# Ep86 Dead Air

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/net-society-7073603/ep86-dead-air
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/net-society-7073603/ep86-dead-air.md
Podcast: [NET Society](https://stenobird.com/podcast/net-society-7073603)
Published: 2026-07-05T22:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/30a9c71f
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/30a9c71f/cbc7ad97.mp3
Processing state: not_requested
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/net-society-7073603/episodes/ep86-dead-air
Duration seconds: 2761

## Resource

The Net Society crew is back together for a holiday-weekend episode. They begin with Chris’s frustrations around Fable before examining Meta’s struggling engineering culture, copycat tendencies, and surprising progress in brain-signal decoding. From there, the conversation turns to custom models, expert investor judgment, and the growing push for AI sovereignty as enterprises question how much control they should hand to frontier labs. The crew considers whether open-source models, fine-tuning, and intelligent routing will create a more fragmented AI ecosystem where models are selected by cost, reliability, and specialization. They also ask what happened to the inventive energy of the last NFT cycle and whether better tools, cheaper blockspace, and a little AI could make crypto fun again. The episode closes with America’s 250th anniversary, Europe’s resistance to air conditioning, and an unexpectedly serious debate over whether AC belongs among humanity’s greatest inventions. Mentioned in the episode Fable 5 returns https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2072163884430229756 Meta Engineering Culture https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/12/metas-months-old-ai-unit-is-a-soul-crushing-gulag-say-the-engineers-stuck-inside-it/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter Nature Article decoding brain activity https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02303-2 Bridgewater and Thinking Machines https://x.com/ziv_ravid/status/2072171186620960908?s=46&t=3cJ-BS7Y1NeBdjntkS2hZQ Backseats tweet https://x.com/backseats_eth/status/2072020616400757233 AC being a hot topic https://x.com/NYCMayor/status/2072411003170472359 Show & Hosts Net Society: https://x.com/net__society Aaron Wright: https://x.com/awrigh01 Chris F: https://x.com/ChrisF_0x Derek Edwards: https://x.com/derekedws Priyanka De…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/net-society-7073603/episodes/ep86-dead-air/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/net-society-7073603/ep86-dead-air.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.