Nov 29, 2025 ยท 2025 #45. Read the transcript grouped by speaker, inspect word-level timecodes, and optionally turn subtitles on for direct video playback
Edit labels for this show, save them in this browser, or download a JSON override for the production folder.
Transcript Playback
The Year of Intelligence
Human Transcript
Timed transcript
Blocks are grouped by speaker for readability. Expand a block to inspect word-level timing.
Speaker 2
Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, December the 13th, 2025. This will probably go live at least on Keen on America on the 14th. It's our weekly That Was The Week tech newsletter show with my old friend Keith Teer, the publisher of That Was The Week tech newsletter. He might put his up today. This week, Keith is focusing on... Human's greatest invention, AI, but we're going to try and talk less about AI and more about media this week. It's been an interesting week, Keith, for media. The Australian story is getting a lot of press, understandably. One CNN piece talks about Australian teens were kicked off social media this week. Some are already back. I know you're not a big fan of this ban. What do you make both of the ban and its coverage?
Well, I think the main thing is the ban won't work because the one thing we all know about teens being parents of... children that were recently teens, is trying to control their instincts is impossible. Or at least trying isn't impossible, but succeeding is impossible because teens have a force of will greater than most parents and are devious enough to do end around any regime. So it won't work. The second thing is it from an Australian branding point of view, it conjures up Australia. They think they're becoming the good guys, but actually what's happening is they're becoming Orwell's big brother in the face of,
Big Brother down under. How about that as our headline this week? Big Brother now is down under. I'm not sure if it's Big Brother, but I tend to agree with you. I'm not sure it necessarily shows Australia in its best light. It's so hard to make any sense. There was one piece I found that suggested that only time will tell if this ban will have any impact on children's mental health and i'm guessing that it's not going to last very long it's so hard and there are so many studies and so many interpretations i just don't know what conceivable metrics they'll be or i know there'll be many metrics and they'll be used to each party's to suit each party's agenda everyone will find some data to support their argument won't they
Yeah, you know, it's interesting because I think the real discussion here, which isn't being had, is what is the nature of adolescent mental health? I don't know if this is true for you, but certainly it's true for me that when I was that age, the playground was the cruelest place you could possibly be unless you were in that elite group. There were bullies, there were stage fights, there was name-calling. Almost anything that you had that could be made fun of was. And my observation about my own kids is they're way nicer than the kids of my generation.
But the actual people are nicer because they've been trained. One could even say weaker. They're weaker. They're empathetic and therefore not resilient. They don't really have that survivalist element because they're not under threat because we live in wealthy times. And true, Palo Alto would have that more than Scarborough for sure. But I think it's a general phenomenon which is often called woke. which just means people are softer, nicer.
No, but back to Australia, the point I'm making is I'm not really convinced there's a problem. I think, in fact, maybe the opposite, that social media has made people less aggressive to each other.
Yeah, I'm not sure... about that firstly i think the arguments for banning teens social media is not about bullying it's about mental health getting them out of the house uh that sort of thing as well i mean there is a bullying element but there was another interesting piece on the bbc about online gaming escaping australia's social media ban but there's been more and more press also on the addictive nature of online gaming with kids so
It's such a legal and regulative minefield, if that's the right word. It's so complicated. Why should online gaming be allowed but not social media? They seem equally dangerous, equally bad for kids' health.
I took my oldest kid, when he was three, my wife went away for a vacation for a week or so, and I took him and bought an Xbox, and he learned... He learned a puzzle that was then called... I'm sure your wife was thrilled, Keith. Star Wars Lego is what he learned.
Go on. Star Wars Lego was a puzzle game. You had to solve puzzles to go through levels. And at the age of three, he learned the puzzle super fast. And I'm pretty sure his brain benefited from problem solving.
Well, there you have it. According to Keith Teer, you shouldn't ban any of this media. Andy Kessler wrote a good piece, his AI Making Us Dumb, which also deals with this Australia ban. He talks, and Kessler tends to be quite skeptical of a lot of things. He goes back to Nick Carr's famous Atlantic piece in 2008, his Google Making Us Stupid, and suggests that we have a similar hysteria now about AI and social media. And I... I don't disagree with him. I mean, the hysteria in our culture about technology now is so absurd that we seem to be hysterical about everything. Don't you think, Keith? I mean, I know you think this even more than I do.
yeah although i you know i tend to i always ask myself the question what is it the other side sees that's making them make those points and and this idea that ai makes us dumber the the kernel of truth in it is that um we have to do less of the things we previously had to do. It's a bit like the calculator thing, you know, where you don't need to understand how to solve an equation anymore because it can do it for you. But is that equal to us being dumber or is it equal to us spending our time on harder problems or more creative problems maybe? And so I don't think the other side is... is maliciously making things up. I think they're observing something real, but then they're interpreting it in this pessimistic framing that says humans are getting dumber, when in fact what it means is humans are getting to focus on things machines can't do.
I had George Packer on my show, a very distinguished American nonfiction writer. He has a new novel out, a dystopian novel called The Emergency. And we talked about the issue of parenthood and how much more central it is to our generation, yours and mine, and George Packer's to our parents' generation. And I think this is an important part of it. I'm not suggesting the entire culture is paranoid, but we parents seem to be paranoid. Kessler, in his piece that you linked to in your newsletter, says that Jonathan Haidt had a moment... last year with his book, The Anxious Generation. And I think hate is the best example, Scott Galloway as well, of these, just these paranoid parents. They seem to view the whole point of their existence as being parents. I talked about this with George. So I just, it's, I think you're right. There's a more, It's a more complicated cultural discussion than just AI is making us dumb.
I over-parent my kids. And it kind of infantilizes adolescence. where you don't trust the kids and you try to compensate for, you know, by injecting yourself into their decision-making. And it doesn't work, obviously, because kids are still kids, but it's more to do with who we are than who the kids are. And I think we've become, as we've lost trust in institutions, we've also lost trust in human beings. And the idea of failing in order to learn has become scary for some reason. I think that's at the core of it.
Well, I think if this Australian thing really does take off and other countries copy them, you will have a generational revolt. There's already, I think, a brewing anger of younger people against... our generation for economic, cultural, political reasons. But I think this would spark, for better or worse, it wouldn't actually necessarily, I think, be a bad thing. Ezra Klein also, and you, I think, linked to this in the newsletter this week, paying attention to how you pay attention. Do you think we're losing the ability, Keith, to pay attention?
I think we're losing the desire to pay attention. um unless it's core to our set of goals in the short term um i i think people can still focus not not everybody is add most of us you know that we have both elements simultaneously as a slightly add element that social media uh you know tantalizes if you will but we also have a kind of an ocd element which is we can focus in for long periods of time on single problems, especially using AI as a tool. And they're not contradictory, actually. We do both. I'd say the first is pleasure, and the second is output-driven. And most people are balanced in those. For example, I don't have TikTok on my phone because I find that I waste a lot of time if I do. But I do come across YouTube and Instagram Reels every now and then and Facebook. And if you get sucked into them, you can easily spend five or 10 minutes just scrolling through them because they're funny. And that's entertainment. And it's kind of fun. That's why you keep scrolling. But at some point, you have work to do. And as long as you're balanced, it's fine.
Although you promised us with your, and we'll come to this next week when we have our summary of the year with Human 100, when we magnify our power by a hundred times maybe we won't have work we can spend all our time staring at tick tock and instagram reels one good piece of news this week we always read pieces about the crisis of journalism the end of journalism the lack of trust um how social media and ai is ruining the world there was an interesting piece you linked to from Neiman Lab is a very authoritative source for information about journalism. Their predictions for journalism in 2026 suggested that by a piece written by June Lee, that journalism will become the center of gravity for YouTube's next era. And Lee focuses on some of the aspiring or growing brands on YouTube who are replacing mainstream media figures. This makes sense to me. I don't know a lot of the people that Lee writes about, but what do you make of... this cautious optimism about the future of journalism shifting to platforms like YouTube, Keith?
I think there's two parts to that. The first is to have a common agreement of what we mean by journalism. And the second is whether YouTube is where it is increasingly living. Certainly almost everything. that is video is increasingly living on YouTube, whether it's cooking shows or demonstrations.
Yeah, I don't know if I want to be post-modern. I mean, I'm still- We're post-post-modern then. Exactly. I'm hoping for the return of modernism sometime soon. Anyways, so YouTube... You can go back to Scarborough for that. Yeah. YouTube is an amazing phenomenon. For those who don't really use it very much, If you have any interest in anything, you will find a community of people on YouTube that have the same interest and there'll be experts there showing their expertise. And it is absolutely gripping whether you want to understand quantum mechanics versus relativity theory or whether you want to understand what the James Webb telescope is. is finding at the edges of the universe or whether you want to cook an omelet better than anyone else, you'll find YouTube has excellent, just fantastic content. Journalism, to me, I separate journalism into two groups. The first is, you know, just fact-based reporting. I think AI is gonna take that over completely. And that probably will not be on YouTube. It'll be mainly text-based. But journalism as in interviewing opinion pieces, discussions of controversial current events, all of that with either individuals or groups discussing or even face-to-camera news desks is definitely already on YouTube.
Yeah, and some of the examples, Lee talks about Mr. Beast and Marquez Brownie, who is the new Walt Mossberg, Philip DeFranco. I haven't heard a lot of these figures, but they're worth looking at. One area that I would disagree is I think that AI will play an increasingly central role on YouTube as well, given that obviously YouTube is part of the Google family, the Alphabet network. And given their commitment, it's hard to imagine that YouTube will remain somehow separate from AI.
Well, you know, it's interesting, but you and I have often talked about whether we could do an AI video of this show where we appeared to be there, but it was all AI content.
Maybe it already is. Maybe we're just bots, Keith.
Words and timings
Maybeitalreadyis.Maybewe'rejustbots,Keith.
Speaker 3
But here's the truth. I don't think we could train an AI successfully to have the same opinions every week vis-a-vis the news that we will actually have as individuals. So I think there is a realm of the individual that gets stronger, not weaker. The desire for authenticity of opinion in particular and nuance and ways of expressing opinion, I think gets stronger, not weaker.
Well, video has also been in the news in a different way this week. The streaming video story of Netflix and Paramount and Time Warner. Lots of pieces about this. What's your take? Is there a good guy and a bad guy in this fight that seemed a public fight between Netflix and Paramount Plus? What's your take on the whole story, Keith?
Well, I think there's a bad actor. I don't know if I would characterize him as a bad guy. I like Paramount. I watch Champions League football on it. I watch Star Trek on it.
But just to give some framing here, Paramount's market capitalization is around $15 billion. Netflix's is $405 billion. Netflix is wanting to acquire Warner Brothers minus CNN and Discovery. for well over 100 billion. And Paramount is going to market to borrow enough money, I mean, 10 times its actual value, to compete to get the deal done, which would be a debt-based deal, a little bit like how the Glazers bought Manchester United using debt.
Right. So I don't think the human race should want Paramount to succeed. I think it will create a very unstable house of cards. And I think if Netflix... Wasn't that a show on Netflix, House of Cards? It was. If Netflix succeed, that catalogue will be made available globally to billions of people. And I think that's probably a good thing.
No, Tim Wu writes about it, suggesting, surprise, surprise, that he's not a fan of either. Tim Wu, of course, who has been on my show a couple of times, very influential writer, has an excellent piece actually today on AI in the Financial Times, about the race on AI between the US and China that we'll talk about next week. He's not a big fan of Netflix for antitrust reasons, but politically he's not a big fan of Paramount because of Ellison and his association with Trump. How do you expect this to work out? Is it fairly inevitable that Netflix will actually win?
We will. But so I would expect, especially given the current administration is hands off when it comes to antitrust, for the most part, I would expect This will go through. I do know that Trump is not happy that CNN is not part of the deal. He wants CNN to be part of the deal. And the current assumption said- Surprise, surprise.
Yeah. So the current plan is CNN and Discovery Channel will spin out as a separate news-based thing. I do think it's interesting, by the way, because the future of live streaming is heavily centered on news and sport. You can watch a movie anytime or a TV series anytime, but you have to watch the news when it's happening and you have to watch sport when it's happening. It is surprising to me that the most aggressive player in sport currently is probably ESPN and Apple, which is Disney and Apple. And Apple getting more and more aggressive with F1 and MLS and baseball.
and that Netflix doesn't want to play there, and it certainly doesn't want to play in news. I guess news doesn't have a big enough audience and isn't a big enough revenue generator, but it is a good funnel builder and credibility builder.
Yeah, I disagree with you on news. I agree on sport, but I mean, you can't perhaps do everything. I think one of the reasons why Netflix has been such a successful company is they're always the most realistic. They always bite off just as much as they can chew. The FT, in contrast with Woo, suggests that Netflix's Warner Brothers bid is an antitrust drama without a villain. I try not to be nostalgic for another world. And as you know, I often fail in that area. But the one thing about the Netflix bid that does make me slightly uncomfortable is that most of the arguments against it, especially from Hollywood, and there was a good piece in the New York Times, an op-ed that I'm trying to put up on the screen, Netflix's swallowing of Warner Brothers will be the end of Hollywood. by the former head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price. The one area which does convince me is that Netflix are not sympathetic to the movie theater economy and that a lot of the critics of the deal from the Netflix point of view suggest that Netflix... essentially want to replace the movie experience with watching at home and as someone who goes to two or three movies a week i think that as you would say the human race although i'm careful with that term are poorer without movie theaters well you're not a big movie theater guy are you keith you know i recently went to
That one. I went to watch it in theatre. A fantastic theatre with maybe 200 seats. I think about 10 of the seats had people in them in the first week. Well, that wasn't the first. The boom is... When did you go? I went the week after you went. You mentioned it to me.
And what I noted is, firstly, obviously, the picture and the sound experience is great. Obviously, you get gouged for anything you buy in the theater. But it isn't the theater as it used to be, where everything is packed and there's an atmosphere. And so the truth is Hollywood, if you mean by Hollywood theaters, which I don't think is what Hollywood means, I think it's production, but let's assume you narrow Hollywood down to go into the theater. I think it's already dead. I think it's been dead for a while. And I think COVID accelerated it, but didn't cause it. And it's because the quality of in-home video, if you can afford it, things like wall projectors instead of TVs and sound systems that are Dolby Atmos capable is just fantastic. And plus you're sitting in your own home, you know, with all your utilities. It's just a good experience. And streaming is a good experience. You know, we now have great broadband.
Yeah, I mean, I agree in a way. I think it's like everything in the digital economy. You've had the disappearance of the middle. I go to and I plug my local cinema network, Alamo,
And they sell season tickets. So for $50 or $60 a month, I can go as many times for free as I want. The experience is remarkable. The seats are beautiful, the food and the drink. It's not cheap, but it's a great experience. So either movie theaters have to become deeply experiential, like Alamo Drafthouse, and they've just been acquired by Sony, which I don't think is necessarily that good for the brand or at least the experience. Yeah. or it has to be free or it has to be Netflix. Everything in between, I think, will be destroyed, as with every other sector in our new economy. So there will be a high end, an expensive high end for people who physically want to experience going to movies, just as vinyl has made a comeback with music. But it's never going to be a mass market anymore.
Yeah, I don't know if you'd agree with this, but my experience is I'm quality driven. For example, I love Scandinavian noir dramas. I thought you were going to say something else. Yeah. Go on. So, you know, and
No, on Netflix at home, I'll watch Wallander, the original series, for example, in native language. And it's fantastic. And so what Netflix has done to me is it's brought the world of Brazilian, Argentinian, Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean quality dramas or series or movies to me that I'd never be able to see otherwise. And, you know, my local movie theater, I'm lucky if there's one movie I actually want to see because they're going for the mass market.
Well, you live in the cultural wastelands of Palo Alto. If you ever came into San Francisco, you might experience something slightly different. But I think we're probably on the same page here. Finally, the other very big piece of media news this week is The news about Disney, you mentioned Disney earlier, being a bit soft on sports, but they're investing a billion dollars in OpenAI and they're also suing Google. I don't want to make this another OpenAI conversation, although of course it's part of the narrative. But why is this big news, Keith?
There's so many different things inside this story that are interesting. I mean, the first, and let's break it down into from the Disney point of view, from the OpenAI point of view, and then from the future point of view. The Disney point of view, it's all about distribution. If people aren't going to the theaters, and if they haven't yet subscribed to Disney Plus streaming channel, Disney needs to get its core IP in front of more and more people more and more often. And it's making a bet that Sora, which is a laggard in video creation compared to Google's Vio.
It's technically very good. It just hasn't taken off because I think video creation is a minority sport anyway. And Google's, I think Google's both technically better and the bar's very low from the point of view of measuring success. So Google's definitely ahead. But, you know, so Disney is saying, okay, if we can put our characters into context where kids can make their own stories using Mickey Mouse or whatever or Star Wars characters or can use a lightsaber and it's fully licensed and Disney's getting paid, that's good for Disney. I think that's basically the bottom line for Disney. I think from OpenAI's point of view, they are making a bet that licensing IP will build a moat. Now in doing that, they're making a huge compromise. So far, the courts have found that AI training on IP is not breaching the IP. And so OpenAI has not taken advantage of those court findings and is agreeing to license. And I don't know what the payment terms are at all.
Nobody does. I'm on strict orders of my wife not to reveal what she thinks on this. She, as you know, and our viewers know, is the head of litigation at Google. So she has a particularly interesting take on this. I'd love to. Yeah, well, I'm not allowed to. I'll get killed if I mention her take. But There was an interesting piece by Casey Newton on this, kind of implicit at least on this,
from his platformer newsletter. He says, OpenAI is a normal company now. And he notes that it always used to be a weird company. It wasn't really focused on profit or loss. Before we went live, you noted, Keith, that it's likely OpenAI will go public next year. I wonder whether Newton has a point that this deal, for better or worse, this OpenAI Disney deal, really does reflect the fact that OpenAI is now just focused on revenue, on business development, on doing media deals. These kind of deals, 20 years ago, I worked for a 3D internet platform called Pulse 3D. We were trying to do these deals, not in AI, but with images back then. So this is a very standard biz dev kind of internet deal. And it reflects the fact that OpenAI's focus now is on revenue, so it can go public. It's just another company.
Well, you see, therein lies the future discussion. I think AI should not be licensing IP from publishers of any kind, because It isn't in the business of recreating existing publications. It's in the business of learning on them. And that shouldn't be a licensable habit. It should be just as we can go and watch a Disney movie and then sketch any of the characters we want and even put them on our website, our sketches, and no one's going to come and sue us because that's fair use. And so I think OpenAI has made a huge compromise that may be a backward looking structural decision. And in that sense, yes.
So you agree with Newton? Yeah, my understanding is The press this deal is getting is not very accurate of what really happened, especially given that Disney announced the deal with OpenAI the same day that they announced that they were suing Google. So this is a business-driven thing. This is not... The way it's being presented is a great opportunity and victory for OpenAI. I don't think that's the case, in my sense.
Right, you said it. And in terms of deals and partnerships, there's always a strong and a weak one. And certainly in this case, this new Disney OpenAI deal, Disney is the senior partner, the dominant partner.
Well, it's funny because that isn't the analysis in the financial markets. I watched the interview on CNBC. and then went to X. And almost all the commentary on X was saying, why are Disney putting money into open AI?
I thought you were going to make the argument now that in our... networked, democratizing world. People don't want to watch Mickey Mouse, they want to become the mouse and... No,
Well, finally, there was also an interesting headline on Adobe integrating ChatGPT, which I'm guessing is a better deal for ChatGPT. It's certainly not being pushed around by a company like Adobe. Is there a future, Keith, for a company like Adobe? I use Premiere Pro. I use all their products. They pay about $60 a month. But I wonder whether in five or 10 years, Adobe will even survive.
Yeah, in my head, Adobe's already dead. I stopped my Adobe Creative Cloud license two years ago. Where did you take your photos then? Affinity. There's an app called Affinity. It's free. It's owned by, I want to say, Canva. It does everything Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Lightroom. You know, it's basically vector, Vector drawings and pixel-based photography stuff all in a single app.
Right. And then for video, I use DaVinci Resolve, which is also free. It's as good as Premiere. And if you pay $300 for a lifetime license, you get some additional features that are even beyond what Premiere can do. There's a learning curve because it's a bit different, but once you've learned it, it's easy. So I think Adobe is already dead. And I think what this represents, I mean, look, who wants to crop a photo inside ChatGPT or apply AI filters to a photo? It's just not a use case that's going to be scalable.
Well, we've got a headline, Keith, for this week's show. Adobe is already dead. What kind of impact do you think that's going to have on the Adobe stock price on Monday morning in Wall Street?
Well, there you have it. Anyone watching, listening? We do have some viewers, even on YouTube. Sell your Adobe. What should they buy, Keith? You can't buy OpenAI unless you're on the secondary market. Is there a stock that you still think is a good buy in late 2025?
To be honest, I think... I hope you're always honest, Keith. On this show, anyway. The mega seven as an index for the last several years has beaten everything. And I think that's going to be true in the next year as well.
Well, that was the week for December the 13th and 14th, 2025. We'll be back with one final series of shows for 2025. We're going to do an overview of 2025 and then a prediction for 2026. Keith is going to South Africa for the holidays. So this is our final weekly summary of tech news. And we'll be back next week with a broader... view of 2025 and a preview of 2026. Have a good week, Keith. I'll see you next week.