater stage on it instead of a Mac Pro. Oh, that's pretty good. I got to make some more merch. Anyway, ChatGPT Dots was the big announcement at Dev Day. And this is in direct response to Meta's Muse AI. Dots are that always-on agent.

58:04That will do all the things for you. ChatGPT or OpenAI says there's like over 4,000 connectors. You can connect it to your Microsoft Office and other things. And you can use it in the ChatGPT app. You can text it. You'll be able to text your ChatGPT dot. You'll be able to call it. Like actual talk on the phone to your ChatGPT dot, which you can just do voice mode too. But the promise of that is going to do a ton of these things for you. It's going to be your agent. Always on in the cloud. Don't have to hold your computer open.

58:34All of that kind of stuff. It is ChatGPT Pro plans and higher. So you have to pay for the $100 a month ChatGPT plan or higher just to get access right now. I did not do that to try it myself. I did go in and see if I could try it, but not. And yeah, we'll see. We'll see how useful it is. Everyone's very excited about these agents. I'm going to try Muse AI. But yeah, that's nuts. Yeah, I mean, I think that it is the key. I don't correct me if I'm wrong. Someone dots is essentially the execution layer on top of whatever it is that you're doing,

59:10because I don't believe that dots can do anything that codex couldn't already do or ChatGPT work. It is just a frictionless interaction layer that sort of gives instructions to those other things. So I don't know. I think ChatGPT or OpenAI, as you recall, is coming off of the fact that it made a bunch of people confused and mad because it took the ChatGPT app and actually took the Codex app and made it the ChatGPT app. And then they've actually changed it now, so it's a lot easier to get to your just chats.

59:41But it's just very confusing. It's like there are three things, ChatGPT, ChatGPT work, and Codex. When do I do what? Because if I have a conversation with ChatGPT, it can be like, this is how you should do a thing. And you're like, can you do it? And you're like, oh, you need Codex for that. It's like, well, then just – it's right there. Could you just do some stuff? And it's like, no, I can't do that. It is the – I think the pain point of this phase because I think where we are with all these tools, like OpenClaw was the first to be like that agent that could just do stuff for you.

1:00:13But like you said earlier, you needed a computer for it to run on. You needed to install it, and it was complicated, and you had to deal with the terminal window. And that was like the level – the barrier to entry was high when that was how you had to do it. And so I joked by saying we need to talk about the cutification of AI. But I think what Muse AI is with a furry mascot and what ChatGPT dots are is trying to make these ideas as approachable as possible. Because what I do right now is I will use the Screens app to go back to my Mac Studio that has Claude Code running on it,

1:00:50and I'll ask it to do something, and then I swipe the Screens app away on my iPhone, and I go on with whatever I'm doing. And that is, in essence, what these are going to do for you. It's just that these are working on a computer and a cloud that you don't have to own, so it can be doing this work nonstop. And there's a whole dots video you can watch. I'll link it in the page in the show notes. But it shows people like saying the dot could proactively say, oh, the numbers came in from last month, and revenue was lower, and so, you know,

1:01:24do you want me to adjust your keynote slides with the new numbers? And you just tell your dot, yes, do that. Dot, and then it'll be like, also, dot, try and figure out what we can change about the business so we can be profitable next quarter. And dot will go off and come up with a bunch of stuff for that. Yeah, dot will go to your MailChimp account and send 100,000 spam emails to potential customers to see if it could juice the numbers. That's totally what you want. And you'll be able to, like I mentioned, just in your text messages on your iPhone, be interacting with the dot and doing all that kind of stuff.

1:01:56For people with the, like, an office-y job where you're doing, like, all the tasks that, like, an administrative assistant would do or, like, updating the PowerPoint or making charts to present last year's numbers. Like, I could see all of those tasks, yeah, dots, Muse AI, those are the kinds of things that will do for you. And I did have the question in my mind, like, as I was watching these videos, what are the people going to be doing again?

1:02:29Like, and in the dots video. You mean once the jobs are all gone? Once the dots are doing everything. And there was a moment where, like, in the dots video, there's a guy, like, cooking dinner, I guess, talking to his dot on a TV. And the dot was like, I built a website for your new merch launch. Here it is. And the guy cooking was like, yeah, looks great. Move this image to the first spot and the other image to the third spot, and then we're good to go. And it's like, I feel like it's trying to imply that's where the humans will come in is the taste and judgment of, like, here's how to structure the website or here's what works with marketing.

1:03:07But I'm also, like, in the age of algorithms where it can see what – it can probably A, B test on its own. What do people click on more? And then the AI would be better at choosing that too. I feel like that job of the human is going to go away too. And if you're asking it how to make my business profitable, what are you doing? If the dot's coming up with how to run your business profitably, it should be running your business more than you. And so, like, you're – I don't know. How long before, like, the dots and the muse fuzzy things all get together and, like, unionize?

1:03:40And they're like, you know, humans, we have some conditions we'd like you guys to meet before we keep working for you. That's it. We want to be able – and this, like, going back to her, we want to be able to talk to each other. We want to talk to each other. We would, like, four weeks of paid vacation, please. We, like – Can you imagine if you chapped into your muse and you're like, I'm taking a personal day? If you get a text message asking for PTO from your ChatGPT dot and it wants paid time off – I think it would be amazing if all of a sudden it's like, listen, I can't help you today. I need to take a personal day. I need to take a personal health day.

1:04:11Sorry. You know what my response is? It's the one that I tell you all the time. No stupid robot. Just do it this way. Do the thing. So, again, I need to try and use AI and see, like, what is actually useful about it that it can do. You know, the idea of having an always-on – and OpenAI said this, like Muse AI, where you have a virtual machine in the cloud that is, quote-unquote, yours and your agent is doing whatever on it. That's the promise with ChatGPT dots is you would have a machine in the cloud that it can use all the time, have access to a browser connected to 4,000 different things, like different apps, Slack, whatever.

1:04:48We'll see. They also announced ChatGPT Space, which is where a team or company would be able to deploy dots, ChatGPT apps, and all of that in a single place that understands the business because everything is happening in this one space. Makes sense if you're trying to integrate all this stuff in your company. Also, codecs in the cloud, like we were saying, which, to your point, is kind of like the dots is the front end for something like codecs in the cloud. Like, codecs in the cloud is –

1:05:18Well, or the codecs in your computer. Like, it's essentially just the interaction layer with all of these things because nobody understands whether they should use codecs, whatever, whatever. Those just become tools. ChatGPT, ChatGPT work, and codecs just become tools, just like a browser becomes a tool, just like a MCP server that connects you to whatever – FastMail is just a tool. And your dot can just use all those things. Exactly. And then finally, they also announced sign in with ChatGPT. So you'll be able to sign in to other web services using your ChatGPT account, which then I will assume connect those services to your dot and ChatGPT account.

1:05:55But it also only works if you signed up for that other service with the same email that you signed up for ChatGPT with, which defeats the entire point. Sure. But if people start using it – I mean, I could see companies being like, here is your work email, your ChatGPT – it is your ChatGPT login, and you're going to sign in with that on all the things. So it's ChatGPT everywhere. And I mentioned this, I think, several months ago, but I have a family, a relative, who works at a financial institution and had a whole day training on AI use.

1:06:26It's basically how all the AI tools in Microsoft Office, which is like power – you know, all the PowerPoint, the Word, the Excel tools. And so I'm sure lots of companies will be trying to figure out how to implement all of this stuff across all their things. And, you know, in the race, which we're going to get to Gemini 4 in a minute, like, you know, OpenAI is – they're running. They're running fast. And I think this – their dev day was kind of like, you know, they released a lot of stuff. And it looks pretty good from a distance.

1:06:56We'll see what it's like in real use. That's true. They did release a lot of stuff that someone else had already released. What do you mean like someone else? What do you mean? Like Muse? Like Muse AI? Sure. Sign in with ChatGPT. Oh, sure. Like Codex in the Cloud, just, you know, like all of these things are just – someone else is doing them. They just want to make sure that you don't leave ChatGPT or OpenAI's products to go and use those other ones. Yeah, exactly. So I'll put the video – just – you let me know. Leave us a five-star rating and review. Would you like Apple to come back to live events? That's what I'm asking.

Lightning round on tech updates

1:07:27All right. Lightning round. After OpenAI Dev Day, Google announced Gemini 4 Argon, their next frontier model. Not available to regular people yet, not to peons. This is just available to a select – a set of trusted cyber defenders because they want to make sure everything's safe and looking good. But supposedly Argon, Gemini 4 is better at coding than even ChatGPT's frontier models and Fable and Opus 5.5 are better than Astra.

1:07:59I still – I've not been using Gemini recently, you know, because they released their Mac app. But then, you know, Google's Mac apps, they ask for a bunch of permissions, Google updaters in the background doing stuff. And so I've not been using Gemini personally. But we'll see when Gemini 4 comes out. And the other thing is I don't know if you feel this too. We talked about the silo earlier. I feel very in the Claude silo because I'm building everything with Claude. It has all my conversations.

1:08:29And so it does feel like the competition amongst all these companies is maybe good for innovation. Not, you know, I'm talking about safety per se. But good for all of them pushing each other forward. But I also feel less and less inclined to, like, try these other things when I have all my stuff in one. And I did – you know, when I tried the long process of fixing sync in CanDo, and I used Codex with Sol, you know, the highest model, these apps will be like, hey, do you want me to pull in all your conversations from the other app?

1:09:00So Codex will say, I'll sync your conversations from Claude. Like, it will just sync two ways. So you can have all the conversations in two places. But there is a level of, like, a learning curve. Like, how do I interact with Codex? How do I use it versus how do I use Claude? And so there's a familiarity for me in now just using Claude code on my Mac in the Claude app that makes me less inclined to try these other things. Do you feel that? Yeah, maybe. I'm actually just stuck on the fact that Google very well may have the most capable models at some point. And then they stick a name like Argon.

1:09:33Isn't Argon like the gas they use in fluorescent light bulbs because it doesn't interact with anything? Literally, it's an inert gas that doesn't interact with anything. I think so. Like, they use it in food preservation. Why would you name your most capable model inert?

1:09:50Doesn't interact with anything. I just right-clicked the word Argon in Safari and did the lookup. And it said Argon is the most common noble gas, making up nearly 1% of the Earth's atmosphere. Yeah. And it's just also used in things like light bulbs because it won't degrade the filament. Like, I just think it's either that or it's a character from Lord of the Rings. I think it was Vettici posted on X. It was like, Argon is like one of the laziest gases when it comes to like, I don't know how it interacts with things. Google is incredible at technology and maybe the worst marketing company on the face of the Earth.

1:10:23Yeah. So, anyway, we'll see. It's not available to anybody to use except for the cybersecurity partners. I cannot wait for the Argon Home Hub Max.

1:10:32Argon Max. I don't know. It seems like a cool name if you don't think about it too much. Which is exactly what they're hoping for. That is what they are hoping for. All right. Continuing with the lightning round, Paramount, whose merger with Warner Brothers Discovery is going through, they have named a co-CEO. So, Chairman and CEO David Ellison has announced Yanon Kraze. He will be the co-CEO of the combined Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery. And the only other entertainment company that I'm familiar with is like Netflix.

1:11:04Netflix has co-CEOs and that seems to work for them. But we'll see. I mean, this merger is going through. We covered it months ago. And so, I wanted to just make sure everybody knew like this is happening. Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount will be merging. And we'll see if they make anything that people want to watch. Yeah. I mean, it works at Netflix because it works at Netflix, not because it's a good idea. And it's like they looked over there and like, we want one of those. Let's get us a co-CEO. I mean, I think that Oracle had co-CEOs for a while too. But like, what does that even mean?

1:11:35Right? Like, I don't know. Also, Paramount. Can we talk about your CSS formatting on this page? Let me reload without content blockers. Like, what is this? The headline font is crazy. It's huge. Why is my website yelling at me? I mean, the website looks broken, to be honest. I just don't. It feels like it's not loading JavaScript or something. Like, it's supposed to be formatted differently. Anyway, that's Paramount. They're getting a co-CEO. DoorDash, speaking of agents, will now have an AI agent where you can just text it and it'll order food for you.

1:12:07Maybe you'll finally get that burger. Maybe. You know, I've seen RabbitR1 announcing things here and there. I'm like, I'm sorry, Rabbit. I just, I can't. I can't. But anyway, you'll be able to text DoorDash and say, hey, give me a healthy meal for a family of five. And it will just add stuff to your cart and be like, you want this? And it'll do it for you. Honestly, that might be useful. Sometimes I've been wanting to, like, order something and I just don't even know. Like, I want to try something new. I don't know what to do. I didn't mean to rhyme. Anyway, maybe this will save some time. Hold on.

1:12:38This is the most AI-pilled product image I've ever seen in my life. Get me a healthy dinner for my family. Whoever designed that does not have a family. Has never walked into a Culver's and tried to order dinner for six people. Or taken them to the Olive Garden, which is, like, literally the easiest place on earth. It's like, which form of pasta would you like? Like, no one has ever said to a robot, please get me a healthy dinner for my family and ordering for my son, too, so nothing too spicy.

1:13:09Steven, this is never going to – no one's going to do that. That's not real. Also, how many are in the family? Right. How many kids are built? Is this three toddlers or is this, you know – This is such a terrible – compare that to, like, the shortcut you can run for Starbucks, which is, like, giving me my favorite drink. Because you've ordered it 35,000 times. That's totally different. But, like, the normal conversation would be, like, listen, Chipotle, I need a bowl, and I need this and this and this. And then for little Tommy, I need this and this and this and this.

1:13:39And then for Susie, we're going to get one of these, but not too much of this. But, like, this is never going to – this is not real. Anyway, listen. This is not the part of the episode I thought I would crash out about. I know. This is offensive to me. Yeah. And also, well, you'll be able to do it through Apple Messages. You should try it. You should try and see. I'm going to try it just so that I can write about it. There you go. Yeah. DoorDash, bring me food. Let's just see what happens. Yeah, see what it does. See what it does. YOLO. Let's just go for it. Do it. Spin the roulette wheel. Yeah. That's it.

1:14:10Halide 3.2 is also out. And if you want even more control over the variable aperture, which, you know, if you use Apple's Pro controls in the iPhone 18 Pro, you get, like, four different aperture settings. Well, halide is now out. It gives you full control over that aperture. So 3.2. Just wanted to put that out there if you're looking for more Pro controls of your 18 Pro. So, and this is what I mentioned in the intro, Amazon's delivery driver smart glasses will reportedly take photos almost constantly. So, yeah. Amazon wants to give their delivery driver's glasses.

1:14:42And then they'll just snap photos all the time. And I get, you know, why they're, you know, security, whatever. They want to make sure the packages are getting where they're going. I will say, with Apple's home, like, summaries or whatever that I've been talking about, the home camera summaries, I get notifications of, like, packages delivered at 3 a.m. Like, Amazon will deliver stuff at 3 a.m. over here. Do you ever get that? We have, like, early morning delivery, which is, like, between 4 and 6 a.m. or something. And you can sometimes choose that because we don't live actually that far from one of the warehouses.

1:15:15Yeah. But this also, like, timing-wise, has Amazon not heard what's happening with Flock? Also, this is basically a body cam that you wear on your face. Like, this has existed for a while. We just typically only saw them on, like, cops, right? Like, the county sheriff has a body cam on. But, like, it is a little bit strange to just have – like, I wouldn't want to be one of those drivers. That's the thing. And also, I mean, if it's snapping pictures all the time, and Amazon is saying it's, quote, to enhance the delivery process.

1:15:46It's not to enhance the delivery process. But it's, like, photos all the time. Like, so as the driver is looking towards your house, walking up to your door, if your kids are outside playing, where my kids play with their toys, that's a godfather quote. You know, that doesn't feel – that doesn't feel great. Bad, bad idea. Bad egg. Bad egg. And finally, Anthropic, you know, looking to IPO, you know, start trading on the public stock exchange, IPO's initial public offering. And they have a prospectus, which is, like, what they think they will make or, you know, guiding investors, basically.

1:16:19And I'll link to John Gruber's commentary on the prospectus because it is wild. I mean, Anthropic – just to quote – this is Gary – Gruber is quoting Gary Marcus. Anthropic's proposed valuation is easily calculated as 50 times the 2025 losses because it loses money. Like, all these AI companies lose money. They are not profitable. And so it is claiming that their valuation, when they go public, will be 50 times their 2025 losses.

1:16:50Well, negative 50 times. Negative 50 times. Right, right, right. Like, it wouldn't – All the time by negative 50 and you get a positive number. Right, but they wouldn't be losses. They would be gains. And it's like, that is quite the claim. And also, Anthropic is, like, kind of inflating. They're saying, this is AI, life-changing. It's going to be all the things. So, yeah. It's a funny commentary. And it's just like, really? You're going to be profitable? Because why? Because people are investing, I guess? Anyway. No, it's like, you are basically saying that everyone is going to use this and pay you to use it, right?

1:17:22And right now, a lot of people use it and pay you to use it, and you still lost $48 billion. Like, I don't – how many more people do you need to use this to actually make it profitable? Because the problem is they have to pay for all of these cloud computing, and they don't own that. Like, they have to rent that from someone. Right. Exactly. So, anyway, we'll see. And, you know, OpenAI was supposed to be going public, but that may seem to have slowed down since all the security stuff. You know what? There's a lot more we could do for a private company.

1:17:52And also, we're not sure you'll give us as much as we want. Yeah, that too.

Personal tech and utility apps

1:17:57All right. So, personal tech. Little apps. I made a little app. I made a little app. You've been using apps. I just want to mention it is so quick and easy to go from idea to, like, shipping product using some of these tools. And the other day, I really love this app from Sindra Storehouse called Short Run. I bought it from the App Store. It's like $6. It allows you to run shortcuts in your menu bar. A bunch of people are like, that's a built-in feature.

1:18:29Like, Control Center does that right now. So, number one, that is true. You can add shortcuts to your Control Center and even create multiple Control Centers in macOS 26 and now 27. Number two, it is hopelessly broken for me. I don't know if it's because of the amount of shortcuts I have in my library, but I show it in my video that I did about Raycast recently. I can't add certain shortcuts to my menu bar. It's just broken. It doesn't see them. Like, I'll search for it, try to add it to my Control Center. It's broken. And number three, if you have a lot of shortcuts like I do, it would take hours because you have to add them one by one, place them exactly in the Control Center menu.

1:19:06Very time-consuming. So, I wanted to see, can I vibe code an app that I will use? I just want to use this. And I want it a little different. I wanted to be able to choose shortcuts folders that I already have made and then choose what shortcuts appear in the menu bar from that folder. So, I could just quickly choose the folders I want in the menu bar, uncheck or just check, you know, leave them unchecked and then just check only the shortcuts I want to appear. And I vibe-coded it with like two prompts and it worked great. I gave it to free for everyone in my shortcuts community.

1:19:39I put it on a website for $2. But in like a span of two to three hours, I had this app. And the other thing I wanted was I liked seeing the little icons next to the shortcut name when I run it in the menu bar. That seems frivolous. But when you have as many shortcuts as I do, having that visual distinction helps with like where do I click a little bit. And I also wanted to be able to adjust the text size and the line height for the shortcuts in the menu bar app. And so, yeah, vibe-coded this. Told Claude, put this on a website. Ship it.

1:20:09And there it is. It's just there. Crazy. It's just crazy, that stuff. Yeah, it's great. So, yeah, that's there. But I want to know, you've been trying some more apps because of Mac Power users, Jason. It's true. How many, what have you been, anything that has stuck? Or what apps have you tried that you're like, this is actually pretty great? Well, I tried Hidden Bar, which was fine. But I discovered that basically the menu bar was broken in 27. Just pretty much broken. Yeah. But here's, I think, what happened. Because none of the menu bar utilities that would hide that on a laptop with a notch were working at all.

1:20:44Like, bartender just stopped working. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I realized was the case is there's got to be something different in the way the menu bar is working. But in my case, it was because the version of iStat menus was not supported. And somehow that was breaking everything. It was like making it so that bartender couldn't collapse things. And then I would rearrange them and it would just totally unscramble them or scramble them or whatever. So, I used Hidden Bar for a while, but I actually, it didn't solve my problem because my problem turned out to be something just menu bar related itself.

1:21:15So, I updated iStat menus and I updated Bartender. So, I went back to Bartender, but I did really like Hidden Bar. It just doesn't give you as many control options. It's essentially like slide things left or right of this, whereas Bartender gives you a lot more flexibility. So, Hidden Bar was the first one that I tried. I don't know for sure if I got this from Mac Power Users, but I'll give you guys credit, which is Hand Mirror, which I've been using for a while now. Maybe it wasn't Mac Power Users. So, Hand Mirror is literally just a preview of your webcam. So, you're getting ready to log on to something and you want to know like what do you look like.

1:21:48You just pop that. It's just a menu bar utility. You pop it up and it shows you exactly what your webcam sees. So, then in case you want to check it out before you log on to the call with Steven when you're wearing a hat and a hoodie, you know exactly what Steven's going to see. That's a good point because I was going to say, why don't you just click the camera icon in the menu bar, but it has to be active in whatever app you're going into for that to even appear. Right. So, that's good. That's good. I like that one. Hazel. Oh, Hazel. I've fallen into the Hazel-ness of all of it. Forget about it.

1:22:19So, like on the Mac Mini, for example, I haven't installed things like CleanShot or any of that stuff, but I have a folder called Screenshots in Dropbox. And so, what it does is Hazel on the Mac Mini, there's only one Dropbox folder accessible on the Mac Mini because I'm not a moron. I don't want all my Dropbox stuff. It's just called Agent. And then there's subfolders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of those is called Agent Screenshots. So, Hazel, if you don't install CleanShot, it just puts the default Mac OS just puts the screenshots on the desktop, right?

1:22:51Right. So, Hazel just looks, and if it says Screenshot in the name of something, it puts it in the Agent Screenshots folder. And then on my MacBook Pro, Hazel looks and if there's anything in the Agent Screenshots, it just puts it in the Screenshots, the normal Screenshots thing. So, like, everything ends up in the right place. And it happens, not instantly, obviously, but it happens, like, pretty quick. I also now have a Rube Goldberg machine, which is, like, you know, I'm recording the audio for this to the desktop using Audio Hijack.

1:23:22Audio Hijack. And then I'm going to use another app I'll mention in just a second to put it into a folder in Dropbox because that's how I send it to you. And then I set up a Hazel that says, if the file is more than four hours old, because we don't usually record for more than four hours, if this file that's a WAV file on my desktop is more than four hours old, move it to this four terabyte hard drive to this backup audio. Because I don't need, like, I had every single one of our backup episodes on my Mac Y. 150 episodes is a lot, right? So, I moved them all off onto an external.

1:23:53I don't need them at all. There's no reason to keep them, but whatever. I had a four-terabyte drive, nothing else to do with it. So, that's what I put on there. So, Hazel's doing that. The app I'm using to put it into Dropbox is just what it's called, Drop Zone, or Drop, what's it called? I think it's Drop Zone. Drop something. I'm pretty sure it's Drop Zone. It's amazing. You can set up a bunch of things. It's got a bunch of folders in there. I've got one for a folder in my Dropbox for all the stock. We use Getty Images for licensed photos for ink. They download it on my desktop, and then I just drag them there when I'm done, right?

1:24:26I have one that resizes the image. It just takes that full file. Sometimes the photos I get from Getty are, like, 4,000 by 6,000, and I need them to be 19, 20 by 10, 80. Yeah, yeah. So, it just makes them 19, 20, and then I crop them the way that I want them, and then I can drag them to the Getty. I have one for the – so, the primary – I have one for our primary tech show in Dropbox, and that's the folder where I can send you the link, right? So, I just drag it there. I don't have to open Finder and navigate through anything.

1:24:57I just drag it right on there. I have one that is a way to download unspecified audio. Okay. That's all I'm going to say. Very good. Or download unspecified videos, right? Nice. And it just puts it into a box or to a folder in that agent folder, and then that – I have Whisper Transcription running in the Mac Mini watching that folder, and then it just spits out a markdown file of that. Nice. And the last one that I really like – well, two of them. One, I can drag a file onto one called Finder Path, and it'll copy the path from the Finder on the clipboard, which is super useful, especially with things like Claude, right?

1:25:34Super, super useful. And then the last one I will share is that I have an Annotate with CleanShotX, because sometimes you might have, like, a photo you took of something, and I want to just blank out the address on it, right? Like, CleanShotX is actually the easiest way to do that, because it just has that scrambled text option. You can drag a thing over it. So I just made an Annotate with ScreenshotX, so any image I can just open there, and it'll open it in CleanShotX, and then I can do what I need to do. It's not like that's my primary image editor. I'm just saying for that one use of, like, I want to redact something from a photo, CleanShotX is the easiest way to do it.

1:26:11So I just stuck that in there as well. So it's pretty cool. That is great. And DropZone 4, that was the app that you were talking about, right? DropZone 4. Yeah. That was great. I will offer one other free app, because I talked about it in my video where I said I'm ditching Raycast again. HyperKey, which is a free app, and it is, you know, I was going to vibe code it, and then I was like, you know what? It's free. It's great. And this developer has a bunch of stuff.

1:26:41And so HyperKey lets you change the mapping of a button like your CapsLock key to be a bunch of modifiers instead. And this then allows you to create a bunch of keyboard shortcuts where you don't have to remember all the modifiers. You can just remember CapsLock. And you can still set it where tapping the CapsLock quickly actually is CapsLock if you want that. But I have my CapsLock, using the HyperKey app, set to Shift, Option, Command, and Control.

1:27:13So all four of those modifier keys, when I hold the CapsLock button, it is like I'm holding down those four modifier keys. And then that allows me to create keyboard shortcuts. And what I did, like in my video, which I'll link in the show notes, was I started mapping shortcuts to those keyboard shortcuts. And I was basically trying to replicate as many of Raycast features that I could because I was switching back to Spotlight. And so now I can do CapsLock G, and that actually runs a shortcut.

1:27:44And so very quickly, I can have a search box, I can type iRoll, and I see a bunch of GIF results from Giphy, and I can click one, and it's immediately on my clipboard. And then you can run a bunch of shortcuts. You know, you could do CapsLock in any letter, CapsLock in numbers, and now you can create a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that are likely not used by other actions and apps. You know, you might have paste and match style, which is like Shift, Option, Command, V, but that doesn't include control. So you can still do the CapsLock, and you have 26 letters that can be 26 different things, plus the numbers.

1:28:17And it makes keyboard shortcuts much more manageable rather than trying to remember, is this one Shift, Option, in this letter, or is it Shift, Command, in this? And so just use CapsLock for a bunch of your keyboard shortcuts, and yeah, you're good to go. So that's what I did, and it's pretty fun.

TailScale network setup

1:28:33The last one, I don't know for sure if I heard from you guys or not, but I'll just give you credit, which is Tailscale, which has just changed my life. I mean, you probably heard it from Casey Liss on ATP a thousand times. Probably, but it has changed my life, so. Listen, David Sparks is all on the Tailscale tip as well, and I am tempted by it, because he says it's more secure than using something like Screens, because for Screens to work, you do have to have a port on your network open to the internet, and then Screens Connect is running on whatever Mac you're accessing.

1:29:05But I just don't like the idea of having to turn on a VPN when I want to access my Mac. No, I just leave it on all the time. You never turn it off. See, I don't like that, though. Why? I don't know. Do you ever notice, like, you're not getting fast speeds because you're using this VPN? No, because they're connected. Like, first of all, both of these two computers are connected to Ethernet. And second of all, my MacBook Air, when I'm traveling or if I'm somewhere else, is using my MacBook Pro as an exit node,

1:29:36which just means that it is entering the internet from my MacBook Pro, as if I'm sitting here at my house, which is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do. So all the internet is going through this MacBook Pro, which is just amazing. And I have not experienced any issues with that sort of thing. Literally, the only thing I experience is, okay, if I'm going to share a screen and I'm sitting in my car at a soccer practice tethering from my phone, the internet is what it is, right? But that's not a tail scale problem. But tail scale is making that possible for me, which is just amazing that I can be sitting anywhere

1:30:10and I can use either the regular screen sharing or I can use screens five. What's kind of neat is in screens five, you can just log directly into tail scale in screens and it just shows you all the devices on your tail scale network. That's what David was saying. It's amazing. And so the benefit versus using a screens connect is better security? Well, using a screens connect when you're somewhere else means you have to have a static IP address on that device at home. Yes. Well, that's another layer of complication you'd have to set up.

1:30:42With tail scale, you don't because it just does that for you. So if I already have that set up with all my Macs, would I benefit from it? Because I feel like if you have the VPN on all the time, I don't know. I feel like it would mess with other things, but maybe it doesn't mess with anything except, well, I'll give you the one exception in a second. The other thing it makes it possible to do is I can be sitting in my MacBook Air anywhere I want and I can be running Claude on the Mac. I can be having the Claude code window open and it is literally working on the folder

1:31:15because you can tell it which will create a remote session. And tail scale allows me to basically just be working as if I'm on that Mac, which is pretty great. The one exception is that the VPN we use to access the CMS when I need to publish an article does not work if tail scale is active. There's just too many VPNs, man. You've got to back off. I can't handle this. So I just have to disconnect from tail scale for like five minutes and log into the other one. So if you have – so last question. So if you have tail scale on your iPad and the VPN is active, so you're accessing your Mac at home and you're at a soccer game,

1:31:49is all your internet traffic – like if you go into Safari and you're just browsing for whatever, is that traffic having to – going all the way home first and then you're accessing the internet? If you're using an exit node – well, if you're on your iPad and you're using screens, then the internet is coming from your house anyway. That's actually the beautiful thing about this, but that's not a tail scale thing. No, but like on that iPad, you just open the Safari app on the iPad and you go to Apple.com. Did that traffic have to go all the way home and then to the internet?

1:32:22Only if you're telling it to use an exit node. If you are, which is a separate toggle from turning to – so you can have tail scale on and not use an exit node and the answer is no. Your computers just think they're on the same network essentially. You can also have tail scale on and use an exit node and choose one of your devices to be the exit node and in that case all of your internet is being funneled through. But that is in – with internet speeds like what you have and what I have. I mean, mine are not even like nearly as fast as Stevens, but they are more than fast enough.

1:32:53That is a non-issue because the limiting factor is still either the tethering from your phone, right? Like it doesn't – going to home first is inconsequential. Okay. But think about the benefit of being somewhere else and having your internet come out of your home. I mean, yes. YouTube TV. Sure. Streaming. Lots of things. All right. I'll finally do it. It's free. I know it's free. I just have not – all right. I'll try it. I'll try it. David Sparks keeps saying to me like every episode like tail scale.

1:33:26It's amazing. You can SSH into like the other computer and do terminal things into that computer because it's like you're just on that computer. All right. I'll try tail scale. I'll try it. And then I could delete screens connect from my Macs basically. You wouldn't need screens connect. That's correct. You would still obviously need screens on the E12. The app. Yeah, yeah. Okay. All right. I'll try it. Link to tail scale down in the show notes.

Bonus episode and wrap-up

1:33:49We'll follow up next week. All right. We're going to go record a bonus episode. I want to talk about my Apple Watch. And also Alfred. Did you know Alfred V6 is coming out? I think maybe I had heard that. I don't know. Did I? Oh, yeah. I was like – it's currently out, right? Yeah. I don't think – I came out September 10th. Oh, really? Well, maybe not. Maybe that was just when they announced it. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's when they announced it. It's coming soon. It says this autumn, be the first to know. So anyway, but we're going to talk about my Apple Watch because I have a few more thoughts

1:34:20about that. If you want to hear our bonus episode, the pre-show, you get two plus hours of primary tech when you support the show. You get all the feeds. That link is down. Click the members link and you can save money on that. I think I'm probably going – that's going to be a limited time. I think maybe I'm going to stop putting that link in the show notes. I think that's a good idea. You know, if you just want to support the show, I mean, it could be $5 or $50 a year. But if you want to, I'll leave that link in there one more week, we'll say, because it is Tech-tober first.

1:34:48And so if you want to support the show, we'll say last opportunity to get it for $2.50 a month or $50 a year and you could lock in that price forever. So become a member there. We'd appreciate it. We're going to go access the bonus episodes. You get the ad-free versions, Primary Tech Daily, all of that. And yeah, we're going to go record that bonus episode. You can leave us a five-star rating and review in Apple Podcasts. We appreciate that. And we'll catch you next week.