(Preview) How Tech is Transforming the Suburbs, Q&A on Gemini, LLM Use Cases, Working With Your In-Laws, UAPs, and More

The ways tech has improved suburban life, why urbanism may have peaked, and the first and second order effects of Tesla's full self-driving technology. Then: A Thanksgiving mailbag! Topics include: A note from the Gemini team, a correction on Llama 4, a hater’s question on the utility of ChatGPT group chats, Ben and Andrew share their daily use cases for AI and Ben shares his prompt, while an emailer wonders about a boss using Copilot to send holiday gifts. From there: A subject matter expert debates whether to train his AI replacement, a listener seeks advice about working for his father-in-law, a question about balancing work and young children, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, robot vacuums, Ben's ancestry, and a word about the Giannis era.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:20Ben Thompson?

  Doing well, Andrew. You know what? I'm doing fantastic. I'm doing great. This is our last piece of content before Thanksgiving.

• 0:26Andrew Sharp?

  Yes, yours and mine. It's great. A festive mood here on the podcast. I'm very excited to be here.

• 0:33Ben Thompson?

  What? It is your last piece of content or it is your favorite holiday?

• 0:36Andrew Sharp?

  It's both my last piece of content this week and Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite holiday.

• 0:42Ben Thompson?

  It is by far the best holiday. It's so good. Like even in Taiwan, my favorite Taiwanese holiday was Moon Festival, which is basically the same concept, just get together and eat a lot. What more do you want?

• 0:53Andrew Sharp?

  Hang out.

• 0:55Ben Thompson?

  That's right. It's perfect. No football there. I'm, you know, running the risk of a Packers loss impacting the Turkey. But you know what? A long time ago, I decided to not let sports events impact my mood. Except for really floored with disaster with the Bucks in 2021, to be totally honest. But, uh, you know, I'm looking forward to it. It's gonna be great.

• 1:14Andrew Sharp?

  Yes, Thursday will test that commitment from you. I don't know who's favored in that game. Should be a pretty good game. The only good game of the day.

• 1:22Ben Thompson?

  I should the Lions. It's in Detroit. Yeah. But yes, all good. The Turkey's gonna be awesome. I'm ready to go.

• 1:27Andrew Sharp?

  No matter what, Thanksgiving is gonna be awesome. Thanksgiving is awesome every year. As for the episode today, we were inundated with questions. So first and foremost, thank you to all the listeners. Just a tidal wave of questions and takes in our inbox over the last 96 hours or so. So as we get into it, we'll actually start with an email that we teased on the last episode, but didn't get to on the last episode. Hansson says, "Long time for Techery and Sharp Tech Podcast listener. First time emailer. I wanted to share some color I've had with regards to how full self-driving is changing modern life."

• 2:07Ben Thompson?

  People are like, "Really? On Thanksgiving? You're gonna talk about Tesla?" Anyhow, continue.

• 2:12Andrew Sharp?

  Here we go. In the past year, I've had four friends purchase a Tesla specifically because of full self-driving. One friend who hates Elon is such an exceedingly bad driver that he's unable to manually drive a car. He now uses full self-driving for 100% of his driving. The three others purchased a Tesla because the wife forced the husband to, and it goes a long way toward making nervous drivers comfortable on the road.

• 2:42Ben Thompson?

  I'm curious about this. Is this because the wife was complaining about the husband's driving or they wanted the car? Because I can relate to both. So I'm just, I'm curious what he's referring to specifically.

• 2:53Andrew Sharp?

  Yes. In my house, I think it would be my wife insisting that I need full self-driving.

• 2:59Ben Thompson?

  You are a self-admitted bad driver.

• 3:01Andrew Sharp?

  Exactly. Not a very good driver. I believe, he says, "It's worth talking about and analyzing the second-order effects of full self-driving." Would our friend have ever purchased a car if it weren't for full self-driving? Would our other friends be willing to tolerate a long commute in rush hour and arrive feeling refreshed if it weren't for full self-driving? Similar to how the luxury tech bus shuttles made it feasible for Google and Facebook employees to live in San Francisco, full self-driving will likely do the same. It seems to make a key downside of suburban living, driving, significantly more tolerable for people. Ben, you say the suburbs are back.

• 3:44Andrew Sharp?

  It does seem to trend that way. I don't believe the end of urbanism is near, as agglomeration is an economic inevitability, and as an urbanist, I do dislike the growth of the suburbs. But maybe it'll go the other way. We'll all move to the suburbs and have driverless cars and robots delivering packages. Then we'll complain about how long delivery and the driverless rides take, and we'll later move back into an urban area. Who knows how the future will pan out? So, Hudson is hitting a lot of beats there, echoing a lot of the observations in your article last week. Reading that back, though, I'm realizing Hudson didn't really ask you a question.

• 4:27Andrew Sharp?

  So, in the spirit of the mailbag today, a lot of notes from Hudson. In the spirit of the mailbag, I'll narrow it down with a spicier question. Is tech accelerating the end of urbanism? Or are you just old, Ben? Building on your article last week?

• 4:48Ben Thompson?

  That is a perfect question because the thought did occur to me. Who am I to be talking about the suburbs? When I, you know, when I was young, I wanted to live in the city. As I recounted, I bought a condo downtown. And then I'm like, you know what? I would like to live in a house. This would be actually be be pretty great.

• 5:04Andrew Sharp?

  Yes.

• 5:04Ben Thompson?

  Uh, I think what's interesting in thinking about these shifts. And I do want to get back to his observations about full self-driving and, and potential customers for that in a moment. But I'll start with your question. I'm trying to be respectful and honor Thanksgiving and not to sort of go, go on my own path here. There's, there, there's always a balance of factors that favor sort of one or the other. So if you go back to say 20 years ago or throw, let's go back 40 years. The, the, if you live in the suburbs, you have a big house. You have a big yard. You can grow out in the summer. You can, the kids can run around. You can go to the big box store and buy a bunch of stuff and then store it.

• 5:44Ben Thompson?

  All these are advantages that still sort of exist today, but they came with a lot of significant downsides. You have to drive everywhere. You have to get to the store. If you want, I forgot toothpaste. Well, time to saddle up for a 10 minute drive or whatever it might be. If you're fortunate, it could be even longer than that. You have to make all your own food. You, you have to like, you're carting your kids around everywhere. Like there's.

• 6:09Andrew Sharp?

  Or if you're trying to go out and go to a restaurant, there are fewer options where you live in the suburbs as opposed.

• 6:14Ben Thompson?

  Right. Or if you do, you have to drive there and you want to have a nice bottle of wine. Well, uh, are you going to drive back? You know, a lot of people did, but you know, that's, that's, that's certainly an issue. And then you needed to drive to work and the commute sucked, right? And, and the commutes got worse and worse over time, further and further away, more and more people on the road. All the sorts of things that, that we've talked about. And so there is a, it's a real, there's a real balance. And I think I might've made this point on this podcast before, which is. I always criticize people which are like, oh, probably it would be really nice to have a guest room for when people come over. And it's like, don't optimize your life for two nights a year.

• 6:57Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Ben Thompson?

  When you could live in a smaller place, closer, have a shorter commute to work, have a more relaxed life. And if someone wants to visit, just get a hotel room. Okay.

• 7:05Andrew Sharp?

  I was gonna say, just pay for an Airbnb and solve it that way. The two or three times a year that that's relevant.

• 7:11Ben Thompson?

  That's right. So that is all still a valid perspective. What's interesting though, and what I was getting at in the conclusion is technology, particularly the manifestation of technology in the physical world, first through these sort of platforms, whether it be Uber, whether it be Amazon drivers, like there's a fair bit of Amazon drivers that that work on like an Uber sort of system, right? Then in addition to all the full-time employees and the vans and stuff that they have, you, you have DoorDash, all these bits and pieces. And then you step forward, this changing into fully automated vehicles or delivery or drones or sort of whatever it might be. All those are ameliorating a lot of the downsides of the suburbs. And I, you can feel this very tangibly. To me, e-commerce

• 7:56Ben Thompson?

  is really the big one.

• 7:58Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Ben Thompson?

  At the end of the day, the reality is even when I was living downtown, I'm going to order on Amazon because it's going to be there for sure the next day. It's going to have the widest selection. If I wait, number one, I might run out of time to go to the hardware store. Number two, they might not have what I want. And then I order and now I'm just later because I didn't order it right away. Like, to me, the shift to one day delivery was a massive psychological shift for me personally, where as soon as you need something, just order it. And you're guaranteed to get it one year.

• 8:31Andrew Sharp?

  And there's really not a difference. If you live in a city, depending on the city, you may be getting it on the same day. And all right. So if you move to the suburbs.

• 8:40Ben Thompson?

  Right. I don't want to over promise on Amazon's behalf because I feel like the same day delivery is a little shaky.

• 8:45Andrew Sharp?

  It can be. Honestly, it works fairly well in DC. So it doesn't even matter that I'm close to all these stores.

• 8:52Ben Thompson?

  But yeah, no, for sure. And so, yeah, it might. Might get it right away. Now, there still might be the toothpaste emergency, right? But, uh, but there's no reason around a toothpaste if you have a good managed system where you have a stock of toothpaste. As it runs out, what do you do? If you're old and responsible. And then it shows up and you put it. That's right. Uh, you just need to have a system, Andrew. It's all about systems. So what's happening, that's number one, the e-commerce is a big one. The DoorDash one is one for sure. I personally just find DoorDash meals consistently disappointing and absurdly expensive. And I'm, you know, I like fresh food. I definitely prefer, e- even if I'm doing the cooking, I would rather sort of cook, you know, when,

• 9:33Ben Thompson?

  when necessary, but it's there. It's there in an emergency when you, when, oh, you're just swamped and you need to get something. And the variety, it's not just pizza. You have like a, a lot of stuff that you can get. Even if being in the suburbs means it takes like 45 minutes to an hour to get it and it's warm and, or it's cold and whatever it might be. So that takes care of another challenge that was living in the suburbs. And then the big one was also COVID. And COVID driving this work from home, which if you can work from home, even if it's only a few days a week. Suddenly the commute, the biggest downside is being eliminated. And if you need to go to work to the full self-driving point, you can be driven and you can listen to podcasts or do whatever.

• 10:17Ben Thompson?

  Don't look at your phone or you're going to get a check more, whatever it might be. So what's happening is the suburbs are getting better. Simultaneously, everything about urban living is getting worse. And if it weren't getting worse, it's also never going to get better. You're not going to get bigger places. In fact, the places that exist are getting more expensive. You're, you're never going to get sort of, I mean, hopefully you can get sort of increased safety than sort of what's happened over the last decade or whatever. But regardless, there is sort of those downsides that always exist in our urban environment compared to a suburban environment. You're not going to have that guest bedroom, sort of downtown. And the issue is that there is a rate of improvement happening in the suburbs.

• 11:02Ben Thompson?

  That is almost certainly not going to happen in urban areas. And to the extent it does happen, it won't be driven by technology, it'll be driven by political change. Which is a lot more difficult than just counting on technology getting better all the time. And that's what the assertion comes from. Am I old? Does that make me more likely to like the suburbs? Absolutely. No denial there. I have three grills and I love it. Okay? I'm leaning into my, my old man arc here. But when you look at these curves of the relative balance, they used to be pretty balanced. I think the balance has tipped already towards the suburbs and that tipping is only going to accelerate.

• 11:39Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. I mean, I liked the article last week. It really made me think and I love cities, but I would say that where I live now is as close as you can possibly get to living in the suburbs while technically living in Washington DC. And I'm also at an age where living any closer to downtown DC looks completely exhausting. So I love being on the outskirts.

• 12:05Ben Thompson?

  Yes. You know, it's nice, quiet. But yes, that also I think marks me as an old man.

• 12:09Andrew Sharp?

  Totally. And while I project forward, I do think that the most successful companies in the world will still be located in about five places for the foreseeable future and young people will still want to live in those places or near those places. And also on a basic level, young people want to have sex and go out and having everybody in one place just makes it easier to do those sorts of things. There are more options in a city. And so urbanism probably isn't going away, but the dynamics are shifting. And you mentioned like the city life not getting any better. Like restaurants used to be a differentiating

• 12:53Andrew Sharp?

  factor. Well, that industry has been struggling pretty mightily over the last four or five years.

• 12:58Ben Thompson?

  Also, by the way, if I want to go to, number one, I'm not going to a restaurant every night. Number two, when I want to go, I can take an Uber now. I can go and I can have a bottle of wine and you have a great restaurant and be driven home. Like in a way that, that just, is it still better to walk to the, absolutely. Like there's not, I love it. That, I mean, that's one of the things I miss about my condo downtown is just walking to dinner, that being full and having that nice walk back, maybe do an extra little tour around the Capitol. It's great. It's fantastic. But the delta used to be walk to a great restaurant versus drive and park and don't have a bottle of wine because you have to drive back. Now the delta is walk. All that part is still great.

• 13:40Ben Thompson?

  But the relative benefit compared to the alternative is decreased. That delta is smaller. Well, no, for the restaurant thing, I can now go to a restaurant and have a bottle of wine and have a relaxing drive home. Which is still not as good as walking, but the relative difference is much smaller than it used to be. And I, that dynamic just applies all over the place. All the things that made urban living great are still great. But the relative difference is lower. Now, to your point for young people, and this applies to jobs too, by the way. I worry about, I feel so bad for young people who start on remote jobs.

• 14:20Ben Thompson?

  It's like, I don't even know how you would manage that and make an imprint and do things and learn.

• 14:26Andrew Sharp?

  Having started as a lawyer during COVID, it's really, really frustrating to just be staring at a computer all day. As opposed to interacting with superiors that can teach you and then also just friends. That you can kind of commiserate with when you're just isolated, remote. It really sucks and I hope that's not the way entry level work looks for the foreseeable future. It doesn't look like it's trending that way. It seems like companies are emphasizing a return to office. Much to the chagrin of those same young employees.

• 14:58Ben Thompson?

  I know, it's true. They don't realize that they're having a favor done for them. There's also, by the way, something to be said for having a separation between work and home. Like, I think I wrote about this when COVID first came out, sort of like warning people. Like, this is a lot harder than you think. Like, just like your family dynamics. Yeah, like, there's, there's something about like going off to work and then coming home. Great for us, by the way. Love the commute. Thumbs up for podcast listening time. But, but just also, and just sort of like, I need to focus on work now. I don't need to take care of the kids. I don't need to sort of prepare food. All those dynamics become a lot more difficult.

• 15:39Ben Thompson?

  And it's funny, I was talking to a friend where, when I was thinking about writing this article, I've always been a little hesitant to write about some stuff like this. Because my life was so different than most people. So, for example, one thing that I was very tuned in on very early was the importance and power of group chats. And that's because group chats were one of my primary sources of fellowship and friendship. For a long time, because I lived halfway around the world. Communicating asynchronously, like learning how to work remotely. All these things are things that I went through a decade ago, 15 years ago.

• 16:22Ben Thompson?

  But it's always like, should I write about this being the future? Because is it a function of me having a unique situation?

• 16:29Andrew Sharp?

  And not everyone else's future.

• 16:31Ben Thompson?

  That's right. Or is this actually what it's gonna be? And I think one thing I've realized over time is it was incredibly useful to have the experiences that I did. Because they did end up being the future. And that sort of gave me some confidence to make these assertions about being old. Yeah, or sorry, in the suburbs, there's a Freudian slip right there. It might be that I'm old, but I don't know, maybe I'm onto something here.

• 16:53Andrew Sharp?

  You could be, you could be. Again, you made me think. Any quick thoughts on the full self-driving before we shift to the rest of the mailbag?

• 17:02Ben Thompson?

  It's a big deal. Like, so for, I mentioned the reason, the chief reason to get a, well, there's three reasons for me. Two reasons to get a Tesla, I guess. Number one, I do think for someone who does what I do, it is actually important and useful to have it and experience it and use it regularly. Yeah, I don't think people appreciate how good it is. It's actually phenomenal. It actually does go door to door. In my experience, I would say 99% of the time. Um, I don't have done 100 drives yet, but very, very rarely do you need to break in. And just to have an appreciation of how far in as far as living in the future, the implications of this for cars and also how that manifests for things like robots and things along those lines.

• 17:45Ben Thompson?

  We talked like a year ago about Tesla's approach, how they sort of reset. We're not going to do this deterministic. They tore, they basically tore out all their software. It's going to be pure neural nets. Now there's still questions, is video alone going to be enough? And it's great that Tesla is taking a very different approach than Waymo. Waymo's like all the way, full autonomy from the beginning. Tesla is, you do need that human in the seat because of all this sort of, you know, is it going to be good enough and all the regulatory issues? But the difference is Waymo is in what 10 cities now? I have a Tesla in Madison, Wisconsin that I can use right now. And so I think it's useful to be aware of that, in touch with it, what's going on. Um, that said, I love driving. Um, so I like the

• 18:27Andrew Sharp?

  So this is actually a question I have, reading back, looking at Honsen's email here. When we start to wonder about the second order effects of full self-driving. I mean, on one hand, some of what you wrote about was pretty mind blowing, where Tesla is going to have the optimist robots or wants to have optimist robots in its robot taxis, potentially delivering packages to monetize that hardware in off-hours. We'll see whether that ever comes to fruition, but it all seems pretty feasible.

• 18:58Ben Thompson?

  Right. By the way, the way to think about Elon Musk pronouncements is his track record is what he says actually usually ends up happening. Just never ever on the timeline that he says. So, um, so the, the like

• 19:12Andrew Sharp?

  Well, there's line of sight. There's line of sight to like three or four different aspects of what he's describing.

• 19:17Ben Thompson?

  That's exactly it. This approach, the neural network approach, sort of pure machine learning in terms of autonomous operation. The fact that's working for cars is why You should be bullish about the robots working because the only way you're going to, you're not going to deterministically program a humanoid robot that is going to be effective. There's too many edge cases, too many sort of difficult situations. But if it works to actually just throw massive amounts of data and compute at the problem, that is, that's working for cars. It is working. You get in a Tesla, go for a drive, it is working. And that, to your point, means there is line of sight to it working for things like humanoid robots.

• 19:58Andrew Sharp?

  Okay, so on full self-driving and actual humans and the second order effects, does this assume that at some point in the near future, you'll be able to hop in a Tesla and do work during the hour-long commute to your job downtown? Because right now, it doesn't appeal to me to just sit there while my car drives for me, as opposed to driving myself, which I frankly prefer. But it could be more appealing if you can sit there and actually get stuff done for an hour while you're on the commute. But I don't know whether that's like realistic anytime soon.

• 20:35Ben Thompson?

  Well, it's funny, this kind of ties back to the aside I made about politics as far as urbanism and sort of making the situations better. The challenge there is it's a political problem. Like, I, I think you can probably make the case that full self-driving should be, like unsupervised full self-driving should be allowed now. It is good enough. The reason it's not is regulatory reasons and like insurance reasons, like, like who's liable? Like, and those are massive challenges that even if in a theoretical case, all Teslas driving themselves is better than people driving them because people suck at driving.

• 21:13Andrew Sharp?

  Mm-hmm. It's not that theoretical. I mean, we might be there already.

• 21:16Ben Thompson?

  Right, but that's a very, that's a very difficult case to make. Like, just, that's not how humans work. They don't do the math like that.

• 21:24Andrew Sharp?

  All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at [email protected].