Netflix Angst, The End of the Internet, Q&A on Meta’s VR Glasses, Anthropic Alignment, You Can See Everything

A new studio and video era

0:00Hello, and welcome back to Sharp Tech, presented to you for the first time ever by Stripe. I'm Andrew Sharp, and joining me on the other side of the couch, Ben Thompson, our new studio. How you doing? The accidental studio. I wanted to make a studio when I moved back here, but we really needed the extra bed in case we ever had guests. So I'm like, I got to do the sofa bed. It's

0:31a very nice sofa bed. It's comfortable. Here we are. It's not that cool to sit, I'll be honest. But I did get all this sound stuff in here, and I'm like, this works unbelievably well. Every time we are together, I feel the podcast is way better. We both love it. The only problem is, is you're really loud, so we need a very well, a very good acoustic space. My mic has been turned down in order to account for my podcast voice. Now here we are. So the chance, so I'm super excited. The Stripe thing does make all this possible. Like

1:03we spent a lot of money on this. I'm already having visions of actually a real studio, not just my office that's made it to a studio. But it's super important to me that we are always getting better. And I continue to grow. Or you're going to hear some ads, but I think the podcast, which I've been super proud of where we are, how good Sharp Tech has been. And yet every time we're together, I'm like, It could be so much better. No, I know. So fine. Let's be together almost every time. It's a whole new era, whole new studio.

1:34Oh, there's one big problem. Okay. We have taken on a dependency on American Airlines. That is a big problem. The potential fly in the ointment wasn't a problem today. You know, I did sit on the runway for about 30 minutes before I finally got to Madison, but I landed in Madison, had some Culver's. Here we are. That's right. Midwest living. If they could sponsor the University of Wisconsin athletic teams. That's right. For the first one, we had to have our drinks. Here we go. We're like, I've been watching a lot of America's Got Talent because there's this, did you see

2:04the whole Nene Royal thing? Of course you're watching America's Got Talent. No, I'm not watching America's Got Talent. This is the type of crap that you watch. This is why I'm afraid to recommend things to you. It's sports and America's Got Talent. No, I did not watch any of the shows. I watched the YouTube clips. No, there's this girl from Thailand who- Oh yeah, this is your favorite celebrity right now. Yes, I do have celebrity crushes. Not like crushes and obsessed with it. She's like a 16-year-old girl. Let me be clear about that point. Let's not get canceled on the first- No, but she shows up.

2:35It's unbelievable. Her performance is like her stage presence. And then you realize she's been playing at a night market in Thailand every week since she was like 10 years old. And it's like, it's not only she's unbelievably talented, but it's like such a, oh, no wonder. Like she has all the pieces sort of coming together. Anyhow, on America's Got Talent. How does that relate to this? They always have those sponsored drinks. They're always like setting them just right and taking big swigs. Maybe that's our trademark, you know? Culver's not actually a sponsor, but certainly a sponsor in our hearts.

3:09Yeah, I mean, I was going to say at this point, clearly we're for sale. Um, or actually not, because we have an exclusive sponsor. It is an exclusive deal. What are you going to do? Well, and just from this point forward, to clarify to anybody who might be lost, who didn't see your Stripe announcement earlier in the week, Sharp Tech is now going to be a public podcast going forward. Every episode will be on YouTube. No, that's not true. Okay. There's going to be members-only episodes. Well, I was getting to that. There's also going to be a special sort of bonus episode for Stratechary subscribers.

3:40That will be around 30 minutes long, will be released later in the week. Probably on Sundays is when we're going to publish that. And how frequently is it going to actually be 30 minutes long? Well, that's going to be the challenge, isn't it? I honestly think the issue will be running up against my return flight to Washington, D.C. Every time we record it. No, but to that point, we're going to do the extra episode. We're not going to release it the same day, give you a little breathing room, but we're going to do that in person, too. We're all in on this. We want to make, again, we want to make the best podcast possible. We are still, this is on video, but we'll still be on audio.

4:13The feeds, we're super invested. Hopefully, our producer was very worried when we had this idea, and he's like, but then he heard it. It's like, I hate it when podcasts go from audio to video. By the way, it's so weird that he's actually listening to us right now. I'm not used to that. I'm used to an in-person producer. Hi, Jim. Silent partner. That's right. Third chair. But we're still a podcast. We're going to have great audio. The subscribers only will be audio only. If you're not a subscriber, if you're watching on YouTube, you can subscribe.

4:45For you to subscribe. That's right. That's right. Get on the bandwagon. All right. Well, enough prelude.

Netflix at a crossroads

4:50We can jump in. First segment here. The SS Sarandos has hit some turbulent waters over the last seven days or so. I'm sure you've followed all kinds of bad Netflix news. I did sort of call it in mid-July as far as the Netflix peak, and it's gotten so much worse from there. So we'll start with Rav. Well, not that much worse, but certainly a lot of bad news and bad press over the last week or so. Rav says, Andrew and Ben, Netflix. They've fired executives.

5:20They laid off 6% of the workforce. The share price is really taking it. I think it's gotten worse. It has gotten worse. He says, Andrew and Ben, this is Rav. Netflix reported earnings this week, and the company appears to be at a crossroads. They laid off 6% of staff last week, which included relieving their head of content and chairman of Netflix film. Relieving, by the way. Well. It's a great verb in this context. Well, and I believe the chairman of Netflix film had to fire the head of content and then was fired himself. So been a messy week out there.

5:52The Wall Street Journal cited data showing Netflix has fully saturated its U.S. base and has not added any subscribers this year. Engagement has notably slumped and is missing targets by 10%. Their current podcasting and gaming initiatives are useless. Meanwhile, Netflix has increased its standard subscription price four times over the past five years. They hiked it by 16% in 2025 and 12% in 2026. Given the slowing engagement, another increase will result in the dreaded customer churn.

6:27So, Rav asks, what should Netflix do? The Warner Brothers acquisition was seen as a kill shot, but in retrospect, the move was a desperate bid to reinvigorate their content and engagement. Should Netflix make a bid for NBCUniversal? They wanted Warner Brothers because of HBO, but NBCUniversal has something Netflix does not have, sports, Sunday Night Football, Big Ten, the NBA, the EPL, and the Olympics, all in a single package. NBC also has a fantastic parks business, which would put Netflix on the diversified Disney

7:02path. Alternatively, Netflix could keep investing in its own content and wait for Skydance to self-employer, under its ridiculous debt load, and then vulture the Warner Brothers' carcass. Speaking of which, let's take a quick second to acknowledge how atrocious the Ellison family's core investments have performed over the past year. Larry Ellison's Oracle shares are down. I saw the numbers there. I didn't realize they were part of the email. They're down 53%. David Ellison's Skydance shares are down 59%.

7:34And JoLynn Jew's Bryce Underwood shares, those are down 99%. Are we sure not bankrupt? No. Look. So the Western... Was it Western Michigan or Eastern Michigan? Western Michigan. That was like a government bailout of the auto industry. The Big Ten... Supporting it for a little while longer. Yes, that's the only reason there is 1% or one basis point left or whatever might be. Let me tell 98% of the audience, that's a very specific college football joke from Rav,

8:05but also a very funny college football joke about Larry Ellison's wife. JoLynn Jew and Bryce Underwood, yes. Indeed. And then look at Michigan's record. So bigger picture, I think Rav's email covers the Netflix status quo fairly well. We've both written a lot about Netflix. Well, the one I pushed back on is he said, given the slowing engagement, another increase will result in the dread of customer return. Will it? I don't know. That's the question, right? So every time they were asked, and the Netflix executives are so funny. I think I've pointed out before, everything they do was always their strategy.

8:37They've always been doing this all along. This was always the plan. Even as they're weaving all over the place, and we're never going to do ads, now we're doing ads, like being the most prominent example. But in this case, it was actually kind of jarring, where they've been asked about engagement for several calls now, and they're like, ah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're saying, yeah, yeah, our engagement is a problem. It's like, I'm not, unexpected straight talk was not what you usually expect from them on these earnings calls. And these are so controlled. It's actually an improvement now, where their head of investment reads questions from analysts.

9:13It used to be they would do earnings interviews, where one journalist slash analyst, often was like a journalist, was allowed to come in and ask questions. Okay. And it was like, and it was like super controlled. Now, multiple analysts ask questions, but it's still read out by a Netflix guy. Like they, they, it's not a like earnings call where they get from the other who. That's fascinating. How do they get away with that? Basically, one person goes in and asks questions on behalf of the masses? Well, when, when, when your stock price keeps going up and to the right, you get away with

9:43a lot. Sure. Okay. So, uh, the, no, but even now though, no one is allowed to ask questions. It is a, they send their questions and then the Netflix guy reads the questions. So these earnings calls are very shaped, very controlled, how they communicate. This has always been the case. So in this, for them to come out and say, yeah, uh, engagement is a problem and to be like pretty explicit about it means it's probably a big problem. It's a big problem. And, and you layer on top of this, the other thing that, that, that was very notable about

10:14talking. Well, every time there were the questions were about engagement, but again, controlled by Netflix, their answer was we raised prices and we didn't have higher than normal churn, which is good. Sure. Make no mistake. Like Netflix is low churn is the key to the superpower that they've had for 10 years. And for, you know, the saturation of the U S market, that's been the case for a long time. Of course, they're gonna have to raise prices in part to increase the revenue. But the problem is once the churn shows up, it's too late.

10:46Right. So the, the, the, yes, that's good. It hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean everything's okay. And if that is your answer, you're basically saying our last line of defense has not yet broken, but you're the fact you're not listing other things is a problem. And then you layer on top of this. The part I, the, the call that made me a little raise my eyebrows was they had a big advertising miss. They were, I think it was $3 billion. They're going to come in at 2.7. And they're like, well, we had really a day, Dacia's goals, a hundred percent growth. We're only going to have 80% growth.

11:17That's still really good. It is really good, but except last year didn't grow as much because they had to redo their whole stack. Okay. And so part of this is like, oh, we have certain partnership things that are not in place that are taking longer. We want to do it right. The first time all that is reasonable, except that we're in a call. Investors are worried about engagement and the business model that depends on engagement, which is advertising is not, is missing, right? No, it's growing. It's growing, but not as much as they thought.

11:47Sure. So, well, and going forward, I, I think it's interesting given the news with Netflix, because clearly they're aware that not everything is okay. And they're signaling that changes are necessary. I think it's a two, it's a two track conversation. One is what can Netflix fix? And one is what can't Netflix fix? And as far as what Netflix can fix, they can fix the content issues. Like the American content has not been good enough recently. And it seems like they recognize that and recognize that the brand has suffered because

12:22of the confusion at Netflix. I mean, watch stranger things. I did watch stranger things. It debuted. No, I'm playing a Netflix executive where all they would talk about, whatever content That's all they can come back to. And it's been a decade, right? Like the queen's gambit was really good and won a bunch of Emmys. I think that was six or seven years ago. And they haven't been able to recreate any of that success. And in terms of Netflix pricing power, I do think having some of those prestige shows, I forget who you pointed this out to. It may have been Greg Peters himself, but like HBO, one of the reasons they're able to charge

12:56what they can charge is because they have one or two tentpole shows that everybody wants to watch per quarter. It's not a tremendous amount of great content, but it's enough great content to protect a pretty good business. Netflix could try to do that, but it seems like they've been trying to do quantity over quality in recent years. Recent years? Well, I would say this decade for sure, because they started out with quirky quality stuff that really caught people's attention. That's not where they've been living.

13:26The other thing that I thought was interesting in your update as a specific content issue is Bella Bajaria, the now fired head of content. One of the things that was part of her remit was growing the global originals program. So there's a, one of my favorite ways to insult people in Chinese is there's these things called chungis, which are like four characters that have different things. Have I told this one before? Oh, you've mentioned it in the past. It is one of my favorites. Yeah. So, so they'll have like four adjectives and you drop one of them and say, this person

13:59is very, that, that, that one, two, and three, you not saying the fourth is like a massive insult, right? Okay. Everyone, it's such a beautiful formulation of an insult, like very well done. The Chinese are great at stuff like this. So, so, so, uh, in this case, they're like, they want to thank the former head of content really did a great job internationally. And they're just like, meanwhile, the rest of the call is all about the U S it's like, uh, yeah, we're in rough shape. Well, and what's interesting is that like Netflix has done really well globally.

14:31That's a, that's been a huge part of their success over the last six or seven years. And it's success that other like peers have not been able to replicate in any way, part because there are a lot of the challenges for a lot of the other companies is they're locked into all these distribution agreements. Like they were to distribute their shows like HBO, for example, where HBO would be only in the U S and so actually HBO content would be sold to other distributors in other countries. And that has to be negotiated one by one, right? Well, if you want to have a global service, you have to get out of those agreements, right?

15:03And like, and, and, you know, go the other way. So this is always a tension with, this is a problem with sports rights, right? Like there's a lot, those are also sort of parceled out and, uh, a platform like Netflix gets scale by reaching because they came up by themselves organically. They didn't have a previous business model. It's not just the advantage. Isn't just that they don't have old business model assumptions or they're not used to getting money from the cable bundle. It's also, they can like rethink distribution from first principles. Like it's on Netflix.

15:33It's everywhere. Yeah. And you still get some stuff like licensing. So some of their license shows are not always available everywhere. Like Netflix original content usually always is because it was. And so that's why they're so much more dominant in around the world than any of the competitors. Right. I mean, the content will differ a little around the world, but by and large, if you get Netflix and so you, you can have a global conversation or something can resonate globally. Like they've dominated like K-pop dramas, I think. Like it's just been a huge thing. And if you're into K-pop, K-pop dramas, K-dramas, Korean dramas.

16:06K-dramas. K-dramas is out there called? K-pop Demon Hunters and K-dramas. Yeah. Do you watch the K-pop Demon Hunters yet? Not yet. Not yet. I'll get around to it. How about, I'll watch the Elizabeth Holmes. You can see everything. Great. If you watch K-pop Demon Hunters. I will make that deal. A hundred percent. I'll sit through K-pop Demon Hunters. I'll start singing all the songs on the podcast. We need to get to your review of that movie, by the way. We will. We can mention it for sure. Anyways, I do think one of the things that's interesting is that Bella Bajaria, she was growing all this international content.

16:38You made the point, American content done well will also do very well globally. Oh, for sure. And they've neglected that. I mean, they'll always hype up a local show that goes big. Like, by local, I mean non-U.S. Yeah. Like a Korean show or like a, there's a ton of some French show or I think actually there's a few Latin American shows that tend to do pretty well. But the ones that everyone watches, like the old Hollywood being a U.S. export still lives. Like, that's still a real thing.

17:09So the U.S. doing poorly, it affects the whole business in a way. Any one unit elsewhere doing poorly does not. And it's important context for all the international success that has been celebrated here. So content side, spending an unbelievable amount of money, empowering the wrong people, making all kinds of weird choices. The Narnia movie sounds like a complete disaster. So there's some stuff that they can clean up and just run their business better. What can't Netflix fix as we look at the future here?

17:42Well, they can't fix the number of, the amount of, the population number in the U.S. and American market. I mean, so you can grow three ways. You can grow your number of subscribers. You can grow how much you charge those subscribers. And you can show subscribers ads. This is why the ad business model is so amazing. Man, now I feel so, everything's going to be interpreted the wrong way now. I've been defending the ad business model forever. And that is because you have infinite capacity to raise prices. Yeah. So when you raise prices on Netflix as a service, and this was sort of Raj's or Rob's concern,

18:15at some point people are going to, like, how much am I paying? I would churn. Yeah. Right. If they charge me $30 a month or whatever it is. On a very personal level, there's a lot of people that are annoyed they're going to be paying for a subscription to get ads. But, well, one option is I just retire because this is tiring. But number two is I just jack up the prices. I'm going to lose subscribers that way. I want to reach more people, not fewer. And I, like, I, there's, like, elasticity is a thing. And this was a whole issue we talked about with the AI companies. It was madness that they're going to have a consumer business predicated on subscriptions.

18:49Yeah. Like, it's actually incredible how far they got. But, but at the end of the day, people aren't willing, they don't want to pay at all if they don't have to. And sometimes you're in situations where there's no real viable way to charge. Hello, YouTube. Or sometimes there's, there's examples where just you're going to raise prices, you're going to lose customers. Like, there is a lot of ssd. With ads, you get to raise prices infinitely with no effect on your customer base. Now, infinitely is obviously overstating it, but you, this is like Meta's, like, why is Meta still growing?

19:21They... There's not, they have the same problem. They've saturated everyone. Well, because their ads are, like, more and more and more valuable over time as they get better and better at targeting them, as they, like, the gap between them and everyone else sort of increases. And so that's why the ad story is so important. Yeah. And this miss, again, allegedly for, like, weird partnerships are not worked out, whatever it might be. It's like, that better be the case. And these better come through because what's the gross story? If the gross story is nothing but raising prices, you're running into the Rav nightmare.

19:55That's my question with Netflix. And I don't want to underestimate them. Sorry. The other thing about the rest of the world to mention, the problem is the rest of the world, the prices are just way lower. Yeah. You can't make nearly as much money. That's right. Like, I think, yeah, exactly. So, well, and if the fight is for engagement and like, because engagement is elemental to the ad story. And if that's their path to long-term growth, then it looks to me and it looked to me over the summer when I wrote about Netflix in July, it just looks like the company is at a fundamental

20:27disadvantage relative to the rest. So, yeah, so this gets into the bigger issue that I was trying to get at with here. And it's funny. I thought like, we talk about Netflix a lot, how much is there to say? And I'm like, actually, no, we're only halfway through. I don't have to get to with you here. So, one of the issues with Netflix is, or the hope for Netflix, he kind of refers to this like, wait for Sundance to like, blow up. And I've made the point, like, Hollywood, it feels much more, whatever they are, what would I call it? It was, it's not Sundance, that's a film festival, Skydance, invented like two years ago, who

20:59cares, whatever. Skydance? Yep. Okay. Their stock is also getting hammered. Yeah, no, it was listed in that list. I was too distracted by the Underwood reference.

21:09Hollywood is not what is rational, but to what I thought would be rational. Like the, where the Sony strategy, um, we're just going to focus on making content and sell it to the highest bidder and everyone's, nope, we're going to do our streaming service. Nope. We're going to buy Warner brothers, apparently with no, like how idea how we're going to actually make this profitable. Again, I think Fox and Sony have been the two really rational actors. Basically Fox got out of the studio business and then they're combining to be and Roku to

21:43be Roku is to be the one, whatever. Like the free services, they're all in on like live ad supported stuff. Super smart. I think it makes a ton of sense. Sports is obviously a big part of that. And then you have Sony's in the opposite direction. All we're just going to do is scripted content. We're not going to have our own streaming service. I thought everyone should have followed those paths. Yeah. And basically no one else has like there. So they're still in the game. And the problem is it had everyone sort of bailed on that. Then Netflix's content problem would have solved itself. I always thought Netflix doing original content was not what they were good at.

22:14It was a bridge to get to a world where they got back to getting all the good content from the people who are best at making content. Right. And they have leverage in that scenario. So it's almost like they're, they're the tail end of a whip in a little bit where everyone is still being irrational, but they're good content makers. Maybe that's related. And Netflix is good at business. It's like, was waiting for them to show up and they just never showed up. And that's how I interpreted the Warner brothers thing was like, look, everyone should be selling to us. Fine. We'll just go and buy you. And then you have to sell to us because we own you.

22:46And that's why I called it the Hollywood end game. Like they were trying to force the end game of what I thought should happen. I think that should still happen, but the issue is who knows how long it's going to take. It's already taken longer than expected. And they need to, they're ongoing concern. They need to keep growing. They want to keep their stock price. All these sorts of things that go into companies. Would it make any sense for them to buy NBC universal? Sure. Yeah. Well, they seem like they're out of ideas as a starting point with that conversation.

23:17Yeah. I mean, well, what's really interesting, the sports issue is super interesting. I was, they've gotten much more into sports recently. And that's the real premium content. Well, that is also the, if you have one big event every month, it's like, that's enough to keep everyone signed up to a certain extent. Like as far as a churn avoidance, sports does a lot for a billion advertising business. It's still the best place to advertise. Yeah. And the, they're allergic to it because sports is structured such that the leagues are going to extract the vast majority. There, you can't even lie to yourself and say, okay, eventually these costs are going to come

23:50down because people are going to go out of business. But that's always been the case. Like the, the, the, the whole brilliance of the Rupert, when Rupert Murdoch got the NFL was he, I don't, I don't know that Fox has ever made money in the NFL, but we don't talk about a big three. We talk about a big four because of the NFL. And so Fox has made billions of dollars because of the NFL, even if like on the NFL package specifically, I would, I don't know for sure, but I would guess that they've never made money on that narrowly, but it made them into a real network.

24:21And then you get all the shoulder stuff that comes from that. And maybe that's something that was thinking about. Like how do we actually build an ad business? Yeah. And ad business that benefits the whole business. And right now, I mean, if they're trying, cause they've hired, they brought on, uh, podcasts and cooking shows and like internet friendly content to try to juice the engagement numbers. None of which was mentioned on this call. I mean, you listened to the whole thing, but I saw some notes that basically they didn't mention the podcast.

24:51They didn't mention the video game stuff. And so actually the opposite, they were like, actually we're spending all our money on the important stuff. Don't worry. We have a little 5% of them. Don't worry about that. So they were like very, I think there was a bit where people that was, it was, it looked bad. Yeah. Right. It's like, you're going to solve your problem with the ringer. And, and it's one of those things where like six months ago, those were all points of emphasis. And now, so you know, but their strategy has always been, you get the feel of a company that's making it up as they go here.

25:22It is really like, we've, we've always been doing it this way as it's like 180 degrees different than it was a little bit ago. Well, and in terms of the broader ecosystem, the extent to which Netflix is dependent on engagement to sell its growth story feels to me like the extent to which Netflix's growth story just isn't as compelling as it used to be. It's just, well, the issue is it's the, it's the ad model, like the, the, their growth more and more in the long run is about ads, which is the ad model, but also it's the way people are consuming entertainment these days.

25:53It's like meta is a real competitor to what Netflix wants. I mean, honestly, that's the real problem is TikTok and reels. It's devouring everything. And like how many people are sitting down and watching meta reels every night? And actually a staggering number of people are choosing that over Netflix. And I think that's what they've been running into. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't consume video content. Um, again, another great irony here. So I, I don't, but, uh, no, I was actually, I discovered the quality of the audio content

26:25in this room because I like did like a podcast with my daughter and which I never did publish, but I thought that was pretty good. Um, I loved it. She was great. And she was a huge Netflix consumer and I didn't ask her about this specifically, but she talked about, Oh, she has her little reels time every night. Yeah. And it's like, it just occurred to me right now. Oh yeah. That's a perfect example. That's when the light bulb went off with me. My wife has her reels time every single night and she'll just sit over there on her phone. I'm like, what are you doing? And she doesn't know. She doesn't have a good answer. Beyond just watching reels.

26:56So, uh, that's the challenge for Netflix is a lot of people who used to watch Netflix are now watching Instagram and Tik TOK. Um, and that will be a headwind as they try to build a headwind. If your growth story involves that. Yeah, exactly. All right. One other note related to the streaming world, just because I came across it and was kind

Skydance, SpaceX and Hollywood finance

27:15of, uh, gobsmacked. Uh, the Hollywood reporter this week wrote, could a major deal between David Ellison Skydance and Elon Musk's SpaceX be brewing? The media mogul, John Malone thinks so. I think there's a deal coming there. Malone said, citing an eyebrow raisingly specific eight to $10 billion investment figure. I predict big prediction that you'll see a global output deal for Skydance with SpaceX and an investment by SpaceX into Skydance to de-lever Skydance and take a little bit of the burden

27:49off David Ellison's shoulders because he's taking on a pretty big pile of debt. What exactly would SpaceX get in that deal? That's less obvious. The Hollywood reporter notes though Malone, who was the architect of the Warner brothers discovery deal alongside David Zaslav noted that Musk and David Ellison's father, Larry Ellison are very intertwined. Who helped Elon finance Twitter when he bought it? Larry Ellison Malone said, how did Larry Ellison come up with some of the money to put into the creation of Skydance?

28:21Tesla stock. And I would not doubt for a minute that before very long, you're going to see an announcement. And then Thursday morning, there was news. Oh, I actually didn't know this. This morning. Elon. Been a little busy getting stuff set up. I was going to like, well, number one, basically whatever John Malone says is likely the gospel truth. Exactly. That's why. Reason to believe it. I clicked on the story. I was like, okay, I guess if John Malone is saying it, there must be something real here. That's right. So, but that's going to sort of poopoo or the idea is that, well, yeah, they are buddies,

28:53but oh, there you go. News breaking on the show. Elon, a billion dollars into Skydance, not $10 billion, but maybe that's coming. I have no idea what SpaceX would get out of this investment. Wait, is it from Elon Musk or is it from? From Elon today, Thursday, as we record this. An investment from SpaceX would be.

29:14Straining the bounds of credulity. Well, so this Ouroboros, like I don't really understand what's happening. The first time I've written about Tesla very little and people always wonder why. And part of it is just like writing about anything Elon related, even before like our politics went particularly crazy over the last few years was like writing about any hot button political issue because the Elon zealots are just like, yeah, six dimensional chess and you either

29:46see it or you don't. That's right. They might be right, but it just make them any less annoying. Actually, the more right they are, the more annoying they are, which is, I guess, fair enough. But I wrote about Tesla. I wrote, it's a Tesla. When they opened up the Model 3 and they had all these orders overnight, they found an affordable Tesla. It just went crazy. And I talked about how they built, they built up the, um, the built up the brand and how that sort of paid off. And the next week they did this crazy deal for Elon's brother-in-law solar thing or something

30:19like that. And I'm like, that's insane. I don't want to write about this. This is not worth it. I'm like, I will write about Elon Musk like once every three years. I know, exactly. So that was, that was, if SpaceX invested in this, that would be, that would be the same lines. Yes. I read it only to say that might happen. And at a certain point with Skydance and with Elon, I just throw up my hands. The debt that Skydance has taken on is completely ridiculous. And I have no idea how they could sustain it over the next several years, but maybe they'll

30:53find a way. Maybe Elon will be part of that story. So, uh, time will tell in the streaming world here for now to keep it moving.

Stripe sponsorship and going independent

31:01As I mentioned earlier, Ben, we are presented by Stripe today, whole new era. I'm going to read a note from Gurgly Orzaz on Twitter. This week, Stripe announced they are sponsoring the Mercedes F1 team, and they are becoming the first ever exclusive sponsor for Stratechery. The second one in my book is possibly a bigger achievement than the first. Mercedes has, and always had, dozens of sponsors. Stratechery has never had any. I, for one, just for the record, am absolutely delighted to be one step removed from the Mercedes

31:35family these days. Well, as you know, I've always been a big Mercedes fan. It's always been my number one team. No, there's, there's two ways I could take the Mercedes news. Number one, I could pretend like now my views are being influenced by Stripe and pretend to be Mercedes. I went with that one. The other one was, uh, reiterating that Mercedes, they, they control the FIA. They manipulated the rules. It's unbelievable. They get an engine upgrade and Red Bull doesn't. Yeah. It's absurd. Screw this team. No, it's all right. I've had a trial independence. They go both directions. Uh, no, uh, yeah.

32:07Well, the funny thing about this is, uh, it is not Stratechery for a sponsor. So when Stratechery went independent, I had sponsors for like two months. I didn't know this until your announcement post. Yep. Uh, the, I know WordPress was one of them, so I appreciate them. Uh, and WordPress also, WordPress.com sponsored another company that I'm just intrinsically not going to, cannot be unbiased about, uh, Google, how close to work with them, used to work there. Uh, I think MailChimp did, who again, another company I worked with and for, but if you go back, I should go back and like find the list of like, cause I've God bless them.

32:40Anyone who sent me, but like at the end of the day, it's like, I could not charge a lot for ads back then. Yeah. It was a lot of work and it was just the math. Like it would not have been a business that sustains a family. Right. So you think, and I've, I've since then, cause I've counseled a lot of people on go independence and people will start with the, Oh, I'm going to do this and this and this. I'm like, no, you're not. I'm like the cost, the payoffs, not worth it. And it's going to take you so much time and energy. Like you, one person, you have to focus on one thing. And if you're small, it has to be maximizing your, your revenue per user through subscriptions,

33:16like be super narrowed, be super focused, deliver on that, become indispensable for a small number of people who will give you a lot of money and grow from there. In the long run, you might be able to do sort of other things. And you know, we are now 12 years past that. And stripe is another thing. Here we are. So, uh, but yeah, that's why. So I bailed on those super quickly. I'm like, no, I just have to build, build this business. So 13 years later, why stripe?

33:44Well, the stripe part is easy as far as choosing them. Uh, I can write about like why ads make sense. We have a lot of attention. We should capitalize that. We want to get more attention. Like just, you know, especially with the podcast, sharp tech has been very successful, very high penetration amongst stretchy subscribers. Turns out our thesis about it, driving new subscriptions doesn't really, doesn't really work hard if you're not going to be free. And that's right. And I think it's a good, I think the show is good and deserves to be larger and bigger

34:19and better. And so that's part of that sort of part, part of the calculus there and stripe, you know, stripe helps make that possible. But at the same time, it is a big change. I understand people who feel, I don't know if they're betrayed or disappointed or whatever it might be. And I can feel that a bit too. Like the, particularly if I was going to, you know, everyone has the dream of like, let me get like a luxury company to sponsor me. Right. I'm like, I'm in a fluid audience. Rolex. How about you come sign up? Right. Or, uh, or LVMH. You're like, your stock's down. Why don't you see the strategy audience can pick you up a little bit there.

34:50Sure. Um, but realistically, you know, amongst the companies that would find this compelling, they're going to be close to or adjacent to what I cover. And the cool thing about stripe and is number one, unabashed believer in supporter in of stripe. I mean, when I was proposing to you, the companies, what was your line? Uh, I would still be a lawyer if not for stripe. Yeah. That's our tagline. I would still be a lawyer if not for stripe. Which by the way is literally true because what stripe enables with the independent creator

35:24system and the ecosystem and the subscription basketball podcast. Like I would not have been able to stay in the media while practicing law. No, sports illustrated is imploding with everyone else in media. You get laid off. And I had a bunch of offers to do ad supported podcasts, but had I gone that direction, it just would not have been sustainable with the workload I had at a law firm. I needed to be able to create my own schedule and sort of exist as an independent publisher, which stripe makes possible. Like I would never be able to figure out payments without that sort of thing.

35:57And by remaining in the media, like that led me here. So it, I do owe a lot to stripe. So number one, it's like super genuine. And then number two, just the reality is because I've been so dependent on stripe from the beginning, because we work closely with them with that board and because I've had the good fortune to get to know Patrick and John sort of over the years, I've always like, actually a subscriber, I was writing about Adyen, Adyen, let's see where I go, being biased, the European payments entity. And I, you know, I wrote something and he's like, you're too in the bag for stripe.

36:32And I'm like, I don't think I was in this analysis. But then I think about it, I'm like, I try to be objective, but of all the companies intact, there's a few that's just difficult and they were on there. So it's like, I love this company. How about I just lean into the conflict?

36:48Guess what? Everything I say about stripe, take with a grain of salt. That was a layer of the announcement. I do really love it. So there you go. That was a layer I was not prepared for is actually, I'm going to cover fintech more going forward now that I can do it with a clear conscience. I think there's an aspect to that. Like, I can't say that for sure, but it's been in the back. Like, there's a lot of interesting around stable coins, for example, or stripe with they're doing like link for agents and all this. It's actually a very interesting layer. And I think there, you know, we'll see, maybe there's gonna be some information that we'll be able to uncover from stripe with a closer connection.

37:19All this is to be determined. But there's an aspect of if something's uncomfortable, actually just go into it all the way. Yeah. And well, here we go. We're kind of doing that right now. Absolutely. And to your point, I don't have to fake my enthusiasm for any of what stripe makes possible, which is pretty cool. Yeah. It's good to have an ad that we're a company you believe in. So I'm very lucky in that regard. Could Stratechery have survived as a business model? Like, would it have been viable? No, the only option, the only option, I thought about strips for ages.

37:51PayPal was the only option. There was tons of problems with that. Like, it was just, I mean, that was the, there was people who had tried it and that was part of it being a big disaster. When stripe came out with subscription API that like, to me, it was very clear. Like, this is what the model should be. I started Stratechery with the goal of being the subscription business because of, because of stripe. So there we are. Yeah. And here we are now. All right. Well, to keep it moving, we have some news in the cyber universe.

Critical PHP and certificate vulnerabilities

38:23And I don't know where to begin. I'm just, there's. No, this tweet is pretty good. There are eight different cyber issues that have been rearing their heads. How many did you list here? Well, no, here's, I'll just read NSA this week wrote, effective immediately. All organizations using PHP for their systems. Oh, by the way, did you see the thing about the, the, uh, the elliptical, uh, there's the NSA, another NSA story this week that is actually super interesting. No.

38:54So, uh. Elliptical? Elliptical trainers? So there's elliptical curves. It's a type, it's a type of encryption that is like, uh. Not elliptical trainers, okay. No, it's not elliptical trainers. Uh, but basically you, you have, you need some seeds that generate curves based and it's how you can efficient, it's actually a very efficient way to encrypt things more encrypted than like, than using hashes. Uh, but the idea is you want to be able to encrypt things and you have a public key, a private key, you can pat, you have the other side and you can decrypt it and it's easy to get encrypted or hard to get decrypted unless you have the right key.

39:24Uh, but a particular style is called elliptical, elliptical, and it depends on certain seeds like that, that, uh, generate whatever it might be. And, um, the seeds came from the NSA for this type of encryption. Okay. And no one, there was like stories about like, oh, there was some funny catchphrase or something, but no one could remember what the seeds were. I was like, how, how are these seeds chose? Like, is there something, like, there's no obvious reason why it shouldn't matter what the seed is based on the encryption works, but maybe they did, there's something about

39:58this that we don't know the NSA is like crackling. So part of this is, uh, Bitcoin uses elliptical, uh, cryptography or their, their, their elliptical curves, but they use a different set than what everyone else uses. Okay. And Ethereum is the same way. Why? Because they assumed the NSA was like, so it turns out. So, uh, anthropic cool AI story doing random stuff. They like, everyone had heard this myth of there's like these joking phrases that were

40:28used and they're like, let's back up. Let's throw away assumptions and have quad or some version of quad think through how these passphrases might've been made. And it turns out if you take what was a standard pseudo random number generator and combine it with a specific date and time around the time the seeds were generated, that's where it came from. Oh, all it happened. The NSA just ran a program that generated some seed numbers and handed them over. It was not. So all this assumption that it was like they were doing something dodgy.

41:01No, it was just, there's nothing wrong with them. They were just, someone ran a program at a particular moment in time and handed over some seeds. There you go. Well, that might be the most benign update of the week, uh, because the other note on the NSA is effective immediately. All organizations using PHP for their systems are advised to be prepared for an update addressing two critical vulnerabilities. PHP is widely used for web applications. These vulnerabilities often provide a direct path to the server's file system or database.

41:35If an immediate update is not feasible, it is recommended that organizations take the system offline until it can be fully mitigated. NSA will follow up shortly with more specific guidance. So as I said, that's one of like a couple different threads that are pretty ominous. You took care of this, right? Uh, I have not taken care of anything, anything related to PHP's or security certificates. Haven't taken any of my websites offline.

42:06Sharptext.net still live. What do you think? Should I be? Sharptext.net is a WordPress site. Oh boy. You are, you have a PHP. You haven't fixed it? Uh, no, I don't. How would I fix it? Is this a bit? Cause you're scaring the crap out of me. Uh, don't worry. It was fixed for you. Oh, thank you so much. No, I didn't fix it. Uh, I like any sane person who has anything exposed to the internet, uh, have contracted it out to professionals to take care of it. In this case, uh, Pressable, which is a WordPress company or an automatic company hosts your site.

42:39Uh, this is as part of the disclosure process. It's actually been patched for a while. Not, not just this week. I believe. Uh, so congratulations on that. Thank you so much. Um, but yeah, it is. So it's kind of funny because there, there's all those whole list of stuff that happened this week. Some of it is probably AI drive. Some of it might not be in particular this, this pH. I, I, I don't, well, there's another story. This certificate story. Yeah. Um, this one is particularly insane, which is, uh, I'm going to come back to the PHP

43:11one. This other story, there is, there is a company from India. So there's certificates that are issued. The problem with encryption or whatever, there has to be something at the bottom. We've talked about this in the context, like smartphones, right? At the end of the day, you are trusting Apple because ultimately it has to like all encryption has to go down to something. There has to be something at its root. And in the case of stuff online, how do you have a trusted transaction with like an Amazon? How? Well, there is, there are certificates that are issued by these, uh, like everyone agrees

43:43they're an authority. They're embedded inside your browser and inside like your operating system. And it's, and then you get it. So I have, our websites have keys. Uh, there's a service called let's encrypt. Let's just, you get keys very easily, but it's all based on these like baseline certificates that everyone agrees that if you have a key that matches that it's secure. So when you go to an amazon.com, there's a little lock in your browser. If you go somewhere, it'll throw up that scary screen. This site is not secure. What it means is they don't have a certificate that is issued by one of these certificate

44:15issuers. So a certificate issuer in India, uh, it's not clear what happened. They're blaming software, but these are supposed to be 256 bit encrypted hat. Like, so 256 unique, like digits or letters or numbers or symbols there, their numbers were like four. Oh boy. Or like 127. It a little easier to decrypt. It appears they interpreted 256 bit as a number between zero and 255 or something like that.

44:51So it's unbelievable. Okay. Um, it's, uh, it's, it's hard. You're so visibly disgusted. It's unbelievable. And the problem is, so what does that put at risk? Well, so you number one, make sure your browser is up to date. Well, all the browsers and stuff have been, have been updated to, to exclude these. Okay. But look around this out. How many things in this office are connected to the internet? Oh my God. Like I'm worried about running around like 150 different. Which is not true because I have like different view on stuff, but the, like all this internet

45:25of things stuff out there, a lot of them will have like trusted certificates, like deeply embedded in there. Are those going to ever be updated? Yeah. Like, um, there's, uh, so like, it's just, this is, this certificate issue is going to persist where people can basically impersonate that you're trusted and it's just, it's going to, it's going to persist like forever. It's going to be this permanent damage done to the internet of these, because of one company's

45:55incompetence. So you get back to this PHP issue, PHP, uh, they are, the PHP foundation is, uh, issued a patch for everything. I believe from 8.2 on, I think 8.2 came out in 2022. There are millions of websites, millions of things out there that have older versions of PHP, or even if they have newer versions of PHP, are they going to be updated immediately? And this bug is so bad that if you go to a site that has it, you can take control of

46:26the machine, like basically immediately. Wow. Like it's extreme. That's why the NSA is putting out tweets about this. Take your stuff offline. And this stuff is everywhere. Mm-hmm. And a lot of it's old. And there's a, it's really interesting because there is a, there's a, there's a, there's like a political and sociological and techno technology story here. Okay. The internet connected everything, made everything global and everything being connected and being

46:59global is what's going to bring the internet down. That's the vulnerability right now. The internet seeded AI. It gave all the content for AI and AI is devouring the internet. There is this, like, we, we overstretched ourselves, like as a species from the internet. From dust to dust. So there was, there was, there was a big conversation. There was a lot of controversy a few years ago or a lot of pushback argument, like, so the U S is always, I think it's, I should have checked it. Like you can or something. There's like a, a internet governance body that's controlled by the U S and there was

47:33a lot of like, I can't remember if they ever got changed or not or undone, but, um, but that wasn't popular with the rest of the world. Right. Sure. But then you see something like this, you're like, was it a good idea to let the world issue certificates that everyone's going to trust on is going to, is going to trust. And that is a very biased sort of American statement. But what I'm, what I'm getting at is the internet, the way there is constructed, it entails so much trust for so many people, for so many entities and it might not work out.

48:07Well, and particularly so now that AI has emerged and can exploit any sort of vulnerability. So the AI comes along and finds these owners. So, no, so it's a different one to be clear. That's not an AI one. That is a sheer incompetence one. The PHP one, I would, I haven't looked in the details. I would imagine AI helped discover it. AI is going to find way more. The, my big takeaway from this though, and this goes back to my sort of getting, having a vulnerability, um, again, stupidly my fault. Yeah. Which was caught by Claude.

48:37I think everyone's like, I don't want to set these AI agents loose on my computer. I don't trust them. We're very rapidly approaching. If we have not yet already gone over the line of you are nuts. If you don't have an AI agent looking at all your stuff all the time. Because your agent is what caught the vulnerability. No, just in general, there's, there's going to be so many vulnerabilities. I'm just saying that was an example of the AI agent, like actually securing. Yeah, no, for sure. And that was sort of on accident, but like, you know, we have, I have my, you know, I

49:08have a rack. Did you know? I'll show you the rack later. Have you seen the rack? I went into the other room and saw the rack. It's a great rack. Yeah. It really is a great rack. Uh, now again, all that is purposely kept offline to the greatest extent possible. Uh, you know, all behind tail scale. I, I don't want anything serving the public internet should not be at my house. It should be like, that's what I pay professionals to do. Um, I will note like my version of Linux had the old certs. I'm like, oops, I didn't have, cause it was, it was like, it was bad by me.

49:39Cause I think the, the fix, but I don't know what was issued, but I need to have the, I need to have a watcher going that is keeping stuff. I regular schedule, which I had, uh, but regular updates and then something that is deputized to keep track of this all the time. And this idea that, no, I can't let it, I don't trust it. It's like, you need to stop trusting yourself. Let go of the reins because you're screwed. Otherwise, because there are so many threats and potential vulnerabilities.

50:11Uh, and so, you know, of course everyone can, should be proactive and looking for these bugs. Uh, right. And it's hard because it's difficult to podcast about it right now because there are so many different vectors that have been highlighted this week. And I'm so many, there are like six or seven ongoing stories here. And so I'm hesitant to talk in like ambiguous language, like, Oh, things are getting bad. It just, when you read some of the headlines, it does feel like things are beginning to crack

50:42to some degree. And there's been sort of a ground. We said this was coming. It's going to get worse and worse and worse. Yeah. Like until.

50:51And it feels like the internet, like the, the internet, the old internet of I'm going to throw up a WordPress site. I used to do it all the time. I've had a bunch of WordPress sites over the years. Uh, I'm going to run my own email show that that's dead. That's been dead for a long time. No email gets delivered. If it's not sent by like one of the big ones, uh, this, this, the whole promise of the internet of the openness, openness, million nodes, you can connect and be connected to anyone else. BBS is hosted on someone's like draw, you know, server in their basement.

51:22We are fortunate. Everyone who's listening to this, who knows anything of what I just said, you should consider yourself fortunate because it was a moment in time golden era. It will never return. It will never. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What do you mean by that? Like, what would a new version look like? There will be no new patch our way around. Absolutely not. Everything is. So the, one of my favorites, um, what's the, uh, honestly, I won't miss it too much at this, but the internet has been kind of a cesspool for a while, so it's fine.

51:55Well, so part of it has been an economic factor, which aggregation theory talks about, about the centralized controlling demand, um, all that sort of thing. But there, the, it's not just the, uh, it's also just the very structure of the internet of this relatively cloistered, very nerdy subset of the population that could figure out how to even get online in this like garden of Eden sort of environment of like-minded people. I mean, that happens with every social network as well. It starts out small and then when everybody joins, it becomes more trouble than it's worth.

52:28That's right. And, uh, and what we're going to get to, there's, I'm trying to remember who's, who's the, uh, who's the science fiction author that has written like 47 gazillions, uh, science fiction books and clearly the most, one of the most well-known is about, about virtual reality. Um, this is driving me absolutely crazy. We're going to right now, we literally have thousands of people yelling the name of this. Um, I have no idea who you're, I'm not a science fiction guy. Oh, this is so bad. Uh, virtual reality. Oh, William Gibson, Jim third chair.

52:58Just checked in. It is not William Gibson. Okay. It is not ready player one. It is. I was going to guess ready player one. No, it is, uh, one of the other class one, Jim. Kurzweil. No, it's not Kurzweil. He writes novels. This is unbelievable. Uh, this is great, great TV right now. Sorry. This is all happening live. That's this is the new era here. Um, no, not Asimov. Uh, anyhow, he, one of the most famous books about virtual reality, which, uh, Jim is going

53:28to think of and type it on the screen here if I, if I can come up with it, um, is, uh, it depicts this world. That's like the cyberpunk world where people are, there's lots of nations or nation type states, but they're fully distributed. And so if you're in a different area, like there's one that was like a Hong Kong one and there's one that was like a vaguely sort of us one, but everything in between these areas, like they're super secured and super locked down. And if you're not a citizen or a member of that group, you don't get into their property,

54:00but inside it's beautiful and bucolic and all this sort of thing. But then everything in between, it starts out with this guy who's like a delivery driver, like driving around between these different things. And it's just like a hell. So that's what the internet will look like. Um, the, yes. Like if you think about it, it's kind of like that now for social networks, the group chat is like the best social network ever. It's high trust. It's like, like what we, like we used to act like, you know, on social, on social media, but to an even greater extent.

54:32And then when you're out there, like there's other group chats that are like, they're girding for war and then they venture forth on Twitter to do battle. And then you retreat to lick your wound. It does get pretty dystopian out there. That tweet goes viral. You're answering idiots. That is like the internet in general. Like, like you, I, so I'm building this story. Yeah. Neil Stevenson. Thank you, Jim. Neil Stevenson. I can't remember what the book was. Uh, I hope that's gratifying to the thousands of listeners who were driving themselves insane, saying the name to themselves.

55:03Uh, snow crash is the name of the book, uh, where he coined the term metaverse. That's a decent movie. I'm told anyway. Yeah. So, so a snow crash was, was the novel I'm referring to, uh, but this is going to be the internet. Like you're going to, or, or like I'm building all, all we have all these little apps we're doing for our company. Like tail scale is our wall. You're logged in and you're a part of it and nothing is exposed to the outside. It's like my little fortress here. And that is like the internet is going to be little fortresses everywhere patrolled in

55:34a very cyberpunk way by, by these agents that are just always on, always alert doing battle. And hopefully it never breaks through and you don't know about it. This idea of the old world where you're just out again, a garden of Eden garden of Eden went away, didn't come back. That was the internet that we grew up with. It's gone. Well, uh, so you could still visit websites in this future. You can, but like the economic model is already pretty rough. Yeah. Right. But that's what I mean in terms of like, will we really miss what we had or what we have

56:08now? Because the quality has gotten pretty degraded anyways. That's been my case about this for a long time. Right. Everyone's like scared of the future. I'm like, you should be scared of preserving the present. Cause like everything is at its worst right now. Cause you, the problem is you look backwards and you, you think about how it was and you're like, let's arrest the decline because with the assumption that you're going to go back, you're not going to go backwards. You're, you're not going back. The only way through is forward and don't freeze us where we are right now.

56:39Cause it's like the worst. Everything's going to be. Well, the worst does feel like where we are right now, as far as a, uh, cyber security community. So let's see. No, it's going to get worse. Do you think so? Yes, absolutely. All right. Well, fair enough. There's going to be cyber incidents, like just accelerating and like what the, what's downstream of these ones that are happening right now. Like there was a, uh, uh, rail railway railroad. There's like a developer site that was, uh, broken into this week. All the credentials of everyone who's like, use that site.

57:11That's right. Which are one of the stories. Yep. A lot of user data. Sure. Well, developer data. So you can use those credentials to break into other apps, other websites. If they don't rotate all their credentials, which is a huge lift, a big pain in the rear end. Uh, and so all like, and so it's going to like propagate and get worse and worse and worse. So what we're, where we are now is the dike is slowly breaking. Yes. And at some point there's going to be a flood. No, there's just like some little ways going over the edge right now. Okay. The tsunami is.

57:43Well, that's all very comforting. One thing I will know is that Axios had a big story about banks freaking out because of agents accessing, uh, bank accounts. I think a lot of what's referenced in that story is people deputizing their agents to access their bank accounts. So the headline was very scary. I can put a link to the link to it in the show notes. Um, but like I deputized muse to access my bank accounts and look at you. Well, of course, like it's one of the most useful.

58:16It is so great. You are either zero or 100. I mean, I'm in on muse all the way, man. We need your review.

Meta VR glasses impressions

58:24Uh, how was the, the, uh, meta, the new VR glasses? Uh, we did get a chance to try the meta VR glasses when we were out in San Francisco last week. Um, they are an amazing product as a vision pro user. I think I still prefer the vision pro. And when I say amazing product, the resolution on the glasses are, it's like pretty breathtaking that they're able to have that resolution on a pair of glasses that are as light as they are.

58:58My issue is they actually feel like too insubstantial. They're in kind of an uncanny valley where it's like, if I'm using this for entertainment, I want to have full blackout, have it be heavy. The fit wasn't great for me, at least in my demo. So I came in with very high expectations and I wound up liking them and not loving them. You're such an Apple fan boy. It's unbelievable. No, I'm not. Are you like, I'm not, you literally just said the words, they weren't heavy enough.

59:29Listen to yourself. They, they, they felt like they could fall off. I don't know. It was not quite as thrilling as I expected. I actually would have preferred them with a headband. They just sat on your ears and they never did come off, but they always felt like they were about to come off. So it was more disconcerting. Right. And it's harder to immerse yourself, uh, in entertainment. So I think they said they're going to have a, there will be an attachment. So do you get like full blackout? I think the full blackout with the headband, once you get past that, just better than a

1:00:03vision pro in every single conceivable possible way in the big one that's, so there are very slightly lower resolution, which you can tell the app vision pro is also not enough resolution. It's enough resolution though. For text. I did the whole like vision pro on the back of an airplane would actually be amazing. Yeah. Well, you know, it was, there was, there was kind of a peak, you know, um, being out of touch point by like, you know, I can remember when I used to sit in the back of the plane, uh, he's going to have been pretty great. Um, but the, you know, maybe I've played room for my laptop, uh, the other parts of the

1:00:34plane, but the, no, the actual, like I, I have four, actually I usually have five monitors or sometimes cause I'm catching the TV too. Uh, this idea that I can actually carries with me and have multiple monitors on the road, super division pro. It's so big. You can't do that. Unbelievable. How big it is. It's like even worse than the weight. Yeah. Like the smallest you can get it packed up does not fit in. That's true. Even in suitcases. No, I don't. It's just a problem.

1:01:05Uh, so, uh, so I think it's great. So you approve of it on that basis. Okay. No, I agree with you. It feels more precarious than it should. I would rather just like, cause they, they did get the moment. Oh, they've been sitting here the whole time. It's like if they had been sat there with like a headband, right. Like my glasses, but I noticed them. Uh, but I, that I would like it to feel tighter, even though to be clear, mine never came off. Yeah. I was so disappointed. Um, so I had to leave cause I, last second I got invited this Apple thing I wrote about

1:01:39this week, Apple and metal working together. So I had to leave you there by yourself. But before I went, I made sure to do the beat saber demo to have them write down the score. I didn't have any plans for any of this discussion. Now you're going to kill me. You are such a chicken. Unbelievable. I'm like, tell me what you're, so we get in for dinner that night. I'm like, Oh, what was your score? I did not participate in the beat saber aspect of the demo. All the meta people were great. So shout out to all those guys. I'm not a gamer.

1:02:09I don't want to do. I don't care that you go up there and you get a bad score. Well, I feel like an idiot. You're so good at podcasting. Yeah. Because you're self-effacing, you let me make fun of you, all that sort of thing. Like you pulled out this humor in Ben Goliver that was so mean. Right. Because he had like permission to be mean to you and it was hilarious. You're so, then, so it's like so jarring for me. I'm not putting my head on the chopping block to get my ass kicked in some kids game that Ben was very into.

1:02:39I'm not playing beat saber on the vision pro headset. Look, the other thing on the vision pro headset, uh, it wasn't a vision pro, but sorry, sorry. I, yeah. Um, the meta VR glasses, um, they, they will have a lot more content. Oh, which is important. I thought their eye control in the hand thing was way better than apples. Yeah. Like the, just the, when you do, they do the same thing. Like you look around at the dots. It's I, I experienced it as identical to apples. Well, so I always find with apple, at least one of the dots I'll miss.

1:03:10Okay. Cause I like it almost for, I'll just do it really fast. Like the meta one, like it just like, it was, I thought it feels like technology is two years newer, but I'm sure that's exactly what it is. Uh, it hasn't come out yet to be fair. It's not coming out till next year. Uh, but no, I think I will definitely get some just for the travel angle. Right. You can't really travel with a vision pro. You will be able to travel with these glasses and they will have a lot more sports on these glasses. No. And Apple has had the other thing that just came back to me. I was traveling, uh, because, oh, cause we had to record, uh, we were going to record

1:03:43somewhere and then it didn't work out. So we ended up recording in your hotel room and I'm carrying around my big laptop and I'm like, I should have just carried my air because this thing is such a, I am so excited, but I do carry it when I travel because the extra screen, I do use a lot of screen space when I'm writing. I like to have lots of stuff up referencing it. It's not ideal on that, but that's the biggest screen that I can get. So I carry around this big honking computer. Um, I'm looking forward to 100% being able to carry a small computer.

1:04:16And when I want, when I sit down to write on the meta VR glasses, 100%, I was, that's what I want to do at the vision pro. So it's just too big. And yet that's why you like it. It's so bizarre. Unbelievable. Well, look, I, I'm not going to be walking around watching stuff on my meta glasses. I may have to buy some myself though. We'll see how much they are. Yeah. We're, we're, we're far afield. Completely afield. Oh yeah. You're giving views access to your bank account. That's how we got here. All in on Muse and these banks that are citing all the agents in their systems and everything.

1:04:51I think a lot of those agents are probably deputized by actual humans and it's not some massive hacking scandal, which you might take away from the Axios story. So I don't put that in the same bucket as everything else that we've been discussing this week. Uh, we'll see. This is very unfortunate. That is my phone. We're not doing it all the time. Uh, one moment. Great video for us right here. Well, I'm thrilled that that wasn't my phone. Cause I was like, did I have an alarm set for some reason? I'm like, you know what? I should not have my phone with me. I should be off on the side.

1:05:21And then I had to go pick up my son. Here we are. Um, all right. Well, should we keep it moving? We should keep it moving. Uh, I would attempt to not lead us astray.

Product philosophies in artificial intelligence

1:05:31Okay.

Product philosophies in artificial intelligence

1:05:32Uh, Joseph says Ben and Andrew putting aside the, we're birthing a Silicon God wackiness from Anthropic. I'm seeing a product distinction emerge from Anthropic as well. Claude is always Claude, singular, monolithic, omnipresent. You at Claude in Slack, work with Claude in Claude code, talk to Claude in Claude chat. Anthropic always has you talking with Claude. Compare this to GrokBot, Dots, and Muse, each with degrees of customization.

1:06:05Muse is the most personalized of them all. My Muse is a robot dog named Murph who wears a call center headset and animates his little tasks. Adorable. While all the labs copy each other, this feels like the first gap in product philosophy. Will people prefer one omnipresent agent, Claude, or a fleet of task specific agents, GrokBot, Dots, et cetera, or singular, highly personal agents like Muse? P.S. In Ben's experiments with Muse, has he updated his Muse at all, or is he running the stock

1:06:41Jolly? I don't know what that last post-print means. I don't know what it's called Jolly either. I called mine Muse. So do I. Maybe that means we're just boring old white guys. I think that might be the case. I do that all the time when others customize things. Or like video games, like back in the day when you could like name the character, I just named it like whatever the character was supposed to be. Like I want the experience that you created. I want to go and experience it. I don't need to like personalize myself. I don't want the pressure to reinvent this. Right. Muse, by the way, very helpful organizing flights out here for our new era of Sharp Tech.

1:07:16Haven't let it book my flights yet. It's going to be so fun when you miss a flight and it's Muse's fault. It could be. So the beautiful thing about doing a podcast like this is everything is content, right? You're going to have a flight misadventure. It's going to be. Muse will either resolve or compound. That's right. We're going to talk about it. It's going to be fantastic. So that is one of the good things. Yeah. So I call it Muse. The Quad thing, I do think there is an aspect. This fits the philosophy. They think they're creating God. God is named Quad.

1:07:48God is infused in all their different products. I don't know if they've said this. I've always assumed his name after Quad Shannon. Very, you know, very important figure in sort of the history of computing.

1:08:00But it does sound like God. I wonder if that is it. I mean, honestly, I just occurred to you right now. I wonder if that is a if that is an accident. And yeah, it's like it does bug me because Quad is a it's not just that your experience with Quad is different than my experience with Quad. Literally every token is like a fresh experience, right? That's the nature of LMs is everything. So it bugs you because it personifies the technology, the machine intelligence.

1:08:31All the anthropomorphization of this bothers me. And I like the idea of going in the opposite direction. And to an extent, it is anthropomorphized. Like, yeah, make it personal. Like, I kind of like what Muse has done in this regard. There's a bit where we everyone talks about alignment and safety. And. The nature of text generation is so like that's it's so tied to what it means to be human. I think that's why these things feel so human, because they're using the most human way possible to.

1:09:05That's all they work. They literally work on human speech. And I think part of my theory of this is.

1:09:12They're dominating this higher level. Can they actually come back down? What makes us human is our more animalistic bits, our instincts, our desires, our drives, which are linked to our cerebellum, like our higher level intelligence and that link. The A.I. is all on the top. It's all like the top part of our brain. It doesn't actually have the brainstem like that actually is the drive to do it. And there's an aspect of it's actually chat. GPT was actually the greatest name because. It's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real.

1:09:47And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue to remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. They try to teach it like it's real. And their old view of alignment is not that they can control quad. It's that they teach quad to be good. Yeah. So it will control itself. And I just it's a fundamental. It's divide. A corporate misalignment is what you're describing. I think so.

1:10:18I think we should be treating these and seeking to control them as tools. And there's good news in this regard. It turns out LM's are more understandable than we thought. There's some really interesting paper about interpret interpretability and just being able to analyze it and understand what they are. That is great news. Yeah. It is great news. And it's so funny. Like so many safety people like we're so dismissive of this of this paper immediately because it is a real blow to their view. Sure. It undermines the narrative. And it turns out this paper is so is so useful that you can use it to make training better because like if you understand how they work and the results are like the initial results.

1:10:53Thank God. So there's something real there about actually, you know, these are more understandable. The reason we didn't understand them before is we just didn't have the tools or capability. OK, so they're not necessarily as much of a black box as we thought. That's fantastic. The output is cleaner. I think that is the adjective. It is. It is good news. And that's what we should be driving for is continually being able to control them. Nuclear, a nuclear bomb explosive force is higher than my fist. This idea of there's something that exceeds some of our characteristic is not a strange concept.

1:11:29Right. It's just like we're in part of this is I think Silicon Valley and the sort of person in Silicon Valley is so their sense of self-worth. And value is so wrapped up in being smart. Everyone in Silicon Valley has always been the smart one. And like that's how they there. And so this idea that something smarter than me is so overwhelming. It's such a blow to the psyche that you have one side is like descending to nihilism. It's all over. And the other side is like.

1:11:59It's OK if it's God. God can be smarter than me. And you end up in like these crazy places. And I just I just think it's wrong. I think we need to be pushing towards making these tools, making them controllable. And part of that is helping people think about them in this way. OK. Anthropic on every single of those points goes in the opposite direction. Well, a counter to this conversation and that. Well, the part of this conversation is that Opus 5.5 is unbelievable. It's not just that though. Everything and there's an aspect of I quad is so much better at agentic stuff in my experience.

1:12:35Yeah, because it just it can multitask better. It can keep track of lots of different things. All the stuff that's going on like Chatsby gets so obsessed and focused about one thing. And I haven't. Well, and I agree with you. I think that people should think about Anthropic and whether they are aligned with humanity's best interests in terms of how they view these tools. And how they're framing these tools for the masses to understand. I will note, though, that their Claude branding seems a lot more coherent than anybody else.

1:13:07It does. So I'm honestly not really that mad at it as far as this question is concerned. No, it's true. Like from like a corporate. No, this is like what I said last week about. It's like, oh, should Amadei be replaced? Like, are you are you off your rocker? Yeah. Like, what the hell are these other companies doing? There are eight different products. How do you keep track of any of it as a consumer? 100 percent. So and the Anthropic IPO may be coming over the next week or two here. Yeah, I was at a panic attack that they had dropped the S1 this week. I know it's like there's a selective feeding of different news organizations about this.

1:13:38Can we just drop the S1? Are you going to go to market? Just release it. I'm not going to write about to that. I'm not writing about a Wall Street Journal report about the S1 or Reuters report about the S1. It's not worth podcasting about. But boy, oh boy, takes men. Start your engines. It will be fun to sink our teeth into some real numbers from Anthropic. And again, I saw a note that it could come Friday. Who knows? Kyle says, gents, another branding question. Is there a reason Apple sticks with the soiled brand of Siri?

1:14:08Apple intelligence is genius, simple and lends itself to all kinds of advertising synergies. If it's a hit, Apple becomes synonymous with good AI. If not, well, they lose nothing. Moreover, Hey Apple is a fresh start with a beloved brand as the call name. Hey Siri is associated by millions of people as the certain pathway to frustration. What am I missing? Why not just let it be Apple intelligence instead of Siri AI?

Apple, Siri and naming conventions

1:14:38Do you have an answer for Kyle? Well, number one, Kyle. Kyle apparently is a bigger Apple fanboy than you because he has confidence that Siri is worth being called Apple. Maybe having a different brand. That is the issue that I see. It's actually bad for Apple's brand to associate the broader company with its AI efforts. Number two, if anyone do, I link to my ethics statement. By the way, we did just get like this first day of school. We got new portraits put up. So I'm going to finally replace my portrait on my page from 12 years ago. Great. Everyone gets upset about because I look like a child and a marathon runner, which I used to be.

1:15:11Wow. I'll have to check out this photo. Yes. We got headshots taken. We did. Very exciting day here in Madison. On that page, I talked about my ethics, which is why I don't look like a marathon runner anymore. So on there in my ethics statement, I talk about there's a couple of companies I have talked to. Like when I first started, it was I have a multi-stool revenue. It wasn't just going to be subscriptions. It was going to be ads. It was going to do like consulting and speaking. And I think I had a fifth. I remember I had five monetization ideas. I can't remember what the fifth one was. And so I did a very small number of consultants.

1:15:45And the last one I did, I'm like this. I can't do this. It's too much of a conflict, which was actually with Google. And which I disclosed it. But I'm like, on one hand, it's like, wow, I'm talking to very senior people at Google. That's amazing. On the other hand, I'm like, I think this newsletter thing is going to work out. And I don't even like the sense of any sort of conflict here. So I'm never doing consulting with a company that I cover again. Okay. In that meeting, I was like up in Napa Valley.

1:16:15This is like over a decade ago. There was a discussion about what they were going to call their assistant. And I was a big advocate of just calling it Google. I'm like, Google is a great brand. People are associated with it. Like this, I didn't love the Alexa or Siri thing. And so they want, I don't know how much of an impact. There's obviously lots of people that, you know, there's a back and forth. But I was on the Google side. Yeah, call it Google. They watch it, I've never told any of this story. They watch it and it was like, okay, Google.

1:16:46Terrible. Hate it. The actual experience saying, okay, Google, like saying like a corporate name. Talking to a multi-trillion dollar company. It's not great. Like Siri or Alexa are both way better in my estimation. And it's funny, I'm kind of arguing the counter of what I just said as far as quad. It's something about speech. Yeah. Right? Like saying, hey, Apple, Tim Apple. John Apple, like which one is it? The doesn't work. I think the okay, Google is a mistake.

1:17:17I did not consider that. So it's better for consumers and more natural for consumers in addition to being better for Apple to not sort of take the corporate risk. And Siri is a great name. Like I think there's a case to redo Siri. Is it a great name and such a bad product that they have to redo it? No, exactly. They have to redo it because they have to redo it because they're, they don't have to redo it. They might want to redo it because of the, it's solely. Yeah. The actual quality of the name is phenomenal.

1:17:48It's easy to say for like lots of different, whatever your language background is. It's very distinct. It's very noticeable. It reads well. It's better than Alexa. Like Alexa is kind of tricky. Siri is just, it's a great name. Yeah. Well. Which is probably why they're still sticking with it despite, despite everything. It's, it's so bad that I can't imagine ever using Siri for anything after the last six or seven years, but perhaps Apple will get its act together. Hey, Apple, I agree, would just be a bad idea for a variety of different reasons.

1:18:20Apple, remain associated with great hardware and maybe the AI software will catch up somewhere along the way.

Reading speed and agent workflows

1:18:26A couple more questions here. CK, Ben and Andrew, long time listener. I've been thinking about a major challenge in using AI agents, the sheer volume of reading they require. I work in tech in the United States and while I'm fluent in English, it is not my first language. Reading comprehension has always been a weakness of mine, even in my native language. Before AI, this never mattered much at work. Domain knowledge, math, stats, and coding carried me. Then I started working with agents. Now my day is reading, plans, reasoning, summaries, more plans.

1:19:01The agent produces faster than I can absorb and honestly, I skim or skip most of it. That's the part that bothers me. I can tell the quality of what I get depends on how carefully I read and push back at the planning stage. So my reading comprehension and speed, which I think often go hand in hand, are now the limit on how deep the work can go. For the first time in my career, I wish I were a faster, better reader. You two read and write for a living and use AI every day.

1:19:32Has the sheer volume of reading been a challenge for you? Is the problem that agents dump undifferentiated pros on me and better tools would fix what I'm treating as a personal limitation? Ben, any thoughts on that question? Yeah, it's a really interesting email. I mean, what I will say on it is I am an extremely fast reader, also an extremely fast writer. I prefer to consume everything via text. The people, like I just don't watch videos.

1:20:03The people who share videos, I have to be, a video has to be shown to me like 50 times. Yeah, you mentioned this last week. I've been sending you videos for years. Rarely watching them, to be totally honest. Ignoring them. Yes, not ignoring them. I acknowledge they exist. I sort of gather what is happening in the video from all the comments around it, which I read. Yep. Okay, great. A real word sell. There's a lot of reading involved with the agents. I totally get what he's saying.

1:20:33And it's very funny because the times I have to actually do work is often like late at night when I'm unwinding or like on the weekend. Yeah. Where, you know, I might want to have a drink or whatever. And I'm like just asking for bad decisions. And it's just hitting you with walls of text. Because for sure, reading it closely and catching the assumptions it's making makes a huge difference. Like, and I force my, even still, I experiment with letting them do long runs. If it matters, it's very short runs. They come back to me with every correction, every single, because you, like you would see, they're like, oh, let me fix this line.

1:21:04It's like, oh, there's, you have a bad assumption that is undergirding why this correction needed to happen. Because, like, we're well past the typo stage. Like, if something goes wrong, what went wrong? Is this actually a bug or is this, okay, you know, it's shifting more and more where if it screws up, there's actually something, the thinking around it is mistaken. So, you do need, CK's right. The closer you read, the better. I think the answer, I hope the answer, is generative user interfaces that make sense for what you're doing.

1:21:36Okay. Like, I think text, what should be happening. And you saw this, I think OpenAI released something or they did a demo of, like, within Codex or within ChatGPT, it's generating an interface based on what you're doing on the fly. And you're actually, like, interacting with something. We're kind of there with voice to a certain extent. You can do all your work talking. Now, that takes longer because it has to read it all out. You have to be perceiving what they're saying. By the way, CK, I discovered it is unbelievable.

1:22:07Did I say this last week? I was reading a book, or I talked to Ari. I was going to say Ari Gold. Not Ari Gold. Ari Emanuel last week. And he just came out with his biography. Of course, I always read my books before I interview people, which, by the way, the number of times you talk to someone because they had a book come out, and they're shocked you actually read their book. I'm like, what are all these interviews? I feel bad for them. Imagine going on a podcast. You slave over a book. Well, I mean, Ari had someone help him write it. Right. In general, you slave over a book, and then you have to do a media tour, and the people didn't do the honor of reading it.

1:22:40And you get 20 minutes into the interview, and it's clear that the other person hasn't read it. No, apparently that is normal. Yeah. Like, every time they thank me, and, like, you're the first one I talked to who actually read the book. I'm like, that is sad. Well, look, to defend the interviewers, think about how busy people are just mowing through 300 pages. Now, if you're a talk show host, are you going to have the time to, like, take down a 300-page book recording interviews with all sorts of other people all week? This is why.

1:23:11This is the last defender of the media here on Sharp Tech, Andrew Sharp. If you want to be able to charge subscription fees and have the ads, you've got to put in the work. You do the work, you also read at a superhuman speed. Well, no, so here's the thing. Oh, it's a built-in advantage. So, because I might have gone to a Brewer's game before, the night before, and so I was driving to the Brewer's game, and then from Brewer's game down to O'Hare, where I was going to fly from. And I needed to get this book read. And so I did the audio book, which, for this particular book, worked great. But then on the plane, I did the audio book, and I read it at the same time.

1:23:48It was unbelievable. We landed. We hit the ground, and I was jarred. The whole flight disappeared. Okay. It's like mainlining a book into my – and you're just like – I'll have to try it. I've never done that before. No, you've got to try it. It's because when it was both coming in through my ears and I was locked in my eyes, and you had to stay – you couldn't flip over to social media or do something else, or else you would get out of sync. It was nuts. You've got to try it.

1:24:18Just to see if you get – it's like I was in a fugue state. Fugue state? Is that how you say it? Fugue state, sure. I was in a fugue state. I'm dead serious. It was the most incredible – It was crazy. It was like one of the most craziest physiological feelings. I got all that point. I was like groggy. Wow. It was like I had just been in this other dimension. It was nuts. Yeah, CK, try that.

1:24:38Get a screen reader software that reads it, and you read it and listen to it at the same time. Well, look, I think it is – first of all, I look forward to trying it. The last book I read was Patrick Reddenkief. He wrote a book about London that I read in about two days, a couple weeks ago. Fantastic book, but I read it the old-fashioned way. Could have taken that thing down in like six hours if I was listening. I don't know, but I think it's a little slower because I can read so fast. I'm pretty sure I can read – I had it at 3x speed also when I was listening.

Audiobook listening speeds

1:25:08Oh, we got a question about that. Robert says, Ben and Andrew, I was enjoying Ben's recent conversation with Ari Emanuel, but was taken aback to hear Ben mention listening to an audiobook at 3.5x speed only for Ari to respond that he routinely listens at 3 to 3.2x. Really? I tried listening to the latest Sharp Tech at gradually higher speeds and managed to get up to 2x before admitting defeat. My normal listening speed is around 1.3 to 1.5x.

1:25:40Am I missing some cognitive superpower or has Ben trained himself to process audio at increasingly ridiculous speeds? And Andrew, where do you stand on this? What's your regular podcast slash audiobook listening speed? I'm a 1x guy, so I don't know what my problem is. I am absolutely 100% a 1x guy. Oh, okay. And I also don't like the eliminate pause things that – I think Mark Lorman invented this with Overcast.

1:26:10It compresses all the spaces. It's off-putting for me as well, yes. No, because I – but this is for things that I listen to for entertainment. See, that's my thing. I only listen to podcasts for entertainment. I understand a lot of people probably listen to Sharp Tech for information and probably listen at 1.5 to 2x speed. No shots at any of those people. That's the difference. So the – I want the pregnant pause.

1:26:40Great. All the people with erase silence just missed that. That's, by the way, that's why I – like, I know it drives you nuts. It's why I'm so obsessed about audio quality. Yeah. The higher quality audio that you have, the faster you can listen to something. And I know that matters to a lot of people. In this case, for sure, I would not do 3.5x if I was only listening. Okay. That's because I was reading. So – And you were prepping for an interview. Well, so I was listening, I think, on the road at 2x speed. Okay. So I can definitely – and that was just – I have to listen to this. I have to get through it.

1:27:11The 3.5, I think, would be too much if I was just listening. But because I was doing the listening and reading, it was fine. Because I had, like, the dual sensory – I can't explain how crazy this was. But that – but so I think the 3.5x was only possible because I was reading at the same time. Also, I might not be able – I'm not sure if I would have retained much. Okay. Do you have a preference for how sharp tech is consumed?

1:27:38Nice, long, pregnant pause. Pregnant pause. There we go. No, I've always gotten these. I'm silently offended if people are listening. I record podcasts all week long. If people are listening at 2x speed, I do take it personally. It's like I recorded this at 1x speed. Yeah, exactly. But, again, a lot of people listen at crazy speed. Well, if I fall – so if I fall behind – No, so I always listen at 1x speed. I do listen to every episode of Greatest of All Talk. Always have from the very beginning. Great.

1:28:08And I fall behind sometimes, and then I reluctantly bump it up. And you catch up. I do catch up, but I do bump it up to 2x speed. Oh, boy. Wow. That wounds me. Honestly, that wounds me. How are you – But you have – How are you – You have been putting in the hours. Yes. I listen to every single one. You may not know this. I'm a fairly busy individual who's had a lot going on recently. Yep. Fair enough. Fair enough. A lot of cameras to set up in our new studio here. Oh, it's getting hot. So a couple more questions. Nick says – and these are follow-ups to last week.

1:28:39There is HVAC changes coming. We're going all out here. But anyway, I'll continue. Nick says, guys, what is the olive oil rack? You mentioned a specialized olive oil order on last week's episode. Do you have an olive oil rack for Nick? Yeah, I got this from my mom. Sorry, I forgot to look at this question, so I didn't have it prepped. It is – it's actually from Arizona. Okay. Of all places. Domestic. Love it. Buy an American. Well, so it's interesting because – See, the internet just sucks today.

1:29:11I need my phone to finish logging in. It's like – I don't know. Should we wait? We can debut the olive oil rack on next week's episode? Yes, next week's episode. Nick, I promise there will be an olive oil rack. I will say – But you want the robust one. Like the – I'm not a big fan of the other ones that they have. It's very difficult buying olive oil because you just never really know – That's right. I don't know what the quality is. It's frustrating. I'm willing to pay for good olive oil, but – No, and I use – I'm a big fan of olive oil, like especially for grilling, stuff like that.

1:29:45Yeah. Olive oil and salt is like the solution to almost everything. And quality actually matters with olive oil. It does. So, yes, that is the – I'll come up with the number. I might come up with it shortly. Great. But it has to be robust. Okay. For this particular – for this particular – whatever it is. Another question. Malcolm says, guys, I love the show, but just for the record, Google – Queen Creek. Queen Creek. There we go. Well, the worst – it's actually a very disappointing. Queen Creek olive mill. They used to sell like 1.5 liter bags.

1:30:16Okay. With a spout, which is perfect. I set it in the cupboard. And then you could go up and you could just – Like a wine bag? Yes. Wow. Yes. You just press the button. Now they only sell bottles. Okay. So I – which I buy the biggest bottle because I – of course I want to have a – Not a problem for me because I've never experienced the magic of an olive oil wine bag. Oh. Phenomenal. Sounds great. I don't know why they took it away. I was very sad. Queen's Creek. Okay. I'll check it out. Always in the market for a good olive oil.

1:30:46Hopefully Nick is as well. Malcolm says, love the show, but just for the record, Google paid $2 billion for Sunday ticket. That's still less than 1% of their 2027 CapEx. That is what I was referring to when we were talking about AI potentially squeezing sports rights in the future. All of the sports rights pale in comparison. That's right. To what these companies are spending on AI. So good note though because I didn't have that number offhand when we were recording last week. Oh, hey.

1:31:17What?

Movie review for You Can See Everything

1:31:18Time for the last question. Eli says, I assume by now you've seen the rave once-in-a-generation reviews that you can see everything is getting 100% worth seeing in a theater. So I have seen a review. Okay. I've seen your preview post of your sharp text article this week, which is your movie review. You did say a certain part of spoilers, which I blew past because obviously I'm never going to see this. It was such, number one, you're a great writer. Love it. Thank you so much.

1:31:48So I love the review. Number two, you were so effusive. I actually might go see it. Well, well, well. Look, I might be stuck firing up K-pop Dean Hunters two years later. I think last week, were you on, were you saying you would not go see it? I owe an apology to Eli. Oh, that was a great part of that. Yeah. First parent, I feel like I lied. Yeah. Completely lied on the podcast last week. I said, Eli, I'm not a Nathan Fielder guy. I don't really care about more Elizabeth Holmes in my life.

1:32:18This, that, and the other thing. Saturday rolls around. It's raining in Washington, D.C. There had been 48 hours of people saying, oh, my God, this movie is amazing. And if I'm being 100% honest, I went to the theater expecting to not like it and expecting to zag from consensus and had a great time. So what is the Spike Essendon thing? Accidental viral critical consensus, A, B, C, C. Yes, I did think that there was some viral critical consensus taking hold.

1:32:49And then I sat down. Or maybe you're just washed. Well, maybe I am. Look, I'm definitely washed in all sorts of different ways. But I sat down in the theater. That's my recommendation to the audience. Without spoiling too much, this is not a movie you should wait to watch on streaming. Because watching it in a full theater and the numbers on the movie have been insane. I mean, that's a funny thing. There's two reasons to see a movie in a theater. One is the spectacle and you want the screen and the sound. And number two is you want the collective experience of watching something.

1:33:19That's what's wild. And typically I'll go to a theater because I want the spectacle and I want the sound and the big screen, the IMAX experience. It had been a really long time. DC people are buttoned up and they're not really expressive movie watchers. It had been a long time since I'd been in a theater where people are like gasping, laughing together, everybody experiencing it together. That elevated the experience for me. And also it was not like the Nathan Fielder work that I had seen in the past.

1:33:51He was much more sincere in his approach. And I think he was genuinely kind of vexed by Elizabeth Holmes. And it turned into a great time across three hours. I did not check my phone once. What's the Elizabeth Holmes face? Yeah, he's doing the Elizabeth Holmes eyes at me now. I just picked up on that. Um, so yes, I, I, my highest recommendation after completely dismissing it a week ago, you win this round. Eli, uh, you, the, the, the, the article is a good one.

1:34:23Sharp. Yeah. We'll put it in the show. There's a clear spoiler note in the middle. Um, which again, if you're like me, you can just blow right by, uh, the whole spoiler thing. Okay. Are, are we, are you pro spoilers or something? Well, what I like to do hot take. No, well, yeah. Okay. It's your responsibility. Don't go online. No, everybody's online all the time. And honestly, I actually think there's been something pretty impressive with you can see everything.

1:34:55Cause there are some key spoilers and people who have discussed the movie have been very restrained discussing the spoilers publicly on Twitter. A lot of use of the word redacted. And I think there's kind of a communal spirit where people who like the movie want to preserve the experience of discovery for moviegoers out there. And you oppose that communal, the communal spirit there. The communal spirit is like, get to a movie theater and see it right away.

1:35:27Get your ass out there. Fair enough. No, I think it's, so it's funny. I was actually, as you were talking, I'm like, do I actually think that I was just sort of like, just throw that out there. Um, because the problem is I had to record everything in Taiwan, particularly sports. And so I did have to train myself not to go online and to like, and someone like Dumin, who I would always be in contact with, like only happened once or twice that he accidentally spoiled something. I'm like, you're, I'm going to, you're going to, the shortest route of getting fired is you saying something about the Packers games.

1:36:02So, um, so, uh, um, so I got very good ultimate down. So, so there was an aspect where I did actually have to learn to practice discipline. Okay. Like practice discipline, turn off notifications on the groups that are going to talk about that. And even then it would still get broken sometimes, but there, there's a bit where this is my problem. I'm in Taiwan. Who am I to impose? There's like this imposition aspect, which I can play the opposite direction.

1:36:34Like, don't tell me, don't, don't, don't tell me what happened at the end of Sopranos. I don't want it. It's like, dude, relax. It's been 30 years. Right. And people will still like act like it's a, there's definitely a statute of limitations. We probably will be spoiling. You can see everything at some point over the next couple of weeks, but people have the opportunity to see it this weekend. The statute of limitations is when I see it. Yeah. Fair enough. Which could be three years. That's right. So you might be able to talk about it for a while. No, I read, I read the end. I read including the spoilers. So it's fine. Yes.

1:37:04Well, on that note, Ben, we will keep things rolling next week. Email at sharptech.fm is the email address. We have like two pages of like AI show and tell. Do you want to do an AI show and tell? No, that's okay. We should wrap it up. We're running out. You said you got to get to the airport. We got to do a subscriber only segment. Indeed. Indeed. So there will be a subscriber only mailbag coming Sunday. In your audio feed, not on YouTube. That's right. We will be back on YouTube next Friday. Whole new era here.

1:37:34Great to be on the couch with you today. And I can't wait to do it again next week. Email the show, though. We need more email than ever. That's right. And we will be producing more content than ever in this new era. All right. I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later. Talk to you later.