Technology’s daily show. Hosted by @johncoogan & @jordihays. Streaming live 11a–2p PT weekdays. Sign up for our free newsletter at TBPN.com.
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Happy Monday. On today's show:
- @bingfish (Kleiner Perkins)
- @dakshgup (Greptile)
- @jgreze (Town)
- @quintendf (Tolan)
- Katie Drummond (WIRED)
See you on the stream.
50 Gigawatts To The Face, 17% GDP Growth Please, Road to COD 4, Bing Gordon Joins nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1NGaroZpr…
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Tolan CEO @quintendf is skeptical that personal AI agents will become compelling standalone consumer products.
"Technologists always go through cycles like this where we mistake new capabilities for new products."
"I think Muse is going to crush it with the millions of small business owners on Facebook."
"I don't know that my mom wants to talk to her Muse all day, every day. She doesn't want to really share her life with Zuck."
"That's where I'm sort of uncertain of how this category will evolve."
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Steve Jobs didn't believe gaming was a market worth pursuing because it didn't have a billion users, according to @bingfish.
"I spoke at WWDC in 2007 and I told Steve that games are big. They have like 400 million monthly players."
Steve's response: "Bing, 400 million? We don't start anything until we get to one billion."
"He disrespected games."
"I started thinking, 'Oh boy, he's arrogant.'"
"Then I thought, 'Oh boy, he's right.'"
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EA co-founder @bingfish thinks people are drawn to games because they give players something life stops providing in adulthood, which is levels.
"Humans mostly stop levels somewhere between age 12 and their college degree. After that, everything is wide open and disorganized."
"People try to overlay levels on top of it: I want to be a podcast level A, and I'm only a podcast B+. How do I do that?"
"We like to build systems of ranking and leveling and improving, because it makes us feel better."
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Bing Gordon (@bingfish) co-founded EA and helped build Madden and The Sims. He believes AI will strip the grunt work out of making games, freeing designers to iterate more, which he sees as the key to great creative work.
"Better people get more good iterations out."
"There's a book called The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson, who actually correlates what predicts the most successful patents. They come from people who have the most patents. So I think there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that iteration is the key to success, that you just don't get the one-shot. You iterate, you iterate, you iterate."
"When I was a kid, I made money typing papers for people back in the days of Wite-Out. It was really painful. You had to slow down because if you made a mistake, you literally had to take the page out of the typewriter, put some little white stuff on it, put it back in, type over it. And that's what a lot of creative tools are right now."
"We're going from Wite-Out to word processors. So I think we're going to see a lot of the grunt work that makes people not like working on games go away, and my hope is that that leads to more iteration."
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50 Gigawatts To The Face, 17% GDP Growth Please, Road to COD 4, Bing Gordon Joins nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1NGaroZpr…
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For two years, @WalterIsaacson lived in an Airstream next to Elon Musk while writing his biography.
Isaacson didn't want a book built on a series of interviews. Instead, he got near-constant access to observe Musk firsthand.
That's how he saw Musk's "demon mode" up close.
Here's how he describes the mood swings:
"He gets really dark and really difficult. He just goes silent."
"There are people like Gwynne Shotwell and [Tesla design chief] Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage."
"It depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf."
"There'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode. I'd be sitting at dinner at a restaurant in Austin and Grimes would be next to me, and she'd say, 'Oh, demon mode's about to come.'"
"I'd watch people text Gwynne to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something."
And he doesn't think Musk has gotten any less mercurial, either.
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Elon Musk's biographer @WalterIsaacson doesn't think enough people are focusing on the Roadster as basically a joint Tesla and SpaceX product and a physical manifestation of their potential future merger.
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.@WalterIsaacson says Steve Jobs would be appalled by agentic AI.
"[Steve Jobs] says the goal is to connect human creativity to the processing power of our machines."
"What we're doing now with agentic AI is where I worry."
"When I start using agents that try to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that."
"It doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our hearts sing, as Steve said, with the iPod."
"These people aren't stepping back and saying, 'Why are we making this?' The answer should be to help humanity."
"That was Steve's lodestar."
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LORE: @WalterIsaacson says Elizabeth Holmes failed his smell test long before the Theranos scandal, and that he repeatedly turned down opportunities to interview her, write about her, and moderate panels with her as a result.
"I met Elizabeth Holmes before she was quite famous or infamous."
"[Her team] wanted me to interview her on stage and she wanted me to write something about her. I said, 'This doesn't meet my smell test'... There's something really wrong here."
"I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off."
"She was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs."
"She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had... I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often. It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field Steve."
"I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself?"
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Happy Friday. On today's show:
- @WalterIsaacson (Author)
- @eglyman (Ramp)
- @theRealTavarish (YouTuber)
- Christian Jensen (Dragoneer)
See you on the stream.
YCSE Review, Roadster Reactions, Porsche Does It, Walter Isaacson Joins, The Glymanator and Christian Join nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1yJAPwVVz…
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YCSE Review, Roadster Reactions, Porsche Does It, Walter Isaacson Joins, The Glymanator and Christian Join nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1yJAPwVVz…
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Oxide co-founder @bcantrill believes every VC wants to be contrarian, but most get cold feet when an actual contrarian bet is staring them in the face.
"Everybody loves contrarian. But no one actually wants a zero."
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"Name a tech regulation that was actually good or didn't have some major blowback."
@ReedAlbergotti on why banning open-source AI is a fool's errand:
"There's not some law that's being violated by this already… you would have to create a whole new legal framework. It makes it really difficult."
"Even Section 230, which is almost like unregulating rather than regulating, is like hugely debated today."
"The DMCA that governed all the downloads and torrenting and everything, that's a huge mess. That just created headaches for years, and still is creating all these issues with doing security research. You have to be very careful about how you research bugs in software because of that."
"Let's have open weights. Let's have open-source harnesses and sandboxes. I had a little scoop today on Perplexity open-sourcing their sandboxing technology."
"Let's crowdsource figuring out how to keep this stuff in silos and make sure it's safe. That makes a lot more sense than let's have two labs, or companies, in Silicon Valley figuring this all out for us. That never works."
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Semafor's @ReedAlbergotti on XBOX launching XBOX LABS to combat video game decompiling:
"The video game industry is going to have to rethink everything... If you can't beat them, join them."
"If some kid wants to decompile a game in their home using Claude, there's not much you can do about that from an IP perspective."
"Asha is probably the right CEO for XBOX right now. She's a little more forward-thinking and flexible."
Today we're standing up XBOX LABS (labs.xbox.com). Here is the note that I sent to the team:
Team,
The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make XBOX what it is today, and we've helped shape the industry in return, from bringing hard drives to consoles and online gaming through Xbox Live to Game Pass and cloud gaming, alongside franchises that have brought millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models.
To explore these possibilities, I’ve asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
I think XBOX has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties, and people spend more than 72 billion hours a year playing XBOX games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide. We've spent 25 years learning how to make great games, and I want our game makers to help shape what these new technologies make possible. As we learn, we’ll share the tools we build with developers across the industry, just as we always have.
Our priorities aren't changing. We remain committed to the 4Cs, to making great games, to our hardware and to being responsible stewards of IP and the communities built around it. LABS gives us a way to explore new technology that is game design led without abandoning the work already underway.
Asha
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