(Preview) The Anthropic Saga Continues, Fox and the Future of Streaming, Q&A on ChatGPT, Agentic Shopping, Autonomous Driving

**Andrew Sharp** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how are you doing?

**Ben Thompson** (0:19)
Sad, Andrew.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:20)
Why?

**Ben Thompson** (0:21)
Sad, because I've been forced over the last week to use these really crappy AI models.
Only 5.5 in Opus. Where's Fable? I told you Fable was good.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:34)
Somebody needs to jailbreak Fable back to life for us, man.

**Ben Thompson** (0:38)
We did not need the 48 hours of truly leap forward in terms of model capabilities.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:44)
Poor Ben, his wings have been clipped here. Yeah, now here we are living in the Stone Age. But I mean, look, only a matter of days until the rule is reversed and Fable is brought back to life would be my guess.

**Ben Thompson** (0:59)
We are going to start with Anthropic. Is that Andrew Sharp reports?

**Andrew Sharp** (1:03)
No, look, it occurred to me as we come on to record to talk about the export controls and everything else, like by Friday night, I'm sure there will be a twist that renders half of this obsolete. We're not going to start with Anthropic, though, actually, because you inform me that you have a World Cup take related to the hydration breaks.

**Ben Thompson** (1:23)
Oh, you want to, no, I don't know if we can do this at the top of the show. Because I'm concerned I'm going to make people so mad that...

**Andrew Sharp** (1:35)
They will hit stop and unsubscribe.

**Ben Thompson** (1:37)
Right, okay. If it was at the end of the show, then they might go and unsubscribe, but then at least they've listened to the whole show. But if we put it up front, we might not listen to the rest of the episode. Although maybe if we make the rest of the episode really good, then they'll decide to continue to be subscribers.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:51)
A bit of grace after 90 minutes. Fine, we can save it to the end.

**Ben Thompson** (1:55)
I'll drop it. Here you go. Here's my World Cup hydration take. So you remember previously, and people sort of got annoyed at this, but I still stand by it. The US implements these policies in the stupidest way possible, right? So like I said, we have universal health care and everyone has to be served by an emergency room. That made a lot of people mad, but I stand by it. The fact of the matter is, everybody, if you're in an emergency, you're going to get health care. That is universal health care. In the stupidest way possibly, oh, it doesn't cover preventive. Yes, I know. It's dumb.

**Andrew Sharp** (2:30)
In a very narrowly defined way, it's universal health care.

**Ben Thompson** (2:33)
The point of making that analogy is that it's a really stupid way to do a complex policy. Or if that was in the context of AI data centers, they're going to just end up paying people to build them. And that's how we're going to back door into AI, like putting money in people's pockets. UBI, right?

**Andrew Sharp** (2:51)
Right.

**Ben Thompson** (2:51)
Yes. So this is the stupidest way possible. So this is sort of context for my hydration break take, which is soccer is, and it is called soccer.
By the way, do you know where the word soccer comes from?

**Andrew Sharp** (3:07)
I have no idea. Where?

**Ben Thompson** (3:08)
It comes from England, to be clear.

**Andrew Sharp** (3:11)
Great.

**Ben Thompson** (3:12)
So football was a sport played on your feet as opposed to on horses. And then there was association football, SOCC, was soccer, came from England.
They, you know, I'm sorry that we preserved English culture better than they did and used the word soccer.

**Andrew Sharp** (3:29)
And they've been getting it wrong for 150 years.

**Ben Thompson** (3:32)
What the hell happened? That's right. Okay, no, that's not the take. Don't unsubscribe yet. Give me a couple more minutes and I'll really make you mad.
So soccer has all these traditions, the way it's always been played. And, you know, in one of them is you have 45 minute halves, the clock doesn't stop. And that's just like part of the whole thing with the hydration break is, well, the US is really hot. Number one, come on. It's not that hot, seriously. This is tied into the like, look, go to Taiwan in the summer. That's hot. I would come back to Wisconsin every year. How do you go to Wisconsin this summer? It's so humid. I'm like, it's not humid at all. But it's not that hot. But whatever, everyone's like, it's so hot. We need to have, you know, some games is going to be too hot.