TBPN Live - John Reviews The Social Reckoning, Muse Wonder, Apple’s HomeView | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:01 How was your weekend? It was great. Too long. Yeah? Too long. Yeah. Four days is way too much. I missed you.
Starting point is 00:00:08 Yeah. I missed us. I missed the Ultradome. I'm glad to be back. We are back. And, yeah, it was a good weekend. I saw the social reckoning. Big drop, big weekend.
Starting point is 00:00:20 Because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty. But it's interesting. Do you think that the meta team tried to time up, Muse Wonder, all the good news to like fight back like the cheeky pine appearance because they completely steamrolled the movie they won i don't know they needed to because the movie got really the crazy thing is that i had i have zero desire to see the movie i will not be going to the movie yeah and in
Starting point is 00:00:46 many ways it's my job to at least go yeah i feel like i i figured you were going to go yeah so i felt like we were covered so i did go it's crazy that i'm like it's crazy how excited i am yeah to go see the nathan fielder film Yeah. And how little I even care to even know about, I don't even care about your review. Okay. Well, you're about to care. Others might.
Starting point is 00:01:09 My review is going to be riveting, okay? Okay. So it's Saturday. It's a little rainy in L.A. And so I'm like, oh, I'll throw on this jacket. I'll get a little cozy. You go out. I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place, and then I go to the movie.
Starting point is 00:01:26 So I walk in. And I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for like a, you know, a nice rainy day. in L.A. I walk in to the theater. I sit down for the social reckoning and it stars, you know, it focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz. And in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man who dressed up a Spider-Man going to see Avengers. And I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket, my exact, I had the same jeans and boots too. It was really, really striking. I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie.
Starting point is 00:02:06 So it was very funny. And I was like, that is exactly my jacket. Like, it's not even just the same brand. I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway, it was a very funny moment. It's not quite a sequel to the social network. Like, it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations at Meta at Facebook. It's very much about the, so the, the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg. And it's a much more peripheral. The story follows data engineer Francis Howgan and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era.
Starting point is 00:02:44 The race towards superintelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. I'm not surprised at this movie is an underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now. Worldwide opening was $9 million on a budget of $40 million. So it's like gearing up. up to be a flop, but not, you know, the game's not over yet. And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting's fairly compelling, the lighting, and it moves quickly. Story ebbs and flows nicely over the two-hour runtime, but it feels like a time capsule
Starting point is 00:03:15 from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like, I was like, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh, yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019, but since then, it's a It's like UFC, complete fashion makeover, change the company's name. They have fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements. And then AI, obviously, personal assistance. Like even hearing the word Facebook feels antiquated now because people have actually shifted to, well, Instagram is the more important social platform.
Starting point is 00:03:49 And then MSL and the AI stuff is really important. So Muse is a more important buzzword than Facebook. And then they rename the company and stuff. So it felt like a blackfliped past. You know, people often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about meta. You could ask, you know, will Mews margins be comparable to META's core ad business?
Starting point is 00:04:17 But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask, like, does Muse wonder jumping really good on the benchmarks? Does that change the underlying? Is it benchmarks? Is it benchmarks? That's a hard question. And even cheeky pipes. Even Cheeky Pint was pushing on that.
Starting point is 00:04:29 Exactly. But corporate media. Sorkin completely drops the ball. Yeah. Doesn't address the fact that if MUSE is, if Mews Wonder is competitive, does that change the underlying frontier model economic thesis? Like, that's the question that people want to ask. That's the question that media has a responsibility to ask and to investigate and to interrogate. And yet Sorkin completely shirks his duty there.
Starting point is 00:04:51 Will the retention curve for Mews smile? You know, right now there's some, there's a post by D.D. Dash. showing that Muse, you know, there's a lot of excitement on day one. After 14 days, a lot of people have stopped using the product. Sometimes these things come back. What's going on there? Completely ignored by the movie. It was very, very odd. And so instead, he focuses on old stories that have been settled in the courts, essentially. But there were a bunch of other funny things. I was taking notes. And it's hard because, Michael, are you here to give your review? I have to be very careful because I'm a fan of Aaron Sorken. I think he's great.
Starting point is 00:05:26 He has made a lot of great work. This did not feel like one of those great works. What specifically was lacking? Because I thought the acting was pretty good, and I thought like, if it had been three hours, I would have been like, oh, that was a drag, but like two hours, I thought it was okay. Was it just like too contrived? Because I feel like my critique, I think it's probably very different than yours. Yeah, contrived feels like a good word.
Starting point is 00:05:47 It just feels like it felt like all the character dynamics and the dialogue and everything just felt so forced. Yeah. And it felt like it was trying to be like an 80s, like journalistic thriller, like all the president's men or something like that. But it just felt like kind of out of place and it felt too polished to actually fit in that in that scope. I don't know. It was a total glazed piece on the Wall Street Journal because Jeff Horowitz. Maybe I want to watch it now. Jeff Horowitz, I mean, sure he's in shape, but let's be honest, Jeremy Allen White, the guy is diced.
Starting point is 00:06:17 He's absolutely shredded. And they cast him as like the ultimate chat. There were a bunch of other funny moments where Jeff Horowitz. the character, the journalist, shows up. And he's like, I don't even have a Facebook. I don't know how to use the GPS stuff in my, he's like the extremely offline guy. And there's a whole bunch of funny, funny moments
Starting point is 00:06:37 where the benefits of social media are kind of revealed through this because part of it takes place during COVID. And the Francis Howgan character is like, oh yeah, I set up a Facebook group for all these scientists and everyone like really understands how serious COVID's gonna be. And the journalist who's like offline, like doesn't care about tech is like, that's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. And it's like, wait, like you're kind of pitching me the whole idea of like the internet.
Starting point is 00:07:02 Like it's like the Bology calling COVID so much earlier. Like there clearly are some benefits here. Oh, they have this funny moment where they're like Mark Zuckerberg has a bulletproof couch. And they're framing it as like, look at how weird this guy is. And it's the meme like literal coolest thing ever. Like this thing sucks. Because I'm watching there. I'm like, ballproof couch.
Starting point is 00:07:21 That's amazing. A couch that's always watching your back. Yeah, so the idea is that you can hide under it. And they kind of frame it as like he's being a coward by having it because you should obviously charge straight into the hail of gunfire if you're being attacked. But, and they're like, he would be hiding behind his bulletin. But did I not kind of call this like two months ago
Starting point is 00:07:39 that no one would care at all about the whole premise of this movie anymore? Yeah. Like the whole, the narrative. Yeah. Even the media itself is so far moved on. Yeah. That they, I would have liked. to see this kind of production on the current AI race.
Starting point is 00:08:01 Yeah. And I think we're getting something like that with artificial. Yeah. But it's interesting because like the social network. Yeah. I don't know, I don't know if I can say this. This is a cult classic? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:13 Yeah. I mean, it was a box office success as well. Box office success, but within tech, it's like it's a classic. It was so, it was so influential on the culture, sort of had the opposite effect. that the makers of the film maybe wanted it to have, where everyone was like, I want to be like Zuck. Yeah. I want to be that guy.
Starting point is 00:08:33 At least on the inside of the industry. And in some ways, like I could imagine that Zuck and his team were worried about this movie because the last one was like such a hit in the outside world and within the tech industry. And they've had to, it was like, I'm sure, hard to reinvent like Zuck or figure out who he was outside of, you know, at some point in the 2010s, it felt like he was just becoming the character. He was looking more and more like the character in the movie in some ways, like almost like becoming. Wait, when? This was like late.
Starting point is 00:09:06 Yeah. And then PT has that idea that it's funny and ironic that Mark Zuckerberg became the Justin Timberlake character from the movie. Yeah, or that was. But it was like so influential on, it was so influential on the industry. and especially the next generation of founders that it seemed like it had an influence on Zuck. Oh, interesting. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:09:31 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's funny. I mean, it definitely feels like the post-2020 UFC, like, you know, fashion remake. Yeah, that was like, wait, who am I? Who do I want to be? Yeah, yeah. I have to figure out. And it created a ton of distance
Starting point is 00:09:44 because the Jeremy Strong character, it feels like it's a completely different person. And then he also, Jeremy Strong reads as kind of older, but he's playing a much younger character than what you see on Cheeky Pint, who's like actually Jeremy Strong's age, but has become something else. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting, weird things. Yeah, there's also a bunch of things where you're like, oh, that just doesn't, that doesn't, that's not how things work. Like, there's a scene where Mark Zuckerberg is, like, addressing the board and explaining how
Starting point is 00:10:12 the algorithm will work. And he's like, emoji reactions will be worth five points. And retweets will be worth 50 points. And it's like, seen as like, oh, my God, he designed the algorithm for controversy and it's like that's, you know that the algorithm is like 12 levels deep. It's like he goes to Adam Masseri, who goes to the chief technology officer, goes to the VP of engineering, who says like, okay, what are we doing? It's like, well, we created this optimization pipeline for retention that balances all these things. It's a bunch of, it's a bunch of data and we have no idea what's going on the black box, but we saw the retention went up.
Starting point is 00:10:45 There's no one at Facebook who's like, add another three points to retweets or reposts or whatever, shares. It's like more, more signal than can be humanly understood for sure. Also, it's just hilarious view of, like, Hollywood's perception of tech that, like, the final shot of Mark Zuckerberg is him sitting in front of, like, a 42-inch TV in this, like, war room, and he's just, like, sitting there like this, and he's just watching code scroll by. Just, like, really fast code scrolling by. And it's like, why would you be reviewing code? extreme speeds during like it happens during like January 6th that's like that's not how you monitor a situation yeah you can just open Instagram yeah yeah and then also like they go through the Trump
Starting point is 00:11:30 band in this weird way where it's very much it's framed as like his decision and it's like if you were if you were paying attention on that day it's like very clear that all of the different tech CEOs were like in a group chat together talking about like hey if we're gonna do this we all got to do it at once because like otherwise we will be you know singled out as like the one that did that did it. So there's a bunch of interesting things. And yeah, also very weird that, uh, like Aaron Sorkin, like seems to be under the impression that Francis Hogan and Jeff Horwitz, like had a romance of some sort, like, which they deny and Jeff Horwitz was like Aaron Sorkin, please don't make it seem like
Starting point is 00:12:07 it was romantic. We were, I would, she was my source and we just worked together on this, but we weren't romantically involved. And there's like so many scenes where you're like, okay, they're trying to make, they're kind of making it look like they're going to date. And then they like sail off into the sunset. And you're like, oh, so did they get married? And you look it up. And it's like, no, they were both married to other people. Anyway, funny movie.
Starting point is 00:12:28 But the big news, of course, is meta. Zuck says meta has reached the frontier with its new muse wonder agent. What was the exact line? He said, he said he, you know, he doesn't get it. We'll get into that. Okay, he's going back forward. So this is from the Financial Times. Mark Zuckerberg says meta has reached the AI,
Starting point is 00:12:46 Frontier, FT interview, tech billionaire, tout's release of new Muse Wonder model after vast spending to challenge rivals in AI race. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowdstrike secures AI and stop to reaches. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking with the FT as meta released, it's Muse Wonder AI model on Monday. This is watermelon, right? Everyone's doing the fruit thing. There was strawberry and then the banana and now there's watermelon. He said, the new system was going to allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what's being done in the AI field. The Silicon Valley Group claims Muse Wonder outperforms or performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic and Open AI in some tasks, according to technical benchmarks. The release marks a major milestone for Zuckerberg, who, since last year, has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta's AI leadership, build vast data centers and higher star AI researchers on multimillion-dollar salaries, in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI Anthropic and Google.
Starting point is 00:13:45 Quote, getting to this point required both a large amount of compute and investment and a lot of very rigorous scientific work by the group working on it over an extended period of time. So he's bullish. He's posting on X about it. What's your take, Jordy? I was trying to understand how Mark and Alex really felt about the model by watching Cheeky Pint on the drive to work today. I was listening.
Starting point is 00:14:12 It's great to have Cheeky Pint back. Yeah. I thought that they were all like, I mean, this was the most candid I've ever seen Zach. That's great. He felt like he was just hanging out, having a beer trying to have a couple beers. Yeah. And so I thought it was great.
Starting point is 00:14:29 He did. Tyler cataloged it. He did. How many exactly Tyler? He did. It was 1.4 pints. 1.4. Okay.
Starting point is 00:14:36 Okay. And I will just go out and say, as somebody who's had. a couple drinks while recording a podcast, as we would celebrate whenever we would double way back in the day. I certainly, we always felt that the content just got worse. Totally. Like, it was like each sip, it was getting like a little bit worse. Yeah. So we basically, no, it's a funny idea. There was a funny bit. It'll be looser. It'll be better content, but that's just not what happens. You're just not as sharp. You're just not a sharp. Like, you're just period not as sharp. And, and, uh, yeah, it wasn't like, suddenly it was like, there's no reason we're here for three hours.
Starting point is 00:15:09 So if you're going to do it, you've got to practice. You got to be drinking six to 12. So anyway, if I'm Zuck and I have to launch this new model family and talk about views and all these things, you got to give him credit. Because either one, he was practicing having like 10 beers a day. So that when he had 1.4, he was still feeling like sharp. Yeah. I like to imagine. He built up his tolerance.
Starting point is 00:15:34 But either way, ballsy to come on and just. start throwing them back. So yeah, I was I was trying to understand, you know, the benchmarks are all amazing. Mews is a great product. People love it. They like manage by by being like later movers, they manage to solve a bunch of problems. Totally. And like created just a more compelling user experience. I thought it was cool. They were even talking about how they even talk about their experience with like open claw, sure, which was cool. But I was trying to, if you actually listened to the wording, Zuck's wording, he said,
Starting point is 00:16:10 the quote that stood out to me and I had to play it back, he said, this is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier. This is the beginning of like MSL, kind of being at the frontier. I mean, it's so hard. At the 24, at the 24 minute
Starting point is 00:16:28 Mark. Brother Collison then said, so you think this is Astra or or Fable level? And then Alex and Zuck kind of like fight over each other for a second, which can't knock them for. We do the same thing. But then they said by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. Which to me is like, yeah, we all see the benchmarks. They look amazing. Yeah. But you've been accused of bench maxing before and so we all want to know. No, no. I don't think they've been
Starting point is 00:16:55 accused of bench vaccine before. Oh, maybe like early Obama stuff. Like everyone went through this with Spark. Yeah, maybe. Sparks bench, you know. Okay. But it's not like. And so to me it's like, So you think this is Astor of Fable level, and then you answer, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. So, again, like, I don't think that they are actually, based on a few of these factors. Yeah. I don't think they're, I don't think they're really at the frontier. Okay. And I think it will become pretty obvious that that's the case.
Starting point is 00:17:26 Yeah. As people. I mean, these things always, like, the crown goes back and forth so quickly. Like, they're, you know, they've been working on this for a long time. They launch it. Who knows that the other labs have up their sleeves to. fire back, et cetera. But I do think the language is odd because it feels like there's pretty little downside
Starting point is 00:17:43 to just being like, yeah, this is a Fable class model and just use the anthropic terminology because everyone has an idea of what Fable means. It's like big model, you know, really expensive. And you're like, yeah, we're giving this away. We're putting it in the same category. But it's basically free because it's integrated into the product. But here's what is. I think, here's what I think is interesting.
Starting point is 00:18:07 And then people can quibble over like the, I think you have to be way more excited about, you have to be way more excited about what MSL is doing. Yeah. Than, then Google or SpaceX at this point. Yeah. And you have to give, like, everyone should be giving Mark credit for that. Because if you're thinking about rewinding a year, even after the talent raids, hey, a year from now, you're going to be more excited and more interested about what MSL is doing than Google and XAI,
Starting point is 00:18:35 SpaceX. Yeah. You know, this was, this was pre-merger. But, yeah, so yeah, they're, they're competitive. For sure, for sure. Yeah, it is interesting that SpaceX has yet to launch a model. Elon's been very cautious with the words on like when the progress will come from that team on GROC and different versions. But obviously they have a cursor.
Starting point is 00:18:59 They have great team inside. So you would think that there would be more progress there. But he's been sort of downplaying it. little bit more. But yeah, yeah, it's interesting. The big debate, the funny thing about the interaction with like the meta universe and like the EA world is, I mean, going back to the movie, there's this moment where there, like somebody asks Francis Howgan, like, what, what percentage of teenage girls having a bad experience on Instagram would be acceptable to you? Like developing body image issues and she's like 2%, maybe 1%? She's like backtranex.
Starting point is 00:19:35 it and they're like it's 34% and that's like a bombshell but from like an EA perspective it's like oh so like potentially net good if like if like 46% are positively impacted and only 34% are negatively infected it's like you take that trade all day long because it like maths out in the spreadsheet not how people actually think about things but it really goes to show you how different philosophical how different philosophically some of the some of the worlds are right now and and this is like the The AI safety world is like colliding with Mark Zuckerberg right now. Like Andrew Curran summed it up, he said, pacing is out the window. For it to work, every American lab needed to be on board.
Starting point is 00:20:14 Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among U.S. labs breaks at all, as the others will be forced to accelerate or get passed. Mark has a staggering amount of compute and has been all in on compute CAPEX for years. Even in the face of some investor opposition, he never stopped building his in for once. he said on the earnings call a couple years ago that he'd rather overspend now and potentially even be wrong than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride and he's not going to slow down for team pacing to solve a defection like this.
Starting point is 00:20:46 They would have needed a supportive pro pacing administration that was passing capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring non-compliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite market. Trump's ear. President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen are all completely aligned on policy. It's full speed ahead. And if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. This breaks pacing. And so the interesting thing is like the, like, are we on the
Starting point is 00:21:16 frontier? Are we not? There are benefits to being on the frontier from a prosumer adoption perspective. Like people will be like, oh, I got to try the new model. It's Fable Class. Or it's, it's Astra, but it's cheaper. Or it's Astra, but it's integrated by Instagram. People will be excited to try that. But if you actually say, like, now we're on the frontier, we're the most important AI lab. It's like, okay, so what are you doing about the potential problems from AI? Like, now you're the one getting
Starting point is 00:21:40 the hard questions about that stuff. Being like a strong second, a strong third actually gives you a little bit of cover because you can say, oh, well, like the most dangerous stuff, like, yeah, like Muse Wonder's great at coding, but you can't build bio-weapons. Like, that's not anything.
Starting point is 00:21:56 Like, we'll see that emerge at the frontier labs first. We'll see those problems. confronted by anthropopical. And that's one of the reasons why you can say, like, they're not at the frontier because the researchers that are at the frontier sometimes have this like, you know, stare where you're like, oh, you've seen things that know, you've seen man-made horrors, you know, beyond all comprehension. Yeah. Let's pull up this video on Saturday, Zuck, uh,
Starting point is 00:22:23 went live. You went back to the barbecue. Went back to the barbecue. Back to the egg. Wow. Let's pull up this video. Let's get some sound. Don.
Starting point is 00:22:30 Yeah, Tank. We're smoking sausage. Smoke whatever the fuck we want. Wow. Okay, so... Is this real? Catch me up to speed. I was just a boy during this era, but he didn't used to, like, post selfie videos
Starting point is 00:22:47 during the social network. Well, he was in and out of going direct through the entire journey. Okay. So he, like... Because, like, part of the reason that this new, the new movie doesn't hit, is because you just see Zuck all the time talking to people. Totally. And he'll go on podcasts a couple times in line.
Starting point is 00:23:08 And you could do an impression of the new Zuck and make fun of him and do a more exaggerated version of this character and poke fun at the quirks of this character. But it's a completely different vector of like comedic attack than the previous art. It's funny that they're talking about deploying capital for AI spend. And Alex is like, you have to make this very large investment. you have to make big decisions about how you're going to invest and develop the technology before you know that there's data to support this. And it's funny because you go back and listen to Dario on Dwar Keshe, and he's like,
Starting point is 00:23:42 there's these people that are just yellowing. And everyone's like, oh, he's talking about Open AI. But it's like, oh, no, he was actually talking about meta too. And it was absolutely the right thing to do. So it's just funny. Yeah, it seems that way so far. But this didn't, yeah, using like this line to try to criticize Z, Zox's management style is like he's always operated the business this way. He's always been willing
Starting point is 00:24:04 to bet the company. He's always been willing to invest more. He did, he did this with the Metaverse. You think, I don't think if you look back, it's like, company if you're just spending on the cash flow. Yeah, not betting, not betting the company. He's just like, I have this cash machine and I'm going to spend it. Like, he actually treats $10 billion like it's $200 billion, you know? And like, to him, it's like, you know, a nice car. Yeah. And for other people. Yeah. And I just never thought With the Metaverse, he was like, oh, like, this is 100% going to work. So that's why we're going to invest so much. It was like, there's a chance that this is the next paradigm on a shorter time horizon than the rest of the world thinks.
Starting point is 00:24:39 And we're going to invest against that. And it's okay if it doesn't work out. Clearly, the company has been fine. It is remarkable how quick companies can catch up in AI, can get another foothold, can train a new model, can get near the frontier or to the frontier with enough effort versus math. metaverse and VR where Microsoft says HoloLens and like it didn't really go anywhere and like Apple when are they going to fire back with the next Visionaire or Vision Pro or something. It's just completely when you're when you're operating in the domain of pure software things move so much faster. Anyway speaking of Apple Apple, Apple just announced Home View a $299 Smart Home Hub. John Turnus posted it on X. Let's play the video and I want to know are you in the market for this? It looks like a big Apple watch, like the rounded rectangles or the rounded square. You're spinning like it?
Starting point is 00:25:36 Yeah, we heard about this. And I thought it was going to be much more like the Pixar lamp, like with an articulated arm. It has a much simpler design to it. I think it just swivels and then you can manually adjust it up and down. But I guess it can follow you around the room if you put it on a kitchen island. And they're touting the new Apple intelligence and they think that will catch up. It is interesting how what they will have to do to catch up to Muse and Instinct and Dot and Grockbot. Like there are several AI agent products that are barely fully featured at this point.
Starting point is 00:26:10 And they all have pros and cons based on what they integrate with. Apple has an incredible integration point and an incredible model partner with Gemini. I think if you went to Noah Shin and said you can only use deep mind models, but they're free. he would say, yeah, game on. Like, I can build a great product. But it'll be interesting to see, like, when do they have the, hey, go and, go and, you know, plan a birthday party, reserve, make a reservation, create the invite, send it out to all my friends, and, you know, just come to me with the key decision-making questions.
Starting point is 00:26:49 And I don't want to be involved. I want you to actually do this agentically. that functionality, that ability feels far off. It screams, you know, it screams stagnation. Okay. And yeah, it's hard to get excited about this. I would be, so here's where I would get excited, John. If Apple actually, and maybe this is where they're going.
Starting point is 00:27:10 Yep. If Apple was committed to actually making this device be able to control all of the electronics around my house from like my gates to cameras to lights to cameras to lights to HVAC, all that kind of thing, I would be extremely excited. Because the current system I have in my house is like some random tablet thing. I don't even know who makes it attached to the wall. And it controls everything and the software is really bad. And if they were going to actually, is that what they're doing?
Starting point is 00:27:40 Or is this literally just like a half iPad, a half computer that sits on your kitchen counter? Yeah, it's an iPad. And that functionality exists. Like Astra or Fable can like straight up reverse. engineer the API to your garage door clicker and make it work on the smart home. But then they bump into the OS layer all over the place. But I think they're going to reverse engineer that too. I think the end state might be buy this and jail break it and run your own software that's, you know,
Starting point is 00:28:15 sort of instantiated on the fly or forked from something. But in terms of industrial design, it looks pretty nice. Yeah, really solving a problem that no one has. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Rains Capital at the New York Stock Exchange. John needed to break the ice, so he ran another ad for the New York Stock Exchange. Oh, I didn't.
Starting point is 00:28:41 Sorry. Yeah, solving a problem that I don't have. You know when you're FaceTiming and you need the phone to follow you around the room, and it's hard to hold it because you're. cooking and you want it and you want the camera to follow you around the room yeah but we built the solution for that so meta had a product that competed with this called the portal yeah same thing and i was i like that for the name it's portal time baby yeah i i actually did get a bunch of them for family members during covid and we used them like once and then and then they started collecting
Starting point is 00:29:15 dust uh they worked as like picture friends basically but uh they they they did not become like the smart home. Although maybe they should bring that back now that they have muse. Yeah, and I'd just be curious how Apple thinks about this. Is this like, yeah, we have enough customers that like a million people will buy this? Yeah. Like, does it actually move anything? I would just like to, yeah, I would love to see that like really bold bet on like, we are actually going to provide iPhone level software. Yeah. For your entire home. Some big news on the timeline. What happened? Open AI discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of their offices. They used models to understand.
Starting point is 00:29:51 the device and where it came from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We refer the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agents and prosecutors who move quickly to make an arrest. The FBI's investigation is ongoing, and we will continue to support their work, just reading the Open AI Newsroom. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weight source code or customer data. The employee was terminated. We take protecting our technology data and people seriously and as a matter of national importance, our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors from insider risk to cyber criminals to nation states. And this case is an example of how
Starting point is 00:30:35 an AI can help address these sophisticated security threats. Federal prosecutors say an employee from Saudi Arabia planted an audio recorder and left another unattended in his bag. I'm not going to be able to fully pronounce this. Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan, Saudi National, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court today. They have a camera back there that caught it? What is going on?
Starting point is 00:31:11 Well, no, was this maybe his own device that he recorded himself with? Maybe. I don't know. I don't know why you need video from on the TV. That's very odd. No, but it said it was a recording device. But I thought it would just be audio. I know, but maybe it just happened to...
Starting point is 00:31:25 Wow, that's crazy, crazy, crazy. Interesting. Yeah, really, really wild. You wanted to be a fly on the wall for the wrong reasons. You got to be in those meetings just for the mindset, like our friend, the poster, who wanted to be on the fly on the wall at the White House dinner. You know, this is very, very crazy.
Starting point is 00:31:44 Really underscores, like, the stakes here that there are, like, potentially like, nation states and spies. is afoot, all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff going on in the AI race. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And we'll see you tomorrow. Cheers.
Starting point is 00:32:04 Bye.

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