A First Look at Digg iOS | E016 | Diggnation

Summary

Diggnation (Rebooted) – Episode E016: A First Look at Digg iOS

Release Date: June 25, 2025

Hosts: Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht
Guest: Justin (Digg CEO)

---

1. Apple’s Strategic Moves in AI

The episode kicks off with an in-depth discussion about Apple's potential acquisition to bolster its position in the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape. Kevin Rose introduces the topic by highlighting Apple's internal deliberations about staying relevant amidst the rapid advancements in AI.

Notable Quote:

Kevin Rose [00:00]: "On this episode of Diggnation, we talk about the massive potential acquisition that Apple has to make to stay relevant in AI."

Alex Albrecht speculates that Apple might be eyeing companies like Perplexity AI, considering their innovative contributions to the AI field. The hosts debate the feasibility and strategic implications of such an acquisition, weighing Apple against other major players like Anthropic.

Notable Quote:

Alex Albrecht [22:31]: "Apple Intelligence was one of the biggest letdown flops that they've done. Worse than the Vision Pro."

They further delve into the challenges Apple faces with its AI integrations, particularly criticizing Siri's performance compared to competitors like Amazon's Alexa. The conversation underscores the importance of acquiring AI talent and technology to enhance Apple's offerings.

---

2. Personal Updates: Sobriety and Minimalism

Kevin shares his personal journey towards sobriety, detailing the initial challenges and subsequent benefits, including increased energy levels and a renewed passion for running.

Notable Quote:

Kevin Rose [02:28]: "I have a new level of energy, which is good. And it took a while to get there because there's those first few weeks of withdrawals, if you will, of no alcohol."

Alex recounts their ongoing kitchen remodel in Southern California, emphasizing their commitment to minimalism. They discuss the emotional and logistical hurdles of decluttering and the therapeutic process of creating a more intentional living space.

---

3. Kevin Rose’s New Podcast: Less Than One

Kevin introduces his latest venture, the podcast "Less Than One," which explores minimalism, human connection, and intentional living. He explains the inspiration behind the show, stemming from personal experiences like his house burning down and the subsequent reevaluation of what truly matters.

Notable Quote:

Kevin Rose [04:55]: "The idea behind Less Than One is that when you're giving things away, like a little bit of yourself or support for other people, or being a little bit more in that camp of wanting to acquire less, you actually gain more in terms of the way that you feel and the way that you show up in life."

Justin Freed from 37signals and Basecamp guests on the inaugural episode, discussing disciplined product building without unnecessary features.

---

4. Self-Driving Tesla Rolls Out in Austin: Safety Concerns

The conversation shifts to Tesla's rollout of self-driving cars in Austin. Alex expresses deep concerns about the safety and reliability of Tesla's autonomous technology, recounting specific incidents where the self-driving feature malfunctioned, including a harrowing encounter with a "paper child."

Notable Quote:

Alex Albrecht [43:38]: "I feel like there's this weird undercurrent of kind of like communism. Things are moving too fast for people. And, like, they feel like people being old."

Kevin shares his personal experiences with Waymo's autonomous vehicles, contrasting them with Tesla's approach and emphasizing Waymo's superior safety measures.

---

5. Innovative Autofocus Glasses: The Future of Vision Correction

The hosts explore the cutting-edge technology behind adaptive optics glasses developed by Finnish startup Ixi. These glasses aim to make traditional bifocals obsolete by using tiny sensors and liquid crystal lenses to adjust focus in real-time based on eye tracking.

Notable Quote:

Alex Albrecht [32:11]: "So this Finnish startup called Ixi is developing frames that have adaptive optics. So basically it uses little tiny sensors in the glasses."

They discuss the potential applications and the impressive speed at which these lenses can adjust, making the transition imperceptible to the wearer.

---

6. Nvidia’s Investment in TerraPower: A Leap Towards Nuclear Innovation

Nvidia's recent investment in Bill Gates' nuclear startup, TerraPower, becomes a focal point of discussion. The hosts reflect on the historical stigmas associated with nuclear energy and how modern innovations are overcoming past fears.

Notable Quote:

Alex Albrecht [59:10]: "But nuclear is actually not a inherently bad way of making energy. It's actually very energy efficient."

They delve into the future of energy storage technologies, such as molten salt storage and kinetic energy storage, highlighting how these advancements could revolutionize the energy sector.

---

7. Digg App Alpha: Building the Future of Digital Curation

Justin takes over to provide an exclusive look at the Digg iOS app alpha. He demonstrates new features like "gems," which reward early curation of trending content, and "TLDRs," AI-generated summaries of source material.

Notable Quote:

Justin [67:03]: "So one of the things that we've been seeing is the question around gems. What are gems? ... It's like being early to content that really takes off on the Platform."

The hosts discuss community feedback and the iterative process of refining the app based on user interactions. They emphasize the importance of maintaining a human-centric experience while integrating AI to enhance content discovery and summarization.

Notable Quote:

Alex Albrecht [73:33]: "It's been really fantastic. ... the content that we're seeing here being posted by people on the Dig app, and they're utilizing it right now, which is awesome."

---

8. Host Banter and Closing Remarks

The episode concludes with the hosts engaging in their signature playful banter, reflecting on their personal interactions and teasing future developments both in their personal lives and the Digg platform.

Notable Quote:

Kevin Rose [86:01]: "This has been fun. Thank you for supporting me on my sober journey."

They end on a light-hearted note, encouraging listeners to stay tuned for upcoming episodes and innovations.

---

Final Thoughts:

Episode E016 of Diggnation (Rebooted) offers a comprehensive blend of tech insights, personal stories, and community-driven app development. From analyzing Apple's AI strategies and the future of autonomous vehicles to unveiling groundbreaking vision technology and embracing nuclear energy innovations, the hosts provide listeners with a nuanced and engaging exploration of contemporary tech trends. Concurrently, their personal narratives on sobriety and minimalism add depth and relatability, making this episode a standout in the Diggnation series.

Transcript

[Kevin Rose]

On this episode of dignation we talk about the massive potential acquisition that Apple has to make to stay relevant in AI.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, Justin Dig CEO comes and shows you I'm not just iOS Apple. I'm just pointing because he's here, but he's here later.

[Kevin Rose]

And we also cover things that make us sweat.

[Alex Albrecht]

Welcome to dignation. Also potentially hazardous to your health.

[Kevin Rose]

All right, moving on. Why do you have flies in your chicken house?

[Alex Albrecht]

I noticed in southern. It's Southern California and I have fruit.

[Kevin Rose]

You put zombie and you put earring in the title and I don't want to do it. Dignation.com.

[Alex Albrecht]

Hello everybody and welcome to Dignation. Episode number 16. I'm Alex Albrecht.

[Kevin Rose]

And I'm Kevin Rose. Dignation covers some of the weekly hottest user submitted stories on the DigAlpha site.

[Alex Albrecht]

And then other places at other places.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, it's a more story. It's not full dig yet.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

But there's sprinkles of dig activity that is surfacing to the front page that we are collecting and bringing into the stories. But I will say it is great to be here and it is great to be sober.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes. So 61 days.

[Kevin Rose]

61 days. 61 days.

[Alex Albrecht]

So how is it? Does it feel?

[Kevin Rose]

First 30 days, tough as hell. And first day 45. Tough. 50. Tough 55. 57.

[Justin]

Easy.

[Kevin Rose]

58.

[Alex Albrecht]

Nine. Okay, tough again.

[Kevin Rose]

Easy, easy. 61.

[Alex Albrecht]

Pretty tough.

[Kevin Rose]

No, it does get easier. It does get easier.

[Alex Albrecht]

I will say I've been drinking a little bit.

[Kevin Rose]

I know I've been jealous.

[Alex Albrecht]

My lovely mascot, Wonder. Of course, of course. I know. I feel so bad. I don't want to.

[Kevin Rose]

It smells like good juice. I love that little like.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's great. I don't know what that is, but.

[Kevin Rose]

No, it's that little alcohol smell.

[Alex Albrecht]

You mean alcohol?

[Kevin Rose]

Yes, yes, it does.

[Alex Albrecht]

It smells very much like alcohol and it is very, very lovely.

[Kevin Rose]

Thank you, Will, for sending us this wine. We love the mascot.

[Alex Albrecht]

Of course. And has it been. So you're. How do you feel? Do you feel like.

[Justin]

I feel good.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm running. I'm running again.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, you're running.

[Kevin Rose]

Which for me I have not run.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes, I. I know how that feels. I have not run for my entire life.

[Kevin Rose]

So there is a thing of moving the legs in a general direction.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

I've been trying to hit 10,000 steps a day, which is my new shit. And I'm at 4800 right now.

[Alex Albrecht]

Jesus Christ. You gotta get going, man.

[Kevin Rose]

I gotta get going. We're going to grab some food, so maybe we'll Walk. But I will say that, honestly, I have a new level of energy, which is good. And it took a while to get there because there's those first few weeks of withdrawals, if you will, of no alcohol. And now I'm finally at the point where I feel like running again. And I feel like I wake up with bells on, which is. It feels good.

[Alex Albrecht]

You just get up and you're like, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Actually, that has been happening.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're like Charles Dickens opening the window.

[Kevin Rose]

Church bells are going, dude, I'm drinking less coffee. No, it's like, yeah, there's weird shit. I don't know how to explain it.

[Alex Albrecht]

How much coffee do you drink a day?

[Kevin Rose]

Two cups.

[Alex Albrecht]

Okay, well, that's not.

[Kevin Rose]

I was doing, like, four, though. Oh, what do we drink? You're just like, get a little coffee.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know, it doesn't matter how much I drank. Cup and a half. Two cups. I'm good. Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

That's amazing.

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't think it's healthy for me. I just think it's just how it's going.

[Kevin Rose]

No, coffee's actually liver protective. I don't know if you knew that.

[Alex Albrecht]

This is the thing.

[Kevin Rose]

That's why people do it.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's why my liver's so good.

[Kevin Rose]

You have good enzymes.

[Alex Albrecht]

I have good enzymes.

[Kevin Rose]

Let's talk about one thing I wanted to mention real quick is I have launched a new podcast.

[Alex Albrecht]

I know. I saw it, and I haven't heard it yet. What was the impetus for the podcast?

[Kevin Rose]

So this is a new show that I've been wanting to do for a long time. I've got Dig Nation Kevin, which is a real version of myself.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, we love it.

[Kevin Rose]

Slightly exaggerated, but also not. And then there is the Kevin that also goes home and has other interests, obviously a lot of those around, kind of Eastern philosophy, deep meditation, just, you know, I think all this was triggered largely by those interests. And then my house with the whole burning down thing was crazy. And it makes you really sit there and say, okay, well, what I want to add back into my life now that I have really just my pants and shit that I was wearing. And how can I be a little bit more thoughtful, a little bit more deliberate, a little bit more minimal on just how I approach things? And then I was like, oh, gosh. You know, I know some builders that have this type of philosophy, which is kind of like, I'd consider to be a very. A life, Like a very intentional life around just authentic building and really getting to the depth of their craft, and not so much about just adding More to their life, but about living life on their own terms in a very authentic way.

[Alex Albrecht]

So have you heard of the. What's it called? The Swedish Death organizing or whatever, A Swedish Death theory or something where you.

[Kevin Rose]

Plan your death or something?

[Alex Albrecht]

No, where you go. You pick up items and go, when I die, do I want my relatives and friends to have to decide where this goes?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And it goes, oh, man, there's a lot of stuff. What the fuck? Does this exist?

[Kevin Rose]

Well, it's crazy is when you do have something like the fire, it's like, I realize there is very little you need to add back. You don't really need a lot of that shit. Yeah. So anyway, the podcast is called less than 1. And the idea behind Less Than One is that when you're giving things away, like a little bit of yourself or support for other people, or being a little bit more in that camp of wanting to acquire less, you actually gain more in terms of the way that you feel and the way that you show up in life. And so what I put the copy on the website says basically it's subtraction, human connection, meditative depth, minimalism. And then I'm just profiling the journeys of these authentic builders that are crafting meaningful lives. So there's no ads in them. I. I know it's a very niche audience that I'm kind of going after. This is not like in any way personal. I love doing it. I love doing it. So I had Jason Freed on the first episode. He built 37 signals with Basecamp and. Hey. And he's also someone that is like, really thoughtful about how he builds products. And he does not add the extra features he doesn't really like. He builds features that he wants to use. Not necessarily what everyone is telling him he should be building. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just love how disciplined he is around that stuff.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

In the second episode, which is coming out soon, I have my old drinking buddy Jason DeFilippo, who you know from a long time ago.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

Very technologist with us and also a podcast editor and well known guy in the podcasting circuit. And he had a stroke, actually, which was brutal. He's okay. But he talks about this in the episode. He was drinking for three years. 18 Guinnesses a day. 18 Guinnesses a day.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, look, I drank, but Jesus.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, I mean, that's like, that's intense. That's a lot.

[Alex Albrecht]

And they said like, Guinness is like a loaf of bread, right?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, it was. It was. So he was drinking 80, but he wasn't even to get drunk. It was just to kind of maintain. Anyway, we go around and we talk about.

[Alex Albrecht]

So I'm assuming he's been sober.

[Kevin Rose]

He's been sober now. Yeah, he's sober now. And he's also done some of these kind of 12 step type programs. And so I started to tease out, like, what are the strategies that you've used here? And so really getting back to that atomic unit of what can make you live a more meaningful life. And that's the idea.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, it's interesting, the whole thing of like. Cause as you guys all know, my kitchen remodel has been the gift that keeps on giving. Yes, but it is currently, we believe tomorrow will be the last day.

[Kevin Rose]

Do you have a little bottle that you're gonna break over the countertops?

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm not gonna break anything in that place.

[Kevin Rose]

By the way, be careful with those countertops.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, no, I know. Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

You got granite.

[Alex Albrecht]

I know, I know.

[Kevin Rose]

Granite is.

[Alex Albrecht]

Granite doesn't chip. It does chip forever.

[Kevin Rose]

It chips a lot.

[Alex Albrecht]

Shut up.

[Kevin Rose]

I got granite in San Francisco. Oh, yeah, it just chipped. It's flaking. It was like a dandruff.

[Alex Albrecht]

It was dark. The dandruff of dark dandruff. God dam. We have mostly butcher block.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, butcher block.

[Alex Albrecht]

We have butcher block and the other stuff. So they all just use the butcher block books on the butcher block. But it's interesting that you're saying about the whole less than one thing and the minimalism, because we spent all this time, all this time, it was a fucking frenetic mess. The night before demolition where we were like, oh, shit, we have to put everything in our kitchen into our guest room. And so we literally boxed everything up, fucking wrote what it was and just put it in the thing. It's been there for five months. We have no idea.

[Kevin Rose]

All in that little guest room.

[Alex Albrecht]

All in that little guest room. But like it's piled up. You can't even open the door. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally. But we opened it up and I was like, oh my God, this shit is giving me agitated. There's so much stuff. And I told Heather, I was like, look, we are going to open up everything, pull everything out and go, does this deserve to be in the new kitchen?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And if it doesn't deserve to be in the new kitchen, we're give it to a friend. We're going to, you know, give it away or we're going to throw it away, depending on what it is.

[Kevin Rose]

That's going to be a nice process.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, I'm so excited you got to.

[Kevin Rose]

Do that with your partner. Like, every six months, months or every year. Just a good cleansing of the house.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's what we are trying to do. And the other sides of the other parts of the house are full of all the shit that we can't deal with because we're like, we can't deal with this right now. We're in the middle of a remodel. So, like, my office is destroyed. It's got so much shit. It's got all this, like, unifi. Boxes and dust.

[Kevin Rose]

You've been going deep on the unifi.

[Alex Albrecht]

Dude, I love it, man.

[Kevin Rose]

Isn't it great?

[Alex Albrecht]

Unifi play? They installed the in wall speakers.

[Kevin Rose]

I haven't seen that yet.

[Alex Albrecht]

So good.

[Kevin Rose]

The little. The little thing.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, the little things.

[Kevin Rose]

The Sonos replacement.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, Yeah. I play amps. Oh, my God.

[Kevin Rose]

Is it good?

[Alex Albrecht]

So great.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, God. I gotta.

[Alex Albrecht]

And it works with airplanes.

[Kevin Rose]

I need a house first.

[Alex Albrecht]

And so I'm like, literally? Yeah. Are you gonna.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't have a house. I don't have a house.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm gonna have a house.

[Kevin Rose]

It's a. Bonnie, it's a point.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, my God.

[Kevin Rose]

Justin wants me to move by him.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, speaking of Justin. Hello, Sir Dig CEO Justin.

[Kevin Rose]

Mazel.

[Justin]

I love the ham horn coming back.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's nice.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, we love the dv.

[Justin]

Well, you know.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Justin]

Well, I appreciate it. All right, so I will just say this. This is the summer of skin for me. I am getting out. I'm getting about. And to me, I feel like. I feel like we got it. We got to be done with the turtlenecks. It's been so long, Boys. Fellas, get out there, strut your stuff. Get a deep V on. I'm going to keep getting this thing lower. I want it down by my belly button by the end of summer.

[Kevin Rose]

So.

[Justin]

This is only the beginning of my journey.

[Alex Albrecht]

My God, it's going to be like the Bee Gees with, like, the, like, full on all the way down past the belly button.

[Kevin Rose]

That's right. It looks good. Looks good. You've been working out. I can tell. Your pecs are perky.

[Justin]

Only here. Only here. Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Just been doing this exercise.

[Justin]

I'm just doing flies.

[Kevin Rose]

Just the entire time. Nothing but flies. I knew.

[Justin]

I knew it was the summer.

[Kevin Rose]

What do you say? You. You had this saying that you told me, thighs out, sky's out.

[Justin]

Thighs out.

[Kevin Rose]

Sky's out. Thighs out.

[Justin]

The good news is the sky's always out, so you're always free to get those thighs out. There oh, God.

[Alex Albrecht]

La. Too much.

[Justin]

There you go.

[Kevin Rose]

Too much.

[Alex Albrecht]

Too much thigh in la. We're excited to catch up later.

[Justin]

We have a lot to talk about. A lot to talk about. Let's get back to it for y' all.

[Kevin Rose]

Awesome.

[Alex Albrecht]

I love it. I love it.

[Kevin Rose]

We got to talk about the disc. New little guy over here.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, yeah. Well, first off, before we talk about this new little guy over here. Like and subscribe. If you're on YouTube, this is what the young kids say.

[Kevin Rose]

Like and subscribe. Oh, speak of like and subscribe. Last thing, less than one show is the. The My plug.

[Alex Albrecht]

Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. Like and subscribe. It's audio only, but we did want to thank Michael Bills.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

If you notice in the Polycade, the new marquee is from Michael Bills. Thank you for sending in the marquee for our new polycade. Check out the show notes. If you have an interest in having your Polycade marquee show up on the show, feel free to send in. The information is down, which we asked for.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't know how do they have to send it?

[Justin]

Mal?

[Kevin Rose]

Did they send in like a movie file? Like, what is that?

[Alex Albrecht]

Actually, it's like an MPEG4.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Could be a still. Could be a still. Make it happen.

[Kevin Rose]

Make some awesome. Like, we want our heads flying around, like flying.

[Alex Albrecht]

And we were going to say we're. We don't know what we're going to send, but we will send something potentially to Michael.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, yeah, we're going to send shirt or something.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. So like, if it shows up on the thing, we.

[Kevin Rose]

We'll give you. We have new shirts. We have worn shirts. Justin's V necks are. He gets really sweaty in here. So the. If you want a little musk, Justin. I don't know why I did two double hand thing.

[Alex Albrecht]

Don't know what he's doing.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

All right. So we also had an email that I wanted to mention on the show. This is from Alex Willingham. Alex, thank you for the shout out for Fusion360. Alex and Kevin, I'm a longtime dignation fan and I've been so excited to have it back. We are excited to be back. Thank you, sir. Was thrilled when I was watching your last episode and Alex mentioned using Autodesk Fusion to design the spacer for your door lock mechanism. Go back if you haven't seen that. I did do it. I printed it works like charm. And I just designed something else because I wanted. Speaking of the unified system, I want to get into a buddy sent Me. The doorbell. A G4 Doorbell Pro.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm gonna set it up in my new intercom system.

[Kevin Rose]

How do you have buddies who's sitting in G4 Doorbell Pro?

[Alex Albrecht]

It was actually Brentano. Joshua Brentano didn't set up. He couldn't set it up in this thing. Anyway, I'd love to send you guys some fusion swag. Let me know your hoodie size and where you can send it, and we'll hook you up. Probably like a large. I like them sort of a little bit more oversized.

[Kevin Rose]

Large. Extra large.

[Alex Albrecht]

Large. Extra large.

[Kevin Rose]

Oversized. Is it large? V Neck.

[Alex Albrecht]

We don't know V. Deep V. If.

[Kevin Rose]

You have deep V hoodies, Justin will take them over.

[Alex Albrecht]

Justin will love them. We don't know the address yet, but it'll be down in the show notes.

[Kevin Rose]

P.O.

[Justin]

Box.

[Alex Albrecht]

In the show notes.

[Kevin Rose]

V Box. V Box.

[Alex Albrecht]

We'll have a PO Box in the show notes.

[Kevin Rose]

Pox.

[Alex Albrecht]

PO Box in the show notes. V Box. The show notes, as we know, very common to say. PO Box will be in the show notes. You always comment that there aren't many women in your audience. I can tell you that there is at least one. My wife. I recently had her listen to a reboot episode, and she reminded me that I, quote, used to make her watch the show back in the day. Quote. Thank you, Alex. I appreciate that. And I love that you're forcing your wife. And if anybody wants to force any of their friends to watch the show.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

Feel free to do so. As long as they're not under extreme duress. Minimal duress. That's just a party. Extreme duress.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And feed them. We should.

[Kevin Rose]

There's probably a whole group of people that are watching right now that used to watch with somebody else, and they could send that out. Reach out, reach out. And so if you're older than watch, I just want to say, Jeff, Jeff, we know you're watching.

[Alex Albrecht]

We know.

[Kevin Rose]

Send this to your friends.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. We know that you had a whole bunch of friends that you used to watch it with, and they don't know about it now.

[Kevin Rose]

That's Mark.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, Mark. Even worse.

[Kevin Rose]

Very popular names right now to try and hit as wide audience as possible.

[Alex Albrecht]

Quasimod Joe. Oh, Quasimod knows. He knows who he is.

[Kevin Rose]

All right. First sponsor of the day.

[Alex Albrecht]

Wix.com. so Heather uses Wix.com all the time. She works on a couple of different friends businesses up in Fresno. She works on their websites and builds some stuff because she's so good at that stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

Good partnership with them.

[Alex Albrecht]

Wix.

[Justin]

Wix.

[Alex Albrecht]

Makes it easy. Wix gives you a website without limits. No rigid templates, just freedom to build what you want. Their AI builder makes setup stupid fast and answer a few questions and it gives you a custom business ready site. Or you can choose for over 2000 professional templates that are customizable testicles with built in tools for booking, selling or whatever your business desires. It's all drag and drop, super fun, super intuitive, super easy. And plus they've been pioneering this work on websites for over 20 years now. Use the link in the show notes to get your code. What is it? To get your. There's a QR code. QR code right now. On the screen.

[Kevin Rose]

On the screen right now. And then there'll be a bit. Oh, there's a QR code on the screen like right here.

[Alex Albrecht]

Screen right there. Somewhere here, right somewhere around here. Here's a QR code and if you're listen go to the show notes and there will be a link for a Special offer from Wix.com ready to create your website. Go to Wix.com that's Wix.com to start building your website today.

[Kevin Rose]

There's a QR code right there.

[Alex Albrecht]

Thanks for WIX for sponsoring us. Thank you.

[Kevin Rose]

LML's like fucking hell. Like add more work QR code right here.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's dancing.

[Kevin Rose]

It's all over the place. It's like extra 30 minutes every time we say there's a QR code somewhere.

[Alex Albrecht]

Now it's a QR code. It looks like mouse face.

[Kevin Rose]

Thank you wix. Yeah, also element element is fantastic. I really do love element. Element element gives you science backed hydration without sugar which is key because you don't want to spike glucose. This is just clean electrolytes that taste great. I use it post sauna which I use sauna six days a week and.

[Alex Albrecht]

I use it post workout because I was getting charley horses in my stomach muscles and my guy goes are you having your electrolytes? And I go no. And then I started drinking the element and I do not have them anymore.

[Kevin Rose]

It's great. It's great. I actually have mine over in a big bottle over there. Post sauna is awesome. They have a new sample pack Alert as of June 17th each. We need one of those little keyboard things there. Yeah. Each eight pack now includes two citrus salt which are great.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yep.

[Kevin Rose]

Two raspberry salt. I haven't tried those yet.

[Alex Albrecht]

Nope, not me neither.

[Kevin Rose]

2 watermelon salt, watermelon grape watermelon's great. Watermelon grate and 2 orange salt which is my favorite.

[Alex Albrecht]

And Heather, my partner's favorite.

[Kevin Rose]

Your partner loves the orange salt.

[Alex Albrecht]

I gotta live it down.

[Kevin Rose]

This is eight sticks and they are still three with any purchase now just double the fan favorites. Here's the deal. Get your 8 count sample pack of elements. Most popular drink mix flavors with any [e-mail] find your favorite element flavor or share them with a friend. Thank you, Element.

[Alex Albrecht]

Love it. All right, let's get into the first story. K Rose.

[Kevin Rose]

All right, first story of the day is all about Apple. There is a report that Apple has held internal talks. That means they most likely called some people together.

[Alex Albrecht]

Okay.

[Kevin Rose]

Got them around the table and said we need to talk about something.

[Alex Albrecht]

This is going to be a big deal.

[Kevin Rose]

We got some issues.

[Alex Albrecht]

We have reserved this conference room for exactly an hour and a half. Let us discuss.

[Kevin Rose]

They discussed acquiring Perplexity. Ooh, yeah, boy.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's the thing. I don't know how much that thing is gonna cost. Lots.

[Kevin Rose]

Here's the thing that had 89 digs on it.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, yeah. Well submitted.

[Kevin Rose]

If I did, I just refreshed the page. 92 has 92 digs on it right now. That's the actual website. Not lively yet, but soon. 92 digs on it and submitted by Danial. Submitted by Danial. Which interesting username, but you know, they got it.

[Alex Albrecht]

And so what's the deal? Is there unpacking to be done?

[Kevin Rose]

Well, I think if they had to go for an acquisition here, I don't see why you don't go with Anthropic. I don't know.

[Alex Albrecht]

So what's the front facing stuff? Anthropic is Claude. Right?

[Kevin Rose]

Claude. That's right.

[Alex Albrecht]

And then Perplexity is that.

[Kevin Rose]

That's their website, Perplexity.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, so.

[Kevin Rose]

And wait, what Perplexity AI this one.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, Perplexity is Perplexity. It's. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

It doesn't have like a different name to it.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, I got you, I got you.

[Kevin Rose]

But I would say Perplexity is for me is more of a destination for news. They have like this whole finance section.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're all talking things Apple wants to be in the game of.

[Kevin Rose]

But they have news already. But I hear you.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm just saying it's not like the.

[Kevin Rose]

Thing about Perplexity is I'd be really curious to know behind the scenes. And I know they've rolled out some of their own models and they're working on that, but if you go into like all settings, like, here's my account, I'll go in There. And it allows you to choose which AI you want to use, meaning that they are reliant upon other AI to kind of.

[Alex Albrecht]

They don't own their own LLM. You can, like, associate other LLMs.

[Kevin Rose]

You can associate other LLMs, but they are doing. They're rolling their own. They recently came out with a bunch of new stuff that just came out, like some personal memory storage, so you can remember certain preferences that you might have. It's getting better and better. It's still going to be pricey.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, but don't you think that they're.

[Kevin Rose]

One of the top three or four, I would say.

[Alex Albrecht]

Right. But again, like, let's say there's, you know, three or four. There's no way you're buying OpenAI.

[Kevin Rose]

No way.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know, and you start to go down the list. A lot of it's internal.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know, Google's not going to give it to you. Meta's not going to give it to you. You know what I mean? So it's like, of the ones you can purchase at this point.

[Kevin Rose]

Right.

[Alex Albrecht]

Perplexity has got to be the cheapest, right?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, I would say so.

[Alex Albrecht]

There is that. To me, when I heard it, I was like, that makes sense. Like, if it was OpenAI, I'd be like, holy, what the. That makes no sense. Like, how much money that's gonna cost. And you know what I mean?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

But with Perplexity, I was like, that makes sense.

[Kevin Rose]

It really depends on how far behind they are internally.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, I mean, I have a feeling, since the talking is happening. And that also makes me go, boy, they don't really have an AI section.

[Kevin Rose]

I feel like they do, dude.

[Alex Albrecht]

Apple Intelligence was one of the biggest letdown flops that they've done. Worse than the Vision Pro.

[Kevin Rose]

I still can't talk to Siri. I'm, like, trying to get it to dictate.

[Alex Albrecht]

Shit, dude.

[Kevin Rose]

It won't do anything.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, it's. Why is Siri worse than Amazon's Alexa?

[Kevin Rose]

Well, Alexa's gotten a lot better, but, yeah, I agree.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know what I mean? Like, I never. Anytime Siri pops up, I'm like, jesus Christ, this lady again. Like, I don't want to talk to you, man.

[Kevin Rose]

You can change it to a man if you want.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, I don't want to talk to that guy either, because they don't do anything for him.

[Kevin Rose]

I got mine to be a British lady.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's amazing.

[Kevin Rose]

It's kind of a little bit better. You know, you're kind of like, I.

[Alex Albrecht]

Don'T know what you're talking about Kevin.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, as far as the role, not so it's not so old. It's actually a little bit more sexy.

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't know what you mean, Kevin.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, exactly. It's like, let me check CHAT GPT.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'll just check it on chatgpt.

[Kevin Rose]

Something makes me a little bit happier when it's. It's British. But anyway. Oh, God, yeah. Perplexity would be a pickup for them.

[Alex Albrecht]

Because they really needed to do something with. Because they were so all about AI, AI, AI. I mean, even back in the day when they launched everything to be ready for AI and then didn't launch, the AI was like, guys, come on. Like, wait, bake it into the next one correctly. Which is so not how Apple usually works. Apple's usually like, we'll be third, but we'll do it better than anybody. You know what I mean?

[Kevin Rose]

Yes, that's right. Because they're never like the first to the arena, but when they do it, they come out and it's splash.

[Alex Albrecht]

So different, right? So innovative and so amazing.

[Kevin Rose]

The thing is, you have to wonder if they aren't just lacking some engineering talent here because, well, Sam Altman came out and said that recently Meta is paying $100 million for signing bonuses to go work on AI over at Meta.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh my.

[Kevin Rose]

I mean, obviously you have to be a certain skill set. It's not like a vibe code like us. We could go over there and just get $100 million.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, I'm just be submitting my resume after this.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, exactly.

[Alex Albrecht]

Be like, hey, man, AI, AI.

[Kevin Rose]

But $100 million as a signing bonus?

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, I mean, talk about riding the wave. If you were somebody that got really into AI and machine learning early and built some skills and you could then just command the most. I mean, because there's not that many people, I guess, out there that do this at all.

[Kevin Rose]

I think that is the whole thing here is like, yes, you can find kind of value add engineers that will help out in terms of building the scaffolding and engineering required to pull this off. But if you want people at the edge that's doing the innovation side, very small pool of talent to pull from.

[Alex Albrecht]

Man, they must just be stealing people left, right and sideways too.

[Kevin Rose]

People are jumping all over the place. I feel like the last six months has been just people hopping around to different companies, acquisitions that are happening. It's the hottest space right now. Without a doubt. There is so much money being poured into. Apple has a lot of ketchup to do. It wouldn't surprise Me, if they went and spent a lot of money to.

[Alex Albrecht]

Pick something up, I mean, it would be the quickest way to fix a very bumpy, broken product that's in everything that they have.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know what I mean? Like, that's the thing that's also interesting. It's not like, you know, oh, the, you know, the trackpad air. And it's like, well, that's kind of a weird product. Whatever, I don't care. It's like every iPhone. You know what I mean? Like, every Mac that has the quote unquote, Apple intelligence, like, they baked it into so much and it's not good. That's gotta be something they're pissing about.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, I just wish for the time being, as a stopgap, as an Apple user. Yeah, I would love it if. I mean, we're seeing this today. With any of the AI coding tools, you can typically bring your own AI, so you can just go in and get a key from any of the big providers out there and say, you know What? I want OpenAI to power my AI coding over on this platform over here.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, that would bring your own key.

[Kevin Rose]

Crazy.

[Alex Albrecht]

If it was all of a sudden, wouldn't it have been easy? You're in your phone.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, I mean, they kind of do that. They make it hop. But what I'm saying is, like, imagine a world where when you're dictating to Siri, when I press and hold, it is just Gemini or whatever I want built in. Because I chose that as one of the options. Just like when you're in the settings and you can say, I want Chrome to be my default browser. I want Apple Mail to be my mail. You should be able to say, I want this to be my AI.

[Alex Albrecht]

Do you have any offline LLMs?

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

What do you use those for?

[Kevin Rose]

I can't talk about it.

[Alex Albrecht]

I love it. That's the best. Because I got into. I was just talking.

[Kevin Rose]

You have some offline ones, too?

[Alex Albrecht]

No, no, no. I haven't yet done it, but I've gotten into the home.

[Kevin Rose]

We gotta get a good gpu.

[Alex Albrecht]

So this is the thing, is that I want to get. I want to break away from the Alexa ecosystem.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh.

[Alex Albrecht]

Cause we use it still to, like, turn the lights on and off. I know he stands up and he's like, what'd you say about that? Cause we use it still to talk about, like, literally the thing that we use Alexa for is what is the weather in Oxnard when you're getting out of the shower before you go to Oxnard, you know what I mean? I don't even do timers. It's literally like turn on your lights, Timex timers. Timers. Not really. I do it on my watch because it's for time anyway. But I got into this thing, but I want to be able to pull off of that and then integrate it with home assistant and their voice assistant stuff. And you can connect it with ChatGPT, but it's still going online. And I'm like, well, if I'm gonna do it, I wanna do it. And so I was just wondering if you had any offline LLMs.

[Kevin Rose]

No. We should talk. There's a ton of ways that you can get this working and then you can use it to power all types of devices. Raspberry PIs or anything can query it and get data back. Have you seen the Billy Bass?

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

The Arnold Schwarzenegger Billy Bass. Best use case ever for.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh my God, I love it.

[Kevin Rose]

Have you seen that? Now we've shown it on the show. Okay. We've shown it for a long time.

[Alex Albrecht]

And also, by the way, with 11 labs we were just talking about, I think last time that they just announced this crazy new stuff. It's like you can go to the cloud, connect to 11 labs to be the voice of your local.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, 100%.

[Alex Albrecht]

And that to me is like, I want to do that.

[Kevin Rose]

You want to hear yourself.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, not me. Someone from 11 Labs. Some. One of the natural voices from 11 Labs.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, you would just add a voice.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. So like you would then basically your LLM would make the. Would make all the thinking and decision making and then send up their response to elevenlabs. They would then vocalize it, send it back speaker.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay, so I can get a little bit geeky here.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, please.

[Kevin Rose]

This is kind of fun. One of the things that when you launch like Gemini voice mode, like I have it as my action button here, or you launch any of these voice powered assistants, they're not using their best models because a lot of them, even like the more hardcore models don't support voice yet. So they're typically using a cheaper model. And it works for like, hey, tell me about like, how does fusion versus fission work? Like, it'll do the basic stuff. Right. But what's interesting is the best thinking model. So we're talking about like Opus from Claude, the thinking version, the Max. Or you're talking like O3 from ChatGPT. So O3 with reasoning. What you can do is you can take that as an API and use your API key and feed it into 11 labs.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so then you can talk to it, and then it will go out and pull it from O3 so you get the best knowledge, and then it'll read it back to you. So you're bypassing your crappy.

[Alex Albrecht]

How fucking fast this shit goes. Like, think about Internet speeds when we were kids.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Think about how many I was on dial up. How many, like, jumps it has to go. And it's happening in almost imperceptible moments. You know what I mean?

[Kevin Rose]

This is the whole thing where every. Well, we've talked about this before. Every two to four weeks, we're on this show talking about how we have our minds blown yet again, and it's just insane.

[Alex Albrecht]

I know.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't know how we're gonna keep up with it, but it's fun.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, pretty soon it will just be making these shows for us.

[Kevin Rose]

That's right. But, Amy, the voice is. You can train it to do any voice you want. I'm sorry. I'm spitting on you.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's okay.

[Kevin Rose]

You're very excited. Sorry.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's very exciting.

[Kevin Rose]

So the good thing you didn't have a deep V on. You could train it to be any voice you want.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

So you could have, like, Alfred Hitchcock. You could have, like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, then the whole fucking copyright shit pops up.

[Kevin Rose]

No, but, like, if you have your own local models and you're doing some of this voice training.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, interesting.

[Kevin Rose]

And so you can have Alan Watts. You can have any of these, like, epic voices.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Wouldn't that be amazing?

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes. I mean, yes. I want tone loke telling me that the weather in Oxnard is awesome.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. Yeah. There are weird. There's weird shit's gonna happen in that, like, people that are de. That are evil or good or whatever, we're gonna. They're gonna come back alive again.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, that's Jeffrey Dahmer.

[Kevin Rose]

Could be a voice.

[Alex Albrecht]

First off, who knows what Jeffrey Dahmer's voice sounds like?

[Kevin Rose]

Isn't that a thing?

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't think there were many recordings of Jeffrey Dahmer.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay.

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't know, giving big speeches or maybe just talking to his victims. And somehow it gets recorded.

[Kevin Rose]

You only need a few seconds of audio. Now, I hate to be burst your ball, but you don't need a big speech anymore. You'll need a few seconds of audio from Jeffrey Dahmer to get his whole voice.

[Alex Albrecht]

So you could just like, circuitously record him.

[Kevin Rose]

No, I'm sure there's a.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, he's dead now. But yeah, I'm sure there's an interview.

[Kevin Rose]

Didn't they interview him in jail? Am I thinking about a different serial killer?

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, that serial killer you could use. Yeah, that's how that works.

[Kevin Rose]

Dumber. Okay. Anyway, keep going, keep going. Okay, where were we? All right, next story, next story, next story. Perfect.

[Alex Albrecht]

Landed that one. Like a swan coming home for the winter.

[Kevin Rose]

They will always land correctly.

[Alex Albrecht]

They do. All right, story two. Story two. Why am I selling you that? Whatever. Next story. These auto focus glasses could soon make bifocals obsolete by tracking your eyes in real time. First off, I don't know about you, but it's happening like I am. It used to be like, oh, this menu is really small and the lights are really dim. Hey, babe, can I borrow your reading glasses? Just for this experience? It's just a little intense.

[Kevin Rose]

Have you ever turned on your light 100%? I've never done that. Oh, I won't do it.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's either that or put the glasses on.

[Kevin Rose]

No, I just won't order.

[Alex Albrecht]

You just won't order.

[Kevin Rose]

Get up and leave. I'm not going to be the person.

[Alex Albrecht]

Whatever the chef recommends.

[Kevin Rose]

Exactly.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're like, we're at Taco Bell. But I. So I've been getting to the point where I'm like, I should just bite the boat. So I have reading glasses.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, I have some too.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. Well, yeah, see, they work. They do the thing. But I've often thought about, like, transition lenses or like, what are they called? Progressive lenses, where they sort of go from your far vision to your closer.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, that's what mine do. When you look down, they get a little bit tighter.

[Alex Albrecht]

But the problem is is that a lot of it is, like, sometimes you're not in the right thing when you're looking at a thing. So you gotta, like, bring the thing down. You gotta, like, angle your head and all this stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

So this Finnish startup called Ixi is developing frames that have adaptive optics. So basically it uses little tiny sensors in the glasses.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, let me guess.

[Alex Albrecht]

To track where your eyes are looking.

[Kevin Rose]

Can it give you eagle vision?

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't know if it can give you eagle vision. It actually probably can give you eagle vision.

[Kevin Rose]

That would be amazing, right?

[Alex Albrecht]

Based on what this is happening, what is actually happening. And then what it does is it uses this little lidar. Like, it's not really lidar, but it's.

[Kevin Rose]

Basically just baby lidar.

[Alex Albrecht]

Baby lidar to check the distance from what it is you're looking at to the lens, and then uses a liquid crystal lens to transition the size of the lens to correct for the distance.

[Kevin Rose]

And they're $20,000.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, they're pretty soon. But the really crazy thing is it can do the change in the focal lens. It can do it in 0.2 seconds.

[Kevin Rose]

Insane.

[Alex Albrecht]

And our eyes focus in 0.4 seconds. So technically, the change in the lens will be imperceptible to you because by the time your eyes adjust.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, I didn't realize it was that slow. Because I'm looking around and it is about 0.2 seconds.

[Alex Albrecht]

No. 0.4.

[Kevin Rose]

No. Oh, mine's faster.

[Alex Albrecht]

Fucking ninja over here. First off, what's a 0.2? It just happened.

[Kevin Rose]

Happened. Just happened.

[Alex Albrecht]

7. That's not even. That's like a second.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. So the cool thing would be if you get 4040, like with the eagles and shit.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, but that's the thing is because it's correcting the lenses, there's no reason why it can't. I mean, I'm sure there's a threshold of how much it can adjust the focal length of the lens, but there is a world in which it could be making you have better vision. And by the way. Yeah. Because if you're looking over here in the corner, the whole concept is it instantly knows that you're looking in that corner. And then it instantly knows, like, speed of light knows how far away that is. And then within 0.2 seconds, changes the curvature of the lens so that you can see that better.

[Kevin Rose]

It's so freaking cool.

[Alex Albrecht]

Isn't that amazing?

[Kevin Rose]

Dude, when did these come out?

[Alex Albrecht]

So this is the thing. There's two other companies that are trying to get this into the same thing. But as you saw on the video, if you're watching, Mal threw up some of the internal X rays of the glasses, that they can actually fit the electronics into the frame of the glasses because it's all very low energy. So it's not like the Meta glasses where you're doing AR and putting all this stuff. It's like. No, no, no. You're just tiny motion sensor tracking the eyeballs, tiny baby lidars checking the distance for what it is you're looking at. And then I don't know how much energy it takes to do the liquid crystal curvature stuff, but it's pretty fast. They have yet to come out with something that's consumer facing, but they're close.

[Kevin Rose]

It's so cool.

[Alex Albrecht]

Isn't that rad?

[Kevin Rose]

It's so red. So I just did a little research on eagle vision. What do you think eagles are we're 2020. They're at our best.

[Alex Albrecht]

Humans are 2020.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

I actually at my best was 2015 when I was a kid.

[Kevin Rose]

Are you serious?

[Alex Albrecht]

They did call me eagle eyes when I was a kid.

[Kevin Rose]

Did they really? Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

So you're thinking the number's lower?

[Alex Albrecht]

No, no, no, no. So the 120 is when you're looking at something that far away, it looks to you this far away. So that's why 2020.

[Kevin Rose]

Wait, so say that again.

[Alex Albrecht]

Okay, so when someone says 2020 vision when something is 20ft away, it appears 20ft away to you. That's why 2020 is normal vision. I was 2015 when I was a kid. So something 20ft away from me looked like it was 15ft away from me.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes. The second number tells you the distance at which a person with normal vision could see the same detail.

[Alex Albrecht]

Right. So I was 2015 as a kid. So I'm gonna guess an ego would be like 40 20.

[Kevin Rose]

It says here that.

[Alex Albrecht]

It says eagles are mostly.

[Kevin Rose]

It's 25.

[Alex Albrecht]

20, 25.

[Kevin Rose]

25.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, 25. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so it's four to five times better than a human.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. So something 20ft away, like, it's like, appears five feet away to you.

[Kevin Rose]

Exactly.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's fucking tight. We could make that happen with these glasses. Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

I feel like you could get better than that. You could probably get like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

[Kevin Rose]

So what's the best possible 20 0.

[Alex Albrecht]

20 0. It's just like, I can't read this.

[Kevin Rose]

It's too close.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, my God. I can't read that. Billboard's too close. Yeah. At this point, I'm like 25. 25 would be hard because I'd be like, I gotta get my reading glasses.

[Kevin Rose]

Chatgpt's been making fun of me. It's like 200 is nonsensical.

[Alex Albrecht]

Amazing.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. So what would be the best possible vision? Well, that sounds awesome. I want a pair of those, like, right away. Wait, 56 million?

[Alex Albrecht]

That's just an investment that they've raised.

[Kevin Rose]

That's fantastic, though.

[Alex Albrecht]

And, yeah, that's Australian.

[Kevin Rose]

Did you see the new Oakleys from Meta?

[Alex Albrecht]

I did, but I'm just. It's really hard for me to get excited about all this, like, AI stuff in the glasses. I'm just walking around talking out loud, like, fucking.

[Kevin Rose]

They look so. Well, they're a little bigger than normal. I love how the shots of them, like, the action shots are moving very fast. You don't get a chance to really look at them because they do look large. Whoa, there they are. Those are bigger, right?

[Alex Albrecht]

But there's that guy, right? So, perfect example. I'm just never gonna be in a world where I literally am, like, walking down the street and I'll be like, hey, Meta, take a picture of this thing that I'm staring at. It's really cool. That's never gonna happen. I would feel so weird.

[Kevin Rose]

But what if you could just.

[Alex Albrecht]

And you're like, sitting on a bus. Like, say, we're sitting on a bus, right? Hey, Meta, text Kevin back. Ha. Laugh out loud. That's fun. I'll be there at 7:30. Hey, Meta. What am I looking at? Like, it's just dumb. Come on, man.

[Kevin Rose]

The last one's dumb. The texting thing people do all the time. They're like, hey, come here.

[Alex Albrecht]

But they're also, like, fucking. Just write.

[Kevin Rose]

So how about this? So you know how the Apple watch has the. You know what I'm talking about? Have you done that?

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, you've never. I'm going to tell you something, Kevin. That happens a lot. And I'm like, what the fuck is my watch doing?

[Kevin Rose]

No double tap.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, I know. What? I'm just saying.

[Kevin Rose]

Isn't that nice?

[Alex Albrecht]

It's very nice. But I'm just saying, you've solved a question, which is, why does my watch keep doing weird things?

[Kevin Rose]

So imagine you're just looking at something. You want to take a photo and you're like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Because it's a little less weird.

[Kevin Rose]

No, but it's gonna know your hand gestures, right? So you're gonna go out there and just be like this. Be like.

[Alex Albrecht]

If I get. Literally, if I'm like a fucking mime in Central Park. Zoom.

[Kevin Rose]

Huh? That's what people are gonna see.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'll be walking around, be like, oh, Ah. Filter.

[Kevin Rose]

Blood mist removal.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Y. Like, that's. I mean, that's what people are gonna be doing.

[Kevin Rose]

You're gonna get caught taking pictures of, like, you know, like, hot chicks or whatever.

[Alex Albrecht]

You'd be like, yeah. You're just like. Anyway, that's very interesting. Later. That's for later.

[Kevin Rose]

Just like, ha.

[Justin]

Okay, Sam.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're just like, not looking, you know?

[Kevin Rose]

Exactly. Save that one for later.

[Alex Albrecht]

Sweating.

[Kevin Rose]

Sweating just thinking about it. Oh, God. All right.

[Alex Albrecht]

That is totally gonna happen. By the way, there is something to say about privacy. Like, you know when there's a phone up and somebody's pointing at you? I mean, I don't really realize that, but nobody does that, but.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, yes, good. Don't lick the top.

[Alex Albrecht]

Like, you gotta make sure the little drip doesn't hit the bottom.

[Kevin Rose]

Why isn't Justin here anyway?

[Alex Albrecht]

He's almost here. He's almost there.

[Kevin Rose]

He was supposed to come in. You were supposed to talk about the.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, not yet. It's coming down.

[Kevin Rose]

It's okay. Okay, you're up. Sweating. Sweating.

[Alex Albrecht]

Why are you sweating? You've just envisioned your future with meta glasses. Anyway, those glasses will fix your eyesight, and you should invest now. All right, next sponsor, real quick. Delete me. Privacy protection.

[Kevin Rose]

Speaking about privacy protection.

[Alex Albrecht]

Speaking about privacy protection. If you've ever been stalked, doxxed, or you just value your privacy, well, Delete me is a must. Your personal info, name, address, phone number, even your family's information is sold by data brokers. Delete me finds it and removes it. I gave them my info. They handle everything for me. Plus, they send me an ongoing privacy report showing what was deleted. And it's not just one sweep. Delete Me keeps working in the background 24. 7. It's working. Boom. This is Delete me working. Boom. It's working.

[Kevin Rose]

It's working. Stop.

[Alex Albrecht]

Think about it. Oh, you're sleeping.

[Kevin Rose]

You're sleeping.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm sleeping.

[Kevin Rose]

It's going work.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's Delete me. Take control of your privacy and your data. Keep your private light private. By signing up for Delete Me today, you can get 20% off of your Delete Me plan when you go to justdeleteme.com digdig and use the promo code digdig when you are at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to justdeleteme.com dig when enter the code dig at checkout.

[Kevin Rose]

Love Delete Me. Awesome. I also want to talk about a little VPN action.

[Alex Albrecht]

NordVPN privacy.

[Kevin Rose]

You can go back, I would say, gosh, like 15 or so years. We've been doing this podcast for a long time.

[Alex Albrecht]

Long time.

[Kevin Rose]

And back before we had gray hairs and we were old, we had NORD as a sponsor.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

We've been using NORD for a long time. So thank you, Nord, for being a returning sponsor over many, many, many years. And the reason we're stoked to have you is because we love your product.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

NordVPN is the way that you can browse securely on any public WI fi. It's interesting, it says public WI fi here. I actually use it at home as well because it is good when you're jumping around different countries depending on what you're trying to do. You use it for soccer games, rugby Rugby?

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, I mean maybe football games, AKA soccer in the world, but mainly it's rugby.

[Kevin Rose]

I use it for sometimes buying subscriptions. Yeah, because you can say you're in a different country and you get a little discount. Hey man, there's all kinds of different ways and reasons to use it. You can get your account, which has encryption that protects your browsing threat, protection against malware and ads, and access to servers in 60 plus countries. Plus you get coverage for up to 10 devices.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, they have an Apple TV app so you can do Apple TV stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

That's amazing.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, no, it's great.

[Kevin Rose]

So NORDVPN even alerts you if your credentials are leaked on the dark web. On the light web they don't tell you, but if it's on the dark web they let you know and you use our link. You'll get a huge discount on a two year plan plus four additional bonuses, months. Get it at nordvpn.com dig D I G. It's risk free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. And it's the best deal on the Internet. Dark or light web.

[Alex Albrecht]

Ah.

[Kevin Rose]

All right, let's talk about the next story which is that Tesla rolls out self driving in Austin.

[Alex Albrecht]

Who finally.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't know how I feel about this.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm concerned.

[Kevin Rose]

Did you watch the video?

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, so many videos.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. Did you see the one where it couldn't figure out which lane to get into and it was like.

[Alex Albrecht]

No. Did you see the one where they had it go by a school bus?

[Kevin Rose]

No.

[Alex Albrecht]

That was stopped and then they dragged a paper child out in front and it not only hit it, it just kept going over.

[Justin]

No way.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, he probably knew it was paper.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean first off, that's a lot of credit.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, you have to imagine there's some kind of depth sensor. So they dragged a paper. Show me this video. Not paper, it was like a big like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, it was like big plastic.

[Justin]

It was two dimensional.

[Alex Albrecht]

And by the way, it wasn't the robo taxi. Just to say it was the Tesla in self driving mode.

[Kevin Rose]

Same code base though. Ish.

[Alex Albrecht]

There's something about. Look, I've had Teslas for years. I'm on my third Tesla. I remember when I got my first Tesla and it didn't have any of the self driving. Like the self driving stuff was like you could go like 30 miles an hour on the freeway. So it was great for traffic. And I was like, oh it's great, it's autopilot. You know what I mean? I was like, this is Great. And it's worked its way up. And I, for a while was buying the self driving, like full self driving. And I was listening to Elon, I was trusting Elon when he was like, we're two years away from full self driving. A year away from full self driving 90 days ago. And there are certain things that I really loved about it. I loved the summon. I loved being able to pull up into a parking spot where my door wouldn't open and you just put in like, boop, boop, get out of the car, close it. It drives itself. Parks love that stuff. Very. It's not rudimentary. It's still crazy. But, like, not, you know, driving by itself 20 minutes away. You know what I mean? And I got into the Beta in my Model 3, I think maybe my Model Y, my most recent one, I got into the beta for full self driving. And it was scary as hell.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Some of the stuff it was doing, I was like, why are we doing? Why would you do this? And I was like, oh, this is not. And then I got into a waymo.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And I was like, oh, I feel so comfortable.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

By the way. So my Model 3 had LIDAR, and my Model Y, they were like, good news. We took out the lidar because our AI is so good it can shift.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't think the Model 3 ever had LIDAR.

[Alex Albrecht]

Then it was my Model S that had lidar.

[Kevin Rose]

Are you sure? I don't think any of them had lidar.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, no, no. 100% had at least radar or sonar or whatever.

[Kevin Rose]

Maybe it was like.

[Alex Albrecht]

But there were sensors. There were sensors that were.

[Kevin Rose]

Has a Model 3 ever had LIDAR? Or has any Tesla ever had lidar? Radar?

[Alex Albrecht]

Was it radar? There were sensors that was doing sensor stuff and they were like, we don't need the sensors anymore. We can just do it by understanding the cameras. And I go, that's not good. I want more sensors. Don't take sensors away. Give me more sensors.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. They were trying to save money.

[Alex Albrecht]

So even like the beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Of every car usa that was in my Model S. And I think they took it out on the Model 3. And I was like, it goes beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. But I was like, I don't trust this because it's just looking at the cameras and deciding that I shouldn't. You know what I mean? Like, it's not getting radar information.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, but neither are you.

[Alex Albrecht]

I don't. But I'm also Not going. I guess I should stop. You know what I mean? Like.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, I hear you. Trust me. I just feel like I don't want to get into one anytime soon. Yeah, no, I think that I'm with you, so.

[Alex Albrecht]

Too soon.

[Kevin Rose]

I had the self driving enabled on my ex and there were a few things that it like you. Where I had to grab the steering wheel back 100%.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Because I was like, I'm gonna die.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, 100%.

[Kevin Rose]

And the one thing I realized, the advantage of the lidar is that you get a level of depth and understanding of the terrain that you just would never get with a camera because the camera is not gonna be able to see around corners. The lidar is actually showing me like two cars in front and off to the right there's a cat that's about to run out across the street, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's amazing at. Because when you get in these waymos if you haven't taken one yet.

[Alex Albrecht]

I took one here.

[Kevin Rose]

So did I. You get to see. They kind of give you the whole playing field. And like, it almost looks like X ray mode has been turned on for all the environment around you. And the sensors are crazy expensive. So when they have those riots out here in LA and they burned a few of them, they came out with the price and they said they were like 180 grand a piece or something.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, it's funny, cause somebody was like, the sensors. Yeah, somebody was like, oh no, they burned a bunch of waymos. And they were like, that's like, you know, $75,000, $100,000 car. And I go, yeah, with like hundreds of thousands of dollars of compute and sensors and like that's what you have to do. And the Teslas, I think what they do is they just added a little like lidar cluster by the rearview mirror.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't think they have lidar at all.

[Alex Albrecht]

They have to have put something in there.

[Kevin Rose]

No, he's against lidar. Like he's come out and said like he hates lidar, but they put a.

[Alex Albrecht]

Camera, they put a sensor thing up there. If you can see that there's more sensors in the.

[Kevin Rose]

See Tesla's adopted vision only approach. They will not. He's like, he's come out against lidar.

[Alex Albrecht]

What the is what? What?

[Kevin Rose]

Because he says it's too expensive. So here's the one thing, here's the one thing I think about.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's expensive, good and safe.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, yes, but consumers can't buy it. And that's the whole thing is he wants to get this in consumers hands as fast as possible.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, God.

[Kevin Rose]

Trust me, I'm with you. I'm with you on this one. We're on the same team. I don't want to get into one of these things. No, I think they're scary as hell. And also he comes out and he says the rides are 4.20, which is like $4.20, which is like a weed joke. Like 420.

[Alex Albrecht]

Do not want the guy who's creating the autonomous vehicles to be giving me weed jokes.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes, exactly.

[Alex Albrecht]

I want him to be the nerdiest guy that, like, I don't want to.

[Kevin Rose]

Charge me like PI, like three point, like, you know what I mean? Like it's something where I'm like, oh, there's real engineers like working behind the scenes here.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

I don't want the weed charge.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh my God.

[Kevin Rose]

Like that makes me feel like nobody's taking this seriously. Like, I don't want to die in this thing. They're not.

[Alex Albrecht]

They are not clear.

[Kevin Rose]

So anyway, I think that maybe Elon knows something that we don't in terms of how much data they believe they need until it gets safer. But I just can't see this. It's been so long with the same sensors and the same issues. Yeah, I just. I mean, I know it's getting a little bit better over time, but to watch it kind of freak out and change lanes and now run over this paper child, like, it just seems like it's not ready for prime time.

[Alex Albrecht]

So we were both in New York. Yes, I was there a little bit before you. I had. And I've been talking about Waymo for ages. Obviously anybody that watches the show knows I like to talk about Waymo. I took a Waymo over here. It's great. So fun watching a YouTube video about making dashboards in Home Assistant. Actually, now that I think about it on my way over here to the show anyway. Nerd on nerd on nerd. Yes. But I was in New York and we got an Uber, so we had to get an Uber for something. And in my mind I was like. Or not even in my mind, I was telling. Talking to friends that were there. I was like, there's no fucking way. Like Wayma. There's no way they would be able to do this. Cause there's so much unwritten in New York. In Manhattan, you know, people walk against the light and everybody's like. And then you just sort of honk when somebody goes like, oh, it's too close. You know what I mean, and you have to just kind of go through the people. Like, you just have to believe that the people are gonna kinda go. I know, I'm sorry. You're gonna, like. The car's gonna have to go. Otherwise the car's not gonna like. This is. It's almost like this unspoken humanity, like a human mass. Just works in New York.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Waymo just announced that they're moving into New York.

[Kevin Rose]

I know.

[Alex Albrecht]

I was like, holy shit, it's gonna happen.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, I'll say. There's two things that I've noticed with the Waymos. I've ridden probably 200 rides now, and I've had two incidents that I consider to be kind of significant outliers. So one was there was a homeless person in SF that came out of nowhere. And I gotta tell you, that Way has been trained in San Francisco on a lot of homeless people because it did an amazing job at dodging the homeless person. And I was like, zombie apocalypse or anything. It's gonna have the training data to get out of town.

[Alex Albrecht]

Just go into a zombie apocalypse mode and be like, we're fine.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. But the other thing, though, that was really kind of crazy is it was another homeless situation, unfortunately. But this one was with somebody that I would say was definitely mentally unstable. Cause they were yelling at the car, but they just walked right in front of it and it slammed on its brakes.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And. But what was crazy is I realized that this person was doing it on purpose.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

They knew that thing had to stop. And so he was like. He thought it was funny and he was walking by.

[Alex Albrecht]

So that crazy guy had enough confidence in Waymo's tech to just yeet out in the middle, being like, I know this car's not gonna hit me. That's.

[Kevin Rose]

And it caused me, like, my laptop and everything went flying because I was, like, doing shit on the commute. And I was like, well, that could be a thing. Because kids will have fun doing that once they realize that's a game.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, they did the thing where they put cones on it and, like, fucked up all the sensors.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, really? I didn't see that.

[Alex Albrecht]

They were just like, ooh. And the other thing is, first off, once people get like. Once it becomes. Currently, it's novel, Right? Just like the autonomous pizza delivery. Well, it's not pizza. It can be anything. But the autonomous delivery bots, you guys have those in. In Santa Monica?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Little like Coco.

[Kevin Rose]

What are they called? Cocos? Yeah, Cocos. Yeah. My kids call them wallies.

[Alex Albrecht]

Wallies. I mean, that's what they are. And by the way, there's one pizza place that we order from.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, does it bring a pizza?

[Alex Albrecht]

I might have to do pizza tonight. That'd be good. It does. And it's really fun because it's so nice. It's so cute. It's like. And I'm like, oh, thanks.

[Kevin Rose]

Did he talk?

[Alex Albrecht]

And, yeah, it goes like, no way. Opens. And you're like, oh, thanks. And it closes, and it's like, boop, boop.

[Kevin Rose]

No. No way. 100%.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

So that's what.

[Alex Albrecht]

I should go away. 100%.

[Kevin Rose]

Can you talk to it?

[Alex Albrecht]

No, I don't think it knows that I'm trying to talk to it. It's just sort of like, hello?

[Kevin Rose]

Because that would be really cool. Because imagine you could just, like, have a little conversation. It would like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Right. But we're talking about 11 labs.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Just think if it pulls up and it's like, hey, sir, your pizza's here. Hot and fresh.

[Kevin Rose]

No, I don't want that.

[Alex Albrecht]

Why? It's so weird. It's like, all of a sudden, it's like a. A 50s. I want it to be, like, 40s. Barker.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. I want to, like, come back to me with code.

[Alex Albrecht]

How great would that be? If you could, like, set. Who do you want to deliver your pizza? R2. D2.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

C3PO.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes. Alex.

[Alex Albrecht]

Alex. I'd be like, hey, fuckers, your pizza's here.

[Kevin Rose]

Wow.

[Alex Albrecht]

Light the fireworks. We don't have any fireworks. Take the pizza.

[Kevin Rose]

I would love that.

[Alex Albrecht]

But once that becomes. It's gonna. The shine is gonna wear off.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And then people are gonna go, oh, yeah. It's way more. I mean, it's already starting to happen. Like, people are like, oh, my God. A fucking waymo. Like, take. But those are people that are coming in from, like, Milwaukee.

[Kevin Rose]

Right.

[Alex Albrecht]

And are in Los Angeles.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. I'll still get people pulling out their phones and stuff. Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

But, like, once enough people. Once it. Once it sort of gets to enough people, it'll be like. It'll be like a fucking iPhone. It'll be like FaceTime. It'll be like, whatever.

[Kevin Rose]

You don't think people are gonna, like, fight back against these things?

[Alex Albrecht]

But why? What's the negative impact?

[Kevin Rose]

I think I feel like there's this weird undercurrent of kind of like communism. Things are moving. No, things are moving too fast for people. And, like, they feel like people being old. Yeah. But I feel like kids, like, they're easy targets. I mean, the reason they were lit on fire is because you could summon one and let it on fire.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, the Waymos.

[Kevin Rose]

I thought the kids were easy targets.

[Alex Albrecht]

I was like, jesus Christ. This took a turn. You can get a kid here in five minutes. It's like, okay, Kevin, calm it down. We're talking about Waymos. No, no, I know. 100% easy target. And same thing with. So that was one of the things with the Cocos.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And there's more than just Coco. It's just the one that's been branded on the side. They actually had issues with vandalism.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, you can get inside that.

[Alex Albrecht]

But so what they did was they.

[Kevin Rose]

Put eyes and it makes them more human. Like.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, it makes people less likely to vandalize.

[Kevin Rose]

I've heard that. Yeah. Well, I'm a big fan of Waymo. The prices will come down. I did a little research because I was. I was looking to invest in some Alphabet stock and I didn't pull the trigger, largely because their search business is under attack. But I do like other areas of their business. Obviously. Gemini is amazing. Waymo is a really interesting business unit for them. The prices are falling dramatically on LiDAR. Like, it was really per sensor was like tens of thousands. And now it's coming down quite a bit. But they really have to ramp up production to get them to parody with traditional cameras. It's gonna be quite some time.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's gonna take ages.

[Kevin Rose]

So Tesla is betting on this idea that cameras will do will get us there and they don't have to spend the money on the sensors. But we'll see.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean that. I. Yeah, I have. I have that. Sus is the way that I would say that I would call that sus. I was just about to ask you something. You were gonna invest in Alphabet?

[Kevin Rose]

Alphabet, yes. Search business under attack.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, I lost it. Gemini. Good.

[Kevin Rose]

Way more good.

[Alex Albrecht]

I. Way more good. Oh, I was gonna say. I will say. I did not. I was very hesitant when any of the AI stuff comes over. Like, anytime AI kind of is forced onto me in my way that I'm usually working. So, like, a good example is I hate the, like, priority message in my email. I will. I was like, I'll tell you if this is a priority. Like, I can just read.

[Kevin Rose]

I'll tell you.

[Alex Albrecht]

But I was like, I can read my emails. I get like so little emails. I was like, I can read my four emails. What's your email address? No, somebody on the show. And it was thankfully blurred out later. Thank you, Mom. But it was like, I'd get so few emails.

[Kevin Rose]

You can guess it by the way, you really wanted to guess it.

[Alex Albrecht]

Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. Kevinrosevinrose.org Anyway, anyway, but so I get so few. When I see that thing, it's confused. It, like, distracts me. I'm like, just show me the email. Like the normal. Like it's normally. But I will say, when I first started seeing.

[Kevin Rose]

You sound like another language.

[Alex Albrecht]

When I first started seeing the Gemini results in Google searches, I was really like, I don't need fucking AI search result.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, it's way better.

[Alex Albrecht]

But now that's kind of all I use. Yeah, I do the Google and I look and I read the thing like, Heather's car is having a hard time charging for some reason. And I was like, how do you reboot a BMW i4? Cause, like, on a Tesla, you press the two things to have weight and then it like, goes. But I didn't know how to do it in Heather's car. And literally the Gemini result was, here's how you reboot, you know, the Idrive system in a BMW i4. And I just was sitting in the car, I was like, okay, cool. Didn't have to go to a website. Yeah, dude, this is amazing.

[Kevin Rose]

Welcome to six months ago.

[Alex Albrecht]

I know, but I never. Why are you still going to Google? Why aren't you going to Perplexity now?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, why don't you change Perplexity?

[Alex Albrecht]

I know, because I didn't even know that was a thing I had.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, you want a pro account? Yes, I have some coupon codes.

[Alex Albrecht]

Send me a coupon code.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, I'll give you a free year.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'll take a free year of Perplexity. Especially right before they're bought by Apple. Hey.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, hey, O.

[Alex Albrecht]

Anyway, it's great. I love things that are great. Okay, next story. Nvidia goes nuclear, investing in Bill Gates nuclear startup. First off, I used to say nuclear, like, wrong.

[Kevin Rose]

But anyway, I still do.

[Alex Albrecht]

I still do, but it's fine. So Bill Gates has a nuclear power startup called TerraPower. And it's very interesting because I think, you know, I grew up in the 80s, so I grew up in the time when nuclear was super scary, right?

[Kevin Rose]

Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

It was Chernobyl. It was, you know, China syndrome. It was Three Mile Island. Like, it was very much like nuclear bad, everything else good. And I think there was a little bit of, like, bad press when it came to that.

[Kevin Rose]

Like, well, to be fair, there were some bad times.

[Alex Albrecht]

There were some bad times. There were some bad times. But nuclear is actually not a inherently bad way of making energy. It's actually very energy efficient. It's clean as far as the off product. Like when you're like, oh my God. But all the nuclear waste. Cause we've been trained like the fucking Simpsons. Like barrels of nuclear waste being hidden in a fucking mountain. You know what I mean? But when you actually see the numbers, the amount of electricity you can generate and the little amount of nuclear waste that it makes, you start to go, why are we so afraid of this? And we've stopped kind of iterating on the technology for the most part when it comes to the government.

[Kevin Rose]

Right.

[Alex Albrecht]

Because everybody was like, not in my backyard. You know what I mean? NIMBY or whatever it's called.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. But the thing is that that was the old nuclear.

[Alex Albrecht]

Right. 100%. This is what I'm saying. But I still, until I read this and I knew I'd seen Bill Gates talking about like how he was like, I think nuclear is a way for forward. Also small reactors I think are really interesting. Like the idea that your house could have its own small nuclear reactor that powers the house for the life of the house.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

So there is no grid, you know what I mean? Or they were talking about with this, it's data centers. Yeah. You know, and then you think about like how much energy that AI is being is using up. I mean, I know. I think OpenAI has already talked to them about or is an even invested in them to be like, yeah, bring us nuclear. So Nvidia has now gotten into the thing and this makes sense to me because of the fact of the power consumption of AI and Nvidia being the chip of AI. So they're like, we're in trouble. Well, or not, right?

[Kevin Rose]

No, but America is in trouble. This needs to be an all hands on deck emergency moment to get more power to the United States without a thing. Really? Oh, 100%.

[Alex Albrecht]

Holy shit, dude.

[Kevin Rose]

So here's the deal.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, hit me, hit me, man.

[Kevin Rose]

China. So imagine all the capacity power capacity in the United States right now. Okay? So just imagine. Let's call it. Let's call it 10. Okay?

[Alex Albrecht]

That's everything.

[Kevin Rose]

China to their grid and their power capacity is adding the entire capacity of the United States every single year to their.

[Alex Albrecht]

You mean they're increasing their capacity?

[Kevin Rose]

Increasing their capacity of the entire United States every single year.

[Alex Albrecht]

Jesus.

[Kevin Rose]

Yes, it is like all we are going to. This is so about a year ago, I.

[Alex Albrecht]

Who knew?

[Kevin Rose]

So there's two things. One, we're invested in a company at True Ventures called the nuclear company, which is. They are focused on helping America win this new nuclear race which is going to be small nuclear reactors. This is what I'm talking about at scale. Yes. And so about a year ago I started talking about this on Tim's podcast. And this is not investment advice, but I talked about how I made an investment in a company called NuScale Power, which is, this is one of the very few publicly traded and this is the riskiest of the risky because there's no revenue here because it takes a while to get these spun up. So this is not investment advice again, but it's done. Well, it's up a couple hundred percent since a year ago. But they were one of the first to get approval from the doe, which is the doe, which oversees all the nuclear everything. And so they got approval for their.

[Alex Albrecht]

Small reactor plans, which takes a long time. That's one of the things they talked about in this article, was that they're.

[Kevin Rose]

They'Re gonna fast track this stuff.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

But the thing is like what the cool thing is, what they figured out now is they have a game plan for these nuclear reactors that can literally be in your backyard. Not literally in your backyard, but like in your neighborhood.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And they can take up a couple city blocks and the way that they will assemble them is largely, almost everything is gonna be self contained underground and so they'll be self sealing as well through ever any issues whatsoever. So the attack vector is minimal because everything is underground. First of all, it's super tiny and that's actually what you want because you want more, less massive big single point of failure reactors and a much more distributed grid of smaller reactors all over the place.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so if they can pull that off and they have a game plan of a working set of modern planes that's safe, efficient and you can stamp them out.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

Now you can go crazy and put 100 of these around the United States. Right.

[Alex Albrecht]

Think about them like putting it out in the Palisades.

[Kevin Rose]

Right.

[Alex Albrecht]

Because that is a, an area that's going to be densely popular populated, that is completely flat and needs to be completely re. Like redesigned from the ground up.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. I mean there's. There. We're gonna have to do this all over the place.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And so I don't think there's a lot of companies that are now in the race here. TerraPower looks like an awesome one. Obviously. I think engineering resources are going to focus a lot on power over the next decade. It's going to be.

[Alex Albrecht]

Well, I thought the other thing is that this blew my mind. I learned This a couple years ago and I was like, oh my God. The idea of energy and energy storage not necessarily being battery. So what they're doing is that they're doing molten salt storage. So essentially they take the energy that's being generated and they melt salt and then they can use that salt to quench water. That then causes steam which then powers electrical turbines that then allows you to utilize the energy. So like some of the stuff that's like the kinetic energy storage or the like mechanical energy storage like where you literally have like they have solar farms where they'll have like a giant rock and a wench at the top of like a ramp. And during the day when they're generating the solar, they wench the excess solar wenches the rock up. And at night when the solar is done, it slowly lets the rock down causing an electric turbine.

[Kevin Rose]

He just punches off.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes, I heard about this. I was like this is a fucking battery that's just literally a rock going up and down a fucking. Blew my mind.

[Kevin Rose]

Is there a Greek mythology around this concept?

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fucking Sisyphus energy battery. But it's actually, it's called mechanical energy storage or kinetic energy storage where they literally will like use the excess energy to move a physical thing. And then just like an electric car going down, it fucking generates electricity over and over.

[Kevin Rose]

That's so cool.

[Alex Albrecht]

And then in the morning pulls the fucking.

[Kevin Rose]

I mean that's how electricity. A lot of these crazy. A lot of these wave based ones that sit in the ocean. Same idea like lifting up and. Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

And wind. You know what I mean? But to be able to store energy in a way that's kinetic, that has nothing to do with like batteries and lithium and.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, we haven't even talked about quantum storage.

[Alex Albrecht]

Fuck me.

[Kevin Rose]

Which I just made it up. But that's gonna be a thing at some point.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's going to happen.

[Kevin Rose]

It's going to happen.

[Alex Albrecht]

That is a fucking.

[Kevin Rose]

We shouldn't get that domain name.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm sure it's sticking.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm sure it's stake it.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm sure it exists. All right, all right. Let's Talk about the iOS Alpha that is currently happening.

[Kevin Rose]

And we have our one and only.

[Alex Albrecht]

Deepest V. The Lord of V's CEO of the new dig.com the Queen V.

[Justin]

Please, it's just V. Mr. V is my father.

[Alex Albrecht]

Like Mr. V is my father. Just call me Voice.

[Justin]

I'm really happy to be here. I am. I believe I'm screen sharing. Am I am, I am I am indeed. Yeah. So this is me just calling out. This is at Justin on there. You can notice we got a new little badge on there for all of our Dig staff members and the team that's in there, so you can tell when they're interacting, which is a lot of fun. But I know we've gotten a ton of questions.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah.

[Justin]

About gems.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah. So I have gems.

[Justin]

Yes.

[Kevin Rose]

I have 15.

[Alex Albrecht]

What are. Oh, I think I might have more gems than Kevin.

[Kevin Rose]

You probably do. Can you guys go more like high context here?

[Alex Albrecht]

What are we looking at?

[Kevin Rose]

Who gets access to this? Yes. Oh. Oh, roll it back.

[Justin]

Yeah. What is the Dig Alpha? That's a Great question. For iOS. It looked like you were about to say something. Were you?

[Kevin Rose]

Not me.

[Justin]

Yeah. Oh, maybe you weren't. Maybe you weren't.

[Kevin Rose]

Maybe that's a big dig energy. You take it.

[Justin]

So about a week ago, we rolled out the Dig Alpha through test flight. So if you're on iOS, I think we've got about 5k ish in there right now. And we've got people poking around using the app right now. This is. Now, if you start in here, this is actually your account. You're building your account as you go right now.

[Alex Albrecht]

So there's no wipe before.

[Justin]

No, no, this is all live. This is it.

[Kevin Rose]

I didn't know that, actually. And I have a lot of that. I'm like, I've been thinking about the.

[Justin]

Stuff you've been posting, and I post the same thing.

[Kevin Rose]

We don't have the NSFW turn on yet.

[Justin]

No, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's totally fine.

[Kevin Rose]

And so NFW go live, by the way.

[Justin]

Well, I mean, technically, it is live.

[Kevin Rose]

Now, but how can you find the stuff that is. No, I'm just asking for friends.

[Alex Albrecht]

I just want some gems. I just want to harvest my gems. And the nsfw.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, it blurs it. Okay. But there's no, like, category yet for.

[Justin]

There's. There's really no place to post nsfw. I'm just letting.

[Kevin Rose]

I mean, you know. I know. I hear you. I'm not into it.

[Justin]

You know, I mean, art. Yeah, that's true. Art.

[Kevin Rose]

Art.

[Justin]

But then it's some weird food, then it's art.

[Alex Albrecht]

That's true.

[Justin]

And so, okay, so the app is live right now, which means the content that we're seeing here being posted by people on the Dig app, and they're utilizing it right now, which is awesome. I did. I only buried that post, by the way, because it's asking me to Bury it. That post said, let's try to bury this as far as we can. So the cool thing about it right now, aside from the fact that it's all live, is that we are taking feedback from everybody who's in there. We created a channel specifically called Slash Dig. Now, this is the official channel here where people are giving feedback. They're talking about what they want to see, they're talking about what they hate, they're letting us know all the awesome and terrible things that are happening right now on the platform, as well as giving ideas, suggestions, what have you, all the good things. And so one of the things that I've been seeing a lot is the question around gems.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes.

[Justin]

What are gems?

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Justin]

And it's a great question. We are constantly working on this. And let me explain the thinking around gems. So when we started thinking about Digg and, you know, in speaking with Kevin and Alexis about, you know, what does it take to make a platform like this work, there are a number of different Personas and archetypes of people that show up every day. You know, you've got the people that post content, you've got the people that are, you know, commenting on those posts. Some of them are funny, some of them are informative or empathetic, what have you. But one of the archetypes that we identified, and it's kind of an unsung hero, particularly in these places where, you know, you've got upvoting and down voting that exist here, are the people that curate that space, that show up every single day. They browse by recently added, and they're just like sifting through all of the content, all the mail coming in and they're putting into categories like, hey, hey, this is great. Hey, this right here, it's probably a little less relevant. Hey, this is kind of a low quality piece of content. And so they're sifting through all of these things. And so one of the ways that we thought about this was what if we had a metric where if you were early on a piece of content that reached, you know, a certain threshold, let's call it escape velocity, like it really took off. What would it look like for the earliest people to earn a certain amount of gems? And, you know, as the time went on for these escape velocity posts, you know, you're in a second tranche, maybe it's like a little less, and then it's a lesson. Eventually you don't earn gems for it. So it's like being early to content that really takes off on the Platform.

[Kevin Rose]

It's like when you say you found a band before anybody else. Like I called that like five years ago.

[Alex Albrecht]

I knew that was that shirt. The first shirt, not the second shirt.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, Little Jim's Early. Early adopters. Not early adopters, early hunters.

[Justin]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're discoverers, if you will.

[Alex Albrecht]

Like the si. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it. Yeah.

[Justin]

Now listen, we know that at a very basic level we heard from a lot of people, well, why not just go through and just like dig everything from recently added so that you always have a shot at doing it. So there's a couple things on that. And again, we are very much still fine tuning this thing. You know, we are looking at that behavior. It's pretty easy to see and there are ways to discourage that sort of behavior from just blanket digging everything as you go down there. You know, we want to see your curation with the things that you identify with that you like. Now that said, it is a fine balance. We don't want you to be discouraged from digging things and to be, you know, really thinking it's like a scarcity and being really stingy with the digs like, like the things you like. But just know like there is that balance that we are fine tuning where we want to see people really taking part in that act of curation. And so it's, it's a constant work in progress. Everything from how we're looking at certain behaviors to what those thresholds look like as escape velocity approaches. And it's really just kind of a constant conversation with the community, what's working, what's not. And I think it's a newer idea for how to do this. Yeah, we're going to see how it goes. We are.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, I've not heard of any social media company coming out and being like, we're just going to let people in and see what they think. I'm like, oh my God, why would you do that? But I've been seeing a lot of the. Because I'm in the alpha and I've been using it every day. I mean it's crazy how much, how quickly it became the dig of old to me where I was just like, oh yeah, this is fucking this great poop scrolling. You know what I mean? Fucking love this. And then it was like interesting to see things that were commenting. Cause I'm also in the company Slack. And so it's interesting to see stuff that I pick up on that people are like, hey, this is interesting. Or what is this? Doesn't I'm bumping on this and people's comments and then seeing it reflected in what you guys are all talking about behind the scenes as far as like, hey, this popped up. And I'm like, dude, this is happening in like real time. It is crazy and super iterative. And every time I get a new email about a new test flight build, I'm like, oh my God, what's it gonna look like?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, it's cool.

[Alex Albrecht]

And even when I come in here to do dignation and I'm just seeing people's like, the stuff that hasn't even matriculated out to the alpha, I'm like, oh, oh God, that's good. I can't wait to see that. It's been really fantastic.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, the builds are coming fast and furious now. I feel like we're kind of gaining some momentum there, which is great. But I think one thing to add on to what Justin's saying is that ultimately what we're trying to figure out here is kind of reputation and this recognition for that heavy lifting that you're doing and also the ability to have an eye for what is important. Right. And so you can imagine we have a fixed taxonomy right now, but eventually this is going to go open pretty broadly. Right.

[Justin]

Anybody can create any niche community they want to create.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Justin]

So you can.

[Kevin Rose]

There's a world where there is a community that's dedicated to whatever it may be that you're into. Call it like, you know, Tesla's full self driving advocates or whatever. And no, but if you go in there, you should be able to build a reputation and say, like, I'm good at submitting stories here, commentary here, whatever it may be, however you decide to show up, that the community says, hey, that person is awesome. Gems will most likely play some type of role in that whole thing where you're able to see, oh, this person's really well known in these five different categories or these different spaces because they've taken the time to do the heavy lifting there.

[Justin]

And it has some interesting implications for where it can go on the platform. One of the things that Kevin and I talked about was it's like as humans, we are dynamic, our interests are dynamic. Sometimes you meet somebody and you know them in one context and you had no idea of this other part of them that is like so deep on something like Kevin. I trust Kevin's taste when he's like, oh man, I've been using this AI tool. It's wild. Let's take a look. I don't trust Kevin's movie taste. Though, because he doesn't watch movies and so it's like.

[Alex Albrecht]

I agree with that.

[Kevin Rose]

I have like good movies.

[Alex Albrecht]

He just got two gems for I.

[Kevin Rose]

Like the cat movie. The flow. The flow, yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

Everybody loves.

[Kevin Rose]

I like deep V T shirts from Justin. Yeah, I trust you on that, by the way.

[Alex Albrecht]

Only said one movie and then moved on, so. You're right.

[Kevin Rose]

Damn it.

[Alex Albrecht]

Agreed.

[Kevin Rose]

I was hoping you wouldn't notice to be fair.

[Justin]

Movie recommendations. I'm like, oh, you made. You got so good. And then you're like, I hated it.

[Kevin Rose]

You know what's good? Any Predator animated movie. The voice acting, the best. Chef's kiss.

[Alex Albrecht]

Mostly one old Viking guy, some dying Vikings and a guy getting heated out of a plane. But other, all the other voices are good.

[Justin]

I heard it's the new wheel home scream that we're going to be hearing.

[Kevin Rose]

He just said yeeted.

[Justin]

Yeeted? Yeah. It's common vernacular now. It's aged up.

[Kevin Rose]

We can use it.

[Justin]

We're allowed to use it? Yes.

[Alex Albrecht]

Why would it? How? Why could I not use you?

[Kevin Rose]

Like six months ago you couldn't use it.

[Justin]

Yeah, you have to wait until something moves into the public domain. The young people start with like we can't say bus and bus in yet, but in about six months we'll be able to say it.

[Kevin Rose]

You will be.

[Justin]

You say that you wouldn't have wanted to say yeet it six months ago, but now you do.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's funny, I feel like I was saying yeeted.

[Kevin Rose]

Maybe you thought you were. It's only been a few weeks.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, interesting.

[Kevin Rose]

It's percolating back there. And then you have enough drinks and the heat just comes out.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, I've eated a lot of stuff out of my ass when it comes to just drinking stuff.

[Kevin Rose]

Well, Justin, on that note, Justin, on.

[Alex Albrecht]

That lovely note, is there any way.

[Kevin Rose]

For people to get into the Alpha?

[Justin]

No. Yes. Yes there is. If you are in Groundbreakers. We did put up a post post about it. So if you're active in Groundbreakers right now and you are in that community, you can let us know on that thread. I think there's a form there to give your Apple ID and we can let you into that. And then coming up soon, we've got the Android app for testing. So actually by the time this comes out, that should already be out. So I'm going to say this past tense. The Android app also came out.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, it's so good too. Yeah, it's bug free. Just we have.

[Justin]

I heard. It's incredible.

[Alex Albrecht]

I've heard it's amazing.

[Justin]

Absolutely.

[Kevin Rose]

I just downloaded the source code for Digg like an hour ago. And data is like, you have to commit something. And I'm so. I'm going to fix a bug. There was a bug. We didn't expire the cache. And I know how to do it now, so I'm going to do it. Justin, can we get a little bit of a tour of the app I.

[Alex Albrecht]

Know you talked about? Oh, sure.

[Justin]

Oh, sure.

[Kevin Rose]

Look at it, by the way. Some of the top stories. One top story today had over 200 digs on it, which is like, awesome.

[Justin]

Let me close this out. Let me reopen it so it's a.

[Kevin Rose]

Little, it's springy on its merch.143 digs on this one. I'm waiting for this. Merch is coming.

[Alex Albrecht]

Merch is coming.

[Kevin Rose]

Merch is coming. You found a provider? Yeah, yeah, Good one. Yeah, like good shit. Good like, not shitty shit. Only the best.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, only the best. Yeah, we got the good stuff, but some, like, shitty shit. That's like, good.

[Justin]

It's a little shitty.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay.

[Alex Albrecht]

No, but like, good shitty.

[Kevin Rose]

I need better stickers. This is the best sticker I've got and it's not that good.

[Justin]

Shut up, man.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, first off, why stickers? I feel like stickers were very.

[Kevin Rose]

What's wrong with everybody likes the little extra stickers.

[Justin]

Yeah, come on.

[Alex Albrecht]

Okay. Yeah, stickers. Let's do stickers.

[Kevin Rose]

Put on your wine bottle.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, I mean, first off, my wine bottle goes away.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, that's true.

[Alex Albrecht]

You know, Dig decanters, dignation decanters, Dig Nation mascot decanter.

[Kevin Rose]

I mean, that Voltron boom. Oh, what happened to the finger flipping people off on the dig button? Is that gone?

[Justin]

People don't like my icon. A spade icon that looks like it's pointing up and a spade that looks like it's pointing down because they think it looks like, hey, I, I, I have a lot of options. We got a lot of, like, concepts I've kicked around. Expect them to make their way into the app so it's not so confusing.

[Alex Albrecht]

Amazing.

[Justin]

Let me take you for a quick spin around the dig app. Now right here, we're on that home feed. That home feed has four different ways to browse it. You've got trending, which is like within a 24 hour period. What has ranked. Ranked the highest in there based on engagement? There's a couple different factors we're kind of fine tuning in there. You've got most. Doug, what has the most digs? You've also Got newest, which is just a chronological feed of everything based on those actual communities you're following. And we've also got heating up which is a much faster trending, which is I think right now, every two hours. I think we're going to speed it up though. Maybe once every hour. Maybe once every. Who can know know what it's looking like now within your feed you can click onto any of these right here. And this is a link style post where somebody has taken a link, they've posted that specific link in the technology community. And communities are where these topical discussions happen right now. Fix taxonomy. But it will open up. So we can go over to technology right there and we can actually see what is every post that is related to the technology community and you can see all of that going on.

[Kevin Rose]

One quick question. Yeah. Can someone go use an external web browser if they want to and they want to open a link?

[Justin]

Absolutely. Yeah. If you go to.

[Kevin Rose]

Is that a new setting?

[Justin]

You know, I think it's actually been in there. The bottom right icon is open in your external web browser.

[Kevin Rose]

Ah, I didn't know that.

[Justin]

Yeah, well now you do that.

[Alex Albrecht]

Kevin is trying to poke holes.

[Justin]

No, no, hey, hey, I'll take it.

[Alex Albrecht]

He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's try to break it.

[Kevin Rose]

One more question, One more question.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh yeah, wait.

[Kevin Rose]

Go back to the screen though.

[Alex Albrecht]

One question in the back.

[Justin]

Go back to what?

[Kevin Rose]

Go back to the screen. There we go. So talk about the TLDR and stuff like that.

[Justin]

Yeah. So the tldr, written by Dig Intelligence, is a small summary of what you'll find contained therein from the source that it comes from. So this is a YouTube and it says, John Oliver discusses the rise of AI generated content, its potential harm and its impact on his personal life in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a little meta, if you will.

[Kevin Rose]

I would love if it was like, fuck John Oliver. Like the AI was like, there's not.

[Alex Albrecht]

A guy's bashing AI.

[Justin]

Here's an AI bash back now on that. You know, I think here's. Here's kind of what we're seeing is like there was kind of an internal debate on TLDRs because we were like, we want people to go to the source content. We want people. If there's a topic that interests you, it should go beyond that headline. And so one of the coolest things that we are hearing is that like their likelihood to click on it, or at least for some people anecdotally has increased because they are getting those TLDR which then gives them a jumping off point or a frame of reference outside of just a headline, which, as we all know, headlines can be written a number of different ways. A lot of times just click baity or attention grabbing, but ultimately the content might be really helpful. And so if we can still be a place and a source where people are deciding they want to engage with content deeper, I think that's a huge win. That said, if you're not a fan of those TLDRs, if you click Minimize on there where it truncates that, now it's in a collapse state, we're going to remember that setting for you and we're not going to start it unrolled for you. And if you want them engage in them later, go ahead, open them up. That's up to you. This is kind of our thinking when it comes to AI assist on these sort of experiences. We want this to feel like you can fine tune this thing. If you want it out of the way, you should be able to minimize it and have it take minimal real estate on that screen for you.

[Kevin Rose]

A question.

[Alex Albrecht]

This guy's got another question.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah, no, the one thing I, I know we've talked about this before. I'm curious when it's in the. I haven't been up to speed with the roadmap and everything. When comments get to say several hundred comments, something's like getting really hot and heated in there. TLDR is on comments and kind of giving people a quick like before they jump in.

[Justin]

Yep.

[Kevin Rose]

Is that. Is that soonish or is that.

[Justin]

It is. So the conversation summary is kind of what we call it. And yeah, that's, you know, ultimately you've got a certain threshold of comment that have come in. You want to see like generally what has the discussion been on this that does exist, however, that is actually behind a discrete action of clicking on it. Like I want this conversation summary. And the reason why we made this decision at Digg was ultimately, again, we want the best technology to help us make the web more efficient to be able to browse. I think discovery is an incredibly powerful area that we can use AI to do. But what's really important on Digg is that the human experiences should feel deeply human and we want to make sure it's out of the way for those sorts of things. And so comments are one of those things where we've realized there's so much that's captured within commentary with the way people show up, how they talk about things, the sarcasm, the humor. And so we want to make sure that that is at the forefront to be able to browse. And sure, the conversation summary can be a really quick way just to see at a high level what are these conversations about. You can use it as a tool to dig a little deeper and say, okay, actually, I do want to read these comments. But we really want the human aspect to be at the forefront of these experiences, to keep what is human human and to keep technology in a place where it makes the most sense.

[Kevin Rose]

I love this, man.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, baby.

[Kevin Rose]

Congrats on all the progress, dude. I know you've been working your ass off on this, and, you know, it's been fun to work with you on it and see this actually up and running and in your hands.

[Justin]

We've got a long way to go. We've. We've definitely, you know, we've got, obviously the web browser version of it that I know a lot of folks are asking for, that should be up very shortly. We've been internally testing it over here. That's what Kevin loves to use. And we'll be out there shortly. Really, really excited about what's happening. And honestly, it's because we have an incredible team and an incredible community around us. That is why we move so fast. And so I may be the really fast speaker box for it at the moment, but ultimately, it's an incredible team and community around us. So thanks to those of you who have taken part in the alpha, and also thanks to our incredible team.

[Kevin Rose]

Awesome.

[Alex Albrecht]

Are we gonna do this?

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah. Thank you, Justin.

[Justin]

Thank you.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, my God. I got it. Oh, my God. I got a. I got a fucking dig notification.

[Kevin Rose]

Oh, you did? What did it say? Personal electric aircraft lands in jfk.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, my God. Somebody responded to one of my dig posts. That is fucking. That's cool. I'm not. I mean, that happened real time. Maybe they pushed it over there. Cause they were like, hey, he's recording. Let's just send this to his watch. I don't know how this tech works, but that was pretty fucking cool. Guys.

[Kevin Rose]

We had two stories. Insulin, People are not dying. And then also, chatgpt.

[Alex Albrecht]

We'll bake them in. We'll bake them in.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay.

[Alex Albrecht]

Chatgpt. Insulin people. Get it.

[Kevin Rose]

That's it. I think we're done. World's first human. Yeah, that's all I got.

[Alex Albrecht]

Kevin. I'm just gonna say I appreciate that by the end of an episode of Dig Nation. You seem a little drunk.

[Kevin Rose]

Dude, I get proxy drop from sitting next to you.

[Alex Albrecht]

Is it just my breath?

[Kevin Rose]

I told you this alcohol Is just coming to me. I told you this before the. Well, I get slappy and silly when someone else is around me and is like, that match that energy.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Kevin Rose]

And before the camera started rolling, I said, alex, we should do this in a sauna so that your vapor just comes off and I just get proxy drunk. Yeah, exactly. But this has been fun. This has been fun. It's so much fun. Thank you for supporting me on my sober journey.

[Alex Albrecht]

Take as long as you want. Don't say it like that. When you're ready.

[Kevin Rose]

Like, 10 people have done that where they're like. Like, like, oh, you're not drinking. Oh, just. Okay, you're going to be. And I'm just like, jesus, like, was it that bad?

[Alex Albrecht]

No, no, no. We want you to be drinking so then we don't feel bad in reflection.

[Kevin Rose]

But I'm okay.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're fine.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay, good. That's all I need.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm just saying, I. I feel like.

[Kevin Rose]

People have been like, a bottle of wine. Somebody said to me, like, oh, Josh, should I not drink around you? And I'm like, ge.

[Alex Albrecht]

No drink, dude. I get that.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

I mean, when I drink, it's not.

[Kevin Rose]

Like, you're not going to drink.

[Alex Albrecht]

Do that. No.

[Kevin Rose]

Yeah.

[Alex Albrecht]

When I did my. I mean, unless you need. And that's the thing. Unless you were like, don't say that.

[Kevin Rose]

You're doing it again.

[Alex Albrecht]

I'm just saying if there was something I could do to support my friend.

[Kevin Rose]

I can't wait till you start. Stop drinking for, like, a month. You're gonna get some bad liver enzymes.

[Alex Albrecht]

What? I don't. First off, don't throw bad liver enzymes.

[Kevin Rose]

At me like that.

[Alex Albrecht]

Just magically sprinkle bad liver enzymes at me.

[Kevin Rose]

What are you doing?

[Alex Albrecht]

That's unhealthy.

[Kevin Rose]

I did just use a bad liver enzymes liver.

[Alex Albrecht]

I was like, oh, I felt it in my liver.

[Kevin Rose]

You walked out of here like, kevin, I'm sweating. I gotta get on this top. I gotta stop bad liver enzymes.

[Alex Albrecht]

You're not gonna get bad liver insides.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm sweating wide. At least take my jacket off. Okay. That's not a jacket too.

[Alex Albrecht]

It's not working.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay, look at that.

[Alex Albrecht]

Oh, my God. I see. I see what's happening.

[Kevin Rose]

Okay.

[Alex Albrecht]

This is what's happening. I know Mao is like, come on.

[Kevin Rose]

I need that deep V. Okay. Yeah, let's go. All right, thank you, everyone. I don't know what that meant. And we'll see again soon.

[Alex Albrecht]

It just meant thank you. Thank you, everybody, for watching this episode of Dig Nation. I'm Alex Albright.

[Kevin Rose]

I'm Kevin Rose. Evanrose on thedigalpha and the beta.

[Alex Albrecht]

Yes. And, Alex, because I was smart enough, and I just said I can get that name. So boom on the things. We will see you next time. Thank you.

[Justin]

Love you.

[Kevin Rose]

Bye.