Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - Apple and the Power of Platforms, AI Comes for Google Search, ChatGPT Comes for Higher Education

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Talking Platform Power and 15 years of App Store arguments, with topics including Ben's memories from Microsoft, the difference between regulating platforms and aggregators, and the case for intervening in the App Store today. Then: Eddy Cue testifies that Apple is exploring AI search options for Safari, and a New York Magazine feature on ChatGPT in colleges sparks thoughts on tech, higher education, and Blue Books.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp. And on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? I'm doing well, better than you. I feel like you blew all your being right points picking the Lakers season. You can't win them all. You've been wrong about everything ever since.

But, you know, so it goes. You know what? It was worth it. If it meant that I had to forsake all my. pick karma for the remainder of the playoffs. It was worth it because that's how satisfying the Lakers loss was in round one to my Timberwolves. Really rough outing for the wolves earlier this week against Steph Curry in game one. And honestly, I'm bummed. Monday night we have both the Celtics and the Thunder taking it on the chin as massive favorites. And it was just so much better than

tonight when the Celtics are rolling as we come on to record. I'm sure the Thunder are going to kick Denver's ass later tonight. I do have an announcement. And apologies to everyone who's not in for the sports. But I have decided that I am cheering for Denver to win the title. And the reason is I'm just psychologically tortured by the fact everyone universally acclaims Yokic is the best player in the NBA, despite the fact there's absolutely nothing in his resume that is better than Yonis is. I mean, they both should have the equivalent of MVP's.

Yonis does have a defensive player of the year, which Yonkish, you know, doesn't play defense. Good luck. Maybe one day. And you know what? Let him have another title just for my own peace of mind. Then there will be no questioning or disputing it. I'll be happy to get on board. So just so I can stop raging against the world defending Janus.

I mean, it sounds like all the followers of at no tech Ben should be rooting for Yokic as well to get this done, you know? Let this particular crusade just pass you by. So it goes. Let it be. Whatever. Whatever phrase is appropriate in this circumstance. Enough basketball, though.

Let's move on. Indeed, enough basketball. Enough with the reality check night around the NBA. We are going to bounce around on this episode. And we will start with a bigger picture piece you wrote on Apple and the App Store and the nature of platforms. But as a preliminary question, I want to focus on one sentence from that piece. You wrote, before I started at Stratory, I worked at Microsoft.

recruiting developers for the Windows App Store. Can you give me any color from that era of your career? What year was it? What sorts of developers were you pitching? What became of the Windows App Store? Well, there's actually a few. There's a few undocumented aspects of this. Once documented aspects of this,

I am not one to delete tweets. You know, by and large, I think that, you know, what I say is out there for better. or worse, even though I've always argued that Twitter should delete tweets by default. Like, I think Twitter would be a much better platform if it just auto deleted everything after like a week. I fully support deleting tweets. There are a lot of people who look at it as an act of cowardice.

I think it's an act of, you know, sanity. It makes sense because divorce from context, there's all sorts of tweets that can come back to bite you. We're all on Twitter trying to have a good time. It doesn't need to be anything more than that. No, the only reason to go back dig through people's tweets by. large is to try to just like do back to people yeah no exactly so uh i'm i am in favor of of deleting tweets also but i am don't delete my own tweets most of the time but uh back when uh you

know back when uh you know back when i was in business school and you know looking for a job uh i did ultimately end up at microsoft and i decided you know i should probably be pretty this is the better part of valor here and i had a lot of tweets extremely critical of Windows 8 when it was first announced and the entire concept of it. And this idea that Microsoft was going to leverage, it completely transformed the Windows experience into this touch first experience. And it wasn't going to work. They were too late.

You know, all these sorts of pieces, which in some respects, I wish I had held on to because they were totally correct. You know, the Windows 10 was like the apology tour for Windows where it still nominally had the initial like blocky start screen and stuff, but you could just get rid of it and use, you know, Windows as normal. And it undid a lot of the things with Windows 8. But all the same, I needed a job. I was going to say, so you're deleting this in the middle of the interview process.

Is that right? I don't remember when exactly I wiped it out out. But I'm like, yeah, you know, maybe maybe better to not be out there. And for the record, I went in there and gave the good college try. And it was a ton of fun. Like, it actually worked out really well for me, personally because I joined a team that was nominally focused on. I think it was One Drive or something like that.

But within like a month, our team got switched to working on the Windows App Store. And actually, you know, the Windows 8 might have happened after I has already had the offer letter. I hadn't joined yet. Anyhow, whatever. So I think I actually like discretion was a better part of valor within like, you know, two hours of posting my tweets. But regardless, our team got switched to we're going to do the app.

store and developer relations. Both our team dealt directly with the biggest developers and then sort of enabling what's known as the scale motion. Microsoft has this huge team of people all over the world that interact with developers. Like I've been writing about the last couple of Microsoft earnings calls because one of the reasons they missed on earnings or slightly missed a quarter ago was because their scale motion was messed up. In this case, their scale motion was too focused on AI.

Basically, they had a lot of their field pushing small and medium-sized businesses to adopt AI. And the small-in-sides business are like, we're not ready to do that. And so they're like, no, we don't get them back to just doing normal, like, get them on the cloud basics sort of things. And that was sort of a repair they needed to make. I created the, like they had a presentation for the scale motion. That was terrible. And so one time on a plane, I'm like, this is such a bad presentation. I hate using it.

I can't imagine what else trying to sell. when it was there on this. So I just rebuilt the whole thing kind of from scratch. Ended up being used all over the world by, you know, by thousands of people. That's awesome. No, it was awesome. It was, it was, so, oh, our team stepped in. And so I actually ended up with a role that was like a level 64 role. This is Microsoft nomenclature, even though I was only level 61 or whatever.

So I was like, I had like way more responsibility and was doing way more things than I would have normally. It worked out very well for me. It was a ton of fun, work super hard. I got the Kindle team on board. I got, uh, the WordPress on. board or automatic on board with the WordPress app. They were in like the initial announcement of the app store. Those were two of the featured apps.

Like it was, you know, I worked with a lot of the publishing industry. I got a lot, weren't a lot about publishing and, and, you know, the challenges and issues that they had, lots of trips to New York. And all fun. And then Windows 8 actually watched and then it wasn't very much fun anymore. And so when you say not much fun anymore, are you still interface? with those companies and having to explain like don't worry one day the users will get here right well as you go out there you're like windows has a billion users everyone's going to use this like

you're you're selling this story that you know this is you'll get in ahead of the curve remember don't you wish you had been ahead of the curve with the iPhone or or or with Android or whatever it might be and the reality was was there was no curve to get ahead of and so you're what are you ahead of you're ahead and you're stuck in the desert right and uh and uh and as part of this, you know, some of the, some of the companies built the apps themselves. Some of them didn't, like, fine, we'll do it. But, you know, like I said, like there was definitely pain going on. And like we worked with a third develop like, like these different shops that would actually build the apps for them. Very useful experience. Warned how to manage software projects. Understand,

you know, like when you're being BS, when, when, you know, when there's actual legitimate problems, like working with a, uh, in development API that was, you know, not stable. It was a, a phenomenal learning experience. And then the warning experience was more about managing dashed expectations, which was, again, not nearly as fun. So. Well, and it seems like it would be good experience to get Windows into how all the, pardon the pun, with Windows, but to be given a look at how all those other companies are doing business and what

they want out of a platform, does any of that resonate? For sure, for sure. And, you know, just just in just an in depth understanding of how everyone's, thinking about the space. And like, again, and a lot of the specifics that go into it. Like, what are the actual, what do companies actually think through when it comes to launching an app or a new service? Like, it's not just about building the app.

It's the maintenance. It's the fact that even if you have a small number of people using it, if you cancel it or deliver bad experience, those small number of people can be very vocal and can take your reputation broadly. Like, that's a big risk. why you would want to, even if someone else is paying for it to build an app. But the overall question that I wanted to mention this in passing that I think is important, it's often framed the question of apps and platforms is framed as a chicken and egg question.

You need apps to get users because users want to use the apps, but you need users to get the apps because the developers want to serve users. and my contention, which I actually made this point nine years ago, I think, in the context of the iPad and Apple and Microsoft. So it's not a fresh point, but I think it was, I thought it was worth, you know, there's sometimes I've, yes, I made a point seven in the past. I have a somewhat encyclopedic memory of what I've written. Most people don't.

And I thought this case was a good point to just mention again, the chicken and egg fallacy is a fallacy in this case. it is a fallacy. It's not a conundrum. The reality is users come first. And this is obviously in line with Chattery in general. My whole point that demand is what matters, not supply. But the other point I wanted to emphasize with this article is I think there's also a lot of, just like the chicken and egg thing is ultimately a dishonest isn't the right word, but it's an incorrect description. of the dynamics at play here, there's been a lot of dishonesty

slash incorrect depiction slash wishful thinking of App Store dynamics all along. And some of it came from me, I think particularly in the early years. I backed off this a long time ago because what I wrote in this article

has become clear and clear to me. But I thought making it explicitly clear that the reality of the app store is this is just a fight about money because the app store is so important, the iPhone is such a big platform, there's so many users who are worth so much money that there's basically nothing Apple can do that will stop developers from building for it. And so at the end of the day, it is a bit of a sympathetic frame on Apple's positioning, which is you're just asking Apple to be generous. And the only

all the cautions, Apple, you're going to have, developers are going to flee your platform. No, they aren't. That's not going to happen. The only valid critique for Apple all along that has stood the test of time and was validated in this case is your inviting government regulation or a judicial decision. That's always been the only hang up. And I think it's worth being crystal clear about that. I didn't think it was all that sympathetic. I thought it was more just a realistic, clear-eyed look at Apple's motivations in the midst of all this and Apple's incentive structure in the midst of all this. I do like puncturing tech myths though, right?

Like I always love talking about everyone's like, oh, Windows beat the Mac because it disrupted the integrated product with a modular player. And I'm like, no, that's actually completely incorrect. The Windows one, because it built on DOS, which was distributed by IBM, it had one before the Mac ever came along. And that summary of Windows versus Mac leads to really bad. analysis from people I really like and respect. Like, this is a Clayton Christian,

Christensen reference, who in my estimation, completely misunderstood the computing market precisely because he misunderstood the Windows versus Mac dynamic. And he misunderstood it because he just repeated what was totally accepted wisdom. The totally acceptable wisdom is totally wrong and led to bad analysis. And I think there's a similar thing here. Everyone is all about, you need developers to build platforms. And the answer is, no, you need a good product that collects billions of users and then you get a platform sort of by default. That's how it actually works.

So the headline of your piece was platforms are underrated. Can you define for any normies in the audience what distinguishes a platform from an aggregator? Yeah, a platform is in the specific case that I'm using it here, it's a, it's like a, operating system. It's something that has APIs that with third party developers build on top of it. So if you're a Photoshop, you depend on

MacOS existing. You depend on Windows existing. You depend on iPad iOS existing. It's a foundation on which things can be built. And so that's the conundrum here. Is they platforms are one of the largest value generating

things basically ever. There's like all of the value and technology by and large is built on top of platforms. And so they're super important. We should want them to exist. They should have a lot of leeway by and large because their benefits are so significant. But the reality is that also gives them basically untrammeled power. And that's why I didn't mention it, but I put the Lord Act on quote at the beginning,

that power corrupts. And, you know, at the end of the day, all appeals to Apple about the app store have been an appeal to Apple's better angels, as it were. And the reality of, I'm going to sound like a Marxist here, shareholder capitalism in 2025 is going to say, the baby bird is growing up to be a proud anti-monopolis falcon here before our eyes. I love to see it. Well, this has been my whole point about. So aggregators on the. the other hand, there is no lock-in. You don't have to use Google.

You don't have to, like Google always says, another search engine or another site is a click away. That's totally true. So that is the fundamental difference why aggregators are different than platforms. Aggregators depend on users choosing to go there, but that is a choice users make that is not forced on them. Platforms are much more like railroads. Like someone built it and it's there. right, their infrastructure. And that's why I've always been so critical of the anti-monopolis focusing on aggregators.

I'm like, solve the platform problem. That is an actual, they are making choices that are restricting innovation, restricting competition that is addressable and can be fixed. With aggregators, you're trying to change the preferences of billions of people, which is impossible. Like there's a bit about the whole anti-monopolis take against aggregators that is similar to the worst utopian visions. Like there's a saying, right? If it was as if people just did X, if your political program entails people doing X, your political program is doomed.

And if you get power, you're going to be authoritarian because you're going to get frustrated people don't do what you want and you're going to make them do it. That's right. And all the anti-monopoulists. focus on the aggregators are adjacent to this because they're actually frustrated the individual choices of individual consumers. Platforms, on the other hand, it's a point of leverage that you can address that can fundamentally transform the economic value that they provide. And it is driving me, it's like an environmentalist that is anti, that, that, you know, they

were anti-nuclear for years and now they're, they're, you know, a queen energy advocate or whatever it might be. It's like if you, we can have a debate about nuclear costs and all those sorts of things. But I'm not going to take you seriously if you spent years objecting to fundamentally clean energy in terms of its impact on global warming or the atmosphere or all those sorts of things. Because I don't think you're serious because you're not actually thinking through tradeoffs here. It's a similar thing here. If you're worried about monopoly and tech and you're obsessed with Google and Facebook and have turned. a blind eye to Apple in the App Store, it's hard for me to take you seriously.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think those people don't really exist. I think everybody who's concerned about Google and some of the aggregators are also concerned about platform reviews. The priority order matters. Like, you don't get to say, all, I care about all of it. What do you actually focus your time and energy on? Yeah. Well, your article more generally was a great meditation on 15 years of this conversation. And your articulation of the App Store platform specifically, you wrote, once there are users, there is demand for applications. And that is the only thing that incentivizes developers to build. Moreover, that incentive is so strong that it really doesn't matter how many obstacles need to be overcome to reach those users. That is why Apple's long-standing

App Store policies, egregious though they may have been, ultimately did nothing to prevent the iPhone from having a full complement of apps, and by extension, did nothing to diminish the attractiveness of the iPhone to end users. So it ultimately didn't matter how good a salesman you could have been for the Windows App Store, because Apple's users were the ultimate moat for, yeah, exactly. And it didn't matter, you know. You gave it the college try, good faith effort. I thought in general it was just a great sober look at the realities of Apple's market power, Apple's policies, and why those policies haven't changed over the last 15 years. I will say for me, it was interesting to read your article as an, like an outsider to tech,

because the conclusions were all a little bit self-evident at this point. And I missed the era when people were arguing that the apps, store being locked down was going to really cost Apple's business. I missed the like seven years of the argument. And today, it's clear that it hasn't really affected Apple's bottom line. It's funny because this is adjacent to where I really cut my teeth early on with the app store. I mentioned the Clayton Christian angle. I've said this before in the podcast, but the dominant sentiment was that Apple and the iPhone were screwed because everyone was going to flee to Android. And my whole point all along is, no, they aren't. Like you don't like. And it's funny because. It's funny.

Because it's almost, we're both laughing at the possibility. This was an argument. But literally I spent like three years on trajectory arguing this point and built my entire business. It's worked out well for all of us. It goes to show like how stuff becomes super obvious over time. But that was another example of just like there's these myths and fallacies that are spun up that actually have are not correct. And that's just another example there. And yes, the same thing with the app store and Apple's power.

No, it was absolutely assumed that they needed to do. And it's interesting because the counterpoint is the look at the Vision Pro. You, Ben, wrote an article saying part of the reason the app, I wrote before the Vision Pro came out that it was in trouble because entities like Netflix and YouTube were not going to be on there. And I'm like, why would they go on there? Why would they want to help out take a chance with Apple, given how poor, you know, Apple's treatment of them. And it's interesting because that article is written before the Vision Pro came out,

which was similar to my time at Windows 8. And I can tell you from that time, people are more receptive. The potential is a bigger selling point than reality. And so I do think that was true then. The fact you couldn't get a Netflix on board, what is a really bad look for Apple and its state of developer relations. Yeah. The reason you can't get Netflix on board today is because there's no vision pros in the market. Like, like, and so, and if, if Apple sold, you know, millions of vision pros tomorrow, Netflix would get an app for it.

Like, like, now they're purely in market dynamics. So to the extent that critique held, it, it holds in the potential era before something happens when, when you're, it's all kind of fuzzy and no one has proof points. And it's like, well, I've scratched your back all these years. When you scratch my back and put an app on here for you. And Apple's like, I've stabbed you in the back for 10 years. Will you scratch my back? Yeah.

Well, and I mean, for five years now, the risk has been a regulatory risk, and that's the incentive to potentially adapt and evolve for Apple. But they haven't done it. Two more emails I want to read before we shift gears. First is from Vishal. He says, why shouldn't Apple charge whatever they want for their IP? They don't have 100% market share over app platforms. if Spotify or others don't like paying 30%,

they can sign people up on other platforms. I don't understand why this is an issue. So I could answer this, Ben, but I get the sense you wrestle with this. No, no, I'm curious your answer. I mean, first of all, my answer would be that Apple can and will charge whatever they want in the app store, and Apple's probably going to continue charging 30% fees on in-app purchases,

and none of this will really change until Congress intervenes because in-app purchases is still going to be a massive business. And the reason Congress should intervene on the 30% fee and the reason there should be a ban on Apple's anti-steering provisions is that over time, the economy will produce better outcomes for more people if everyone who wants to run some kind of business on a mobile phone isn't paying a 30% tax to Apple or Google. So are you saying those as two separate things? the in-app purchase and anti-steering? Because those are two distinct.

Those are two distinct questions. There are two distinct things. Yes. And I think the in-app purchases are now being overlooked as everyone says, all right, no more anti-steering. It's all good. It's a whole new era. I think the in-app purchases are still going to be an issue going forward unless Congress addresses that issue.

But perhaps we'll cross that bridge in a couple of years. I just think I understand where V. Shal is coming from. Well, no, we're going to cross that bridge. in this podcast right now, have you warned you? Well, and I understand where Vishal is coming from. Like Apple has a right to capitalize on having a great product,

and Apple has capitalized on having a great product. But I would say adhering to that principle starts to look ridiculous when you're then defending Apple's right to collect perpetual taxes on millions of digital businesses who just have no practical alternative but to pay Apple merely for the right to exist. What do you think? So I have a few responses. I'm going to start by responding to you,

and then I'll respond to Vishal. Okay. My response to you is the reason I do, the reason I called out that distinction is to your point, which you acknowledge, you should be able to harvest the benefits of your, of your creation, right? So we agree on that at a high level. I think by and large, the user experience of in-app purchase is a great thing that Apple created and should be able to benefit from. It's a perfectly, we can accomplish our goals by letting apps go out to the web. That's what they control. Why do they get access to Apple's infrastructure?

The issue with the steering thing is this Apple, it's not a free speech argument, but it's like philosophically a free speech thing. They're not letting developers talk to their users. which is this is Apple's problem is setting aside all the legal stuff. This specific aspect is so gross. It just kind of discuss everyone, including me. And my view is, is it a little clunkier to go out to a web page and have to make sure you're signed in and again, tokenization helps fix this, but do a purchase, then go back

to your app is a little clunkier? It absolutely is. Guess what? Apple gets to have a better experience because they can. created the better experience. I have a much more difficult time and in fact pretty strenuously object to developers having a right to Apple's integrated purchase when they can do their own purchase on their own website. If you want to use Apple's purchase flow, Apple gets to have a take. And I think that's totally reasonable. And I think you are going too far to say it's not just

that you get to collect payments from users without giving money to Apple. You also have not just a right to communicate to users, which I think is fine, you have a right to Apple's creations to do so. So I would just disagree with you, number one. That's fair. And I will just add that Apple and the anti-steering provision, I'm only a couple episodes into Andor season two, but it's real imperial behavior from Apple trying to collect fees from external websites days on from the initial link click. But yeah, I actually agree that in-app purchase is is a wonderful customer experience. And that's one of the reasons I'm confident that this issue isn't going to go away

because a lot of people are just going to prefer to do business in the app. Yeah, but now we're getting to an entitlement. Why do developers have an entitlement to a better experience? They can own websites. This is what I actually agree with Vishal that they could make their own platform with a beautiful, smooth experience. They want access to Apple's platform. To seamless, frictionless purchases.

Yes. I just think that rates are super. competitive. Well, let's talk about the rates. What's interesting about the rates is I can spin an argument for why the rates should be 99% and an argument for why the rates should be 0%. It just depends how you look at it. So the 99% is what I wrote in this article. The reality is, is that people want apps on their phones. The phones are the most important devices to them. Apple controls that. And because that Apple, it's like Facebook in their advertising, right? Right. If Facebook finds you a customer, you're never going to have found otherwise.

What's the limit on what they can charge for that? Every cent that you make is additive, right? Now, it's not quite the case with apps because you, but imagine like, because you could go otherwise, you know, so it's not a perfect scenario. But by and large, and this is the point of the article, the power of owning all the users on a platform that is essential is you can do what you want and developers will, abide by it. They'll complain, but they'll abide by it because that's how powerful platforms are. So that's the argument for the one side. The argument for the opposite side, why it would be zero, is that suppose Apple were not allowed to charge anything for its intellectual property, the market clearing price would be zero. They would still offer it because it's so important to

have apps collectively, even if you have power over anyone individual app, having apps is such an essential ingredient for a platform that if Apple were forced to, they would still make APIs and documentation and all these sorts of things. They would be like Windows back in the day. And it's funny, everyone points to Windows as, see, that's how you should do it. Honestly, if anyone knows anything about Windows, I think it's probably the case they just didn't think of being able to charge this much.

Or was it possible in a world when you bought, you know, applications on CD-ROMs or, right? Or discs, yeah, back of the day. And so the reality is the market clearing price is zero. So this is my whole problem. This is the fundamental, like, logical flaw in the judge's case. She's just asserting it's super competitive based on nothing. Because the answer is actually the correct rate is either 99.9 or zero. Any point in between is arbitrary.

30% is arbitrary. Any, like she's mad at Apple doing a post hoc. valuation of their IP, any valuation is post hoc because it's just like, that's just the, like there's some aspect of this decision that is not in touch with reality that speaks to the lack of an appropriate law in this case. This is my point all along. The laws we have don't address this as clearly as they could. That's why I conclude by saying, look, it's actually pretty straightforward.

If you have a platform, and I think you can divide a platform pretty tightly, You have a high number, which means it's consumer. It's not enterprise because the enterprise, it's a much more sophisticated buyers and users and much more viable to do other things. If you have a platform, you bring two fundamental American truisms. And I threw in this extra one along the way. The platform doesn't get to interfere with your commerce and they don't get to interfere with your speech. Like, which who can be opposed to that, right? Apple doesn't get to kick apps off because of what content they have or don't have.

And Apple doesn't get to kick apps off because what. what they do on their websites between two consenting adults, right? I was going to say. So you may run into some issues where they have traditionally not been fans of adult content on Apple. There's a case with the judge's opinion. She's 100% morally right, but it's kind of legal nonsense and economic nonsense. You just stated blindly it's super competitive, super competitive based on what? Well, if there would be based on if there were other app stores available, they wouldn't be charging 30%.

And also I think that the rational economic outcome, like Spotify, for instance, ultimately, this is a redistribution of wealth from Apple to Spotify. But Spotify is the one who is providing the value to users. Apple is not providing 30% of value to users for every single subscription. I completely agree. Just to be super clear. It's so important. That's when I say it to get it again because there's such emotional resonance to this bit, particularly amongst developers. I completely agree.

I've been objecting to this for years and years and years. I hope my stripes in this case are sort of well established. But at the end of the day, Spotify's not going to pull their app from Apple, say, actually Spotify is only available on Android or we're going to build our own Spotify phone. So that's how we're going to compete. Not going to. And that's fair. I only raise that to say that that would be my response if a judge asked me.

So is this super competitive? And we're saying supra, not super. Super. Yes. Well, you just said super. I would invoke it. Yes, I need to enunciate better. But yes, that's what I would invoke.

And ultimately, I think this is not the optimal economic arrangement. But Apple is a platform, makes great products, and is able to dictate terms in perpetuity until Congress intervenes. Yeah. And by the way, the judge's solution is the solution. allow links out to the web. Like the problem is, again, I think the Apple did file their both an appeal and and asked for a stay.

We'll see what happens. I think, again, I'm not going to, I think 50, 50 chance, maybe 55, 45 to actually win. But if they win or even if they don't win, I think a law here is actually, I'm not one to call for laws. I'm not one to call for regulations. There's aspects of the DMA that do get at this. The DMA is it's way too complicated and way too in depth and it tries to police too many things. The fact of the matter, everything is a tradeoff.

I am someone that is hesitant about regulation. I want to open up for innovation. But there's a bit where, like, infrastructure is important and platforms are infrastructure. And at the end of the day, if we want to. innovation, if we want creative outcomes, then sorry Apple, congratulations in your success. You've made a lot of money. I again completely disagree with you that you should be forced to open up anything on your phone that you don't want to, including in-app purchase.

But the idea you can police what developers say as a price to be on an essential platform is bad economically. It's fundamentally un-American. There you go. Well, and as you noted, on Wednesday night, Mark German reported that Apple has filed a motion for a pause on last week's ruling on the App Store, that it must stop collecting payments made on the outside web. And so this journey is going to continue for years to come. Good news for everybody. We're never going to stop talking about the App Store here on Sharp Tech. But on that note, I want to stick with Bloomberg and a story that is also from Mark German. And also from Wednesday, busy day for German. He wrote, Apple is, quote, actively looking at, end quote, revamping the Safari web browser

on its devices to focus on AI-powered search engines, a seismic shift for the industry hastened by the potential end of a longtime partnership with Google. Eddie Q, Apple's senior vice president of services, made the disclosure Wednesday during his testimony in the remedies phase of USB Google, Q said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, perplexity AI, Inc, and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet's Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future. Prior to AI, my feeling around this was none of the others were valid choices. I think today, he said, there is much greater potential,

because there are new entrants attacking the problem in a different way. And not included in that excerpt was a note from Q that in April, searches on Safari dipped for the first time in two decades. So clearly, some user behavior has already begun to shift. What do you make of this discussion and what it could mean for Google? Well, the incentives here are important to note, which is Apple gets $20 to $25 billion or whatever the number is of pure profit. from Google based on searches in Safari.

And it's, I mean, it's pretty remarkable. Apple somehow as an integrated device manufacturer has made itself susceptible to AI disruption. I mean, there is a bit here where Apple has squeezed the juice out of every aspect of their business to such an extreme degree that they're actually way more brittle and at risk then they should be. Like, why should Apple be having a quarter of their profit coming from Google? Like, like, why should Apple be so dependent on China? Why should Apple be so locked down on this App Store stuff and not willing to give an inch?

This is maybe another way of looking at the quick critique, which is that this company has resolutely optimized to an unhealthy, degree such that they're headed for it. I made an article years ago. I think I quoted the ASOP's parable about the reed and the oak tree. And the oak tree mocking the reed that bows before the wind and all these sorts of pieces. And then, you know, the storm comes. The oak

tree's uprooted. The reed is still there. Tim Cook has destroyed Apple's resilience. And in multiple areas. And this is a good example. Of course, Eddie Q is up there saying, oh yeah, Google's in big trouble because under like we need we need this money man that's right we're we're extremely dependent on on this money for our profit and ultimately our stock price and we should clarify the the incentive there google is trying to argue that the search market is more competitive than ever and therefore the claims of its monopolistic dominance are overstated and so apple is an interested party trying to

help google sell that story and perhaps not the way to help them is to take google stock price by like 10% or whatever by revealing what we've been predicting and talking about for years is happening. Like search volume going down is a big deal. Like, because search is a service. It's something you do. So even if like say iPhone sales flatline because the the upgrade cycle is elongated, like a favorite word of analysts, because people don't buy phones more frequently or they buy use phones. They're still using their phones every day. And so should be searching every day. So the fact, search volume diminishing is not because people are using their phones less. It's because they're using something else on their phones.

And, you know, and the thing with AI that should is, is so compelling as a product is anyone who seriously uses AI only uses it more and more. It's a one-way ratchet. They don't start using, it's not like Instagram where you get super into it. then you're like, why am I wasting hours of my life? And you just stop. You don't just stop. AI is much closer to the personal computer or the phone than it is to an application.

It's like a level down in the Mazel hierarchy stack or a level up or whatever direction it is. And so this is only going to go in one direction. Now, for now, Google still retains commercial queries. So the value of those searches are still high. I would bet that Apple's payments are not diminishing. because they're paid on a performance basis. And so they're probably still fine financially. But the reason the market reacts to this is theoretically, this should be happening.

And boom, here's a proof point. And there you go. Yeah, I mean, it also makes me wonder is the end of the Google Apple search payments, default placement arrangement? Is that a bigger problem for Google or Apple? because removing Google as the default on iPhones could really, really accelerate this process and make it a lot realer, a lot sooner.

And so I think that's part of what people were reacting to on Wednesday. It's like, wow, okay, so if Apple's going to make it easier to just search through Safari on chat, GPT, or perplexity, or any of these other options, I mean, overnight this could change. It feels like an asteroid that is now, much, much closer to Google search. You've always been able to use a different search engine.

Like there's five or, no, the selection list is limited by Apple's. But you've been able to change it. Most people don't because Google's good enough. I think your point is, if you can change it to one that's already better, maybe more users will do it. But this whole thing has always been about defaults. My initial answer to your question is it hurts Apple more. Like a quarter of your profit disappearing is a quarter of your profit disappearing.

Like that's just kind of hard to paper over. it does, it is, you can make the case that Google at any other time until now, this would have been a non-event because people would just reselect Google. Fine, we have to have a search engine choice screen. Now if we didn't, it might be different. But the fact it might be different kind of speaks to maybe this judgment is not necessary because there actually is competition. It's like Facebook dominates social media.

It's like, well, social media doesn't really matter anymore. user generated content and TikTok's taking a big bite out of them. And if you zoom out even larger, this is the general critique, which is, is the heavy handed hand of the court necessary for a five to year interregnum of dominance when actually the evidence is it keeps changing and keeps going away? Again, I think for platforms, probably yes, but when you get to some of these area questions, it's a little fuzzier. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I would go the other direction and say that this is evidence of why the verdict was important and ending these default payments is important because right now Apple may be forced to integrate with chat GPT or Claude or whatever it may be perplexity.

But if not for this verdict, Apple would have every incentive to continue working with Google because Google monetizes much better. better than any of the AI options in the market. And it would just continue on with most iPhone users. Like, I'm, I feel bad admitting this on the podcast because you were very judgmental of another friend who's not really availing himself of AI search capabilities. But, I mean, I don't have that much firsthand experience with using chat GPT for search because I use Google and Safari for 95% of my search needs. And that's how most people behave.

and Apple would be happy to keep that going in perpetuity and continue to make $20 billion a year. And in a couple of years, I'm sure it'll be $25 billion a year. If not for the court intervening here and saying this payment is illegal given Google's market power. And it's time to go a different direction. I think we're getting exactly the sort of intervention at the perfect time that the body of antitrust law envisions. Like I said, your movement ends in authoritarianism in the end because people don't do what you want them to do. You can set another default browser.

By the way, which you couldn't do previously. So that is an important change. You can set a different search engine. You can install the chat GPT app. You're just mad that people don't do what you want them to do. So like, we're talking about defaults here. Like, like, no, being a whittle antagonistic. No, but I'm going back.

I mean, the reason the default is more, that conversation is more compelling now than it was a couple years ago is because there actually are alternatives to Google that are more compelling in a lot of people's eyes. And you're mad that people won't go out and find them and use them. Again, this is more of a less of a legal argument and more of a this just rubs me the wrong way. Like people being mad about other people not doing the thing they want them to do. Like, and that's honestly sort of a motivation that I'm just instinctually opposed to. That's fair. Well, Google is headed for some turbulent waters over the next couple of years if, in fact, Apple ends up making this shift at some point. And it's interesting.

Well, but that's the thing. Apple has no interest to making this shift because they make so much money. This is a whole other point. It's not in Apple's interest to, I mean, Apple is a kind of a paternalistic company also. They want they like, we know what's better for you. They're the otherwise. They're not going to give you the best experience. They're going to give you the experience that monetizes the best. Like like again, because they've overoptimized themselves into this corner where, yeah,

they're up there like say, please Google hold on figure AI searcher overviews, do a good job. We need the money. We're dependent on the money now. Please judge. The market is more competitive than ever in 2025. Yes. Well, one final question on Google. would it be fair to say that Google is still well positioned for the future, even if search is disrupted?

Because, like, they still have Google Cloud. They've got YouTube. They've got infrastructure advantages in AI and Gemini. I mean, like, how panicked should people actually be in the wake of these developments? I mean, I don't know. Google, it's really hard to evaluate. I mean, like I said, they still dominate commercial queries. They still, like, there's a lot of infrastructure that goes into ads that is hard and difficult to build.

they, you know, they, it works very well. Their CPMs are going up. There, there's a flight to safety aspect to them. There's a bit where can, you know, we critique the sort of users have to click on the ads route, but there's also some value in that. Can you ever actually deliver a compelling ad experience in a chatbot? What do the alternatives look like? And AI search overviews, by the way, are the most use ad product in the world,

which is kind of like you don't think about it that way. but more people are using generative AI on Google than on any other platform. And they claim that they have ads in there. They claim they monetize as well as search. So there's reason to believe that they could, and just as a rule of thumb, these things hold on longer than you think. And new things tend to layer on top as opposed to completely replace them. On the other hand, search on Google sucks compared to chat DVD for a lot of things.

It is interesting, though, because there's a bit with chat GPT where it gives you, like chat chitpt, it's kind of like the wire cutter phenomena where like the wire cutter, the review site that New York Times bought. And it's like, is this actually the best for me or is it sufficiently convenient to just go there that I'm just going to sort of go with it, right? Yeah, no, exactly. Like, maybe actually Chesape could be better if you really let it understand your preferences. Like I hate review sites by and large because, oh, how do I say this? This is going to sound terrible. They over index on price. And it's like if I'm buying this particular thing.

Show me the best product. I don't care how much it costs. Let me do a, let me do the value perspective on is this worth X, Y, Z. Like I actually want an absolute quality evaluation. So maybe I should put that my prop for chat GPT. I want to know the best with a list of prices. And I will say, yeah, that's way too expensive. You know what?

I wish I could make fun of you for being Marie Antoinette on the other line here. But I actually wholeheartedly agree because there's nothing worse than going to a wirecutter type article and getting the cheaper option because they oversell it essentially. and then realizing this kind of sucks, I should have gotten the more expensive option and then having to spend that much more money at the end of the whole process. Just give me the best product. Or just live with the fact you know you don't have what you don't have

what you actually wanted. It's so particular, right? There's some products I don't really care. I just need something that's functional. There's other products that like, like I have thousands of dollars of audio equipment here. Like I, you know, I go out, I buy a thousand, I have $2,000 mic.

It's a travel one and one here. I have a very high-end mic interface. And you know what? It's cheap relative to its importance to my work and career. If I go to a site and it's like, well, this is actually your best option because of some sort of value. That doesn't resonate with me. That's not what I need. And so, yes.

But, yeah, we are, this is an aside. Just a couple of podcasters here talking shop, you know, talking hardware here on the podcast. Maybe we can be a reviewer at some point. Well, we'll throw Bill Bishop under the bus, right? Like Bill Bishop, very expressive moves around. And so we're like, you know, you know, we ended up getting a headset mic where he, so the bike's always in front of his mouth. You get some diminishment in quality, but it's better than sort of it was. I remember going through this whole thing.

Like all the recommendations are for these like low end one. No, we got like the same mics they used like NFL broadcasts, right? Like it's like like it's a podcast you're selling for money. I'm going to invest to get the best thing. All these reviews are. So what I had to do was go to an audio professional. Explain the situation. And then he's like, yeah, this is what you need and you need this interface box.

You need X, Y, Z. And it's great. Works great. You know, no, no complaints from from the editor or anyone else about the sound quality now. Like the, it's interesting. I'm actually thinking about out here. This is probably, maybe this is actually bad for Google because this is something it feels like the AI should be better at. No, Google should in theory.

Like this kind of gets back to the meta AI and the personalizing AI bit. I would like Google to gather more information on me. I would like it to track my purchasing habits and start to build this sense of what my priorities are, what I care about. If anything, we're, and this goes back to one of my Apple critiques, we're entering an era where privacy is just a massive detriment to the user experience. I want my AI to know more about me. This idea that I was just pitching about, oh, go into my custom prompt and tell Chat Chip-T to focus the next way. Why do I have to do that? You should be.

You should just know. Yeah, no, exactly. Yes. Well, I have breaking news. Off to the gate team next. I have breaking news here on the podcast. Have you seen the Celtics score? I have and it's been hard for me to focus for the last three minutes.

I'm going to tell you at the end. Just magnificent. I love to see it. Even though I didn't literally see it, I will be watching it the second we finished recording here. I did turn out a recording because I'm like, I find the Celtics winning. Yeah.

Depressing. Watch that. Yeah. So, no, fortunately, I have means to access your recordings. I'll be downloading it for my own. I definitely enjoy watching the Celtics lose. I can tell you that. And I'm going to be taking credit.

I lied. You know what? Totally. I'm not cheering for Denver. I'm cheering for a Celtics lost. Whoever the Celtics are playing. Go Nix. Absolutely.

Let's go Nix. All right. Final segment here. I got to read you six quotes from a New York magazine article on chat GPT's impact on colleges. The headline was, everyone is cheating their way through college. quote number one, AI's takeover is a full-blown existential crisis for higher education. Quote number two, college is just how well I can use chat GPT at this point. Quote number three, I think we are years or months probably away from a world where nobody thinks

using AI for homework is considered cheating. Four, it isn't as if cheating is new, but now, as one student put it, the ceiling has been blown off. Who could resist a tool that makes every assignment easier with seemingly no consequences? Five, massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees and into the workforce who are essentially illiterate. The humanities and writing in particular are quickly becoming an anachronistic art elective like basket weaving. And then six, every time I talk to a colleague about this, this is a professor speaking, the same thing comes up. retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That's what we're all thinking right now.

So, Ben, I sent you this article before we came on to record. It went minorly viral on Wednesday. Hilarious article. As a parent of a child who's going to be attending college in the fall, what do you think of all this? Is it a problem? And if so, what do the solutions look like? Well, you know, if I could pat myself on the back, I'm looking at this article on Monday, December 5th, 2022. I believe that chat GPT came out on a Wednesday, so I, you know, I didn't violate my general don't write on Friday. I waited until the following Monday. And my article is entitled AI homework. And my way to write about chat GPT from day one was to start with homework and to sort of expand from their.

about how this is going to change, change things. I completely forgotten that, but yes. So being right points for you. Yes, thank you. Victory Lab, two and a half year victory laugh. I appreciate it. Well, this is like the challenge, right? This was eminently foreseeable,

and it's funny to see people worrying about it now in 2025. I think zooming out, by and large, what things like this are less causal than they are revelatory and what I mean is chat GPT is not causing college to be worthless it's revealing how worthless

the vast majority of college is good take and I think like you just read this article so much of this sort of comes through it the unfortunate reality is I mean one of the most hilarious things in here was the, I assume, millennial author worried about Gen Z not knowing what's true and what's not. When this entire article was caked in the sort of embrace of these myths, like, for example, everyone should go to college, you know, everyone is equally capable,

you know, like this is just dripping with sort of a blank slate of sort of ideology that, you know, if everyone, which under, which has tremendous consequences. Like that's a problem with myths when you act on them. Why do we end up with this hilariously distorting market of student loans and all these bits and pieces of we're going to emiserate all these people? And oh, by the way, now there's all that we're going to make it so they can't declare bankruptcy to get out of it. And then we're going to end up with degree. Like all these knock on terrible effects are all downstream from saying, if we just get people college degrees, they'll magically make more money.

Like, no, actually the premium for a college degree is still significant. So, of course, I'm going to send my kids to college. I'm not going all the way. Like, I think people go too far with this. They start highlighting some of these issues with college. Like, I would never send my kid to college. Like, no, you're being a moron. Of course you're sending your kid to college.

Like, the reality is, it is an essential credential that, now it's bad. We've extended the credential from 18. The credential used to be like 12, right? Now it's, that it was like 18. you need to have a high school degree. Now it's 22. You have to have a college degree. It'd be like, oh, what about fertility?

So, well, maybe if you're extending the credential to be a functioning person in society or not a functioning person, but to make X amount of money in society, you're pushing it up to 22 and making it further. And now you need a graduate. Like, you need a graduate degree to like be a librarian or something, right? Now it's up to 24 or 25. Like, there's all these knock on effects that are downstream from mixing up cause and effect. The reality is, is that college. knowledge by and large is it's a filtering mechanism to see if people sufficiently have their shit together to get a degree that actually isn't that hard because we've dumbed down and

introduced all these majors. I mean, it's funny. I was, I've embraced all these myths. I mentioned last episode that I was a political science major. Dumb major, to be clear. I was in it because I loved it. I thought it was a really, really fun class. I really enjoyed my political science classes. Well, the But great thing about it was I realized it was like a cheat code. Almost every class I took my last two years were these seminars. And like I actually organized a few seminars. Like I went to professors that I knew like I got a group of people that would like to do this. Can we spin up a seminar?

It'd be like five people were reading. Like I did this one about like the philosophy of education. And like we're in there like five people like reading like Plato or whatever and like having like these two hour long debates about it. Like I love talking and debating. It was freaking awesome. My last two years were amazing in college. The reality is that, well, I maximized it.

I'm not sure political science is one of the largest majors in the University of Wisconsin, and not because everyone wants to sit around and debate the philosophy of education about Plato. It's because it's easy, okay? I frequently admit that, right? But that kind of speaks to it, right? College back in the day, like hundreds of years ago, was for a very small number of people that were intrinsically motivated to discover and find all these things. And by the way, if you still have that motivation, AI is amazing.

It actually lets you know more. I started like 15 AI chats yesterday about basically a gazillion different things because why not? Like I was the heaviest Google user in the world. Like when I'm in a conversation with someone and some question comes up about some fact in the world and no one knows the answer, I can't handle it. I immediately go and look it up. And then people are like, wow, Ben, why do you know so many things? Because I'm a freaking maniac that every time I encounter something I don't know, I look it up and then I have a good memory.

So I sort of retain it and keep it in. And oh, by the way, like, I love to argue and debate about everything. Like college for me was amazing. It's this incredible experience. And AI only enhances that. It gives me agency to know more, to dive deeper, to see all these sorts of things. And the reality is, is that. that most, that's not why most people are at college.

And this isn't a value judgment. Like, there's lots of things to be done in the world and lots of roles and things to play that don't entail debating the philosophy of education and reading Plato. Like, that's that, and, but the problem is as a society, we've instituted this. Actually, you need a college degree as a test of conscientiousness and basic intelligence. And we, the way we got here, there's some superiors decisions. There's this case called Duke versus Griggs, like disparate. income. Like you can't, employers can't give like tests to, to employees or also get sued into

oblivion, basically. And so they've basically outsourced filtering to colleges. But because people who pass the filter make more money, it got interpreted as just get more people shoved through the filter. And what, what AI is doing is exposing this farce, exposing how we've flipped cause and effect, how we've gotten this all backwards. So you have people going in there and they go in there and they cheat, cheat, whatever you want to call it, on all the papers. Like there was, there was a one in here about someone like the history of jazz music, blah, blah, blah. I hate to break it to you, Professor, but people are in that class not because they love music.

They're in that class because they have some stupid requirement to take some sort of class. And it sounds like an EZA. Let's just call it what it is. Yeah, I took a history of music something. I loved it. It was a great class. It was also ridiculously easy. We sat around and listened to music and like wrote thoughts about it, right?

Like it was it was all good. But like there's technology and you see this again and again. It's revelatory. Right. And we were just talking. What podcast we were talking about this? Just a little bit ago. What the competition bit, right?

A big problem people have with tech is actually it engenders perfect competition and people don't like that. Right. What is revealed is that there's actually only like 10 sports columnists in the U.S. that are worth reading. Right? The fact every city used to have one. was not because there were a lot of great sports columnists

because people were geographically constrained to their local newspaper and every local newspaper had a columnist. And as soon as people could read the whole internet, guess what, they all flock to Bill Simmons. Yeah. A similar dynamic is happening here. AI is not ruining college. College was ruined and AI is exposing the extent of the rot.

So I like that take. I do think it's a little bit more complicated than that. I mean, first of all, what I don't understand, if cheating is the concern, this is probably because I'm old and my last academic experience was law school where basically every class is just a series of lectures and then you have a written in class exam at the end of the course. I don't know why that model is supposedly unavailable to professors today. I have never understood the whole take home exam thing in general, even when I was in college 25 years ago. Yeah.

I'm like, like, I mean, on one hand, it is, there's an aspect of this that is sad, to be clear. I'm just coming out guns blazing because I feel like I had a hot take and I really wanted to like, like fully deliver it. And I'm just noting for the record, I think it's more complicated. I enjoy the guns grazing pen at the end. I just sort of want to cook today. But there's, there is it up, even going back then, it was basically on the honor system that you're going to do your take of exam and query the parameters that the professor delivered and do it. And it mostly worked. And one of the sad things about society is the extent to which stuff like that doesn't work.

We've talked about this in all sorts of arenas, right? As you lose societally accepted mores and taboos, you're forced to introduce hard laws. And when you have hard laws, everything, you're introducing red tape and all these sorts of issues. And there's a massive loss that comes from that. And so, yes, one of the answers is go back to in-class, you know, write down. your answer. Totally. Like if the concern is purely rooted in academic integrity, and again, I'm probably dating myself here, but just I took a lot of exams in blue books and it doesn't look like it should be that hard. Well, and by the way, as long as I'm on my soapbox, you know,

the taking notes by hand offers much better retention than trying to take notes on the computer. I actually think like, look, oh, like, college, I'll let you be paternalistic. Ban laptops in the classroom. Like, like, make people write it down. You're actually doing them a favor. I'm actually, you know, I'm fine with that to an extent. But there is a bit where if you think about it from an employer perspective, if employers are looking at colleges as certification machines, guess what employers want their employees to do? Know how to use. No how to use AI. Colleges are actually doing their job, right? They're like, how can you get through all this busy work? Busy work, which accumulates because we need more and more laws because we've lost society,

borays and taboos that controlled people's behavior. Like, as a society, we're eliminating judgment from people anyway. So there's some aspect where actually this is totally normal and arguably even appropriate. And like the guy they opened with, the guy who's making all the cheating apps and things along those lines, he's like, he's not going to go work for a big company.

Or something's like, yeah, of course he's not. But also, big companies are liars too. They're like, we want you, we want entrepreneurial students. We want people. No, they don't. They want cogs in the machine. Like, like, there's a reason like, like, by the way, I did that job at Microsoft. I took the initiative to build that deck. I didn't get a single promotion at Microsoft, like, which really irked me at the time. But in retrospect, I was like, you get it. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. I went to promote. I was, I was, you know, surly. I had little patience for people that didn't get it.

Really difficult to work with. Yeah. There's a bit where me making that deck was so out of line because it was like a deck that someone way higher me in the stack had made. It was just so good that it got adopted anyway. I had an amazing manager who really, I think, shielded me and protected me from this stuff. But also to get buy in for a promotion, he had to convince his other peer groups. And he was not able to do that. So like all the qualities that made me a poor corporate cog at Microsoft are the exact qualities that enable me to send in this podcast,

have tens of thousands of listeners, and cook. on here and say this is all pointless and worthless, right? I don't care what people think. I don't care what they say. I'm going to go out, do my own thing. More power to this league. I, he's totally unsuited for college anyway. And there's a bit where the returns to people like that, questionable though their morals may be, are only getting larger. The internet was already step one. People like you and I could go out and just put a podcast out there. And because there's, it's perfect competition, our willingness to compete in ability to succeed was rewarded. And we talk about the returns to HCS coming from AI.

It's only going to get larger. And it's going to be tremendously disruptive. And there is a bit that's sad about this. Like we romanticize the college experience. I think fondly back to those seminars that I sat in and debating things back and forth. We talk about, oh, this is a dorm room topic that, you know, we're just going to sort of debate sort of back and forth. Absolutely, man. Common room.

It's sad to see that go. But one thing that's important to keep in mind, and this is going to be a really hard thing. to deal with. I think a problem societally generally is we have a romantic view of humanity that doesn't match reality. Which is, for example, there's a lot of crappy jobs in the world that need to be done.

And people do those jobs not because it's their calling or they have their dream. It's because they need money. And that's the job they that's a job they can get that puts food on the table. And if they don't have the job, they're not going to eat. Yeah. And that's very difficult to think about because it seems vaguely or explicitly wrong. Of course people should be able to eat.

Like people have a right to eat. They have a right to housing. They have a right to health care. All these sorts of things. And again, this is a dorm room discussion to a certain extent. But we do ourselves a disfavor and thinking about the reality of humanity by not appreciating the extent to which people do stuff they don't want to do because they have no choice. and there's an aspect of this college discussion

that is sort of along similar lines. There's a lot of professors here that fooled themselves into students doing work for their classes because they were interested in wording. Actually, you have a faulty view of human nature. It was always a chase to a credential. Yeah, no, that makes sense. We're not going to close out the podcast

by quoting Caddyshack. The world needs ditch diggers too. But I do want to read this professor. He says, Williams knew most of the students in this general education class were not destined to be writers, but he thought the work of getting from a blank page to a few semi-coherent pages was, above all else, a lesson in effort. In that sense, most of his students utterly failed. They're using AI because it's a simple solution, and it's an easy way for them not to put in time writing essays. And I get it, because I hated writing essays too when I was in school. But now, whenever they encounter a little bit of

difficulty, instead of fighting their way through that and growing from it, they retreat to something that makes it a lot easier for them. I just want to say that that's a real concern. And if people are abdicating their critical thinking and entrusting chat chb-tieb-tie to do it for them, I don't know where that leaves us as a society in 10 or 15 years. Well, the other hilarious, there's a lot of very funny things. People should read the article. It's a really entertaining read. One was the girl who's like, yeah, I have so little time to do my homework because I spend 10 hours a day on TikTok. Hours and hours until my eyes start hurting, she says.

But Chattebt makes it easy to write an essay in two hours. Yeah, that's the concern. And, you know, as someone who- But that exists, right? Like, again, I don't know that we have the answer to this. These are real concerns. Like, you go back, you know, to use a literary reference, the movie up, Or not up.

I always get Wally. I always get Wally and up mixed up because Wally, it's a spaceship. It's up, right? The Wally, like this world of people, you know, just sitting in their chairs endlessly amusing themselves. Seems pretty prescient. And you know what, though? You also, you talk about the value of these tools.

You put in a good 20 years learning in analog fashion. You know, you were taking notes by hand and you were reading real books and writing real essays. And so that lays a foundation that I think makes all these tools a lot more valuable. And if people don't have that, I wonder where that leads. It leads to them sitting on their couch, surfing TikTok and vaguely depressed about their life, but drowning it in social media. Well, hey, there was that one kid who launched his own cheating app business. So it's working out for him.

No, but that kid's fine. Yeah. No, I know. But this is the broader concern is we're barreling towards this reality. of the vast majority of people being vaguely dissatisfies their life, but having enough to eat, having a roof over their heads, and entertainment that sort of drowns out the vacancy in their lives. And while some smaller number of people,

because have the agency and initiative to actually take advantage of this stuff and go out and do things and do far more things than they could otherwise. This is like, it's a real, again, this is the dorm room question, Is that a good thing? If you measure world net GDP, probably yes, because the talented people with agency are going to get accentuated or amplified to such a dramatically greater effect.

In many respects, when I talked about cogs in the corporate machine, corporate machines are there to amplify the person at the top, right? Apple was a Formula One car built around Steve Jobs. Nvidia is a Formula One car built around Jensen Wong. They are there to enact and articulate their vision. What if we could do that for more people without all the difficulty of having tens of thousands of employees, right? Like it's like the trade debate.

Like you measure GDP because trade makes everyone richer when you measure it as an average. And then the question is, well, what about the. the experience of someone in the Rust Belt, right? Like, like, is there something that's not being measured that's being lost? And this is the concern about these sorts of things. Maybe on average from a purely economic lens, we're going to be better off with all these tools. But the reality of humanity is a huge number of folks are not just consigned.

They're self-consigning themselves to a world of being cattle. And, like, that's pretty depressing. but then again, it's like the arrogator versus platform argument. They're doing it themselves. They're choosing to watch TikTok for 10 hours a day and then using chat GPT to write their answers. Yeah. Well, and look, final thought here, if this is, if students aren't learning how to think because they are abdicating all of the critical thinking to chat GPT.

Did they ever know how to think in the first place? Well, I mean, I like to think I learned along the way. I don't really romanticize my college experience. You have, I know, but you have initiative. Yeah. Like the reality is, I didn't in college. I'll tell you that much. But it emerged.

I mean, I don't know. You went back. I mean, I don't know. I got good grades in college, but I mean, college is very easy. That's one of the reasons I don't really romanticize college all that much. But I think it's an, it is an existential problem for both. Look at you. Look at you.

I don't. What? College is easy. Very easy. Didn't even try. It was pretty easy. I mean, let's not get ourselves. I just think coming from the humanities world, I know a lot of people in that world,

channeling my Grantland pedigree here, the cultural elitist on the podcast. So many people in that world are so smug and dismissive about AI tools. And by failing to engage with these tools, a lot of the people running these institutions are just way less equipped to actually come up with solutions that help students build an immunity to the problem here or work around the problem and force everybody to use blue books. And I think that is part of what will compound the crisis that afflicts higher education. But to your point, we started with the best take. That crisis was coming regardless.

Well, it really goes back to this societal malaise slash sickness that I think is comes from an overly optimistic utopian view of human nature, right? Like there's a strong drive. There's been a drive for decades to diminish social taboos, to diminish mores, to empower individualism. And if you're not hurting anyone, just do what you want. And it's very easy at an intellectual level, particularly for people like us in our audience who are high functioning adults who can make our own choices and can control ourselves

to say, yeah, everyone should be able to smoke weed, like to use an example, right? But what does it actually mean up and down society when you remove even the imprint of illegality or the sense of that from that? Everywhere smells like weed and it sucks. Like there's so many things that people pass for themselves because I don't want like, you know, I'm actually not a weed smoker, but like I have plenty of friends that are who like on the weekend like once in a while. And what they really resented was the vague sense of feeling like they were doing something wrong. because they've been good, good kids all their life. And they did a lot of, it's like,

but yeah, good little credentialists. They're not the problem, right? The problem is people that now are smoking a joint every day. And it's like super concentrated. And then like they were basically dropouts from society and all these sorts of, you know, smells everywhere,

right? Like there's this general libertarian argument that people like you're bit right here. They over index on themselves and what they want to see happen. And don't think about the reality of society and up and down and the collective efforts. And sometimes there's. constraints that are put on you because it benefits the whole.

And sometimes constraints are legal, like the weed example. Sometimes those constraints are are mores. Like, no, actually, you're going to be looked down upon or judged for doing this particular activity, even though you're not going to go to jail for it, like you're going to get looked down upon, right? And there's a drive in sort of the liberal idea generally. And I just appealed to the American ideals of free commerce and free speech and all those such a thing. So I'm arguing against myself a bit here, which is take off the chains, let people

do what they want. And there's costs that come from that. And those costs don't manifest themselves immediately. They take a long time. And sometimes they're only exposed through things like AI and technology. And unbelievably expensive college degrees that are ultimately are worth less in the economy that awaits us for the next 10 or 20 years. I'm optimistic about my daughter. I think she takes a tremendous amount of initiative. You're going to be paying tuition the next four years. I think it's like the most expensive.

I don't know how to say where she's going. It's not cheap. She takes initiative. She's very self-directed. She has her own thoughts and point of view. And I think she's the sort of person that has high agency and will benefit from this. she would, you know, and so, but of course, every parent thinks great things about their kids. So I guess she's going to go.

We'll see. For her sake, I hope that they continue to use take home exams. For your sake, I hope they don't. The depressing thing about this is the kids who want to learn and want to push themselves and they're graded on a curve. And so they're actually competing against the AI. They're not competing against other students. That I meant to mention that earlier.

It sucks for them. Like, like we're. and so much of our society is like this, right? Like where we're actually punishing the people that want to do it the right way by basically catering to the lowest common denominator. And in this case, the lowest common denominator is kids that don't want to write their own essays. We're actually punishing the ones that do. Yeah.

Well, on that note, a dour note to end on, but a rollicking podcast. And what's most important is that the Boston Celtics are now down 02 in the second round of the NBA play. Two. Going to Madison Square Garden. Let's go next. All right, Ben. Well, we only have one episode next week. I said a lot of controversial things. We're going to lose more listeners for anti-Seltic sentiment than anything else.

That's right. Jilted Celtics fans. I can't wait to hear from you in the days to come. And God, I hope they actually lose this series. Ben, we have one episode next week. It's coming at the end of next week.

We'll be recording in person. No episode on Monday. Very, very excited. until then, enjoy your weekend, and I will talk to you soon. Talk to you later.