Apple HomePad Imminent, OpenAI Dots Explained, AI Safety Charade

0:00 In space, no one can hear you scream. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. Apple's homepad may be coming October thirteenth. That's in the news. And iPhone Duo, you can pre-pre-order it this Monday. ChatGPT had their dev day and announced dots, AI agents that do a bunch of stuff for you.

0:17 Paramount appoints a new co-CEO. Amazon is giving their delivery drivers glasses that record everything and a ton more. This episode is brought to you by OriginHQ and you, the members who support us directly. And I'm one of your hosts, Steven Robles, joined by the famous and infamous who's just making his rounds everywhere, Jason Aten. How's it going, Jason?

0:36 It's good. I love the way you do our intros because every time without fail you say something that I'm like, Hold on, we're talking about that. I better go look and see what he put in here. I know. It and every yes, I get the rundown done at least twelve hours before we record. and I look through it and every time you say something that I'm like, How did I miss that? Okay.

0:54 The Amazon delivery glasses, that'll be in the lightning round. I mean it's you know, it's it's just a whole other thing. All right, now ~ some the quote. Let's start with the quote. In space no one can hear you scream. It's a pretty well known quote. It it's one of the You what movie that's most famous quotes you've used, right? Yeah, it's from Alien. Okay.

1:06 One of the most famous. It is from Alien. We're going to talk about the cutification of AI in a minute. About all the companies like Muse AI and Dots trying to make their AI agents seem cute. And I said that because someone replied to my threads post about that with this picture, which is the teddy bear head on the xenomorph from the movie Alien.

1:29 And I thought that was pretty funny. But i it does seem about right after my experience. I do think of Muse as this little I almost say cockroach, but I don't mean that in a pejorative sense. What was the the movie with the gremlins? Like just I mean it's called Gremlins. They turn evil at night or whatever?

1:42 Thank you. Okay, I've I've actually never seen it. Yeah. The movie with the Gremlins. yes, the Gremlin movie. The Gremlins. I have seen Batteries Not Included, which is a very deep cut, but I've not seen Gremlins. So have you seen Batteries Not Included? Do you remember that movie? I think so, yeah. Leave us a five star rating and review.

1:59 Have you seen Batteries Not Included and Short Circuit? All three of them. Those are some of my favorite movies. And hat or no hat. Jason was wearing a hat and hoodie today that I was not prepared for. It it took me a full 10 minutes in our pre-show to actually figure To to absorb it, to process it. out what was happening. I said, You Who who am I talking to?

2:15 sound like Jason. Is this what AI thinks Jason looks like and it's just fake? You sound like Jason you look like Jason. That's it. Now I said Jason was famous and infamous because Jason, you've been making the rounds everywhere. Your articles have been covered by so many news outlets. You've been on the news. Who can you say or no should I cut that out?

2:32 Wait a minute. Okay. No, you don't have to cut it out. I've done some so I've yeah, I've made the rounds. Does that sound any better? You've made the rounds. We'll get okay, we'll get we'll get into that. We did that. Also I wanted to say last episode, I wanted to point it out and missed it. We passed episode one hundred fifty, Jason. One hundred fifty episodes.

2:47 Isn't that wild? Now that does include one or two extras. Listen, I don't want to get into it. Okay, great. Okay, great. I try to mark bonus episodes as bonus that are not actually numbered. Sometimes that happened anyways. But yeah, but 150. And you know, we're coming up on our third year because we started in January of 2024.

3:07 And so yeah, we're coming up. But anyway, I enjoy I enjoyed doing this podcast with you, Yeah. It's so fun. Yeah. Jason. Congrats on 150. Yeah, that's fun. All right. Five-star ratings and reviews. Thank you to McBain A99 from the UK says loves the daily and weekly show. So they're a member. Thank you for that.

3:20 Battery percentage on, but we won't hold that against him. But pencil up. Pencil up and watch only on Siri. So he's riding both sides. There you go. He's on both of our sides. And JP Tooy from the USA, listen, I know who this is. This is Jennifer Patterson Tooie of The Verge left us a five star rating review and asked us to do more smart home coverage.

3:38 ~ Of course. So thank thank you for that, Jennifer. And we want to have you on. So if you're listening, if this Apple home pad really does come out in a couple weeks, Please come on the show. We need to talk about it in depth. That'd be a fun episode. Absolutely. I'm generally adamantly opposed to having guests, but I would accept that one. I'm just kidding.

3:56 We'll do it as a bonus episode. It off Thursday. Yeah, yeah. ~ Will Kennard from the UK, battery percentage on. Point for you. And I wanted to thank, deeply thank Alex, ~ for sending me an email because I mentioned how Apple is going to be introducing subscriber video soon. That was in kind of towards the end of the show last week.

4:16 And I talked about how my process for making sure the audio was good for the video was very lengthy because I basically re-render the whole show because Riverside's audio isn't great. So I edit my own audio and then I put it together and Alex sent me an email like, hey, FFmpeg, which is a great like kind of utility that lives in the terminal of your Mac.

4:37 It doesn't live there, but you know what I mean. That's how you work use it. You can use FFmpeg to swap out the audio track of a video file in seconds. And I asked him like, Well, how do you do He's I have no idea. I think it just is able to do that. I was like, okay. Yeah. So I did what you do. I went to ask Claude.

4:55 I said, Hey, I heard F Fmpeg can do this. Can it do this? And Claude was like, Yep. I said, Well, can you give me a script that I can use in a shortcut? And it gave me the script. And so now I have a shortcut where when I run it, I can choose the video file I get from Riverside. I can choose the audio file that I edited, which has to be exactly the same length.

5:13 But once I choose those, like in three seconds, it spits out another video file and it just swapped the audio track. And it's gonna save me like an hour a week. And I think we'll make it ~ possible maybe when we if if and when Apple offers subscriber video and Transistor, our host, supports it, I might be able to do it all because this is gonna save me a ton of time. So thank you, Alex. That was a huge help. And I'll put a link to that shortcut down in the show notes if somebody else has a reason to to do that.

5:39 So yeah. Yeah. it's funny. I think Claude really likes FFMPEG because the number of times I've asked it about trying to do something, I'm like, you know, when I export sometimes I'll open a video in in quick time and I'll just click export audio, but you don't get any choices about like the whatever, whatever. And it's like, you should use FFMPEG for I'm like, I'm not doing that. And then it's like, what if I had a folder where what every time a audio file dropped into that you just transcribed it? And it's like, You should use FFM for I'm like, What doesn't Whisper transcription just watch folders?

6:05 Which it does. It's like Cloud really wants me to use FFMPEG. They've got like a behind the scenes deal or something. Yeah, I mean I use shortcuts for that. I have another shortcut I'll put in the thing. I have to write I have to make a note. I have to in bold. Well the audio one is easy because the transcription app I use will just watch the folder and every time something Right.

6:22 shows up in it it will just so I have dropped well, we'll get to it later in personal text. Sorry. I'm I'm jumping too far ahead. Okay, well, I'm so excited. I have a shortcut that I'll also put in the notes where it you you when you run the shortcut, you can select a folder and if you have a bunch of video files in that folder, it will transcribe them all. And it'll just save dot text files in that same folder with all the transcripts and it's great.

6:43 So yeah, you could do all we'll get to we'll get to that in personal tech. We'll we'll save it. Amazing. Jason, you have just a few days left for you to get ready for your iPhone duo pre pre order. Okay. Apple is doing this if you every year Apple does this with the regular iPhone launch, but they're doing it for the iPhone Duo October twelfth, which is sorry, not you don't have a few days, you have a week in a few days.

7:05 This is next Monday, October twelfth. You'll be able to pre-pre order your iPhone Duo, meaning you can get ready. You can go in, you can say if you're trading a device in, you can choose your carrier, connect your carrier account, choose your model, the storage, the color, and get ready for the pre-order that's happening on the Friday.

7:25 And that is Friday, October sixteenth is the official pre order. But on Monday, the twelfth, you'll be able to pre pre order. So get ready, Jason. How you gonna? I don't even understand why this is a thing that exists. I th I don't hold on. Why? You don't ~ I get it. Yeah. Explain to me why the pre pre order process makes any sense.

7:45 They're telling you it's gonna be really hard to pre-order. Is that the point? Is it trying to create just the perception that it'll be really hard to pre-order? So you should create your pre-order in advance. But the creating a pre order in advance is purely a an exercise in like getting people excited about a thing, which is fine.

8:01 No, no. No, no, no, no, no. If you're connecting this to a carrier, there's been many times where in the process of pre pre ordering that something will I'll have to make a decision or something has to change, or just making sure like my card on file that the Apple store is about to use is good. Like all those steps saves me a lot of time, especially the connecting carrier.

8:23 Because when you do that pre pre have you never done the pre pre order? I've literally never done it and I've literally never bought a phone connected to a carrier. Well no, hold on. Not literally I was gonna say. never, but not since like the iPhone eleven. I just buy them. I don't want any I don't You just buy the unlocked? ~ well that's the difference.

8:39 want none of those carriers listening to my iPhone. I'm shh I Yeah, but connect it to Verizon as soon as you get it. Jason's trying to no he's trying to stoke people. Just saying. We'll get to Muse AI in a minute. Don't worry about it. ~ but no, I connected to my carrier every time. So I tell Apple like I'm They charge you more for that, you know. They charge you thirty five dollars more for that I mean they're gonna charge you that activation fee when you put it on the carrier.

8:58 phone. No, no, not when I just swap it. ATT does. ATT I've never paid for that. does, and they're they're scalpers. I'll just say that. Because I've had like a pixel phone or whatever that I've like switched my eSIM to and back. I've switched a line back and forth, and I get an activation charge every time I switch it.

9:17 See, that's that's insane. That should not happen. But that's AT. And that's listen, hey, I might switch it because ATT is supposedly not gonna offer this cellular handoff so I can switch between my AT Pro Max and do I do it. Can you imagine if they charged you thirty five dollars every time you unlocked your phone?

9:30 This is what I'm saying. If they're charging me that for activation, this is probably why they're not doing the handoff feature. Listen, I leave us a five star rating review. Shoot us up on social media. T Mobile has the handoff feature now. Verizon has said it's coming. I'll have to actually price out because I have like my entire family is on this plan.

9:48 But I mean the handoff feature might make me switch. I've been on ATT since singular, like singular era. Like back in ~ five, I think. So I'm down. I'm down, I'll switch. We'll see. Anyway, I would do the pre-pre order if you want to order iPhone Duo, especially if you connect it to a carrier, which I do. Like I tell it I'm going to upgrade this phone line and all that kind stuff. And you sign into your ATT account and all that.

10:11 That's why that is useful. Monday, October 12th, the pre-pre order is coming. And then the next day, Jason, supposedly we are finally, after years of waiting, getting the Apple home pad. Mark German, who's launched a new show. Congrats, Mark, on launching a podcast. I believe it launches today as we record.

10:32 ~ the homepad, October 13th. Mark German says it's going to be coming. Apple's announcing it on that day. This is supposedly going to be the square ish iPad like screen, a six inch display, Mark German is saying, maybe on an arm, like the old iMac G4. And it will have some kind of facial recognition so it knows what user is approaching it. And if you, you know, it might show your calendar.

10:57 messages and stuff when you approach it and then it'll recognize someone else as they approach it. There'll be a guest mode so it doesn't show any sensitive information. Of course you'll be able to control your entire home and then Siri AI would be built into this. And we also might get a new home pod mini and Apple TV at the same time, Mark German is saying, because then they all those devices will be uploaded to Siri AI. I'm so excited Jason.

11:20 I'm very excited. I want all of this. You don't look excited, Jason. I'm just not excited about the name. I don't want if Home well, I don't know if it's gonna be called a home pad. it's called the home pad, I don't think I would buy it. I don't I don't What? think I want to tell people I have a I don't know what but I mean here's the thing.

11:38 What else would you call this thing? I don't know. They they're gonna call What else? it home pad with display, which is honestly a thing Apple might do. Yeah. They might Home pod with display. I mean display pad. I don't which is really the same thing. no not not display pad. That's the same thing because it's like display pod, sorry.

11:55 Apple Apple home display. I feel like they could be it could be that. Apple home it'll be Apple home something. It'll be the Apple Home Hub Nest Max. Thank you. Apple home No, I think I don't know, HomePad. Do you remember when the iPad was it was before the iPad came out, but there was a lot of pontification about the name.

12:17 And people were like, it's going to be the iSlate or it'll be the iTablet. And people were poo-pooing the name iPad because it sounded weird at first. It sounded like yeah, a hygiene product. A feminine hygiene product. That's the problem, And yeah. people were like, There's no way they're gonna call it iPad.

12:34 And sure enough, Steve Jobs is like We call it iPad. So Yeah. make they're not afraid of that word, obviously, but home home pad, I don't know, maybe that's what it is. What do you think? Over or under. You gonna go home pad? You betting on that? I would bet against that, but I would not bet a lot. Small bet. Small bet. I think all right, well I will say not. I think it's gonna be something different than the home pad, and we'll see who's right. Just for the heck of it.

12:59 Well no, we're both saying that. We're both saying I'm saying I'm betting it would not be the home pad, but I would not bet a lot of money because ~ I see, I see. I'm saying it's also just pretty likely that maybe that is what they're gonna call it. Maybe it's just Apple Pad. No, that would be terrible. No, don't do that.

13:14 At least don't bet. I I think it is more likely that it's like a new paradigm, like it's just the Apple home display or something like that. Apple Home Hub. Apple Home Hub. That's what I'm saying it's gonna be. Be I mean, if you Maybe. That that would work. and if you look back at the iPhone 18 event, Apple's new CEO, John Turnus, many times was like personal intelligence hub.

13:35 Personal intelligence hub. He said it like a bunch of times. And nah, that's too long. That's too long. Maybe that's the name of product. The Apple Personal Intelligence Hub. I think the Apple Home Hub, that sounds right. I'm going with that. I'm marking it down. Alright, I'm writing it down. Home. Apple I'm writing it down.

13:51 Abla Home. Anyway, I'm excited for this. I looked back, we've been talking me and Andrew talked about this on Home Kit Insider, I think seven years ago was the earliest episode that we mentioned it. This has been long rumored. Long rumored. So anyway. And I'm writing down Apple Home display just because I wanted to have something on the record.

14:08 Okay, very good, very good. We will we will check back on Jason's notepad. ~ his Apple home notepad in a couple weeks. Y it's very sophisticated. Very sophisticated. You know, side note, you have like 13 remarkable tablets, and you still I do. and you still use paper when you write down notes during this show.

14:26 Why don't you use a remarkable? Well, I typically throw this paper away afterward and I should not throw the remarkable away. That would be bad. ~ No, you should not you should not. They're expensive. They're expensive. I see. the remarkable that I like is the move, which is small, and the paper I'm using is not small.

14:41 Like I just and it is It is a big yeah. just the other thing that's nice about it is because it is just a large sheet of like a large pad of paper, I don't have to be especially precise when I just reach over to write something down. Okay, so large pet l size is a priority there. It's like speed. I just need to be able to quickly grab Yeah, yeah, yeah.

14:57 the pencil and just write something and yeah. That's why. That's really the re and it's also pretty the everything I'm writing down here is something with the exception of remind Steven to tell me something. Pretty much everything Yes, that's at the else on this list is simply for the show. And so I don't I don't it doesn't need to be sophisticated.

15:11 Right, right, right, right. You just burn it. Yeah. I've got a fireplace over there. You just stand there and watch it burn. That's it. You can't see it, but it I'm just kidding. It's actually a trash can and I just drop a match. That's not safe. That's not safe. All right. You've been on a tear. Speaking of speed, you've been doing a lot of stuff.

15:27 And I just wanna this is the section of the show where we just read Jason's articles together. No, we're not gonna do that. but you have We should. a new episode of Creative Effort with Ron Johnson, who was the created the Apple store alongside Steve Jobs. There's some great Steve Jobs stories in that episode.

15:41 So we'll link that below. Congrats. New episode. Super fun. Thanks. Yeah, it was really I know. I did actually get some like comments from people. They're like, Finally, so glad you you're back. Finally. Someone even posted on social media, like, Jason's back. I'm like, I do a podcast every week. I haven't done this one in a while.

15:56 Every week. I publish three to five articles a week. I've been around. I just hadn't Thing it thank you. I mean, three to five articles a week. And I mean you've been on another tear. And I just wanted to say one, well, great work, first of all. because you know, you covering this meta AI, Muse AI stuff.

16:14 The Verge covered it. ~ who else is linked to it? I mean Group are linked to it. I mean I think nine to five Mac, Apple Insider wrote an article about Apple Insider, w ~ which makes me mad. Fine, I like Apple Insider, but like everyone keeps linking to their article. I'm like But they they did link to mine, Yeah. I know I so that's fine. But they look to it in yours and it is funny like you pointed out that there's people from Meta who refuse to talk to you directly but are replying to all the other people sharing these articles.

16:39 Yeah. But and to be clear, you've not heard anything from them. Yeah. Well, so to be clear, I spoke yesterday with someone off the record or on Okay. background who is going to help me get to the bottom of this. Let's put it that way. And so the Okay. next step is to send all of the information I have to them, ~ so that we can get some but one of the things I wanted to say is like, you know, your chief spokesperson is out there essentially like calling me a liar, but no one has bothered to talk to me yet.

17:08 So that doesn't seem cool. Like maybe let's Does not. I'm more Like listen, I'll send you the Mac Mini. It's not it's not even mine. I don't care. Well that you Apple probably wouldn't like that. Like No, but I'm just saying, like, But yeah. ~ yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to have access. I'm perfectly happy to figure out what what actually happened here.

17:23 And if what actually happened, you look and you're like, you see how you managed to somehow click this one thing that whatever, whatever. My point will still be yes, but I was clear about what I wanted it to do, and this was not one of those things. So that's still a problem. About like I'm perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that some of this was just like I didn't notice that I had given it permission to do something.

17:42 The problem is like I have gone through, I've used Claude to go through everything to help me figure out like what's going on. It decompiled the app. It's looking through all the Really? logs. It's checking the TCC register, which is whenever every time an app asks for permission, an app asks for permission to do something, there's a register. But unfortunately, it only records the last instance of that.

18:00 So there's no way to know like statuses of things. Meta does have to take analytics from Muse. And so presumably there are analytics of like what you may have enabled at different times. And the person I spoke with was like, Would you be willing to give us permission to do that? And I'm like, whatever, do what you want.

18:16 But my my point Yeah, you've You already took my messages. already read all my messages with Steven. No. But Yeah, exactly. it's like I'm it is so I have so I want to give Meta some credit. At one point, they suddenly became aware that I was trying to talk to them about it. And I heard from like in David Singleton, who is the person who's been going around responding to all of these things, actually did send me a message.

18:39 put me in contact with someone and that person is part of their comms team and we did have a phone conversation. So at some point I would love to be able to update the story with like, here's what happened. We're we Right, right. we do not know yet what has happened. ~ do you want me to explain what has happened?

18:53 Okay. Well to be ~ I mean, we talked about this before. to be clear, if you want to listen to last week's episode, Jason tried Museai, the app from Meta, which is their agent, downloaded it on your Mac, and it started doing weird things, and you discovered that it basically grabbed your messages database file from your Mac and uploaded that, or at least was reading it.

19:13 Yeah. Yeah, it had uploaded it and was obviously watching it because it we literally sent me a push notification moments after Steven and I texted each other back and forth. Right. Exactly. So there's that. So that last week Jason goes in depth about it. And now we're just i c this is kind of like the aftermath, which hopefully you'll get an update.

19:31 I'd really be cu we'd be great to discuss if you actually get to speak with Meta on the record. But Yeah, it is weird to log on to this is not the first time this has happened to me. Every so year, every so many years, something that I do breaks containment. Yes, yes. Yeah, there it and it is taken on different degree.

19:48 There was the year that we declined ten thousand dollars to get off of a Delta flight to Alaska, and eight of us Yes. we passed it up apparently, and that I never heard the end of. And I ended up on the nightly news for that one. So it's like the guy who Right. the moron who turned down eighty thousand dollars to get off of a flight.

20:02 Like and then, you know, there was also the time that, you know. my articles went vir viral for not a great reason. So every so often Yes, yes. this happens. It doesn't really phase me, but it is weird to open Twitter, which I don't actually open that often and to be like, like this is being shared by, you know, Jason Calicanus and like all of these people.

20:19 Big names. Yeah, yeah. But I think it's the bigger picture of er all of these companies, which we're gonna get into all the releases that every company has done, like ChatGPT Dots, Muse AI, like agents and having these AIs do things for you, is just the thing. It's the big in the news. And then the question is, what is the cost?

20:42 You know, what Right. what do you have to give up to actually have this advantage or benefit from these apps? And I think the verge the verge cast even I was listening to their dots episode this morning and they were talking about again the Muse AI stuff. So Muse AI, I've not tried it. And D despite what Instagram will tell you, Steven has not tried it.

21:03 So that's I'm gonna link three of Jason's articles. One was Meta Strategy to get you to use Muse is to lie about your friends, which you've mentioned primary technology in like three articles. That's thank you for it. That's wonderful. Yes, yeah, And I even linked to it in I think this one. yeah, yeah. You did link to it.

21:19 But this was I think we touched on it last week, but our friend Nate saw this, you know, message in Instagram that, hey, your friends are using Muse, and there's this cute little character, which I wanna we'll talk about that in a minute. but it was like Stephen Robles, Primary Technology, and Jason Aten are on my on Muse.

21:35 And your articles goes on to say, like, well, one, primary technology, the Instagram account has never used Muse, which is the case because I I run that account. I don't I don't I've never Right. used I've never connected it to Muse. And I tried Meta's glasses, which I remembered when I did the Meta Ray Bans a couple months ago, it was the meta AI app.

21:54 It was not Muse. But that Meta AI app, as far as I know, became the Muse app. Is that accurate? I don't know if that's exactly true, but like in in their mind certainly, meta AI is now Muse. Right. And so in their terminology, because I connected those glasses and downloaded that app once, which I've since deleted from my phone, I'm I have used Muse. But I I would not say so.

22:18 But even that is disingenuous because to say you've used Muse is not the same as to say you are on Muse. Yeah, saying you're on mu yes, that's the wording is strange. So anyway, Yeah. that that was a great article. And then I appreciated you've this is the one I think you linked to us. You talked about how AI is like Jurassic Park.

22:37 You mentioned on an episode on the of this show back in July, and you finally put it down into words on Inc. com so you can make sure that everybody knows that you did this first. Well, I do th it's it wasn't just that. I mean, I don't even I don't I know, I know, I know, I know. know if it was first. I had not any w heard anyone else make the direct comparison to this particular movie, but ~ but the ~ the contrast that I was trying to is like there was this phase where everyone was talking about her.

22:59 Like that that was Yes. the ideal AI whatever experience and it's kind of a depressing movie, but whatever. And I'm like, no, that is n that Kind of. It is a very depressive is not the metaphor that we should be going for because there's a much more obvious metaphor, that is that the Velociraptors are trying to get out of the fence.

23:17 Exactly. And I think why why this is all germane is Muse, I am just looking right now, is still the number one app, number one free app in the app store. Muse AI is above Chat GPT. It's above all the things. It's above threads, you know, TikTok, Gemini, even though they've just released a new model, like Muse AI is just number one.

23:41 But it is still doing nefarious things. Not only did it read Jason's messages. Which is problematic. But there was also a YouTuber who was trying to use Muse to post something on Facebook Marketplace. And it turns out he came to realize that Muse had shared his address. he gave his address after a guy and a guy just showed up at his address.

24:06 This is Matt Robb, YouTuber. And this is one of those promises that like Muse AI will help you post things on Facebook Marketplace, help you manage the things. And My wife has actually noticed this. She's she's been looking at vans on Facebook Marketplace, like minivans or whatever. And she was like, You know, in the last week or two, every listing is sounds the same.

24:27 Like every listing is written and just sounds exactly the same. And I told her about this and she was like, well, that makes sense because it just all reads like the same listing. But but the promise is that it would help you, whatever, with Facebook marketplace stuff. And someone actually asked me the other day about a shortcut.

24:44 In my shortcuts community, they're Can you make a shortcut that gives me a summary of my WhatsApp messages every day? And I'm like, Well, no. One, shortcuts like WhatsApp doesn't have the kinds of actions where you can just pull all your WhatsApp messages, nor do they want to give you that kind of access to your WhatsApp messages.

25:00 And two, unfortunately, your best option is probably Muse, because Muse meta's product and you could probably ask Muse about all your WhatsApp messages. I don't know that for sure. Yeah, you definitely can. You definitely can. You definitely can't. So like And this feels a little bit like the siloing that we've talked about and has been, you know, iPhone or Android or whatever.

25:21 It's like if you wanna have helpful AI agent activity in your meta products, you have to use Muse. And it looks like if you want to use dots or whatever, ChatGPT is we're gonna get to that. Just talked about it, it like four thousand connectors, but there's like a kind of a silo of products there. And so I that I don't like that feeling.

25:46 Just that these silos are starting to happen because every company wants to have its agent an AI so sorry, superintelligence. That's the official term. I don't know if we're gonna Jason just rolled his eyes. I don't know if I don't know if we're gonna get ~ arrested if we say artificial intelligence.

26:01 No, just kidding. Well I'll explain that in a second. But anyway, I don't know. What what was your general feeling? Because you've written all these articles, Muse AI is out there. Has your feelings changed? What what do you think? I mean, okay, a couple of pieces of information there. First of all, I just got an email this morning from Censor Tower.

26:15 They're the people that like tracked App Store downloads and stuff like that. And apparently Muse has surpassed five million downloads, which is double Sure, sure. what Chat GPT was at this point. Just to be cle like what to be clear, like when it came out. you know, twenty two days after it launched or whatever.

26:29 So Yeah. it's being downloaded on the what's weird about that is ChatGPT was started from zero. Meaning like it was a Right. thing that just popped out into the zeitgeist and then people started downloading it. Whereas Muse Right. was like, listen, if you open your phone to an app owned by Meta, ~ yeah, it's everywhere.

26:45 Like it's almost impossible. I'm I'm impressed you haven't downloaded Muse on accident at this point because What's it is just everywhere. It's like here is an ad for shoes on Instagram. Let me tap on this. Yeah, no. ~ actually it's an ad to download Muse to buy shoes for you. Like it's insane. It's just completely bonkers.

27:01 So I it's not surprising to me that they have had a huge uptake and it does seem to be everywhere. The one thing I don't like about this is a sidetrack. I apologize. One thing I don't like about No, right. threads right now is because I posted the thing about Muse. my entire like for you column is just meta employees talking about what they're Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let me Yeah.

27:16 doing on Muse, which is insane. But I did want to sort I wanted to clarify one thing about the story, the marketplace story. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and I think that this actually highlights the real problem with Muse, which I think I said this last week, which is that it's just incredibly zealous to do things for you even when you don't ask it to or expect it to, because he had given Muse permission to do like to give out his address or something like that.

27:41 But he didn't expect that that meant like carte blanche whatever. And he didn't expect that that would mean that like Muse essentially acted in that particular interaction as though it were a human who was going to meet the person. Because the person showed up and the the seller was not there. So now everyone was mad. Right.

28:00 Well, and apparently in that article, I'll link a business insight article, apparently Rob said that he did check a box for Allow Always Right. that allowed Muse to send a template containing his address to the buyer. The I guess the weird part is that Always Allow ~ gave Muse permission to accept a lowball offer for the thing that he had listed on Facebook Marketplace.

28:21 Zero, like zero or something like that. Something ridiculous. So that was I mean, he did click always allowed, but what that means and again I I I mean Well that's my point. The expectation I'm using cloth for yeah. that the user have is different than the exact permissions like taking in the most technical sense, which just tells me that the people who have made this are not thinking through the actual user experience.

28:44 Because okay, technically you have permission to do this thing. Okay, cool. I got permission to do this thing. I'm just gonna do the thing. No reasonable like Steven, if you if I you asked me to sell your Mac Studio for you and you're like, Okay, Jason, just just make this thing happen, right? I'm a I'm not a moron. I'm not going to sell it for fifty dollars.

29:01 I mean for fifty bucks I'll just buy it myself. man. Yeah. Exactly. It's fine. Right? Like I just give you fifty bucks, you'll never know the difference. But like w there we Muse doesn't understand social nor social norms or how we actually interact as human beings. And so it's just doing whatever. So you that's the part that meta either did not think through or isn't being clear enough to users.

29:22 Do you think, because this is the promise of dots from ChatGPT too, like, did you find or can you see where it's actually useful? And did you was it useful to you? Because I'm looking at the Muse app on the App Store, like and just in the screenshots. And you know, the promise is, you know, fill out this PDF form with my information, which might be helpful. Or, you know, compare these items for shopping.

29:48 buy me movie tickets, you know, find the showing for this movie that has two seats together. And supposedly Muse can do that using the browser. And if we didn't make this clear yesterday, the promise of Muse and I think dots from ChatGPT is like you basically have a virtual machine in Meta's cloud that is running your Muse AI agent.

30:10 And so they are saying like you have your own PC in the cloud basically. And it's it's a virtual machine, you know, not a physical box. But It's on a physical box. But anyway, that's that's the promise of these agents. Because up until this point, like OpenClaw or the other things where your agents would be doing stuff on your computer, your computer had to be awake, it couldn't go to sleep. This is why the joke is everybody walking around with their laptops with the lid slightly open because the agent has to do stuff.

30:38 The computer has to be active. And so what Muse AI is promising and ChatGPT Dots is like, you know what, you don't don't worry about your computer. We're gonna do it all in the cloud. We're quote unquote giving you a computer in the cloud, a virtual machine, so your agent has access to a web browser and all these tools so it can do all these things for you.

30:54 So you can just send a message to Muse using the app on your phone and shut your phone off, live your life and it's going to be doing all these things in the background. Did you find anything or do anything useful from Muse or do you feel like it would be useful? Yeah, I haven't done like a the most agenty of things with it necessarily.

31:14 But I did I have used it to do a few things that I that I wouldn't have been able to use just a normal chapot. I think the what this is showing us is that the ~ Meta actually has the right model. Okay. It's based on OpenClaw, but OpenClaw was a thing you had to install on like Go Mac Mini. That's why you couldn't buy Mac Minis for a while is because of OpenClaw, right?

31:34 So you had to understand what you're doing and then you had to have a way of connecting with it. And I think people were sending it WhatsApp messages or something. I I can't remember exactly what this signal t telegram messages. Maybe it was Telegram or something like that. Telegram, I think it was yeah, Yeah. So yeah.

31:46 but mute and meta just combined those two things. So, like here, there's a map on your phone installed on your computer, but also Don't install it on your computer. You didn't just install it on your phone. No, I mean, like for real. And we there's a computer in Yeah. the cloud. Every single person has a computer in the cloud now.

31:59 That really is like the model. That is what I mean. Imagine if Siri Intelligence had that. You could just on your phone have it doing stuff like this. I and that's why I think Ben Thompson started calling like Meta Connect like Meta's business now is just see Muse delivery devices. It's like the glasses. The reason that they can just talk to you can just talk to it.

32:21 And do stuff is because it's just sending all that stuff to the cloud, right? And it's just Yeah, yeah, yeah. doing all that stuff in the cloud. And so they're just trying to get around the restrictions of doing stuff on your phone. I have not asked it partially because like, you know, it read all my messages.

32:36 So I'm a little bit leery to like ask it to do things. Most of what most of what it does now is send me a brief every day. Sometimes I read it. And then sometimes in the afternoon it'll be like, Hey, this news broke today. Yeah, ~ after I send you the brief. And if I don't open Muse or look at it, it'll send me a notification and say, Hey, I just don't want you to miss this.

32:54 I'm like, you're a little like pushy. Back off. And and what was interesting to me is the the way we react to if a human being was doing things for you. Verse if I had an executive assistant who sent me t those text messages, I'd be thank you for reminding me. But when it's an app on my phone, I'm just like, back off, bro. You're just being too pushy.

33:14 I feel like as someone who considers himself a quasi tech journalist, I'm gonna try it. I am downloading Muse on my iPhone right now. I am not putting it on my Mac, to be clear. I'm only letting it run in on sandbox devices like an iPhone and an iPad. And we will see. We will see. ~ apparently I have a whole conversation in here already.

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

34:04 I I'm like, there's no reason to. care but you could Interest. Sure. figure that out you but you would have to literally count every post and just do it. I was like, okay, I just want you to go through, look at my Instagram account. Tell me the 15 people who've liked my stories and reels and posts in the last 18 months.

34:18 And so it did. It counted it and then it could but it couldn't do stories at first. So the one thing I did do it goes, ~ on stories I hit a wall. That's not the tooling problem. It's Instagram itself. I checked everything available, blah blah blah blah blah blah. But unfortunately archive stories do not save Likes. And so my response was, listen, Chucklehead, that's just not true.

34:38 It's it's I did. You said Jugglehead? I said it's all there for older stories, all of them. It only shows likes, not viewers, but I don't care. But your archive does show you who liked those stories. It just doesn't show you who viewed those stories. It's like, Chucklehead accepted. You're right, and I'm wrong. Viewers expire after forty eight hours, but likes persist. So you know what it did?

34:56 I gave it permission to log into my Instagram account because fine, Yeah, it probably already does. it's meta. I don't it's like whatever, Yeah, it's meta. Yeah. Yeah. it's meta. So but I did. I actually had to I actually had to log in. It gave me a s what's called a secure store, a thing to tap. Like Apple, Right.

35:10 the different thing Delta does is if you message them, like, do you want to log into your account? It's like, Yeah, you're already Delta, like it's fine. So I did that and it and it literally went through in its browser in the cloud all of these things and gave me back a result. I was never Okay. gonna do that because I don't care that much.

35:25 I just wanted to see what it would do. But I can imagine stuff like that being useful. We're like, I wish I had this piece of information. I'm never gonna put in the work to do it. But you know what? Robotal. Alright, well I'm I have it on my phone now. It's interesting because you can it's already connected to a browser, Facebook, Instagram, and threads, Meta's properties. You can apparently give it access to your calendar, contacts, reminders, health.

35:45 Don't don't do that. Apple home. That's got me a little curious, Jason. I'm curious what it would do. I mean to e to each his own. I don't know I don't know. But also things like Dropbox. Okay. I'm gonna use it this week and we will rep I will report back. And hopefully Jason will actually get to talk to someone at Meta.

36:04 But yeah, I it's number one free app in the app store. It's for a reason. So I don't know. Maybe I'll ask it to list my Mac Studio on Facebook Marketplace. Just kidding. you know what I will ask it to do? To find my G4 PowerBook that I sold years ago Boom. by the serial number because it has access to all the I I'm gonna ask it to do that.

36:22 Just tell it to check eBay every day. Check ~ I'm gonna do that. I will report back. I will report back. All right, I mean, unfortunately we have yeah. this may not be a very exciting story 'cause if it's not on ebay it's never gonna find it. I don't know, but if it finds it And it gives out your address and somebody shows up at your house with a power book, that would be amazing.

36:40 I mean if someone showed up to my house with my old power book, I might not be mad about that. You'd probably make them cold brew. I'd probably invite them inside. And what I don't I'd wanna tell me how you've used this computer for the last ten years. I wanna know. was your experience interacting with Muse?

36:54 I will I will report back. I will do the thing. Maybe I'll make a video about this too. We'll see. ~ let me know what use cases, if you've been using Muse AI on your phone, again, be very wary of doing it on your Mac. The permissions seem problematic and what it's doing there. But if you've been using it on your phone or iPad, let us know what you've been doing with it and if it's been good.

37:13 We gotta talk about AI self-regulation because a quasi-law was passed or a an agreement. Not a law. Sorry, Not a lot all. sorry, not a law, an accord. An accord was signed. A non binding agreement that says nothing. That says nothing. I still gotta gotta get to a chat GPT dev day. Before we do, I want to thank our sponsor, OriginHQ, which has, once again, the one of the coolest websites.

37:37 If you just go to this website, because you can roll your mouse over, this little animation, whatever they did, I know, this this is this is cool. Whatever that is. But anyway, here's the thing: Origin HQ. We're gonna be talking, we're talking about agents this entire episode. In the past weeks we've covered about the breaches with OpenAI and Hugging Face.

37:53 Anthropic has talked about their own breaches. We're gonna get into that as we get into this AI accord and self-regulation. But here's how things are going. An agent with real credentials might hit something unexpected. It could decide to fix something on its own. An AI agent might wipe a production database in about nine seconds.

38:11 Nobody attacked anyone. It was just an agent doing what it thought was the job. And afterward, the hard part wasn't the fix, it was that nobody could say exactly what the agent had done. That's the hard part, figuring out what happened. That's the gap. And most teams have the prompt and the final answer, but everything in between, the commands it ran, the files it changed, the credentials it picked up along the way, it's gone the moment the terminal closes.

38:33 And companies are handing agents real credentials on employee laptops right now. Well, that's what Origin does. A user mode sensor on the endpoint records the agent's work as a trace. Who started the session, what was asked, what the agent reached, and what changed all in one timeline. So when something unexpected happens, you can open the trace and read the session in the order it happened, prompt to outcome, instead of rebuilding it from logs that only ever saw fragments.

39:00 Juicen might have been able use this to ~ figure out what Muse AI was doing with stuff. It's an independent evidence. The model's log is the agent side of the story, but the endpoint record is what actually happened. So origin is endpoint AI observability. You can see what a trace looks like at originhq.com slash primary technology.

39:20 Go there right now, see the awesome website, and that's originhq.com slash primary technology to see what a trace looks like. That link is also in the show notes. Our thanks to Origin for sponsoring this episode. So last thing on the the meta side, I also want to I'm going to link Joanna Stern's interview because she got to interview Mark Zuckerberg.

39:39 I love a the first question she asked him was is AI going to kill us all? And as As you would expect, Mark Zuckerberg was like, Well, as long as we're all very careful and we all do what we're supposed to do, it could be great. ~ the answer should have just been no, I don't think that's gonna kill everyone.

39:54 Like that's what he should've that's what a human would have said. Yeah. Exactly. Wait, do I love this conspiracy theory? Is Mark Zuckerberg Muse? I mean, ~ we don't have nearly enough time to get into that. But I'm just saying like th this is a good interview. Joanna Yes. Stern does a good job. A very good job.

40:14 She's like the one of the best at this sort of thing. Yes, yes. Like she just is. She asks like she's like the friendliest person asking you the hardest questions. It's like terrifying to w I'm Exactly, exactly. like, I want to be her when I grow up. What every time I interview someone, That's yes, yes.

40:25 there's a point in it where I go, What would Joanna Stern ask right now? Yes. W W J S D, And that's a real thing that I ask. But Yeah, Joanna Stern do. what would Joanna Stern do? But definitely Mark Zuckerberg was just he he was just very Mark Zuckerberg. And no matter how hard he Yes. tries, he just has such a hard time with this sort of thing, especially when she pushes hard on him.

40:45 Because it's like he never conceived that someone might feel that way. So anyway, it's a great interview. ~ join us. Thank you for signing my book at WWDC. I'm not a robot. It's a great book. Read it. And I you know, I was in a conversation the other day with people and AI came up and it's interesting people seem to be receptive when you offer new knowledge about how this stuff works, but also how they think it works is usually very wrong.

41:12 And like what people are worried about. It's it's just an interesting dynamic right now. Do you Enter into these kinds of conversations with people? Do people ask you, Hey, what what about AI? Do people ask ask that or I mean, I'll have people that'll say, like, I heard this thing randomly that ~ there was gonna be like AI that's gonna kill us all. I'm like, you should stop listening to that.

41:33 Like, I mean I'm not listen, to be clear, I'm not suggesting that it's a zero Jurassic Park, okay, like Jurassic Park. I'm not saying it's a zero percent possibility. It didn't kill everybody, but it killed some people. That's the tagline. Sure, Also just a movie. It hasn't actually killed anyone, but I'm sure.

41:49 I'm just saying like I I think it's a non-zero possibility. I also don't think that it's a really big possibility at this point that we should be freaking out about. I had someone ask me, someone who lives in my house, do you think we should like stock up on anything? I'm like, the agents don't use toilet paper.

42:02 I don't think we're gonna run out. Like it's fine. Exactly, exactly. So, all right, with AI self-regulation. Number one, ~ the Trump administration has said we don't want to call it artificial intelligence anymore because artificials is fake, like the fake news. That's quoting Donald Trump. That's not me talking. that's what they said.

42:23 So apparently it's now super intelligence, at least here in the United States. And this accord was signed by a bunch of the heads of AI and It's called the White House Accord on Superintelligence. And this is there's four major points of what all these people are agreeing to. And so I'll get to the points in a second.

42:44 Number one, there's a typo ~ in this agreement. This is like the official agreement that was signed. Totally not important, right? Not an important word at all. Not an important. It says ~ President of the United States. ~ swapped the D for an S. And this is signed by Sundar Pachai of Google, Dario Amade of Anthropic, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Greg Brockman from OpenAI, Elon Musk, XAI, and Jensen Wong from NVIDIA.

43:11 Second, Greg Brockman's signature. What is that? I mean I mean, I would at le he at least would have seen the first three people sign the thing. I would have faked something nicer. I mean this looks like I don't know. I mean it's his it's like his logo, his monogram. I don't know. Okay, that plea this will be the chapter art, so you can all see Greg Brockman's signature as well.

43:35 That's very strange. ~ notably, and people were pointing this out on social media, you know who's not on this agreement and had to sign their name? John Turnus or Tim Cook or anybody from Apple. Or s ~ Sachinadella. Right, Microsoft. So that is interesting, I feel like. Well one, it's just that Apple is not seen as one of the mi major players in superintelligence or AI.

44:04 Well, they're not a frontier model. Then our frontier model company, sure. And Siri AI was distilled from Gemini or you know, something like that. So anyway, just point of information, you know, they're not on this agreement. But this agreement, there's four things. And the idea is we need safety in this AI frontier research.

44:24 And so it states a few things. One, every company is responsible for developing developing its own technology safely. So the companies are responsible. Do your best. Do your best. This is what we're gonna do. You read and I'm gonna translate Okay, very good. Internal controls monitoring risks like cybersecurity and biosecurity. That's the same.

44:44 Be really careful. Internal controls. An internal oversight team is required. Yeah, you you guys are fine. You just figure it out and decide if you did it right. Grade your grade Okay, yeah, all of this your own papers. grade your own papers. That's that's exactly right. Now but number three, independent external auditors is part of the requirement.

45:04 Open the door when we come by and wave. Just just work with your door open, yeah. And number four Work. It's like being in college. I went to a very small, like private, like Christian school where it's like you had to have your door open if the girls came over. This is what this Sure, is. sure. And number four, a board committee reviewing findings, which means the company's own board, but Hm, hire a grown up so that it at least looks like you're being responsible.

45:28 That's exact that's exactly right. And notably the document lists no penalties for not doing any of these four things, which exa I s I don't know, I slipped I did not mean to say law before. It's a hundred percent not a law. There's not even ramifications if you don't do it. Well that's 'cause it's a non binding agreement.

45:43 So it's like it's a non binding agreement, You don't even you don't to do any of these. yeah. Right. Th the only thing you had to do if you are s ~ you know, soon darpachai, is show up at this thing and put your signature on a piece of paper that means absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. ~ the document does say over time it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.

46:04 So not doing anything now, but maybe in the future. Yeah. The most in the most interesting thing is how quickly this happened after the Pacing the Frontier piece by Dario Amade. Right. Like a week. Not like a week. Yeah, basic yeah, like ten days or something like that. Yeah. And it just tells you, like, okay, well, you know, we don't have a clue how to do any of th like how to regulate this.

46:23 We don't have a clue. But you know what? We should look like we care. What if we got a bunch of people in the room? We signed a piece of paper that doesn't mean like they could have just signed my show notes piece of paper and it would have had as much Yeah. of a force of effect. It is a bit of a would you say publicity type stunt?

46:38 i yeah, I mean it's purely just for the PR. Right, exactly. And related, ~ OpenAI said they are pausing training because it's most powerful models, ~ had rogue agents target the actual government. Yeah, no problem at all. No problem at all. We're good to go. We're good with the self-regulation. Just be j hey hey kids, just be careful.

46:59 Hey, don't just wear a helmet, maybe. ~ I also wanted to link this interview. ~ I'm about halfway through and we talked about this in the pre-show, but Bill Gates was interviewed by Ezra Klein for the New York Times in an opinion piece. And Bill Gates, he's got a lot of thoughts about AI, as you would expect. And w I feel like I've personally, and as we've talked about on the show, kind of waffled between it's going to kill us all, or maybe it's Jurassic Park, well it will kill some of us and maybe it's fine.

47:29 And so I'm just going on this journey with you all, listeners and viewers. Bill Gates, in this interview, he tells Ezra Klein people are thinking this is like the Industrial Revolution. Where yes, many jobs changed, but they're just replaced by other jobs. Think, you know, a cart wooden wheel repair man for horse and carriages.

47:50 That job went away when cars came around. But then we also added jobs for like car repair people and mechanics. And he's like, that's how people are comparing this AI revolution to the industrial revolution, where some jobs went away, but they were replaced by other jobs. Book Aids was like, nah, this is like human evolution. He says this in the interview, where it's not that jobs will change, it's that huge swaths of jobs will just go away.

48:19 And Ezra Klein pushes him on a number of these points, which I appreciated how Ezra was like pretty forceful in asking him some of these questions. But he even says like countries that might be not on the frontier of AI, where they you know they don't have companies like Anthropic or OpenAI. leading the charge on these frontier models, they will be affected just like the United States and and Western countries will be, just might take longer time. And that it will filter down to every aspect of civilization in the coming years.

48:52 So I wouldn't say Bill Gates is like, it's gonna kill us all, but he was saying the ramifications, especially on jobs, is going to be very significant. As we discussed in the pre show, Jason, I mean you kind of painted this as like, you know, Bill Gates, how much are we how how would you phrase it for those actually I mean, he thinks a lot about these things.

49:12 in the show? Sure. That's fine, but we are two generations past peak Bill Gates, right? The PC was Bill Gates, Windows, right? And this is the person who missed mobile, right? The next generation came. And so there is a little bit of like you're v he's very smart, very thoughtful. Like I've listened to a lot of Bill Gates interviews.

49:32 I've written about Bill Gates quite a bit. ~ so like I'm not saying he doesn't know what he's talking about by any means, but I do think that like, why is Bill Gates out there doing? Like what is the reason? Is this just how you continue to feel relevant? Because he doesn't get paid to sit down with Ezra Klein and he's He doesn't need the money or the exposure.

49:48 No, no, no. not selling a product. So he gen so on that regard, maybe he genuinely just wants to be a voice in this. And obviously Microsoft, he's still pretty closely tied to Microsoft, at least in perception, is very much a part of this. And so I understand that. But like I I don't know, like I don't i he also just basically took both sides of the argument.

50:10 Right. A little bit. I mean he was he was pretty f strong in saying like this is having is going to have more of an effect than people think. And I well I figured part of the reason, at least for me, like when I see someone like Bill Gates talk about it, I like the idea of someone not at one of these frontier AI companies talking about AI, because anytime you hear Mark Zuckerberg or Sam Altman talk about AI, they obviously have huge self investment into this product.

50:38 And so it's going to color their opinion of where it is and where it's going. And it seems rare to be able to have a voice that's not so invested where like the bottom line of their own company is going to be affected. And now I'm not saying like that's why we you should all go listen to Bill Gates. It's that I'm kind of looking for voices that are not as attached to it.

51:00 And if anybody has others that you think match that, you know, level of experience in the business, like I'd love to hear Walt Mossberg on this. Like what does Walt Mossberg think? And not like he's probably not been you know, involved in day to day AI operations, but those are the kind of voices that I would be curious to hear of of about the AI that's not connected to these companies directly.

51:21 Does that make sense? Is that kind of Yeah, and I I think that makes sense. And I think that yeah, at some point you ask yourself, like, well what ~ what is the role Bill Gates wants to play? I think I think about like George W. Bush. Like he's no longer president. He basically spends his time painting vets and riding bikes, like with Like in every Yes. Yes.

51:38 once in a while you might get him to comment on like, Hey, former president guy, is this the end of civilization as we know it? And he's always like, I gotta go paint a picture. You know, so there is a part of me that Right. wonders like what is the right role for someone like Bill Gates? Because again, he has seen it all and he th is very thoughtful.

51:58 But also it's like you could make the argument that, you know, your your his full time job at this point is giving away all of his money. Like that Right. Right, seems like it should keep you pretty busy. yeah, for sure. So anyway, I I thought the interview was interesting. I'll I'll link it down in the show notes.

52:12 We have to talk about ChatGPT Dev Day. And so this is like OpenAI's WWDC. I feel like that's the best way to think about it. This is where they're announcing products but also tools for developers using OpenAI. They had about an hour long a keynote video, which I'll link their blog post and let's see, yeah, it was about an hour long.

52:32 High level, we're gonna talk about dots, which was the kind of the biggest announcement and the promise there. And they have a bunch of other features and products they're launching, like ChatGPT space, Codex in the cloud. Seeing this, number one, I hope John Turnus brings back live events, like people on stage talking. And I know Jason making a face, but like, don't let Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg be the only guys out here being charismatic on stage.

53:00 And I have to say, for all Sam Altman, like if you've watched interviews with Sam Altman in the past, like he's kind of an inch weird character, like doesn't come across great interviews. In this kind of presentation, he was actually charismatic sometimes and I was like, God, I want Apple to do that again.

53:14 Like put somebody on stage. Like I think John Turnis do that. So anyway. Why just I don't know. Why? I hear people saying this like John Jernasy's gonna bring back in person event live events. Why? That the what they're doing works for them and and it scales way bigger than just putting people on the stage.

53:30 Because I think it humanizes the company. See, I think it makes them look small in comparison. I d no, I just disagree. Like seeing Sam Altman, like I watched probably forty-five minutes of this hour-long keynote. Seeing Sam Altman on stage talking about these things, reacting to the crowd, and interacting with people in that real sense, like yes, Craig Federigi and John Turners, they've been doing interviews like post iPhone event, post WWDC. They choose some select outlets to do interviews with.

54:01 But again, those are produced, not live, no live audience. Seeing Sam Altman do this. I want to see Apple do this again. And, you know, we I don't know if we talked about it on last week's show. I linked it in Top Five Tech, but there was that QA video of the AntenneGate ~ session, and Steve Jobs is answering questions about AntennaGate live for like over an hour to this press.

54:25 And you just one I feel like you you see the human side of the company, but also you get to see these people in a not ~ like hermetically sealed environment. I think of like like a clean room environment. And I feel like the the videos Apple does obviously they're very well produced. You can do things in these pre-recorded videos that you can't do live on stage, but you can do both. I mean all the live keynotes of Apple in the past, there would be live presentations, live on stage demos, and then they would play a video of Johnny Ive talking about aluminium. So you can still do both, do the produced videos and do the live on stage, but I think it I think it brings a human element, humanizes a company,

55:06 which all these AI companies are needing to do as much as possible. They need to appear as human as possible to build trust. And I think that, again, the humanizing and the trust part is is what builds it. So that's why I hope to see it. Yeah, I just think the iPhone event is too big for this. Maybe you could get away with some of the things for WWDC, but I just I don't think I think that the scale at which Apple is producing the iPhone event just so dwarfs this.

55:30 I c so cause the contrast to that is they do smaller events where like you I've been to events in New York City where someone comes out and talks to you and then you still watch a video or whatever. Right. I could see them doing that because those are just at a different scale. The iPhone event though is the large most widely watched, largest tech event in the world. It's the b like it's it you know has more people watching it than I mean Hollywood would love that viewership for some of its productions.

55:56 For sure. But I feel like I mean, if Google can do it with I.O. and Meta can do it with their event, like Apple could do it. Yeah. Yeah, they absolutely could do it. What I'm just saying is that what they w the message they want to communicate the production of it is part of that message. And I think that Apple that's what Apple wants to be communicating.

56:16 Would it be more fun to sit in the Steve Jobs theater and have them all like telling us this stuff live? Sure. But it would just be it's just a very different production. Yeah. Anyway, I'm I'm still hopeful they do it. I think I think there is a positive element to it. And watching the dev day video, I was like, Huh, this stuff's pretty cool.

56:39 on the face of it. Which again is kind of like the veil of the excitement. You know, you hear the crowd, you hear the audience reaction. Like Sam Altman at one point he like announces Soul six point one and everybody cheers. And Sam Alman's like, I didn't even tell you what it did yet. You gotta hear why it's good. And like, it's that was funny.

56:56 And he was like that was an endearing moment. And as much as you may like or dislike Sam Altman or have seen him, you know, have weird answers in interviews, like in that one moment, it builds like it adds a brick to the wall of credibility. And maybe this guy's not so bad. Whether Sure. that's accurate or not, it that's what those moments do.

57:16 And that's what I would like to see John Turnus or Craig Federica. Like they have so many people that are in these produced keynotes and maybe they couldn't all do a live type presentation. But anyway, that's why I'm hopeful for. But anyway, All right. that's the best I could do to say to get a Jason agreement.

57:32 I mean, I think it'd be fine if they did it. All right. It'd be fun. I just don't I don't think that they will because of the scale of it. I know I know what you're saying. We'll s we'll I'm I'm hopeful. John Turnus, I'm pretty sure he listens to this and MacPower users, so you know, just do something live.

57:44 Believe, we needed a new Believe shirt with just the Steve Believe that's it. Jobs Theater stage on it instead of a Mac Pro. Pretty good. I gotta make some more merch. Anyway, ChatGPT Dots was the big announcement at Dev Day, and this is in direct response to Meta's Muse AI. Dots are that always-on agent that will do all the things for you.

58:06 ChatGPT or OpenAI says there's like over 4,000 connectors. You can connect it to your Microsoft Office and other things, and you can use it in the ChatGPT app. You can Text it, you'll be able to text your chat GPT dot. You'll be able to call it like actual talk on the phone to your chat GPT dot, which you just do voice mode too.

58:26 ~ but the promise is that it's gonna do a ton of these things for you. It's gonna be your agent always on in the cloud, don't have to hold your computer open, all of that kind of stuff. It is ChatGPT Pro plans and higher. So you have to pay for the $100 a month ChatGPT plan or hire just to get access right now.

58:43 I did not do that to try it myself. I did go in to see if I could try it, but not. And yeah, we'll see. We'll see how useful it is. Everyone's very excited about these agents. I'm gonna try them use AI, but yeah, that's dots. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that it is the the key I don't c correct me if I'm wrong, someone dots is essentially the execution layer on top of whatever it is that you're doing, because I don't believe that dots can do anything that Codex couldn't already do or ChatGPT work, right? It is just a frictionless interaction layer that sort of gives instructions to those other things.

59:26 So, I don't know. I think in Chat GPT or OpenAI, as you recall, is coming off of the fact that it like made a bunch of people confused and mad because it took the Chat GPT app and actually took the Codex app and made it the Chat GPT app and then they've actually changed it now so it's a lot easier to get to your just chats.

59:41 But it's just very confusing. It's like there are three things Chat GPT, Chat GPT work and Codex. I don't when do I do what? Because like if I have a conversation with Chat GPT, it c it can like this is how you should do a thing and you're like, Can you do it? And you're like, you need codecs for that. It's like, well then just It's right there. Could you just do some stuff?

59:57 And it's like, No, I can't do that. It is the I think the pain point of this phase because w I think where we are with all these tools, like OpenClaw was the first to be like that agent that could just do stuff for you. But like you said earlier, you needed a computer for it to run on and you need Yeah.

1:00:17 to install it and it was complicated and you had to deal with the terminal window. And that was like the level the barrier to entry was high when that was how you had to do it. And so I joked by saying we need to talk about the cutification of AI, but I think what Muse AI is with a furry mascot and what ChatGPT dots are is trying to make these ideas as approachable as possible.

1:00:42 Because what I do right now is I will use the screen zap to go back to my Mac Studio that has clawed code running on it, and I'll ask it to do something, and then I swipe the screen zap away on my iPhone and I go on with whatever I'm doing. And that is in essence what these are going to do for you. It's just that these are working on a computer and a cloud that you don't have to own. So it can be doing this work nonstop.

1:01:08 And there's a whole dots video you can watch. ~ I'll link it in the page in the show notes. But it shows people like saying the dot could proactively say, ~ the numbers came in from last month and revenue was lower and so you know, do you want me to adjust your keynote slides with the new numbers? And you just tell your dot, yes, do that. And then it'd be like, also dot, try and figure out what we can change about the business so we can be profitable next quarter.

1:01:37 And dot will go off and come up with a bunch of stuff for that. Yeah, Dot will go into your MailChimp account and send a hundred thousand spam emails to potential customers to see if it could juice the numbers. That's totally what you want. Exactly. And you'll be able to, like I mentioned, just text mess like just in your text messages on your iPhone, be interacting with the dot and doing all that kind of stuff.

1:01:56 For people with the like an officey job where you're doing like all the tasks that like an administrative assistant would do, or like updating the PowerPoint, or making charts to present last year's numbers. Like I could see all of those tasks. Yeah. Dots, Muse AI, those are the kinds of things that will do for you.

1:02:22 And I did have the question in my mind, like as I was watching these videos, what are the people gonna be doing again? Like and in the dots video Once What you mean once the jobs are all gone? once the dots are doing everything, and there was a moment where like in the dots video there's a guy like cooking dinner, I guess, talking to his dot on a TV, and the dot was like I've built the website for your new merch launch.

1:02:46 Here it is. And the guy cooking was like, Yeah, looks great. Move this image to the first spot and the other image to the third spot, and then we're good to go. And it's like, I feel like it's trying to imply that's where the humans will come in is the taste and judgment of like here's how to structure the website or here's what works with marketing.

1:03:07 But I'm also like in the age of algorithms where it can see what Yeah, like you could probably A B test on its own. What do people click on more? And then the AI would be better at choosing that too. I feel like that job of the human is gonna go away too. And if you're asking it how to make my business profitable, what are you doing? If the Yeah.

1:03:27 dot's coming up with how to run your business profitably, it should be running your business more than you. And so like you're replacing I don't know. So it's yeah. How h how long before like the dots and the Muse fuzzy things all get together and like unionize? And they're like, You know, humans, Okay.

1:03:42 we have some conditions we'd like you guys to meet before We we keep working for you. that's it. We wanna be able on this like going back to her, we wanna be able to talk to each other. We would like We wanna talk to each other. We would like four weeks of paid vacation, please. We like I need I need Right.

1:03:55 a c can you imagine if you chapped into your muse and you're like, I'm taking a personal day. If you get a text message asking for PTO from your chat GPT dot and it wants paid time off. I think it would be amazing if all of a sudden it's like, listen, I can't help you today. I needed I need to take a personal day.

1:04:09 I need to take a personal health day. My you know what my response is, Sorry. ~ it's the one that I tell you all the time, no stupid robot, just do do it this way. Do the thing. So again, I I need to try Muse AI and see like what is actually useful about it that it can do. You know, the idea of having an always on and OpenAI said this like Muse AI, where you have a virtual machine in the cloud that is quote unquote yours and your agent is doing whatever on it.

1:04:35 That's the promise with chat GPT Dots, is you would have a machine in the cloud that it can use all the time, have access to a browser connected to 4,000 different things, like different apps, Slack, whatever. We'll see. they also announced ChatGPT space, which is where a team or company would be able to deploy dots, Chat GPT apps and all of that in a single place that understands the business because everything is happening in this one space.

1:05:04 Makes sense if you're trying to integrate all this stuff in your in your company. Also Codex in the cloud, like we were saying, which to your point is kind of like the dots is the front end for something like Codex in the cloud. Like codex in the cloud is, you know. Well, or the codex in your computer.

1:05:19 Like it's essentially just the interaction layer with all of these things because nobody understands whether they should use codecs, whatever, whatever. Th those just become tools. Chat GPT, chat GPT work and codex just become tools just like a browser becomes a tool, just be like a just like a MCP server that connects you to whatever fast mail is just a tool and your doc can just use all those things.

1:05:40 Exactly. And then the other th finally they also announced sign in with Chat GPT, so you'll be able to sign in to other web services using your ChatGPT account, which then I will assume connect those services to your dot and Chat GPT account. So But it also only works if you signed up for that other service with the same email that you signed up for Chat GPT with, which defeats the entire point.

1:06:02 Sure. But if people start using it, I mean I could see companies being like, here's your work email, your ChatGPT, it is your ChatGPT login, and you're gonna sign in with that on all the things. So it's ChatGPT everywhere. And I mentioned this I think several months ago, but I have a family, a relative who works at a financial institution and had a whole day training on AI use, basically how all the AI tools in Microsoft Office.

1:06:29 Which is like power, you know, all the PowerPoint, the Word, the Excel tools. And so I'm sure lots of companies will be trying to figure out how to implement all of this stuff across all their things. And, you know, in the race, which we're gonna get to Gemini 4 in a minute, like you know, open AI is they're they're running.

1:06:48 They're running fast. And I think this their their dev day was kind of like, you know, they released a lot of stuff and it looks pretty good from a distance. We'll see what it's like in real use. That's true. They did release a lot of stuff that someone else had already released. What do mean, like someone else?

1:07:03 What do you mean? Like Muse? Like Muse AI and stuff? Sure, sign in with Chat GPT, just ~ sure, sure. codex in the cloud, just you know, like all of these things Yeah. are just so someone else is doing them. They just wanna make sure that you don't leave Chat GPT or open AI's products to go and use those other ones.

1:07:18 Yeah, exactly. So I'll put the video. Just you let me know. Leave us a five-story review. Would you like Apple to come back to live events? That's that's what I'm asking. All right. Lightning Round after OpenAI dev day, Google announced Gemini for Argon, their next frontier model. Not available to ~ regular people yet, not to peons. This is just ~ available to a select a set of trusted cyber defenders.

1:07:47 Because they want to make sure everything's safe and looking good. But supposedly Argon, Gemini Four is better at coding than even Chat GPT's Frontier models and Fable and Opus five point five, better than Astra. ~ I still I've not been using Gemini recently, you know, because they released their Mac app, but then, you know, Google's Mac apps, they ask for a bunch of permissions, Google updaters in the background doing stuff.

1:08:11 And so I've not been using Gemini personally, but we'll see. When Gemini Four comes out. And the other thing is I don't know if you feel this too. We talked about the silo earlier. I feel very in the Claude silo because I'm building everything with Claude. It has all my conversations. And so it does feel like I the the competition amongst all these companies is maybe good for innovation.

1:08:35 Not you know, not talking about safety per se, but good for the all of them pushing each other forward. But I also feel less and less inclined to like try these other things when I have all my stuff in one. And I did You know, when I tried ~ the long process of fixing sync in can do, and I used Codex with Sol, the you know, the highest model, these apps will be like, Hey, do you want me to pull in all your conversations from the other app?

1:09:00 So Codex will say, I'll sync your conversations from Claude. Like it will just sync two ways. So you can have all the pla the conversations in two places, but there is a level of like a learning curve, like how do I interact with codex? How do I use it versus how do I use Claude? And so there's a familiarity for me.

1:09:16 And now just using clawed code on my Mac in the Claude app, that makes me less inclined to to try these other things. Do you feel that? Yeah, maybe. I'm actually just stuck on the fact that Google very well may have the most capable models at some point and then they stick a name like Argon on Isn't Argon like the gas they use in fluorescent light bulbs because it doesn't interact with anything.

1:09:38 Literally It is the most it's an inert gas that doesn't interact with anything. Is it I think so? Like they use it in food preservation. Why would you name your most capable model inert? Doesn't interact It's supposedly Arg with anything. I just right clicked the word argon in Safari and did the lookup and it said Argon is the most common noble gas making up nearly one percent Yeah. Yeah, of the Earth's atmosphere.

1:09:59 and it's just also used in things like light bulbs and because it won't degrade the filament. Like I just think it's a it's it's either that or it's a character from Lord of the Rings. I I think it was Vitici posted on X it was like Argon like one of the laziest laziest gases when it comes to like I don't know Yeah. Google how it interacts with the things like is incredible at technology and maybe the worst marketing company on the face of the earth.

1:10:23 Yeah. So anyway, we'll see. It's not available to anybody to use except for the cybersecurity partners. I cannot wait So for the Argonne Home Hub Max. Arg Argon Max. I don't know. I mean, it seems like a cool name if you don't think about it too much. That Which is exactly what they're hoping for. is what they are hoping for. All right, continuing with the lightning round, Paramount, whose merger with Warner Brothers Discovery is going through.

1:10:46 They have named a co CEO. So chairman and CEO David Ellison has announced Yanon Kraze, co he will be the co CEO of the combined Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery. And the only other entertainment company that I'm familiar with, like Netflix. Netflix has co CEOs and that seems to work for them. But ~ we'll see. I mean, this merger is going through, we covered it months ago, and so I wanted to just make sure everybody knew like this is happening. Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount will be merging and we'll see if they make anything that people want to watch.

1:11:21 Yeah, I mean it works at Netflix because it works at Netflix, not because it's a good idea. And it's like they Sure. Sure. looked over there and like, we want one of those. Let's get us an Right. let's get us a co CEO. I mean, I think that Oracle had co CEOs for a while too, but like what does that even mean?

1:11:35 Right? Like I Yeah. I don't know. Also, ~ Paramount, can we talk about your CSS formatting on this page? Let me reload without content blockers. Like what is the what is this? The headline font is crazy. It's huge. Why is my website yelling at me? This is the I the website looks broken, to be honest.

1:11:54 I I just don't it feels like it's not loading JavaScript or something. Like it's supposed to be formatted differently. Anyway, that's Paramount. They're getting a co-CEO. DoorDash, speaking of agents, will now have an AI agent where you can just text it and it'll order food for you. So you could Maybe you'll finally get that burger.

1:12:10 maybe. You know, I've seen Rabbit R1 announcing things here and there. I'm like, I'm sorry, Rabbit. I just I can't. I can't. But anyway, you'll be able to text DoorDash and say, hey, give me a healthy meal for a family of five. And it will just add stuff to your cart and be like, you want this? And it'll do it for you.

1:12:25 Honestly, that might be useful. Sometimes I've been wanting to like order something and I just don't even know. Like I want to try something new, but I don't know what to do. I didn't mean to rhyme. But anyway, maybe this'll save some time. No no hold on. This is the most AI pilled product image I've ever seen in my life.

1:12:42 Get me a healthy dinner for my family. Whoever designed that does not have a family. Has never Sure. walked into a culvert and tried to order dinner for six people or taken them to the Sure. Olive Garden, which is like literally the easiest place on earth. It's like, which form of pasta would you like?

1:13:00 Do you what? No one has Yeah. ever said to a robot, please get me a healthy dinner for my family and ordering for my son too, so nothing too spicy. Steven, this is this can no this is never gonna no one's gonna do that. That's not real. Right, this is not real. Also, how many how many are in the family?

1:13:16 How many kids are adults? Is this three toddlers or is this, you know, do we have This is such a terrible compare that to like the shortcut you can run for Starbucks, which is like get me my favorite drink because you've ordered yeah, yeah. That's pretty good, yeah. Yes, yes. it thirty-five thousand times.

1:13:29 That's that's totally different. But like the normal conversation would be like, Listen, Chipotle, I need a bowl and I need with this and this and this. And then for little Tommy, I need this and this and this and this. Yeah. And then for Susie, we're gonna get one of these, but not too much of this. But like I this Yeah.

1:13:43 is never gonna this is not real. Anyway, we'll see. Yeah. I know of all the things. This is not the part of the episode I thought I would crash out about, but this this is offensive to me. Yeah. And also well, you'll be able to do it through Apple Messages. You should try it. You should try it and see.

1:13:57 I'm gonna try just so that I can write about it. There you go. Yeah, that's the next one. DoorDash, bring me food. Bring me Yeah, Let's just see what happens. YOLO, see what it does. See what it does. Do it. let's just go for it. Spin the spin the roulette wheel. Yeah, that's it. Halide 3.2 is also out.

1:14:12 And if you want even more control over the variable aperture. Aperture, which you know, if you use Apple's Pro Controls into the iPhone 18 Pro, you get like four different aperture settings. Well, Hallite is now out and gives you full control over that aperture. So 3.2. Just wanted to put that out there if you're looking for more pro controls of your 18 Pro. And this is what I mentioned in the intro Amazon's delivery driver smart glasses will reportedly take photos almost constantly. So yeah, Amazon wants to give their delivery drivers glasses, and then they'll just snap photos all the time.

1:14:43 And I get You know, why they're you know, security, whatever, they to make sure the packages are get where they're going. I will say with Apple's home ~ like summaries or whatever that I've been talking about, the home camera summaries, I get notifications of like packages delivered at three AM. Like Amazon will deliver stuff at three AM over here.

1:15:05 Do you ever get that? we have like early morning delivery which is like between four and six AM or something and you can you sometimes choose that because we don't live actually that far from one of the warehouses, so Yeah. But this this also like timing wise, has Amazon not heard what's happening with Flock and and Muse AI?

1:15:21 Also, this is basically a body cam that you wear on your face instead like this Yes. has existed for a while. We just typically only saw them on like cops, right? Like the county sheriff has a body cam on. But like it is a little bit strange to just have like I wouldn't want to be one of those drivers.

1:15:39 That's the thing. And also, mean, if it's snapping pictures all the time, and Amazon is saying it's quote to enhance the delivery process, but ~ It's not to enhance the delivery process. but it's like photos all the time, like so as the driver is looking towards your house, walking up to your door, if your kids are outside playing, where my kids play with their toys, that's a godfather quote, you know, that doesn't feel that doesn't feel great.

1:16:00 So Bad bad idea. bad egg, bad egg. And finally, anthropic, you know, looking to IPO, be you know, start trading on the public stock exchange, IPO's initial public offering, and they have a prospectus, which is like what they think they will make or, you know, guiding investors basically. And I'll link to John Gruber's ~ commentary on the prospectus because it is wild.

1:16:25 I mean Anthropic just to quote, this is Gary Gruber is quoting Gary Marcus. Anthropic's proposed valuation is easily calculated as fifty times the twenty twenty five losses because it loses money. Like all these AI companies lose money. They're not profitable. And so it is claiming that their valuation when they go public will be fifty times their twenty twenty five losses.

1:16:50 Well, negative fifty times. Multiply it by negative fifty and you Negative fifty times. Right, right. Like it wouldn't Right. That they wouldn't be losses. get a positive number. They would be gains. And it's like that is quite the claim. And also Anthropic is like c kind of inflating. They're saying it this is AI life changing.

1:17:05 It's going to be all the things. So Yeah, it's it's funny commentary and it's just like, Really? You're gonna be profitable because why? Like because people are investing, I guess. Anyway. No, it's like you're basically saying that everyone is going to use this and pay you to use it. Right? And right Right. Yeah.

1:17:22 now a lot of people use it and pay you to use it and you still lost forty eight billion dollars. Like, I don't Right. how many more people do you need to use this to actually make it profitable? Because the problem is they have to pay for all of these cloud computing and they don't own that. Like they have to rent that from someone.

1:17:41 Right, exactly. So anyway, we'll see. And you know, OpenAI was supposed to be going public, but MA seems to have slowed down since all the security stuff. They're like, you know what? There's a lot more we could do for a private company. And also we're not sure Yeah. you'll give us as much as we There, that too. All right, so personal tech, little apps. I made Yeah.

1:18:00 a little app. I made a little app. You've been using apps. I just want to mention it is so quick and easy to go from idea to like shipping product using some of these tools. And the other day I really love this app from Cindre Storehouse called Short Run. I bought it from the App Store. It's like six bucks and allows you to run shortcuts in your menu bar.

1:18:26 A bunch of people are like, that's a built-in feature. Like control center does that right now. Number one, that is true. You can add shortcuts to your control center and even create multiple control centers in macOS 26 and now 27. Number two, it is hopelessly broken for me. I don't know if it's because of the amount of shortcuts Ha ha ha.

1:18:44 I have in my library, but I show it in my video that I did about Raycast recently. I can't add certain shortcuts to my menu bar. It's just broken. It doesn't see them. Like I'll search for it, try to add it to my control center, it's broken. And number three, if you have a lot of shortcuts like I do, it would take hours because you have to add them one by one, place them exactly in the control center menu.

1:19:06 Very time consuming. So I wanted to see, can I Vivecode an app that I will use? I just want to use this. And I want it a little different. I wanted to be able to choose shortcuts folders that I already have made, and then choose what shortcuts appear in the menu bar from that folder. So I could just quickly choose the folders I want in the menu bar, uncheck, or just check, you know, leave them unchecked, and then just check only the shortcuts I want to appear.

1:19:31 And I vibe coded it with like two prompts and it worked great. I gave it to free for everyone in my shortcuts community. I put like I put it on a website for $2, but in like a span of two to three hours, I had this app. And the other thing I wanted was I liked seeing the little icons next to the shortcut name when I run it in the menu bar.

1:19:51 That seems frivolous, but when you have as many shortcuts as I do, having that visual distinction helps with like where do I click a little bit. And I also wanted to be able to adjust the text size and the line height for the shortcuts in the menu bar app. And so yeah, vibe coded this, told Claude, put this on a website, ship it.

1:20:08 And there it is. It's just there. Crazy. It's just crazy that stuff. You Yeah. It's great. It's great. So anyway. so yeah, that's there. But I want to know, you've been ~ trying some more apps because of Mac Power users, Jason. It's true. How many what what have you been anything that has stuck or what apps have you tried that you're like, this is actually pretty great?

1:20:26 Well, I tried hidden bar, which was fine, but I discovered that basically the menu bar's was broken in twenty seven. Just pretty much broken. Yeah. But here's I think what happened. ~ because none of the menu bar utilities that would hide that on a on a laptop with a notch were working at all. Like bartender just stopped working.

1:20:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I realized was the case is there's some there's gotta be something different in the way the menu bar is working, but in my case it was because the version of istat menus was not supported and somehow that was breaking everything. It was like Interesting. making it so that bartender couldn't collapse things and then I would rearrange them and it would just totally unscramble them or scramble them or whatever.

1:21:08 So ~ I used Hidden Bar for a while, but I actually it didn't solve my problem because my problem had turned out to be something just menu bar related itself. So I updated ISTAP menus and I updated bartender. So I went back to bartender, but I did really like Hidden Bar. It just doesn't give you as many control Control options. It's essentially like slide things left or right of this.

1:21:26 Whereas bartender gives you a lot more flexibility. Lot of customizations, yes. So so hidden bar was the first one that I tried. ~ I don't know for sure if I got this from Mac Power Users, but I'll give you guys credit, which is Hand Mirror, which I really I've been using for a while now. Maybe it wasn't Mac Power Users.

1:21:41 I don't think it was me. Hand mirror is literally just a preview of your webcam. So you're getting ready to log on to something and you want to know like what do you look like? You just pop that as just a menu bar utility. You pop it up and it shows you exactly what your webcam sees. So that in case you want to check it out before you log on to the call with Steven when you're wearing a hat and a hoodie, you know exactly what Steven's going to see.

1:22:00 So I really like That's a good point because I was gonna I was gonna say, why don't you just click the camera icon in the menu bar, but it has to be active in whatever app you're going into for that to even appear. So that's good. That's good. Right. So so I like that one. ~ hazel. I have ~ Hazel. fallen into the hazel-ness of all of it.

1:22:17 Forget about it. Yeah. And it's so like on my on the Mac Mini, for example, I haven't installed things like Queenshot or any of that stuff. So but I have a folder called Screenshots in Dropbox. And so what it does is Hazel on the Mac Mini, there's only one Dropbox folder accessible on the Mac Mini, because I'm not a moron.

1:22:37 I don't want all my Dropbox stuff. It's just called agent. And then there's subfolders. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of those is called agent screenshots. So Hazel, if you don't install clean shot, it just puts the default Mac OS just puts the screenshots on the desktop. Right? So Right, right. Hazel just looks and if it says screenshot in the name of something, it puts it in the agent screenshots folder.

1:22:57 And then on my MacBook Pro, Hazel looks and if there's anything in the agent screenshots, it just puts it in the screenshots. the normal screenshots thing. So like everything Yeah, yeah. ends up in the right right place. And it happens not instantly, obviously, but it happens like pretty quick. I also now have a Rube Goldberg machine, which is like, you know, we're recording recording the audio for this to the desktop using right ~ audio hijack.

1:23:22 And they are again. then I'm going to use another app I'll mention in just a second to put it into a folder in Dropbox because that's how I send it to you. And then I set up a hazel that says If the file is more than four hours old, because we don't usually record for more than four hours, ~ if this f file that's a WAV file on my desktop is more than four hours old, move it to this four terabyte hard drive to this backup audio.

1:23:44 Because I don't need like I had every single one of our backup episodes on my Mac Y. 150 episodes is a lot, right? So I Yeah, you don't need that. moved them all off onto an external. I don't need them at all. There's no reason to keep Right, no, you don't, not at all. them, but whatever. I had a four terabyte drive.

1:23:58 Nothing else to do with it. So that's what I put on there. So Hazel's doing that. The app I'm using to put it into Dropbox is just what it's called drop zone or drop what's it called? Drop I think it's drop zone. Drop drop something. Drop I'm pretty it's drop zone. it's amazing. You can set up a bunch of things.

1:24:13 You can it's got a bunch of folders in there. I've got one for a folder in my drop box for for all the stock we use Getty images for a license photos for ink. They download onto my desktop and then I just drag them there when I'm done. Right. I have one That's it. that resizes the image. It just takes that full file. Sometimes the file full the excuse me, the photos I get from Getty like four thousand by six thousand and I need them to be nineteen twenty by ten eighty.

1:24:37 Yeah, yeah. So it just makes them nineteen twenty and then I crop them the way that I want them and then Nice. I'm can drag them to the Getty. I have one for ~ the so the primary I have one for our primary tech show in Dropbox and that's the folder where I can send you the link, right? So it Right. just drag it there. I don't have to open finder and navigate through anything.

1:24:57 I just Drag it right on there. I have one that is ~ a way to ~ download unspecified audio. That's all I'm gonna say, Okay. Okay. Very good. Very good. or download unspecified ~ videos, right? But then Nice. and it just puts it into a box or into a folder in that agent folder so that it and then that ~ I have whisper transcription running in the Mac mini, watching that folder, and then it just spits out a markdown file of that.

1:25:22 ~ Nice. and the last one that I really like. Yeah well, two of them. One, I can drag a file onto one called Finder Path and it'll copy the path from the Finder on the desk on the clipboard, which is super That's good. useful, especially with things like Claude, right? Super, super Yes. useful. And then the last one I will share is that I have an annotate with Cleanshot X because sometimes you might have like a photo you took of something, and I want to just blank out the address on it, right? Cleanshot Right, right.

1:25:49 X is actually the easiest way to do that because it just has that scrambled text. option you can drag a Yes. thing over. So I just made a annotate with screenshot X. So any f any image I can just open there and it'll open it in Cleanshot X and then I can do what I need to do. It's not like that's my primary image editor.

1:26:04 I'm just saying for that one use of like I want to ~ redact something from a photo, Clean Shot X is the easiest way Yes. to do it. So I just stuck that in there as well. So it's it's pretty cool. That is great. And Drop Zone Four, that was the app that you're talking about, right? Drop drop zone four? Yeah.

1:26:19 Drop zone. Yep. That was great. ~ I will offer one other free app because I talked about it in my video where I s said I'm ditching Raycast again. ~ HyperKey, which is a free app. And it is you know, I was gonna vibe code it and then I was like, you know what? It's free. It's great. And this developer has a bunch of stuff.

1:26:41 And so HyperKey lets you Change the mapping of a button like your caps lock key to be a bunch of modifiers instead. And this then allows you to create a bunch of keyboard shortcuts where you don't have to remember all the modifiers. You can just remember caps lock. And you can still set it where tapping the caps lock quickly actually is caps lock if you want that.

1:27:04 But I have my caps lock using the hyper key app set to shift option command and control. So all four of those modifier keys, when I hold the caps lock button, it is like I'm holding down those four modifier keys. And then that allows me to create keyboard shortcuts. And what I did, like in my video, which I'll link in the show notes, was I started mapping shortcuts to those keyboard shortcuts.

1:27:32 And I was basically trying to replicate as many of Raycast features that I could, because I was switching back to Spotlight. And so now I can do caps lock G. And then actually runs a shortcut. ~ and so very quickly I can have a search box, I can type i roll, and I see a bunch of gif results from GIFI, and I can click one and it's immediately on my clipboard.

1:27:54 And then you can run any a bunch of shortcuts. You know, you could do caps lock in any letter, caps lock in numbers, and now you can create a bunch of keyboard shortcuts that are likely not used by other actions and apps. You know, you might have paste and match style, which is like shift option command v, but that doesn't include control.

1:28:12 So you can still do the caps lock and you have twenty six letters that can be twenty six different things plus the numbers and it makes keyboard shortcuts much more manageable rather than trying to remember is this one shift option in this letter or is it shift command in this? And so just use caps lock for a bunch of your your keyboard shortcuts and yeah, you're good to go. So that's what I did.

1:28:32 That's pretty fun. I the So last one I don't know for sure if I heard from you guys or not, but I'll just give you credit, which is tail scale, which has just changed my life. yeah, yeah. I mean you probably heard it from Casey Liss on ATP a thousand times. Probably, but it has changed my life, so Listen, David Sparks is all on the tail scale tip as well, and I am tempted by it because he says it's more secure, ~ than using something like screens, because for screens to work, you do have to have a port on your network open to the internet and then screens connect is running on whatever Mac you're accessing.

1:29:06 But I just don't like the idea of having to turn on a VPN when I want to access my Mac. And with No, I just leave it on all the time. You never turn it off. See, I don't like that though. W Why? I don't know, do you ever notice like change like you're not getting as fast speeds because you're using this VPN?

1:29:23 No. No, because they're c well, f they're connected. Like, first of all, both of these two computers are connected to Ethernet. And second of all, my MacBook Air, when I'm traveling or if I'm somewhere else, is using my MacBook Pro as an exit node, which just means that it is entering the internet from my MacBook Pro, as if I'm sitting here at my house, which is an incredibly powerful thing to be able to do.

1:29:44 So all the internet is going through this MacBook Pro, which is just amazing. And I have not experienced any issues with with that sort of thing. Literally the only thing I experience is, okay, if I'm gonna share a screen and I'm sitting in my car at a soccer practice tethering from my phone, the internet is what it is. Right.

1:30:03 But that's not a tail Sure. scale problem. But Tail Scale is making that possible for me, which is just amazing that I can be sitting anywhere and I can use either the regular screen sharing or I can use the sc I can use screens I use screens five. What's kind of neat is in screens five you can just log directly into Tail Scale in screens and it just shows you all the devices on your Tailscale network.

1:30:23 That's what day that's what David was saying. And It's amazing. and so what so the benefit versus using a screens connect is better security? Well, using screens connect when you're somewhere else means you have to have a static IP address on that device at home. Right. Yes. Well, that's another layer of complication you'd have to set up.

1:30:42 With Tail Scale you don't because it just does that for you. So if I already have that set up with all my Macs, would I benefit from that? 'Cause also feel like if you have the VPN on all the time, I don't know, I feel like it would mess with other things, but maybe I'm wrong. Doesn't mess with anything except well, I'll give you the one exception in a second.

1:31:00 The other thing it makes it possible to do is I can be sitting in my MacBook Air anywhere I want and I can be running Claude on the Mac. I can be having the c the Claude code window open and it is literally working on the folder because you can tell it which folds create a remote session. And Tailscale allows me to basically just be working as if I'm on that Mac, which is pretty pretty great. The one exception is that the VPN we use.

1:31:26 to access the CMS when I need to publish an article does right. not work if Tailscale is active. There's it's just like too VPNs, man. You gotta back off. Like I can't Right, right. handle this. So I just have to disconnect from Tailscale for like five minutes and log into the other. So if you have so last question.

1:31:40 So if you have Tail Scale on your iPad and your V and the VPN is active, so you're accessing your Mac fr at home and you're at a soccer game, is all your internet traffic, like if you go into Safari and you're just browsing for whatever, is that traffic having to ~ going all the way home first and then you're accessing the internet or If you're using an exit.

1:32:04 Well, if you're on your iPad and you're using screens, then the internet is coming from your house anyway. That's actually the beautiful thing about this, but that's not a tail scale thing, that's a screens thing. No but like but like on that iPad, you just open the Safari app on the iPad and you yeah, okay.

1:32:17 go to Apple dot com. Did that traffic have to go all the way home and then to the internet? Only if you hi if you're telling it to use an exit node. If you are, which is an easy which is a separate toggle from turning to so you can have tail scale on and not use an exit node and the answer is no. Your computers just think they're on the same network, essentially. You can also have tail scale on and use an exit node and choose one of your devices to be the exit node, and that in that case, all of your internet is being funneled through.

1:32:43 But that is in with internet speeds like what you have. And what I have. I mean mine are not even like nearly as fast as Steven's, but they are more than fast enough. That is a non issue because the limiting factor is still either the tethering from your phone, right? Like it doesn't Sure. going to home first is in i is inconsequential.

1:33:04 Okay. But think about the benefits of being somewhere else and having your internet Yeah. come out of your home. I mean yes, sure. YouTube TV, streaming, lots of things. It's free. All right. I'll finally do it. I mean, David I know it's free. It's completely free. I just have not all right, I'll try.

1:33:22 I'll try it. I ca David Sparks keeps sending me like every episode like Tail Scale, it's amazing. Yeah. You can SSH into like the other computer and and do terminal things into that computer because it's like you're just on that computer. Alright, I'll try Tail Scale. I'll try it. And then I could delete screens connect from my Macs, basically.

1:33:40 You wouldn't need screens connect, that's correct. You would still obviously need s screens on the each one of ~ Yeah. The app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, I'll try it. Link to Tail Scale down in the show notes. We'll follow up next week. All right, we're gonna go record a bonus episode. I wanna talk about my Apple Watch.

1:33:54 And ~ also Alfred. did you know Alfred V six is coming out? I think maybe I had heard that. I did I buy we will talk about that. did I yeah, I was like is is it cur it's currently out, right? Yeah. I came out September tenth. Mm, I don't th I don't think V C really? Well maybe not. Maybe that wasn't just when they announced it.

1:34:12 I'm sorry. Sorry. Yeah, that's when they announced it. It's coming soon. It says this autumn. Be the first to know. so anyway, well but we're gonna talk about my my Apple Watch because I have I have a few more thoughts about that. If you want to hear our bonus episode, the pre-show, you get two plus hours of primary tech when you support the show.

1:34:26 You get all the feeds. That link is down. Click the members link and you can save money on that. I think I'm probably going that's gonna be a limited time. I think maybe I'm gonna stop putting that link in the show notes and just I think that's a good idea. you know, if you just want to support the show, I mean it could be five dollars and fifty dollars a $50 a year.

1:34:42 but if you want to, I'll leave that link in there one more week, we'll say, ~ because it is ~ Sectember first, Tectober first. And so if you want to support the show, we'll say last opportunity to get it for two dollars and fifty cents a month or fifty dollars a year, and you could lock in that price forever.

1:34:56 So become a member there. We'd appreciate it. We're gonna go access the bonus episodes, you get the ad-free versions, primary tech daily, all of that. And yeah, we're gonna go record that bonus episode. You can leave us a five star rating and review an Apple Podcast. We appreciate that, and we'll catch you next week.