I didn’t watch the Super Bowl this year. I had absolutely no connection to it and no preference for either team. While I generally enjoy football (college football, specifically) and spending time with friends—and yes, the commercials and halftime show are usually worth watching, if only for the water cooler conversations—I was elsewhere.

Instead, I was doing dad things: attending Ski Team with my kids, helping with homework, making dinner, and assisting my wife in unloading a mountain of Costco supplies she’d picked up earlier that day. (I bet Super Bowl Sunday is a fantastic day to shop at Costco.)

That’s just how it is in our family—we’re more of an Olympics-watching group, and that’s perfectly fine.

So, I didn’t watch the game, but apparently I was destined to see one of the ads…

This morning, in my groggy pre-coffee state, I was reading one of my favorite newsletters, Garbage Day, and chuckled at their critique of a Super Bowl ad:

Google’s Super Bowl ad last night, “Dream Job,” depicted a dad getting ready for a job interview by talking out loud in his kitchen to an AI voice assistant, something I am very confident no one has done ever. But that doesn’t matter because Silicon Valley believes they are big enough now to create the future, rather than scale up to meet it.

I love Garbage Day—it makes me feel online and cool, with that warm fuzzy smugness we all occasionally need.

Then, not five minutes later, my dad texted me a link to the same commercial:

In case you didn’t see this… ❤️

I watched it, and damn it, my eyes started leaking. It’s beautiful.

I feel seen.

Will I ever walk around my kitchen talking to an AI assistant? I can’t say (but yeah, almost certainly). While I doubt it’ll be Google’s service, I’m firmly in the camp that believes GPT and LLMs are legitimately transformative technologies, with more useful tools being built on top of them every day.

I left my “professional” job to devote more time to my family. Currently, I’m exploring AI tools to improve my journaling, workflows, and time management. And yes, I’m about to jump back into searching for paid work that fits with a more balanced life. I am absolutely the target audience for this ad, and it hit the bullseye.

Congratulations to the Google creative team and everyone involved in making this. Even in our hyper-critical online world, the reception seems almost universally positive (even the youtube comments!). And while Garbage Day may have rolled their eyes at it, I thought it was beautiful. I guess I can’t be smug all the time.