Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - College Students and Chips, The Future of Computing (and the Limits of Physics), Formula 1 and Apple

Episode Date: October 17, 2023

An emailer recommends ignoring college students on Twitter, the strategic logic of America’s ban on the sale of advanced chips to China, and a few different questions about AI and our digital future. At the end: Apple’s rumored F1 interest and why the partnership makes sense.

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 okay, Andrew. How are you? I'm good. You know, Ben G Oliver and I just banked the 400th episode of the Greatest of All Talk podcast, which is an incredible amount of time to be talking to another human being about basketball.

But, strategici subscribers, if you're into hoops, go to your show notes. You can click on a link to add the podcast. there. We were having fun, though, bouncing around over unders and everything. Basketball is right around the corner. So I'm in a good mood. I did sit down to watch my first sort of officially sit down and watch a game. The, you know, Bucks Lakers are on. You know, first time Yonnas and Dame together. So it was, you know, it wasn't super smooth and we just very easily beat that by 10. So I think that that was a good, good foreshadowing of the upcoming season. You know, I don't want to put you on the spot, but Bucks, the over under is 54 and a half. Would you go over?

or under? I'd probably go over just because I'm an optimist, but I think ideally they're going to use the regular season for experimentation and figuring stuff out. The one thing I've been cured of of the last few years is really caring about the regular season at all, which is sort of a fundamental issue for the NBA, generally speaking. But I am extremely optimistic about this year. If we don't win the title, I will view the year as a disappointment. So that's basically where my head's at. What an upgrade over Janus on the way out of the playoffs last year. It's not a failure to lose the first round of the playoffs. You know, compared to where the team was, I think you might have to revisit your criticism

of that comment because it seemed to have played out pretty well. It was nothing, if not a step to success. But in any event, we're here to talk about technology tonight. And we're going to start, we're just going to be bouncing around. This is going to be a more traditional mailbag. The news online continues to be very disturbing, but I am committed to keeping this light today. and providing a distraction for anyone who needs one. And I want to start with this follow-up from Ivan after our last podcast.

He says, per your discussion last week, I think this article does a nice job explaining how to treat college students and especially college students on Twitter. And he links a piece from Daniel Dresner on Substack, who writes, A reminder for everyone who is not a college student or administrator. The musings of Harvard or tough students do,

not, or at least should not, amount to a hill of beans in the public discourse. Just because it is now possible for outside observers to read these student scribblings does not mean that they should carry any intellectual weight. Just as there will always be people who are wrong on the internet, there will always be people who are stridently wrong on campus. Shining a spotlight on these statements gives them vastly more import than they merit. Ben, this may me smile over the weekend because everybody's having these, you know, intense conversations about modern political discourse. As I said, there's dystopian news all around us. And I sort of like the idea of a simple solution, just stop taking college kids seriously as being a step one

toward a brighter future. Do you have any thoughts as a former college kid? I thought you were going to keep this light and easy. Geez, this is our first question here. Well, no, I'm spinning it light, okay? Just college kids, you know, we don't have to put too much weight into anything they say is my read on it. I mean, there's a lot of things we should or should not do and that are entail sort of ignoring the reality of the world today and as it is. I mean, yes, I think that was the case. You know, I was in college in the late 90s or 2000s, you know, around the time of like the second defada and 9-11. And so I'm very aware of the sort of sentiments that came out this.

week and have been through this cycle before. But I think that, you know, Daniel Dresner is living in a pre-internet, pre-social media world. Like, unfortunately, there isn't the luxury of ignoring what was happening on campus, which I think was the appropriate sort of response. And this gets into the broader issues where the reality is, unfortunately, there is no more line. That sort of analog, the sort of wine we talk about between the analog and the digital, the

geographic constraints that actually mattered, that apply here just as much as well. Everyone on the campus discourse is the discourse because everything is the discourse. There is no sort of escaping it. And I think the challenge with these mediums and, you know, man, like I went back and read the article I recommended last week my sort of defining information and how the quality degrades as the, you know, there's a sort of a line between how much interest there is in something and the volume you get and just it all goes to crap. And you end up with everything becoming super partisan, super binary.

You're either on one side or the other. And most wise people like Daniel or like you or like me, check out. Or if not check out, at least don't post because like it's not worth it. And the problem is that those that do post are going to be on the most extreme side. And you're sort of stuck in the either I'm all the way on side A or I'm all the way on side. be in the loudest voices tend to dominate who either don't care are extreme or are trolls or are acting in bad faith. And you, if you try to put up a nuanced comment or try to balance in either direction, and we were starting to start a podcast sort of last week, you're going to have people

come in with bad faith. And as predicted, we had people coming in with bad faith to some of our takes, right? It's like, that's fine when we're getting email, right? Like, we can choose what to read and discuss sort of in a follow-up podcast. Right, exactly. On Twitter, it doesn't work like that, particularly when all the incentives around it are around the dunk, are around the sort of, like Twitter is a war. It's an online war. It's not a center for discourse.

And to your point, it does become a problem that compounds as things get more extreme because then more and more reasonable, rational people are like, I'm just going to sit this out. Right. So it's like, you know, so it's a very vicious cycle where the real. reasonable voices all do sort of check out. And, and, you know, not to remake a point that I've made many times, actually, I don't feel bad about doing that at all, but this is why I feel Twitter has been so bad for

journalism in particular. Who are the most online people, the journalists, right? Like, they're on there all the time. That's where they look for sort of validation. You end up in a situation where you get herded into sort of group think because you want the affirmation of people that are in the place that you're sort of always at. And so you not only end up with group think, you end up with extremist group think because the loudest voices who are the least scared or the most sort of absolutist or activist or whatever it might be are going to push the dialogue in a direction. And it does happen on both sides.

Right. And so anyone who's sort of in the middle just checks out and you get a perception of extremism that actually starts manifesting in sort of extremism. And it does filter back into whatever the various mediums that that might be. So, you know, again, we're going to keep it light, but I don't, I think there's a, I think this view by Daniel Dresner is obsolete. And it's obsolete because of the reality of the Internet. And the reality is, you know, it is very challenging. Gatekeepers have disappeared.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's definitely a huge part of what's changed. That's right. There were gatekeepers against sort of like crazy students on campus. And the problem is, you know, there's that comic on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, right? On the internet, no one knows you're a college student or no one knows you or whatever it might be. We need college kid badges or academic badges. Right. Let's be able to filter by age. That would, you know, that might be useful.

And from a sociological standpoint, it's just interesting to me, apart from being a little bit hilarious, you could make the argument that a lot of the dumbest discussions society has been having for the last 10 years. have been driven by college kids who are just being taken too seriously or academics who amplify those sentiments. And it is a function of the modern media environment. But awareness is the first step to moving toward a different brand of discourse would be my argument. This is just a ploy by you as a millennial to sort of abdicate responsibility for, you know, just making the online. I've taken full millennial responsibility on several other podcasts we've recorded. So guilty as charged, okay? Actually, it depends on what you're charging me with.

But yes, continue. But I do think that, you know, the broader point, this isn't a commentary on the commentary per se, the content of it. It's rather just a, I think a lot of our heuristics and understanding of the way things work, everything needs to be updated for the reality of the internet. And that goes to this idea that like the appropriate response isn't to parse, oh, how old is this person tweeting that's making me mad? Let me decide whether or not to read it or react to it. It's needing to gain sort of discipline and control over everything you read, right?

Like this requires a re-approachment with how you deal with media broadly. because, you know, there's also this distinction between social media and real media. And again, it's a distinction that doesn't actually exist in the way people actually experience the internet. I mean, this goes back to, I think, another journalist sort of point where I think from the journalist sort of perspective, there's a bifurcation in your mind about what I write for the publication versus what I put on Twitter. And Twitter is just throw away sort of stuff. But for people who read it, who consume it, they don't make that delineation. It's why would they? It's the same person.

And I think that that that is also a sort of analog mindset being applied to a digital space where the actual experience of the medium just is different. And again, I don't, the reason to not talk about this beyond the controversy or not is I don't have super compelling answers here. Like there's a reason why we we spun off into like what can you do for yourself personally and what can you talk about with your sort of friends. And I do think it's important to invest in and have closed conversations with people that you trust. And, you know, form a group chat with a bot if you need to get your takes off. Well, and I do think that there's a collective recognition and it extends to various parts of the media that Twitter is not to be taken too seriously and that there was real. damage done to the credibility of journalists writ large because of the way people use Twitter toward the end of the last decade. And maybe that recognition hasn't fully set in yet.

Maybe I'm being a little optimistic. But I think that is one way that progress can be made is that everybody just approaches things with a lot more skepticism if you're talking about social media discourse and whatever bubbles up on any given day or bubbles up from campus, perhaps. You know, it's not that college kids are always wrong, but there are enough, like, horrendous misses that it merits society-wide caution moving forward. Well, and also, the reality is there's plenty of horrendous takes that have nothing to do with college students. So I think we're like, like, what's, what distinction are we actually drawing here?

There you go. Last thing, while we're talking generations, the other reason this email cracked me up is because I texted that substack link to my boomer mom last week. And she responded and said, when I was in college, I might have gone to a protest for Charles Manson if a cute guy had asked me to go. And then also, she said at one point in college, she went to a protest where everyone was protesting national seatbelt regulations. And she wore a dress that said, keep your laws off my body. So college kids have been ridiculous for at least 50 years. And it was a reminder of a simpler time in America when seatbelt law was the biggest controversy we had.

had not necessarily a simpler time around the world, though. Anyways. I mean, you promised to keep it light. Now you want me to comment on your mom. I mean, I think this is. Well, are you pro or anti-seatbelt in America? Here, take a stand live on Sharp Tech. I'm pro-seatbelt.

What is this? What has happened in this podcast? I am pro seatbelt. This is me hosting. I'm keeping it light as promised to everybody, despite how serious everything is around the world. And in keeping with that theme, the chip ban, Jacob says, as far as the chip band is concerned, I struggle to understand what kinds of computing abilities five or three nanometer chips enable.

I can understand how they are more power efficient, physically smaller, and faster. But if a nation wanted to, say, model nuclear weapons, couldn't they just do it on 10 nanometer CPUs? and sure, it would take a bit longer and cost more power. Why target five and three nanometer chips so specifically with these export controls? Now, Jacob sent this to the Sharp China email address, but as far as the strategic rationale for urgently closing loopholes on the chip band that was announced almost exactly a year ago, it's really more of a sharp tech question.

So what do you think of what Jacob's asking there? Well, first off, the chip controls were focused on, I think, 14 and 16 nanometers, not three or five. And my response to that, or maybe it was 28, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was higher than three or five. And the problem with that, which I said all along, and of course, no one actually, you know, bothers to understand how this stuff works, is that was always a totally arbitrary and unrealistic place to draw the line. because the same equipment you use for 28, you can use all the way down to 7 nanometer. And because, and I mean, and they had a lot of that equipment, correct? This is why the whole discussion is very frustrating. Like, anyone that wanted to actually understand these issues could have known that the first

generation of TSM's 7 nanometer chips did not use EUV. They used immersion DUV, which is the exact same technology. you use for 28 nanometer chips, which China is making a whole bunch of. So sort of by definition, and this is why the whole response to the 7 nanometer chip thing is so, it really exemplifies, you know, I will articulate my frustration, say, with the FTC and like the Activision case or whatever, right? And, you know, like, can you actually try to understand the industry you're trying to regulate?

Like, look at the UK. They actually got a meaningful divestment that actually addressed their, problem of harm because they bothered to understand the industry. What a concept, right? The exact same thing applies here, arguably to sort of the other side of the aisle, which is, of course, China came out with a 7 nanometer chip. They had to come out the 7 nanometer chip two years ago, but it was a Bitcoin mining chip, which was simpler.

It's totally reasonable and rational that they would be able to advance and come out with a better 7 nanometer chip, particularly since the core technology undergirding it is basically the same is the technology undergaring chips that they've been producing in volume for quite a while now. Now, the one place where it does make sense and it's viable to draw a line is with EUV, which is the sort of, you know, extreme ultraviolet technology. TSM introduced that with the second generation of seven nanometer chips. But by and large, that was just to learn how to use it.

They didn't need it per se. They did need it to get down to five nanometer. And that, by the way, was already sort of restricted back under the Trump administration where they convinced the Dutch government to stop any EU exports to China. Now, there is a gradient spectrum of like DUV machines and ASML is still sort of innovating on this and Nikon and stuff like that. So there like there is further lines to be drawn if you want to make it harder to build 7 nanometer, for example, or to make it. less efficient or less productive or whatever it might be. Because like you don't just like innovation hasn't just stopped in that sort of area. And so there is discussions to be had.

But if you want to draw a line, you don't get to just arbitrarily pick a number. You have to actually have a linchpin on which you can enforce that. And the only linchpin that does make sense is EUV. Just because like either you have EUV or you don't. And so to the extent that the, the update. to last year's export controls are designed in part to make sure that every loophole is closed and you're curving access to EUV and also just generally making it much harder for China to ever break through to that leading edge. Why would they do that? I don't think we have evidence

whether or not these controls work or not. I think the issue was misplace expectations about what could actually be done. People are approaching this with the framework of exports on like uranium and like plutonium or geridium or whatever it might be when it comes to nuclear, which are tangible physical goods that can be tracked. Like we're talking about the export of tools that could potentially be used and the output is a commodity, like, or not a commodity, but it's a, it's a fully fungible sort of good, right? One chip is the same as sort of another chip. And so this was always the issue with the regulations and the question of if, if

they were appropriate was is it even viable to enforce? And this is something that's easily forgotten when it comes to laws and things like this, is it ought to go into your calculation. Can you actually accomplish what you're trying to accomplish? And the idea that we could just buy Fiat stop things at 14 nanometer never made sense. Now, again, though, it was viable to say we could potentially stop things at seven. Again, we have evidence TSM five years ago or six years or whatever it is, already shipped chips at 7 nanometer without using EUV. So that should have been our expectation that China will be able to do the same. And sure enough, they have done the same.

And I guess this is why I don't get the reaction. I got a lot of pushback when I wrote about, you know, the 7 nanometer chips a few weeks ago, saying like, oh, you don't understand the mood in Washington. That, you know, this is, you know, people are, you know, X, Y, Z. Like, my point in the article is not the mood in Washington. My point is the technical realities of what you're actually trying to do. It feels like that should probably matter. Like, this is like the inverse of the college student question.

Like in this case, the actual physical characteristics of what you're trying to regulate is an important factor on what can be done or not. It's just not. It's not just about what you can sort of wish into existence. Well, the main reason I include the question is because there's also this sort of parallel question that I continue to have is, you know, I defer to U.S. intelligence experts, but Bill and I were talking about this on Sharp China. Like, from the outside, it's hard to tell whether this is actually about military concerns

or whether it's more about long-term economic concerns. So, yeah, I realize I didn't actually actually question. Sorry, I guess I'm a little rantey today. So it is what it is. No, no, that's fair. But that's what Jacob actually articulates the technical question that Bill and I were alluding to last week is like, what are you actually gaining if they do if they were to have EUV machines and have the capacity to make five and three nanometer chips. So as I think we've discussed in the past, the actual chips you need for traditional military applications are not that high power. We've had guided bombs and guided missiles for decades,

right? Like, like, you know, those are super old chips that anyone could make. So the sort of kinetic weapons that we're familiar with by and large are not necessary. Where it does start to make a really big difference is with AI. And this is also in the defense of the chip regulations, this is why if you're going to draw a line at some point and try to enforce what is going to be very difficult to enforce, this is the time to do it because AI is clearly going to be a super important force when it comes to fighting in the future. And it's going to be a step change. And you can imagine, Imagine a future where most of the fight is with drones. It is with unmanned vehicles.

And of course, there is going to be care put to have human decision makers in the loop, but there is going to be edge sort of decision capabilities and coordination. And can a relatively small number of people control a huge sort of force. I'm going to get to the word that I'm looking for because they can control all these entities because of AI is sort of coordinating things and all those bits and pieces. AI is one of those functionalities that in this regard can really never be good enough. And so there is a real payoff from, you know, the same sort of payoffs we've gotten from getting smaller and faster chips for decades, which is you get better performance. There are step change. It's not just pure performance, also things like bandwidth, how much stuff sort of goes together.

There's issues of like scalability. There's issues of energy, how much it takes to power, all these sorts of things. Like there are physical limits that will apply and have always applied to computing that are best overcome by computing just getting faster. There's sheer complexity in software. You know, time and time to compute does matter. And this will matter for AI. AI is at this point, what is the bound on how much computing we can have? We're certainly nowhere close to knowing where that is or what it might be.

So this is the most cogent argument for the chip ban, which is number one, we actually have a point of leverage, which is EUV, and number two, there is actually an application which can use infinite computing, which is AI. And that just requires a ton of three nanometer, five nanometer chips at some point in the meter, one nanometer. It doesn't matter. Like, like, the payoffs from better and faster computing, like you run into a wall. If you can't just make it up in time or space.

Like, like, there's just fundamental limitations you run into. There's so many variables that go into computing. Again, things like heat, things like energy, things like memory bandwidth, things like how much can you keep in memory at a certain time? What can you process over? Like, this has just been the reality of computing for 50 years. This isn't a new concept. Like the entire progress of technology has been gated by and led by Moore's law, the fact

that we're getting sort of faster chips that for a long time or cheaper, that cheaper part has gone is gone as we've talked about, but has made sort of new things possible. And so this is, but the, you know, The implication of this being the justification and the reason to the chip ban now is it's not going to pay off in 2023. It's not going to pay off in 2024. It's going to pay off in 2030 and 2035 when the U.S. has these significant AI capabilities and China doesn't. You can also understand why this is a big problem for China because if you have a real balance of force, like sort of step change thing, like this. This is the sort of like idea like one side is nuclear, one side doesn't.

When they both have nuclear, then it changes. One side, like the whole Star Wars thing in the 80s, right? The whole concept there was if you remove a country's ability to mutually destruction, you sort of unbalanced, that changes the equation. And this is always driven sort of technological development and balance of force issues between great powers for all of humanity. But there's just this lack of understanding in Washington. and about that like an expectation that this is going to one manifest now.

Number two is going to be perfectly effective. And the reality is it's going to be fuzzy by definition because of what you're trying to regulate. And the payoff's not going to be for a long time. And it's just the fact of the matter. Yes. Ban today what others won't so that in 2035 you will have banned what others can't. And I think that is well articulated and honestly very helpful as.

the chip ban continues to be a central foreign policy of the Biden administration and updates are rolling out this week. And I hadn't fully internalized all that logic in terms of what's underlying the push. But that makes a lot of sense. And to your point, earlier, where the advantage is going to compound, right? Like, so yes, to sort of Jacob's point, we may have applications now where you can do it with slower chips, you know, just take longer and larger. But those differences are only going to sort of accelerate and get larger over time as we,

and there's a bit where the faster capability uncovers more things that you can do. Our faster chips sort of make possible scenarios that you can't even imagine yet. And this is a core challenge technology generally is, you know, it's like, oh, justify this new thing because how is it going to be used? Well, part of it is we don't know how it's going to be used. because we haven't even had the possibility and our imagination isn't even larger enough. That's the whole excitement right now about AI, right?

When I talked about, oh, this experience of talking to chat GPT is so fundamentally different. It has changed my perception of what's possible with AI. Is that a failure of me as an analyst for not seeing that before I talked to chat GPT? Well, maybe, perhaps, but, you know, there's a reason why it's always risky to be like a quote-to-quote futurist or whatever, why some of this stuff is in like sci-fi because it's, it's hard to sort of even know what's possible until the capability is there. And that's why business models often follow so many years from the technology.

The feed on the internet didn't exist until the internet had already been around for a decade. Why? Because we had to even wrap our minds around what was possible in this new paradigm before something new could be invented. And that's going to be the case with AI. And there is a virtuous cycle of this will drive new computing. necessities. And those new competing necessities will make possible new things that will then drive new computing necessities. And that is a virtuous cycle. And there needs to be, again, understanding and patience. If you're going to go down this path, and obviously the U.S.

is going to go down to go down this path, at least try to get a clue of what path you're going down and where you're sort of headed for. And the payoff is in 2030 and 2035, not keeping Huawei from making a comparable, you know, competitor to the iPhone now. Which should have been. completely predictable. I mean, that's what's so right. They had the equipment to do that. As you've noted at several different junctures. Well, all that is well said. I don't

think that you're a bad analyst because you failed to anticipate chat GPT. And I think one of my favorite aspects of covering basketball is that there's an inherent mystery to the sport, no matter how much people have tried to quantify

it. There are certain things we'll just never understand. And I do think that some of what we're seeing with AI is like the magic of technology that makes it so alluring in the first place. And it's pretty refreshing alongside a lot of what we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years and the big debates we've been having. Like now we're stepping into the unknown again, which is great. Yeah. No, and it is exciting. And it can be unnerving.

But I do think there's a reason to be biased towards optimism. I mean, you know, not to echo like, you know, Mark Andreessen, that that, that, that. essay sort of dropped yesterday. But I do think there is, you know, and this applies to like the college student debate, it applies to all this sort of stuff. We are in a new reality. And there is a temptation to what, what the way things were before. But there has to be an acceptance that that's not possible anymore.

Like, like we've already gone far enough that the only way is forward. And, you know, that doesn't mean there aren't issues. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't figure things out. It means we should figure things out with it in mind that this is what is possible. So there's good things that can and will come out of this. And also what is realistic. And, you know, unfortunately, these are sort of critiques and complaints that can be applied to a lot of stuff, particularly in Washington. Well, listen, as long as possibilities for the future are the theme of the day, I'm declaring it the theme of the day.

A couple questions following up on our glasses conversation. Dan says one of the comments you made on a recent show is how we're going to see more and more advertising everywhere. But as a thought exercise, someone will inevitably jailbreak the smart classes and someone else will create an ad blocking app for those same smart classes. So imagine smart classes with an ad blocker built in. You see ads on TV blocked. You see ads on a billboard blocked. Ads in any visual medium blocked. what if in the desire to get to the metaverse, meta creates the ultimate ad blocker?

So, Ben, help me out here. How far-fetched is this proposed technology from Dan? Who knows? I mean, we'll see. I mean, you know, meta getting sort of replacing the advertisements in the world with the advertisements they want you to see. I mean, like, I don't know. I mean, like, you can, if you had glasses in front of you or you're actually like looking through a screen actually all the time, Number one, that's probably going to be terrible for your eyesight.

I'm not sure I would counsel that. Number two, that would be incredible technology. There is an aspect here, and this is not, I am sort of cheating on the question, but I think it's legitimate sort of cheating, which is, I don't know, we'll figure out these problems when we get there. I mean, I do think this bit about you're going to have glasses on and it will pop up ads in your vision is put forward because it's like people are thinking, what's the most dystopian sort of outcome and what can I sort of like,

imagine and that's a classic sort of example. But why would you wear glasses if they were putting advertisement all around you, right? There's, there's a sort of discrediting and forgetting about that people make rational choices in markets and people use Instagram today or they use Facebook because they get utility from it. It's kind of like our whole antitrust sort of thing. No one's forcing you to use these sorts of things. And you can, easily go, you can absolutely go without them. Like I, right. Facebook was irritating with notifications like five years ago.

And so I turned them off and I like, and now I barely check Facebook. You know what? I'm totally fine. It's not really, it's not really making any difference in my life sort of either direction. I probably ought to check XLS, you know, like the, the, we'll get there as a society. If you have, no, look, if we get to a society where they are like holding you down in the morning and strapping glasses on your face and saying, I'm asking about an ad blocker, though, and whether you can install, like, some sort of software that blocks advertisements everywhere you look in society.

Right. No, he's saying, like, like, your glasses go out there and you would see a billboard and now it's been replaced by something else. Right, by like a fuzzy image. So you're not assaulted with advertising everywhere you go, which to me actually would be more depressing. I don't know if I would want that product. Like, I don't eat it. Advertising is really not that much of an imposition. Let me knock on wood as I say that because God knows what we'll be dealing with like 15 years from now. No, but my point is maybe that will happen. And then it will be interesting. And I'll write about it on Shatka. We'll talk about on Sharp Tech and we'll figure out what we'll sort of will muddle through.

We'll figure it out. I don't know that we're going to muddle through the clockwork orange scenario where you're held down and forced to watch advertisements. That's why that's what we should be worried about. Right. Let's have faith in our ability to sort of figure things out, sort of get. through them and you know and let's not get paralyzed by hypotheticals let's make sure that we actually get there first i mean you know this is a covid thing is like getting paralyzed by hypotheticals what if it's unlike every other virus ever created is all these qualities

now turns out it's just like basically every other virus ever created with all the qualities that that entails both good and bad had we started with sort of basi and priors like let's assume that this is a coronavirus that behaves like other coronaviruses. Like, we did learn some stuff. We learned that actually, you know, it is airborne, for example, and that's actually has influenced our understanding of other viruses, as it might be, but also was the case that it didn't have all these other sort of fanciful properties that were driving. But what if, but what if? If you get stuck in a world of but what if, you are gated and captured by the imaginations of people who don't know what they're talking

about. We live that. Let's try to avoid that. Let's try to avoid that. Let's try. to stick with reality, actually understanding what's possible, what's not, and trust ourselves to figure it out when we get there. Now, I understand the concern like, oh, if we could have foreseen XYZ, we would have avoided it. Well, if you want to follow that through to its logical conclusion, it's if we could have foreseen the internet, obviously the powers that be would have never allowed it. But like, you know, that also speaks to the fact that the truly transformational stuff is not what people see coming. That's exactly what. why it's sort of interesting and is so powerful.

And I do think there's an important, like there is a paralyzing effect that can happen when we let our imaginations run wild. And it's important to stay rooted on where we are, where we're at and sort of trust ourselves to figure it out when we get there. Okay. Well, some transformational technology that never quite resonated, Johnny says, and the subject line to this email was, hey, glass holes. He says, gents, we've been here with the glasses in the past and the public opinion was clear. One of you just said they would stop being friends with

someone who was wearing an AI pin. Well, we hated people wearing Google's glasses. What's different this time around? Now, aside from the dead ender perspective that's being expressed from Johnny there, I am curious what like 2011 Ben Thompson thought about. about Google's glasses when they first hit the market. Like, were you a believer or were you skeptical early on? Well, no, I think the dead ender point is actually the only way to look at this, which was I was skeptical of those as a product at the time, but the idea that this is in broad strokes where we're going was clear.

I mean, it was just a, the technology was not remotely ready or appropriate. That doesn't mean it never would be. You have to look at anything technological with the assumption that computing is going to increase massively. Things are going to get miniaturized. And we will figure out use cases once we cross a critical threshold as far as what the form factor is and what it might be. This is why, by the way, the existential question that will always be over tech is when

and if computing speed plateaus, right? Like one of the weirder stories that I'm still not quite sure what's going on is why is the iPhone new iPhone not really faster and doesn't really have better battery life, even though it's on a faster process? No one's really quite figured that out or answered it. And it's actually a very scary question. There's probably good explanations. You know, there's things about like they actually, they shipped the newer, like three-nine

mirror was delayed. And so in the process, son is actually going to be a deprecated process. There's lots of like weird questions about what's going on there. But there is a sort of existential question around that, which is what happens when all the iPhones will be the same speed. No, and it applies to this AI and chip ban question, right? What if actually we're as fast as we're ever going to get? And so 7 nanometer is pretty close. It was all sort of invade, right?

You know, like built on that assumption, this will pay off in 2030 or 2035 is that we're going to keep improving at the rate we have been improving. but we are hitting fundamental laws of physics. We would have to go subatomic, correct? Yeah, no, the challenge of chips is quantum, like quantum effects, where you have electrons like escaping and interfering and like weird stuff going on. I mean, beyond my ken to sort of like sort of explain or fully understand. But there is this sort of overarching question. I'm just, Huang is always saying, oh, Morslaw is dead.

It's all about systems. His sort of point of view is you have to start rethinking the entire computers. The computer is the data center. and everything is going to be in the cloud sort of XYZ. That has implications on this debate as well. But, you know, but so set that aside. That is just an important aside. I'm still mostly operating.

And in 2011 was definitely operating under the assumption. I stand corrected. That's when Google class hit the market. And look at, look at our, look at our capabilities what we have today versus 2013. Dressively better, drastically more capable. Look at, if you want to do more extreme, look at the Apple Vision pro compared to like the Game VR in like the 80s, right? Like the idea, there's a lot of ideas that are in science fiction that, that's, that, you're

like, oh, yeah, whatever. Then they, there's like a V1. I was like, oh, this is it. We actually got it. And it sucks. It's terrible. It's, it's not even viable. It's like you could actually build it, but no one would ever want to use it.

But that doesn't mean the concept of being able to sort of see things and talk about them and have, like, get information about them, the use case is plausible and your assumption with technology should be that it will become capable. Now, where it is useful to think about things is questions of physics, right? Physics is like the gating factor on what is possible and what isn't. And with Google Glass in particular, I think the question of when are we going to have like images in front of our eyes that are sort of put there that like I'm still you know meta says they have like sort of stuff running in the labs but it costs like $30,000 per unit or whatever

might be obviously has to get shrunk down we'll see I've never sort of demoed anything like that but the idea that I can be looking at something and vocally have a conversation with an AI every one of those pieces is there today like we have glasses with cameras and them and we have AIs we can talk to. It's obvious that's going to be put together in sort of a package. Right. And so, you know, yeah, I think that my response to Johnny is don't be a dead ender. Like, like, you can't look at technology as it is sort of today.

It's not going to shock you, but I was a major Google Glass hater 10 years ago. But the one thing that I will credit to you more than anybody is that these days, I think my reaction when I hear somebody hating on a given technology or particularly a lot of these AI hypotheticals that are thrown out or the meta glasses is there are just so many examples of technology we use constantly today that we would have considered dystopian or fantastical that at this point I just throw up my hands and say I don't know where we're going to be five years from now. But it's also not likely that it's going to be as bad as the skeptics claim it will be. And it probably won't be as crazy as the true believers. Well, I think that it's right.

It's probably going to be in the middle. But it might be worse. Right. I mean, I think the, the context of our talk about that AI pin was it was a wake up call for me where my initial reaction was if any of my friends ever wore one of these things like you're out. And I had to admit that I And just the day before written excitedly about these classes that you wear around and sort of record everything. It's like, well, I have hoisted by your own petard. Hoisted by my own petard, but this is how the frog boils, right, to sort of mix metaphors here is, you know, the utility becomes more and more apparent. I think there is a, there probably is some sort of technological principle. Maybe there is a name for it.

I don't know what it is where it's very easy and natural to imagine the, the discharacterial. dystopian sort of outputs and to thus be skeptical of what's coming. And it's only as it comes into focus that the utility becomes clear. This ties into the idea. It takes us a while to even discover the utility. We need the capability first to sort of get the utility. And this is, this is a reality of tech and how it progresses that I think, you know, there is a thought that you need to like sort of, you know, I say like human-centered design like back in the day. The idea is you go and you observe people, you need to understand their needs. And you're not going to necessarily get product insights from when people tell you, they will describe their problems. But if you can understand how

they actually experience their environment and what their desires are. And, you know, the classic example of this, I might have talked about the podcast previously is like the Swiffer Mop and P&G, which I think was, I think IDO might have been a part of that or one of these human center design sort of firms. And what they observed was it was very like, you know, this was back in the 80s or 90s and, you know, your traditional household had like a homemaker. And it was very, they really desired to have a clean floor. But the challenges of like mopping and, you know, it was such a pain. It took so much effort.

And then there was water all over the floor. And the idea was what we need is something that delivers the feeling and the satisfaction of having a clean floor while making it super seamless and easy and obvious and that way to the swifter blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so in this view, it's like if you can understand. And, you know, a very traditional sort of marking design view, understand the need. And then you can deliver a product that fits that. That doesn't always apply to technology.

Like there is a big part of technology, which is you have to actually create technology. Push forward. Yeah. And only then do, and a lot of technology is about creating new needs. It's like no one thought they needed to have a phone with them, right? Like, and honestly, I haven't. I mean, you get, absolutely. I mean, if you want to come out as an AirPods apostle here, I certainly welcome that interjection.

But it's created a need for a lot of people. My wife loses one AirPods every two weeks and then spends at least 72 hours asking me whether I've seen an AirPod around the house. I mean, maybe P&G should look into that. Like, you know, a swiffer mouth for AirPods. But, but there, but technology, it has to be created even before we know what needs might have been. And there is a, again, a dystopian view of this. Did we actually need to be on our phones all the time? But there's also a very positive view, which is people look at technology with fear and it's going to like replace people.

It's going to take away jobs and all those sorts of things. But what I'm articulating here is the idea that technology doesn't just solve needs. It actually creates new needs. And those new needs can be solved by folks. Like no one could imagine a job creating assets for 3D games, right? Like just to take like a very sort of obvious example. The, you know, and it was like, oh, AI is going to come along and replace that. Well, like, what is going to be made possible by AI replacing that that will then create new sort of opportunities?

And it's a hard case to make because by definition you don't know what they're going to be. But what you can do is look back at the last 50 years and see how this cycle. has sort of happened over and over again. Right. Well, and a huge theme on strategery is your focus on tradeoffs. And one of the things that I look to on the positive side of the ledger with the future of technology is just general faith in the human spirit. And the way I interact with technology, obviously there are some unhealthy aspects of that

relationship in the modern era. We've talked about it on Sharp Tech, whether it's being addicted to your phone or checking Twitter slash X too much or whatever it may be. But there are also connections that are made possible. I'm looking at you in Taiwan live as we record the podcast. We're friends with people all over the world in different group chats and can talk 24 hours a day. And there's just a lot of, like, I never would have thought that I was missing a vibrant WhatsApp community in my life until about a year and a half ago, but I would really feel its absence if it were taken from me now. And so there are new connections made possible by all this that I think are easy to underplay

when you're making the dead ender and or dystopian case. And so we tend to screwed up the first time through. Exactly. The transitions are always a little rocky. And that's part of the human experience also. Trying to have a communal experience on Twitter. It turned out was not a very good idea. Right. But that's where things like, yeah, group chats and encryption, where you can actually have a, you know, wrap your arms around small scale community that is actually scalable and viable is actually, it's not just a, it's better in a water. Now, should you still get together? Absolutely. I think any group chat has to have a principle that everyone gets together at least once a year. And that's the price of being in the group chat. It's like you make whatever sacrifices are necessary.

Because real world connection still matters. But at the same time, the reality of modern life, and particularly like we're not, I don't think we have a TikTok segment today. But when you have kids, particularly when you're in the, when you're in the tough years, we had that question a couple of years ago. What happens to your hobbies? Good questions. What happens to your friends? Mostly WhatsApp chatting. But that's, but you know what?

That's really great. And that's a lot better than when I was going through kids the first. time, you know, as, you know, as in Taiwan. Isolated, right. Yeah. And I was totally isolated. And it was difficult. And again, that's great. It's great. And also this is where we're going. So let's find the great things as soon as possible. Right. Okay. Well, I promised light and we're going to end on something that both you and I love two questions about Formula One. So first, Daniel says, hi, guys, while listening to your conversation on the merits of real world experiences, it struck me.

that some digital versions of the world could be better than the real thing. Imagine watching George Russell get sandwiched by his teammate on the opening lap of a race and you're watching from a stereoscopic camera mounted on top of the W-14, which is the name of the Mercedes Formula One car.

George Russell did in fact get sandwich much to Ben's delight with his shit-eating grin here on the podcast. I like George Russell. I was delighted at who did it. That's right. I don't think that sitting on the grandstand could ever beat that, he says. Of course, traveling with buddies and 300,000 other people to watch F1 cars swoon by is fun too, but just in a different way.

I think that is a interesting point. We'll come back to that in a minute. But Vikesh says, just making sure you guys saw, as I know you're both interested in the rumors that Apple is prepared to make a giant bid on global broadcasting rights for Formula One. And he includes a link to Judge13.com, who writes, In what could be a monumental shift in the motorsport broadcasting landscape, tech giant Apple is reportedly eyeing up the global television rights to Formula One. Sources in the latest issue of Business F1 magazine suggests that Apple's intentions aren't just casual.

The company is, quote, serious. about launching a, quote, blockbuster bid to secure the prestigious broadcasting rights. The proposed deal, estimated to be worth a staggering $2 billion a year, would significantly outstrip and potentially double Formula One's current income from its TV rights. Apple is said to be considering a, quote, sliding scale approach to exclusivity. The vision is to start with 25% exclusivity and gradually increase it to a full 100% percent. percent exclusivity over a five-year period. This phased approach would coincide with the expiry of existing contracts, ensuring a seamless transition. That is actually a pretty fascinating

clause at the end there with the sliding scale approach to exclusivity. Oh, I thought you're going to say it's pretty fascinating that you said expiry. Isn't it expiry? Well, I was guessing on that one. We'll let the audience decide. I had never really pronounced the word expiry. or expiry, the expiration of existing contracts. That's what we say in this country. But I'm curious, what's your reaction to the rumors that Apple is interested in Formula One? And for people who do not care about racing, I promise this is actually a pretty interesting story about Apple and its ambitions for the Vision Pro.

How do you read it? I think it's a really interesting deal of just setting aside the racing part from the structure of things for Apple, which is the challenge for them, getting into any sport popular in the U.S. is that the U.S. is by far the biggest market. It's by far the most expensive television rights, which means the cost for them to get in is going to be massive. And they are going to, if they wanted to make it exclusive, they're taking massive economic hit.

If you pay billions of dollars for the NFL, say, and then you take it off the air, like, that's a lot of subscriptions to Apple TV. You're going to have to sell to make it up. Whereas F1 is only just now, like, getting money from ESPN. For a while, I think they were. paying like NBC or whatever to like televise it right even not that long ago so there is a bit where yeah where having it be relatively non followed in the US is actually a benefit because buying out the rest of the markets in the world is like cheaper than the US for most sports but in this

case you have a sport that's sort of on the upswing so you can get in on the US market at a reasonable rate and then you can sort of bring the world along for the ride I think for Apple they want to have sort of the worldwide offering. Their entire product is one product for the whole world. And they don't want to have to deal with geographic split-ups and things on those lines. That's part of the MLS deal is they have sort of global rights. So I think just from a structural perspective, F-1 makes a lot of sense. Number two, the F-1 audience, I would suspect, is probably an Apple audience.

I mean, it's not a cheap sport by and large. You know, number three, this could be an unbelievable. vision pro sort of like experience right i mean like one of the the challenges and i mean i would like to go you've been to an f1 race uh so i'm actually curious your thoughts my view is i'd like to go for the experience i can't imagine it actually being a particular great way to watch a race yeah no i mean that's exactly how i feel about daniel's question at the top is obviously in person has merit and i mean i'm currently exhausting all options to try to get out to Vegas for the Grand Prix before Thanksgiving.

And there's an element of it that you have to experience in person. Like when you're sitting there by the side of the track and feel a Formula One car fly by, you gain an appreciation for just how insane the machine is. It's like closer to a rocket than a car. And that's something that you sort of feel in your loins as it's flying past you. that being said, it's just a much better sport to experience on a regular basis watching from home. And I would even put professional football in that category. Like sometimes the broadcasting experience is so good that it just wins against an in-person experience.

But still, I want to go to a Formula One race with you one day, Ben. So it's on the bucket list. I want to go to one for sure. But like, you can imagine, you know, I do think. you have to think about the Vision Pro in all these sort of considerations. Is that, you know, are they going to sell enough Apple TV subscriptions on Vision Pros? Well, no, it's a $4,500 device or whatever it might be, right?

But there is a sort of proof of concept thing that I think is going to be important to get other leagues on board, get other sports on board, sort of in the long run. And it's hard to imagine a more compelling showcase. Like, you give someone here, try this out, put it on, and you're suddenly like viewing it from the driver's sort of point of view. I can imagine it being unbelievable. And so that sort of makes sense. And yeah, I mean like a staggering $2 billion a year, Apple makes like $2 billion like a minute, right?

Like that's the sort of jarring thing when you're dealing with sort of something of this size. So I do think it is, I wouldn't be surprised if there is something here. I do think it makes sense. Apple wants to be in a situation where it can be in charge and call the shots. F1 is sort of, you know, they can deal direct with Liberty Media. they can do the whole worldwide thing. F1 is already interesting in that the F1 does all of the television already, right? Like everyone gets the sort of same feed.

And so that actually is good for Apple. They don't have like multiple throats to strangle as far as like getting the sort of. Right. It's Sky Sports broadcast all over the world right now. No, but even Sky Sports. But Sky Sports is taking the F1 feed. Oh, the cameras. That's right.

Right. Like I think the only race that did their own television feed was Monaco. and one of the sticking points in the current renewal where they just renewed it was, no, we're going to do the TV. And so Sky Sports provides commentary and they have like, where they do two screen and one shows the track and one shows like, you know, 10 in the pits or whatever might be. That is like that they're adding that on.

But that actual view of the track, everyone gets the same thing. And so when you complain, why didn't they show XYZ? That's actually not Sky Sports. That's actually the F1 sort of broadcast. And so, but that from Apple's perspective, I think that's also another positive. So I think it's pretty intriguing. I'm definitely going to be watching it in all senses of the word.

And it would be fun to watch a division pro. That's for sure. Yeah. I mean, Vikesh says, could Apple find a way to add spatial video to the driver's helmet cam or on a pit crew member's helmet or up close at certain corners of a racetrack, an F1 equivalent of court side seats? See, you have the advantage on this end of the spectrum because you've actually actually tried the vision pro. I've been to a Formula One race. You've tried the Vision Pro.

And after you tried it at the Apple event, one of the conversations we had was, in keeping with the theme of pushing technology forward, O-L-E-D is an amazing experience, an amazing way to watch sports. And the Drive to Survive series is obviously the biggest Formula One success story over the last five to 10 years, and it's broadcast in 4K and looks unbelievable on an O-L-E-D-TV. And so I just can't even imagine what it would look like in the Vision Pro context. And so for Apple to spend whatever it takes to secure these rights would make sense, because then you're just going to have people sort of rhapsodizing about the experience of watching Formula One in a Vision Pro, and it could ultimately,

sort of go viral among consumers. Well, this is sort of a point where actually the Vision Pro might not be the best thing for Formula 1. Let me explain why. I think the way that the best way to televise sporting events for the Vision Pro is going to be fundamentally different than the way you televised sporting events today. And so there was the, I posted about it on Twitter, but there was that, you know, someone posted the, you know, ESPN you can get with a 5.1 stream, which, you know, you know, I highly recommend, here's my sort of tech tip of the day, get a center channel for your TV. Like, even if you can't get reversed around speakers, have a center channel and have two stereo speakers. Because the way it works is the center channel is the announcer and the side channels are the crowd.

And even that bit of separation, I think, makes watching a sporting event much more immersive. In this case, what happened was, you know, the Phillies hit a grand slam and someone took the 5.1 feed and they cut out the center channel. So all you got was the crowd noise. And so you could watch this clip and you could just hear the crowd and they were like singing when the batter came up. His like entry song and then they're cheering and then he crushes the ball and then like it goes out and the crowd's going crazy. And actually the best way to experience that. Number one, it's incredible on its own. The best way to experience it.

And I think what actually gives you a sense of what's possible VR is to close your eyes and listen to it. And the reason why you need to close. your eyes is what happens in the television broadcast. They show the ball flying out. They zoom in on a fan here. They remind you that you're watching television. Yeah. And what they're doing is, did I, I can remember if I talked to this on a recent episode, but I'll talk about it again. No, we have not discussed it on Sharp Tech.

Well, I will say, you know, I saw that I'm repeating myself from somewhere. I will vouch for Ben. I watch this clip and we'll put it in the show notes. I watch this clip while keeping my eyes closed. And it was pretty trippy to listen to the. and sort of feel transported to some degree. And I can't even imagine how much cooler it will be when you can do something similar in a headset. So what I want from a Vision Pro game experience is take the MBA. I want them to plant one of these cameras right at midcourt.

Take up one seat. So you're removing one sort of court side seat, which is very expensive. So we better to sell out to sort of make it worth it. And then you sit there. and the audio you get is the audio of being in the stadium. And the view you get is determined by you by turning your head. You look at where you want to look. You can look up, you can look down, you can look at one basket, you can look at the other.

You don't need multiple cameras. You don't need a production truck. You don't need announcers. It actually, I would argue that the superior VR experience for watching a game would actually be massively cheaper to produce. because all you need is that camera right there. Because what that camera is doing, it's not delivering you a television experience.

It's delivering you a portal. So you can be sitting in that seat from wherever you are in the world. And for something like soccer or baseball or basketball, what I want for that baseball clip is I don't want the cutting or whatever. I don't want the being reminded that I'm watching a facsimile of a baseball game. I want to be able to look where I want to look. And when I look at the billboards, because I looked at the billboard,

not because some TV producer chose that for me. This is all why F1 actually might not be the best fit, because we just said, is in person actually the best sort of view. It is kind of nice in this case because you're dealing with a three mile long track, whatever might be, that it follows around and it moves around. Maybe if you want to be a drone,

you can fly your drone or whatever might be. So there is a bit where F1 actually might not be the best fit. And I think that is a, you know, I'm glad you sort of brought that up because it is a point worth making. Yeah, it's a good point. I think the utopian vision for the Vision Pro,

part in the repetition there, that you have in terms of the future of watching sports in the Vision Pro is a little bit different than what's being laid out in this article and what Vecche is saying, oh my God, can you imagine a camera on a pit crew member's helmet or driver's helmet camera. and being able to shuttle through all his options.

But you actually want to watch a whole race that way, right? Like to me, again, I think the canonical, to my mind, the experience I want is that is, is that Vision Pro camera at Center Court. And you like you, you get the sound, you get the visuals and it's self-directed. There's no like that's like it's going to and it's definitely viable. And it would be awesome. I will settle for F1 on Apple TV in the Vision Pro. as a compromise until we get to that point. Exactly, because it just looks so amazing in 4K, and everyone across sports media is still too broke to broadcast most games in 4K. So I hope that

one day we get there, maybe Apple can spend some of its money on high-tech cameras that will blow our collective minds. The sliding scale approach to exclusivity also really interesting, because I think on one hand, F1 still wants to reach as many people as possible, and that could be a reflection of that. The eternal tension between subscription and free and ad supported. Well, and Apple may also recognize that, look, it's going to take us a couple years to get real market penetration where we can go exclusive without like undermining the value of the product.

So in any event, I just thought it was an interesting clause baked into this rumor, at this point, but it does make a lot of sense for everyone involved. Ben, I promised you we would hit a bunch of different topics tonight. This is now one of my favorite podcasts. So thank you for joining me. Do you have any final thoughts before we sign off? Nope. No, I don't. No more final thoughts. There you go. Okay. Well, we are coming back later in the week. And Ben, have a good. good rest of the day and I'll talk to you in 48 hours. Sounds good. I'll talk to you later.